Instructions for a Heatwave (19 page)

Aoife looked from the coat to Monica, reclining palely on her pillows, and back again. Her parents were starting to collect their belongings, their bags, their containers of food.

There is a kind of invisible osmosis that occurs between people who have shared a room. If you sleep near someone, night in, night out, breathing each other’s air, it is as if your dreams, your unconscious lives become entangled, the circuits of your minds running close to each other, exchanging information without speech.

Aoife looked at her sister, she looked at the coat and suddenly she knew. There wasn’t a shadow of doubt in her mind. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t realized yesterday, but then everything
had been such a shock and a panic that she hadn’t been thinking straight. The clarity of it clanged through her: this had been no miscarriage, no accident. Aoife saw this. Her mind unfolded the information and laid it out for her. Monica had done this to herself.

Goodbyes were being said—nine minutes had evidently elapsed. Monica was embraced several times, there was a small drama when Gretta couldn’t find her scarf. It was located, under the bed, put in place.

Aoife continued to stand beside the door and the knowledge seemed to congest her chest, like asthma. As Gretta leaned in to clasp Monica in her arms for the final time, Monica glanced over her mother’s shoulder at Aoife.

Aoife held her gaze. The sisters regarded each other for a long moment, then Monica pressed her teeth into her lip. Color sprang in patches to her cheeks, and as Joe rose from his seat to see Gretta and Robert out of the hospital, Monica put out a hand to stop him. “Don’t go,” she said. “Stay with me.” Joe was patting her hand and saying he wouldn’t be a minute but Monica held on. “Don’t,” she said. “I want you to stay.”

“But Aoife’s here,” Joe was saying gently, peeling her fingers off his sleeve. “You’ll be fine.”

And suddenly they were alone.

What to say? Aoife wondered. Who would speak first? What was the protocol in such situations? Part of her wanted to say, It’s not my business, it’s your life, your choice, the secret is safe with me. The other part wanted to say, Mon, how could you, why would you, what about Joe?

Monica wasn’t going to speak, Aoife saw that. Her gaze had skittered away, towards the ceiling, her chin had risen slightly, her lips pressed together. It was an expression so familiar to Aoife—one not so much of defiance but of valiance. Monica was, Aoife knew, at that moment rallying her resources, mustering
her powers. Monica shook back her hair, brushed an imaginary piece of lint off her sleeve, her gaze directed out of the window. Aoife turned, pushed her way through the door and walked fast down the corridor. She had the sense of being pursued by a pack of animals snapping and baying at her heels. If she walked fast enough, far enough, she might get away from them, might stop them latching their jaws into her flesh.

Aoife turns left at the end of Gillerton Road. She shields her eyes as she checks the traffic, surprised momentarily by a car zooming in on her from the right. Outside the phone box, she pauses, as if to catch her breath, but it’s just to wipe the line of sweat from her hairline, from her upper lip.

Gabe’s voice, when he comes to the phone, is measured and distant. So disconcerting is the effect that Aoife finds herself saying, “So, how are you?” into the receiver for the second time.

“Fine,” he says. “Good.”

Aoife tunes her hearing to this new way of speaking, its odd deliberation, its tonelessness. It’s the kind of voice you’d use for a friend you didn’t particularly like or someone you didn’t know very well and had no inclination to know better. Is it because he’s at work? It’s the early-morning shift at the restaurant, always the most relaxed because Arnault doesn’t arrive until later. But is someone listening to them? Perhaps that’s it.

Her hand tightens around the black phone receiver. She knows it’s not that. She’s called him plenty of times at work and he’s never sounded like this before. The string of letters written in steam seems to unfurl again before her:
THIS
, was it, then something, then
PART
, then something else? What did it say? she wants to ask. Please just tell me.
PART
what?

“Any news on your dad?” he asks.

“Not yet. So … I was wondering … did you get a chance to …” She winces at herself for asking but she has to know. “… go over to Evelyn’s?”

She hears Gabe draw a breath. “I did,” he says, in his new voice.

“And … did you find the file?”

“I did,” he says again, and Aoife waits for him to say something else, pressing the phone against her ear. “Jesus, Aoife,” he says, and she feels as though he’s carried the phone somewhere more private as there is a lull in the air around him. “There were things in there going back a year. Letters and contracts and really important stuff.”

