Page 70 of Whale Harbor

“You still haven’t found a way to tell your other brother?” Mary asked after Sean’s surgery was complete and he came through safe and sound.

“How can I?” Mac asked.

WHEN MARY WAS APPLYING TO college she asked her parents to sit down with her at the kitchen table so they could fill out the financial aid forms. Mac didn’t like her knowing details of their finances, but there didn’t seem to be any way around it. She took all the information she needed, had them sign a sheaf of paperwork they didn’t really look at, and in the spring of her senior year she told them she’d like to go to the University of Pennsylvania. She’d written down for them the amount of the grant she’d received, two low-interest student loans, and a loan she hoped they’d be willing to take out. She said she’d help them with it when the time came to pay it back. They moved her to Philadelphia without ever having seen the place and standing in the quad on move-in day, a plastic crate of her things in his hands, Mac looked around at the ivy-covered buildings and marveled that he’d made this girl, she was his, and she’d figured it all out.

“I love you so much,” Lillie said, crying, as they said goodbye. Bridget and Annie were also in tears.

“This isn’t the moon, you guys,” Mary said. “I’m less than two hours from home.”

“It makes you think, doesn’t it?” Lillie said on the drive back to Yonkers.

“About what?” Mac asked.

“About how our parents felt when we left. No one ever thinks about the parents.”

BARRY HAD BEEN GIVEN THE all-clear back in 1994, but in July of 1999 he had a heart attack while mowing his lawn. His teenaged next-door neighbor, who was a volunteer EMT, did chest compressions until an ambulance arrived. Once he was safely on the other side of this scare, it was all any of them discussed for months. The surgeon said he could clearly see the thickened left ventricle wall. It wasn’t a mild case. The rest of them wanted to know what kind of quack doctor he’d gone to in ’94 that hadn’t caught it. They all got tested again, and again Mac was cleared.

“But what does getting cleared mean?” Lillie said. “Barry was cleared too.”

Soon after Barry’s heart attack, Mary called from her dorm room. She talked to Lillie for most of the time, and then Annie, but then she asked to speak to Mac. She said the usual things, that she was shocked to hear about Barry, thank god he was all right. “And your brother Rian, he still doesn’t know? No one found a way to tell him?”

“No, Mary.”

“Well, is he married? Do we know if he has kids? He could be anywhere.”

“I realize that, love.”

She was like a dog with a bone, that girl, always asking about Rian. The other two must know about him, too, Mac said to Lillie, but they never asked.

Lillie laughed. “She’s asked, what? Three times in the last decade? She was made in your image, my love. Don’t complain.”

At a gathering soon after Barry’s surgery, someone asked if Cathal knew and they all decided not to tell him. He was eighty-two and frail, according to Noel and Seamus. Noel had gotten into a car wreck and was fine, but the car was totaled and his license was taken. Cathal was beside himself and banged on in the village about the roads being treacherous. He wrote letters demanding signs be put up to warn people of certain turns. “This would never happen in America,” he said at a local meeting and Noel was embarrassed: Cathal had never been to America and everyone knew it. What did America have to do with anything? Everyone knew Noel had had too much to drink that night, but no one would say it to an old man, not even to get him to shut up. Where some old people got fat and soft, Cathal was only getting more like a coiled wire. He paced, he gave out, he carried on about the smallest things. His latest grievance: a six-pound raise in taxes to help cover new bus shelters that no one needed. Wasn’t that what umbrellas were for?

THEN ONE SUNDAY IN EARLY spring, 2002, Martin called from Montana. It was cold, a lick of winter still in the air. Mac was in the yard splitting wood and was just heading inside to find gloves when Lillie called his name from the back door and waved the phone at him. “Guess who it is?” she said in a happy voice, delighted by their long friendship. The last time they’d seen the Lees was when they’d come to New York and packed into Mac and Lillie’s house when Mary and Bridget were still in high school. The two families went to the Statue of Liberty together and took a photo at the foot of Lady Liberty. Mary acted like an expert about all things to do with New York but Lillie said after that she obviously had a crush on Martin’s son. Sure enough, after the Lees left, Annie told Lillie—who of course told Mac—that Mary had kissed him in their basement while the rest of the kids were watching Jurassic Park. On the phone, Mac and Martin caught up about wives and kids, people they knew, the Cuan. Ireland had just switched to the euro and they’d both heard that Cathal had given a few speeches outside the pub about what a boon it would be for Ireland, wait until everyone saw what EU funding would do.

Once they’d covered all the usual subjects, Martin cleared his throat and said that the reason he was calling was to tell Mac that he heard of a man who’d been working at the Continental Pit in Butte who was from home.

“Yeah?” Mac said, a prickle of fear moving through him.

Martin had heard that this man was at a pub called Cutty’s, eating a hamburger at the bar, shooting the shit with people there. Someone asked where exactly he was from and when he said he was from Connemara, they asked if he had any Irish. He said he did indeed and spoke a little for them. When his audience left, the bartender approached and told this man that he knew of a trio of brothers, the Lees, who were also native speakers, and lived north of Livingston now. One of them had married into an old Montana family that used to have a sprawling ranch near Teaberry, but it was condos and a golf course now.

“Larkspur,” the man said. The bar patron didn’t seem surprised. He’d seen photographs of Larkspur a long time ago, he said. He’d already heard it was no longer there except as a name on a sign. It was a pity, because it had sounded so perfect to him, an ideal place.

The bartender said if he left his name and contact information, he’d be glad to put the Lees in touch with him. It might be nice, he suggested, to encounter a bit of home so far away.

“And?” Mac asked. “Did he?”

“He wrote down the name Coleman Walsh and left a phone number,” Martin said. “Wasn’t that your grandfather’s name?”

It was his grandfather’s name.

“Did you call the number?”

“No, not yet. Mac, do you think I should go see? PJ knows a state trooper who can put a telephone number in a database and get the address. Do you want me to ask him? It’s a ninety-minute drive to Butte. It would be no trouble.”

Mac needed to think for a minute.

And then a minute turned into days, into weeks, into a month. He told no one, not his brothers, not even Lillie.