The Beach Book Bundle: 3 Novels for Summer Reading: Breathing Lessons, The Alphabet Sisters, Firefly Summer (145 page)

“
You
never apologize,” Jacinta said. It was true. He rarely did.

“Say something to Dara. She’s very upset.”

“We’re all upset,” Jacinta said.

“What
is
all this?” Dr. White looked old and tired suddenly.

Jacinta bit her lip as she looked at him. “You wouldn’t understand, Daddy,” she began.

“I might,” he sighed. “I just might if you told me.”

“It’s just I got cross with Dara, she’s got everything, she’s gorgeous-looking and they’re all mad about her, Kerry and Grace, and her brother Michael’s lovely to her not like Liam, and Maggie sort of worshiped her, and Tommy Leonard can’t stop talking about her.” Jacinta’s face was red and her shoulders were heaving.

“Of course I shouldn’t have said it but it’s not all that terrible, people often say things in a hurry and don’t mean the half of it.”

She looked at him to see if he had any glimmer of understanding. To her surprise he was patting her hand.

“I know,” he said. “It’s very hard.”

“Oh Daddy, I’m sorry,” she wept.

He held her while she cried and he patted her as if she were a baby.

Then when the storm had died down he said gently, “I’ll go and bring the car around, you get up out of this bed now and get dressed. I’ll take you over to Ryan’s, and you can tell Dara you didn’t mean it. That it’s not true.”

“Do I have to?”

“Yes, you have to.

“Dara has been sitting there all day, apparently, and not taking in what’s going on all around her. She’s in a very bad way.”

“It’s not due to me surely …”

“No, it’s not all due to you. This time yesterday your little friend died. Died, Jacinta, that’s a terrible thing to have seen. No wonder you are all upset. What we have to do is try to make it a bit easier on everyone, not harder.”

“Very well.” Jacinta swung her feet out of bed.

She stood in her pajamas choosing which garments to wear. She looked for a moment at the shirt with the leather tassels on it. But she rejected it, it was too festive for these times.

   Kate was surprised to see Dr. White and Jacinta. She had heard various versions of the incident. But in view of everything else that had happened it seemed almost minor. Surely Dara would understand when the shock lessened that Jacinta had only been grumbling and complaining the way she always did.

“I’m afraid Dara’s up in her room,” she said.

Dara had come down for meals and said nothing. She had eaten nothing either. She said that the food literally would not go down.

Kate had decided to leave her for one day.

John had been up to see her several times, maddened with his grief not to have been in Mountfern when it happened. Shocked still at the news that was waiting when he came back happily from his meeting and the beer and sandwiches that had followed it.

But Dara hadn’t talked to him. He told Kate that she sat there white-faced, twisting this false rose on a wire stem and a clip back and forth in her hands. Sometimes tears came down her face. Strange tears without any sobs, they looked as if they were painted on.

“Can Jacinta go up and see her?” Dr. White asked tentatively.

“She doesn’t seem to want to talk to anyone. It’s terrible times for all of them, all of you.” Kate gave Jacinta a slight pat on her arm as some kind of token that she wasn’t siding against her.

Jacinta understood. “I said something a bit stupid yesterday. I wanted to tell her I didn’t mean it.”

“Well then, why don’t you go up and tell her? I’m sure she’ll be relieved,” Kate said.

She poured a whiskey for Martin White without asking him whether he wanted one or not, and he took it without asking himself the same question. They sat and waited for their daughters to make their peace.

   “Dara?”

“Yes.”

“Can I come in?”

Jacinta stood at the door.

Dara looked up listlessly.

“I’m sorry for what I said.”

“What?”

“It had nothing to do with you. She just fell. She would have fallen anyway.”

“I know.”

“But I’m sorry I said it.”

“That’s all right.”

Jacinta and Dara had never had the arm-in-arm friendship of any of the other girls. There would be no embracing, no tears, no emotional reconciliation.

“It’s like a nightmare, isn’t it?” Jacinta said.

“I wonder did she know,” Dara said.

“Did she know what?”

“That she was going to die.”

“She couldn’t have. It was so quick.”

