Placeholders, p.18
Placeholders, page 18
‘Róisín?’ Aaron says quietly. ‘You okay in there?’
The pain is immaculate. She thinks of burning forests, searing flesh, carved meat. She wants to respond but finds it impossible. There are three more knocks, louder this time.
‘I’m fine,’ Róisín blurts out. She is unsure why she says this. Perhaps she hopes that if she says she’s fine, it will become fine, as if the things she says are prescriptive instead of descriptive. Her knuckles go white where they wrap around the sink basin. The pain remains. There’s blood between her legs and she sees now that it’s soaked through the crotch of her pyjama bottoms.
‘Okay,’ Aaron says through the door. ‘Let me know if you need anything.’
There’s a clammy feeling of sickly lightness and Róisín pulls on the shower door until it opens. Blood drips in tiny dots onto the tile floor from the hem of her pyjamas. She’ll have to clean that up now, she thinks. She steps into the shower and the glass door swings shut behind her. Shaking, she peels the cotton from her body like the skin from an orange. Her underwear is a deep red. She feels faint and eases herself down onto the tile floor of the shower. She reaches upwards for the faucet and grazes the edge of it with her fingertips. Another wave of pain hits and she clutches onto herself. Taking a breath, she tries again to turn on the shower and succeeds. She’s met with a blast of freezing water that sputters before it streams and slowly warms. She peels the rest of her clothes from her skin and forms a pile of soaked cotton in the far corner of the shower. Now she is naked, her pale and freckly legs splayed out. Blood weeps from between her legs and drains into the hole in the centre of the shower. She watches, disinterested, and wonders vaguely if she’ll continue bleeding forever, if she’ll empty out completely and soon there will be nothing left, and if whatever remains will simply slip through the drain. It’s a comforting notion. Then bits of crimson mucus come out in clumps like half-formed cells and catch on the tiles, too large to wash away. Panic echoes in the back of her mind. She does not know what is happening to her body.
‘Aaron,’ she finds herself saying. It comes out as a whisper. Nothing changes. The world remains as it was before she spoke. She puts an arm against the shower door to push it open and finds the action impossible to complete.
‘Aaron,’ she shouts.
The bathroom door opens a crack. Finally, he appears.
When Róisín opens her eyes, she’s in a hospital bed. They’re there, all of them, this surrogate family. Annette sits in the chair closest to the bed with her legs crossed, a newspaper unfolded on her lap. Róisín’s hand floats towards her, as if autonomically, and Annette takes it in her own.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Róisín says, crying.
‘Sorry?’ she says. She folds the newspaper along its creases and sets it on top of Róisín’s bedcovers. ‘Sorry for what?’
‘I didn’t know about the coffee.’
‘The coffee?’ Annette shakes her head. ‘Oh, this isn’t because of that.’
‘No?’ Róisín asks softly.
‘No, dear.’ She holds Róisín’s hand firmly in her own. ‘This has nothing to do with anything you did.’
‘All right,’ Róisín says.
She blinks, her eyes heavy, and when she opens them, she finds that she is alone. The hospital is decorated for Christmas. A doctor whips open the privacy curtain and pulls it closed behind him as he sits down and reads through a clipboard. He has a felt peppermint candy cane stitched onto the breast of his scrubs. She wonders what day it is. Her mother would have surely put up the decorations by now. They’d have their Christmas tree sorted, the customary proposal of using a plastic one rejected, its practicalities discounted yet again in the name of tradition. The doctor is telling her something she can’t follow. She’s had something called a ‘threatened miscarriage’. She cannot remember if the front door of her parents’ house is green or purple.
‘Is the baby all right?’ she asks.
The doctor nods as he reads from his clipboard.
‘And the clumps?’
‘We’re doing tests and we’ll have to do some more, but it’s not cause for concern just yet,’ he tells her. ‘These things happen.’ The doctor stands and opens the curtain.
‘My family…’ she starts.
