Free Blue Mercy: A Novel. by Orna Ross

smile, at the satin coverlet so silky against our bare legs, at the good feelings now filling the room, at the daft names we used to have and the naïve people we used to be. A laugh filled with tenderness for our daughter and our own younger selves. For youth itself, its carefree ignorance.
      I was so happy in that moment, that's what I remember, still as I sit here now, in Doolough, writing this. Parenthood might be tough, but we were surviving it. Beneath the squalls and storms of living, despite Brendan's dead-end jobs, even with my poor domestics, we still had love to give each other and our little girl. I was proud of us for that.
    After a while, we went down to the poolside. We had it to ourselves. The sun was low in the sky, the evening glowing orange and still warm. Brendan put on Star's water wings while I lay on a sun-bed, watching. He swung her up onto his shoulders and climbed down the little ladder into the glinting water. This released a memory in me that I'd forgotten, of my father holding me like that on his shoulders, walking us both into the water at the beach. "Ready?" he would ask me, his voice smaller in the wide outdoors than it was in the house and, without waiting for an answer, he walked us in, me on top, him below. I held the sides of his head under me, unsure of my grip, frightened he'd go too far, that the water would come right up over his head and then over me.
    I shook my head. This was 1962, I was here with Brendan, it was Star's anxiety I was feeling. He was gently lowering her into the water, holding her out in front of him like the figurehead of a ship and she was loving it. "More," she whooped whenever he stopped, and off he set again, her chubby little hands slapping the water.
    And then. The breach.
    " Aaaaargh !" Brendan went, a roar as he went down.  
    I don't want to recall any of this now, the story I repeated so often afterwards, how I saw him twitching in the water, then flaying, his face contorted. How I saw Star's face sinking under the surface, and quicker than thought, was in the pool with them, water to my thighs, grabbing her.
    Even now, I can still feel her costume, wet and cold against my chest, and see Brendan thrashing forward, face down, spectacularly splashing until he was just as spectacularly still. And hear the silence that followed, and in it the slap-slap-slap of the lifeguard's bare feet on the tiles, running towards us.

BEREAVED |BIˈRĒV| [ADVERB]
    deprived of a loved one through a profound absence, esp. due to the loved one's death.

    *

    Buzzzzzz.
    "Yes?"
    "It's Iris Cunningham."
    "Come on up."
    I pushed open the door and a tang of must prickled my nostrils. An old carpet, pattern worn to grey all the way up. The bannister looked sticky and I avoided touching it as I climbed up the flight of stairs, and around and up again, and again a third time. I came to the blue door, as described on the telephone, and found a homemade, cardboard sign, inscribed unevenly with black marker: JOSEpH PLoTKIN, PsychoTHerApIst.
    I was about to turn and sneak back down, but the door was ajar and a voice called out, "Com'on in." A billyhick, Southern drawl. I hadn't expected that: my thoughts had been of somebody urban and urbane, with a dark beard and spectacles. Instead, I found a fat man with bushy, black brows that met in the center, over two bulging eyes set too far apart.
    He was seated in an armchair with wooden arms and didn't get up.
    "Miss Cunn-ing-ham?" His drawl made three separate syllables of the name.
    "No, er --" I'd momentarily forgotten my alias. "--I mean, yes."
    "Well now..." He raised one half of his unibrow. "Which would it be: no or yes?"
    "It's 'Ms'," I said, recovering. "Not Miss."
    The unibrow wilted, returning to its rightful place. "Allright-y Ma'am. I'll try to remember that."
    He reached under his chair and brought out a clip-board with a plastic pen dangling on a grubby length of string. "Maybe you'd fill out this here form for me." A registration