DAY THREE
Eoin Connolly
The evening sky was as red as infected gums and peppered with agitated, tree-hunting starlings. Ciaran left his bike at the back door and dashed inside, not bothering with the lock hanging from the Raleigh’s peeling frame. He called a taxi while he swapped his overalls for a t-shirt and a pair of jeans and went out to meet it a few minutes later, having brushed his teeth, applied a lick of deodorant, and retrieved the weather-beaten hippopotamus plushie from its spot at the back of his wardrobe.
Noemia, his ex-girlfriend, lived a fifteen-minute drive from his estate. The taxi took him past the docklands and across the Liffey to the Gasworks, where Noemia’s parents had bought her a flat when her daughter, Saoirse, was born. Cheap back then, eye-watering now.
The entry code hadn’t changed since he’d last been to the apartment complex, nearly five years ago. He tore up three flights of stairs to the penthouse suite and knocked twice on its resonant wooden door.
Footsteps. A jangling, of keys or of bangles, he wasn’t sure. And then she was in front of him, her hair cut spikily short and the skin around her dark eyes flaky and raw.
“Ciaran,” Noemia said, her Southsider accent stretching out his name. They talk like they’ve all the time in the world because they do, Ciaran’s father had been fond of saying. And because they haven’t a notion the rest of us don’t.
“Saoirse called. Said it was a crisis, so I brought Ernest.” He bran-dished the hippo. “I’m sure her dad has her overflowing with toys, and she’s probably too old now anyway, teenagers and all, but sure, look. Thought it might cheer her up.”
Noemia made a sound somewhere between a choke and a laugh and covered her mouth with her hand. And then she crossed the threshold and he let her collapse into him. They embraced for what could’ve been a second or a minute, all Ciaran was aware of was her smell, stale sweat and almost-gone perfume.
“She’s sleeping, but you can go in,” she said when they broke apart, stepping aside to let him past. “Shoes off, if you don’t mind.”
All that time he’d lived here with them, playing stepfather, and she still thought he needed reminding. Ciaran slipped out of his trainers and padded down the hall, stopping at the second door on the left. Saoirse’s bedroom seemed impossibly dark, as if all the light from the world had been forbidden entrance. Once his eyes adjusted, he approached the bed.
The girl-shape underneath the covers was breathing steadily. In the gloom, all he could make out was the side of her face and her parted lips. He hovered a minute or two, listening, and then set Ernest down by her outstretched arm.
In the kitchen, he found Noemia at the table with a bottle of Jame-son and two tumblers, typing on her phone. When she saw him, she said, “You’ll have a drink, won’t you,” like it was a statement, not a question, and poured two fingers into each glass.
If she’d let him answer, he’d have said no thanks, water’s grand, or have you Coke by any chance, because he was, once again, on Day Three. But he knew Day Four just as well as he knew Day Three, in a funny kind of way he maybe even knew it better, and he’d no greater desire to arrive at Day Four than he had to remain in this particular Day Three, and so he sat and raised his glass and touched it against hers.
They drank. The back of his tongue burned cleanly and he drank again and felt it go numb. He looked around, at the portraits on the wall and the mugs in the sink, and then he turned back to find her staring like he was a stranger she was trying to place.
“Where’s João?” he asked.
“João,” Noemia said, as though correcting his pronunciation, though Ciaran couldn’t hear any difference. “He’s at the hospital. They might have a bed ready for her tonight, they told us, or it might be tomorrow, it could go either way. He said, well, I’ll go down there and we’ll just see about which way it’s going to go.”
“Good man.” The Jameson was making his voice sound more bitter than he’d have liked. “I was at work when she called. Ran home, came straight here. Left Ernest in with her,” he added, hoping for an-other choke or a laugh or for anything at all, really.
She reached across to refill his tumbler, the bracelets on her wrist rattling. A new tattoo, he noticed, right below the heel of her hand. Sideways eight, scabbed.
