He tucked the wodge of brochures under his arm and headed out the door of the travel agents, looking down as he walked. Campaign posters lined the street, every telephone pole and lamppost swathed in them.
“Ah, James, how are ya?”
He glanced up. Patsy Lenihan lumbered toward him, listing heavily, panting like an old dog. There was no way around the man without stepping off the pavement, such was the broad beam of him.
“Patsy, how are you?” James said.
“Ah, I’m not so bad, I suppose, but this getting old is no craic at all.”
“Oh, we’ll be for the scrap heap soon, Patsy.”
“A-ha-ha-ha.”
James turned away. At home, whenever he or Izzy made a joke at the other’s expense, the response was a resounding A-ha-ha-ha, Patsy’s slow-fire laugh a shorthand for idiocy.
“Well, take care of yourself now, Patsy—”
“Are you off on your holiday, James, you are?” Patsy said, nodding at the brochures.
“Ah well, thinking about it anyway. Izzy likes a week away this time of year.”
“Aye, you should be enjoying your retirement. Sure aren’t you better off out of it.” Patsy scanned the posters.
“Oh, I was long enough at it, Patsy.”
“Indeed you were. I saw Izzy at bridge last week, and I asked after you, and she said you were grand, and I was glad to hear it. Jesus, don’t you deserve a holiday after all you’ve been through.”
Patsy was close to James now, wagging his face. His complexion was the same indelible pink as always. His little milky eyes danced in his head.
“Well, I should get going, Patsy. Izzy’ll have the lunch ready.”
“Have you heard any more about what happened?”
James fixed his gaze on the road, the yellow lines daubed with gray patches of chewing gum. “There’ll be an inquest soon enough. I suppose we’ll know more after that.”
“But, Jesus, it was terrible—ha?”
James peered back at Patsy’s face and realized he was expecting an answer to this. “Bye now, Patsy.”
“I mean, what must have been going through Trevor’s mind at all?”
James’s hands tightened into fists. “Don’t ask me about that man’s mind, Patsy Lenihan. I saw inside his mind, and I never want to think about it again.” By now, he was nearly butting Patsy, his nose brushing the big man’s cheek as it pulled away. “And the next time you want to try and understand him, you just remember what he did to his wife, and never give him another thought for as long as you live.”
Patsy had stepped aside, his mouth a gaping hole, sniveling noises spluttering out of him. James slid past. He hurried along the street and crossed to where he was parked at the shore road, then threw the brochures onto the passenger seat and sat, slamming the door behind him. He rammed the heel of his hand against the steering wheel and growled at his reflection in the rearview mirror. His eyes peered back, framed by a web of fine lines. The man he saw looked watery and indistinct, like he might dissolve and drain out of sight at any moment.
The pale, green lights of the dashboard clock read 14:07. How long, he wondered, before everyone would be talking about James Keaveney attacking Patsy Lenihan on the main street of the town. Poor Patsy, who left the farm only once a week to buy the Donegal Democrat, and who’d given quotes to the newspapers about what a “fantastic neighbor” Trevor had been, what a “pillar of the community.”
James had wasted twenty years of his life as TD for Donegal South, representing clodhopping eejits like Patsy Lenihan.
A gull swooped down and lighted on the seawall just a few feet away, then plodded back and forth, stretched its beak wide, and pointed a pink sliver of a tongue at him.
“A-ha-ha-ha,” James said to the bird. “A-ha-ha-ha.”
Four months earlier, following dinner that night, he’d put on a shirt and tie and returned to the kitchen table to finish his cup of tea.
“And where are you off to?” Izzy had asked him.
“Up to Munley’s house before it gets too late.”
“And why in God’s name would you go up there?”
“I want to see if Trevor would be interested in running for local council.”
She clacked one plate against the other and set them in the sink. “And you’re going to bother them with that, at this time of night? That’s not the kind of house you can just call on. Would you not ring them first?”
“No. I want to make it seem official, let him know I’m serious. I won’t be ten minutes in the house. Anyway, I’ve mentioned it to him already.”
This was not strictly true, but he had tried. After Mass the Sunday before, he had spotted Trevor near the church gates holding his twin daughters, one small child in the crook of each arm, their faces turned into his chest. He was a tall, broad man who stood head and shoulders above everyone. When James spoke to him, he stared past—to his wife, Fidelma, by the doors, chatting with Cathleen Meehan. Izzy was the same—wherever they went, she stopped to speak to every person they met. James had promised to call up to Trevor’s house some evening for a word. Trevor had smiled and wished James well, but he had not taken his eyes off Fidelma for a second.
