The Ballymara Road (16 page)

They were all three assembled in the hallway, ready to leave for the doctor’s.

‘And, Mary, you won’t have any problem with that now, will you? Not today, Mary. None of your lectures now, d’you hear me? Today we celebrate, because the doctor is going to tell us our little lad will be fine.’

Mary avoided responding by fixing her hat in the mirror.

‘Ouch,’ she said as she sucked her thumb, after a prick from the hatpin. ‘Let’s not fly in God’s face, shall we? We don’t try God and you should know that.’

She dipped her fingers into the stoup on the hall table, full of holy water that had been shipped over especially from the Vatican, blessed herself and pushed forward her husband and brother so that they could do exactly the same.

‘What’s up with ye both?’ she admonished them. ‘Are ye both so full of your own arrogance you have no time to bless yourselves today of all days, so help me, God?’

Mrs McGuire was in the kitchen with Dillon, rocking him back and forth on her knee. She had been trying for over an hour to coax him to take his bottle. Worry lines were etched on her face. The situation with Sean had taken its toll, and now this.

‘Will you be all right, Mammy?’ said Mary, fussing around.

Mrs McGuire waved her daughter away. ‘Will I be all right? I’m not Mrs Clampett. I can manage very well, thank ye. Just because ye live in a big house doesn’t mean anything to do with rearing a child has altered. Now go, and come back with good news that this little fella is going to be fine.’

Sean noticed how anxious his sister looked. Mary hadn’t laughed for a week. Not since their last appointment at the doctor’s office, when the doctor had told them that they would need to travel straight from there to the hospital where a Dr Sanjay would remain behind, waiting for them.

‘For goodness’ sake. Right now? What for? You’re joking, right?’ Mary’s voice was tight. She had spent every moment since she found Dillon making herself believe that the doctor would put everything right. She had done a good job.

The doctor wasn’t joking. Far from it. Dr Sanjay, a specialist, was indeed waiting at the hospital, examining a set of X-rays of their little boy.

At that moment, Henry saw his wife’s spirit die. She had turned to him and tried to smile, to let him know that she would make this better, but her smile had died too.

‘Don’t worry, Henry love,’ she had said, Mary the fixer. Mary, the mother. Mary, who made everything right.

She grabbed Henry’s hand and pulled him closer to her, protecting him from the news that she herself failed to comprehend. ‘It’s nothing serious,’ she said, with no conviction whatsoever.

But Henry had seen hope decay, right there and then.

The smile on her face. The dream in her eyes. Dead.

Their little boy had a form of leukaemia, but one that could be cured relatively easily. The chances were high that the bone marrow of a family member would be a successful match.

‘In my years of practice I have never known a family match to fail,’ Dr Sanjay had said.

It was all very simple. They had to place everyone on the federal donor bank today and then return to the clinic on Monday. They would have to log in their social security numbers and blood type, and once they had done that, the doctor could start work.

‘The sooner we find a donor, the less the disruption to your little man’s life,’ Dr Sanjay had said. ‘Dillon is still a baby and this will be nothing more than a correctional process. We just need to give him another blood transfusion in the next few days in order to turn his cheeks pink again. We have all the cards in our hands. I wish every child’s case was as straightforward as yours.’

Sean liked Dr Sanjay. He was calm, matter-of-fact. He had said that the little lad had an excellent chance of a complete recovery. They were the best odds.

Dr Sanjay had answered all Mary’s questions honestly. Now they had to return home to Mrs McGuire and Dillon. Sean knew that Alice would be back from the hairdresser’s and would be helping Mrs McGuire. The frost between the two women had almost completely thawed in their concern over the baby.

Sean knew Alice missed Joseph. It was something none of them ever mentioned.

‘That is the strange thing about America,’ Sean had said to Henry. ‘It is as though your life before you reached these shores had never happened. When you are an Irish immigrant in a country as proud as the USA, the only thing that matters is today and tomorrow; the past is forgotten.’

Sean was right. It was all about now. You were reborn as an American citizen and you began anew.

This filled Sean with hope. Their life would begin in earnest with a son of his own, a little Sean McGuire, and Alice would have to agree.

