IT WAS THE YEAR’S TURNING. These few hours like the blink of a great eye—just enough light to check that the world is still there, before shutting back down.
Sometime in the midafternoon, he had an impulse to go home, or go somewhere, and when he lifted his head, of course, it was dark outside. It just felt wrong. Two hours later, he was in the multistory looking for his car and he couldn’t find the thing. It was like a lost dog. He clicked the key fob over and over, but there were no answering lights flashing orange on Level 2, where he usually parked, or on Level 3. He went up the little stairs to Level 4, then along the tiny path on the side of the ramp to 4A, brushing against the live cars that were stuck on the slope, nose to tail. He glanced into the windows as he went past and there was a gone look to the drivers’ faces; they’d already left for home.
Out there, it was Christmas, but he did not think it was Christmas inside the multistory, the only place in Dublin that had no fairy lights. He walked the last ramp to Level 5. Above him, the black concrete angles of the car-park roof gave way to the night sky, and the car was right there, out in the weather. He took a moment to glance up and around him at the longest night of the year.
It felt like the end of things. Made you want your religion back. He looked out over the landscape of west Dublin, the square industrial units set among dark young trees, and he entertained the possibility that it would not work this time. This time, the world would spin deeper into shadow. And, because the exit ramps were still jammed, he stayed a minute to check the solstice on his phone. For some reason, it didn’t always happen on the same day, but in 2016 it came just when you thought it should, on the twenty-first of December. Not at midnight, though—“the event,” as the Web site called it, would happen at 10:44 a.m. Irish time. Somewhere in that moment, whether he believed it or not, the sun would pause in the sky above him, or seem to pause. It would stop in its descent and start its slow journey back to summer and the middle of the sky.
Or this year, he thought, it might not bother.
The M50 was at a crawl, and there was the usual nightmare getting off at the Tallaght exit. He could see the red taillights running in a sequence toward him until he pushed his own brake pedal down. It would be stop-start all the way to Manor Kilbride.
A full forty minutes later, the dual carriageway turned into the old Blessington Road, and oncoming traffic shot by so close he flinched in the glare of the lights. This was the part of the journey that he loved best: the streetlamps gave way to the idea of countryside, and there was a song on the radio as the road opened up ahead. The music made him feel like he could keep driving forever. It was a love song, or a sad song. It reminded him of a time in his life, some town he was in, he could not say where. The loss of that place made him unsure of this one. Or indifferent—as though he could clip an oncoming car and it wouldn’t matter. And he didn’t know what he was thinking, until a truck bellied past, sucking the air from the side of the car.
It gave him a fright. He checked all the mirrors and shifted in his seat, set his hands more deliberately on the steering wheel. After the turnoff, he followed his own headlights down a country lane, and when he got to the house he sat in the parked car for quite a while.
The night was very big out here. There were three texts on his phone; ten, fifteen minutes apart.
When home?
Will I put yr name in the pot?
Food anyway, half-seven.
When he comes in the door, there is the smell of cooking, the sound of pans and of water pouring into the sink. His daughter is failing to set the table and complaining about the Dakota Access Pipeline. “It’s, like, so unfair,” she says, and her family neither agrees nor disagrees, because that’s just asking for it. Ruth is fifteen. She is arguing with her own shadow, her mother, her teachers, none of whom care about the Dakota Access Pipeline, or not enough for her. “We live in County Wicklow,” her mother sometimes likes to remind her. But Ruth does not see what location has to do with anything, and he would admire this more, he might even take up the discussion, but she is back on her phone.
He glances over her shoulder and, for once, she lets him see.
“What’s that?”
“Just,” she says. A person called chikkenpenis has sent a funny picture to do with Kanye’s breakdown, a video clip that jerks and repeats, endlessly. It’s hard to know what the joke is. And what kind of person spells “penis” right and “chicken” with two “k”s?
“Is that someone you know?”
Ruth just rolls her eyes, types with two thumbs. Cracks up laughing, saying, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God!”
He looks into the kitchen, where his wife is trying to serve up stir-fry out of a too-heavy pan. She is in her track pants. Upstairs all day, at a guess, translating some car manual for solid German euros. Her hair is in a scrunchie, which does not suit her. He tries to remember the song he heard on the radio as he goes over to help, but “Go, go. Out!” she says, and it is gone.
Halfway through dinner, he becomes aware that Ross, his son, is talking to him about something or someone called Stripey. His son says that Stripey knew about death because he always went to Tiger’s grave. After a moment, he realizes that Stripey is a cat and so is Tiger. The ones at the childminder’s, when Ross was little. Cats from many years ago.
“Animals believe in death,” his son says.
“You think?” This is a big statement for a ten-year-old. “Maybe he was just waiting for the other cat to come back out of there. I mean, maybe he doesn’t know what the ground is. Maybe he doesn’t believe in the ground.”
The boy’s face goes still, and he looks at his plate.
Ruth goes, “Kcchchhhh,” does a Carrie hand out of the grave. And there is an immediate fight. Shouting, pushing.
