Alice McDermott - After This

“An ache is all,” their father said.

The wind seemed to come up from under the car, it pressed against the window, muffled, shut out, although they all still felt the sting of it on their cheeks. Michael placed the paper cup, almost empty, between the knees of his jeans and moved his fingers to the ivory knob. His hands were pale, the fingers plump and squared-off, the nails flat and broad, just like his father’s.

He tested the give of the handle with his fingertips. He imagined paper napkins and paper cups, wax paper, cheese, wafers of white bread lifted by the wind, swirled about the car.

Their father took his hand from his shoulder. The wind rattled the windows, careful now.

“Listen to that,” their mother said. “It’s really picking up.”

Above the pines, the sky had turned a deeper blue. In another minute, there would be rain.

“We just might feel the brunt of this hurricane after all,” their father said.

Mary Keane saw how the news made Michael pause, and then change his mind about rolling down the window. He lifted the paper cup from between his knees, took a drink of it. Annie said, “Really?” but it was Jacob who said, “Maybe we should go home,” a crimp of fear in his voice. Her fault. She saw her husband flex his jaw. He did not love his oldest child as he should. There was gray at his temples and a roughened thickness at his throat. His face was not the face of the man she had married, but resembled, instead, some of the men she had worked for when she was single, or a doctor who had cared for her own father in his last days. Closer now, in appearance, to any number of fifty-year-old men she had known than he was to the young stranger he had once been.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said, and raised his eyes to the rearview mirror. There was the ache in his heart, and now over his shoulder and down his arm, as he caught the reflection of the boy’s pale cheek and full girlish lips, his dry mouth hanging open in fearful expectation of what?-the sky growing black, the wind moaning, the scrim of sand that blew across the empty lot forming itself into tooth and mouth and open jaw. “What are you afraid of?” More derisively than he’d meant it.

“Let’s at least have our dessert before we go,” Mary said, soothing. A balancing act. “I have plums,” she said, leaning over her stomach, over the baby’s feet that were now-little acrobat-pressing themselves up against her breasts. She leaned over the curve of its back and spine as they pressed themselves into her stomach and bladder, leaned over the head that was now pressing itself down toward the worn upholstery of the old car, sensing, perhaps, that its watery world was a tributary after all, not a pool. She leaned into the quilted hamper where she had plums and grapes and sugar cookies shaped like laurel wreaths.

In a few minutes, the rain began. The children spit the plum pits into their paper cups and handed them across the seat to their mother. John Keane pressed his chest to the steering wheel as he put the key in the ignition, taking a deep breath as he did, hoping the change of movement would ease the growing pain. The windshield wipers were like a new beat in the day’s rhythm. Mary Keane wrapped the two coffee cups in paper towels. Her husband put his arm across the back of the seat. “Everybody set to go?” he said. He had been too harsh with Michael, too derisive of Jacob, and who knew what his daughter needed, looking up at him, the bear in her arms. “I’m ready,” she said, primly, the first to respond. The apple of his eye.

“Let’s just go,” Jacob added, fighting tears. His face was once more turned to the window. “Let’s get home,” unable to keep the crimp of fear out of his voice. Michael leaned forward, looking toward him across his sister’s lap, and his mother saw that his lips were pursed with either the sour aftertaste of the plum or the sharp phrase of an insult, a tease. She watched him until he sat back again, thinking better of it. He understood, even then, that he could repeat word for word something his father had already said about some weakness in his brother and still be reprimanded for it as severely as if he alone had let the cat out of the bag.

That evening, just after midnight, John Keane was drawn downstairs by a pounding at his door that might have been theatrical, something falsely urgent and echoing about it. Something familiar and rehearsed, too, in his own manner as he asked Mary, “Who could that be?” and then slowly pushed the blankets aside and found his slippers. The rain was a steady rush against the roof and the windows. The light in the empty living room was just enough to see by, to distinguish the black shape of the couch and the chairs, the tables and lamps, the television set and hi-fi and decorative mirror that caught and reflected the oddly gauzy, deep blue light that came through the front window, cast off by the storm. A puddle of darkness in the center of the floor was the board game the boys had left there. In the short hallway, which lacked any light whatsoever, he could feel under his slippers a remnant of sand on the linoleum. The football and the box of soldiers were beside the door, invisible. “Coming,” he cried when the rapping began again, on the heels of a distant roll of thunder, and in the instant before he reached for the doorknob, he felt with utter certainty, as if all of this were indeed merely something revisited, rehearsed, recalled, that he would not return-not to the living room behind him or the narrow stairs or the small rooms where his wife and his children slept.

This was the culmination, then, this odd darkness, this familiar dream, of the day that had begun with the tugging of the wind at his eaves; this was the simple and terrible meaning, after all, of the pain in his arm, the weight on his heart. Here now and at last, and too soon-as it had come to his brother’s heart too soon-the utter darkness, the black street, wind rain and sea and some glimpse, in his final fall, of the damp room (odor of salt, odor of peat) where in another darkness he had been conceived. An instant so close-in its familiarity, in its blackness, in the cry of the wind-to everything he had been told as a child would attend his last moment (he would hear the banshee, he would open the door, he would see the black coach, wet with rain), that he felt both amused and terrified.

Still, he pulled firmly at the door, knowing how it swelled and stuck in wet weather. He might have wished to see their faces once more.

The face that met him was under a fireman’s helmet, lit by a flashlight held low and expertly angled. The light caught the silver needles of rain, in the air, off the rim of the black hat. It showed him a mouth and a chin and the broad shoulders under the wet rain gear without blinding him or turning the man himself into a grotesque.

“I only wanted to warn you,” the man said. He moved the flashlight across his body, to the shrubs beside the steps and then to the grass and then to the weeping willow at the edge of the yard, beside the house. The streetlights were out. Following the moving beam of white light, John Keane saw the grass of his small lawn stir like a rising wave and the roots of the tree-thin as an arm, bent here and there like an elbow-breaking through. The fireman moved the light until it caught the base of the tree where a wider swath of dirt was opening like a mouth, an unhinged jaw filled with broken roots and dirt, and then it closed up again, as if with a breath. “We were driving by and saw it,” the fireman said. “That tree’s gonna fall. It’ll probably fall straight back, but you might want to get your family downstairs. Keep them to this side of the house.”

He felt the wind and the rain on his bare ankles, against the hems of his thin pajama pants. He looked beyond the young fireman. In the street, there was no sign of the fire truck or car that had brought him. No coach, either. “Yes,” he said, thinking himself foolish, in his thin pajamas. “Thank you.”