Even from the foot of the stairs, Maureen smells it. The drink. The unmistakable odor of trouble that emanates from a brain pickled in spirits. The better choice would be for her to go about her business, put the groceries away, dust a bit, let him sleep it off. She’s seventy-three now and the stairs sometimes make her hips burn. But she takes off her jacket, goes up anyway. She wants an explanation.
She finds her grandson Brian tucked under the navy-blue comforter in the bedroom she lets him use. Hardly bigger than a walk-in closet, it remains his, whenever he needs it, no matter how many unplanned turns his life takes.
But it isn’t always about need. Even now, in his late thirties, Brian sometimes just wants to be with her, the way he did when he was little, when he’d plead with her to come and get him. Danny, Brian’s father, her firstborn, roared and stomped when he was in a rage, like a wrecking ball spinning from the center of the place, leaving his wife, Kate, sprawled on the carpet somewhere, one more casualty in the chaos of smashed lamps, broken dishes, and trembling tots clutching crib railings or hiding under beds.
“Grandma, come get me,” Brian would whisper into the phone, his plea as familiar as a rosary, and she would.
The bond between them came like something unexpected, a wish she didn’t know she had, a vague hope that she might get it right this time. The years passed and at Maureen’s lace-curtained house Brian could play Metallica and Nine Inch Nails at the highest tinny volume her stereo could manage, and when she got home from work and the neighbors complained, she’d turn her back to them, mutter about how tolerance was a lost art.
The tiny room is stuffy and still, no movement beneath the comforter, even after Maureen speaks his name. A bottle lies empty beside the bed, along with the glass from the upstairs bathroom. The blinds are open, morning sunlight everywhere, but the window is closed, which surprises her, because Brian makes a mission of letting air into the house when he visits, sometimes even when it’s raining, as if desperate for some kind of equilibrium between where he’s been and how it feels inside.
Bitterness rises like acid in her throat, and she struggles with what she’ll say to him. He’d been sober since the accident, almost four weeks, the longest stretch in years. She steps closer to the bed, not wanting to see his face but convinced she has no right not to. She believes she’s somehow responsible for what’s become of him, not just the wild Irish DNA he inherited, but her inability to find ways to steer him in another direction, her readiness to cover up his mistakes, even when they were deadly. She’s watched him fight the drink and lose, watched his innocence recede, until, to others, no trace remains of anything but guilt, a guilt she’d hoped to spare him.
She wonders if the accident haunts him, as it does her—that moment when she pulled him away from the young girl’s side, a girl who was surely dead, just a slim, small figure tangled in a shrub, barely noticeable in the thick pinks of spring. The swerving tire tracks darkened the road, marks of desperation. Her bike landed yards away, the breeze ruffling the happy pastel streamers on the twisted handlebars. Nothing to be done. The area was deserted, a bucolic country road; no houses marked the horizon. She’d appeared without warning. It wasn’t Brian’s fault. If they’d reported it, he would have been blamed. Because of the drink on him so early in the day.
Brian lies flat on his back, eyes closed, arms outstretched and palms up, like a crooner finishing a ballad. She places her hand on his forehead, but he doesn’t move. He may have passed out, but would he look like this, so pale and slack? Drinking can do that. She saw it with her husband, with her father, with Danny. But Brian is resilient, the type who gets himself to work the morning after. His embrace can make you believe a boss will change his mind, a car isn’t really totaled.
She says his name, but he doesn’t respond, so she says it again louder, then grabs his shoulders to shake him. Nothing. Frightened, she takes his hand to feel for a pulse, but she’s shaking so badly she can’t feel anything. She crouches next to him, turns her head to rest her ear on his chest, trying to hear his heart beat. She’s not sure she does, but she thinks she feels his chest rise, and she prays he’s breathing. She gets up, stumbling, and heads downstairs to get her phone.
By the time the ambulance arrives, she’s upstairs with him again, and she must go back down to get the door, her legs weak and uncooperative. She follows the emergency team up the stairs, as if they know how to save him, though she’s surely the most experienced in this parade of rescuers.
•
Maureen glares at the nurse, impatient for her to go away. She’s slow, cursed with poor posture and a pursed mouth from too many shifts spent in drunk tanks. Maureen has seen her type here before, possibly the very same woman. She finishes her routine at the next bedside, unsurprised by anything she’s found, and pulls the thin, beige drapery back into place. The cold, indifferent sound of the metal rings along the pole mocks the need for privacy.