“Hey, hey, that’s enough!” he says.
When they are settled, his wife casts a baleful look at him, and he shoots one back. What have I done now?
“I think the cat was sad,” she says to Ross. “I think Stripey missed Tiger, don’t you?”
She has put her hand on the loose fist his own hand makes beside his plate. This is one of the things they fight about. Stop undermining your own son. Which irritates the hell out of him. Because the boy has to learn how to roll with the punches. “Could have been hungry,” he says. “Yum yum. Dead cat.”
Ruth starts to laugh. And Ross obliges him with a crooked smile.
His wife pushes back from the table, starts collecting the plates, though they are only just finished.
“Sorry that was so,” she says. “It was just a rustle-up.”
“Lovely,” he says.
Oh, great, he thinks. On the longest night, his wife with that look in her eye that says, Christmas is coming and it is all turning to shite.
Correction. His wife with a look that says, Christmas is coming and it is all your fault.
He pours a glass of wine and almost spills it on himself falling asleep on the sofa after the news. He was dreaming about weather, or discussing the weather with his dreaming self: all autumn it had been so dry, high pressure, clear skies, the leaves drying to dust on the trees, falling like smoke, they’d hung on so long. It occurs to him that Tiger was Stripey’s mother. The cat’s mother, no less. He says as much to his wife, who is sitting across the room. She looks at him.
“Yes,” she says. And he suddenly remembers that his own mother is dead—a fact he manages to forget for days at a time.
“You’d think they’d make a better go of the names,” he says.
Later, he mutes the TV to check on a noise, and hears his daughter singing upstairs. She has her headphones on, her voice half in her head, half in the room.
“Goddamn truck,” he says. “Nearly had the wing mirror. You know the bend.”
“Be careful,” his wife says. “This time of year, they’re all drinking.”
“They’re all wrecked,” he says. “I was half asleep myself. No, not asleep.” She looks slightly shocked. “Just a bit.”
Unmoored. That is the word he is looking for. Recently he feels—he has felt—unmoored.
He used to have a place in his mind where he could go. Hard to say where it was, but his mother has been dead since April, so maybe this was the place she used to occupy. Because he can’t go there anymore. It was the song reminded him.
“I was listening to the radio,” he says.
“The radio?”
It wasn’t like an inner monologue or anything; he did not sit around talking to his mother all day. It was more like a silence. He had lost a great and wonderful silence. The traffic came against him, and he felt unprotected, bullied by the lights. Because he had no one on his side anymore. Not even his wife.
“Yes, the radio. In the car. You know, I wish, for once, you’d let me say something without repeating it back at me, like some kind of gom.”
She lets this sink in for a moment and then gets up out of the big armchair and leaves the room. He can hear the sound of her starting to unload the dishwasher in the kitchen.
And “Mutual!” he wants to shout after her. “Fucking mutual!” He wants to tell her how he sat in the car, outside his own house, thinking, Whatever happens when I walk in the door, that’s the thing. When I walk in the door, I will find it. The answer or the question, one or the other. It will be there.
And what did he find? These people. This.
Even in her sleep she is affronted, her body straight in the bed beside him, her head twisted to face the wall. The earth spins them toward morning, and he cannot close his eyes for the vertigo; he has to urge it on. He wakes without knowing he has slept, and the house is busy around him—the sound of the front door, finally, and silence. It is after nine o’clock, but when he comes into the kitchen Ross is still at the table, stuck on his phone.
“It’s the Christmas concert,” his son says, as if that explains something.
The office is closed but he still has a mad number of payments to process before the end of the year, so he takes a coffee back to bed and opens his laptop there.
He clicks on a spreadsheet, then he starts reading the news instead and wandering about online.
Ross comes in to show him something. He climbs across the duvet, bringing the phone screen so close that his father has to push the thing a distance away. It is a video of two tigers, play-fighting in the Siberian snow.
They are pretty impressive, the tigers.
“Fantastic,” he says.
And Ross is so pleased his cheeks glow with it.
It is 10:38 and, outside, the sun has not cleared the tops of the winter trees.
“Look up ‘solstice,’ ” he says, spelling it out for him and then typing it on his own keyboard, because he is running out of time now. He has six minutes to do this, to tell his child that the world will keep turning. No matter what happens, the sun will always rise in the morning, the planet’s orbit will tilt them toward the light. He finds a video clip of a cartoon earth circling a harmless, small sun, but Ross says he already knows about the solstice. They covered it at school.
It is 10:42.
The boy is sitting cross-legged on the bed beside him. Ross shuts his eyes, and “Sh-h-h,” he says. “Is it happening?”
“In a minute.”
“Is it now?”
The seconds pass. The boy squeezes his eyelids tighter.
“Now?”
“Yes.”
Ross keeps his eyes shut for another moment, then punches the air. He turns to his dad and they look at each other, full of mischief and amazement. Because it happened. Nothing happened, but they know it was there. The tiny stretch of daylight that will become summer.
His wife is home. She is standing in the doorway watching them. They look up and smile at her.
“What?” she says.