‘Are you OK, Mary?’ Sean now enquired again, this time with more confidence. ‘Are you not happy with what the doctor said?’

Henry answered, ‘Mary is fine, Sean. She just needs a little time to get used to things, that’s all. Isn’t it, love?’

Sean almost smiled. He loved the way Henry’s accent was an absolute mix of American and Irish when he was calm and collected, and yet it was full-on, one hundred per cent Irish, when he was mad or worried, which wasn’t very often. He was obviously worried right now.

‘I’m sorry, Sean, Henry, I’m sorry.’ Mary turned in the passenger seat and stretched out to take hold of Sean’s hand. Her mascara had carved tiny black tracks through her powdery cheeks and the whites of her eyes were bloodshot.

‘It won’t be a problem, Mary, so don’t cry. You just have to do as the doctor said.’

Sean didn’t know what he had said wrong but, whatever it was, he had really upset Mary. She began to sob openly. Sean looked to Henry, seeking reassurance, wanting him to say something to halt Mary’s distress, but tears were sliding down Henry’s cheeks. What the hell was going on?

Henry put his foot on the brake and as they slowed down Sean looked out of the window. They were turning into the parking lot for the new mall that was still only half built. Parked outside, he spotted green construction vehicles with the family name, Moynihan.

‘I will be five minutes,’ Henry said. ‘Look after Mary, Sean. I will stay home with you today, love.’

Mary grabbed her husband’s hand as he moved to slide out of the car seat. He hesitated a moment with his hand on the door handle and whispered, ‘Just hold it together, love, until we get into the house, OK?’

Sean shifted forward and patted Mary’s hand. It didn’t matter how much he scrabbled around for something useful or comforting to say, he found nothing. So he decided the best thing to do was to say nothing and just let Mary know he was there for her.

Henry, who had been gone for less than five minutes, ran back to the car.

Sean had never seen a man cry before, but now, unashamedly, with no attempt to wipe away his tears or to halt their flow, Henry wept freely.

‘Tell me, Mary, what is it, what is wrong?’ Sean’s voice trembled slightly. He was not sure he really wanted to know the answer. They were almost home, only minutes away from being able to walk in through their own front door and break down in private. Sean thought, with a huge sense of relief, thank God, Mammy is there. She will know what to do.

Amazingly, Mary appeared to be pulling herself together just as Henry was falling apart. She turned from the front seat to face Sean full on. Picking up his hand, she began to speak.

‘Sean, things are not as you think. We have only six months. Six months to find a match for Dillon.’

Mary looked directly at Henry to reassure herself before she spoke. They were words that could not be taken back once said. He raised no objection.

‘We never discussed our baby boy with you because so much was happening when you arrived – the upset with Mammy, the new contract to build the flyover. It was all going on and, anyway, you never asked and why would you?

‘Little Dillon, he came from a convent in Ireland, near Galway. We don’t know who it was who gave birth to him and gave him up for adoption. We don’t know who his family is or where we can trace them to find a bone marrow match. We flew straight from here to collect him, it was all so quick, and stopped over in Liverpool on the way back. He flew on a temporary passport. They had it all arranged before we even arrived.’

‘Six months.’

Mary repeated those awful words as though they were a death sentence. The car journey had eaten up almost an hour of those six months since the doctor had first given them the news.

As they pulled into the drive, Sean saw Mrs McGuire, who been waiting patiently, struggle to open the heavy oak front door. She was more used to a cottage in the village on the outskirts of Galway, where they had all been born, or the Nelson Street two-up, two-down. Little Dillon was in her arms, looking pale and wan, but he still managed a smile for his parents’ return.

Sean was struggling to take in everything Mary had said.

Only his thumbs moved, over and over.

As they stepped inside, Mrs McGuire and Alice stood in the hallway, anxiety binding them together in a flimsy companionship born from a joint concern for Dillon’s health.

Mary, as ever pragmatic and fighting for the life of her little boy, knew without any discussion what she needed to do.

‘Mammy, Alice, I have to travel to Galway with Dillon. Will ye both come with me?’

The three women hugged briefly and silently. They would do whatever it took, no matter how inconvenient or difficult.

