Where will his own children be this New Year’s Eve?
How do we go back to the very simplicity of the original notion? How do we sit with Sandi in her lonely outpost? How do we look out into the dark?
(And who, anyway, was that dead Marine?)
13 redux
The phone rings: it rings and rings and rings.
Sh'khol
It was their first Christmas in Galway together, mother and son. The cottage was hidden alongside the Atlantic, blue-windowed, slate-roofed, tucked near a grove of sycamore trees. The branches were bent inland by the wind. White spindrift blew up from the sea, landing softly on the tall hedges in the back garden.
During the day Rebecca could hear the rhythmic approach and fall of the waves against the shore. At night the sounds seemed to double.
Even in the wet chill of the December evenings, she slept with her window open, listening to the roll of the water sounding up from the low cliffs, rasping over the run of stone walls, sweeping toward the house, where it seemed to pause, hover a moment, then break.
On Christmas morning she left his present by the fireplace. Boxed and wrapped and tied with red ribbons. Tomas tore the package open, and it fell in a bundle at his feet. He had no idea what it was at first: he held it by the legs, then the waist, turned it upside down, clutched it dark against his chest.
She reached behind the tree and removed a second package: neoprene boots and a hood. Tomas stripped his shoes and shirt: he was thin, strong, pale. When he pulled off his trousers, she glanced away.
The wetsuit was liquid around him: she had bought it two sizes too big so he could grow into it. He spread his arms wide and whirled around the room: she hadn’t seen him so happy in months.
Rebecca gestured to him that they would go down to the water in a few hours.
—
THIRTEEN YEARS OLD AND THERE was already a whole history written in him. She had adopted him from Vladivostok at the age of six. On her visit to the orphanage, she had seen him crouched beneath a swing set. His hair was blond, his eyes a pellucid blue. Sores on his neck. Long, thin scars on his lower back. His gums soft and bloody. He had been born deaf, but when she called out his name he had turned quickly toward her: a sign, she was sure of it.
Shards of his story would always be a mystery to her: the early years, an ancestry she knew nothing about, a rumor that he’d been born near a rubbish dump. The possible inheritances: mercury, radiation sickness, beatings.
She was aware of what she was getting herself into, but she had been with Alan then. They stayed in a shabby hotel overlooking the Bay of Amur. Days of bribes and panic. Anxious phone calls late in the night. Long hours in the waiting room. A diagnosis of fetal alcohol syndrome gave them pause. Still, they left after six weeks, swinging Tomas between them. On the Aeroflot flight, the boy kept his head on her shoulder. At customs in Dublin, her fingers trembled over the paperwork. The stamp came down when Alan signed. She grabbed Tomas’s hand and ran him, laughing, through Arrivals: it was her forty-first birthday.
The days were good then: a three-bedroom house in Stepaside, a series of counselors, therapists, speech experts, and even her parents to help them out.
Now, seven years on, she was divorced, living out west, her parents were gone, and her task had doubled. Her savings were stretched. The bills slipped one after the other through the letter box. There were rumors that the special school in Galway might close. Still, she wasn’t given to bitterness or loud complaint. She made a living translating from Hebrew to English — wedding vows, business contracts, cultural pamphlets. There was a literary novel or two from a left-wing publisher in Tel Aviv: the pay was derisory, but she liked stepping into that otherness, and the books were a stay against indifference.
Forty-eight years old and there was still a beauty about her, an olive to her skin, a sloe to her eyes, an aquiline sweep to her nose. Her hair was dark, her body thin and supple. In the small village she fit in well, even if she stood at a sharp angle to the striking blondness of her son. She relished the Gaeltacht, the shifting weather, the hard light, the wind off the Atlantic. Bundled up against the chill, they walked along the pier, amongst the lobster pots and coiled ropes and disintegrating fishing boats. The rain slapped the windows of the shuttered shops. No tourists in winter. In the supermarket the local women often watched them: more than once Rebecca was asked if she was the bean cabhrach, a phrase she liked — the help, the nanny, the midwife.
There was a raw wedge of thrill in her love for him. The presence of the unknown. The journey out of childhood. The step into a future self.
Some days Tomas took her hand, leaned on her shoulder as they drove through the village, beyond the abandoned schoolhouse, past the whitewashed bungalows toward home. She wanted to clasp herself over him, shroud him, absorb whatever came his way. Most of all she wanted to discover what sort of man might emerge from underneath that very pale skin.
—
TOMAS WORE THE WETSUIT all Christmas morning. He lay on the floor, playing video games, his fingers fluid on the console. Over the rim of her reading glasses, Rebecca watched the gray stripe along the sleeve move. It was, she knew, a game she shouldn’t allow — tanks, ditches, killings, tracer bullets — but it was a small sacrifice for an hour of quiet.
No rage this Christmas, no battles, no tears.
At noon she gestured for him to get ready: the light would fade early. She had two wetsuits of her own in the bedroom cupboard, but she left them hanging, pulled on running shoes, an anorak, a warm scarf. At the door Tomas threw his duffle coat loose around the neoprene.
— Just a quick dip, she said in Irish.
There was no way of knowing how much of any language Tomas could understand. His signing was rudimentary, but she could tell a thing or two from the carry of his body, the shape of his shoulders, the hold of his mouth. Mostly she divined from his eyes. He was handsome in a roguish way: the eyes themselves were narrow, yes, but agile. He had no other physical symptoms of fetal alcohol, no high brow, no thin lip, no flat philtrum.
They stepped out into a shaft of light so clear and bright it seemed made of bone. Just by the low stone wall, a cloud curtained across and the light dropped gray again. A few stray raindrops stung their faces.
This was what she loved about the west of Ireland: the weather made from cinema. A squall could blow in at any time and moments later the gray would be hunted open with blue.
One of the walls down by the bottom field had been reinforced with metal pipes. It is the worst sort of masonry, against all local tradition, but the wind moved across the mouths of the hollow tubes and pierced the air with a series of accidental whistles. Tomas ran his hand over the pipes, one by one, adjusting the song of the wall. She was sure his fingers could gauge the vibrations in the metal. Small moments like these, they crept up, sliced her open.