“I’ll leave you be,” she said.
“No, that’s all right. You can stay.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Quite frankly I’d like the company. I really don’t want to fall asleep again.”
She dragged up a chair and sat in the middle of the floor, a strange privacy between us. I noticed for the first time that her left eye was just slightly lazy and it gave her the look of a woman who had overcome some distant sadness.
There was a frosted window in the bathroom and she looked towards it as she spoke. An outdoor lamp brightened the dark. She had met Manyaki, she said, at university in London. She had been studying fashion design, he was in the English department. He had come to one of her shows with a girlfriend of his — one of many, she said, he was never short in the girlfriend department — and had stood in front of her thesis project, a line of high-fashion skirts and blouses supposedly inspired by tribal nomads.
“He snorted at it,” she said. “Right there in the gallery. Just straight out snorted. I was mortified.” Aoibheann reached for the hot-water tap again, fanned a little more water down by my feet. “I hated him.” She laughed a little, gathering the folds of her humiliation.
She saw him years later at a publishing party in Soho where he’d written an essay called “The Politics of the African Novel.” She tried to ridicule the article while he was in earshot, but the problem was that the article was pure irony, head to toe, he had designed it that way.
“There I was, lambasting him, and guess what. He started laughing again. A real smartarse.”
She knuckled the moisture out of her lazy eye.
“So I told him what lake to jump in. I won’t tell you how he replied. I hated myself for it, but I was fascinated by him. So the next week I sent him a Bedouin robe, along with a barbed letter saying how he had embarrassed me, that he was an obnoxious arsehole, a git of the highest order, and I hoped he would rot in hell. He wrote a four-page letter back about my pretentious fashion instinct, and how it might be an idea to learn a culture before I slapped it on a million asses.”
I shifted a little in the bath, the water growing cold again.
“It’s hardly a love story, but we’re married eight years now, and he still wears that robe as a dressing gown. Just to get a rise out of me.”
We sat a moment in silence. It seemed to me that it was possibly the weight of her family she carried. I had heard that her father had once been arrested, or at least questioned, for some financial irregularities just after the boom years. It was hardly any of my business, and I avoided the temptation. I moved to get out of the bath.
“I’m glad you came to visit,” she said. “We keep to ourselves a lot these days.”
I put my elbow on the rim, and she guided her arm in underneath me, helped me out. I kept my back to her. There’s only so much embarrassment we can bear. She took a heated towel from the hot-water press, and put it around my shoulders. She gripped my shoulders from behind.
“We’ll get you a good night’s sleep, Hannah,” she said.
“Am I that bad?”
“I have half a sleeping pill if you want one.”
“I’d rather a brandy to be honest.”
When I came downstairs she had made a hot brandy with cloves in a beautiful crystal glass. The conspiracy of women. We are in it together, make no mistake.
I STAYED FOUR more days. Aoibheann washed my clothes and nursed me back to some semblance of rest. I missed my cottage, but the sea kept me company. I walked along the pier with Georgie. There could always be one last emigrant in my family. A friend of mine once wisely said that suicide only suits the young. I counseled myself to stop sulking and simply enjoy my time there.
On the last day of my visit, I rose from the bed and went down to the small garden at the back of the house. I sat on a deckchair, made patterns out of the wisteria. I heard the door handle turn behind me. A quiet cough. Manyaki was barefoot, still in his pajamas. He wore wire-rimmed glasses. His dreadlocks were askew.
He dragged up a flowerpot, turned it upside down, sat beside me. I could tell immediately from the hunch of his shoulders. The collector had emailed him back about the letter, he said. He rubbed the white of his feet along the stone. “He’s interested,” he said, “but only willing to pay a thousand dollars.” I shifted a little in the deckchair. I had known, but did not want to be told. I had to feign a quick happiness: rosin on the bow seconds after the violin has been smashed.
Manyaki cracked his fingers together. He thought perhaps the collector might go as high as two or three thousand, but I would have to give him proof that the letter related to Douglass. There was none that I knew of, short of opening the letter and reading it, which was just as likely to make it worthless.
“I’ll consider it,” I said, but we knew full well that it wouldn’t happen. I would rather just let the letter go. It was hardly worth a drop in the ocean now.
Manyaki drummed his fingers a moment on the base of the flowerpot. He reached across and petted Georgie on the neck.
“Sorry,” he said.
“There’s nothing for you to feel sorry about.”
