We’ll Held
Silence. A swallow. Then a different quiet, like two people exchanging a look you could almost see. “We’re not recording,” Daniel-on-tape said. “Are we?”
“We are, yeah,” the other him—no, that was still him—said, gently exasperated. “It’s going, Dan. You pressed the red.”
“Oh,” he said, and there was a truer smallness there than she had expected. “All right.”
The washing machine rose to its pitched whine. In the studio Ciara felt her chest wear that sound like a scarf. “We did go,” she said to nobody, and nobody in that kitchen heard.
“We didn’t,” Daniel-on-tape said. “But we can.” His voice moved away; a door opened. “We’ll go. We’ll go where we said we’d go.”
“You always say that,” the cassette-Ciara said. “We’ll go. We’ll go. I’ll keep you to it.”
The present Daniel pressed stop again, then let the button up, unsure if he was keeping something terrible from happening or stopping something necessary from finishing. “Mum being practical doesn’t make her right,” he said.
“Nor does you telling me we’ll go every time I scrape myself on a fact mean we went.” She put her forefinger against the play button and left it there like a person touching a bruise. “I can feel both things at once.”
He tipped his head back. The ceiling held three blue stickers left by the previous tenant—glow-in-the-dark stars that never held a charge. “Let’s speak to someone.”
“We spoke to Donal.”
“Not Donal. A someone with a couch.”
“Most couches are free if you ask.”
He smiled in spite of himself. “A therapist.”
“Which one?” The city held them like rosary beads. She had names. She had sat in enough rooms to know which windows made crying look becoming. “Áine’s decent. Honest face. She doesn’t perform empathy at you like a singer doing a sad song.”
“Make the call.”
Áine Gallagher’s office had the self-respect of plants that were watered on a schedule. When the radiator clicked it sounded apologetic. A shelf held titles that wanted you to stop trying to undo what happened by naming it better. She sat cross-legged in an armchair with her boots off and gave them their own words back like bread.
“Say what you know,” Áine said. “And then say what you fear. If those are different, that’s interesting. If they’re the same, that’s interesting too.”
“She thinks we went to Achill in April,” Daniel said, and then looked at Ciara for permission, which she clutched and then handed over. “I think we didn’t. There’s a photo that may not be a photo. There is a tape we didn’t make that might be us.”
“Might is a heavy word,” Áine said. “Fill it with what you mean. What do you mean when you say ‘might be us’?”
“The voices sound like us,” Ciara said. “The way he says ridiculous things sounds like him. The way I move my mouth around a joke at the last minute as if I can save it from me sounds like me.” Her hands were in her lap like birds that had agreed not to startle. “And if they aren’t us, then someone is playing us into ourselves and I don’t know why.”
“What function would that serve?” Áine asked Daniel.
“If I believed we didn’t go and she believed we did,” he said, “and then evidence arrives to say we did, made by who knows who, then I look like—” He groped for a word he didn’t want. “A gaslighter.”
“And what would you gain by gaslighting?”
“Nothing I want.” He was good at saying that; he practiced knowing what he meant. “The only prize would be being right about something that hurts her, and I have no use for that prize.”
“What would you gain by being right?” she asked Ciara.
“My life back,” Ciara said before she could edit it. “The one where we promised things by the sea and were not stupid enough to put the promise somewhere a seagull could steal it.” She took a breath that was work. “But also—if I’m right, then the part of me that is sure is still allowed out in daylight. The part that can make a line with a brush and not ask it twice.”
Áine nodded in the way of a person marking a place. “How do each of you usually handle memory when it disagrees with the person you love?”
“I write mine down,” Ciara said. “He files his.”
“I check my phone for receipts and call my mother,” Daniel said. He smiled ruefully. “I’m sorry. That sounds like a cartoon of a man.”
“Cartoons work because sometimes they’re true at a distance.
Ciara held the card. Willingness wanted to be a better person than she was. “I will not use words as though they are weapons and he is a war,” she said. “I will not make the studio into a fort he cannot enter.” She looked at him. “I will not call you a liar. I will not call myself broken. I will not ask paintings to pick sides.”
Daniel’s list was neat. “I will not call my mother before I speak to you,” he said. Áine’s eyebrow rose and he sighed, having told on himself. “I will sit with you while evidence is evidence rather than trying to decide what it is beforehand. I will remember aloud rather than only in my head. I will not decide you are ill because I am scared.”