“You still smoke, do you?” she asked, and when he confirmed he did, she stood and opened the sliding door that led to the balcony. Fol-lowing her out, Ciaran shook two cigarettes from his pack of Camels, lit both, and handed her one.
She winced her thanks and turned to face the city, painted sepia by the burning sky. The decrepit distillery; the insectile tech offices by the river; the river itself, sprawling, stinking. Grey brick Dublin – Ciaran grew up not far from the Gasworks, but there had been no Aga stoves or wraparound verandas in his neighbourhood back then, and he doubted things were any different now.
“She was doing better.” Noemia’s voice was hoarse. “Seemed to be making progress with the therapy. A few hours ago, she told us she was going to kill herself. I swear to God it happened just like that, she came out of her room and said, Mum, she said, Dad, I’m going to kill myself, I’m going to slit my wrists. We thought it was just the eating, but they go together, apparently. Depression, I mean, and the eating. This place, St. Pat’s, they’ve a great program,” she went on, and he wasn’t sure was she trying to convince him or herself. “They’ll get her eating again. Just need a bed to free up.”
It was the same way Saoirse had phrased it on the phone. It sounded strange to Ciaran, waiting for a bed. He pictured a series of them in some cavernous dormitory where sick girls lined up at one end, worked their way through the procession, and came out healthily fat at the other.
A bed a day until you were better. Day One. Bed One. And at some point you were better. He was better, though he was no longer officially on Day Three he was clearly better than he used to be, and if he was better then Saoirse would be better too, it was just a bed she needed, a bed and enough time.
Ciaran stole a glance at Noemia, hunched over the railing. The swan curve of her neck close enough to reach out and touch. He watched her go back in.
They’d met outside the arts block in Trinity College, where Noemia was studying history part-time. Saoirse, six then, filling out a colouring book at one of the wooden tables and drawing curious looks from the undergraduate hipsters. Her mother clinging to a takeaway americano like it was the only thing stopping the November wind from carrying her off. Ciaran, halfway through a philosophy degree that was doomed to go unfinished, walked out of a lecture on Heidegger and thought her the most gorgeous woman he’d ever seen.
Three covert cans deep by two in the afternoon, he’d asked her to join him at a pub around the corner, a juice for the child. Thinking back, he couldn’t remember what he said or did, only that they parted with her number in his phone and the promise of another drink at some point. Two weeks later, they slept together for the first time in the Gasworks apartment once Saoirse had gone down for the night. He moved in another month after that.
Saoirse’s father, he learned in bits and pieces, had moved back to Portugal not long after she was born. He never got the sense it was acrimonious, exactly, but the man was gone, that much was appar-ent. Noemia sparing with her details; Noemia known among her few friends for finishing stories how she wanted to imagine them finished. Noemia: as austerely beautiful as an unblemished mirror and a metronomic adherent to five-year cycles. Five with João away, Sao-irse aged one through six. Five with Ciaran present, ages six through eleven. And then another five, ages eleven through sixteen, with Ci-aran summarily dispatched from their lives following João’s trium-phant return from Lisbon with a specialization in pediatric oncology, a consultant post waiting for him in Tallaght, and a newfound appreciation for the passage of time.
From one day to the next your life changes – from all days to the next your life changes – and if some changes feel bigger than others, it’s only your perspective, Ciaran reckoned, draining his glass. You’re one place and then you’re another and there’s nothing more to be said about it. No explanations required beyond the presentation of con-crete facts that explained themselves.
The child’s father is back. You can’t stay. Let’s not stray too far, it’s getting late.
Now she was starting in on the next cycle, ages sixteen through twenty-one, God willing. With Saoirse thin and critically sad and João more fatherly than ever and Ciaran a memory, if even that, a ghost her daughter texted on birthdays and called on some Christmases and never once asked to visit.
No insistence from Noemia on that front, mind. Heaven forbid. Mirrors don’t touch you of their own accord. They don’t move un-less you move.