Brian’s eyes are closed. He looks restful, and Maureen is relieved he had no seizures this time. Her great-grandson Eric stands beside her at the bed railing, so tall for fifteen, staring down at his father. “Dad,” he says.
Brian grunts, opens his eyes. Maureen’s hair is pulled up, and harsh light from the ceiling filters through the loose, gray tendrils. “Goddammit,” he chokes out, a lame attempt to shout. “What’s he doing here?” He pounds his fist into the mattress, points a shaky finger at the door, insists Maureen take him away.
“He’s your son.”
“I said get him out of here.”
Eric has seen his father in this condition before, but as Maureen walks the boy out, she hears his breaths coming in little shallow gasps, as if he’s discovered something he’s powerless to change. She knows that feeling, the shock of it. It returns often now, unexpectedly, as raw and desperate as it was the moment she saw that the girl’s blond hair was matted with blood, that her leg was obviously broken, that she couldn’t possibly survive.
Outside the room a long metal bench rests against the wall and Maureen tells Eric to wait for her there. She watches him lumber over to it, collapse against its rigid back.
She returns to Brian, her pale lips pressed together to keep from saying what she learned long ago is pointless to tell a drunk. How can you treat your son this way? She holds on to the bed railing. She wants to sit down, but Brian doesn’t ask her to. All he wants to know is the time.
“The time? Now you’re worried about being late? You should have checked your watch twenty-four hours ago.”
“You had no business bringing him here.”
“Eric is my business. And he ought to be yours.”
Brian clenches his fists. “You shouldn’t have brought him here.”
“Keep your voice down, for Chrissake. He’ll hear you. He’s right outside.”
“Why would you do something like that?”
“He was worried. He wanted to see you.” There is some truth in that, but there’s more to it. Eric is suspended again. Fighting. This time with tenth-graders, older but not bigger. One of the boys needed two stitches from falling against a drinking fountain. Eric is six-feet already, eyed by the football coach, who encourages him to stop cutting classes, get passing grades.
“So you bring him to a place like this? The smell alone is enough to—”
“He hasn’t seen you for two days. He was scared.” Nothing in her tone sounds apologetic. Maybe that’s why she gets no answer. “So was I,” she adds, though she suspects it will make little difference to him right now.
She’s scared for Eric too. She knows he counts on her to defend him, forgive him, just the way his father did, and Danny before that. Brian grew brazen in the luxury of it. By junior year, he was bringing his friends to her house, boys his mom didn’t approve of. A few of them were older, served in Afghanistan right after high school, and when they returned, they introduced him to a different kind of trouble—hard drinking that led to short stints in nowhere jobs. But he parted ways with them before things got too bad, went to college, started traveling. The Midwest. Canada. Short stays in small towns where odd jobs lay around like leftovers.
Brian would come back to Brooklyn, describe what skies were like without buildings in the way, roads as quiet as the woods beside them, the smell of wild vegetation, the sight of places undisturbed by the rules needed to govern greed and desire. He liked the Northwest, the mountains. He brought a woman home, lovely and lost, carrying his child. Maureen did not welcome this change and disguising it was pointless. Brian could tell, because she kept her distance from the girl, a tall blonde Nordic type, too quiet, too pliant. Maureen wanted Brian to be happy, but this girl was a spark that would never catch. She wondered how long it would be before the girl could take her eyes off Brian and see how far off course she’d gone.
Maureen sought time with the baby alone, as she had with Brian. The girl stayed until the child was two, just as lost as she was at the start. Maureen quit her job until the boy could start preschool. She treasured those months, though they took a toll on her back. Eric—she hated the name—was big for his age and always pleading to be picked up, such a darlin’ boy. Maureen obliged him, wanted him to feel protected.
Brian pushes the sheet aside, as if to get up. “What time is it, for Chrissake?”
She steps back to get a better look at the clock on the wall above them. “A little after three,” she tells him. He’s already back on the pillow, wincing from pain.
“Shit.” He digs his palms into his eyes. She sees there’s more bothering him than a bad pint.