Áine folded the cards and set them at the corner of her desk as if protecting them for later. “The tape,” she said. “Bring it next time if you like. Or don’t. But remember this. Memory is not a camera; it is a poem we keep editing. Two people can hold different drafts of the same day without either being immoral. Our job—mine with you—is to make meaning without bayonets.”
In the hall, after, Ciara leaned into the cool paint and closed her eyes. Daniel touched her shoulder with the flinch of a person not wanting to touch a bruise. “Tea?”
“Always.”
They went home by the river as if the city might line up their insides. A man threw a ball for a dog with the kind of faith that only exists between species. At the Ha’penny a busker sang something with a chorus so certain it embarrassed itself. She wanted to be inside a certainty like that. She wanted to feel their day catch.
In the studio the cracked mirror was still a problem. She turned it face to the wall and immediately missed the trouble of it, so turned it back. The tape deck sat, patient. The lamp made a small weather all its own on the table.
There was a notebook under her brushes with the elastic thick from being bitten. She took it to the kitchen table because the washing machine wasn’t on but the table had its promise anyway. Halfway through the book there was a page that had been carefully torn out and just as carefully returned, the rip mended with three neat strips of tape that weren’t her tape. On the returned page, two handwritings looked at each other as if across a small room.
The first was hers, and read: April 14: we were there; tell nobody; it’s sweeter when it’s ours first. The second was like the line in the sketchbook, square engineer letters, claiming: Didn’t go. You dreamed me into it. —D.
“Again,” she said to the empty flat. She stood so fast the chair hiccuped against the tiles. “Daniel?”
He came, wiping his hands on a tea towel he was too proud of. She slid the book to him. He took the kitchen chair like a barrister in a show who would soon object to something on principle.
“I did not write that,” he said, but softer now. “Ci, I didn’t. Look—the D is wrong.”
“It’s your D,” she said, and then caught herself and remembered the list: I will not decide what evidence is before it is. She put her hands under her thighs and sat on them like a child caught near a biscuit tin. “Who would write it, then? Who knows where I keep the book?”
“People come here,” he said, sounding like he knew no such thing. “Niamh has a key. Your collector came last week, the one with the stories about the border. Tom brings cables and leaves with ours. Mum—” He stopped. “Mum has been here when we weren’t.”
“To water the plant that despises us,” Ciara said. She looked at the book and felt equal parts fury and relief. Fury because a boundary had been passed. Relief because if someone was writing inside their days, then she hadn’t simply mislaid them on her own. “Do we ask her?”
“We can.” He sounded careful, like a man stepping onto a new-built bridge. “Or we can change the locks and make tea and decide we’re being sensible.”
“Sensible can wait. Ask her.”
Maura came round with two containers of stew and a face that said she had not interfered with anything and would never. When she saw the notebook she arranged her mouth as if the photograph of a mouth might serve until her real one caught up.
“No,” she said immediately. “I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t write in a woman’s place. That’s like using another person’s sacrament.”
“Did you come in when we were out?” Daniel asked, mild as milk.
“Not since Monday week,” she said. “You asked me to let the plumber in. He was handsome. Or I’ve lowered my standards with age; who can say. I watered the… those droopy ones.”
“Pothos,” Ciara said, because naming made it less easy to lie to herself about what lived with her. “Did you touch the books?”
“I put one under the leg of the little table because it wobbled. I put it back. If that’s a sin.
“You didn’t write this?” Daniel asked, showing her the square careful line. “You didn’t think it would calm things down to be on paper?”
“Is that what you think I do?” Maura asked, her voice acquiring cold. “No. I think I make dinners and I scrape gravy off plates and I try not to say I told you so when people do what I warned them they would. I think I live in the wake of you, keeping water from getting into the engine. If someone is writing in your book, child, it isn’t me. Do you think I’d choose that G?” She sniffed. “It leans like it’s drunk.”
When she had gone Ciara sat on the floor with the book and the page that had left and returned and tried to inhabit the hours it would’ve taken another hand to become his. She tried on the thought that Daniel had written it and forgotten writing it and hated that thought so much she wrote over it: I will not call you a liar. I will not. The words made their own trap if she looked too long. She closed the book and slid it under the chair and put a boot on the chair’s rung as if she were guarding a small domestic animal with bad habits.
The text came late, when lamps have made a town believe in its own safety. Did you listen?—A. Then, as if A had waited to see the three dots of reply and lost faith, another: If you want proof, check your phone backups for April. Look under a different name.