‘They’re in the waiting room,’ he says, not unkindly, and closes the curtain behind him.
She imagines Mam and Da and Darragh and even Maeve with her kids, all piled up in the sterile white room, sitting on chairs. The doctor means Aaron’s family, of course, not her own, but, as she drifts back to sleep, she finds it difficult to differentiate members of the two.
21
The decision is made that Aaron will quit his job and start taking the requisite classes at the local community college in order to complete his degree in computer science. It would be inaccurate to say that this choice is made for Aaron, but it would be equally inaccurate to say that it is his idea entirely. It is, as so many things have become in the past few weeks, a family decision.
‘You’re coasting,’ his father tells him over dinner.
Evidently, there exists a threshold which has been unknowingly crossed over and now, on the other side of it, Aaron’s choices are no longer his own. Róisín has started to show more prominently. The baby has moved from a state of speculative existence to one of physical evidence. Of course, the baby had always been real; maybe it is only Aaron’s perception of the situation that has changed. His mother taps on the screen of her phone and Aaron immediately thinks back to a night, only months ago, when he might have snorted something off of it. That is a before memory, he realises, and he is living in the after. Jake, Percy, nights out, Rudy’s, the old apartment, these are all things that once existed in such surplus as to be tiresome but have become permanently inaccessible to him now. He wonders if he misses it.
‘I’ll take you into the office tomorrow, as usual,’ his father says between bites of lemon-crusted salmon that Róisín helped him prepare. ‘It’s better to do this kind of thing in person.’
The lemon breadcrumb crust was her idea.
‘What will I say?’ Aaron asks.
‘You tell them you’re leaving, that’s all,’ his mother says.
Róisín helps him fill out the online forms for the community college that night. His mother has his high school and university transcripts stored in her filing cabinet.
‘A for Aaron,’ she says to herself as she removes the printed pages from a folder.
Two hours later, Aaron is sent an automatically generated letter of acceptance by email for the spring term starting in January. His mother helps him fill out the financial details.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she tells him. That’s all.
Life has begun to move at an incredible pace.
Aaron stops at his cubicle with an empty cardboard box and looks for personal effects to fill it with. The whiteboard held up with Blu Tack. The corporate bobblehead. The document inbox. The phone. It is, all of it, company property. He leaves the cardboard box on his keyboard. It all looks so small now, so insignificant. Five years spent typing letters and numbers onto a screen. His contributions are part of something larger, surely, but from down here Aaron cannot see how they relate to anything he could call progress. He hears a quiet weeping. He peeks above the dividing wall of his cubicle and sees Marge bent over her trash receptacle with a box of tissues in her hand.
‘Hey, Marge,’ Aaron says softly. She doesn’t respond. He comes around to the side of the wall and knocks lightly on it, leaning his head through the entrance of her cubicle. ‘How are we this morning?’
Marge looks up, sniffling, trying and failing to maintain a forced smile. ‘We are good,’ she says.
‘Is everything okay?’
Marge nods and then pauses. Her smile wavers and falls and then she shakes her head. ‘We’re supposed to be a family,’ she sniffles. ‘But families don’t treat each other like this, do they?’
Aaron isn’t sure what he’s supposed to say. Work is a thing that happens outside of real life. He’s been operating under the assumption that everybody knows this. Now he understands that, for Marge, work is the whole and everything else is what happens in the interim. He takes a tentative step into her cubicle and places a hand on her shoulder. This seems to be the right thing to do.
‘Things will get better, won’t they?’ she asks him.
He considers the question. He nods slowly. ‘Yes, Marge, things will get better. That’s what things tend to do.’
The elevator door closes as he jogs towards it.
‘Could you hold that for me?’ Aaron calls out.
The doors shut. There’s a ding and then they open again. Standing there, one hand in his pocket and the other on the elevator’s buttons, is Jake. He looks at Aaron with total indifference.
‘You heading to lunch?’ Jake asks.
Aaron shakes his head. ‘No, I, uh…’ He takes a deep breath. ‘I kind of just quit.’