“What’s going on?” she says. The fellow in the next bed, no more than four feet away, stirs again. His moaning has been nearly constant. “Are they short on morphine here, or what?” she mumbles, glancing in the neighbor’s direction. Brian’s muffled laughter comes out like a snort.
Maureen plants herself in the chair beside the bed. “So,” she says.
“So?”
“So he thought you’d show up at his game yesterday, with Kate.”
“I didn’t make any promises.”
“That excuses it?”
“You hear me making excuses?”
“No, because there aren’t any.”
She feels her face get hot. The motherly concern she felt for him when they brought him here this morning has morphed into something else, something that makes her want to shake him. How could she have expected him to realize what he’d done, how he’d hurt his boy needlessly? She wants him to be sorry for that. But that’s not the way he treats his mistakes. He’s become like his father now. The rare apology, if it’s offered at all, is given in passing, buried quickly in excuses. Even after the girl was killed, his regret seemed like an afterthought. “You should have driven home, not me,” he wailed. “If you weren’t so afraid of the fucking interstate, it never would have happened.”
The moaner in the next bed calls out someone’s name. “Joanie . . . Joanie . . .”
“Does he never stop whingin’?” Maureen mutters.
“Joanie . . . Joanie . . .”
“She’s gone out for cigarettes,” she tells him, twisting to look over her shoulder. There’s a woman at his bedside now and beside her a young girl with hair so blond it startles her, because it’s tied back in something blue. Just like the girl they left on the road.
“Dad,” the girl says. “It’s okay. It’s me, Joanie. I’m here.”
Brian looks over at her, and Maureen wonders if he sees it too, how much she looks like the girl on the bike. The pale hair, the white hoodie. The dead girl’s was unzipped and twisted around her shoulders, darkly blood stained.
“I’m here, Dad,” Joanie tells the man again, but her voice trembles as she reaches for him. They’ve strapped the man down to keep him still and she seems uncertain where to touch him. She takes her father’s hand in hers, then lets it go, as if so small a tenderness is not enough. She leans forward, places her hands at his temples and kisses his forehead. Maureen can’t bring herself to look away—even when the girl begins to sob, even when the woman tries to pull her off the man. The girl jerks away from the woman’s grasp. “Leave us alone,” she tells her. Sobbing, she wipes her eyes, smearing mascara across her cheeks, like a toddler who’s gotten into her mother’s make-up bag.
“Look what you’ve done. You need a tissue.” The woman digs into her bag, cursing under her breath, unable to find what she wants.
Maureen spots a box of tissues on Brian’s night table and gets to her feet. She takes the box to the far side of the man’s bed, where the two are standing, offers them the tissues.
The woman takes the box and looks away, mumbling a thank you, but the girl meets Maureen’s gaze. Her eyes are very blue, glistening from tears. “You’re very kind,” she whispers, still crying, and Maureen feels something twist in her chest. She wants to answer, but she can’t move, can’t take her eyes off the girl, such a fine, delicate thing. What right does God have to inflict such pain on an innocent child? What right did Brian have? She nods to the girl, because she still can’t speak. The girl smiles, as if she recognizes who Maureen must be, a harmless old lady, who only means well. Maureen turns away from her, fearing she’ll lose control, confess the truth. I’m not very kind, not kind at all.
Maureen lowers herself carefully into the chair at Brian’s bedside. The pain in her chest softens, spreads warm and mean through her stomach. He stares at her, examines her really, and she wonders if he’ll finally say something about the accident after all this time. “There’s something I better tell you.” He speaks tentatively, as if testing the strength of an old plank that might not bear his weight. She’s afraid he’s about to blame her for what they did, claim he, at least, was too drunk to think straight.
“What is it?”
“It’s about Dad.”
“Danny?” She doesn’t want to hear it.
“He had an awful lot to drink.”
“Is this supposed to be news?”
“Gran, you need to listen. This isn’t good.”
Maureen folds her hands in her lap. No, with Danny, it can’t be good.
“We were drinking last night. Together. Into the morning.”
“And what did you think would come of that brilliant choice?”
“Gran.”
She clasps her hands more tightly together, willing herself not to scold him. But she wants to. She wants to tell him to look at this girl, this Joanie, and see what he’s done, see the Joanie they left twisted in that shrub.