The light fell slant in the back garden: it was a beautiful bright day. Aoibheann and Manyaki accompanied me out to the road where we said our good-byes. She had packed me a little brown bag of sandwiches and a yogurt, along with some biscuits. Days of school lunches. They smiled politely. I pulled out into the road and made my way along the coast. A long drive home.
Obama was, by all accounts, arriving at Baldonnel Airport that very day. Hurrah for Ireland. The sky would keep me company all the way home.
THE DARKNESS DROPPED from the bent limbs of the trees. The lough was perfectly calm. I pushed open the door and smushed the waiting envelopes up against the wall. The cottage was freezing. I had forgotten to bring in any wood. I lit a tilley lamp and put it on the mantelpiece.
I had expected an immense relief at coming home, but the house pushed a sharp cold into my bones. Georgie nudged up beside me. There was a little bit of kindling and a few peat briquettes. I lit a fire starter and shoved the bills in with them.
I searched out the wetsuit. A faint smell of mold off it. I warmed it up by the fire. Georgie watched me, her head on her paws. She seemed to own a strong reluctance, but she came down through the grass and stood at the edge of the wall while I waded into the water. A quiet night. Three stars and a moon and a lone plane traveling the high dark. The wind came off the water as if looking for company, the living and the dead passing into each other. The breeze rattled the large windows and then curled around the gable end, settled down.
DAVID MANYAKI CALLED in the morning to say that I had left the letter behind. I knew perfectly well. I had left it square on the bedside table, placed a glass paperweight upon it.
Lord knows, you can’t grow this old without looking for others to shoulder our burdens. I told him he could open it. Excuse me? he said. You can open it, David. He called my bluff almost immediately. The room grew small, the ceiling close. I was breathing through muslin. He had short, stubby hands, I remembered that. The tops of his fingernails were very white. His cuticles were chewed. He asked me again if I was sure, and I said yes of course. I thought I heard the envelope tear but there was the archival plastic surely. He was opening that. I tried to recall what the bedroom looked like. His house. The children’s curtains on the windows. An eiderdown with a shellfish motif. He must have had the phone cradled at his ear. He eased the letter out of the plastic. His voice grew faint. He had put me on speaker. The phone must have been lying on the bed. Holding the letter in his right hand, slowly easing under the flap with his left. I was in my kitchen looking out to the lough. The weather was perfectly banal. A low roll of gray. What might happen if it tore altogether? How dare he. There was a silence on the other end of the line. He couldn’t do it. He would send it express post. The sky lightened out the window. No, I said, just read it to me please, for godsake. The hollow sound of the phone moving. The ceiling dipped. The letter was open now, would I like now for him to unfold the paper? A bolt of blood to my temple. An attempt at nonchalance. Is the envelope torn? No, he said, it was open, but not torn. A gray carpet on the floor. Children’s clothes hanging in the cupboard. A tree outside his window, the branch touching against the frame. He unfolded the paper. The little café in Dublin where the small crumb had fallen from the plastic. Two pages, he said. It was written on headed notepaper from the Cochrane Hotel. Blue paper with a silver embossing at the top. They were small pages, folded over in half. The handwriting was faded but legible. Fountain ink. He took the phone off speaker. The branch maybe touched against the window. It’s dated, he said. Exactly what I had expected. June 1919. Emily Ehrlich. I am sending this letter in the hope that it will make it into your hands. My mother, Lily Duggan, always remembered a kindness shown to her by Miss Isabel Jennings. The sharp cut of his African accent. Slowly he read. Blue paper. The marks around his cuticles. It is just as likely that this will be lost at sea, but if they make it, perhaps you will receive this from two men who have knocked the war from a plane. They ditched in Clifden. Caught in the hard roots. The living sedge. They had carried the letter across the Irish Sea. We seldom know what echo our actions will find, but our stories will most certainly outlast us. The foghorns along the pier. The traffic sounding outside his window. The stone tower on the waterfront. This, then, is just a simple acknowledgment. Emily Ehrlich’s blouse splattered with ink. Tapping the edge of the inkpot with the nib of the pen. My mother, Lottie, standing over her shoulder, watching. Out the window, a shape against the sky. I send it with deepest thanks. The grass bent backwards. My son walked in the back door. The world does not turn without moments of grace. Who cares how small. A heavy dew soaked his trouser cuffs. I asked him then to read it to me again. Hold on a moment, Manyaki said. I heard the crackle of paper. It was short enough to commit to memory.