By Adrienne Brock

Featured Art: “Autumn Window” by Scott Brooks (Passion Works Studio)

Before her father died, Amanda’s daughter used to crawl up onto the big bed and draw dramatic imaginative landscapes with her mother: tiny-shaped figures escaping from aliens using elaborately constructed slides or hot-air balloons. Immediately after the day of his funeral, they had tried to continue the tradition, but rather than adding onto each other’s fantastical scenarios, these two could only manage coloring bland shapes, inert and unanimated. Síomha had never been cuddly, not even as a baby, but in the middle of filling in a green rectangle with bright purple marker, the seven-year-old had pulled her mother’s arm around her and clung to it until her breathing slowed in sleep. Puffed breaths passed through the girl’s lips as if the child had summoned her father’s spirit to hold him in place on the Earth.

Before, Amanda had noted, warmly if resentfully, the uncanniness of her daughter’s unconscious impressions of her husband. She was ambivalent, taking a kind of painful joy in all of the ways in which Síomha literally embodied her father. But when they were out together, she felt the urge to scream to passersby, “I swear she’s my kid!” Or watching father and daughter play effortlessly, their humors and interests almost identical, Amanda felt as if she were watching her friend win a promotion for a job she’d wanted herself. On bad days, there had been a feeling that father and daughter were aligned against her. Now, it was immediately apparent that this feeling had been not only a result of her own stupid, stubborn inability to feel really at home, but it had also been a waste of time. A missed opportunity. Instead of vaguely threatening, these little ways in which Síomha resembled her father transmuted for a while into the only animate containers of his presence. His things remained in the house but were inert. His coffeemaker never needed to be cleaned anymore. A book was left on the bedside table, but the bookmark didn’t move, nor did the book travel around the house as it would have before, finding itself deposited in random locations on a sightseeing tour of their rooms, its owner calling out for the location of the lost tourist. At the side of their bed, her husband’s clothes hung suspended from wire hangers in the wardrobe. When someone walked quickly from room to room, the clothes would move slightly, and glancing in from the corridor, Amanda would have an illogical glimpse into what might have been: her husband had just taken something out of the wardrobe. He must be getting dressed. They were on their way somewhere together, and she would go so far as to open her mouth to speak, to ask what time it was, if he had rung the sitter. For weeks following the funeral, Tom’s phone would buzz with reminders about upcoming bills, and Amanda would feel the absence of a hand that might have reached for it, the absence of the sound of him upstairs, the absence when she returned home after work of smells from the kitchen from some experiment that would have become dinner.

The lack of her husband’s presence was so acute, it seemed as if he, and their life together, had never existed. She had to tell herself that there had been a time when this was a family of three, when they had checked the newborn Síomha’s breathing at night, had worried over her together. So she found the slow exhales of her child when asleep became less about her own insecurity and jealousy of her husband and almost instantly about the certainty that there had been an- other life previous to this one. About her desperate need to hang onto that as a tangible fact.

In an uncomfortable black dress borrowed from her sister-in-law the morning of the removal and worn for two days in a row, Amanda fell asleep shortly after her daughter in the same bed. Almost every night for the next year and a half, mother and daughter fell asleep together, fully clothed in whatever they had worn that day. So the family that was left behind began the first new habit of their life—a life that, at first, felt meaningless and temporary, but soon became a continuous after. Not real life, per se, but a collection of odd, disconnected habits stringing themselves together for the time being until the new story of their life emerged and calcified on the body.

At work, most of Amanda’s co-workers waited an acceptable amount of time before asking whether or not she had any thought of moving back home. Amanda responded with a polite no, resentful that she had lived in Ireland for ten years, had worked in the same job, had been in the same house, where Síomha had been born in the hospital just down the street, but still, these people thought, with her husband gone, her connection to the place must be severed. She knew her reaction was about her and not them and tried to keep her rage to herself.

