Ashes of Fiery Weather (45 page)

Eileen told him to go back and wipe his shoes on the mat. The guys would murder them if they tracked mud all over the place. A call had interrupted breakfast. Plates of congealed eggs sat on the table. Eileen checked the stove. They'd remembered to turn the burner off, which was good. One time they went out and forgot. Luckily, it was a false alarm and they were back in ten minutes, but a pot had been scorched black. They sent the probie to borrow one from Delia. She told them to keep it. And to be more careful.

Sean was calling, “Burney! Hey, Burney!”

The dog came trotting into the room, wagging his tail. Sean knelt to pet him. Burney was a brown mutt sprinkled randomly with white, as though he'd walked beneath dripping paint. Fur was beginning to grow over the spot on his back where he'd been burned. He and his owner had been rescued from an apartment fire. Unable to care for the injured dog, the owner abandoned him at the vet's. One of the guys called to check on him and was told that since there was no one to pay the bills, he'd probably have to be put down. The Glory Devlins took up a collection, and when the vet released the dog, they brought him back to the firehouse.

Sean gave Burney a pat and opened the backdoor and let him out. A minute or two later, he came back in wagging his tail, and Eileen gave him a treat. She also filled his water and food dishes. Sean left the kitchen, and when Eileen was done, she found him on the apparatus floor. The dog trotted beside her. The apparatus floor always looked huge without the rigs. He was up front near the housewatch, reading the riding list written on the blackboard to see who was on today.

On the far wall were the hooks for the turnout coats. When the guys were in and the coats were hung up and the boots placed neatly beneath them, it reminded Eileen of the coatroom at school. Sean ran up the spiral staircase and in a moment appeared in the pole hole. “Hey!”

Eileen and Burney looked up.

“I'm Joe Walsh!”

He slid down, landed on his feet and dropped to the ground. “Splat!”

“It's James, dummy,” Eileen said as he got to his feet, laughing.

“Whatever. Come on.”

Sean ran for the stairs, and she and Burney followed. On the second floor, they went down the uncarpeted hallway, bypassing the office, which was in the tower, and the bunkroom with its rows of neatly made beds, to the narrow set of stairs that led to the third floor. The four rooms there were used for storage. There'd been some talk of turning them into a rec room, but nothing had been done about it.

The heavy air smelled of dust. Sean started poking in some of the boxes. They mostly held old logbooks, which were kept by the housewatch and listed every alarm, every firehouse visitor. Sean liked to read them.

Eileen went to the front window to gaze out over the gray rooftops of the neighborhood.

“I wonder if the guys would mind if I moved up here.”

Eileen stared at him. “Now?”

“Not now, stupid. When I can live wherever I want. If I'm a fireman here, then I can just walk downstairs to work.”

He tugged a cardboard box from against the wall into the middle of the room and pulled out one of the old logbooks. He knelt and began to leaf through it, reading a line out loud here and there.

The handwriting was faded and spidery. He liked the boring entries even more than the entries about the runs the company went on, which detailed the kind of fire, the address and how long it took to put out.

“‘Firefighter Carroll returned from breakfast,'” he read aloud. “‘Visitor for Firefighter McDonnell.' It's dumb that it doesn't say who the visitor was.”

Eileen envied how he would someday have two places to live, his house and the firehouse. They heard a sound on the stairs. She turned quickly and so did Sean.

“Who—”

He put a finger to his lips and, as quietly as he could, went to the door and peered down the stairs.

“There's nobody there,” he said. “We'd have heard the guys come in.”

“It must have been Burney,” she said.

“That dog can't move that fast,” Sean said.

They stared at each other for a moment. James Walsh was said to haunt the firehouse.

“Boo!” Eileen whispered, and Sean laughed.

April 1967

Eileen focused on getting up the stoop. She put one foot carefully in front of the other. The peppermint was losing its freshness. Halfway up the steps, it began to burn. She imagined a little smoking hole in the center of her tongue and spit the candy out. It landed in the neighbors' front yard. The Smyths didn't live there anymore. They'd left Brooklyn for Long Island.

