Chapter 47
When you arrive, the gallery is full of strangers.
A few people that you maybe knew in a past life, but all of them looking around in a curious state of wonder, running their fingers through scraps of paper, asking whether they can borrow a glue stick.
Someone asks you if you’d like a drink and maybe you get chatting—How did you know and Isn’t this a nice idea.
You don’t have many anecdotes to share, or the ones you have are patchy now, have lost the rhythm they used to have, but you remember Susan Byrne, the warm feeling of spending time in her company.
And when the daughter walks in, you can’t help but stare for a moment—caught in the bright delusion of a miracle you didn’t realize you still believed in.
Viola turns to a box of paper scraps. She thinks about her brother cutting all of it out, wonders what it was inside him that lit up so brightly when he felt her. Her hand passes over it like a defunct metal detector.
Another hand, on her back, a woman introducing herself.
“You’re the spitting image,” she says, and explains that she is a friend of Sebastian from some online forum.
“I loved your mother,” she begins, and explains how much she connected with her mother’s character on Life and Times, how she helped her support a friend through addiction and recovery, how when Susan died, she cried alone in her house, she couldn’t explain it to anyone.
Can she see it, all the empty space inside her where there ought to be a person and is nothing?
A force in her wants to resist: to refuse to become a receptacle for all of the feeling in the room, all the old, homeless grief.
But she says “Thank you” and holds it close to her, the woman’s small offering, receives a mighty embrace.
Maybe it’s all equally important, all the people who felt anything about you. That’s the problem with belonging to everyone. But maybe it is the blessing too.
She gravitates to Sadie, who has lost weight, and also—it seems to Viola—height. She had always thought of her aunt as an overwhelming presence but now, it seems as though she has become a child again. She stands effortfully when Viola comes over.
“Sit, Sadie, you’ll tire yourself out,” Sebastian instructs.
They lower themselves onto some plastic chairs and Sadie begs for Viola’s phone, her photos of Dublin.
Beautiful, Sadie says time after time. Beautiful.
It was, they can agree, even in miniature captured on the phone of an unskilled photographer; clouds over the Liffey, a man papering up a poster, the sun setting on cobbled streets that have belonged to millions before and will belong to millions after.
“It doesn’t really capture it,” Viola says.
“Well, you can’t do that,” says Sadie.
Tentatively, her father approaches the two of them, and she rises to hug him, her body tense, resisting regression, refusing the teenage self who was so blinded by the gospel of Al.
He turns, now, to Sadie, his old enemy. Readying himself for combat, Viola thinks, using me as a shield.
But he only smiles shyly and says: “Nice to have this one home.”
“Isn’t it! Jesus, she looks like Susie.”
“I know. More and more like Susie.”
His sincerity catches her off guard. His white hair. They are both staring at her, and it’s palpable how much they need to feel it. How desperate they are to say her name to each other.
“Your brain, though,” Sadie says.
“I don’t know about that.”
“I do. And thank God for that.”
They both laugh a bit in discomfort and Viola hardly believes in it, the gentleness. Did it take them this long, just to grow up?
Al rubs the balding spot at the back of his head, turns to Sebastian. “Well, this kid has your creative streak.”
On the wall, Sebastian is projecting some video, decades old, of their mother performing in a school play.
They watch her for a little while, a woman of movement and joy.
She’s funny, she makes them laugh. She flubs a line.
She is just a girl like any other girl. Viola takes in her corny gestures, meets her backstage as she giggles, as she receives flowers and blushes at praise for her performance.
She introduces all of her castmates as though each one is a name they ought to remember. She is unapologetically herself.
The clip switches to an early family video.
Her mother must be her own age, or near enough.
Viola watches as she picks her up, a little girl, her feet dangling in the air, her curls downy on her tiny scalp, and they smile at each other the same smile, and she can hear her father’s voice under the music that is playing saying: Let’s see a spin!
and her mother is lifting her high in the air with strong arms and looking into her face and saying: Look at you go!
“In some ways, it made it harder,” he says. “Having had that time together. Feeling what it might have been like, to be a real family.”
“We were always a real family.”
Viola’s anger is growing, alarming and righteous.
It’s his fault they didn’t have more time with her.
His fault that they grew up without the full picture.
His fault that she doesn’t remember her.
But how can she hold all of this stupid, directionless rage when all she wants to do is slip back into the easy comfort of their relationship?
What she wants is not to hurt him, but to tell him about her thesis and receive his praise, to go home and sit on the couch and watch detective shows.
To cook for him. To talk to him like this, as two adults.
To think about his time with her mother as a circumstance that arose between two people who probably loved and hated each other, who fought and made up and were similar and different.
Who needed each other and didn’t need each other.
Here he is again on the screen, just a man, waving the camera away, not wanting to be seen.
“You know, I still feel sorry that I never asked her what she wanted. Afterward, I mean, for the funeral. I had so much time and I just. It felt like asking would have made it come true.”
Viola places a hand on her father’s back.
The great sadness of her death had made it so easy to sweep away the smaller, more preventable sadnesses. She wonders if the greater tragedy was the one they might have affected.
“You were young,” she says to him.
Her father holds her hand. Maybe we are done, as a family, leaving things unsaid. Or maybe this is just a moment in time.
“How is that mystery gentleman you were seeing?” he asks.
“It ended. Unfortunately.”
“Sorry to hear that. Who was he?”
On the wall behind her is a cutout of Soap Opera Digest, Orson looking playfully into her mother’s eyes. Her heart is wretched with him. Sebastian glances over, a snatch of their conversation caught in his face.
“Doesn’t matter now,” she says.
Al rubs his daughter’s back. “Cheer up, sweetheart. The sea is full of fish.”
Viola
I’m thinking of you.
Her brother’s hand wraps over her shoulders, and both of them watch the video in silence.
Around them the room is moving and people are talking about her, and not talking about her, spilling out into the street despite the cold, with plastic cups of wine.
Her face, her mother’s face, her brother wanting to be lifted.
She looks to her father, and he is watching too, listening to some younger version of himself, and in the middle of all the guesses and imperfect memories, Sebastian has salvaged this: a brief and crystal love.
“Thank you,” she says. He bends and hugs her around her neck, and then she pushes her way outside.
Someone has hung Christmas lights between the houses, and through the glass, looking back inside, Viola can see mingling in the dim, her father chattering to Sadie, Tillie refilling glasses and nodding her head at the woman from the forum.
She begins to walk down the street to a small beachy point.
A man pushes past on a bicycle. A woman carries something large and rectangular wrapped in thick brown paper. Where are they all going?
Where is she going?
At this time of night the beach is cold and empty, though still she can sense the ghosts of parents clamoring to catch the last rays of sun before the rhythm of school supplies and extracurriculars and report cards begins again, their children moving forward whether they like it or not, forcing them to reckon with the fact that they themselves are getting older, that they might one day be left alone and have to join some superfluous local committee just to keep busy, just to avoid reckoning with the smallness of their lives, the fact that they will, at some later point, die.
All of them, everyone in the gallery and Orson and Niamh and her father and Sebastian, all of them will die.
Still the seagulls cry and the waves crash relentlessly. Above her is a full moon.
Viola takes off her shoes and stands ankle-deep in the water as it rushes around her, freezing, sinking into the soft sand.
The beach is so much smaller than it used to be.
She is listening more often now to all of the stories about the rising tides, the catastrophe waiting just around the corner.
Ready or not. Overhead, a plane makes a wide loop, ripping gray across the sky.
Orson
thinking of you too.