After This (6 page)

 

with her tears, wrapped in her fingers. Mary Keane was fumbling in
the pocket of her car coat for a tissue. She found one, held it to the
girl’s nose. Leaned a little to say something into her ear. The girl
nodded. Mary reached for the stuffed bear that still leaned against her
hip, lifted it, and placed it in her daughter’s arms.
A

s

SUDDENLY AS THE PEACE
of the morning had turned to bedlam,
peace returned. John Keane looked around, his hand on his neck,
his love for these children three heavy stones against his thumping
heart. Jacob was once more bent over his men. Michael, his machine
gun hung over his back, was sitting Indian-style just a few feet away,
pulling apart a stalk of sea grass, watching the ocean, not crying, his

father was relieved to see, but, he suspected, not chastened either. He
rubbed his neck. Swung his arm out, shaking it a little. It was the arm
he had given to Catherine, his niece, his brother Frank’s only child, at
the door of the church on the day she was married. “Maybe we should
eat,” he said. And then, raising his voice only enough to be heard over
the wind, “Boys. Come over and eat.”

But the wind had indeed changed and as the
five of them gathered
on the blanket they could feel it prick their faces and their arms. Mary
Keane, with Annie still leaning heavily against her and the baby like an
iron beach ball in her lap, leaned toward the quilted hamper, unzipped
it, and then paused, a single wax-paper-wrapped sandwich in her
hand. “Our food will be full of sand,” she said, “with this wind.” And
her husband said, “Well, they are sandwiches,” and winked at Michael,
who seemed suddenly to recognize his father again.

 

“Maybe,” Mary said, “we’d better eat in the car.”

 

Slowly everything was gathered and they made their way out to

the beach once more and then over the path that returned them to the
parking lot. They placed the blankets and the pillow and the toys into
the trunk, depositing as they did a residue of sand that would be there
throughout the winter. Standing above the knot the three of them had
formed before the open back door of the car—a debate about who
would go first and who would get the middle—their mother said, her
hand on her belly, “Just get in,” and they did, sliding across the soft
fabric of the backseat. Annie was in the middle because Michael
moved so quickly and Jacob had put a definite pair of fingers to her
shoulder to make her follow him.

Mary Keane eased herself into the front seat. The size of her belly
made her legs feel short, as though they could barely reach the floor
under the dashboard. Her husband closed the door on her, gently, with
both hands, as if he were covering her with a blanket. He crossed in
front of the car, his hair on end and the pale scalp at the back of his
head exposed. He now looked every bit his age, she thought. As he
grew older, it seemed to her that she was not losing sight of his
younger self but coming to recognize instead another man altogether,
one she was just beginning to find familiar. He opened the door, slid
the quilted hamper onto the seat between them, and then got in
behind the wheel. He pulled the door closed and the wind became just
the slightest rush of air against the rolled-up windows. There was
suddenly a pleasant warmth. Their voices, suddenly, seemed rich and
sure now that they could speak quietly, now that their words were no
longer scattered by the buffeting wind.

Mary, one knee bent up onto the seat—her legs seemed only
inches long, her feet in their small loafers appeared no larger than her
daughter’s—handed sandwiches into the backseat while her husband
poured lemonade from a glass jar into small paper cups.

 

“Careful now,” he said each time he slowly moved the cup over the
back of his seat, bending his arm like a crane, awkwardly, because it
was the same arm he had used to throw the football and it still
seemed to echo with the strain. “Ladies first,” he said and felt his
daughter take the cup from him with both hands. “Careful now.”
There was coffee in the plaid thermos and, when he had screwed the
lid onto the glass jar and placed it back into the quilted hamper, he
poured some for his wife and some for himself. She had packed two
china teacups, wrapped in paper towels. She would not drink from
anything else. He exchanged a cup for one of the sandwiches. The
whole thing was a balancing act: cup and sandwich, napkin and wax
paper—careful now—the three children in the back (the fourth would
have to be up here, in the front seat between them, the hamper on his
wife’s lap, or at her feet), his wife and her belly perched beside him,
the wind shut out and their voices suddenly gentle and clear. A
sweetened cup of coffee, a ham-and-cheese—the bread a little dry but
the meat thick and tender. The wind shut out. It was a balancing act,
to hold off quarrel and worry, the coming years, the coming months,
even tomorrow morning for just whatever time it took to finish a
sandwich, to drink the coffee while it was still hot. Careful now.

All around them, the parking lot was deserted, only a scrim of
sand moving across the bleached asphalt. Mary Keane stretched her
legs and touched her side. “This baby is doing somersaults,” she said
and Jacob laughed softly, imagining it. Beside him, his sister put the
crust of her sandwich to the line of brown thread that was the bear’s
mouth. Beside her, Michael looked through the rolled-up window,
across the long and empty parking lot to the dark green pines that
seemed to be raising their arms to the wind, shaking spindly fists. His
own hands were full, sandwich and paper cup, but the small ivory
knob on the silver handle was a temptation. Just a few turns and he
could fill the car with the sound of the rushing

“An ache is all,” their father said.

 

wind. The hair was mussed across the back of his father’s head, the
familiar gleam of his white scalp peering through. His father leaned
forward to put the china teacup on the dashboard and then, leaning
back, placed his hand over his shoulder, kneading the material of his
shirt, raising the shoulder toward his neck, like a pitcher on the
mound. “Are you all right?” their mother asked, all their voices grown
soft and gentle now that they were out of the wind.

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.
T
HAT 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 hifi 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.”