O’Lunney’s
Allison would never really know why it had been so important that she go to O’Lunney’s that particular night. She was lonely, of course, but that was an old story. Yet the urge to get out of her apartment and go there was overpowering. That night she thought she was going out just to be with people, to hear laughter. Later she might attribute it to Divine Providence.
She had worked as much as she could that day. These days, instead of running Lydia’s Closet, an enterprise so successful there was a chance it might go public, she made her own designs and sold them from a market table in Washington Square. She didn’t make a lot of money, but it was enough for rent, food and her medication of choice – alcohol.
The night at O’Lunney’s had gone like many in the past year had gone, in a blur. Until she slid off the barstool and stood up to discover Mike Dennison looking at her like she wasn’t even there.
Kevin couldn’t understand why Mike wanted to spend his first night out in New York at a certain Irish pub.
‘Why do you want to do this to yourself?’ he asked for the tenth time as their Uber sped up Eighth Avenue. ‘That part of your life is gone.’
‘I don’t know. I just do.’ Mike leaned forward in the cab, eager to get to O’Lunney’s.
‘It’s not good to live in the past,’ Kevin said. ‘Didn’t you pay attention to your doctors at Reed?’
‘I didn’t have to. I have my own pain-in-the-butt shrink who goes everywhere with me instead of living his own life.’
The brothers remained silent until the car had arrived at the pub. Kevin tipped the driver and they got out.
‘There’s a little table out of the way in the back,’ Mike said, as he made his way through the door. ‘Let’s sit there.’
He stood stock-still when he came through the door. A woman was singing. He listened carefully, before heading towards the sound. ‘That’s Allison,’ Mike said. ‘I’ve heard her sing that before. It’s Allison.’ Mike was frozen in place.
Kevin watched as Allison slid off the barstool and onto the floor, laughing like being drunk was funny. Make-up was smeared all over her face but she didn’t seem to take note. She was still laughing as she clambered to her feet. And that’s when she saw Mike.
‘It’s her,’ Mike said.
Kevin looked at the wreck the once-beautiful Allison Jones had become. ‘No, Mike. That’s not your Allison. Nothing like her.’
He took his brother’s arm and disentangled from the chair the white stick given to Mike by the therapists at ‘the blind school’. Mike insisted on calling the place he had spent the past six months, ‘the blind school’. It was there he had begun to learn to live without his sight.
The hardest part of the therapy, however, was dealing with the fact that it would never change. He had recovered from his wounds but he would never regain his sight. Nor would he ever regain the love of Allison Jones.