The house was being rented now. There were three apartments, one for each floor.

One of the new people would find the half-sucked peppermint tomorrow. That made her laugh as she stumbled up the next step, cracking her knee. She hissed through the pain. They'd sat on Jackie's stoop, opening beer after beer. Jackie's mother had a couple with them and then went up to bed. She always said it was better than them drinking in Prospect Park. Now, with less than a month to go before high school graduation, most of the girls were already eighteen anyway. Only Eileen and Terry Lynch were still seventeen, because of their October birthdays.

Eileen reached the top step, turned and stared down. It had to be after midnight, but the neighborhood was never really quiet. Music was playing from somewhere. From another house she could hear shouting.

The hall light had been left on for her. Eileen kicked off her shoes and went into the living room. She knocked the lamp over. Pulling it by the cord like she was reeling in a fishing line, she set it right and turned it on.

Then her mother appeared in the doorway.

Eileen smoothed her hair. “Hey. Were you waiting up for me?”

“Yes,” Delia said, but the slight hesitation before she answered told Eileen she was lying.

It was Sean she was waiting for.

“Right.” Eileen turned her back, but she stumbled and pitched against the couch. She sat down, hoping it looked like that's what she'd been aiming to do.

“Why do you do this to yourself?” Delia said. “It's Thursday night and you can barely walk.”

“Thursday night!” Eileen said. “Okay, I'll only get smashed on the weekends from now on. And I'm fine.” Her stomach started to quiver.

“You're about to pass out.”

“I'm
about
to go to sleep,” Eileen said. “If you'd let me.”

“Fine. Go to bed. We can talk about it tomorrow.”

“I'm graduating high school in two weeks. You can't tell me what to do. Anyway, you never could.”

Delia, who'd been about to leave the room, turned back, her face stony. “I absolutely can tell you to stop making a fool of yourself. You're smarter than this.”

“Nope! I'm not.” Eileen stretched out on the couch. The room began to tip.

If he were here, Sean would have jumped in, pointing out that he was usually around anyway. Nothing would happen to her.

“The blind leading the blind,” Delia might say, but not in anger. She didn't care how much Sean drank.

When they were alone, though, Sean would tell her the same things that Delia said: You've gotta knock it off. Some guy's gonna think . . . stay away from those jerks . . . those guys are going nowhere . . . I'm not always gonna be there to drag you home before some shit happens.

But where was Sean?

Vietnam.

Eileen woke in the middle of the night. Mostly sober. Terrified, not sure where she was. It was still dark and she was covered by a blanket. When she sat up, she almost puked into her lap. Her foot hit something. A pot, the big one they used to make spaghetti. Dropping to her knees, she brought up a torrent of beer. There was a glass of water on the coffee table. Eileen rinsed her mouth and spit it into the pot.

She left the pot where it was, unable to deal with it. With the blanket wrapped around her shoulders, she walked up the stairs. The door to Sean's room was shut. No light was on. Eileen went down the hall and peeked in her mother's room. The bed was rumpled but empty. Eileen often heard her walking around at night these days. Usually when it had been a couple of weeks since they'd had a letter.

Eileen hated to remember the look on her face last year when Sean told her he was enlisting. Delia had saved enough to pay for two years of college for both of them, just the tuition. Dorm fees were out of reach.

She stared at Sean and got out only one word: Why?

Sean said he could be drafted until he was twenty-six. Why sit in a classroom for two years of school, then get sent to Nam right as he was ready to start some kind of life? Might as well get killed first.

“Nathaniel can possibly help pay tuition for two more years of school, so you'd be safe for four years.” Delia was clenching her fists so hard her knuckles were white.

Of course, if Sean were an only child, Delia wouldn't have to split her money.

“No way in hell am I taking money from Nathaniel to get out of going to war,” Sean said.

“World War Two was a war.” Delia lost her pleading tone and was now angry. “America was attacked and we fought back. This? What is
this?
Sean . . . no.
No.
”

“I'm no coward,” Sean said.

