I shoved my paper stacks to the edge of my desk and laid my head down on my arms. I couldn't work any longer. But if I stop working, I thought, I'll end up thinking. And feeling. Don't want that.
I listened to the occasional car swish by outside. My refrigerator clicked on across the house. Other than that, it was totally silent. Not even the ticking of time.
How long had I been hammering away at my research? I raised my head and gazed at the ornate old clock on the wall. Bad move. Every time I looked at it, the sadness came. The clock said 12:30. And it always would.
At half past midnight on new year's day, Donagh had died. The months since had been empty of everything except pain. The clock was all I had left of him; everything else had gone to his family -- as it should. But the clock had stopped at the moment he died and all efforts to restart it had failed.
Donagh's relatives made a great show of superstition about it. Crazy harps, all of them. I have no belief in that kind of crap, and I figured the real reason they gave it to me was because it was worthless now. I hung it on the wall of my study.
I'd thought I'd be glad to have it, and in a way I was. But it was a constant reminder that, when it had stopped, so had I. It brought back those last months in his bedroom -- which was his whole world, at that point -- tending him. Even the smells came back. I would prop myself on the adjoining bed and listen to his labored breathing and stare at that clock, willing its ticking to drive Donagh's heart one more beat, one more hour, one more day.
For a time I'd relied on it to schedule his morphine shots. Eventually, though, we'd wordlessly agreed to give him whatever relief he needed, whenever he needed it.
By the time he died, I literally had no life left. My office had given me family leave -- he was, after all, all the "family" I had left -- and I immersed myself in arrangements, phone calls, flowers and grandchildren.
I'd managed well, too, during my first day back to work. But that evening... thinking about it now made me start to cry as if it had been yesterday.
I'd automatically rushed to my car to race to Donagh's bedside, knowing he'd have been crying out for me for an hour by now. And then I'd stopped, and stood, realizing that he wasn't waiting for me. And never would again.
It had still been light. Where would I go? I'd scanned my mind for all those things I'd wished I could do, and hardly remembered what it was like to be out in daylight beyond that hurried trip to Donagh's side each afternoon after work.
But nothing came to me. I'd lost touch with all my friends; friendships wither without nourishment. After a year's absence, I was sure there was no one left who'd welcome a casual drop-in. The personal projects I'd longed to get on with were packed away in boxes, too long abandoned to be viable now.
There was nothing to do and nowhere to go.
So I'd worked. All of each day and all of each night. Although the work no longer brought me any joy, I couldn't seem to stop.
But now, I thought, I should go to bed. It was after midnight already. I knew I wouldn't sleep. I could take one of the sleeping pills Dr. Fullerton had prescribed but I knew I wouldn't. I never had, yet I always refilled my prescription as soon as it came due. I ran my eyes across the pill bottles arrayed on my desk. Five of them, all in a row.
Hey, why not?
The sense of decision soothed me, gave me peace in advance. I fondled one of the bottles, then replaced it and eased back in my chair, the hardness draining from my neck and chest. It would be good, to rest. I wondered if I would be with Donagh. Somewhere. I drifted in vague speculation about what the afterlife might be like.
Out of nowhere, a sense of unease crept into me, countering my newfound relaxation. I grew ever more sharply aware of it, but couldn't imagine what it was about or where it was coming from. The outermost pill bottle toppled and rolled off my desk onto the floor. The others followed, very slowly.
I shivered. I was nowhere near those bottles. And I'd been sitting completely still. There wasn't any breeze.
My hair stood up along my neck and arms. I looked carefully around the room, and even wheeled completely around and looked behind me. It was then, turned around, that the sound reached my consciousness: ticking. Slow, deep ticking.
I spun back around to stare at the clock. Its pendulum clacked calmly to and fro. It was precisely 12:31.
"And where're you hidin' the whiskey, girlie," rasped a voice to my right.
I screamed and shot to my feet. There was Donagh, sitting in my never-used visitor chair, looking a bit cranky.
How could he be sitting in that chair? It had been stacked with reference books. And how weird, that I was wondering about such a stupid thing, under the circumstances.
"Is there not a drink to be had in this house!" Donagh shouted in his county Cork brogue, his scowl deepening.
Never moving my eyes from him, I groped in my file drawer and brought out my bottle of Jamesons and my pair of guest glasses -- also never used -- and set them on the desk near him. I noticed my hands were shaking.
