False Mermaid

He’d been reading up on some of the materials the doctor had provided on stroke rehabilitation, and was alternately encouraged and depressed. At this point they still had no idea who would come out of the coma. Would the man who woke up here be some reduced version of Joseph Maguire? There was risk of a still-vital mind trapped in a nonfunctioning body. Cormac suddenly realized he wouldn’t have much longer to wait and wonder. Joseph’s eyes began to flutter again, more rapidly this time. Then they opened wide, just as he took a deep lungful of air. It was almost as if he’d been underwater, holding his breath. Cormac watched his father blink several times, apparently unable to focus. Probably all he could see was the dust-clogged grate in the ceiling. Did that shape mean anything to him? Did he even know what it was?

The old man’s lips began to move; he was struggling to make a sound, but managed only a low moan. His hand reached out, and Cormac took it and held on. “Raahhh. Raaaahhh,” the old man croaked, and Cormac moved closer, unsure whether to speak. “Da?” he said at last. The shape of the word felt foreign on his tongue. It was as if they were both infants again, reduced to single syllables.

“Unnhhh. Raaaahhh,” the old man said again. Was he trying to say “Roz”?

“I’m right here. Roz and I are both here.”

Tears began to trickle from the corners of the old man’s eyes, but whether they were brought on by emotion, or merely the effort of trying to speak, Cormac could not tell. He only knew he was overwhelmed by the notion of having a second chance, an opportunity to forge something new from ruins destroyed long ago. How many received that gift?

Roz stirred in her chair. “What’s happening—what did I miss?”

“Nothing,” Cormac said. “He’s just now opened his eyes.” The old man’s hand felt warm, leathery. The words might be absent, but Cormac looked into his father’s eyes and saw something burning in the depths of those dark pools, a light of recognition. “I think he knows me, Roz.” His father’s warm, dry fingers closed around his hand. “That’s it. Do you know who I am?” Another small compression—but Cormac felt it as a semaphore, a signal between far-distant sentries.

“Do you know my name?” Again the slight pressure. “My God, you’re there, aren’t you?”

Roz approached the bedside, her eyes shining. “How are you, Joe? We’ve missed you.”

The old man’s gaze turned to her, and with a sinking feeling, Cormac watched the small light of recognition sputter and flicker out. “It’s Roz,” he said. “You know Roz—”

But it was no good. And Roz could see it as well. She had been erased from Joe’s memory by the recent brain storm. Every tender feeling the old man held for her had been wiped away. It made sense that the memories last formed were the least solid, while the older memories—of people, places, events—were cemented into place like a building’s foundation, the last thing left standing in the event of calamity.

Roz tried not to show how much she felt the slight. “Why don’t I just wait out in the—” She waved a hand and left the room. Cormac found her a few minutes later at the far end of the corridor, her face flushed and wet with tears.

“Roz, listen to me. You can’t expect everything just to be there as if nothing had happened. He’ll come back. Everything will come back, eventually. You have to be patient.”

“I’m not there at all, Cormac. It’s as if I never existed.”

5

When their plane touched town at Dublin Airport, Elizabeth managed to fall a few steps behind her father and Miranda after they made their way through customs and passport control. She fell a little farther behind as they headed toward the airport exit, and her heart rose into her throat as she slipped into a shop filled with whiskey bottles and perfume and all kinds of gleaming jewelry. DUTY FREE, said the sign above the door. She hung back beside a wall of crystal bowls and glasses and clocks, watching passersby through the glass, their faces and limbs distorted and shattered into hundreds of facets edged with rainbows, thinking about how those two words together—DUTY FREE—seemed like a contradiction. She watched her dad and Miranda move out of sight without even noticing she was gone.

Her plan was to look up Nora’s address in the phone book, and get a taxi to take her there. She approached the shop counter and addressed the woman who stood behind it: “Excuse me—would you happen to have a phone book?”

The woman looked like somebody’s grandmother, with her soft brown sweater set and glasses that perched on the end of her nose. She squinted down through them. “Sorry, love, what was it you needed?”

“I was wondering if you had a phone book I could use?”