“You don't need to prove anything to a man who abandoned you,” Delia said.

Sean looked fiercely at her for a long moment, then turned and left the room.

Eileen knew, and she knew their mother certainly did, when Sean set his jaw like that the conversation was finished.

Eileen tried to talk him out of it too, but only when they were alone, because she would never take their mother's side against him. He could have her college money. She was too dumb for school anyway. But he refused, adding that their mother wouldn't let her do that.

“Wanna bet?” Eileen said.

Now Eileen went back down the hall and hesitated outside Sean's door. Behind it, no doubt, Delia was sitting in the dark beside the bed. Eileen didn't dare open the door or knock. She went to her own room and crawled into bed.

After school on Friday, Eileen went straight to the convent. It always looked deserted. When they were kids, she and Sean wondered if there was really anybody in there. Maybe it was a hideout for a gang; maybe Sean's grandmother hadn't become a nun but had just run off.

Eileen pushed open the heavy gate and shut it carefully behind her, trying not to make a sound. She was lucky that she never blacked out. Some of her friends had sex without remembering a thing. She, at least, remembered everything, if hazily.

She put her white box, neatly tied with red string, in the turn with a note that said,
Please let me not be pg.

Please turn back time so that on St. Patrick's Day she never left her mother's side at the boring reception at the American Irish Historical Society to jump in the parade. Never went to a bar afterward with all the old people and married couples she'd marched with. Never left them for the backroom where a group of four Irish guys were hanging out, celebrating their first New York St. Patrick's Day. Never went to another bar with them, and then another. Never did shots of some kind of whiskey. Never went back to the dingy apartment in the Village that smelled like old socks and worse. Never woke up in a bed naked, facing a pale, freckled back. Never crawled around a sticky floor, snatching up her clothes and putting them on in the dark. Never snuck out without saying Hey, what's your name? Never got back to Brooklyn believing it was the middle of the night, to find it was only eleven-thirty and her mother wasn't even worried yet.

Most girls would probably cross their fingers out of superstition but not real fear, not until they were later than two days. But Eileen existed because of a girl it had happened to.

When she reached the gate, she heard the front door open, and she turned away as though she'd been caught burglarizing the place.

A girl came out the front door and paused at the top of the steps. Her brown hair was pulled back in a barrette, and her round face was solemn. She wore a plaid skirt, though not a school uniform, and a blue blouse that was untucked a little in the back. She had on a pair of red-rimmed glasses.

Her attempt at being daring? At fashion?

Eileen hadn't seen Marian Clark much in the past few years, since they'd gone to different high schools. She looked the same, as if she hadn't grown up, only taller.

“Hi, Eileen,” Marian said.

Eileen asked, “What the hell are you doing inside the convent?”

“I work here. Reading and sorting the mail. Wrapping up the soda bread. That kind of thing.”

“They pay you?”

“The nuns don't. The diocese does,” Marian said. “How are you?”

How is Sean, she meant. Eileen always made fun of the girls who fawned over Sean, and Sean would laugh. Except for Marian. Leave her alone, he'd say with a half smile. Maybe it was that Marian didn't wear lipstick. She didn't laugh loudly with her friends and touch her hair when Sean passed by. She didn't try. But Marian hoped, and it was obvious. Sean felt sorry for her.

“Fine,” Eileen said.

“Everything okay?”

Eileen left without answering her.

The cookies not only worked, they gave Eileen an idea. A solution to the problem she'd only been able to focus on once she knew she wasn't pregnant.

One of the older women she'd marched with in the parade was from Sligo. She and Eileen were at the bar together.

“I'm Irish too,” Eileen said, and the woman, whose name Eileen couldn't remember, said cheerfully, “All Americans think they're Irish.”

Eileen explained that she actually was. She'd been born in a place called Rossamore Abbey in Galway. She was going to call the home there and ask for the name of her birth mother. Tomorrow. Maybe even tonight.