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The workman is wearing green overalls underneath a Detroit-style jacket – but a real one, one used for actual manual labour rather than the uber-hip imitation customers would wear in the café – and he’s halfway back down the walkway when she calls out to him. He turns and considers her. The whole scene makes Róisín feel that she’s looking at a painting instead of real life. His van out front. The bucolic patchwork of snow across the front lawn. The gulls, the hoarse wind carrying powdered white swirls across the lawn, the distant sound of waves crashing, the reeds of the marshland across the street, and the workman, who is in the moment of returning up the brick walkway to her.
‘I was passing by and saw that tree there,’ he says, through a thick Boston accent. He puts something into her hands and she takes it without reading it. He gestures to the tree on the front lawn. ‘You see the branches there at the top?’
Róisín nods.
The man takes the cap off his head and scratches his forehead. ‘All of that’s well overdue for a trim. You don’t want to mess around with that getting out of order. All my details are on the card, all right?’ He puts the cap back on and squints at her, as if seeing her for the first time. ‘Pass it along to your mother,’ he says.
The card is thin plasticky paper. O’Connell’s Tree Service is written in big block print at the top. There’s a shamrock in place of a dot above the i in Service. The card goes on to list the litany of services the company performs, including but not limited to: grass clipping, gutter cleaning, tree removal and the aforementioned branch trimming, which is underlined twice. At the bottom is a name – Joe – and a phone number. The world still works in such a way that people come to your front door and offer to trim your tree for you. This world, she clarifies in her mind, this world of suburban houses that are three to four times larger than the terraced house she grew up in. Róisín turns the card over in her hands. She’s smiling.
It’s been a few days since she arrived ‘to the boonies’, as Aaron put it. She fit everything she cared about into two large suitcases and left everything else behind. What use was her budget furniture in an actual house? It was just stuff and any attachment she had to it had grown like mould in the absence of sunlight. She managed with extraordinary effort to get the suitcases and herself to North Station within ten minutes of her train’s departure. She asked the ticket collector out front three times if she was getting onto the right train. She squeezed into a purple vinyl booth and looked out the grease-smudged window as the city evaporated behind her. The world looked distorted and yellow-tinted through the glass. Someone had scratched their initials in the corner. The scenery alternated between barren marshlands and dense, ugly downtowns and then it all cleared away. There was a screeching sound and the smell of burnt rubber as the train came to a sudden stop. The ticket collector threw open the door at the front of the carriage and told her they’d arrived.
Róisín heaved her bags onto the platform. The air was cold and fresh. The sunshine was stark and hot on her face. There was a house-like structure behind the station sign with red clapboard siding and a small wooden clocktower on its roof. The train started up behind her with enormous noise and then it passed a bend in the trees and there was sudden and complete silence. Her ears adjusted. She could make out distant cars, not in the overlapping noise of city traffic but as individual entities, the quaint sound of a squealing tyre as a singular car turned left. Aaron told her only that the town was small and near the ocean. And then there he was, waving at her from the parking lot below.
‘So you didn’t get lost, then?’ he called up to her.
She gestured at her suitcases. ‘What are you doing all the way down there while I’m all the way up here with these heavy bags? Here I thought you were the man in this relationship.’
Aaron came up the stairs two at a time. ‘You were the one who wanted to look self-sufficient for some reason. How many times did I offer to drive down?’
‘In your Dad’s car.’
‘Yes, in my Dad’s car.’
‘I think that’s a bad first impression to be making with your parents. Speaking first-hand as the Irish barista you knocked up.’
‘Not even a barista,’ he said, climbing the last few steps. ‘Unemployed, even.’
Then he was there, all teeth and smile lines, radiating warmth. He wrapped her in his arms and kissed her face and she pushed him off and pretended not to like it. He lifted her bags with ease, one in each hand. They descended the platform together and loaded the bags into the boot of a red sedan.
It all turned out to be more like a toy town than a real one, as if she and Aaron had been shrunk down to drive among intricately painted miniatures designed for display. She pointed out a brick building as they pulled out of the station parking lot.
‘What is that – the fire house?’ she asked.
‘What, the one with all the fire trucks out front?’ Aaron asked. ‘Yep, that’d be the one.’
‘Listen to how he mouths off to the mother of his child,’ she said, which made him laugh.
The streets were lined with colonial houses. A thin layer of snow on the sidewalks. Aaron pointed out a tall wooden building on their right and told her it was an Orthodox synagogue. They stopped at a stop sign at the end of the street and Aaron smiled.
‘You’re going to like this.’
He turned the car right and then left onto the main road of the town and the ocean opened up into view in front of them. There was a boardwalk that wrapped along the shore and a few huddled clumps of people making their way up and down it. A wave crashed into the sea wall, spewing a great big cloud of mist above them all.
Róisín tapped on the glass of her window towards a woman in the distance. ‘Is she eating an ice cream?’
Aaron laughed. ‘She is, yeah.’
‘That is mental,’ Róisín said. ‘You’re all absolutely mad for an ice cream when it’s freezing out, sure you are. What’s that about?’