“We wound up at Bully’s, his old haunt in Bay Ridge, near the freight yards.” Brian takes on a far-away look, as if picturing the scene. “He was okay at first, spewing his shit about Trump, comical really. People were laughing at him.”
She knows the place. Danny has taken him there before. He took him there the night of the accident, insisted he’d never seen Brian so upset. Danny knew nothing about what happened that day. Neither did Kate. Maureen had sworn Brian to secrecy. By the time the girl was found—late that night—Brian had already had the car detailed. Maureen insisted that might not be enough and later paid for the Honda to be repainted. A story ran in the paper, naming the parents, their son, the girl—Brittany. She was fourteen, finishing eighth grade. They lived in Mamaroneck. Maureen found a phone number online of the place where the mother worked. She entered the number in her Contacts list but never called it. The clipping is still in her wallet, tucked neatly behind her license.
“What possessed you to go with him—”
“Will you listen? When I got to the house to pick Mom up for the game, he was giving her a hard time, really cranking it up.”
“About what?”
“Does it matter? I figured I’d take him out, let him cool off. We had some time. We’d make it to the game by the third inning.” Brian scrapes his hands over his face, rubs his palms into his eyes, as if that might help him explain. “But in the bar he started in about Eric, about Mom. I was pretty drunk by then myself. He got loud. They made us leave. So we walked over to the yard, sat in a freight car.”
“How did you get into the yard?”
“He knew the guard. He’s been there for years, since before Dad left the job. We sat talking with the guy for a while. Dad told him he wanted to walk me around inside, show me where the barges come in to load the containers. It was like he missed the place. So we sat there in a freight car.”
“So what’s all the fuss about?”
“He fell asleep.”
“In the freight car?”
“Yes.”
“And you left him?”
“I must have.”
“Well, he’ll wake up soon enough, find his way home. He’s staggered home from there a thousand times.”
“And what if he doesn’t? He’s got no—”
“So what?” She wants to curse him, demand to know how leaving a brute like Danny in a stupor could be worse than leaving a child for dead on the side of the road.
“He’ll wind up on the barge, for fuck’s sake. That car gets loaded onto the barge in an hour. He’ll wind up in Jersey City.”
Maureen’s laughter is so mocking and so loud the rest of the ward goes silent until the nurse’s footsteps clop toward them. Maureen stands up. There was a time, not so long ago, when she would have helped her son, gone to the yard to get him, save him once again from his own mess. But she can’t do it. She has to stop this.
The nurse appears at the foot of the bed. “We need to keep it down,” she says, and Maureen wants to laugh again, ask her if a good joke isn’t exactly what this place needs.
“For fuck’s sake,” Brian mumbles.
Maureen gives the nurse a glance imperial enough to send her away.
“Your father will do well in Jersey City,” she tells Brian.
“He hasn’t got his inhaler with him.”
This piece of information, this detail of Danny’s carelessness, makes her chest tighten with fear as she pictures him desperate, struggling for breath. But anger rises and her jaw tenses up. How are some allowed to live a life of unlimited neglect? Somehow they figure out that others will take care of business, keep them from having to face the pain they cause, face any consequences at all.
“I’m sure half of Brooklyn is worried sick about him,” she says.
“Gran, think about Mom, what happens to her if—”
“I’ve got more important things to take care of. So do you.”
“I’m fine, for Chrissake.”
“Happy to hear it. Your son’s not.”
Brian raises himself onto his elbows, his thick brows nearly meeting, and Maureen is reminded of her brute of a husband and the look he’d take on when he suspected something hadn’t gone his way. “What do you mean?”
“He’s suspended. Fighting again.” She crosses her arms, instinctively ready to defend the boy, though she knows Eric could have avoided it. He’s told her the truth, that he knew the boys were afraid of him. He could have walked away. “I’m heading up to school after this to meet with the principal.”
“O’Connor?”
“Himself.”
“He’s an asshole.”
“No question. He’s also in charge of deciding if we have to send Eric to public school. This is his second suspension.”
“O’Connor is a lot of hot air. It’ll all blow over. They’re hungry for every tuition dollar they can get.”
“And what if it doesn’t? Would it hurt you to show some interest?”
“I need you to get over to the yard, get Dad off that train. If you leave now, you can get there in time.”
