THERAPY

A car coughed to a stop outside. It was Cherry, not the gran, who brought the boy. Through the window, Mary saw the two of them fumble from the car, then drift toward the door like two magpie feathers caught in an updraft. The boy did not resemble his mother in any other way, but their being in the world was of the same density and flow and rhythm.

“There is nothing wrong with Finn, you know,” Cherry barked before they’d crossed the threshold. Finnbarr ducked under Mary’s arm and headed straight for the room from which he already heard the crooning humpbacks. Cherry pushed a paperback book against Mary’s palm until Mary took hold of it. “An American gave it me. She saw Finn and me at the Statoil.”

Mary hadn’t noticed it before, but Cherry’s pale blue eyes were shot through with blood-black specks as if the irises had been rapped with a tiny carding comb and then healed over. She tried to recall if the gran or the boy had the same look and if it was a marker for a syndrome or sequence that could explain the child’s behavior. Like the keyhole-shaped pupil that flagged heart anomalies, or the chimeric manifestation of different colored eyes.

Cherry continued on at Mary about the petrol station encounter and the book, but Mary, mind sorting through lists of syndromes and symptoms stored in dusty corners of her brain, missed all but a word or two: changeling, shape-shift, fairies.

The combined odors of peat, tobacco and petrol haloing around the boy’s mum crept into Mary’s consciousness raising her stomach up into her throat. She pushed it down with a hard swallow, and began to breathe through her mouth to block the smell.

“Have a look,” Cherry concluded, “but I’ll have it back.”

From the conservatory, they heard Finnbarr “hoooo-ing” with the whales and Cherry followed Mary toward the sound.

Seated at her controls, and feeling sour, Mary continued to breathe carefully through her mouth. She hadn’t eaten because of the cramps and was now regretting it.

Though she couldn’t abide an audience, she did not ask the mother to leave. Cherry sat on the floor with her back against the wall, but as time passed, she slid down until her cheek rested on the worn slate floor and she hummed along with her son and the whales. The session went long because Mary could not find a spot to pull it back to silence without agitating the boy.

When the cd ended abruptly Mary held her breath, expecting a shriek from Finn, but there was silence. It took a moment before Cherry stirred, and then Finnbarr slid out of his protection and drifted toward the door without a glance at either woman. Cherry flicked her chin Maryward and pointed at the book perched at the edge of Mary’s table, then, with her gap-toothed smile, she followed her son to the car.

It was already five when Mary locked her kit in the trunk and turned on her mobile. It cackled to life with three more texts, all from himself.

We're here. There will be four of us. Where are you? ? ?

Mary hit connect. He picked up on the first ring. She heard laughing in the background as he raised the phone to his ear.

“It’s me. I went long, sorry,” was out before he could greet her. There was a pause at the other end. Sounds in the background.

“Fine, ok. I was thinking,” he seemed distracted. Mary wondered did the sister drag along an English git unannounced. It would explain the awkward pause. “Is it Chinese or Indian?” she asked.

“Tell you what, it’s a drive from there and by the time you stop for take out…. Killiney’s halfway. We’ll meet you at Maguires at six thirty. The grub’s ok there.” “Grub”

Signing off, instead of relief, Mary felt exhaustion. She wished herself back inside Begnachgar, chin deep in the hydrotherapy tub and cocooning in warm pummeling water, but the thought of the effort required to reopen the listing wooden door alone was enough for her to abandon the idea. She tossed her folders into the back seat, but the book Cherry had given her slipped off and wedged between the gearshift and the handbrake. “Fire In The Head” it was called. About Shamans. (Should that not be ShamEn?). Mary wondered, had Cherry read a word of the likes of this? Some mad American woman sees Cherry with her ferile child at a petrol station and gives her this book?

Mary fanned the pages to see where they’d open on their own, then, thinking better of it, tossed it in the back with the files. She pulled her car roof to and headed out.

At exactly half six, entering Maguires, Mary was greeted with a shout from himself over in a snug. There she saw three Cheshire Cat smiles glowing one brighter than the next. Ted’s sister was the spit of him and the other was obviously an American and his arm around her shoulder and her fingers in his hair.

“It was quite a surprise,” he told her, that his sister had brought along her best friend on this trip. He had expected only the one of them. As the night unfolded, it was clear that this friend of the sister had been more than that to him a while back but they had drifted, and she had married, and was now single again. And the teeth were very white and the hair much shinier than Mary’s, and thick, and layered. And this one laughed at his jokes without requiring annotations. She called him Bear and ‘Teddy Bear.’

This is what they said:

“Jiff “

“Skippy”

“Peter Pan. . . with Concord grape jelly, Welch’s.”

“Laura Scudder” (the sister)

“With Pepperidge Farm instead of Wonderbread, I suppose, you elitist.”

“ha ha ha aha aha ahhhaaa.”

“They call jello “jelly” here and there is no grape anything, jelly, jam, juice.”

“NO!” the both of the visitors, not mock horror. Not at all.

“Serious…deadly. No graham crackers, no saltines. The Ritz are shitz. Crappy hotdogs that come in cans. Or BOTTLES. NO relish. DO. NOT. ASK. ABOUT. BAKED. BEANS.”

There were tears in their eyes and he continued his litany of American products and he bemoaned the lack thereof on this sorry, soggy isle. Oh the commisery of it all.

Ted would infrequently, “Don’t get me wrong,” glancing toward Mary with such concern. “They’ll be tons I’ll be missing from here when I go.”

“be missing” (Very Irish of him) “when” he goes.

And they’d be back to….

Kielbasa …Essem, NOT Hillshire Farms with real Polish rye that you chew.

And the mention of chewing lead to teeth. How they weren’t quite as bad here as in England, but close. (And how would they know?)

Which lead to Mary’s profession: working with defectives. And doesn’t it seem there are, well, more of them here than you’d ever seen before? Like Appalachia but with dwarves as well and hydrocephalics at every turn. Oh, sorry, Mary, ‘Kephalics,’ they say it with a ‘Kay’ here. (Of course Americans say it the right way.) And wasn’t that movie, that Daniel Day Lewis one, that ‘My Left Foot,’ set right here and you wouldn’t be surprised that he was treated like he was just about regular because if you just look around a minute you realize that here he probably seemed, well….less abnormal anyway than he would, say in Mattapan or Arlington (Ahlingt’n) ferchrissake. But it’s a swell place, really. Unbelievable views…..great craic, right Maer?

The smoke in the pub did nothing for Mary’s eyes and the day had been a long one, so she begged off Ted’s brilliant plan for her to wind them through Kilternan and Glencormac to Johnnie-Fox’s-the-highest-pub-in-Ireland. She was in no mood to drag up the mountain to be jostled by loutish tourists and sniggering culchies and listen to grocery lists of here and there. Mary hadn’t the next day off, though Ted planned to call in sick. He didn’t suggest she do the same, which was just as well. She assured him he’d find his way this time, knowing he wouldn’t. Smartly shaking the hands of both of the women just like an American, she spun on her heel and out the door.

The fog was soggy cotton wool unfurled onto the slick skin of the street. The air was a cool hand on her scrunched brow and the hot wetness that leaked from her eyes. She could just smell and hear the kelp-laden tide retreating. She’d stood, trying to breathe for a good while before she realized she was also straining her ears in the hopes of hearing one of those ethereal whale sounds Finn and his mam and herself had bathed in a pocketful of hours ago. And in the shadows and sounds of the summer evening she turned her attention inward to the heart thrumming in her chest and the hollowness of it for quite some time before she turned toward her car and home.