Izzy sat and poured herself a cup of tea from the pot. “Can you not leave well enough alone? You’ll be retired shortly, and it’ll be someone else’s problem.”
“Look, there are no strong candidates coming up. So if I have a chat with a few men around to see if they’d be interested in getting involved at a grassroots level—”
“And he’s the best you can come up with?”
“He’s steady, he’s sensible, he’s a family man, he does a lot of fundraising for the GAA club, he was a great sportsman.”
“He’s a dose, is what he is. Jesus, I avoid him whenever I go into the bank. ‘Are you all right there, Mrs. Keaveney? Do you need any help there, Mrs. Keaveney?’ ” She contorted her face and moved her head from side to side. “How he ever got that gorgeous-looking girl to marry him, I’ll never know. You could do nothing with him. I hope you won’t have him going around kissing babies. And do you remember the father?”
“He was old-school.”
“He was Old Testament! Jesus Christ, he was the most sanctimonious man. Protesting the whole time. Pro-life, anti-divorce, anti-bloody-everything. You couldn’t walk on the main street of the town but he’d denounce you for it. And that poor, bedraggled wife of his—a path worn between the house and the church and never off her knees. I used to feel so sorry for those kids.”
“What are their names again?” James said, massaging his forehead with the tips of his fingers.
“Eh . . . Teresa . . . Mary . . . Trevor was the youngest—”
“No. Trevor’s daughters. What are their names?”
“Oh, something fierce Irish altogether,” Izzy said, straining to remember.
“Is it Ciara, Cliodna?”
“No, no . . . Caoimhe and Aisling!” She jabbed the air triumphantly. “And they’re lucky to have them. They had to wait until the father died before they could have IVF because he disapproved of that, too.”
“Where in the name of God did you hear that?”
“Oh, where do I hear anything?” Izzy said, tossing her head. “Anyway, if you’re going, go. They’ll be putting those children to bed.”
“Caoimhe and Aisling, Caoimhe and Aisling.” He repeated the names to himself as he drove along the coast road.
And how are Caoimhe and Aisling? Are they at play school yet? Are things all right at the clinic, Fidelma? I hope Dr. Clarke’s not working you too hard.
Fidelma was the hygienist at the dental surgery—an attractive, open-faced woman with hair so black it appeared purple under the glaring medical lamps. She wore a lot of makeup, and when she leaned over James in the dentist’s chair, he could see the gradations in color passing up her throat like tide lines, each eyelash as clearly defined as the leg of an insect.
He turned into Munley’s drive and juddered across the cattle grid. A patch of frost crunched beneath the tires. You should throw a bit of salt around, Trevor, or you’ll never get down that road in the morning. The headlights swept the steep hill, and as he reached the top, Munley’s dormer bungalow rose up before him. It was a handsome home on a fine site overlooking the bay with no neighbors around. Behind the stained-glass window in the front door, a single light shone.
He parked at the side of the house and, stepping from the car, saw Trevor in the hall. It was the size of him that made James stop. The man’s head almost touched the light shade. His scalp gleamed beneath the wispy, brown hair that feathered his crown. His arms hung rigid at his sides. His chest heaved. James lifted his hand in greeting and walked around to the back door, then tapped gently on the glass and let himself in. As he wiped his feet on the mat, he saw that the surface of the cooker was crowded with pots and pans.
“Are you just after the dinner, Trevor?”
Trevor’s stance did not change. He just turned his head to face James.
James noticed the black slacks, the polished shoes. “Are you off out, Trevor? I can come back another time.”
Trevor’s lips parted and closed—once, twice—like his mouth was too dry to speak.
“Right. Well. I’ll leave you to get back to your evening.” James placed his fingers on the door handle and looked away. “But if you did have five minutes sometime, I’d be grateful if you’d hear me out. The local elections are coming round, and we need a few good men to run for council. Your name came up.”
He glanced to Trevor again to signal his departure, and it was then he noticed it—out through the kitchen, in the light of the hall, a rope hung from the upstairs banister. From where James stood, it appeared to turn, trying to loop itself around Trevor’s ear.