‘Oh, we’ll convert you. You’ll see,’ he said.
Róisín rolled down the passenger window and the car flooded with icy air, the sound of crashing waves and the smell of saltwater. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath in through her nose and out through her mouth and told herself that this was what the ocean smelled like, this was what it tasted like.
‘It’s like a movie,’ she said.
They arrived at a stop light at an intersection of low shops and restaurants. A woman walked up to the crosswalk pushing an empty stroller, soon followed by a toddler wearing a puffy coat, hat and scarf, blocks of bright and beautifully clashing colours. His arms stuck straight out as he waddled behind her. The woman held onto his hand and pointed at the red sedan. Aaron genially waved them across the road. The woman waved back and mouthed, ‘Thank you.’
After Róisín told Aaron she was pregnant, she told him that she was going to keep it.
‘I don’t expect anything from you,’ she told him. ‘But this is what I want.’
He kept looking around her kitchen, blinking, silent. He held the pregnancy test in his hands like a prayer book. He was silent even as he left. Róisín came to his apartment two days later and told him she was moving back home. She wanted to appear clinical about the decision. Final. The biggest mistake a woman could make was emotional honesty, she felt, because men would always point to the tone of their voice instead of the words they were saying and discount the message for its medium. But after she coldly told Aaron the facts – that she was leaving and it was unlikely she would ever be able to return – he opened his mouth and just said, ‘Oh.’ Tucked away in that single syllable was torrential heartbreak. His eyes were glossy. She opened her mouth to walk it back but broke down and cried. Then they embraced and he cried and, when all of that crying was just about finished and she felt dried out and used up, he tucked her into the sheets of his bed and brought her a mug of chamomile tea.
He sat on top of the duvet with his clothes on.
‘Why aren’t you getting under the covers?’ she asked him.
‘I didn’t want you to think I was getting any ideas.’
When they had sex, he put an arm beneath the small of her back and stroked her face with his other hand, smiling and kissing her eyelids. His breath went ragged and he told her, almost apologetically, that he was close. She dug into his shoulders and told him to come inside of her, which he did, shuddering while she held him. She never said things like that. They laughed about it afterwards while she lay on his chest, a movie playing on his laptop in the background.
‘I think it’s a little late for caution,’ she said, and he agreed.
He made her pancakes in the morning and they ate them in bed and she wondered if her heart had ever felt as full before. She felt a tinge of pity for everyone who was not her in that moment, who couldn’t possibly ever feel the warmth of love she felt then. He made it easy to forget about the past. It was hard to reconcile this version of Aaron with the one who had arrived at her apartment in the middle of the night, coke-addled and bleeding.
She went back to her own apartment after that. She folded the pregnancy test boxes into quarters and took them to the recycling bin outside. She had nothing else to do then but sit on her bed and scroll endlessly through social media on her phone. A video popped up about parenting and it made her feel so suddenly and violently anxious that her vision shuddered and she closed the app, only to look from the bare walls of her bedroom down to her phone and open it again. Her apartment had never felt so empty and cold. She thought about calling Sofia and decided against it. They hadn’t spoken since that night at the café. Eventually, she did phone her parents, and for the three hours that followed they talked through all of it again. They tried to convince her of various arguments: her mother, of how easy her pregnancy would be if she didn’t live abroad; her father, of how easy her life would be if she were to become suddenly ‘un-pregnant’, as he put it.
‘If you’re asking my opinion…’ her father began again.
‘I’m not asking your opinion at all,’ Róisín said with finality. ‘This is what’s happening and that’s that. If we have a place to stay, we’ll stay here, and if we don’t, I’ll come home.’
‘Well, if that’s that,’ her father said.
They passed the town hall and Aaron did a loop around it so Róisín could see it from all sides. It was an old building designed to look much older, with Roman columns and a white dome roof. A bit ostentatious considering its purpose as a government building for a three-square-mile town, but equally adorable.
‘And that’s the library. I used to walk here when I was a kid,’ Aaron was saying.
Róisín found it difficult to imagine Aaron as a child. She couldn’t picture him waddling after his mother on the way to the library or playing in a field with other boys. She found it impossible to imagine Aaron any other way than he was right now. Reservedly vulnerable.
This was her first time seeing him drive. His eyes darted from car to car, to the side mirrors and back. His thumbnail was between his teeth. His eyebrows were scrunched together. If she asked him what could go wrong on the road right then, he would probably respond with a list of at least ten things. He was preparing himself for every possible outcome at all times, utterly focused on the task at hand. Róisín couldn’t imagine Aaron before Moe died. Maybe that was it, really. The understanding that things could and would go wrong in an immediate and irreparable way at any moment was core to the Aaron she knew and it was difficult to imagine him with the innocent absence of that particular attribute. The worst part of him exploited this truth as an excuse to flirt with an inevitable oblivion. Now she could clearly see this better version of him who, in light of this knowledge, would fight to protect the things he cared about.
Space grew between the houses and the houses grew to fill the space. There were more trees and fewer shops. The closer they got to their destination, the slower Aaron drove. He stopped responding to her questions.