It leaked elsewhere: she raged about bad drivers, minor inconveniences at work, bureaucratic hassles, which, in the wake of death, were legion. But what Amanda really hated about life in those days was taking a shower. There were two in their house, and neither of them worked properly. One needed the heat to be switched on for a full ten minutes before use to give half that time’s worth of lukewarm water. It increased the heating bill by a full twenty euros a month and consequently was never used. The other was some sort of electric contraption that at first seemed novel before settling in as a nemesis of a household item. Its dial advertised a range of varied temperatures, but in fact, there were only two: ice cold or scalding. While seeming unbothered by either option himself, at the time of his passing, her husband had been confidently taking on this challenge for the sake of the woman he loved, calling serviceman after serviceman, talking to anyone he could in the hardware shop, consulting people at parties with vast DIY experience. The assembled data showed only that no one knew any possible causes or solutions other than just to live with it and be grateful that they owned their own house, what with the housing crisis and hardly anyone being able to get in anywhere unless they were extremely lucky or rich or both.

This had not been good enough for Amanda. She knew she was being ungrateful, but she just wanted a shower that was fucking hot right away and stayed hot for the duration of the time it took to wash her hair. She would be fuming, storming out of the house, already late to pick up Síomha and needing to buy groceries because there was nothing for her husband to cook, and then, she would run into her neighbor, Branka, whose heavily accented English just flowed over and over her. Her husband must have shared something about the shower quest, because Branka began asking, in every conversation, if Amanda had solved the issue with the shower yet before telling her for the millionth time about how amazing the modern conveniences were in Ireland and how different it had been in her home country, even before the war, and weren’t they just so lucky that these were the problems they had now? Amanda would tote her guilt along with her on the errands and the school run and tell herself to just fucking shut up and appreciate what she had. She knew her pains were not new or deep in the scheme of things.

At least Branka never asked for home repair updates after the funeral. Instead, she told stories about her murdered relatives. “I like to remember good times,” she said. Like when she and her brothers had gone to the lake and jumped off the cliff in the sun before the borders were redrawn and the checkpoints made it impossible for anyone but soldiers to travel in the area. “Some people tell me that it’s completely polluted now, others that the army drained it, but nobody knows. We’ll never see it again.”

Six months after her husband died, the electric shower also gave up living. It was summer, and for once it actually felt hot. Amanda got angry, threw things, but found herself, through her rage, realizing that this great culmination of her ancient grudge did not feel as climactic as it should have. She wondered if that was just because this—throwing things and chipping the plaster of the walls, screaming curse words near an open window—had become her reaction to everything. She was now an angry, short-fused person who didn’t enjoy anything. She hoped she was hiding this from Síomha and thought maybe, but in fact, her daughter had not only noticed the change but forgotten that it was relatively new. If she had been asked, she would have described her mother as short-tempered, forgetting the woman who used to play games with her to help her to pass time in a line or how her mother used to remind her father to “just enjoy the extra time where we don’t have to do anything” as the family waited for a server in a restaurant to finally bring their drinks.

Her husband kept a bunch of papers in one of the drawers in the kitchen. In perfect penmanship in black ink or purple marker, often in all capital letters next to phone numbers jumbled together were messages like, This is the place with the good takeaway we had that night a week after Síomha was born. You like the Special #3, or THE GUY WHO DOES THE AMAZING SLATE ROOFING WHEN  WE  HAVE  MORE  MONEY  SAVED, or CLASS  plumber!!!  When Amanda called Class Plumber, she was told that he was far, far too backed up with work, and it would be an absolute age before he’d get out to her. Amanda was ready to hang up at this point, but the man, who sounded like he must be in his eighties, first wanted to ask her all about her accent and was she American and where in America was she from and oh she was the one who was married to Tom O’Donovan and he knew the O’Donovans and sure didn’t he play in the club when the boys were very good was it 1995 or 1996 and wasn’t it a shame about him and they were all so sorry to hear about her troubles and he himself had a brother who died only last year and his brother had moved off to Philadelphia way back in the Seventies just like the boy in that play that his grandson was having to study for his Leaving Cert, now, but would his grandson ever get over the line, or would he fall down before the last hurdle as seemed to be his way, and anyway, when he got more business than he could handle, and to be honest, now, he knew he was blessed that this was the case, he sent people along to Niall, and here was his number, and he should sort her out, and again he was sorry but it just would be impossible for him to do it himself, you see, since he was just so backed up as it was with jobs. “But Niall is a great man,” he says. “He’ll be sure to sort you right out.” Class Plumber later called again and left a voicemail telling her, again, that he really couldn’t do it, and he was sorry, but would she please call Niall. Niall would sort her out.

