Alice McDermott - After This

The Keanes were asleep when the phone rang, although Annie was awake, her bedside light still on, Clare breathing softly across the room. She was writing in her diary and when she heard the phone, it was well past midnight, she raised her pen, skipped a line, and then wrote down, “Here it is.” And then waited. Through the wall she could hear the tension in her father’s voice, the effort to be alert and comprehending when he had just woken from a deep sleep. He seemed to be saying, Yes, yes.

She’d had a vision, once, of what would happen to her if her brother was killed in the war. She would not become one of those folk-singing peace-sign hippies, she knew, she would become instead something outrageous, something screaming, full of rage, burning things, tossing flaming bombs. How else would anyone get it, get what it would mean to lose Jacob? Now she saw that she would merely close the book in her hand, get out of bed, go into her parents’ bedroom. It would mean their small family made smaller still. Her father’s limp more pronounced from now on, her mother steely somehow (she thought of Susan’s eyes, in the abortion clinic, getting through this). Michael more disdainful, Clare too babyish for a little longer. Crying jags for her, when she got drunk. No more effort or inclination to record it all in her little diaries, to remember how it had all played out.

Her father said, “No, not her sister. Just a friend.”

Pauline was going to be kept in the hospital for a few days at least, and of course they could have visited her in the morning, but there had been some questions about psychiatric history and her mother felt it would be best if they went right down there. Pauline all alone, she said. She must be so scared. Her father had already dressed and gone down to warm up the car. Annie stood in the doorway, watching her mother run a quick comb through her hair.

“The woman is such an ass,” she said, loud enough to wake Clare. “I thought it was about Jacob.” It seemed the crying jag was going to happen anyway.

Her mother took her briefly in her arms, she smelled of her familiar lotion, warmed by sleep. “I know,” she said. “It startled us all. But the army doesn’t call. They send a telegram. Or they come to the door. And not in the middle of the night, I should hope.” Then she backed away, brushed her daughter’s hair. “It’ll be over soon,” she said. “Things are winding down over there. He’ll be home before we know it.”

Annie followed her downstairs. She watched her get into her coat in the small vestibule. “You’ll be all right?” her mother said. “We won’t be long.”

Annie could hear the idling engine of her father’s car. “Poor Dad has to go to work tomorrow,” she said, but her mother missed the accusation.

“And you have to go to school,” she said. “Go back to bed.” Then she asked again, “You’ll be all right?” and Annie said, impatiently, “Yes.”

The front door stuck a little before her mother got it open. Annie could see the headlights of her father’s car, the wet glimmer of frost on the black windshield. “Lock up,” her mother said, over her shoulder, and with a small smile, “and don’t let anybody in,” because there were other things to fear, out there in the darkness, even if the army didn’t come in the middle of the night.

It was full daylight by the time her parents returned. Annie had gotten Clare up and dressed and they were eating cereal with Susan Persichetti, who was giving Annie a ride to school, when they came in to say that Pauline was all right-a lie by the looks on their faces. Annie saw them glance at Clare. A broken wrist and a broken nose and some bad bruises. Upset, though, their mother added. “The fall,” their mother said, “kind of threw her for a loop.” And then, again to Clare, “She’ll be fine, really. Although,” she added-and now she glanced at Annie-”she might have to come stay with us, for a while. When she gets out. We thought she could have the boys’ room, for a while.”

Annie glanced at Susan and then said, complaining, “What about when Michael comes home for the weekend?” After only the briefest pause, “What about when Jacob gets back?”

Her mother held up her hand. Her lips were pale. Her hair was littered with gray. “I’m not saying all year. I’m saying till her wrist is healed. Till she’s herself again.”

Annie said, “Who wants her to be herself again? I’d rather she be someone else.” And Clare cried, “That’s mean.”

But her father, who was watching the coffee percolate on the stove with something of Jacob’s own distracted absorption, looked at her over his shoulder and smiled. He’d liked the joke.

“I think it’s mean to make the boys sleep in the basement,” Annie said.

Susan laughed. “Hey, I sleep in the attic,” she said.

“Well, the attic would make sense,” Annie said. She turned to her mother. “Let’s put Pauline in the attic. Like Grace Poole.”

But her mother, buttering toast, was thinking of something else. “I don’t know who you’re talking about,” she said shortly. She was about to lose her temper. “It will just be for a few weeks.”

“Your mother has enough on her mind,” their father said.

There was only the smell of coffee, the sound of the pot over the blue flame. The heater in the basement ticking on. “It’ll be fine,” Clare said into the quiet, as if she were the one to settle things. “The boys won’t mind. It will be fine.”

There was more silence and into it Annie whispered, “Bet she never leaves.”

As the girls were going out the door, Mr. Keane asked Susan, his voice low, if her father would be around this afternoon. He’d like to call him. Susan said he was usually up by noon.

Standing in the small vestibule, Annie asked him, impatiently, in a way that conveyed her disinterest in both the question and the answer, “Why?” The lack of sleep had turned her father’s skin to gray parchment. It had hollowed out the skin around his eyes. Just last evening he and Pauline had sat in the living room together with their cocktails, discussing retirement and pensions, the high cost of living on Long Island, the bargain that was Florida.

“They’re talking about sending her over to Creedmoor,” he said, quietly, shielding Clare. “For some treatment.” And to Susan: “I’d like to ask your father about that.”

The girls left the house, walking down the front steps into the icy morning cold. It occurred to them both that a year ago, they would have put their heads together and laughed wickedly at the news. They would have said, the loony bin. Perfect. Annie would have said, I knew it all along. She had already said, Grace Poole. But it was a cold morning, the dry air seemed scoured by the cold, and in their shortened uniform skirts and thin jackets they were both shivering by the time they reached Susan’s car at the curb. It would not be worth the effort it took to make a joke out of it all. The cold was bitter enough. Between the sidewalk and the curb the grass was frozen, each small blade frosted white. Annie heard it crunch beneath her feet as she reached for the passenger door. Tramp, tramp, tramp.

There was a car approaching from the opposite end of the street, the white of its exhaust no doubt exaggerated by the cold. Susan leaned over and opened the lock for Annie. Annie got in. Susan already had the heat blasting and the radio turned up and an unlit cigarette between her lips. They were late, but they were seniors, they were obliged to be late. The car passed them, moving slowly in what might have been an illusionist’s elaborate billowing of exhaust. Last night, when she’d gone back to her bed, she’d picked up the diary and written, underneath, “Here it is,” “Well, maybe not. Silly me. Only Pauline.” She and Susan stopped at White Castle for doughnuts and coffee and then spent five minutes in the school parking lot brushing powdered sugar and cinnamon from their plaid skirts. The old nun at the front desk, Sister Maureen Crosby, although the girls called her Chuckles, waved them away as they began to fill out their late slips, saying, with exaggerated patience, “Just get to class, ladies.” And they had only just turned away, heading toward their lockers, when the nun said, “Hold on, Miss Keane.” Annie looked back; the nun was squinting at a small strip of paper, as if it were a bit of late-breaking news, just in. She was soft and shapeless, slump shouldered in the black suit she now wore instead of a habit, a mouth breather, as solid as gray granite, as dependable, as immobile. The challenge was to get her to laugh just once during your four years at Mary Immaculate. “Call home,” she said.