The Parting Glass (59 page)

“Dr. O’Malley asked me to take charge.”

Peggy couldn’t believe it. She looked to Alice for confirmation, but the nurse only shrugged and said, “Sorry, but I have no information except what it says here.” She turned Kieran’s chart so that Peggy could see it. Dr. Beck was listed as Kieran’s doctor.

“Where’s Finn?” Peggy wanted to shout the words, but there had already been too many angry exchanges in this room. Kieran, even deeply asleep, needed calm around him and gentle, loving voices.

“Miss Donaghue, it’s not my job to figure out what Finn O’Malley is thinking or where he’s intent on going. When I arrived, he caught me up on what occurred with your son, then he left the hospital.”

“Left?” Peggy couldn’t believe it. Finn had saved Kieran’s life, then simply abandoned him to the care of a man Peggy despised?

“Perhaps he’s on his way home. I’m sure he knew you intended to stay with your son tonight.”

She wasn’t certain, but she thought that Beck might actually be trying to cover for Finn, to ease the shock of Finn’s desertion and change it into something understandable, even sensible. It was the most accommodating and human response she had seen from the man. And it didn’t help one bit.

“I see.” She bit her lip. Tears sprang to her eyes, but she would not give him the satisfaction of witnessing them. “Then I’m allowed to stay with Kieran tonight?”

“We encourage it. It’s best for him to wake up and find you here. We need to keep him as calm as we can. We’ll make you as comfortable as possible.” He gave a weary and not convincing smile. “Which is not all that possible, I’m afraid.”

He left the room.

“He’s no Finn O’Malley,” Alice said, “but he’s competent enough. Don’t you worry, now. He’ll be certain the boy’s well taken care of. Under the circumstances, you might get better treatment than normal.”

Peggy wanted Finn. Beck, even a Beck who was trying to prove himself, wasn’t good enough. Where had Finn gone, and why? The first question couldn’t be answered, but the second answer was all too easy.

Finn had retreated one last time. He was gone from her life and Kieran’s as surely as if he had never been there.

She didn’t know she was crying until Alice came over and patted her shoulder. “Now, now, Miss Donaghue. Let me find you a comfortable chair. You need something to drink, and then some sleep. Things will look better in the morning. You have everything to be glad about.”

Finn knew he had saved Kieran Donaghue’s life. He had acted decisively, certain at each point along the way that he knew exactly what he had to do. The instruments had belonged in his hands; the examining room had welcomed him home. From one moment to the next he had ceased being Finn O’Malley, glorified day laborer, and resumed the identity of Finn O’Malley, physician, honors graduate of the medical school at National University, Galway, survivor of a coveted, rugged internship at St. James hospital in Dublin.

Husband to Sheila, father to Bridie, Mark and Brian.

The young woman who was cleaning off nearby tables at The Castle Bar stopped by his, although he was so far off in a corner he was surprised to be noticed. “Like another?” She pointed to his glass.

He held it out in answer, and she took it, returning a short time later with a Guinness filled to the brim. He handed her some Euros and she nodded. She was pretty enough, curly blondish hair pulled casually on top of her head, pink cheeks, breasts large enough to be remarked on by men who had drunk slightly more than he had. She ventured a tentative smile, pausing longer than she needed to. When he didn’t smile back, she moved on.

He hadn’t been in this pub for a number of years. When his practice had flourished, he had come to The Castle Bar with colleagues for brief consultations over lunch or a quick drink after rounds in the evening before he headed for home. After the accident, he had done his drinking
at
home, after Bridie was in bed for the night. In the mornings he would wake up early, before she did, still fully clothed, cheek pillowed on a kitchen table littered with bottles. He’d had no desire for conversation as he drank himself into a stupor.

Finn didn’t think he was a genuine alcoholic. He craved oblivion, not alcohol. In the years of total abstinence he had not awakened at night yearning for the complex roar of whiskey or the clean slice of vodka. He had yearned to forget, and he suspected that if he could forget, he would be perfectly able to stop at one drink or two and go home unimpaired to his daughter.