Amanda would shudder afterward remembering how rude she was to Niall on the phone. She hadn’t responded to his attempts to make small talk. She had threatened to go elsewhere when he couldn’t accommodate her on the day she’d requested. She did not feel guilty when he said he would have to move things around, hinting that she might relent, find some way to negotiate a bit. She let his questions that weren’t really questions hang on the line while she said nothing. Fuck him. If he wanted something from her, he would have to ask her straight out or say no or generally have some sort of balls. She was sick of this indirect, read-my-mind, take-responsibility-for-my-emotions bullshit. But her anger melted when she answered the door for an unexpected yet simple reason: Niall was absolutely gorgeous.

He should have been selling calendars of himself instead of doing manual labor. He was irrefutably and intensely hot, and Amanda worried that everything passing through her mind was scripted legibly across her face in the first moments after she opened the door. If it was, it would explain how Niall, though about her age, if not slightly older, smiled in a way that illuminated his child-like face. It was as if he had been set ablaze, the radiating smile of a boy who had been orbited about by older women, friends of his mother giving him sweets, throwing him into the air. He was surely the baby who was allowed to have a pacifier for longer than his siblings. He was the one everyone wanted to hold. He walked through the door with an easy gait but one slightly dragging heel, the only invitation having been that Amanda stepped to the side slightly. If Niall was challenged or worried in his life elsewhere, he spared himself from that now, stepping into an unfamiliar house and collecting an unburdened version of himself. In this new life, he was also spared the details of his or others’ challenges or worries. He was present only to do magic and receive praise and money, some of which would buy rounds for his friends later when they watched the match. The house brightened.

Amanda offered him tea because she was worried if she didn’t, she would say something inappropriate. Her plumber accepted. Niall left the tea bag in, drowned it in sugar and milk, and took the cup up the stairs to the bathroom with him, a soft-cased container of tools in his other hand. Amanda admired how dexterous his fingers seemed, lightly hanging onto everything. She followed him as he headed toward the stairs, as if she were on a leash, watched as his slender legs took the steps two at a time.

In the bathroom at the top of the stairs, Niall set down his tools, took out glasses from some hidden pocket, and put them on. Instantly, her plumber was absorbed, surveying the intellectual puzzle of the shower in front of him with his full attention, caressing the torso of the deceased unit with his free hand and knowingly murmuring. He detached the hoses, popped the cover off the trimplate, all with the tea still in his hand. Amanda kept to the doorway, leaned against it and then straightened up, tried to recollect how she usually stood in place. She realized she’d left her own tea in the kitchen but felt unable to figure out a way to collect it. She was about to offer to hold his tea for him just to have something to say when he spoke.

“Now, I could tell you I’ll fix it, but I couldn’t stand over my work. Not really. I’d say she’d break again in another couple of months,” he said, turning to her, pushing his glasses up onto his head and smiling coyly. “Can’t have you telling your friends I don’t know how to do my job.” Amanda was horrified by the sound she made that was supposed to be a chuckle of acknowledgement. She felt herself blushing. Blushing. Like a fucking teenager. Her plumber was all business. “I’d change out the whole thing, if I were you.”

