Foster

She leads me into the house. There’s a moment of darkness in the hallway; when I hesitate, she hesitates with me.

‘What’s ailing you, child?’ the woman asks.

I look down at my feet, dirty in my sandals.

Kinsella stands in close. ‘Whatever it is, tell us. We won’t mind.’

‘Lord God Almighty, didn’t he go off and forget all about your bits and bobs!’ the woman says. ‘No wonder you’re in a state. Well, hasn’t he a head like a sieve, the same man.’

‘Not a word about it,’ Kinsella says. ‘We’ll have you togged out in no time.’

Her hands are like my mother’s hands but there is something else in them too, something I have never felt before and have no name for. I feel at such a loss for words but this is a new place, and new words are needed.

‘There are no secrets in this house, do you hear? […] Where there’s a secret,’ she says, ‘there’s shame – and shame is something we can do without.’

Neither one of us talks, the way people sometimes don’t when they are happy – but as soon as I have this thought, I realise its opposite is also true.

This water is cool and clean as anything I have ever tasted: it tastes of my father leaving, of him never having been there, of having nothing after he was gone. I dip it again and lift it level with the sunlight. I drink six measures of water and wish, for now, that this place without shame or secrets could be my home.

[Edna] leans over me then and kisses me, a plain kiss, and says good-night. I sit up when she is gone and look around the room. Trains of every colour race across the wallpaper. There are no tracks for these trains but here and there a small boy stands off in the distance, waving. He looks happy but some part of me feels sorry for every version of him. I roll onto my side and, though I know she wants neither, wonder if my mother will have a girl or a boy this time.

Everything changes into something else, turns into some version of what it was before.

‘They said on the early news that another striker is dead.’

‘Not another?’

‘Aye. He passed during the night, poor man. Isn’t it a terrible state of affairs?’

‘God rest him,’ Mrs Kinsella says. ‘It’s no way to die.’

‘Wouldn’t it make you grateful, though?’ he says. ‘A man starved himself to death but here I am on a fine day with two women feeding me.’

‘Haven’t you earned it?’

‘I don’t know have I,’ he says. ‘But isn’t it happening anyhow.’

And so the days pass. I keep waiting for something to happen, for the ease I feel to end: to wake in a wet bed, to make some blunder, some big gaffe, to break something, but each day follows on much like the one before. We wake early with the sun coming in and have eggs of one kind or another with toast and marmalade for breakfast. Then Kinsella puts on his cap and goes out to the yard. Myself and Mrs Kinsella make a list out loud of jobs that need to be done, and just do them.

I went down and ate a dozen macaroons and then two men came to the door selling lines for a raffle whose proceeds, they said, would go towards putting a new roof on the school.

‘Of course,’ Kinsella said.

‘We didn’t really think—’

‘Come on in,’ Kinsella said. ‘Just cos I’ve none of my own doesn’t mean I’d see the rain falling in on anyone else’s.’

Kinsella takes my hand in his. As soon as he takes it, I realise my father has never once held my hand, and some part of me wants Kinsella to let me go so I won’t have to feel this. It’s a hard feeling but as we walk along I begin to settle and let the difference between my life at home and the one I have here be. He takes shorter steps so we can walk in time. I think about the woman in the cottage, of how she walked and spoke, and conclude that there are huge differences between people.

‘Strange things happen,’ he says. ‘A strange thing happened to you tonight, but Edna meant no harm. It’s too good, she is. She wants to find the good in others, and sometimes her way of finding that is to trust them, hoping she’ll not be disappointed, but she sometimes is.’

‘You don’t ever have to say anything,’ he says. ‘Always remember that as a thing you need never do. Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.’

Now that we can go no farther, we must turn back. Maybe the way back will somehow make sense of the coming.

We stand then, to pause and look back out at the water.

‘See, there’s three lights now where there was only two before.’

I look out across the sea. There, the two lights are blinking as before, but with another, steady light, shining in between.

‘Can you see it?’ he says.

‘I can,’ I say. ‘It’s there.’

And that is when he puts his arms around me and gathers me into them as though I were his own.

Then I bend down with the bucket, letting it float then swallow and sink as the woman does – but when I reach out with my other hand, to lift it, another hand just like mine seems to come out of the water and pulls me in.

‘That’s where Da lost the red heifer playing cards,’ I say.

‘Is that a fact?’ Kinsella says.

‘Wasn’t that some wager?’ says the woman.

‘It was some loss for him,’ says Kinsella.

‘Nothing happened.’ This is my mother I am speaking to but I have learned enough, grown enough, to know that what happened is not something I need ever mention. It is my perfect opportunity to say nothing.

I hold on as though I’ll drown if I let go, and listen to the woman who seems, in her throat, to be taking it in turns, sobbing and crying, as though she is crying not for one now, but for two. I daren’t keep my eyes open and yet I do, staring up the lane, past Kinsella’s shoulder, seeing what he can’t. If some part of me wants with all my heart to get down and tell the woman who has minded me so well that I will never, ever tell, something deeper keeps me there in Kinsella’s arms, holding on.

‘Daddy,’ I warn him, I call him. ‘Daddy.’