The Irish Goodbye

August 1990

Like everyone at the beach club that day, Maggie heard the crash.

She jumped up from the sandcastle she was building and spotted her brother, Topher, diving off the bow of his skiff and disappearing into the blue-black water along the lighthouse’s rocky promontory.

A moment later, he resurfaced holding something she couldn’t make out from the shore.

Alice, Maggie’s middle sister, scrambled to the top of the rickety lifeguard stand and shouted down to Maggie, “Get Mom!”

At the jetty that cut across the shoreline in front of her house, she scrambled over the rocks covered in slippery seaweed, slicing the inside of her ankle against a jagged edge.

It stung, but she didn’t stop. She hurried up the creaky stairs along the bluff and through the fence gate, calling for her mother.

The geese fluttered their wings and scattered, frightened by her screams. She sprinted across the slope of lawn, wet from the sprinklers, and toward the white-and-blue clapboard Victorian, which suddenly seemed massive and terrifyingly empty.

She called out again, and to her relief, her mother appeared from the garden holding a paintbrush in her teeth and wearing her floppy straw sun hat.

Her easel was set up by the lavender blooms she’d been painting all week, and splashes of red and blue covered her smock.

She tucked her paintbrush behind her ear. “What’s this about?” she asked.

“Something happened,” Maggie said breathlessly. Her lungs burned from the running.

Her mother lowered herself to inspect the blood on Maggie’s ankle. “Did you fall?”

Maggie shook her head and pointed to the bay.

“Is someone hurt?” her mother asked, standing.

Maggie wasn’t sure. She’d heard the crash and then seen Topher dive into the water. Her oldest sister, Cait, was supposed to be on her brother’s boat, but she hadn’t seen her there. “The boat… Topher jumped in…” She grabbed her mother’s hand. “Just come!”

Her mother untied her smock and chucked it in the direction of her easel, then raced past Maggie toward the beach club.

At the dock, they found Topher helping Cait and his best friend, Luke, carry someone off his boat.

Maggie tried to follow after her mother, but Alice yanked her by her bathing suit strap, and they stood next to the kayak racks with the club’s camp counselors.

Waiters in black pants and white polos trickled out from the clubhouse to smoke cigarettes and watch. It seemed that no one knew what was going on.

“Is Topher doing CPR?” Maggie asked Alice.

Alice nodded.

Topher had practiced CPR on Maggie’s favorite Cabbage Patch doll while training as a lifeguard, his big hands pumping the doll’s puffy chest. She’d gotten annoyed with him then but felt proud watching him now. “On who?” she asked.

Their father rushed past them from the direction of the parking lot. He must have come from work because he was in his suit, but Maggie didn’t know how he’d gotten there so quickly. He didn’t acknowledge them as he rushed down the narrow dock.

“On Daniel Larkin,” Alice finally answered.

Daniel was Luke’s younger brother. He had given Maggie her first “toasted almond,” a dunk in the bay and then a roll in the sand, at the Fourth of July barbecue a few weeks ago. Like Alice, he was starting the tenth grade at Saint Mary’s that fall.

When the ambulance arrived, the onlookers scurried to the beach.

Maggie gnawed at her thumbnail. The summer sky was bright, and she had to squint and hold her hand over her forehead to look out at the bay.

For a while, it seemed to her like not much was happening; then, in a flurry, the paramedics loaded Daniel onto a board and rushed him off the dock.

Luke leapt into the back of the ambulance and they closed the doors.

The sirens blared, and just like that, they were gone.

At the dock house, Topher stood next to their parents, talking to two police officers.

It was odd for Maggie to see her mother there in her loose linen shirt, her feet bare.

All of Maggie’s friends’ mothers were younger and wore tennis whites, ate lunch at the clubhouse, and drank cocktails on the adults-only patio for happy hour.

Another police officer took pictures of Topher’s boat, which bobbed gently against the dock’s edge.

There was a dent in the bow, Maggie noticed, and she imagined her brother was upset about that.

He’d bought the boat that spring, all with his own money.

It had been falling apart, but he’d rebuilt most of it himself.

“Why are the police here?” Alice asked Cait as she walked off the dock.

“I don’t know,” Cait said in a sharp voice, and turned toward the water. She hugged herself tightly, gripping the silver Saint Jude pendant she’d discovered in their grandfather’s junk drawer years ago, anxiously chewing on it.

Maggie scanned the bay to see what her oldest sister was looking for, but all she found were a pair of sailboats scuttling across the horizon and boats anchored around the lighthouse for its annual fundraiser event.

“What’s happening with Topher?” Alice persisted. “Is he in trouble?”

Cait turned back. “I don’t know,” she said again. But then, “Daniel was driving his boat. The steering wheel got jammed or something and they hit a rock by the lighthouse. I guess he flipped overboard.”

Maggie watched her brother and parents on the dock.

Her mother held Topher by the arm, and her father gestured toward the boat to one of the officers.

Beneath Topher’s aviator sunglasses, his face was shiny and red.

She didn’t understand why he’d be in trouble if he wasn’t even the one driving the boat.

Maybe Daniel should be in trouble. If he wasn’t too hurt, she guessed.

She imagined him returning to the beach club with a bandage around his head and everyone at camp making him a WELCOME BACK poster during craft class like they did when she’d had her appendix removed last summer.

Another police car arrived, and Topher and her parents walked off the dock toward the clubhouse.

“Where are they going?” Maggie asked, but her sisters ignored her.

Alice nudged Cait. “Why was Daniel driving Topher’s boat?”

Cait leaned in closer to Alice. “Will you just shut up?” she hissed. Then she turned to Maggie. “Go find your camp group.”

“Camp’s over,” Maggie said.

“Then go play with your friends.”

Maggie started to protest—why did being the youngest always mean being left out?—but all Cait had to do was raise her brow.

Back at the beach, Maggie found she’d been left out of the fun there, too.

They’d canceled the sandcastle competition, and all the popsicles were now gone.

She sat at the foot of the lifeguard stand and finished reading the last chapter of her most recent Baby-Sitters Club book, then followed her friends to the pool for a game of sharks and minnows.

As they passed the clubhouse, she tried to spot her family, but the patio was empty, and she worried they’d left without her.

Finally, Cait appeared at the pool’s edge and told her to get her stuff.

Maggie walked back home along the pebbled beach with her sisters. They were quiet, and it looked like Cait had been crying.

“Where’s Topher?” she asked. “And Mom and Dad?”

“At the police station,” Cait said.

“Why?”

“We don’t know,” Alice said. “They could be at the hospital.”

That made Maggie feel better. “I’m going to make Daniel a poster,” she said.

Her sisters stopped and exchanged glances. Cait closed her eyes and puffed out her cheeks.

“Just tell her,” Alice said.

“Tell me what?”

Cait opened her eyes again. She held on to the beach towel wrapped around her neck and straightened her back. “Daniel’s dead,” she said.

Maggie looked at her sisters, but they didn’t say anything else, eyes fixed on the path ahead. There was so much Maggie wanted to ask, but she knew Cait would tell her to shut up like she had Alice.

Cait stepped over the broken shell of a horseshoe crab. “Everything’s different now,” she said.

And she kept on walking.