But forget he could not.

He held up the brimming glass in silent toast to the little boy who had brought it all back again. Not that the deaths of his wife and sons were ever far from his thoughts. But he had learned how to tamp down the worst parts, how to avoid situations that brought back the memories, how not to challenge his fragile stability. Tonight, everything he had learned had been for naught. He had been thrust back into the world he had so skillfully avoided to save the life of someone else’s child.

He had not been able to save his own sons, but he had saved Peggy’s.

He wasn’t sorry he had saved Kieran. God no, he wasn’t sorry. The infant Kieran had arrived in an alien, frightening world, and now the little boy deserved every good thing the residents of it could do for him. And Kieran had been so brave, so resigned. In the grip of a nearly fatal illness, he had not behaved as a child, particularly an autistic child, might have been expected to. He had not thrashed or fought. Finn had looked into the child’s fevered blue eyes and seen not hostility or fear, but a simple, poignant resignation.

Faced with Kieran’s death, Finn had been honor bound, even desperate, to save him. But what terrible twist of fate had let him save Peggy’s son and doom his own to death?

He could still make emergency decisions, even life-and-death decisions. Tonight’s revelation had been both surprising and bitter. He had learned that he
could
act when compelled to, take complicated, even desperate, measures to save a life. His judgment was no longer impaired by fear and grief; perhaps it hadn’t been for some time. If he wanted to practice medicine again, he was able to. He might need a colleague’s support and guidance until his confidence was completely restored, but his skills were still sharp. There were no lies or facades to hide behind now.

“Finished already?” The young woman who’d refilled his glass was back again. He was surprised enough to glance down at the table where the glass, empty of everything but a bit of foam, sat waiting to be refilled.

How many had he had?

“Closing time before long.” She smiled at him. “You might not have another chance.”

Closing time was often a figment of some local official’s imagination, but he didn’t want to take a chance that in this pub it was rigidly enforced. He nodded, and she removed his glass and left him to stare at the wet spot where it had been.

A new man wobbled up to the bar not far from the corner where Finn sat and leaned both elbows on it. “Can’t have any more, Sean,” he addressed the bartender. “Had one too many, as it is. I won’t be walking a straight line on the way back home tonight.”

Finn tried to ignore him, but the man’s voice was boisterous and high-pitched, and soon enough it was answered by Sean the bartender, whose voice was nearly as loud.

“You won’t be walking a’tall unless you eat a bit,” Sean said. He had the long, narrow face of a Dickens character and the soulful-eyed demeanor to go with it. “You’d best have something before you go. Crisps or biscuits. Which will it be?”

“Poisoning me, are you?”

“Trying to soak up the poison is more like it.”

“Well, one biscuit or two, and you won’t want me here.”

“Who says I want you here anyway?”

“I’m al—allergic to grains, I am, and there’s no getting around it. Wheat’s as good to me as arsenic, don’t you know?”

“And what happens when you eat it?”

“I’m a wild man.” He beat both fists on his chest. “My stomach feels like a horse kicked it. Why do you think I drink rum instead of good Irish whiskey? Made from grain, isn’t it now?”

“Wild man?” The bartender laughed.

The man seemed to sober. “Tried to kill myself when it got too bad. Couldn’t keep a thought in my head but that one. All that went away the moment I got a new diet.”

Sean didn’t seem convinced, but he reached for a packet of crisps and waved away the man’s attempts to pay for them. “I don’t want any wild men in here.”

The man grinned and wobbled back down the bar, where a group of friends made room for him.

Finn’s entertainment had ended and a new Guinness had appeared in front of him. He paid for it and again didn’t encourage conversation. The young woman left permanently for greener pastures.

“Cel…iac disease.” Finn stared at the full glass in front of him. He’d diagnosed it himself more than once, and he remembered the startling changes in one patient, a young man who was virtually wasting away because he experienced so much abdominal pain after eating. Some researchers called it the “Irish disease” and believed that as many as one in fifty Irish men and women were affected by it, although most estimates were lower.