He quoted her a few prices, in sales mode now, but, she thought, he wasn’t being egregiously pushy. He listed off pros and cons of different models, talked about the shape of one, how it was smaller than the one she had now and where it might fit into the space on the wall. He asked if she had any spare tiles she could use to fill in the gaps that would be left, and she nodded, though she wasn’t sure. He asked if she knew how to cut tiles, and she said no. She stood there, watching rather than listening as he explained, in detail, how one would go about cutting a tile. She retained nothing but nodded again. What was wrong with her? Somewhere, there was a slight inclination toward being annoyed with herself for letting him stand there and give her a lesson on home repair unprompted, but another part of her just wanted to ask a question that would extend the lecture and give her a reason to stare into his eyes, to watch him move his free hand in explanation, to see him gently sip his tea, grimacing as he neared the bitter dregs. He smiled at her, and she could feel herself blushing again. Fuck’s sake. She wondered what it might be like if Niall suddenly stopped talking about tiles and instead, set down his tea, stepped toward her before leaning down to put his mouth to hers, his long hands grasping her shoulders, finding their way down to unbutton her shirt.

The doorbell rang and, startled, she began rambling, speculating about who it could be and why, calling nonsense over her shoulder as she made her way down the stairs. She opened it to find Síomha and her friend Mia from school standing in their uniforms. Before she could ask them what they were doing out of school, her daughter spoke up.

“You forgot me,” she says, “and I forgot my key.”

Mia leaned in front of her friend and waved her hand, excited to explain.

“We were dismissed early today, Mrs. O’Donovan, so my mom said we could take Síomha home and it was no bother, and so we’re here. And it’s no trouble at all. Now, you mind yourselves, and my mom says she’ll see you later.” Mia ended her speech with a broad smile, hugged Síomha with the side of her body, and waved to both mother and daughter as she ran, completely satisfied with herself, and dove, literally dove, headfirst, into the back seat of her mother’s burgundy Mercedes. Amanda realized that the mother, whom she was sure she’d never seen in her life, was frantically waving as the daughter performed some sort of maneuver from The A-Team to get into the back seat and belt herself in. Amanda, still too surprised to take in what was happening, raised an acknowledging hand almost too late as Mia and her mother drove away.

Síomha remained on the doorstep, sullen, and Amanda had the impulse to apologize, but her daughter seemed to have gotten tired of waiting for whatever acknowledgement of the moment she thought was called for just as Amanda had opened her mouth. She walked around her mother and into the house, dropping bookbag, kicking off shoes. Then, she froze, hearing Niall working upstairs.

“There’s someone in the house.” “I’m getting the shower fixed.”

“I thought . . . ” Síómha didn’t finish her sentence, and Amanda wondered what her daughter had the impulse to say: I thought the shower couldn’t be fixed. I thought you would have some better reason for forgetting to collect me. I thought dad was going to do that. “Can I see?”

Amanda didn’t see why not. The two of them stepped as lightly up the stairs as they could before standing and gazing at Niall as he reconstructed the shower unit, “just to keep ye going until I can put a good replacement in here.” He looked up from his work to find mother and daughter each in states of mute wonder. He smiled his boyish smile again. He made a note of the unit Amanda had chosen, set a reminder to call the supplier on Monday. There was a big show of heading to the kitchen, throwing the tea bag out in the correct bin, rinsing his cup and putting it on the drying rack. One last joke was made and he had a wink for the mother. The little girl’s hair was tousled. The two of them were left smiling their shy smiles, which were only little reflections of this light he’d found a way to admit.

Once Niall was gone, all the bright new colors faded quickly, leaving them in a confused state of half-waking. Mother and daughter smiled at each other. They laughed the kind of laugh that was a balloon untied from a party, floating high over the city. And then, it was as if they remembered that they were not supposed to be enjoying anything, that lightheartedness was something from their old life, from a before that was not recoverable. They deflated, the usual weights settling over the truest parts of themselves. They withdrew from each other even as they climbed together onto the big bed, beginning to color together out of habit. Amanda thought, for a moment, should tonight be the night that she suggested they brush their teeth, get into pajamas? But her mind drifted almost immediately away from that thought to another one. Not about Niall, but work. And then, sure, back to Niall, wondering about the sudden, strangling feeling of intense physical longing for someone. Síomha didn’t notice that her mother was mentally absent. They stayed on their own sides of the paper. Tonight, Síomha was unhappy with her drawings. In a burst of anger, she scribbled them out, pushing so hard with the tip of the orange marker that it burst through the paper.

