Chapter Twenty-five

We do not remember days, we remember moments.

Cesare Pavese, The Business of Living; Diaries 1935–1950

FIVE DAYS UNTIL THE PARTY . . .

The johnboat tipped and bounced against the dock as Colleen, Hallie and Dad sat on the bench, so close together that their legs and knees pressed together. Shane sat solo on the driver’s seat.

“Did we get a smaller boat?” Gavin asked as Shane pushed down on the throttle and the small motor pulsed to form a wake like the V of white birds flying across a pewter sky.

“No,” Colleen said. Seated next to Gavin, she placed her hand on his knee as they tilted forward with the momentum. “We just grew bigger.”

Gavin laughed and shifted his baseball cap on his head, lifted his face to the sun. “There is no place on this earth as beautiful as the rivers and marshes of our land. You know that, don’t you?” He asked this with his eyes closed so the siblings didn’t know to whom the question was directed. They all answered in the affirmative.

“It is the scend of the sea for us now.” Gavin leaned forward in the johnboat, upsetting the delicate balance. Each sister grabbed the side of the boat.

“The what?” Hallie asked.

“The scend,” Gavin insisted. “You know, I’ve told you this before.” His voice rose with the recent, increasingly frequent frustration of dementia sneaking in like fog in the night.

Colleen touched her dad’s shoulder, squeezed it. “Remind us.”

“Not send but scend.” He spelled the different words. “The surge behind the boat—the surge behind our life. When the tide and the wind and the wave are all pushing us forward. That is now.”

“Yes,” Colleen said. “That is now.” She understood he meant more than the wind and wave behind the boat, but of life’s current toward something they could not stop, a momentum beyond their control.

Slowly Shane eased the bright silver johnboat into the larger river channel, where sandbars appeared and disappeared twice a day; where the shrimp weren’t visible until you threw the net and lifted it with a great heave; where the water teemed with unseen life and slapped against the docks and shoreline with equal disregard. The humming motor and the swish-slap of river water on the hull lulled them all to silence. Colleen wondered what her dad and siblings were thinking, each with his or her own river of thought pulsing in different directions as complicated as the estuaries and creeks that spread from the main river, some reaching a dead end and others rejoining where they’d started.

Taking Dad out in the boat like this had been part of a well-laid plan. The night before, the three siblings had sat in the kitchen, playing an Ella Fitzgerald LP, and decided that the only way to understand the odd gap in Dad’s timeline was to ask him. To gently ask him in a place that felt utterly familiar and wholly belonging to him.

The river.

The last couple of days had been rough on all of them—Dad getting worse not by the hour but almost by the minute. His spatial sense seemed to be deteriorating; he tripped over stairs and stumbled over his own feet. He time traveled at least once a day—asking when Lena would be home from ballet or when his wife would return from her afternoon bridge game with the ladies.

Another difficult choice had been made—Hallie and the girls would move in with Gavin. Although it seemed a simple solution, it wasn’t. It was a decision fraught with heartache, and Dad asking again and again, Why? Why are you moving in? And Hallie having to explain again and again—I’ve left Walter. And their dad becoming concerned and upset once more.

But at this moment, out on the water, Gavin showed no concern for anything. His face was smooth and his grin relaxed, coming and going as easily as the clouds moving across the late afternoon sky. It was hot, yes, but they were accustomed to the August heat, and floating on the water was a perfect cure—the breeze whipping, the water cooling. A sailboat eased by and the man at the helm waved, and then a motorboat passed, pulling a pair of teenage boys on an inflatable tube, both screaming and loving the simple danger of being tossed off and into the water. The wake rocked them all back and forth as they held on to the sides of their own boat.

Shane slowed and drew near to one of the exposed sandbars, where spartina grass swayed, summer green and bent to the breeze. The tip of the sandbar, always exposed, was crusted with bleached oyster shells, tinkling like wind chimes in the wake of the tide. Shane expertly maneuvered the boat. There was the clanging of metal on metal as he yanked out the anchor and then the soft thud as he dropped it into the sand off the bow. From under the bench Colleen withdrew the cooler where she’d stashed a thermos of lemonade and bottles of water.