‘Oh,’ Jake says.
They ride in silence for two floors.
‘How’ve you been?’ Aaron asks.
‘How’ve I been?’ Jake shakes his head. ‘Fuck me, man. Radio silence for how long? Fine. I’ve been fine.’
‘I’m sorry I’ve been a little hard to reach since moving out.’
‘I get it, sure,’ Jake says. ‘Living clean. Real suburban man. I guess, I don’t know. Percy, I get. There’s no hope seeing him without it turning into a whole thing, I know that more than anyone. I just thought…’
‘What?’ Aaron asks.
‘Like, we lived together. For, like, a seriously decent chunk of time. It’s kind of disappointing finding out that someone you thought was a close friend lumps you into the same bucket as an empty-headed fucking banker coke-fiend. I get that there were things you couldn’t talk about or whatever, that you didn’t feel comfortable talking about with me. But I really thought that, underneath it all… I don’t know. Fuck it, I guess.’
‘It’s not like that,’ Aaron starts. He takes another deep breath. ‘I never told you this, but my brother–’
‘Yeah, I know all about that. Do you know how I know? Fucking Percy told me. Said you freaked after a bump on a night out ages ago, crash-landed the mood in a fucking heartbeat. I had to find out from Percy, of all people. After everything we’ve been through, nothing, but you felt fine opening up to him at one of his banker bars.’ He shakes his head. ‘I bet the drinks were, like, fifty bucks a pop or something.’
‘I don’t know,’ Aaron says. ‘Percy–’
‘Percy paid for it. Is that what you’re about to say?’ Jake laughs, shaking his head.
The elevator reaches the ground floor. There’s a ding just before the doors open. Jake exits first.
‘It really didn’t happen like that. I didn’t mean to–’
Jake holds up a hand and shrugs. ‘It doesn’t matter. It is what it is. Good luck with whatever,’ he says.
Jake’s right, of course, and as Aaron watches him disappear down the hallway, he becomes aware only in retrospect of the transactional light in which he’s viewed their relationship. Since college, Jake was always the ‘cool’ one to provide guidance or score beer. Maybe Aaron’s never seen him as a real person. Not in a fundamental way, not in the way that it turns out Jake has seen Aaron for as long as they’ve known one another. It doesn’t matter, Aaron tells himself. Let the old life die. There’s a new one waiting at home. But there’s something else deep inside himself, something injured and sore. The pulsating pain of an old wound.
Aaron sits in the passenger seat of his father’s red sedan. They drive back to the house from the business park in silence. Then Michael takes a left instead of a right and Aaron asks where they’re going.
‘I think you should come with me,’ he says.
‘For acupuncture?’
‘Sure, why not.’
Thursdays are the day Michael now goes to the Malden Eastern Healing Center for acupuncture and incense treatments. He told Annette about it last week over dinner and she half-frowned, chewing on a salad.
‘That’s my Mahjong night.’
‘That’s okay, I can go alone.’
She kept chewing, her eyes wide and unblinking. ‘Are you sure?’
‘I’ll be fine.’
Now Aaron shifts uncomfortably in his seat. ‘I don’t have to get poked with needles or anything, though, right? I can just, like, loiter in the lobby or something.’
Michael laughs and shakes his head. ‘No, you don’t have to get poked with needles.’
He takes a left and a right through a densely residential neighbourhood. He stops the car.
‘I thought we were going to Malden,’ Aaron says.
His father grunts as he gets out of the car and waves at Aaron to follow him up the walkway of one of the houses. He opens the front door without knocking. ‘Hide the contraband! My son’s here!’ he shouts, and a raucous cheer explodes from the kitchen.
There’s the rabbi at the head of the table, the cantor beside him. Aaron recognises a few of the other faces sitting around the table. Some have glasses of whiskey in front of them, others have cigars hanging from the corners of their mouths.
‘Busted,’ the rabbi says, grinning.
‘Acupuncture and incense,’ Aaron says.