“Hey, hey!” her mother grabbed her hand before the girl began scribbling on the duvet, surprised at how much she recognized herself in her daughter’s outburst. She looked into the girl’s face, really looked at her, and something inside her lifted. “Do you want a hug?”

“No,” said Síomha, looking away, the moment evaporating.

Later, after her daughter was asleep, Amanda threw away the ripped drawings and took a shower. It worked and better than it had, but it was still not as good as she would like. She surprised herself by not having that surging feeling of rage. She didn’t cry either, just sighed deeply and felt an aching kind of disappointment, the kind of feeling that recognized that it belonged to someone who was not the center of a story of any significance. The shower, everything, none of it was personal. For a moment, as she rinsed her hair, she felt she could just let all of it go. Things break in the house, people die, and it didn’t really matter. She turned off the water. It was fine. It worked well enough. It was just that part of her had thought there would be something, just extraordinary, that Niall would have managed to do.

When he returned to install the new unit, she saw it: the old man hiding in Niall’s body, the beginnings of knobbly knuckles, the misplaced hairs, gray and wiry, in spots he couldn’t see. He was all sketched lines that did not know where to end. His cheer at the door seemed more perfunctory, as if he were an actor at the end of a run of a mediocre play, and could not bring himself to put heart into it anymore. He still accepted tea, but chatted very little, his mind seemingly elsewhere, before he checked the time, headed upstairs and became fully absorbed in his work. It was a more difficult project than anticipated for some reason, and he seemed agitated. Amanda wondered why he hadn’t brought someone else to help and thought that, maybe, Niall was still building his business, or that that business was struggling. She thought of the referral she was given, wondered if Niall was really any good or if Class Plumber had been just doing Niall a favor. Maybe he knew that Niall was recently divorced, that he was betting too much, that word of one kind or another had got out and the people who were in the know in the village had stopped calling. Amanda had her doubts and cringed at the thought of an even worse showering experience post-Niall. Still, she and Síomha stepped quietly around the house, talked very little as they set out plates and reheated dinner, listening to the sound of a third person with them. They were careful, respectful, lest he turn out to be a mirage. But during their meal of reheated pasta, Niall called for Amanda, and she knew that was it. He was done. He was going. He was in and out of their lives before they could figure out what was under the dust he was shaking into the air. Síomha looked at her mother, then to the door of the kitchen. Amanda was desolate, for her daughter this time, as well as herself. This wasn’t like the disappointment in the shower. This was something else altogether. But she managed a strained smile at Síomha and headed upstairs with it still tacked to her face to answer Niall’s summons. At least, she thought as Niall smiled, more easily and with a hint of relief now showing her the fully installed shower, demonstrating its efficacy, he was a decent enough plumber. That was what she needed, anyway.

After he left, Síomha grabbed her markers and paper and climbed the stairs to her mother’s room. Amanda took the recycling outside to empty it in the big bin. Out of the corner of her eye something brown and large sprang toward her, and she dropped the emptied bin suddenly, uttering a forceful curse of pure nonsense.

“Sava!” her neighbor cried from behind the wooden fence. “You have Sava over there, Amanda?”

Amanda laughed, embarrassed both that Branka had heard her outburst and that her fear was motivated by nothing more than her neighbor’s ancient pet hare.

“He likes climbing behind your shed,” Branka continued. “Especially when those two cats are wandering around everyone’s gardens.” Branka paused before adding gravely, “Sava does not like the cats.”

Amanda told her neighbor to come around through the house, that the front door was still unlocked. In the gathering dark, she met eyes with the hare, whose nose twitched meditatively, the black tips of his ears blending into the night that flattened its hand on top of them all. There was a knock that startled both woman and animal. Branka’s frazzled bob appeared above her pale face in the sliding glass door before she pushed it open, apologetic.

