Alice McDermott - Someone

“Are you all right?” I asked him, and he answered, “Fine. And yourself?” Which made me smile.

I sat on the edge of the bed, felt him move his long legs to accommodate me. “Bad dream,” I said, and recognized as I said it my own foolish certainty that it had not been a dream at all. I had asked and it had been given to me. Time had relented, doubled back on itself, restored what had been lost.

I saw my brother lower his arm, felt his hand move toward mine over the thin sheet. In the darkness, he lifted my own and held it. His palm was warm and broad. I felt the certainty of it, of his grip. I understood that he knew my dream. That he had felt me tugging at his sleeve.

On the nightstand beside the bed, reflecting the dim lamplight outside, there was a plain glass of water. Beside it, the white-capped prescription bottle Tom had brought home.

I asked him again if he would stay. “This is a nice room, isn’t it?” I said. “It’s always been a great place for guests. Momma stayed here a couple of times. When the kids were young.” I could see the way the streetlight caught in his eyes and on his teeth.

“I remember,” he said softly. He said, “That fellow who was here, Matt Cain, asked if I was interested in his place. He’s got a three-family out in Bay Ridge. The top floor’s available. I don’t know the neighborhood very well, but I told him I’d consider it.”

“You’ll be lonely out there,” I said. I said it abruptly, without thinking. “It will be a lonely life.”

I did not remember then that the phrase had been used for Bill Corrigan.

“That’s occurred to me, too,” Gabe said softly. He lifted my hand and dropped it down again. “I don’t know if that can be helped.” And then he added, “It won’t be like home”—meaning, I knew, everything that once was. And then he laughed a little. “Remember Momma in her last days? Not home, we had to tell her, but Brooklyn.”

I let go of his hand as I stood. “You’ll be at home here,” I told him.

He nodded, and then he once more lifted his wrist to his eyes. I lingered for a moment at the side of his bed. Without fear or forethought, without intention, not at that moment, I lifted the prescription bottle and slipped it into the pocket of my robe.

The staircase was darker than the rooms upstairs had been. I went down the stairs slowly, carefully, one hand on the banister, one on the wall, walking with the caution of my blind old age.

I might have saved my brother’s life that night. I don’t know. I might only have dreamed the loss of my first child.

I went down the stairs carefully in the dark, one hand on the banister, one hand on the wall. What light came from the lampposts outside the living-room window was pooled at the bottom of the stairs. I thought of Pegeen Chehab and her last fall. And then of the distance her parents had traveled to bring her to her brief life, sands of Syria and Mount Lebanon and the slick floor of the pitching ship, and then that brief flame in the parlor floor window.

On the day before she died, Pegeen leaned down to me, her eyes sparkling with her plan. She said, If I see him, I’ll get real close. I’ll pretend to fall, see, and he’ll catch me and say, Is it you again? Someone nice.

She told me, poor sparrow, poor fool, We’ll see what happens then.

After This

Child of My Heart

Charming Billy

At Weddings and Wakes

That Night

A Bigamist’s Daughter

Someone

Copyright © 2013 by Alice McDermott.

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