As he flicked his cigarette butt over the balcony it occurred to him that he’d hate her if he didn’t already love her. He went in and helped himself to another dose of Jameson. A few minutes later, Noemia emerged from Saoirse’s room, collapsing onto the chair like some-body twice her size.
“She’s up,” she said. “Well, up. In and out.”
Ciaran took a swallow and noticed he was drunk. “Did she see Ernest?”
“Yes,” she said, and picked up her phone.
Ernest was a birthday present, purchased right before João reap-peared. As far as he could recall, Saoirse hadn’t even owned the hippo for two full weeks before Noemia gave him back, along with the rest of Ciaran’s things. It was inappropriate, she’d explained, given the con-text, and though he wasn’t clear on how a stuffed animal constituted the inappropriate part of the context in question, he hadn’t said any-thing, had only accepted the cardboard box with Ernest perched on top like some defeated Hannibal and carried it the entire way home.
Five years it took him to drop out of college, retrain as an electri-cian, and reimagine himself as a parent. Bad dreams, training wheels, fantasies of economically unviable pets. Seasonal purchases: statio-nery and new school uniforms in August, Advent calendars in De-cember, tank tops every April. Five years he spent learning to love the child like she was his own and not even an hour it took him to walk to his father’s council flat.
Tapping away on that fucking phone, Noemia was. Penciled eye-brows furrowed. Chewing her lip.
Ciaran cleared his throat and said, “Dad always told me I was playing house. Said a child is the product of two people and there’s no room for manoeuvre. That was how he put it. Manoeuvre. Like it was a question of technique.”
Exhaling through her nose, Noemia locked her phone and looked at him. There was nothing in her eyes he knew how to read.
“He passed a few months back. Cirrhosis.” The whiskey ushering forth the words from wherever they’d been concealed. Somewhere in his stomach, felt like. “Always told me I was kidding myself. About the child, like. About this.”
“You weren’t kidding yourself,” she said. “But you shouldn’t feel you have to stay, either.”
“She called, so I’m here.”
“You don’t have to be. João has it all under control. It was nice of you to come, but you’ve seen her now. Don’t feel you have to stay.”
“Are you not sorry?” he asked.
Noemia held her tumbler to the light and tilted it so the amber liquid crept right up to the rim. “What, exactly, am I supposed to be sorry for, Ciaran?”
“Well, all of it.” He couldn’t believe her. “Shutting me out, like. After everything. Are you seriously telling me you’re not even a bit sorry?”
Still peering at the glass, she said, “She’s not your daughter.”
She said it like it was any other sentence, but she regretted it. He could tell by the abrupt way she glanced at him and by how carefully she set her glass back down on the table. He knew then he had her.
“I’m going to stay,” he announced, reaching for the bottle of Jame-son. Daring her to stop him.
She just kept staring with that electric, ashamed look in her eyes. He was going to say something else. About what, he didn’t know. About the flat he shared with a pack of college kids, maybe, or about his work, because as of last year he was fully qualified and this felt like an achievement of sorts, or about the women he’d been seeing, not that there was much to say about them, or maybe even about his father, whose funeral had been expensive and poorly attended. It wasn’t like she’d asked about any of this, but he was going to say it anyway. Before he could get any of it out, however, there came from down the hall the sound of a door unlatching.
João was as tall as Ciaran remembered, and as handsome, though the lines around his full mouth cut deeper into his cheeks now and his black hair was speckled with patches of grey. Noemia leapt from her chair like a startled cat, but she needn’t have worried – when Saoirse’s father saw Ciaran, he broke into a tired grin, as if there was nothing untoward about the scene he’d happened upon in his own kitchen. And maybe, Ciaran thought dully, there wasn’t.
“Good to see you,” João said in perfect English, extending a hand across the table that Ciaran shook silently. “Saoirse told me she called.”