“He got out of his cage, I guess,” said Amanda, without really thinking about what she was saying. Branka was already hunched over, a treat in her hand, approaching Sava, but she turned and straightened when she heard this, her hands emphatically crossing and uncrossing.

“Oh, no,” she said. “I don’t keep Sava in a cage. He needs to roam, to be free.”

“Oh.”

Amanda aborted the attempt to make small talk. Branka returned to coaxing the animal into her arms with treats. Eventually, Sava allowed himself to be scooped up. Branka cooed, cradling the enormous animal and kissing the top of his head, petting his ears as she stepped into the light. His eye, though. Amanda could see it now, leaking a whitish pus. She tried not to grimace openly.

“Is he sick?” she said, indicating her discovery.

“Yes, the poor baby,” said Branka, jiggling the hare slightly. Sava did not appear to enjoy this and twisted half-heartedly before settling. “His eye is infected, but it will never fully heal. We’ll need to treat it for the rest of his life.” She sighed exaggeratedly, and it would have been comical had it not seemed to come from some deep sense of exhaustion that could not be otherwise expressed. “I had another one, a girl, but she died because she got a hairball. She could not vomit, you see—you know this about rabbits? That they cannot do this?”

Amanda said that she did not.

“It makes it very complicated for them to stay alive. They are so fragile,” said Branka.

Amanda agreed that it probably was complicated. She was losing patience and wanted her neighbor to leave. It was fully dark in the backyard now. She wondered if her daughter had already fallen asleep, if she’d missed it. She felt the sharp edges of her old rage cutting up from her stomach until something occurred to her: a conversation with Branka she’d had ages ago.

“Didn’t you have rabbits at home?” she said. “I mean, in your home, home.”

“My oldest brother did,” she replied, meeting Amanda’s eye and smiling. “My father hunted them. He was too much of a coward for bears. Too much of a coward in general.”

Her neighbor did not explain more, and Amanda did not know what to ask. Instead, Branka nodded and walked back toward the front door. Amanda followed, thinking that it was as though the woman had just wanted some sort of acknowledgement, someone to remember that this strange habit of hers, letting a wild animal roam and shit through her house, made sense in a way, that it was passing as a shrine to an old self, to the people who had held that self and who were gone as well. How often were strange habits and quirks of character and fantasies just that: an almost superstitious ritual, designed to paint or pin the shadow of what was to the insubstantial house of what is, to gain justice for what had stayed for too short a time and been too little acknowledged.

After letting Branka out, Amanda locked the front door, and her feet carried her heavily up the stairs. She was tired. Síomha was still up, but her daughter was tired, too. She was yawning and whined as her mother plopped down next to her, complaining that Amanda had crinkled the paper where she was scribbling. Amanda picked up a blue marker without giving it much thought. But brightly, the name on the side of the marker hit her in the eye, Blue Marble. From out of nowhere, a memory surfaced. Tom’s mother had just died. This was before they’d moved here, and they were cleaning things out of the old house before the siblings could sell it. In a box somewhere, she’d found a bunch of photos and a bag of old marbles on top of them. She’d picked them up, intending to look through the photos when Tom had come in and seen what was in her hands. She’d caught a brief flash of embarrassment before he’d smiled and gently lifted the pouch from her hands and told her to watch as he fished out a small blue one like a tiny ocean planet. He snapped it and managed to get it to land in his shirt pocket.

“I spent way too long practicing that when I was in first year,” he’d said.

On Síomha’s paper, she started sketching a boy playing with marbles. Her daughter looked over, intrigued.

“What’s that?” she said.

“Daddy playing marbles when he was a little boy.”

Síomha looked at her skeptically. “You knew Daddy when he was a little boy?”

“No,” said Amanda, continuing to draw. A second blue figure was juggling marbles now. Another version of Tom had one eye closed, focused on a game. She began a fourth figure skating on the marbles that had dropped to the unsketched floor.