“Trevor . . . is everything all right? Will we sit down? Come on now, sit yourself down there, and we’ll talk it out.”
He pulled out a chair and sat, folded his arms on the table, and his eyes came to rest on the white envelope lying at its center.
Trevor’s body shifted. He took three slow steps to face James squarely, blocking the doorway beyond.
“Where are Fidelma and the girls, Trevor? Have you had a domestic? Well listen, don’t worry, it’ll sort itself out. Izzy and I have had more rows down through the years, you wouldn’t believe it. Anything you can possibly think of, we’ve fought about it—money, the house, the kids, the car. And I’m not just talking tiffs, Trevor. Jesus, we’ve torn strips off each other. We’ve gone from one month to the next without speaking a word.”
Trevor was saying something, but so softly James couldn’t make it out.
“But we’ve always sorted it, Trevor. She’s tried to have me out of the house so many times I nearly bought a tent. But I love her. And she knows I love her.”
It was his name. Trevor was saying, “James Keaveney, James Keaveney, James fucking Keaveney,” over and over again, grinding it between his teeth, spitting it out.
“And I’m sure Fidelma knows you love her—”
“You shouldn’t be here, James Keaveney,” Trevor snarled.
James held up his hands. “All I’m saying is, marriage is hard.” He made an inventory of the objects that lay close by: the radio, the kettle, the pots and pans. “Take it from someone with thirty-seven years under his belt. And it doesn’t get any easier, especially after you’ve had kids. But Jesus, they’re beautiful girls. I said it to Izzy after Mass last Sunday, I said they are the two most beautiful—”
“You shouldn’t be here.”
“And things are harder now, I think, for young couples.” James’s voice had begun to shake. “Men have to be involved in every aspect of family life—go to work and come home in the evening and put the kids to bed. I don’t mind telling you I was never too involved in the childcare side of things. I was just the breadwinner. But it was different in my day, in your father’s day—”
And then Trevor’s two great hands came down on the table with a noise that made James jump. “Don’t you fucking mention my father, James Keaveney.”
“Look, Trevor, whatever you may think of me, your father and I always got on well. I had a lot of respect for the man—”
“James fucking Keaveney. Trust you—”
“And you know as well as I do, Trevor, I’m not leaving this house until we have this sorted.”
“Trust you to fucking—”
There was another noise then, and James turned. A door connected the kitchen to the garage, and the noise was coming from behind this door. Filtered and unreal, like a voice from a television or radio or phone—but still, unmistakably, the desperate, hysterical wail of a small child.
He searched Trevor’s face, watched the panic enclose his eyes. Trevor roared, and his palms flashed white. The table flipped toward James, cracking against his forehead. He tipped backward, and the room rushed away into blackness.
The brochures slid off the passenger seat as he pulled up to the house. He gathered them from the footwell. Noise drifted on the shiftless air—the thrum of engines in the harbor, the caw of gulls eddying overhead. After a squally spring, May had arrived with warmth and clear days. Out past the lighthouse, the Sligo Mountains held true against the horizon, like the prow of an upturned boat.
At the end of the garden, Izzy was kneeling by the flower beds, her round rear resting on her heels.
“I got some brochures for you to look at,” he said, crossing the lawn.
She glanced up at him, then poked at the soil with a trowel, tossing weeds onto the grass.
“It was your idea,” he said.
“That was months ago.”
“Do you not want to go anymore?”
“I wouldn’t go to the end of the road with you, James,” she said flatly, her voice directed at the ground. “Not the way you’re being at the moment.”
He sat on the bench and watched her gouge holes in the dirt. “We got a date.”
She turned. “What?”
“For the inquest.”
“When?”
“Not for another seven months—December.”
“No. When did you find out?”
“A letter arrived in the post—yesterday.”
“Jesus. And when were you going to tell me?”
He stared at his hands. “I’ve been called on to give evidence.”
“But sure you knew that was going to happen.”
He could see her trying to catch his eye.
“This is a good thing, James,” she said, her tone soft, placating. “Now that you know, you can prepare yourself, mentally. Because you can’t keep going on the way you are, flying off the handle over every little thing. The kids won’t come near the house because of you. If you won’t go and talk to someone, that’s fine, but you have to start making some effort.” She gestured weakly at the soil. “This is what you should be doing. You should be out here each day getting your hands dirty and thanking God you’re alive.”
