Chapter 45
Sebastian
Any requests?
It’s gonna be good vibes
He had texted last night, with a link to a playlist he had called Mom. Good vibes, what else could anyone want for a celebration of their death?
Viola
snacks
Sebastian
anything in particular
Viola
Cheez-Its?
I would kill for a Cheez-It.
Viola passes into Niamh’s small kitchen, puts on the kettle, and leans over to feel the steam rising against her face, opening up her skin. The kettle burbles loudly and clicks, and she can hear Niamh stirring from her bedroom.
“Tea?” she calls.
“Yes, dear,” Viola says. Milky for Viola, green with sugar for Niamh.
“Love you,” Niamh calls.
Viola cracks open the door, holding the tea warm in her hands. Niamh’s room has a sweet, sleepy smell, and her clothes are strewn across the floor. Niamh gestures to the bedside table, where Viola places the mug, and puts her head in her lap. “I feel like shit,” she says.
“You smoked a lot.”
Niamh nods. “I accept the consequences of my actions.”
“It’s snowing outside,” Viola says.
Niamh gasps. “No. Why didn’t you say?” It’s much too early in the season for snow, but in an hour, after the tea and the cold shower have taken effect and clothes are bundled on, they catch a bus across town and walk, following the Liffey east to the sea until they reach a marina, a fleet of tall sailboats pointing stiff masts to the sky, thin white steeples.
Flakes fall cozy and close. They share a set of headphones and Niamh sings along to Nina Simone, her voice low and strong, and Viola has the sense of being carried.
They walk past old women dragging their shopping through the mounting snow, past abandoned plazas with weeds pulling up between heavy cement tiles.
They walk until they come to a damp beach, surprisingly empty for its proximity to the city center.
Viola thinks of the sand buried underneath the powder, of the cold blue.
Sebastian
Tillie has made snacks her thing
Borderline out of control
I’ll tell her about the Cheez-Its
but you should be prepared to eat a million Cheez-Its
Niamh Casey, goddess of Dublin Bay, lights a cigarette as fat flakes fall onto her neon orange beanie, onto her birthmark, somehow both otherworldly and belonging intensely to here, to this place, rooted and sure.
“What are you thinking about?” Viola asks.
“My mother,” Niamh says. “And you.”
“Sorry she’s not well.”
Niamh takes a drag. “I’m lucky I’ve had her as long as I have.”
The water in the bay is profoundly still, as though it could hardly carry a ship anywhere. Thoughts of Susan surface with the sea-foam, demanding nothing but offering nothing in return.
“You ready to see your dad, then?”
“I don’t know. I just keep thinking. I used to feel so out of place as the only girl in the house. I spent so long trying to be like him. And it fucked me up.”
Niamh nods. “I get it. But at least he was around. I used to really hate my dad.”
“Sorry.” She’s being selfish again. Look at Niamh, look at what she has been through. “You’re right.”
“No, it’s fine now. I think… I don’t know. I just hope he found happiness. In the end I had a good life, with my mammy.” She wrinkles her nose, deflecting her own sincerity. “You get the parents you get.”
They turn back toward town, doubling back over their tracks.
As they cross the street, nearly home, they pass a Tesco selling inflatable sleds and Niamh gets an idea.
On a slow, southbound train, they puff air into the plastic mouthpieces, other passengers looking at them strangely as they laugh loudly, the tubes ballooning in their arms.
When they arrive at Killiney Hill, the air is bracing and joyous, and all around them, children slide around on whatever they can find—lunch trays, shovels, garbage bin lids. Viola anticipates the bump, the jostle, the vertiginous drop. She is thinking of some half-fledged memory.
She wishes her mother could see this.
They climb to a good kickoff point, and the snow is still falling as they throw themselves forward and rip through the slush toward the Irish Sea.
“I missed this!” she shouts above the shrieks of happy children and the crashing wavelets and the expanse of the bay that feeds into the ocean, the cold dragging water out of her eyes.
I missed you.
Viola
no amount of Cheez-Its is too much
see you soon
In a matter of hours she is boarding. How many planes have made this journey before; planes carrying the Queen, planes carrying the Beatles, planes carrying bombs and drugs and priceless art.
People running away from their lives, people running back toward them.
When the wheels hit the tarmac, she can hardly believe she is here.
Tillie is picking Lola up at the airport.
Tillie has done so much. There is a table of all kinds of drinks with all kinds of mixers.
There are potato chips and tzatziki and guacamole, all of them emptied into little ceramic bowls of their own instead of sitting inside bags or store-bought plastic. There are one million Cheez-Its.
“Lola will be tired,” Sebastian says to his father.
“She’ll muddle through.”
