The Stranger in the Lifeboat(24)

Here, then, is my life summation: I am an only child, born in Donegal, Ireland, in the small northern town of Carndonagh, hard by the waters where the Atlantic Ocean and the Sea of the Hebrides converge. My mother, like many Irish kids, used to play golf on a nearby course. She became so good that at age eighteen, for winning a local tournament, she was given a ticket and a bus trip to watch the Open Championship in Scotland. There, I later learned, she met my father, or rather encountered him, because that was also the last she saw of him for years. I was born nine months later. My mother never spoke his name, no matter how often I asked. She also never played golf again. Sometimes, as a child, I heard her arguing late at night with a deep-voiced fellow out in the kitchen, and I thought this might be the man I should call Dad. But he was merely an old flame who might have married my mother had she not gone off that week to Scotland and “ruined yourself.” He yelled those words over and over, enough for me, with my head in a pillow, to become permanently ashamed of my existence.

I had an aunt, Emilia, Dobby’s mother, and an uncle, Cathal, her husband. One morning, when I was seven years old, they drove my mother and me to the county airport, which had just replaced its grass landing strip with a paved runway. We gave our suitcase to a porter. We flew away.

We arrived in Boston in the middle of a snowstorm. I did not understand the accents and was overwhelmed by the cars and the multitude of billboards that hung everywhere, for Dunkin’ Donuts, for McDonald’s hamburgers, for various types of beer. We lived in a flat next door to an Italian bakery, and when my mother found a job in a tire plant, I was sent to school. A city school. I did poorly. The teachers were old and distant. They seemed as relieved as I was when the bell rang to end the day.

I never understood why my mother chose that city, or America, until one afternoon when I came home from school and found her standing before a mirror in a tight silver dress that I had never seen before. She had done up her hair and applied her makeup, and it was almost like looking at another woman, that’s how startling her sudden beauty was. I asked where she was going, and she just said, “It’s time, Benjamin,” and I said, “Time for what?” and she said, “Time for me to see your father.”

I didn’t understand what she meant. America was still a mysterious country to me, and in my childish imagination, I pictured her going someplace outside the city, high on a hill, where fathers waited in lonely rooms for their long-lost brides to return. She would report to a person at the front desk who would yell out her name to a crowd of anxious men. One of them—handsome, strong, with dark stubble of a beard—would rise and yell “Yes, that’s me!” and run to embrace my mother for the answered prayer of her arrival.

It did not go that way.

Whoever the man was, he did not receive my mother well. I was awakened that evening by her smashing things in her room, and I ran in to see her running scissors through the dress she had worn. Her makeup was tearstained, her lipstick smeared, and when she saw me she screamed, “Go away! Go away!” But even then I could tell she was only echoing my father’s reaction to her.

She offered few details about him. I learned that he was rich and that he lived in a house in Beacon Hill. My mother tried to insist that he cared about me, but I knew it was a lie. I saw the heartbreak in her eyes as she told it. I understood, at that moment, that she had been planning all my life for that night, to try and make us whole, to try and make us a family, to unruin herself, and that she had been rebuked, an act that, in my mind, cemented my father as forever a bastard, and me, by definition, a bastard as well.

My mother was a contradiction in many ways. Skinny and frail, she had nonetheless uprooted us, by herself, to a strange new country. When her hoped-for rendezvous collapsed, she did what she had to do. She worked tirelessly at that plant, taking overtime, going in on weekends. She had the endurance of five men, I swear. But one day she fell from a scaffold and damaged her spine so badly that she couldn’t walk. The plant, trying to avoid a large payment, said in court that she was negligent. My mother had never been negligent in her life.

After that, her spirit waned. She would watch television with the sound off. Sometimes she went days without eating. She never spoke of the plant accident, or what happened with my father, but it was understood that her grand plan for a better life had tried and failed, and that failure hung in the air of the tiny kitchen where we ate our meals, and in our dull-green bathroom, and in the peeling paint and faded carpet of our bedrooms. Sometimes, when we went for walks, with me pushing her in a wheelchair, my mother would cry for no reason; when someone passed with a dog, or when kids were playing baseball. I often felt she stared at things but saw something else. Broken people do that.

My mother’s most repeated advice to me was this: “Find one person you can trust in your life.” She had been mine for my turbulent childhood, and I tried to be hers in the years she had left. After she died, I felt heavy all the time. My breathing was labored, my posture stooped. I worried that I was ill. I realize now this was merely the weight of love that had nowhere to go.

So I carried that love, searching the world for a place to lay it down, but never found anywhere or anyone until I found you. I have been a poor man in many ways, Annabelle. Perhaps, upon reflection, even an unlucky one. But I was lucky in the most important way. That night after the fireworks, you told me your name and I told you mine. And you looked at me with your eyes wide open and you said, “Benjamin Kierney, would you like to take me out one day?” I was so overwhelmed, I couldn’t answer. I think that amused you. You got up, smiling, and said, “Well, maybe one day you will.”