Page 45 of Whale Harbor

When Lillie asked about Rian, Mac could tell she’d been wanting to ask for a while, but didn’t know quite how, and he felt sorry to have made her feel that way. They’d gone to hear the Christmas choir at St. John’s and were walking back to her apartment. She was beginning to pack her things in anticipation of moving to the Joyce apartment, and they’d already moved Thomas’s bed into Fearghal and Noel’s room. Mac bought a queen-size bed from a shop on McLean Avenue and when it was delivered his brothers laughed and Thomas blushed and Mac wondered what the hell he was doing, why she’d agreed to such an arrangement. “Because we have a plan,” she said, when he mentioned it later. “I have my own brothers. I know what they’re like.”

On that evening, after the Christmas choir, Mac was carrying a shopping bag with gifts for his nieces and Lillie’s little nephew. He wasn’t in the mood to talk about Rian right then, but he didn’t want her to feel bad for asking. It was just that he didn’t have a short or simple way to explain it to her. He wasn’t prepared.

“What’s there to say? He ran away. He was thirteen. They searched and searched for him but no luck. Our feeling is that he got himself to England.”

“Why do you think so?” she asked. And this was exactly why he didn’t want to talk about it. So much of what he felt certain of when it came to Rian came down to a gut feeling, and how could that be explained?

“There was a group from home who went at the same time he disappeared. They say they know nothing about it, insist he wasn’t with them, but we think he probably was. They mightn’t have even known they transported him.”

“When was that?”

“Ahh, let’s see. 1967. I was in America already for a few years.”

“Eleven years ago. Eleven years and no word at all?”

“We hear things now and then, but no, nothing definitive.”

“Where does he fall in the line?”

“Seventh. He’s between Coleman and Thomas.”

“But—” Lillie seemed to be weighing how to ask. “Why did he run off, do you think? Did he not get on with your father?”

Mac stopped walking. Lillie stopped too. It was mild for December. Other people making their way home from work or dates or Christmas shopping stepped around them.

“Lillie,” he said.

“What? Shouldn’t I have asked?”

“I don’t mind you asking. It’s just impossible to explain. He had a hard time when our mother died.”

“Well, of course! You all did, I’m sure. Did you look for him?”

“What do you mean? I was in Montana. Where would I look? The ones at home looked for him. It’s been eleven years and everyone from the Cuan who goes anywhere still knows to tell us if there’s any sign of him.”

Lillie took his hand and pressed it between hers. “I’m sorry if I said something wrong. I just think there are things I should know since we’re to be married. Your brothers say you were closest to Rian of all of them. Sean and Barry asked me if you’d talked about him with me and if you had they wanted to know what you said.”

“They did?”

“They did.”

They walked the rest of the way to her apartment in silence. Normally, he would have gone up, said hello to her sister, sat for a cup of tea and something to eat, but he told her he was tired. It wasn’t that he and Rian were closest. It was more that Rian worshipped Mac and as far as Mac could remember, all he’d done in return was try to get him to go away.

She was two steps above him on the stoop. “You’re sure you don’t want to come up?”

“No, not tonight,” he said.

But just as she turned to go in, he said: “After our mother died, and Nuala came, Rian made me promise I’d never leave him alone there. So I promised. I’d never lied to him before so I’m sure he believed whenever I left, I’d bring him along. Our mother died just six months before I went to Montana, and he was struggling. But I didn’t bring him. I told him I’d bring him to America when he was a bit older, but he ran away before I could. He’d be twenty-four now, I guess. I mean, he is twenty-four now, wherever he is.”

Mac saw a flash of Rian running after the car, how he kept running and running and didn’t let up.

Even saying that much was why he didn’t like talking about it to anyone but his brothers. The words came out too neatly, when really what he felt was chaos. It wasn’t only that he’d promised he wouldn’t leave him alone and then he had. His mother had left all of them, and then Macdara had left Rian. No, the worst thing was that within himself he’d vowed to keep him top of mind, and then he hadn’t. He’d arrived in America and fallen immediately into some sort of trance, or so it seemed when he looked back at his Montana years. While Rian was more alone in Ireland than ever, Mac was busy falling in love with the air and the mountains, the work, the casual approach to life and God, the cash in his pocket, the respect he got for doing what came naturally to him, with PJ’s old trucks, with hot showers, with the staggering brightness of three thousand acres covered in snow. He fell in love with not worrying for the first time in his life, with a new idea of himself, and while he was doing all of that he forgot how much Rian needed him. While he was being carried away by the thought of kissing a pretty girl, while he sipped American coffee and used PJ’s binoculars to watch the hulking backs of bison walking in the distance, Rian had come up with a plan for himself and then followed through, because he had no one else to rely on.

LILLIE’S MOTHER AND YOUNGEST SISTER were coming over for the wedding, and Lillie could barely contain how excited she was. She and her other sister cleaned for a week to get ready for them. Their third roommate—the one who got them jobs at the ad agency—moved in with a different friend for the week to give them the space to be alone together. Mac said that was very decent of her and Lillie looked at him with a funny expression. It was decent but it was what any of them would do for each other, wasn’t it? She mapped out tourist places she wanted them to see and fretted over whether her mother would think her dress was too revealing for church. They invited Cathal and Nuala, too, which was not something Mac had to think much about because it was only symbolic. Sean and Barry had done the same, and when Barry and Fearghal went back for a visit they returned to New York and reported that the invitations had pride of place on the mantel at home. Cathal had also framed the photos Sean sent of his girls and teased them that he had plenty more frames, so he’d be ready for any American grandchild who came along.

Barry told them that Cathal had a map of the city tacked up to the wall at home. With a pushpin, he’d marked the spot where Fearghal, Barry, and Sean had worked at the meatpackers when they first arrived. He’d marked the address of the apartment, Sean’s new address after he married, Nino’s shop, Barry’s apartment, the Selkie. The key told him roughly how far apart everything was, and he had a surprisingly good sense of the city, how they got around, how it all worked. Mac and Lillie’s invitation would be kept on the mantel, too, no doubt, once Cathal had shown everyone in the village.

Unlike Sean and Barry, who’d received no gift from Cathal when they married, Mac got a box delivered, addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Macdara Joyce in Cathal’s scratchy penmanship. The postmark was the Cuan.