His father is wandering around, inspecting the family photographs that Sebastian has hung.
Sadie’s newspaper clippings and childhood images and some of their own: twins clambering on Susan’s chest, pulling at her hair.
She is pulling a face, she is laughing. She is young and old and happy and miserable and exhausted and in love.
NEW TOPIC: SUSAN BLISS MEMORIAL PARTY
Posted by cutandpaste
You are all invited to join a celebration of the life
of Susan Bliss, who died fifteen years ago
on December 18, 1997. This will be an interactive,
expressive, joyful gathering of family, friends & fans.
Donations can be made to…
Directions to gallery…
Tillie had even helped him with the wording, checked his spelling.
I can’t believe all these people still… she started.
He smiled because of course they do. Still.
He has known them forever and yet he doesn’t know them at all.
He couldn’t tell you their faces or even their real names, but he knows that LATfan4ever has three children who are all married and do not visit her, that burger_mama has been in love with a man for years who has never acknowledged her, that daytimemuse lives alone and makes show memorabilia (place mats, small sculptures) and sells it on Etsy.
Probably none of them will come, but even if one of them does…
Somehow, this feels like the closest he can come to a real goodbye.
And he knows he needs to say it. It occurred to him the other day, when he was working, that everything in her life, everything she loved, all of it was transient.
Television shows like tissue paper. Stage performances that end when the curtain falls.
And here he was trying to make monuments to her.
If he considers—really considers—the lasting marks that people make upon the world, the buildings with men’s names on them and the giant phallic statues and the landfills and land mines and highways and space stations from up above, most of them look like scars.
He is almost jittering as he finishes setting up the room.
The centerpiece is interactive. Four boxes of scraps, painstakingly selected and cut, various shades and themes, magazines and family memories and everything discarded from every previous project, he brought all of it, let them choose.
On the wall, a canvas with a rough outline in Sharpie, and here are the glue sticks, maybe a thirty pack would do. Let them have at it.
“Good curation,” his father says, looking at a photo of the four of them. They could never get one where all of them were smiling. But this one is close, his mother looking at something off camera, Sebastian midsentence. “Wonder where you get that from.”
His father looks older. I guess that’s what happens when you see someone only once in a while. They’re exactly the same height, have been for a while, but it will always surprise Sebastian.
“I’m sorry, you know,” Al says. He’s still looking at the photograph. “I should have given you more credit. For your art, I mean.”
“It’s fine, Dad.”
“You could have gone to art school. You still could if you want.”
Sebastian smiles. “I think I’m good, Dad.”
He’s been invited, recently, to a group show in Los Angeles.
“A New Whole,” it’s called, which as a dyslexic person, he thinks is asking for many unwanted puns.
But the group invited is cool, collage artists from around the country.
He’s buzzed, if he’s honest. It’s a bizarre feeling to be taken seriously.
He’s spent so long thinking of himself as the underdog.
More helpful than art school, in some ways, he thinks.
His father puts a hand on his upper arm, squeezes it. Where is this new sincerity coming from? The room? Or maybe just Tillie, her soft influence. Either way, better not say too much. Don’t spoil the moment.
There’s a picture on the wall of his mom in the hospital, surrounded by cards.
She’s sitting up, waving. He had debated including it, but in the end, it would have felt wrong to leave it out.
His father is looking at it now, the pain of it written on his face.
Sebastian has never really thought about that year, what it must have done to his dad, having to care for her like that.
“I held it against you,” Al says. “That you got to be with her.”
Sebastian doesn’t feel the need to forgive him for this. But he listens.
“I never asked. Did she say anything at the end?”
“No,” Sebastian says. “Not really.” And then, because he can see this answer is disappointing, he adds: “She asked what we were going to do tomorrow.”
Al smiles. “And? What are you going to do tomorrow?”
“Remains to be seen.”
What’s next, if he isn’t bumping up against this man? Or chasing a past that isn’t his own? They smile at each other. The bell on the back of the door jingles and a small, frowning middle-aged woman, immaculately made up, is looking cautiously at them. “Is this…”
Al moves to her, shakes her hand, says, “Welcome, please…” taking her coat and asking if he can get her some wine. Anxiously, she introduces herself as Marion. “I used to work on the show. With. I did makeup.” She takes in the room, the boxes of scraps, dawn breaking on her face. “This is fun.”
Then they all start arriving: a casting director, someone from props.
Someone picked it up off the forum, forwarded it to the old crew.
And then Sadie shows up with an old friend from Chicago named Bernie.
The room gets loud and Sebastian turns up the music and is washed with the relief of having done something right for what feels like the first time in his life. Everything is in place except for Lola.