Counting Stars Read Free

exasperated him. He had dismissed such childish nonsense years ago while I experienced each time the thrill of my transgression. My voice was steady and bold in the small room. I knew by now that it was the smallness of our brains, rather than the wrath of God, that kept our understanding in thrall.
    I was fourteen when it was my oldest sister Catherine’s turn to leave St. John’s. At the end of her last day I made sure I was at the garden gate to greet her.
    “O’Mahoney’s been blathering about the stars,” I said.
    “
Father
O’Mahoney,” she said.
    I laughed at the word.
    “Father! Anyway, don’t believe him. I bet he warned you about counting.”
    She shrugged.
    “It’s nonsense. I’ll show you tonight.”
    That night I waited for the long summer dusk to end and for true darkness to fall. I tiptoed to her room. I shuffled past Mary and Margaret’s bed. I woke her and we knelt on her bed and leaned on the windowsill and pressed our faces close to the pane. We heard the gentle breathing of our parents as they slept next door. I began in the lowest corner of the sky, pointing down over the rooftops of our neighborhood to the sky above St. Patrick’s steeple, and began to count. My finger ticked off the amounts above our small town, leaving untouched the huge expanse of universe beyond. She began to tremble as the numbers mounted.
    “Don’t,” she whispered.
    I held her as she began to pull away. I grinned as I counted more quickly and ran the numbers together in a blur.
    “Hundred,” I said at last. “Hundred and one, hundred and two, hundred and three. See?”
    I saw the stars reflected in her eyes, how they shone among her tears. We heard Mary and Margaret stirring. I leaned down and touched the young girls’ heads.
    “It’s nothing,” I whispered. “Go back to sleep.”
    I touched Catherine’s head, too.
    “Are you all right?” I said.
    She didn’t answer.
    I told her she was too young now, but one day she’d understand.
    I tiptoed back to my room.
    I lay looking out into the night. I cursed myself.
    “Forgive me,” I said into the silence, before descending into my rationalist’s dreams.
    Soon afterward, our father became ill. He stayed in his bed. He had time off work. There was trouble in his groin, then in his back, his chest. In the night we heard his baffled exclamations of pain. He was taken to hospital, where the speed of his decline simply accelerated. He lay pale-faced on the white bed and stared astonished at us and our mother. He licked his dried-out lips. His voice faded to a whisper:
What the hell’s going on?
    They opened him to see what was inside and they quickly closed him again. He was sent back to us with a piece of his lung removed. He told us the worst was over. Their bed was put in the front living room downstairs. Now the house was filled with the rasping of his breath, Mam’s desperately comforting whispers.
    “What’s wrong?” we asked her.
    She shook her head. An infection. Not what had been expected. Nothing. He would get better now.
    “What had it been?” we asked.
    She shook her head again. Nothing. A mystery. She turned her eyes away.
    In the evenings he sat among us in his dressing gown. Often he asked me to rub his back with ointments. The room filled with the scents of Ralgex or Deep Heat while I ran my fingers over his flesh, his ribs and spine, feeling each time how the skin was gathered closer to the bone, and learning how the source of pain each time was more elusive.
    He yelped and stiffened and sighed with gratitude.
    “That’s better, son,” he whispered. “Rub it all away.”
    When nothing worked and it became unbearable, Mam would send Colin or me running down to the Bay Horse for brandy and we knew moments of joy those nights when he was tipsy enough to go beyond the pain and tell us of how it would be once he was well again. We complied in this comforting fiction. We sat in a circle around him and kept our eyes from those of our