“But they say people do …”

“No, Dara, she couldn’t have, it was too short. Try to think of a jump or a dive, it’s over in a second, it would have been for her too.”

“Yes.”

“Will you … will you be all right?”

“Who, me?” Dara sounded like Maggie without realizing it. “Yes, I’ll be all right.”

   Jacinta came back into the bar.

“That didn’t take long,” Dr. White said.

“She doesn’t feel like talking. She said it was all right.”

“I’m sure it’s all forgotten now,” Kate said. She didn’t really feel that at all, but she had to say something to try to console this wretched child in front of her.

“She looks very lonely there, as if she could do with some company,” Jacinta said.

“I know. But what company? Even if I could get up the stairs I’m not what she wants. And she can’t talk to her father, or even Michael.” Kate looked anxious.

Dr. White stood up. “Come on, Jacinta, we’ve done what we came to do, no point in wearing everyone out.”

“Will they have her in an open coffin?”

“Apparently.” Martin White was grim.

“The children shouldn’t go.”

“Of course they shouldn’t, it’s not the goddamn middle ages, but that madwoman will probably go out to the highways and byways finding children to terrify them.”

“I wouldn’t be afraid of seeing Maggie lying in a coffin,” Jacinta said suddenly. “In fact I’d prefer to. Anything would be better than seeing her all broken on the raft.”

Martin White and Kate Ryan exchanged surprised glances. They hadn’t thought of it like that.

   They brought Maggie’s body back that evening. Twenty-six hours after she had died Barry Conway’s hearse drove down Bridge Street and parked almost opposite his own premises.

The front parlor in Daly’s had been made ready. Candlesticks burned and holy water fonts hung on the wall.

Her father looked a broken man, her sisters from Wales looked unfamiliar and startled. Kitty, who had been going to come home from Dublin for the weekend, sat white-faced in a corner. Charlie brought more and more chairs into the parlor.

They were not going to sit there all night, it was not a wake in the old sense of the word. But between nine o’clock and midnight almost every single man and woman in Mountfern would call to tell the family how sorry they were about what had happened.

They would look at the face, and say a prayer. Then they would leave their mass card, a silver or black-edged card stating that the holy sacrifice of the mass had been offered for the repose of the soul of Maggie Daly. Most of them wrote Margaret Daly. Maggie seemed the wrong kind of name for a dead person.

   “I’m not going to go,” Kate stormed to John.

“Of course you’re not to go,” he soothed.

“No, I mean even if I had my own two good legs I wouldn’t go.”

“Easy, Kate, easy.”

“The children? Do you think Jacinta was right? Would it be better for them to see her …?”

“I think it might.” He was quiet but firm. “Don’t forget they have already seen her dead. This has to be better.”

“Will you tell Dara?”

“Yes.” His heart was heavy “I’ll go up now.”

   “If you like, Dara, I’ll walk along to Daly’s with you. Is that what you want to do, or would you prefer to remember her the way she was, laughing and running around?”

“Will her eyes be open, Daddy?”

“No, pet, they’ll be closed.”

“I couldn’t bear to see her eyes, but I would like to say goodbye to Maggie in some way.”

“You tell me when you want to go, I’ll come with you.”

“Michael?” It was the first time she had mentioned him all day.

“He says he would like to say goodbye to her also. You always say the same you two, it never changes.” His smile was gentle.

“It must be the only thing that doesn’t. Everything else has changed. For the worse.”

“Call me when you want to go, Dara.”

“Is Michael ready now?”

“Yes, he is, love.”

“Can we go right away?”

   They walked in complete silence by the river.

They didn’t even look into Loretto Quinn’s. They might have seen Rachel sitting by her window. And Loretto sitting downstairs with all the memories of the night that Barney died clear in her mind. They didn’t look into Coyne’s Motor Works. They might have seen Jack Coyne doing something he hadn’t done for a long time. He was sitting at his table with his mug of tea in front of him as usual.

But Jack Coyne was not reading the newspaper, which is what he usually did at night, hunting bargains through the small ads. Jack was reading aloud to himself a verse of poetry.

He had been trying to remember it all day and in desperation had gone up to the brothers. Brother Keane had lent him an anthology.