“Yes,” she says weakly. “Yes, I know, I—”

“I just don’t get why you would … I mean, does Evelyn have any idea that you’ve …” He sighs. “I don’t get it.”

She presses her fingertips into the sharp indent of the money slot until they turn white with the pressure.

“I don’t know how you could do that to her. After everything she’s done for you. There were uncashed checks in there, adding up to thousands of dollars. What were you thinking?”

“I … The checks usually go to the accountant but maybe a few slipped through … I just …”

“I know she’s difficult sometimes and I know she works you hard but to just chuck all that stuff in a box and forget about it is, well, it’s wrong, Aoife.”

“I know,” she gets out. “I just—”

He cuts her off. “Listen, I’ve got to go. Call me if you get any news of your dad, OK?”

Aoife bursts out of the phone box. The heat in there, inside all that glass, is unbelievable. Unbearable. She leans against the door for a moment, gulping for air. But the air outside isn’t much cooler and seems to burn a path down into the branched pathways of her lungs. The metal of the phone box is searing through to her skin, she realizes, and jumps away from it. Is there no escape? she thinks. Is there nowhere away from this heat?

The file is with Gabe. This problem has been scratching away at her, like a burr in her clothing and now she knows the magnitude
of it. Invoices going back over a year. Thousands of dollars in uncashed checks. What will Evelyn say? Aoife tries to picture the scene: Evelyn will be horrified, baffled, even angry. What she needed, she’d told Aoife when she’d started work, was someone to deal with all the stuff, all the distracting babble of life, so that she, Evelyn, could concentrate on the photographs. And had Aoife done that? No, she had not. She will lose her job. She knows this. Perhaps she has always known it, from the moment she put that contract into the blue file. The only job she has ever liked. And what about Gabe himself and his flat voice, him saying things like, How could you, Aoife?

She glances up at the sky and immediately has to shade her eyes. The sun has peaked above the roofs and trees. It must be midday, or thereabouts. The scene in front of her—cars, buses, shop fronts, a young woman with a pram—shimmers and refracts. The light of the sun seems to have infiltrated everything, boring into her retinas from shopwindows, from car bumpers, from the wheels of that pram.

The idea of someone else withdrawing from her makes her feel unbalanced, panicked. Soon, she thinks, you’ll have no one left.

She watches a bus from Islington take the curve in the road, the standing passengers flung sideways, then back.

There had been no answer at Evelyn’s, as she’d suspected. Even if Evelyn was there, she rarely picked up the phone. So Aoife had had to speak into the answering machine: she had to tell Evelyn that she had a meeting at eleven, a magazine editor was coming to the studio, not to forget to send off the prints to MoMA. It had cost her almost all of her change to say this, the machine gobbling coins at an alarming rate. She’d have to get more from somewhere. One of these shops, maybe. Couldn’t ask them at home. It would provoke too many questions, and how could she answer them, how could she ever tell them when they knew nothing about Evelyn, nothing about Gabe or anything at
all? There was too much to explain; she wouldn’t know at what point she should start. No, best all around if she just went into a shop and exchanged a note for some ten-pence pieces. Her mother would only worry and lament and dramatize.

She’d been seized by the odd urge, in the phone box there, after calling New York, to phone her father. To dial a number and hear his voice coming out of the tiny holes in the receiver. When had she last spoken to him? Months ago. She phones her parents occasionally from New York, but they tend to view long-distance calls as an indulgence verging on illegal. They treat them as a form of telegram, exchanging the barest essential information before hanging up. They talk over each other, in their haste, both shouting into the receiver, their questions merging and competing, so that she can’t hear either of them. Is she getting enough to eat? Is she going to Mass? Does she have a warm coat to wear?

She crosses the road. Black rivulets of melted tar are oozing out of crevices in its surface. She sidesteps these, thinking of that child’s game of avoiding cracks in the pavement. If you tread in a nick. She remembers being horrified by the rhyme. Ridiculous, really, when the worst threat is that a spider may come to your funeral.