‘Just down here,’ he said, rubbing the back of his neck.
He turned right at the top of a hill and coasted down a street lined on either side with so many trees that they formed a canopy of branches above them, blocking out the sky. They arrived at the bottom of the hill. He pointed out a large white house with green shutters on their left.
‘That’s us,’ he said.
‘Fuck off,’ Róisín said. She leant over Aaron to peer through his window. ‘Fuck off, that is not your house.’
‘It is so my house.’
Aaron stopped the car out front and cleared his throat. There was a pathway of brick and moss lazing up to the green front door.
‘You are officially never allowed to see my family home. Like, ever,’ she said. ‘This looks like something out of a movie.’
‘Like Forrest Gump?’
‘I know you’re teasing, but it does, it looks like the house from Forrest Gump, that’s it exactly. Jesus, I can’t believe you ever left.’
The house looked down on them from behind its manicured lawn and prim garden with flowers covered in snow, only blips of their vibrant petals visible, radiant and defiant life. A large bare tree bordered the sidewalk. One of the windows on the ground floor was illuminated. Inside, a silhouette moved from one side of the window frame to the other.
Aaron put his hand on the car key and then paused. ‘Let’s have a look at the beach before we go in,’ he said.
Róisín sits at the kitchen table with a cup of microwaved Lipton tea, dry and watery and mildly irradiated. Aaron’s family doesn’t seem to see the purpose of milk or sugar or even a kettle. She’s scrolling through social media on her phone, letting each square of content occupy the screen for a maximum of two seconds before jettisoning it away with her thumb to whatever intestinal destination digital content goes to once it’s been consumed. Someone she knew in primary school got married this past weekend at an estate in County Mayo. Róisín had forgotten the girl existed. With a flick of her thumb, the former friend is returned to that same abyss.
She hears the back door unlock and then the volley of voices a moment before the door opens. Róisín feels panic rise and considers scurrying upstairs with her mug of tea. Worse than being caught sitting here is being caught fleeing, so she stays and watches them come in, first Aaron’s mother, then his father and finally him, plastic shopping bags in each hand, a look of total exhaustion on his face.
Aaron’s mother stops and puts a hand to her heart when she sees Róisín, shaking away the startle and giving a tight-lipped smile.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to frighten you,’ Róisín says. It seems a diplomatic enough thing to say, even though she was just sitting there, existing, which to her seems a perfectly reasonable thing to have been doing.
Aaron’s father walks through the kitchen to the sitting room without saying anything to anyone. Aaron sets the plastic bags down on the floor and returns outside to get more. Aaron’s mother puts her hands on either side of the sink and lets out a deep sigh.
‘Was it a good trip?’ Róisín asks.
His mother purses her lips and swallows before speaking, looking through the kitchen window at the front garden. ‘I wouldn’t say good. Productive, yes, definitely productive.’
‘That’s good, then,’ Róisín says. ‘Or, good that it was productive.’ She is excruciatingly aware of her hands. For lack of anything else to do with them, she points out the O’Connell’s Tree Service card on the kitchen counter. ‘Someone’s left that for you,’ she says.
His mother’s face scrunches up. She takes the card and reads it, then tuts her tongue and shakes her head. ‘These people,’ she mutters. She tears the card into unnecessarily small pieces and throws them into the bin with force. ‘Did he leave it through the letterbox?’ she asks.
‘No, he rang the bell and I answered the door,’ Róisín says.
Aaron’s mother gives another tight-lipped nod and then shakes her head. This was obviously the wrong thing to do. Róisín has learned in the past few days that there are so many things she does instinctively which are, in fact, the wrong thing to do. When she cleans a plate, Aaron’s mother takes it from her and cleans it again, things like that. His mother is relentlessly unyielding in what she must believe are the right ways to do things but, in reality, are just her preferences for how they are to be done. Not that Róisín would ever make that distinction clear to her.
Aaron comes back in with another few bags and sets them down. He looks from his mother to Róisín. ‘All good?’ he asks.
‘Yes,’ Róisín says and affects a smile. ‘All good.’
17
Aaron grunts as he lifts another cardboard box from the asphalt and heaves it into the open trunk of his father’s sedan.
‘How many more?’ he asks.
‘Oh, a few,’ his father says.
Aaron wipes his forehead with the sleeve of his jacket, leaving a swab of dark brown across the canvas fabric. ‘How many is a few?’
‘A few is a few,’ his father says. He leans on the frame of the back door, breathing heavily and staring. ‘Why don’t you count them when they’re loaded up? That’s the only way to know for sure.’
Aaron’s father doesn’t cover his face anymore. He hasn’t much since Róisín moved in. The half of his face which is paralysed hangs slack but, because his father is not an emotive man, it is only noticeable when he’s scowling, giving his otherwise severe look a light-hearted quality of sarcastic reproach. They eat dinner with the lights on now. He’s stopped wearing sunglasses indoors. It is unclear to Aaron whether this change in behaviour is a positive thing, a sign of acceptance that his life has changed, or else a very bad thing, an acquiescence that his life, no matter its form, will be over soon regardless.