And he had found it under Yeats.

   Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild.

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

   He didn’t read any more of the poem. He didn’t even know what it was about, but it seemed to sum up what had happened in Mountfern.

   Tommy Leonard stood at the door.

He knew that sooner or later Dara would come to Daly’s.

He moved over to join the three Ryans. “I wanted to wait so that we could go together.”

“Thank you,” Dara said simply.

John Ryan almost felt he should let them go in on their own.

Just as they got to the door of Daly’s Dairy, Dara paused. The others stopped, thinking she didn’t want to go in.

“We should ask Jacinta and Liam to come as well,” she said.

Michael ran up to Whites’ in minutes he was back with the two White children behind him.

“Grace’s father didn’t want her to come,” Dara explained. “He doesn’t understand that this is the best thing we can do.”

Just then a car drew up. Grace got out and she walked slowly, almost hesitantly over to the others.

“Father didn’t want me to come, but Mrs. Fine saw you all walking down the road so she called him, and he drove me here at once.”

Nobody asked where Kerry was. It was as if they had forgotten him.

Unaware of the sympathetic looks they were getting from the adults, the six children walked into the house. They went to the front room where the candles flickered and they heard the rise and fall of prayers.

Maggie looked like a wax doll. Her face was a clear almost transparent white. Because she had been injured so badly by the fall her hair was arranged to cover the sides of her face. The great cut over her eye wasn’t visible.

She was dressed in a white gown with long sleeves, and had a rosary threaded through her hands.

She didn’t look what they thought of as dead, she looked odd. Too still, and as if she were acting a part.

Mrs. Daly sat by the coffin. “Thank you for coming to pray for Maggie,” she said.

The children knelt down. They hadn’t intended to, but that was what Mrs. Daly seemed to expect.

They said a decade of the rosary together, then they stood and looked again, a last look.

It was as if they had forgotten the presence of her family and the other adults in the room. They talked to each other in low voices.

“It doesn’t look
too
frightening,” Tommy said.

“She doesn’t have that worried look she sometimes has,” Grace said.

“She won’t have to worry about things anymore,” said Michael.

“It can’t be possible that she won’t get up,” Jacinta said.

“She was very nice, you know, very, very nice,” said Liam White.

“I’m terribly terribly sorry, Maggie,” said Dara.

   Eddie Ryan arrived at the door of Daly’s.

Sheila Whelan exchanged glances with Martin White and Judy Byrne who were standing in the corridor.

She was about to discourage him.

“It’s all right,” said Eddie. “I know nobody would want me here.”

“It’s not that …” Sheila began.

“I’m too young to see anyone dead. But I brought some flowers.”

Sheila looked at the wilting collection in his hands. Some of them were wallflowers taken from Judy Byrne’s windowboxes, some were the purple wild valerian that grew in the cracks of walls. There was a selection of cowslips and some dandelions.

There was little life or bloom in any of them since they had been squeezed in a hot hand.

They were almost entirely weeds. To Eddie Ryan they were flowers.

Sheila took them gently from the boy’s hand. “Thank you very much, Eddie. I’ll see that these are put in a special place. Mrs. Daly will be very grateful that you had such a kind thought.”

“They might need a bit of water if they’re to go on the coffin,” Eddie said anxiously.

And Mrs. Whelan said she’d see to it, never fear.

   Everyone said that it would break your heart next day to see the children at mass. They sat so still near the front of the church. The nuns were all there from the convent, and all the brothers too. The men had come from the building site; many of them knew the Dalys in one way or another.

Rachel asked Kate if it would be out of place for her to attend the service. She didn’t want to do anything that would be out of place.

“You’ll be expected to be there,” Kate assured her. “Weren’t you one of her great friends?”

The small coffin covered in summer flowers stood at the steps of the altar. Father Hogan had asked Sister Laura if she could assemble some of the better singers in the school to act as a choir.

She found a dozen of the older girls whom she hoped would not cry. Girls who were two classes ahead of Maggie. She arranged they should sing “Ave Maria” and “Panis Angelicus,” and at the end of the mass they would have “The Lord’s My Shepherd.”