Later on, I found Saint Brendan of Clonfert in my bunk again and I held him up underneath the kitchen lights to look at him, his sculpted beard and the miniature galleon he cradled in one arm. I remembered Jelka leaning back to tell me a story—the trials of Saint Brendan, recounted over any number of nights on assignment years ago: He meets Judas, one night during his voyaging. It’s a subject you see a lot on stained-glass windows, actually, paintings, things like that. He travels for months on end, encountering demons, sea monsters, every kind of creature you can imagine, and then one night he comes upon a man chained to a pillar of rock, in the middle of the sea—just there, just there in the ocean like this great, tall fang rising from the waves, this thing that shouldn’t be there, a man at the mercy of the elements. So Saint Brendan calls out to him and he learns that the man is Judas—Judas who gave Jesus up for dead, Judas the failed apostle—and Saint Brendan learns that Judas is there because the way in which the Lord chooses to show him mercy is to free him from his torments, to free him from hell on Sundays and Holy Days, and cast him adrift on the ocean, where he can at least feel the wind on his face. I always like that part of the story. Saint Brendan stays all night, until Judas’s respite from his torments is over, and then he has to go on.
At some point, the sound started up again, only this time, when it did, I heard the voice inside it. I mean by this, of course, that I heard the voice that Jelka had told us about, the voice I hadn’t heard before, the voice she had claimed couldn’t possibly be a ghost.
MIRI
I take to reminding Leah of things, inconsequential things: the way she always used to say SMILE aloud when someone photographed her, the way we used to argue quite often about something thoughtless one or the other of us had done in a dream. She is finding it hard to breathe outside the water now, so I’m not sure how much of this she hears. I think of dipping my head beneath the surface of the water to speak these recollections into her ear.
“Remember,” I tell her, “the time that we met. In the bar where they were playing ‘I’ve Got a Feeling.’ And then you came up and spoke to me and the music changed to ‘Horny,’ and that’s something I can’t change now. Like, that’s just the story. That’s what happened. They played ‘Horny’ by Mousse T. in a bar full of straight people and that’s the story of how we met.”
I have taken to filling up glass ramekins with table salt and ferrying them into the bathroom, pouring the salt into the water and allowing it to dissolve. I’m not sure what prompted me to start doing this, although I’m fairly certain Leah appreciates it. On occasion, she will flick a hand up from the bathwater in a gesture I have decided to take as thanks.
Carmen calls me to tell me about her eye surgery. The aftereffects are peculiar, she says, everything tinted a pale tangerine, the shades of figures that cannot be real rotating in the corners of her vision.
“They told me to expect this,” she says, “so I’m not that worried. What’s important is it all seems clearer than it was! Not perfect yet, but they said it should get better every day for a week. Ad meliora, et cetera, et cetera.”
I feel winded by her happiness and don’t know how to express this, ask her when she thinks she’ll be up and about again.
“Anytime, really,” she says. “I have these weird glasses I can wear to make sure I don’t bump into things. They’re different colored on each side, so it’s a bit of a freak show, but I’m sure you’ll recognize me.”
But will you recognize me, I want to ask her, want to know how it is I will look in her new unencumbered vision, whether I will show up at all.
“Miri,” Carmen is saying, and I’m unsure how long I’ve been silent, whether I have missed her saying something else. “You never told me anything. You told me she was delayed and then she came back and then it was fine. When you left that message, that was the first I’d heard of anything being wrong.”
* * *
When they took my mother to the hospice, I spent a weekend alone at her house, packing things away. At the time I didn’t really know Leah well enough to ask her to do this with me, though I remember wanting her there desperately and texting her almost without cease the entire weekend.
It was a strange time; I wasn’t selling the house, only dust-sheeting it for some unspecified future point, and so the act of disposing of things was less cathartic than it might otherwise have been. This was not an endpoint so much as it was a suspension. I took out the rubbish, threw away anything perishable, locked up the valuables, and left everything else as I’d found it: the living room dim, my mother’s handkerchiefs in a pile on the dresser. There were Tupperware boxes in the fridge, steamed broccoli and an untouched chicken Kiev that my mother’s nurse must have heated but then failed to convince her to eat. I thought about eating these myself but found the idea of it somehow distasteful and threw them away. Later on, I sat in my mother’s chair near the windows and thought about the curious way she sometimes had of speaking to me more freely in bad weather, as though the rattle of sleet against the windowpanes might have served as a cover for her confidences. I used to think of it this way: with the rain, conversation. The atmosphere attempting openness and never quite achieving it, my mother returning to reticence before I ever had a chance to get a complete foothold. Often, when I would bring up later something she had said—her feelings on the divorce, her thoughts on something she had read and enjoyed—she would look at me with no small measure of confusion, so much so that I often thought that the very act of sharing was expunged from her mind as soon as it happened. I don’t think that sounds right, she would often say, when I quoted herself back to her, and then carry on discussing something impersonal: the weather or the way a neighbor had of parking their car halfway across her drive and what she was going to do about it.