Colm Tóibín - Brooklyn

Eilis knew that she could not be understood as she tried to reply because she was crying so hard. Her mother was silent for a while on the other end of the phone.

"Tomorrow I'll say goodbye to her for you," her mother said when she began to speak again. "That's what I thought I'd do. I'll say goodbye to her from me and then I'll say goodbye to her from you. And she's with your father in heaven now. We'll bury her beside him. I often thought at night how lonely he might be on his own in the graveyard but he'll have Rose now. They're up in heaven, the two of them."

"They are, Mammy."

"I don't know why she was taken away so young, that's all I have to say."

"It's a terrible shock," Eilis replied.

"She was cold this morning when I touched her, as cold as anything."

"She must have died peacefully," Eilis said.

"I wish she had told me, or let me know something was wrong. She didn't want to worry me. That's what Father Quaid and the others said. Maybe I couldn't have done much but I would have watched out for her. I don't know what to think."

Eilis could hear her mother sighing.

"I'll go back now and we'll say the rosary and I'll tell her I was talking to you."

"I'd love if you would do that."

"Goodbye now, Eily."

"Goodbye, Mammy, and will you tell the lads I was on the phone to you?"

"I will. They'll arrive in the morning."

"Goodbye, Mammy."

"Goodbye, Eily."

When she had put the phone down she began to cry. She found a chair in the corner of the room and sat down trying to control herself. Father Flood and his housekeeper came and brought her tea and tried to calm her but she could not stop herself breaking into hysterical sobbing.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"Don't worry at all," the housekeeper said.

When she was calmer Father Flood drove her to Mrs. Kehoe's; Tony was already in the front room. She did not know how long he had been there and she looked at him and Mrs. Kehoe wondering what they had been talking about while they waited for her and if Mrs. Kehoe had finally found out that Tony was Italian and not Irish. Mrs. Kehoe was full of kindness and sympathy, but there was also, Eilis thought, a sense that the news and the visitors had caused excitement, distracted her pleasantly from the tedium of the day. She bustled in and out of the room addressing Tony by his first name and bringing a tray with tea and sandwiches for him and Father Flood.

"Your poor mother, that's all I have to say, your poor mother," she said.

For once, Eilis did not feel it necessary to be polite to Mrs. Kehoe. She looked away every time she spoke and did not respond to her at any point. This appeared to make Mrs. Kehoe even more solicitous, as she offered her tea at every moment or an aspirin and a glass of water, or insisted that she have something to eat. Eilis wished Tony would stop accepting further sandwiches and cakes from Mrs. Kehoe and thanking her for being so kind. She wanted him to leave and Mrs. Kehoe to stop talking and Father Flood to go as well, but she could not face her own room and the night ahead so she said nothing and soon Mrs. Kehoe and Tony and Father Flood spoke as though she were not there, going over the changes that had occurred in Brooklyn in the past few years and offering their opinions on what further changes might occur. Every so often they grew silent and asked her if she needed anything.

"The poor thing, she's in shock," Mrs. Kehoe said.

Eilis said that she needed nothing and closed her eyes as they continued to talk among themselves, Mrs. Kehoe wondering to the other two if she should buy a television for company in the evenings. She worried, she said, that it might not catch on and she'd be left with it. Both Tony and Father Flood advised her to buy a set, and this seemed only to cause further remarks about how there was no guarantee that they would go on making programmes and she did not think she would take the risk.

"When everyone gets one, I'll get one," she said.

Finally, when they had run out of subjects, it was arranged that Father Flood would say a mass for Rose at ten o'clock the following morning and that Mrs. Kehoe would attend, as would Tony and his mother. There would be the usual congregation as well, Father Flood said, and he would let them know before mass started that it was being said for the repose of the soul of someone very special and he would, before communion, say a few words about Rose and ask people to pray for her. He arranged to drive Tony home but waited tactfully in Mrs. Kehoe's front room with Mrs. Kehoe as Tony embraced Eilis in the hall.

"I'm sorry I can't talk," she said.

"I've been thinking about it," he said. "If one of my brothers had died, maybe that sounds selfish, but I was trying to imagine what you're feeling."

"I think about it," Eilis said, "and I can't bear it and then I forget about it for a minute and when it comes back it's as though I just heard the news. I can't get over it."

"I wish I could stay with you," he said.

"I'll see you in the morning, and tell your mother not to come if it's any trouble."

"She'll be there. Nothing is any trouble now," he said.

Eilis looked at the pile of letters Rose had sent her, wondering if between sending one of these and sending the next Rose had learned that she was sick. Or if she had known before Eilis had left. It changed everything Eilis thought about her time in Brooklyn, it made everything that had happened to her seem small. She looked at Rose's handwriting, its clarity and evenness, its sense of supreme self-possession and self-confidence, and she wondered whether, while writing some of these words, Rose had looked up and sighed and then, through sheer strength of will, steeled herself and carried on writing, not faltering for a single moment from her decision to let no one share her knowledge except the doctor who had told her.

It was strange, Eilis felt in the morning, how deeply she had slept and how instantaneously, on waking, she had known that she was not going to work but to a mass for Rose. Her sister, she knew, would still be in the house in Friary Street, they would take her to the cathedral later in the evening and she would be buried after mass in the morning. All of this seemed simple and clear and almost inevitable until she and Mrs. Kehoe set out together for the parish church. Walking the familiar street, passing people whom she did not know, Eilis realized that one of them could have died and not Rose, and this could be another spring morning, a hint of heat in the air, with her going to work as normal.

The idea of Rose dying in her sleep seemed unimaginable. Had she opened her eyes for a moment? Had she just lain still breathing the breath of sleep, and then, as though it were nothing, had her heart stopped and her breath? How could this happen? Had she cried out in the night and not been heard, or even murmured or whispered? Had she known something the previous evening? Something, anything, that might have given her a clue that this was her last day alive in the world?

She imagined Rose laid out now in the dark robes of the dead with candles flickering on the table. And later the coffin being closed, and the solemn faces of everyone in the hallway and outside in the street, her brothers wearing suits and black ties as they had at their father's funeral. All morning at mass and back in Father Flood's house, she went through each moment of Rose's death and her removal.

The others were surprised, almost alarmed, when she said that she wanted to go to work that afternoon. She saw Mrs. Kehoe whispering about it to Father Flood. Tony asked her if she was sure, and when she insisted he said that he would walk with her to Bartocci's and then meet her later back at Mrs. Kehoe's. Mrs. Kehoe had invited him and Father Flood to have supper with the other lodgers followed by a rosary to be said for Rose's soul.