Her mind snags on the word
funeral
. She passes a hand over her brow, as if trying to erase something from sight, but still her mind persists, offering her images of a coffin, her father laid out inside a folded blue satin lining, her mother twisting a rosary into his stiffened fingers. What other explanation can there be?

She stops outside the library. She isn’t sure why she’s come: she’d asked about it only to deflect their interest in the phone box. Oddly, she used to spend a lot of time here when she was young. She’d loved its atmosphere of strict, dusty hush, the spines and spines of books. She’d loved to trail her hand down the shelves, as if hoping that, by her touching them, the books might yield their secrets to her. It had never worked, obviously.

OPENING HOURS
, the sign on the door probably says and, to get rid of the idea of her father in a coffin, she permits these strings of letters to gain entry to the part of her mind that she strives always to suppress. Immediately, just as she knew it would, it does its usual thing of shuffling and reshuffling the letters, like a hand of cards. “Opening” dissolves into “pen,” “gin,” “open,” of course, “gone,” “peg,” “gin,” “pin,” “nine,” “nope,” “pine.” “Hours” tries to make itself start with “hr” and then “sh” and then the “ou” comes rearing out from the middle of the word and—

She cuts herself off. Enough. Needs to be firm with all that because it’s the kind of thing her mind can run and run with and there’s too much to be done today for all that distracting babble.

A week or so after the incident at the hospital, there had been a family gathering at Michael Francis’s house. What had it been for? One of the children’s birthdays? Aoife is presented with a definite memory of Hughie’s face, startled and awed, behind a flaring seam of candles.

Hughie’s birthday. Monica had avoided Aoife’s eye the whole time, over the opening of the presents, during the singing of “Happy Birthday,” during the endless rounds of tea. She was good at it, this very private kind of cold-shouldering, so that only the recipient and no one else noticed. Aoife couldn’t stop herself looking at her sister, though; her eyes were drawn to her the whole time, as if to check that, yes, Monica was still pretending she wasn’t there.

After an hour or so, Aoife had had enough. How could Monica treat her like this, as if she were the one who was lying and concealing and pretending? She had done nothing wrong and Monica had nothing to fear from her. She wasn’t going to tell anyone; Monica would know that. What people did with their lives was their own affair: Aoife firmly believed this. But something needed to be said between them; that much was clear. So when Monica went into the kitchen to fill the kettle yet again,
Aoife slipped away, out of the sitting room and into the kitchen. She came up behind her sister, standing at the sink, right behind her, so there was no way out.

“Listen,” she said, to the back of Monica’s head, “I want to say that I don’t—”

Monica had turned with a flash. “I often wonder,” she began, in a strangely chatty tone, as if they’d been in the middle of a conversation all these weeks, those spots of color again high in her cheeks, “if you had any idea what having you did to Mammy.”

Of all the things Aoife expected Monica to say, that wasn’t it. Some part of her recognized that Monica was doing what she always did when confronted: directing the focus away from herself, shifting the blame to her opponent. It was a Monica-strategy as familiar to Aoife as her sister’s name but she still took a step back, still felt for the table behind her, spreading her fingers against its cool grain.

“What do you mean?” Aoife said, even though she didn’t want to know, she had no inclination whatsoever to hear what Monica had to say about that. She didn’t want to hear any of it, any of the horrible, terrible things Monica proceeded to lay out for her, in a whisper, as they stood there in the kitchen: it was her fault Gretta took all those tranquilizers, all her fault, it had started with her birth—did Aoife know that she was a nightmare baby who never stopped crying, an absolute nightmare, that she had destroyed their mother, she had; it was she who had driven Gretta to the very brink, brought her to her knees.
To her knees:
Monica kept saying this. And Aoife didn’t want to believe any of it—maybe she didn’t believe any of it, maybe it was all just lies, it was because Monica was cornered, lashing out.

“Ask him,” Monica said, gesturing at their brother, who had walked into the room, “if you don’t believe me.”

They turned to Michael Francis, who was still smiling at something somebody had said to him in the other room and
Aoife’s heart lifted to see him because he was her defender, her pillar of truth and fairness, always had been. If he was here, everything would be all right. He would tell Monica to shut up, that she was talking nonsense. She knew he would.