As if on cue, the bedroom door swung open and Saoirse appeared in the hallway, wearing an oversized hoodie and knuckling her eyes. If she passed Ciaran on the street, he wouldn’t have stopped her. Her wrists were little more than nubs of bone; her legs couldn’t have been much thicker than his arms. It was her, no question about it, the pale blue eyes and the crooked mouth gave that much away. But the child in his head – the one from the dental appointments and piano recitals, all those set-pieces he’d been so desperate to wedge himself into – didn’t exist anymore. For all he knew, she hadn’t existed for a while.
“Dad,” she said, her voice raspier than he remembered but her ac-cent precisely the same, and goddamn him and his pathetically low Day Three tolerance because Ciaran was up and standing before he realised she wasn’t talking to him. He sat back down, his head alight, as João folded her into an embrace that swallowed her figure whole.
When they broke apart, Saoirse called out, “Hey, Ciaran.”
“Hey, kid,” he said. “Left you something.”
“I saw.” The row of yellow teeth her smile revealed made his chest ache. “Thanks, I’d forgotten about him.”
“They’ll have a bed soon,” said Noemia, hurrying over to join the pair. “Maybe tonight, sweetheart. Why don’t we go pack a bag?”
She bustled Saoirse back into the room before the girl had the chance to say anything else. João ran his hands over his face and then shrugged, as if to say, Well, you can see for yourself how she is.
“I’ll have a smoke,” Ciaran said, getting to his feet again. “Leave you to it.”
“Sure,” he said distractedly, casting his gaze around the kitchen like he had the feeling he’d misplaced something but couldn’t remem-ber what it was. “Sure, whatever you need.”
Ciaran wasn’t sure whether he’d seen him stand up when the child said that word. Noemia had surely noticed. He supposed none of it mattered much now.
Outside, the sun had finally set. As he was lighting his second-last cigarette, Ciaran heard the balcony door slide open and felt somebody sidle up beside him.
“Smoking’s bad for you, you know,” João said. “Then again, eat-ing too much, also bad. Eating not enough, even worse.”
On the horizon, where the Liffey became the Irish Sea between cranes and towers of shipping crates, three faint stars had appeared. Ciaran stared at them until he had to blink away the sting.
“I’ll get going now in a minute,” he said. “Don’t want to be trou-bling you.”
“Stay,” said João.
Three stars that could’ve been not stars. Could’ve been planets or satellites or some other sources of light. But they sure looked like stars to him, twinkling there in the bruised purple with the waves gently breaking beneath them. Hard to tell sea from sky, Ciaran thought, only for some reason he thought it in his father’s gravelly voice and the world blurred.
“And it wouldn’t be weird,” he asked, twisting away to scrape his eyes with the collar of his t-shirt. “With herself, like. And with the child . . .”
“No, it wouldn’t be weird,” João responded, and from how devoid his voice was of any hesitancy Ciaran wondered did they talk about him at all, had they spent even a single evening discussing how he’d been there for five full years of the child’s life, sharing a bed in that very apartment with the child’s mother. Or maybe they had, maybe they’d fought viciously about it. Maybe Ciaran had been a chasm between them and they’d simply found a way to bridge it.
“Stay,” João said again, and Ciaran felt a hand on his shoulder, warm and heavy. “Look, there’s no booze left, but we’ll order pizza. I doubt the girls will have any. You and me, though, we can eat. You’re at home here, Ciaran,” he said. “Be at home.”
He let the hand linger another moment before returning inside. Ciaran checked his phone, but there was nothing from work, noth-ing from his housemates, nothing from Tinder. Behind him, he heard voices, muffled by the glass. One was Saoirse’s. He imagined her ask-ing where he was and if he’d be sticking around for pizza, or at least until they heard about the bed, at least until then.
Ciaran stayed out a while longer, looking at the maybe-stars over the water, and then he turned away and went in.
Eion Connolly’s stories have appeared in Red Rock Review, Oyster River Pages, and Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine.