The Edge of Lost (3 page)

2

M
urmurs drifted up from the alley. They lured Shan to the window of his uncle’s one-room flat, as they often did this time of night. Every sound was amplified in those dark, empty hours before Dublin settled in for sleep. Or most of it, rather. A few times a week the husband next door would drink through wages meant for food and rent, and he’d stumble home bellowing songs, promptly cut short by his wife’s furious shrills.

Then there were the rats. They’d scratch and scamper well into dawn, between the walls, in nooks and crannies. They were nomads on a constant hunt for food, shelter, and safety. Same as Shan and Uncle Will. And those in the alley below.

The pane too dingy for a decent view, Shan tugged the window upward. Cold air shot through his thinning cotton shirt. The paraffin lamp flickered on the table by the bed. He rubbed his arms against the chill. His wool coat and sweater sagged on a rope strung over the coal stove. The garments, damp after his walk from the pub, released a musty smell.

Shan gazed down the back side of the building, a shabby stack of four bricked floors. A web of laundry linked them to the next set of flats. Each line drooped vacantly in the rain but for one. A widow from the second story had a habit of leaving her sheets out on rainy days, which was most of the year in Ireland. She would drape them like a canopy, attracting a small herd of vagrants, mainly young, from the shadows.

Shan would hear tenants in the halls and stairwell exchanging their disapproval, blaming the widow’s friendship with the landlord—on the word “friendship” they would raise a brow—for leaving them unable to state a complaint. “We’re doing these children no favors,” they would say, “by encouraging a life on the streets. Many are there by choice, you know. They’ll be tinkers and knackers for good, expecting the government to support them forever.”

Their expressions matched the harshness of their words. But Shan was a listener, a studier of more than pitches and accents. And what he heard, as faint as a whisper, was the truth behind their unease: the fear, and the guilt.

No man wants a daily reminder of the hardships that in a blink could be his own, nor to carry the shame of being unable, or unwilling, to help those in need. Such burdens were easier to discard when not planted outside your window.

All the same, Shan couldn’t help but look.

Beneath a roof of linen, the strangers huddled around a fire set in a metal barrel. They held their gloved hands over flames that glowed orange across their faces. All appeared to be boys, Shan’s age or older. Orphanages favored infants and toddlers, as did parents willing to adopt—unless they were seeking free labor. The overflow went to local churches, where girls were given priority for meals and beds. Even in the house of the Almighty, beggars had a pecking order.

Already Shan knew this. He also knew very little prevented him from standing in that queue. The money left from his parents—no doubt the reason his mam’s brother first took him in—had been spent long ago. And when it came to the government’s weekly charitable dole, the few extra shillings his uncle received for fostering Shan hardly made him essential, as Uncle Will told him on a regular basis. One wrong step and he’d be out on the street, his future far more grim. Sure, he could read and write at a level beyond his age, but now, without schooling, without parents …

At the thought of them, Shan felt the weight of their absence, as heavy as stone on his chest. More and more they were fading from his mind. Like people he’d only imagined.

He closed his eyes now and strained to summon his mam: her long auburn curls, her angelic skin. He could almost smell her talcum powder, a sweet lavender scent, and hear the rhythmic creak of her rocker. In their old house in Dunmore, on the coast of County Waterford, she would sway there for hours and read her books—a love she passed down to Shan—and she would send him a wink as he played on the floor with his jacks and marbles and wooden train.

Meanwhile in the evenings, his father—a doctor with silvered temples and a forehead lined with wisdom—would flip through articles in the
Irish Independent
and puff on a hand-carved pipe—

Well. Not his father precisely. Rather, the man Shan had known as his da. Back before the façade had been yanked clean away with the discovery of a letter.

“Jaysus, Mary, Mother o’ God. Are you heatin’ the bloody neighborhood?”

Shan twisted around to find his uncle glaring from the doorway. “Sorry, Uncle Will,” he spouted, and rushed to shut the window. He braced for a verbal lashing, not unlike those he’d received from his teachers, back before his performing schedule replaced schooling altogether.

But Uncle Will simply tossed a paper sack onto the kitchen table. “Open it,” he said with a trace of a slur.

Shan held in place, knowing better than to trust a glimmer of his uncle’s kindness. Same as the fairies from his childhood tales, it could vanish as quick as a snap.

“Go on,” Uncle Will said. “Eat.”

Shan had briefly forgotten how famished he was. He hurried to the table and emptied a U-shaped sausage from the bag. Half as thick as his wrist, it had a greasy sheen and light black crust. One flight up, the butcher’s wife must have retired for the night, unable to stop her husband from trading the last of their supper for a jelly jar of moonshine.

It was one of Uncle Will’s rare talents, brewing the concoction himself with ingredients bought with the dole. He called the drink “liquid gold.” To be used only for bartering, he’d said.

From the current reddening of his eyes, however, it was clear yet again that no rules applied to Uncle Will. Not that this concerned Shan. His sole interest lay with the meat before him, worlds better than the weak broth he’d expected. Only from his proper upbringing did he find the willpower to fetch a plate, utensils, and a glass of water.

As Uncle Will hung his cap and coat over the stove, Shan took a seat at the table. To savor every ounce of flavor, he sliced up small bites and forced himself to chew slowly.

“Would you look at yourself.” Uncle Will reclined in the chair across from him. He mockingly waved around a match and hand-rolled cigarette. “Eatin’ like British royalty, ye are.”

Shan kept his gaze low. Mealtime together was like wading through a swamp: one wrong step could pull you under.

Fortunately a distraction arrived in the form of a cry. The new tenants upstairs had a newborn girl who wailed, according to her mam, whenever hungry or tired or just plain fussy.

“They’d better shut that gob of hers,” Uncle Will muttered. His eyelids sagged as he lit his cigarette, the first deep puff triggering a hacking fit. The cough came from years of factory jobs, every sort imaginable, made worse by his frequent smoking. Shan was to warn him against the habit—Doc O’Halloran had instructed as much during his last visit to the flat.

Before Shan could do so, the coughing subsided. He held out his glass of water, but Uncle Will waved it off, wanting only a draw from his cigarette. The tip glowed orange, like the flames in the alley, and he exhaled a swirl of gray.

As Shan continued to eat, his uncle slogged from the table and dropped onto their creaky bed. The lit cigarette dangled from his lips as he started to doze off.

A fire would do them no favors. Nor, for that matter, would more dirt on their coverlet.

Shan hastened over to crush out the cigarette in an ashtray made of a tin can. Then he yanked off his uncle’s crusty boots. He cringed from the odor, as ripe as sewage on a summer day. Through the ceiling, the baby’s crying grew.

Anxious to finish his meal, Shan went to close the privacy curtain. It was a quilt turned rattier from hot scrubs in the sink, his endless fight against fleas.

“Come back,” Uncle Will mumbled, suddenly roused. He waggled a hand in sloppy movements.

Shan inched forward, but stayed out of reach. He’d first learned his lesson the day he delivered broth to help his uncle’s cold; when Uncle Will burned his tongue, he’d flung the soup at Shan’s legs to show it had been too hot. “Yes, sir?”

“A song. I be wantin’ a song.”

“What sort of—”

“Anything, for Christ’s sake. Just drown out that goddamn babe.”

Until his parents died, Shan had barely known his uncle, making the man’s requests that much harder to fill. A funny tune could amuse him to the point of hearty laughter, but only if the mood was right. Tonight, Shan’s gut said to go with a gentler choice, a song praising Ireland for its soft rolling hills and stony strength.

Halfway through the first verse, his uncle cut in.

“Not that. Another.”

“I … yes, sir …”

Taking a guess, Shan switched to a tune about seeing a girl on the banks of the river Shannon, but again the man interrupted. “Anything ye haven’t bloody sang a hundred times already.”

Just as panic loomed from coming up blank, Shan recalled an old favorite from his mam: a Gaelic lullaby she would sing at bedtime. If he gave it much thought, the lyrics would escape him. He simply opened his mouth, and as if by magic, the song flowed out, transporting Shan to a happier time, a better place.

He was so lost in the moment he didn’t spare a glance at his uncle until the last note. Only then did he catch the upward curve of the man’s mouth, a wisp of a smile. Even the infant upstairs had gone quiet.

“Our gram,” Uncle Will said. “She’d sing that to us as children. And your mother, och, she’d ask for it over and over, she would.” A mix of care and sadness enwrapped his voice, and he released a sigh that seemed to have been held for years.

Shan stared, motionless, shocked by the stranger before him, nearly as much as by the mention of his mam. It was a topic Uncle Will never broached on his own. Silently Shan pleaded with him to continue. But the man said nothing else, and his eyes began to close.

A wave of questions surged in Shan’s mind. There could be consequences to voicing them, as proven just weeks ago, the day he found the letter.

He had been sweeping the floor mindlessly when he knocked over the books inherited from his mam, stacked in the corner. A folded paper slipped from the depths of
Sense and Sensibility
. A novel for ladies, it was among the few Shan had yet to read, despite its being his mam’s favorite. He otherwise would have much earlier found the missive penned by an American sailor.

Shan’s urgency to learn more had led him to ask the sole living person he knew with ties to his mam. Uncle Will, taken by surprise after indulging at a pub, replied in stammering bits: damning the Yank sailor who’d taken advantage of his sister, just a poor teenage girl with no sense to know better.

Uncle Will had paced as he spoke, the speed increasing with his words. “Off on a church mission, she was, making the state he’d left her in all the more unholy. You can’t tell me the shock of it didn’t have a hand in our parents’ demise—God rest their souls. If the good doctor hadn’t found it in his heart to marry Moira, hiding the shame of it all, our family name would surely have been tarnished till the end of time!”

Shan’s world had spun, a torrent of thoughts. Among them was the date on the letter: a month before his own birth. Overwhelmed by what it all might mean, he struggled to find his voice. “Are you saying … my mam and … that they only married because—”

Uncle Will had halted and his glossy eyes widened, as if Shan had interrupted a private talk. Not a second later, the man’s face hardened with fury. “You want to beckon the banshee, do ye!”

Some believed merely speaking of the dead would invite death to the door. Regardless of whether Uncle Will ascribed to such a thing, he ensured an end to the discussion with a fierce slap to Shan’s face. Before Shan could recover, Uncle Will snatched and wadded the letter and threw it into the stove. Had there been enough money for coal that day, the page would have been burned to ashes, instead of rescued by Shan in the wee hours of the night—though perhaps he shouldn’t have bothered. His parents were gone, almost two years passed.

“On account of the consumption,” the nurse had explained. A female patient of Shan’s da had died from the sickness in the lungs, but not before spreading it about. Revenge for not finding the girl a cure, some would claim. Whatever the case, it left Shan’s parents in a terrible state, too terrible to even say good-bye. “Best to remember them as they were,” the nurse had said. “Let bygones be bygones.”

It wouldn’t be as easy as that, but what choice did Shan have? Determined to try, he’d prepared to burn the letter himself. And yet, when the moment came, so did an unshakable thought: that somehow his mam had guided him to that letter, that she indeed wanted him to know the truth.

He considered this again now. In seconds at most, Uncle Will would be lost to sleep, taking his willingness to share with him. Given the man’s grogginess, Shan stood a decent chance of pressing the issue without earning a slap or worse. Or so he hoped.

“Uncle Will?” Absent a reply, Shan hurried to retain his nerve. “My father—the one by blood. Could you tell me anything about him?”

Uncle Will grunted. Likely a warning, but Shan persisted.

“Please tell me, is there something more you know?”

His uncle murmured, producing a recognizable word.

“Music. Is that what you said?” Shan was sure of it, and his mind raced. Maybe the sailor had a knack for singing, or played an instrument. All at once it made sense that he himself was drawn to performing. “He was a musician, then. In America.”