“I just thought a holiday would be a bit of a distraction.”
“Maybe we could go to Dublin for your retirement dinner. You’ve canceled it three times already—if we don’t go soon, they’ll give up on you.”
“I wanted to have a date for the inquest first.”
“James, listen to me—you’re in denial about that inquest. What do you expect they’re going to do—tie everything up in a neat bow? There’s no way of explaining what that man did.” She pointed the trowel at him. “Your problem is you still think that people doubt you, that they suspect you retired because of that night. There’s not a single person who blames you for what happened in that house but yourself.”
She tore the polystyrene casing from a clump of red petunias and loosened the roots with her fingers.
“Do you want me to get you a pair of gloves?” he asked.
“No. I can’t get a proper grip on things if I wear gloves.”
She bedded the flowers in the holes and pushed down against the bases with the tips of her fingers, like applying pressure to a wound. The little scarlet mouths gaped up at James.
He rose from the bench and disappeared into the shed, returning with a pair of gloves and a cushion. Dropping the cushion on the grass, he creaked down to his knees beside her.
“Here, make yourself useful,” she said, gathering the pile of discarded weeds into a bag and handing it to him. “If you clear that section in front of you, I can get to planting.”
He pulled on the gloves and sank his hands into the soil, amid the woodlice and the worms. The weeds were tough and rooted; he had to dig his fingers deep to excise them.
“He wore a vest,” he said.
“What?”
“Trevor—under his shirt, he wore a vest . . . and the shirt looked freshly ironed.”
“You’ve told me all this, James.”
He tossed aside a worm. “I mean, I’ve heard of men putting their house in order, so to speak—writing a note and polishing their shoes and making the bed. But what use is a vest to a man who’s about to kill himself?”
“James—”
“And why do you think he didn’t start the engine?”
“I don’t know. Maybe that’s the kind of thing you’ll learn at the inquest.”
“He put them in the car—but he didn’t start the engine.”
“James, please.”
He watched the worm shift across the grass. “And what about me? Why didn’t he just finish me off? Why—”
“James!”
He turned to her. Her eyes glistened. Her throat tightened as she swallowed.
“I’m sorry, pet, but you have to stop. Please.”
He released his fist, and a knot of weeds fell into the bag.
He had opened his eyes to find himself on the floor of Trevor Munley’s kitchen. The child’s cries swelled like a siren. He took hold of the edge of the table and pushed hard against it to raise himself to his feet, then staggered toward the noise. As the door swung open, light from the hall spilled into the garage. The windows of a car glinted, and a girl’s face, dappled with shadow, peered out with such curiosity. A tube looped around from the exhaust to the far side of the vehicle. After trying the locked door, he followed the coiling tube to the driver’s window, where it was wedged between the glass and the frame. He pulled down on the glass, and it moved an inch, and the tube dropped to the floor like it had been spat out. He reached his arm through the parting and unlocked the doors.
The two little girls were strapped into their booster seats, one wailing inconsolably with a stuffed rabbit in her lap, the other with a dummy bobbing in her mouth as she stared at her sister and rubbed the satin edge of a blanket between her fingers. He knelt beside the silent child. Her eyes flashed at him, feverishly alert, then weak with exhaustion.
“Listen to me, darling, everything’s going to be all right. You stay here with your sister and look after her. I’ll be back for you in just one second, OK?”
She reached up and placed her tiny hand flat against the dummy and plucked it out. “Mammy in bath,” she said, in a tone so pure and even they might have been the first words she’d ever spoken, then set the dummy carefully back in her mouth.
He rose. “Tell your sister a story.”
As he moved from the garage through the kitchen, the hall light seemed to waver. Gradually, his vision resolved the scene before him: Trevor Munley’s body suspended from the taut rope, revolving slowly; his face swollen and blue; his feet pedaling the air, absently seeking out the chair that lay tipped over on the floor; his eyes widening in recognition as they passed across James. A low gurgling sound leaked from his throat.