She showed Daniel. They stood shoulder to shoulder in the dark with the glow of her phone making them half-lit conspirators. She wasn’t organised, not in a way that would pass an audit, but she did keep backups because she had learned how it felt to lose. April sat there like a neat box. Under it, names she hadn’t made: 2021-04-B, 2021-04-ALT, 14-04-ACHILL. Her thumb trembled and chose. The album opened to three photos only. In the first, the path and the sea and the two of them as in the print, but without the watch on his wrist. In the second, the same, but with the watch and a different sky. In the third, the same again, and his jacket brown. The horizon shifted a degree between them; the gulls held their wings differently as if coached. The timestamps all agreed with themselves and not each other.
“Someone did this,” he said, both angry and fascinated. “Someone changed these. Or—and I hate this—someone took three days and made them into one and stuck it in your head.”
“Which someone would do that?” she asked. “And why would they hate us so tidily?”
She opened the first. The metadata said KEELEDGE_2021_APR14—K. The second said KEELEDGE_2021—J. The third said KEELEDGE_FINAL. The K and J sat like initials and refused to expand.
“Who is K?” Daniel asked.
“Keel,” she said, relief at knowing something almost joyful. “Keel Strand. That’s—Achill. J is…” A person rose in her mind with a scarf that had its own opinions. “June.”
“June who?”
“June Keane,” she said slowly. “The lady at the B&B who told us her husband spoke to angels. There was a J stitched on the tea towels. Or there wasn’t.” She pressed her fingers to her temples. “Daniel.”
“Ring Aoife,” he said. “She’d think this is fun. She’d know someone who thinks this is fun for a living.”
Aoife answered on the second ring sounding like a city that had learned new rules. “Rotterdam,” she said by way of greeting. “Everything’s a circle until it isn’t.”
“A tape turned up at my flat,” Ciara said. “And photographs that don’t agree with themselves. Did you—” She hadn’t meant to accuse; it came out as an accusation anyway.
“Yes,” Ciara said. The word did its best and barely arrived. “I called it The Archive because I am original.”
“You made a call for submissions last March. You asked people to send tapes or files of their beginnings and middles and almosts. You asked for lies too. Do you remember?”
“I… did I?” Her hand went to her throat. The pulse there felt like a man running. “I had a folder called Beginnings. I had a list of names. But—”
“A,” Ciara said. The letter stood up and looked at her. “A for Archive.”
“Or A for Aoife,” Aoife said wryly. “But not this time. I’m not your ghost. I have enough of my own. I can ask around. I can bin the internet and see if your call-out still lives under some couch. But listen to me. You cannot handle this alone. You’re too polite to your own ghosts. Bring a friend when you go through files. Bring me on video. Bring your boring, handsome man.”
“He is not—”
“I’m sure he’s a revelation. Bring him.”
They hung up with two I love yous of old make. Daniel rested his forehead lightly against her temple as if trying to print himself there. “If you built a project,” he said, muffled, “then some part of you could be building it around us now. Not out of malice. Out of habit. You collect. You stack evidence like blankets. You keep people warm who forgot they were cold. You could be keeping us warm beyond what we can bear.”
“I didn’t stitch a watch onto your wrist,” she said, but without venom. She was tired of being an edge. “If I built something, it was to put a net under love, not to throw it over a man.”
He nodded. “Let’s find June.”
June Keane’s B&B existed online as if it had always been a website: a photo of tea in a conservatory, a plant that looked like it had gossip. She answered the next morning in a voice that remembered jokes before the punchline. “We had a couple with your names in April that year,” she said, delighted. “He had a hat he hated and she looked like she knew it was art, what they were. They kept each other like a prayer.”
Ciara put a hand against the table because she had become the sort of person the table held up. “That was us.”
“And November too,” June said. “After a bad patch you didn’t mention. You held hands like people who had learned about tides the hard way. I gave you the blue room. He burned himself on the stove and swore very gently. He said he didn’t like to upset angels.”
Daniel closed his eyes and let the idea that he could be a person who spared angels sit in the room between them. “Did we—did we send you anything? Recordings? Or ask you to record us?”
“I have a drawer,” June said. “I was a wedding photographer before photographs got too thin. I keep bits. Poltroons and parsons and people who never picked up their prints because seeing them meant it had happened. I keep a tape of the sea between the rocks because a man put a microphone there once and ran off to stop his child falling in. I keep a message on an old answering machine of a woman saying, ‘It’s me. Keep the room. Hold it for me. I’m not sure who I’ll be when I get there but keep the room.’ I thought it was you, but it might have been a ghost. I like ghosts. They mind the place.”