‘For me, I tell my wife it’s a Talmudic study group,’ the rabbi says.
The cantor shrugs. ‘Singing lessons.’
‘I’m learning German,’ someone says.
Michael withdraws his wallet from the inside pocket of his coat and removes two twenties, tossing them onto the table. He sits with a groan and pats the empty seat beside him. Someone starts counting out piles of chips.
‘Now, just because he’s my son doesn’t mean you need to take it easy on him, okay? The boy’s got to learn.’
‘I’ll take his money,’ the cantor says. ‘You don’t have to tell me twice.’
Someone passes the rabbi a deck of cards and a cigar cutter.
‘Tonight’s parshah,’ he says as he shuffles, ‘is no-limit Texas Hold ’Em.’
22
The only consequential change to the daily routine of the house during the eight nights of Hanukkah is that, for ten minutes, they gather before dinner to light another candle on the menorah. Aaron drives Róisín to the small cluster of shops by the ocean boardwalk after the first night, where she picks out an omelette spatula and a small, decorative book on exotic flowers from around the world. She hands out the gifts to Aaron’s parents. Michael smiles politely and nods. Annette turns the book over and over again in her hands as if she’s unsure what to do with it. She looks up at Róisín with an expression not dissimilar to anger.
‘I didn’t get you anything,’ she says.
It is initially Annette who proposes going to Shabbat services as a family after the final night of Hanukkah. Aaron makes a face but Róisín, seeing her opportunity, immediately agrees.
‘I’m pregnant,’ she says to him. ‘What I say goes.’
Now, sitting in a synagogue that is very different from the one in Boston all those weeks ago, she is unsure whether or not the reward of his mother’s favour is worth the cost. It is nine in the morning and she is dressed in the only nice clothes that she owns. Aaron tugs on the collar of his button-down shirt beside her and yawns. The sanctuary smells like mothballs and canned air freshener. Everything is beige carpet and maroon felt seating. The congregation consists of, as expected, mostly old people. Róisín feels the corkscrew tighten and loosen inside of her. She squirms in her seat, hoping her pad is doing enough damage control to prevent her from bleeding all over this nice fabric. Only on the third try did she get through to the doctor on the house phone, and he told her in a curt but professional tone that light bleeding was to be expected and nothing to be worried about. ‘These things happen.’ Or, in other words, to stop bothering him.
Annette sits straight beside her, leant slightly forward, a prayer book splayed out on her lap.
‘Now they’re going to take out the Torah,’ she whispers to Róisín. ‘Do you know what the Torah is?’
She’s been doing this throughout every minute action of the service. She is calmer when she explains things. Róisín nods.
‘It’s like our Bible, I suppose. I’m not sure what the Catholic equivalent is.’
‘I was brought up Protestant, if anything.’ This is not the first time she’s said this.
Annette holds a finger to her lips and turns her attention back to the front. A woman with grey hair uses a silver pointer to trace along the unrolled scroll, chanting in Hebrew. Aaron yawns again. Róisín nudges him with her elbow.
‘What?’ he asks.
Michael leans over Róisín and says something to Aaron in a hushed whisper.
‘What?’ Aaron says. He jerks upright, staring at the bimah.
The rabbi is watching him, smiling, gesturing towards the steps. Aaron shakes his head.
‘You have to,’ Michael says.
‘I don’t.’
‘It’s the first aliyah, Aaron. It’s either you or me.’
Aaron stands and makes his way onto the stage. He bites at his nails and rubs the back of his neck. The rabbi nods him forward and the grey-haired Torah reader makes room. Aaron clears his throat. He starts to read Hebrew from a laminated piece of paper, stumbles, clears his throat and starts again. Annette mouths along silently beside Róisín, her eyes fixed on Aaron, who is quite actively not returning the gaze. His face has turned a deep shade of red.
‘The first aliyah is reserved for a Kohen,’ Michael whispers to Róisín. ‘The namesake is passed down from father to son.’