James stepped toward the chair to put it upright, to steady Trevor onto it; but before reaching it, he stopped. All around were dark patches, thick, clotted pools—along the hall, through the half-open bathroom door. The threshold was slicked with the same black sap; and just beyond that, the soles of a pair of feet, placed so neatly together they looked joined in prayer. As he moved closer, the body on the floor came into view, and he felt his breath leave him. He held the doorframe and sank to the ground, near enough to her then to have reached out and touched the cord of the dressing gown that covered her. And between the head of black, lustrous hair that poured over the bathroom tiles and the material of the dressing gown, her neck rent open to expose the dark interior of her throat, unrecognizable as anything that had once been part of her.
“You’re right,” he said. “These gloves are bloody useless. You can’t get a grip on things at all.”
“Sure I said that to you. You’ll listen to me yet, James Keaveney.”
“Oh, I always listen to you, Izzy.” He jammed his fingers in around the stem of a glorious weed—fronds splayed, big as a cabbage—rummaging about until he found the nubby root, and upended it onto the grass.
“James! That was a new one. I planted it just last week.”
She loomed over him, hands on the small of her back. They both looked down at the discarded flower.
He smiled, stifling a laugh. “Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry.”
“Maybe I could plant it again.”
“Ah, come on—in all fairness, it looked like something you’d find on the side of the road.”
“I thought it was lovely,” she whimpered.
He was laughing now, and the glint of a smile lit Izzy’s eyes.
“A-ha-ha-ha.” She extended her neck, poking her face at him. “A-ha-ha-ha.”
He turned back to the flower beds. “I suppose I should tell you, before you hear it from someone else—we had a bit of a row earlier.”
“Who?”
“Me and Patsy—we had a sort of a set-to.”
“Did you, indeed. And what did he say to upset you?”
“Oh, what else? He was looking for information about Trevor.”
She sighed. “And you said, ‘I’d thank you to mind your own business, Patsy, and good day to you.’ ”
“Something like that, yeah.” He looked up at her.
She shook her head. “I’ll tell you one thing, James, it’s a good thing you’re not canvasing for votes anymore, or you’d be out of a job.”
“Well, I don’t think I’d get Patsy’s vote—although he’s that fucking stupid, you wouldn’t be sure.”
He continued turning the soil, tilling the same patch two, three, four times. He would not apologize for his anger—it was the only thing that felt right to him. In the days after it happened, he’d felt nothing. He’d attended the funeral—two coffins carried into the church and placed side by side before the altar. He’d listened to Father Larkin give a sermon on forgiveness. He’d walked in the cortege to the graveyard, where a single plot received both bodies; and as they were lowered into the ground, he’d glanced up. It was the sight of Fidelma’s sister that woke him—her dense, dark ringlets tumbling over her shoulders; her long, woolen coat trailing over the grass. The whole town surrounded her, a bank of black stretching as far as he could see, their faces a unified blankness. She’d stared down into the grave with enough anger to have sundered the earth.
A shadow passed across him.
“Did you hear me?” Izzy asked.
“Of course.”
“I said I’m going up to the house to get a jumper.”
“Right.”
She settled down onto her hunkers and placed her hands on his forearm, as her eyes searched his face. “Where were you at all?” He could see himself reflected in her pupils. “You have to let it go, James. You did the right thing.”
In Munley’s hall, he’d turned his face from Fidelma’s body and watched Trevor, still moving, still with life in his eyes. The spinning of his body had slowed to a gentle sway, but his muscles rippled; there was an agitation in his hands he seemed to be trying to control. And James had waited.
Izzy leaned her forehead against his. “And when you get on that witness stand, you’ll tell them the same thing you told the Gardaí—when you found him, there was no sign of life.”
“I let him away with it.”
“You let him away with nothing. He was stone fucking mad. You know as well as I do he would have been tried with reduced responsibility, or they would have released him in twenty years. When has anyone in this country ever cared about what a man did to his wife?”
James closed his eyes and rested his weight into hers.
“There was no future for those girls, growing up with a father like that,” she said. “If you hadn’t shown up when you did, there would have been four bodies going into the ground.”
She gripped him more tightly, and he gazed down at her arm, mottled with freckles. Running his finger over the new textures age had ingrained in her skin, he thought of Fidelma Munley, that last time he’d seen her at Mass: How when it came to Communion, she’d stood up, and Trevor had moved aside to let her pass while he waited with the children. And when Fidelma almost stepped out into the aisle in front of someone, Trevor had laid a firm hand on her arm, the way you might lay your hand on a gate to stop it from swinging shut. How gentlemanly he was, James had thought—there were so few like him left.