“Can you do that?” Síomha looked at her mother, her hands fiddling with a marker, and Amanda remembered how young her daughter was, younger even than her husband had been when he was practicing his marble trick.

“You can do whatever you want,” Amanda said. “It’s just a drawing.”

Síomha thought for a moment, traded her marker for a new orange one and announced, “I’m going to draw daddy as an old man,” she looked up, “not old like he was. I mean old, old.”

Síomha’s drawing held the hand of one of the little Toms. They occupied themselves like this for a while. This was Tom the teenager. This was Tom with long hair, surfing in Maui, where he’d never been but always wanted to go. This was Tom if he had been a zookeeper. This was Tom the pirate who had an army of dolphins.

“Wait, wait!” shouted Síomha. “This one is real! Do you remember when he took your friends and us to the Cliffs of Moher and he was a tour guide?”

Amanda laughed and threw her head back. She did remember. A couple they were friends with had come over from New York with their boy, who was a few years older than Síomha. It had been raining so hard that the cliffs were invisible. Tom had put on an exaggerated accent, pretending to be a tour guide, and shouted into the wind about the beauty of the landscape as the group was nearly blown over.

“Remember, he was wearing that ridiculous cap?” Amanda said, adding it to the drawing.

“No, it was his ugly raincoat. He wore that cap when we went on the driving tour with Grandma.”

“I loved his raincoat.”

“I hated it. It was too scratchy when he’d hug you, but it smelled really good, like it smelled like him more than his other things.” Her daughter smiled, as if she could feel her father pull her into a hug as they walked from the carpark to the pub. “His suits, too. They really smelled like him.”

“We still have all of that. His raincoat. It’s around here somewhere,” said Amanda. “And his suits are right over there.”

Amanda began digging through the wardrobe, pulling out the suit Tom wore for their wedding that became the regular suit for summer weddings and was now getting threadbare at the edges, the suit for funerals, the one for job interviews. Síomha touched the relics with reverence. Amanda kept pulling things out, and found an old blue jumper crammed back behind some of her own shirts.

“This one is great. This one always smelled just like him.”

She held it up to her nose, and remembered when Tom used to wear it before he gained some weight and it got too snug. It was from the era right before they’d had Síomha. They weren’t having sex much. Things were tense, and Amanda remembered when she’d gone to sleep early after they’d had some fight. Then, he’d sat on the edge of the bed still clothed, and had touched her hair. She wasn’t sure if he thought she was asleep or awake. But she’d sat up, and he’d kissed her and he’d taken off her pajamas first before he’d taken off his own clothes. And he seemed like a stranger to her. They’d been married for at least half a decade by then, but she was more nervous than she’d been with anyone else.

“On that trip with Grandma, he kept wanting her to get soup.” Síomha continued with her own memories, taking a deep breath with her nose in the jumper. “He kept telling Grandma that we should stop and get soup, and he kept asking her and asking her, and then Grandma said, ‘Tom, I don’t want any damn soup!’” Síomha’s impression of Amanda’s mother was spot on, including the nasal twang of the accent. “Do you remember?”

“No, I don’t remember that, but I think we have pictures of that trip.”

In the end, they fell asleep together in the pile of Tom’s old clothes, the printouts of photos that they went through for another hour, the base layer of their drawings crinkling like tiny fires beneath them as they rolled heavily around, arms and legs interlocking then drawing apart. They slept well, even though Amanda hadn’t managed to turn out the light. The branches of the trees at the back of the garden circled together, whispering in a line against each other, stretching down the row of gardens in the estate. Outside the window, the long fingers of the untrimmed hedges waved in the wind.

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Adrienne Brock is an educator and former journalist whose work has appeared in Mid-American Review, West Branch, Poets & Writers Magazine, and elsewhere. She has taught writing and literature in New York, New Jersey, the Federated States of Micronesia, Peru, and Ireland, where she currently lives. She is at work on a novel set in her native Detroit.