He hadn’t thought about that for a long time, of the young man who had gone on to marry and father children once his health was restored, of the others he had helped. He had not wanted to think of them, to feel responsible for their continued health or for patients just like them who needed his skills. He had abandoned Shanmullin and all the people who had counted on him to care for them.

He still did not want to care for them.

“Wild man.” The words sounded fuzzy to his own ears. The pub was a raucous enough place, but it wasn’t the noise surrounding him that distorted his words. He was sorry he didn’t have a collection of glasses on the table to help him remember how much he’d had to drink. More than three, for certain. Many more.

“Wild child.” He didn’t know where that connection came from. He couldn’t seem to stop thinking about Kieran, whose own neurological peculiarities would make his life a difficult one. From the beginning, Finn had admired Peggy for her patience in the face of Kieran’s rebellions, for her obvious love for the boy even when he seemed incapable of returning it.

He’d seen other autistic children in his practice. It was a mysterious phenomenon, with conflicting research and opinions. Peggy had ingested them all with the dual talents of a scientist and a mother, creating her own program from the most promising leads. She was to be admired for that, as well as so many other things.

He could almost see Kieran now, the way the child—no more than a baby, really—had stared at him tonight as if saying, “It’s been a tough ride, and it’s going to end, isn’t it?”

And it very nearly had.

Something tugged at him, something he couldn’t quite grasp hold of—although that was no surprise, considering where he was and what he’d done for the past two hours. Kieran had been different tonight, not just because he had been so terribly ill, but because he had seemed to “be” there. So many other times the child had seemed absent, uninvolved, in a private, miserable locked cell of his own. But tonight, despite being so very sick…

“Wild child…”

No, he hadn’t been wild tonight. And something was familiar about that. Finn had seen Kieran that way once before. He tried to remember, but his brain was working in slow motion. He had seen it once before….

When Kieran was cutting a tooth. He remembered now. The child had been fussy, the way his own children had been fussy when undergoing the same experience, but he had also been more willing to be held, more accommodating, more…“there.”

He’d said the word out loud, but he didn’t care. Why should he care about that or anything else? He lifted his glass to that, toasting the air again. So what if Kieran had seemed more focused tonight and in that one isolated moment in his past? Both times he had been sick, one much worse than the other, of course. But obviously the illness had drained away his energy, and the rest was an illusion. People saw what they wanted, even former doctors who prided themselves on logic and observation.

But was it an illusion?

Finn couldn’t seem to let go of it. Yes, possibly Kieran’s illness was the reason he’d seemed different, but wasn’t it more likely that illness would only have intensified his usual behavior? That instead of letting Peggy hold and comfort him, he would have been frantic to get away from her?

He was sorry his thoughts were so muddled. A lump formed in his throat, and for a moment he thought he was going to cry on cue, like any stereotypical drunk. Next he would belt out a chorus of “Danny Boy.”

“What else…could it be?”

His words were slurring even worse now, but he didn’t really care. He was like a dog gnawing an old bone. There was nothing of interest left, but he couldn’t give it up. What else? What else?

Kieran had been sick. Kieran had been feverish…. He discarded that as the cause. Teething produced a slight fever only, if that. Kieran had been in pain…. That went out with the mental rubbish, too. Pain did not make children more loving, more aware.

Both times Kieran had gotten little enough sleep, but surely that had nothing to do with it? Perhaps fatigue had blurred the edges of his autism, but it was unlikely.

He hadn’t eaten.

Finn stared at the table as the pieces fell into place. Now he understood why the man’s celiac disease had interested him, and why somehow his belabored brain had made the connection between the man and baby Kieran.

He scrambled to remember an article he had read last year in one of his medical journals. He had not stopped his subscriptions to the journals, just as he had not abandoned his office. He had received them, and in the darkest hours of night, he had paged through them, reading some articles, skimming others. He was a fraud and a liar, a man who could not make up his mind to be anything else, except perhaps a murderer of the people he loved most.

The article…

He tried to remember the research, the syndrome. Something about wheat, something akin to celiac disease in autistic children. But there was more.