Page 18 of Finding Him
I glare suspiciously at my younger sister as she jumps from the couch cushions to the floor, eager to switch out my movie forThe Little Mermaid. She’s only been bugging me about when it would be over for the entire one-hundred and thirty-six minutes it lasted.
“I’m feeling better!” she chirps.Liar.
She had choked down the cherry medicine Ma had given her, and I knew she was coasting on a temporary medicinal high. But she wasn’t sick at all, she just didn’t want to go because she hated the water.
Claire has just got the tape shoved into the slot when a knock sounds from the front door. She leaps up—her illness forgotten entirely—calling for Ma and sprinting for the hall before I can tell her to sit her arse back down. Da has always been paranoid about us answering the door.
By the time I extract myself from the four legged weight over my legs—our golden retriever, Comet, who’s quickly becoming more dog than puppy—I’m the last to make it to the hall.
“Hello,” I hear Claire say in her polite-for-strangers voice, before Mam can get to her. I stop myself by the banister of the stairs, watching her with an uneasy feeling in my gut.
I glance over my shoulder at Mam, who’s stopped a few steps away, and then back to the front door.
The man at the door is kneeling so he’s eye-level with Claire. He’s wearing the dark, unmistakable uniform of the Gardaí. The silver buttons glint like cold stars in the gray afternoon light. “Hello, love. Is your Mammy about?”
Lunchtime has past, Da should be here by now.
“Yeah, she’s making us sandwiches—oh, she’s right there. Mammy! There’s a man!”
Mam seems to snap out of whatever trance had frozen her in the hallway, shaking her head. She moves forward, gripping Claire’s shoulder and steering her towards me. Mam’s eyes never leave the officer’s face.
“Niall, take your sister up to your room,” she whispers, her voice sounding like it’s coming from the bottom of a very deep well. “Take out a board game. Go on now. Don’t come down till I say.”
I don’t want to go. I feel this cold, oily dread pooling in my gut. Claire starts firing off questions—Where’s Da? Is he coming home? Did he catch the big fish?—so I grab her hand. I make her promise to be quiet, and we sit on the top step of the stairs, peering through the banisters like criminals behind bars.
We hear the Garda tell Mam that Dad had drowned.
Drowned.The word felt too small for the hole it left in the house. He says it was quick. A slip on the slick deck, a bang on the head against the gunwale, and then the Atlantic had simply claimed him when he fell over the side. He says people in a nearby boat saw him go over, but couldn’t get to him in time. They say he never suffered.
He might not. But the rest of us, we suffer.
We hear the sound of Ma crying, which of course sets Claire off. She starts sobbing into my shoulder, even though it takes days after the fact for her to truly grasp that “not coming home” and “dead” meansforever. But I don’t cry. I just sit there on the stairs, watching the light fade in the hallway.
Still as the waves that took him.
??` ?? ?´?
September, 2007
“IAM GOINGto make one thingvery, veryclear to everyone on this pitch,” Coach O’Shea barks.
The turf under our feet is still soggy from the previous night’s lashing, and a low mist clings to and shrouds the goalposts. I stand at the front of the pack of the returning lads, my arms crossed tightly over my chest and my knee brace biting against my skin since I’d wrapped it on as tight as I possibly could.
Everyone who wants to be on the Saints, even the returning players from last year, is required to re-earn their spot; O’Shea doesn’t believe in tenure, only what you can do with the ball today.
He and my Da went way back. I know there was more to his past than Da ever told me, but what I do know makes me sick enough to my stomach to not want to know more. O’Shea had been the one to convince Da to join the footie team in his fourth year—O’Shea was the equipment manager before he was coach—and he was the one to kickstart Da’s passion. Da would’ve gone pro if he hadn’t done his knee in during sixth year.
History repeats itself.
“If any of you have a problem with the person standing next to you, based on anything that is not related to their skill on the field—meaning if you grumble, mock, or I hear a single disrespectful word about what is or isn’t “between the legs” of a player—I will have no problem sending you off my pitch. I will cut a senior player or deny a new spot. We are a team built ondiscipline and merit; not hormones and idiocy. Do I make myself clear?”
A ripple of nervous silence runs through the group. O’Shea is legendary for being zero tolerance, and everyone knows when he makes a rule he’s not bluffing. Whatever reservations he’d had about Molly yesterday have clearly been crushed by his hatred for a lack of discipline.
Speaking of the devil—Molly herself is standing only a few feet away from me, twisting the end of her caramel-coloured ponytail around her fingers. She doesn’t look nervous, her face set in a look of cool determination, but I wonder briefly if playing with her hair is a nervous tick I ought to look out for.
You know, just to make sure she’s comfortable here and everything. No other reason.
The way she’s biting her lip is kinda cute, though