“Did we leave you copies?” Ciara asked.
“You posted me a tape last winter with a note that said, ‘If we forget, will you remember us to ourselves?’ I thought it was poetry, which is useless except when it isn’t.” June chuckled. “You also left a photograph of yourselves with the brown jacket. Handsome in it.”
When she hung up, the room altered. A thing that had not been given permission had become true and asked to be let in. They stared at each other as if they had not met, and then hugged like people who had met too often to do it wrong. He was shaking. He did not look like a man who enjoyed winning.
“We went,” she said into his collar. “We went, Dan.”
“We did,” he said. Then, after a minute, the thing that would be the first crack in a later glass: “But there is a tape of us not knowing, and photographs that disagree with themselves, and a notebook that edits on its own. So we also didn’t. Or we also do not now. Both may be true. Both may be happening to us. I don’t know what to do with that.”
“We listen,” she said. “We keep listening.”
They took the tape back to Áine. The therapist put it into a modern machine that pretended it was old, and when Side A ended she pressed rewind and when Side B reached the place where Maura mentioned Covid she pressed pause and asked, entirely without venom, “Were you sick in April?”
They looked at each other. “I had it in January,” he said. “Back when tests were rationed and Mum left soup on the step like a fairy.”
“I had it in March,” she said. “I was fine by April. I painted an entire week.”
“We could both be right about our bodies and wrong about our days,” Áine said. “We’re greedy little editors; we tidy. But this—” She rewound a fraction, played five seconds, and stopped. “This is where the voice that sounds like Daniel says ‘We’ll go,’ but you, Ciara, remember him saying ‘We were there.’ That friction is our gold. Stay there. What is it like, the moment you hear him not be who you remember?”
Ciara tasted metal. “Like I’m being asked to mourn a person who is standing in front of me handing me tea.”
“And for you?”
“Like I’m being accused of a crime I can’t prove I didn’t plan because everyone knows I’m good at making plans,” he said, dry. “Like if I say ‘We didn’t go,’ I am also saying ‘You are unwell.’ I am not willing to say that. But if I say ‘We did,’ and I don’t remember, then what else don’t I remember. And who am I then, if I don’t get to keep the way I keep things.”
Áine nodded as if someone had done their homework. “This is the midpoint,” she said, not to them but to the story as if it were a patient. “You have both found a piece of evidence that contradicts the shape of your love, and you have to decide if you are brave enough to let love survive not being tidy.”
“We are,” Ciara said, reflex. Then, softer, in case the day was listening, “We are.”
She started leaving voice notes for herself because hearing her own mouth make shapes was proof of existence at a time when mirrors were unreliable. In one of them, recorded outside the pharmacy because the sun looked like it had made an effort, she said, “If you’re listening to this, you’re me, and if you’re me, you can stand inside two versions of a day without tearing. You can. It won’t make neat paintings, but you can.” She sent it to nobody, then to herself, then to a folder called PRACTICAL.
Niamh texted: You’re frightening Saoirse with all your looking at corners. Come for stew. Bring that man.
At dinner, Saoirse watched them with the frankness of a child who has accidentally seen a rehearsal for an argument. “Mum says grownups have two brains,” she said. “One for people and one for the bin.”
“Your mother is wise,” Daniel said gravely. “The bin one is bigger.”
Tom poured wine like a person who would rather fix a clock than hear it chime. “Look,” he said, when the plates had been scraped. “I think you’re both perfectly right and perfectly impossible. There. My contribution.”
Niamh snorted. “Say what you mean: you want them to break up so we can stop having to remember whose coat belongs to which month.”
“I don’t,” Tom said, offended. “They’re my favourite television.”
After dinner, when the grownups took plates to the sink and Saoirse put on her donkey head to rehearse the pirate’s donkey saga, Niamh took Ciara’s elbow to the hall where old coats smelled like old rain. “Are you all right? I mean truly. Not artist all right. Human.”
“I keep finding versions of us and they all ask to sit down,” Ciara said. “It’s crowded in there. I don’t know who to feed first.”
“Feed the one who takes the least,” Niamh said. “The rest can behave themselves till tea.” She kissed Ciara’s forehead. “I will love you even if you put a hat on the wrong month. I will love you even if you forget my birthday and send me a present for your own. I will love you even if Daniel is a photograph.”