They jumped off the boat into the shin-deep water without talking, and with the practiced synchronicity of childhood. Hallie took the few steps to the sand line and dropped a blanket, stained and full of holes from its long and loving use. The rest of them ambled slowly to the blanket and then sat, chatting about the beauty of the breeze and what a stunning day it was for August when, without preamble, Hallie opened the discussion.

“Dad, we need you to tell us the truth about Ireland.” She drew her knees to her chest in a silhouette so like her childhood self that Colleen thought maybe they had traveled back in time. Soon Mother would appear from behind the grasses carrying a wicker basket full of cut-up sandwiches, potato chips and apple slices, which would all soon be crunchy with sand.

“Hallie.” Shane spat her name and leaned forward, digging his hands into the sand. “That’s not the best way to start.”

“Start what?” Gavin sat with his hands behind him, propping himself in a half-reclining position on the blanket. “Am I being ambushed here? Are you going to leave me on this island to swim home?” His attempt at humor fell flat and into silence.

Colleen sat cross-legged, her hands wrapped around a cold water bottle, her heart hammering. She didn’t have a good feeling about this discussion. Some things were best left alone. Their dad was erratic now—sometimes fully Gavin and sometimes a man or young child they’d never met. He sang the lark song, humming or under his breath, all during the day. Something buried was pushing against the ground, forcing its way to the surface—a Lazarus of memory.

“I have never lied to you.” Gavin’s voice was strong. He seemed himself.

“I know.” Hallie lowered her voice and wrapped her arms tighter around her knees. “But you haven’t told us the truth about your time in Ireland.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, my darling.” He crossed one leg over the other and furrowed his brow.

“We want to know the full story. We love you and we want to know everything before you . . .”

“Before I forget,” he said clearly. He removed his sunglasses so they all saw the tears that gathered in his eyes and didn’t so much spill as seep into the wrinkles. “Oh, my children. I didn’t mean to lie to you. Sometimes when we honor someone’s request it hurts another. I never meant for such a thing.”

“Then tell us,” Shane said.

“If I tell you this story, I will betray your mother.”

Colleen’s pulse battered against her chest; the sun suddenly felt blazing and dizzying. Don’t, Dad, she wanted to scream. Don’t change everything. But she didn’t speak a word.

“Dad?” Shane asked.

Gavin’s gaze moved slowly to his son’s gaze. “Oh, son. I’m going to lose this piece of myself, aren’t I? Soon it will be gone and you will be feeding me with a spoon and I won’t know your name, will I? That is now my destiny. So I have a choice, don’t I? I can keep the story and allow it to be eaten alive by the disease or I can give it to you. Is giving it to all of you fair to you or to your mother?”

“Dad . . .” Colleen didn’t think the words before she spoke them. “Your story is our story. Can’t you see that?”

He held her gaze and then he said, “Perhaps you’re right.”

And so, Gavin Donohue spoke the tale of his Irish love. It was a slow telling, halting and starting again like an engine without enough oil. But the pieces of the story were intact—the story of his journey to Ireland, of meeting the first Colleen. Twilight fell long on the sandbar as the tide moved in, but it was Ireland that filtered into the Lowcountry evening air; the emerald world their dad took over an hour to describe. Fiddle music seemed to echo across the water. Galway Bay, winter whipped and fierce, raged at the sandbar instead of the calm May of Watersend, South Carolina. A pub, known dimly in a faded photo, sprang to life with boisterous County Clare villagers, with grief and love and laughter. And above all of this, and through it, “The Lark in the Clear Air” played on and on and on.

They arrived home in silence; enough had been said, the puttering of the boat and the whip of the wind were their companions. They docked and hugged each other good-bye without I love yous and see you laters, everyone absorbing what they had heard and now knew. When Shane and their dad had left for the pub and Hallie drove off to her children, Colleen slipped into her bedroom and began to compose the tale Gavin had told.

Yes, she thought, something had always been whispering, a certain knowing lurking at the edges of her consciousness, the gap of a secret where her mother’s full attention might have been. Why had her mother insisted on calling her Lena, never by her full name? Now Colleen knew . . .

Colleen wrote so quickly that she misspelled words, shortened sentences. She would clean it later, but she needed to get it all down, everything her dad had said as best she could remember. The truth had struck her like a body blow and she still felt numb. Because she’d learned today that she had another mother, another woman to be called by the same name.