The scent from Mary’s jacket made Alice feel nauseous. She slowly breathed out a deep sigh of relief. Galway. It was much closer to Joseph, to Liverpool, to Jerry, and to everyone and everything she knew, than Chicago.

For the first time in her life, Alice uttered a silent prayer of thanks and made a decision to withdraw the full fifty thousand dollars in their joint bank account on the day she left.

‘
YOU LOOK LIKE
a nervous wreck,’ said Simon to Howard, as they stood inside St Mary’s church, waiting for Howard’s bride to arrive. ‘Stop pacing up and down like a demented dog. You are making me on edge and I’m only the best man.’

Howard took out yet another Embassy cigarette from his packet and handed one to Simon.

‘Here, have one, go on. Me hands are shaking, I’ve got to have another to calm my nerves,’ he whispered.

Standing on the groom’s side at the front of the ornate church, now filling with incense, Howard’s nervousness was as much to do with the formality of the church ceremony, as the fact that he was about to leave behind his carefree bachelor life and marry a woman who knew how to organize a list to within an inch of her life.

Howard had completed his conversion to the Catholic faith upon the absolute insistence of his bride, Miss Alison Devlin, spinster of the parish, deputy head teacher at the four streets convent school and all-round holder-together of the community during a time of crisis. The latter quality had been tested to the limit recently. The four streets had been through more than their fair share of drama and crisis.

‘Howard, we are forty minutes early. Let’s go outside and walk round the church for a fag. Your bride will kill you if she can’t see you from the door for blue smoke.’

Howard, a local detective inspector, had first met Alison during the investigation into the deaths of the priest, Father James, and Molly Barrett. Howard still felt guilty about Molly. Molly had given him information about who had murdered the priest. But no sooner had she confided in them than she had been murdered herself. The confusing thing was that Molly must have been wrong. She had told them that the priest’s murderer was Tommy Doherty. But that couldn’t have been the case. They knew Tommy Doherty hadn’t murdered Molly. As he was under suspicion, they had watched his every move that night. It wasn’t him and it was impossible to believe that there were two random murderers on the rampage in the four streets.

It had all been one extended nightmare. The very worst of it had been the tragic drowning of little Kitty Doherty during her visit to Ireland, and the fact that Daisy Quinn, the Priory housekeeper, had gone missing since the day she had left Alison’s care to catch the ferry, down at the Pier Head.

It had all been too much for everyone to take in.

‘Will the day ever come when you can see us getting married?’ Howard had asked Alison a number of times. It seemed to him as though the dark cloud that had settled over the community would never pass.

‘I would feel better if I could travel to Dublin and look for Daisy myself,’ Alison had responded. ‘God alone knows where she is. Her poor family, to have been left standing, waiting for her at the port. They must be desperate and I feel so responsible. I put her on the boat. I even asked two old ladies to look after her. She was so excited about being reunited with her family for Christmas. I just need things to become a little more like normal.’

Howard knew she was right. In order to remove all barriers to his nuptials, as well as its accompanying rights and pleasures, he had arranged for them both to visit Dublin so that Alison herself could speak to the police and Daisy’s family.

He had hoped as a result that she might be more reasonable regarding his manly needs. It seemed as though everyone, everywhere, spoke about nothing other than women’s liberation and free love. Some women were even burning their bras, what for, Howard wasn’t sure, but it seemed to him like a great and generous gesture.

But none of it mattered. Alison was a stickler for propriety and was apparently wholly against joining her sisters on any march that would make it easier for Howard to stay the night.

‘We will, Howard, when the time is right and things are happy again,’ Alison replied, each and every time he asked. This would be followed by four very disappointing words, which achieved their unambiguous purpose.

‘When. We. Are. Married.’

The door of illicit sex slammed with finality. Words of steel held it shut.

Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.

‘I would be very happy, if I could go to bed at night and wake up with a wife,’ Howard said over and over, but there was little point in complaining.

The nuns, the school and the entire community had become mired in grief. Although not touched by events in quite the same way as his fiancée, Howard realized that to pursue his aim, under such a veil of sorrow, was fruitless.