“He looks well in photographs,” Ciara said, grateful for the little ledge of humour. “He has an honest skull.”
On their way home, the night smelled like chips and rain, which is to say, alive. At the landing window they both paused. The cassette was gone. In its place: a small square envelope, cream, expensive enough to be ridiculous. Inside: a single photograph of their kitchen table. On the table, the shared diary lay open, at a page she did not yet know. Across it two hands wrote: one hers, one not hers. The caption, typed, said: WE WRITE TO KEEP FROM DISAPPEARING.
“Someone is in our house,” Daniel said, not loudly and not panicked and not like a man marvelling at an art prank, but like an engineer whose bridge has made a noise he does not accept.
They went in. Nothing had moved. Everything had moved. The book on the chair’s rung sat as she’d left it. When she opened it, the page in the photograph existed. Two handwritings, two pens. Her line read: I will wake tomorrow and I will choose him again. The other line read: I will wake tomorrow and correct her. —D.
“No,” he said. He sat down very carefully and put his head in his hands to contain what his hands could not. “I did not write that.”
“Then someone is writing you,” she said, and felt sick because the thought was acid. “A writes you. A writes us.”
She found herself, absurdly, heartbroken for the book. It had wanted to be a place where she met herself without an audience, and now it was a stage. She closed it and slid it under the chair again as if doors mattered.
In the middle of the night she woke to the sound of the washing machine. She lay still and let the sound tell her the story of its spin. The machine doesn’t care what you put in it; it will do what it is built to do until something breaks. She went to the kitchen and found Daniel sitting on the floor, back against the cupboards, watching socks orbit a centre. He looked up as if she’d come in the middle of a prayer.
“I used to believe,” he said, “that love means filing the day properly, so that when you open the drawer the right thing is there. I am having to learn it also means holding you while you tell me a day I cannot find in a drawer and not asking you to stop because it makes me feel untidy.” He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. “Will you hold me while I learn that.”
She sank down and tucked herself into the place he made. The spin hit its climax and eased. “We will make new drawers,” she said. “We will label them badly and find things anyway.”
In the morning a message waited, from a number that hid its face. Last night was sloppy of me. Forgive it. —A. Then: If you want the clean version, come to 22 Henrietta Street, Thursday, 8 p.m. Bring the brown jacket. Bring the tape. Leave the mother at home.
He exhaled a laugh that had no humour in it. “That narrows the suspects to everyone we know.”
“Henrietta Street,” she said. “The museum of tenements.” The place where whole families had pressed their lives onto too little wood and called it full. “Rooms where too many memories fit.”
“We’re not going,” he said automatically.
“We are,” she said, because whatever A was doing, she was done being a table someone wrote on without asking. “We don’t have a brown jacket.”
He looked at the photo stuck to the fridge of him wearing one and made a face neither of them recognised. “We’ll borrow one.”
They did not tell Maura. They did tell Áine.
Thursday came like a person showing up early. The street was a formal face holding too much life behind it. Inside, the air knew stories. The caretaker, a woman with hair cut like intention, nodded them through with a look Áine had arranged. A waited in a back room that had been a bedroom when bedrooms had lots of jobs.
A was not Aoife, and not Maura, and not a stranger. A was June. She stood by a dressing table whose mirror had seen more than a person should and gave them the kind of smile people save for when they have been expecting to be hated and are not. “I am sorry,” she said without preface. “I have been trying to give you back the right shape of your beginning. I have made a mess doing it.”
“You’re in Achill,” Daniel said blankly, because when the world moves, you say ridiculous things to see if talking brings it back.
“My niece lives here,” June said. “She’s doing a degree in remembering. Museums. She told me about your call-out last year. She told me you had put your own story inside other people’s to see if it felt truer from a distance. She told me you have stopped answering email. I came because I have a drawer.” She gestured to the dressing table. “I thought maybe the drawer knew what to do.”
“You left the tape,” Ciara said. “And the photo. And my book—”
“No. Not your book.” June looked appalled. “God save us, child, no. I’m a sinner but I’m not that. The tape—yes. You left me a copy last November without knowing you had—you put it in a biscuit tin and said, ‘June, keep this. I don’t know if I’ll be brave next spring.’ I didn’t know what you meant. Then your call-out came past me, the niece, the museum, and it all looked like one song in three keys. I sent the tape to your house because you looked like you had forgotten where your lungs were. I thought another voice might remind you.”