The Empty Family Read Free

sad echoes and dim feelings.
    I promise you that I will not call. I have called you enough, and woken you enough times, in the years when we were together and in the years since then. But there are nights now in this strange, flat and forsaken place when those sad echoes and dim feelings come to me slightly more intensely than before. They are like whispers, or trapped whimpering sounds. And I wish that I had you here, and I wish that I had not called you all those other times when I did not need to as much as I do now.
    My brother and I learned not to trust anyone. We learned then not to talk about things that mattered to us, and we stuck to this as much as we could with a sort of grim stubborn pride all of our lives, as though it were a skill. But you know that, don’t you? I don’t need to call you to tell you that.
    At JFK that night, Joan Carey smiled warmly and asked me how bad things were. When I told her that my mother was dying, she said that she was shocked. She remembered my mother so well, she said. She said she was sorry. She explained that I could use the first-class lounge, making it clear, however, in the most pleasant way, that I would be crossing the Atlantic in coach, which was what I had paid for. If I needed her, she said, she could come up in a while and talk, but she had told the people in the lounge and on the plane that she knew me, and they would look after me.
    As we spoke and she tagged my luggage and gave me my boarding pass, I guessed that I had not met her for more than thirty years. But in her face I could see the person I had known, as well as traces of her mother and one of her brothers. In her presence I could feel that this going home to my mother’s bedside would not be simple, that some of our loves and attachments are elemental and beyond our choosing, and for that very reason they come spiced with pain and regret and need and hollowness and a feeling as close to anger as I will ever be able to manage.
    Sometime during the night in that plane, as we crossed part of the Western Hemisphere, quietly and, I hope, unnoticed, I began to cry. I was back then in the simple world before I had seen Joan Carey, a world in which someone whose heartbeat had once been mine, and whose blood became my blood, and inside whose body I once lay curled, herself lay stricken in a hospital bed. The idea of losing her made me desperately sad. And then I tried to sleep. I pushed back my seat as the night wore on and kept my eyes averted from the film being shown, whatever it was, and let the terrible business of what I was flying towards hit me.
    I hired a car at the airport, and I drove across Dublin in the washed light of that early September morning. I drove through Drumcondra, Dorset Street, by Mountjoy Square, down Gardiner Street, and through the streets across the river that led south, as though they were a skin that I had shed. I did not stop for two hours or more, until I reached the house, fearing that if I pulled up somewhere to have breakfast the numbness that the driving with no sleep had brought might lift.
    Sinead was just out of bed when I arrived but Jim was still asleep. Cathal had gone back to Dublin the night before, she said, but would be down later. She sighed and looked at me. The hospital had phoned, she went on, and things were worse. Your mother, she said, had a stroke during the night, on top of everything else. It was an old joke between us: never ‘our mother’ or ‘my mother’ or ‘Mammy’ or ‘Mummy’, but ‘your mother’.
    The doctors did not know how bad the stroke had been, she said, and they were still ready to operate if they thought they could. But they needed to talk to us. It was a pity, she added, that your mother’s specialist, the man who looked after her heart, and whom she saw regularly and liked, was away. I realized then why Cathal had gone back to Dublin – he did not want to be a part of the conversation that we would have with the doctors. Two of us