She recognizes that tone—the same one Danny would use, and her husband—there’s no mistaking it, the certainty that she’ll do as she’s bidden. “What a relief,” Maureen says, pulling her sweater closed. “If I head out now, I can save the day.”
“What the hell’s gotten into you?” Brian hisses.
She glances over at the girl. She’s sitting on the edge of the bed, shoulders slumped, quiet now. Maureen turns to Brian one last time, because she knows what she needs to do. She looks for a sign, any indication, that he might be ready to do something for his son, for the girl they killed. “What shall I tell Eric?” she says, positioning the strap of her bag over her shoulder.
He rubs his head. His hands seem stiff, his fingernails dirty. “About what?”
The question stuns her. How did he become so callous, so self-absorbed? Was this her doing, bit by bit, the excuses she’d offer, the asylum she’d provide? “About the girl, the one we left in the bushes,” she says. “What shall I tell him about that?”
Brian narrows his eyes, as if her image has blurred. She’s tempted to let the silence speak for her, but that won’t do. “We have to make amends,” she whispers.
He lifts his head from the pillow, braces himself on his elbows again. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about that child. Her parents.”
“For fuck’s sake, it’s over and done with.”
“It’s not over for me. Or for them.”
“Stop it,” he tells her. “Just stop it.”
“I’ll go then,” she says. And before he can say any more about Danny, about anything, she’s at the door. Gone.
The air in the hall is cooler, fresher. But there’s no one on the bench. She calls Eric’s name, then calls again, before moving down the hall to the exit. She digs in her bag for her phone, finds his number. “Where are you? Call me.”
She’s outside on the sidewalk when he returns the call. “Where are you?”
“Home,” he says, and she thinks he might mean her house rather than his own. It takes her a second to realize she does not want that. She knows she should remind him they’re expected to meet with Principal O’Connor in less than fifteen minutes. Instead she waits, wondering if he’ll say it first.
“Should I come with you to the yard? I heard Dad ask you to go to the yard for Grandpa.”
She pictures Eric outside the hospital room door, listening to his father worry about a man who gets a hard-on from hurting people, like his father before him. She feels heat rising in her chest, in her neck. Her throat tightens. How well they think they know her. How predictable she’s become.
She watches the people passing the hospital, a man in a flannel shirt, holding a box on his shoulder; a woman pushing an empty stroller, a child skipping alongside her; a young man walking two large, unruly dogs. The wind is picking up, the sky a white gray.
“I’m not going to the yard,” she says.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s none of my business.”
She’s sure Eric is stunned by this, puzzled. Normally, she would feel compelled to explain. But she’s already past that. Her complicity is undeniable, a stench she can’t bear to breathe in anymore.
“Mr. O’Connor is expecting to see you. If you leave now, you can get there in time. Tell him your dad had to go to the emergency room.”
“By myself?” She hears the sharp breath he takes in. “Aren’t you coming?”
“No.”
“It wasn’t my fault, Gran. They’re always blaming me for stuff.”
Fault. How irrelevant that idea has become to the men in her life, how integral to hers, stalking her, owning her. “You can tell Mr. O’Connor that.”
Eric hangs up on her. She pulls at the neckline of her sweater to relieve the tightness spreading across her chest. She struggles against calling him back, but she doesn’t.
She joins the passersby on the street, the random parade of people moving along, set on their errands, their appointments, their chores for the day. She feels unsteady, uncertain, but she steps into the entryway of a small bookstore, an enclave from the wind that’s getting stronger. She wants to be sure she’ll be heard. She clicks on her Contacts list, scrolls down, finds the mother’s number, and makes the call.
–
Mary Ann McGuigan’s short fiction appears in The Sun, Massachusetts Review, North American Review, and many other journals. Her collection Pieces includes stories named for the Pushcart Prize and Sundress Publications’ Best of the Net. That Very Place, her new collection, reaches bookstores in 2025. You’ll find her creative nonfiction in Brevity, The Rumpus, Pithead Chapel, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere. The Junior Library Guild and the New York Public Library rank Mary Ann’s young-adult novels among the best books for teens, and Where You Belong was a finalist for the National Book Award. She loves visitors: www.maryannmcguigan.com.
© 2024, Mary Ann McGuigan
Halfway Down the Stairs 