A Master Plan for Rescue by Janis Cooke Newman Page B

wasn’t there, and then she was there, standing in the middle of our living room, her face so collapsed into itself, it could as well have been a forgotten apple from several winters ago as a human face. So few strands of white hair covering her scalp, the only way to tell she was a woman was by the black dress that hung from her shoulders. One of her legs must have been shorter than the other, because she walked toward the empty coffin with a hitched, rolling gait, as if she was traversing an invisible boat.
    No one else noticed her. Not my mother, standing close to Father Barry, her pale hands trapped inside his waxy ones. Not Aunt May, bustling about the room collecting half-empty whiskey glasses. Not one of the too-lifelike people who had come by car to stand around and not stare at the coffin in front of the Silvertone. The Keener, though, she looked at it.
    She looked at nothing else, gazing at its purple satin interior and the rosary curled up like a snake where my father’s hands would have been. Looked at it as if she saw my father inside. She made her hitching way through the crowded room to its cherrywood side, circling it until she stood at the top, at the place where my father’s head would be, as though we’d been saving the spot for her.
    The old woman drew a breath that seemed to gather in more than air, that pulled at something that wasn’t in the room at all. She opened her mouth, a dark hole empty of teeth, and produced a low-pitched wailing in that ancient language, the Gaeilge language of the Irish.
    My father had once told me it was the language of Irish heroes. But coming out of the old woman’s black hole of a mouth, it sounded like the knocking together of bones. As if the Keener was a radio for the dead. I stared across the empty coffin at her, certain she had been sent to broadcast the voices of ghosts, transmit their undertones through the dark speaker of her mouth. Transmit them to me. The one she was looking at. The one who was guilty.
    And then, I heard it,
Donnchadh
, my father’s Gaeilge name. And all the air in that chokingly hot room began to disappear into the dark hole of the Keener’s mouth.
    I had to get out, get away. Before everybody knew. Before they learned it was me.
    I hammered my fists on their black-clad backs. Told them all to go home, get out of here. Finish your whiskey and drive away in your cars! It was only Uncle Glenn’s hands coming down on my arms that calmed me. Only his voice suggesting everybody step back and give the boy some air. Leaning down and saying in my ear, “I’ve never been much for Keeners either, all that Irish melancholy.”
    Then he put an arm around my shoulders and the two of us went down to his and Aunt May’s apartment and sat at a table covered in ruffled place mats and drank a couple of cold glasses of milk.
    After a while Uncle Glenn said my name, and his undertone was so thick with sympathy I didn’t deserve, the consonant-filled confession that had been caught in my throat broke loose and came pouring out of my mouth. I told my uncle everything about the sunburnt families and the soldiers with their laughing girls and the man running along the platform with the inner tube that should have been turned in for the rubber. Then I told him about how I’d needed to explain to my father about the code-o-graph, the object he had gone to so much trouble over.
    But before I could get any further, Uncle Glenn said, a Captain Midnight code-o-graph? And when I nodded, he got up, pulled open a kitchen drawer, and tossed a Captain Midnight code-o-graph onto the table.
    “Where did you get that?”
    “Found it in the backseat of the taxi last time I took it out.”
    I reached into the pocket of my Mass pants and set my code-o-graph on the table next to his. They were identical except that Uncle Glenn’s didn’t have anybody’s photograph in the little window. Not even Captain Midnight’s.
    “I was saving it for you,” he said, “but I