"Y' look like th' divil, Laura-lass," he said as he filled his glass to the top. "Póg mo thóin," he offered, and drained the glass.
Donagh had always told me that this toast meant "cheers," but less playful people had clued me in that it was an insulting invitation. In keeping, therefore, with Donagh's capital-A attitude.
Suddenly I was furious with him, and with no idea why. "I never kissed your spindly ass when you were alive, I'm damned if I will now you're dead," I told him.
He roared with laughter. It was always so strange to hear that huge sound from such a tiny, wizened man.
"That's better, girlie, give and get! Y' looked so po faced there, I wondered if you were worth th' comin' to."
As he always did when anything pleased him, he poured the glass full and downed it again. Then again, that was also his response to anything that displeased him. Or bored him, come to that.
"Ahhhh... mither's milk!" he proclaimed, savoring his drink. He closed his eyes for a moment and smiled. Then his eyes snapped open and he barked, "Where's your drink, girlie!"
I obediently trickled a bit of Jamesons into my glass.
"You call that a drink? Augh!" He snatched up the bottle and topped off my glass. And of course his own glass as well. "So, now, what're all these little shitty bitties y're collectin' here?"
I blinked. What in the world was he saying?
"The tablets, the pills!" He swung his leg and kicked the fallen bottles across the carpet. "What're these now!"
I looked away. "I haven't been sleeping well."
"I know that. Not enough sex," he pronounced.
I couldn't help laughing. "That was always your answer to every ailment, wasn't it?"
"Still is," he said, looking smug.
That sobered me. Am I really sitting here talking to a dead person? Though I couldn't have defended it, I was pretty sure that I was. This was no dream. I scuffed the carpet with my bare feet, smelled the whiskey on our breaths, smelled the stale coffee in my forgotten mug, and ... heard the clock ticking.
"You gonna... um... hang out for a bit?" I asked, not meeting his eyes, and struggling to keep from sounding plaintive.
"Ah, no, Laura-lass. They're keepin' me pretty busy."
I looked up, startled. "What on earth," I began, then saw him smile and stopped short. Of course. It wouldn't be something on earth keeping him busy, would it? I wanted to ask him about that, but somehow couldn't.
"So, why are you here?" I resumed scuffing the carpet.
Donagh was quiet for several moments. His face took on a look of uncharacteristic tenderness and he gently laid his hand over mine.
"I don't want you with me, Laura. Not now. Not yet."
The puckish sparkle returned then to his eyes. "I'm busy, girlie. Women! Y' niver saw so many women! It's a chore, it is, keepin' them all happy." He beamed. "But I do. Oh, Laura, I do."
I giggled. The same puffed up old bantam. "Well, of course -- if you couldn't make them happy, it wouldn't be heaven, would it?"
His eyes veiled for an instant. He looked levelly at me and said, "There's so much I wish I could tell you. But each of us must find out on our own."
He rose stiffly and drained the last bit from his glass. When he set it down, he gave me that level look again and said, "I don't want you there, you hear? Don't be comin' and bletherin' at me, ruinin' my fun."
"Don't go!" I cried. I couldn't pay attention to what he was saying, I was too wrenched to think he was leaving me. Again. I got up and reached to hold him back.
There was no one there. I felt horribly cold, and started shaking and crying at the same time. I wanted to run to the window, with some mad idea that I could see him go. Instead, I just dropped to the floor where I stood and sat there, crying and rocking.
I don't know how long we'd talked, so I don't know how long I sat there. But when I got more control, I sought the clock. It was still ticking. The hands said 2 o'clock. It had never said anything but 12:30 in all the time I'd had it.
I was tempted to go all cosmic and deep, and take that as a sign that my life had restarted. Donagh would hate that; shite, he'd call it. And, now, I couldn't be at all sure that he wasn't watching. So I just went to bed. I could figure it out in the morning.
But when morning came, I didn't even try. I chose instead to avoid thinking about it. And I didn't, for weeks. I didn't take work home anymore -- it was too eerie, looking at the clock. I avoided my study. I ended up going out most evenings, finding those of my friends who still wanted to see me.
After three weeks I finally felt ready to clean up my study. I took the mug and the glasses to the kitchen, contents long dried, though the glasses had a lingering fragrance of whiskey. When I vacuumed, the pill bottles rolled out from under the desk. I tossed them into the waste bin.
The stack of unfinished research triggered my calvinistic guilt. I should finish those.
I listened to the clock's ticking.
I went to the beach.
Lehua
©December, 2002