The girl’s name is Saoirse. I’ve never heard of such a name but my brother Joel looks it up – it’s the first thing he does when Saoirse arrives in town – and says it’s Old Irish and means freedom. Can you imagine naming a girl freedom? he asks me. Can you even know what that would do to her brain, starting when she was a baby, being someone who gets to go through life doing whatever the fuck she wants? Joel also wants me to know, not that I would ever have occasion to talk to her or be in a situation where I would even dare say her name, that it isn’t pronounced Say-rise or Sour-see or something stupid like that. It’s Ser-Sha. Soft. Like a whisper in the dark.
She’s an exchange student from Ireland living in the Bells’ drab gray ranch house on Franklin Street while Barbara Bell is staying in a whitewashed sea cottage at the end of a cobbled lane, looking out Saoirse’s bedroom window at the wild Galway coast below. Joel says it’s a lopsided exchange any way you look at it. Barbara’s stout and serious with gnarly brown hair that frizzes up when it rains. Saoirse has radiant red hair spilling halfway down her back. She sits in Joel’s twelfth grade homeroom in the third desk in the third row – Barbara’s desk – and he’s never seen a girl separate herself so completely from everyone else. It’s almost like she’s been set up in a different gravitational field. She walks the hallways looking straight ahead, as if there’s something waiting on the horizon only she can see but is in no hurry to reach because she knows it will wait for her. The boys who try to talk to her and actually have the gumption to ask her out aren’t so much rebuffed as lightly passed over. Afterwards Joel hears them describing the encounter which is the same for everyone, how she doesn’t say no, doesn’t say yes, isn’t rude, doesn’t make twisted mouth shapes signifying displeasure or disgust, but just moves through the moment completely unscathed.
One morning, in homeroom, everyone half asleep waiting for the bell to ring, Saoirse emits a series of stifled cries that cause the tiniest ripple in her imperturbable demeanor – little twitches of her head, slight crinkling of her nose, a tiny tear running down her cheek, all barely noticeable unless you’re paying a certain kind of close attention. Homesickness, Joel guesses. When the bell goes off he swipes the classroom Kleenex box from the back of the room and places it on the corner of her desk as he heads out the door.
The next day she’s watching him stealthily, using that internal tracking mechanism certain girls are born with where they follow your movements while seeming to be looking everywhere but in your direction. The week after that they’re standing in the cafeteria line when she says his name out loud for the first time. She doesn’t say Joel; she says it like you say jewel. I like your sneakers, Jewel. Then one afternoon after school I’m in the kitchen foraging for food – since our father moved out our mother doesn’t seem to believe in grocery shopping anymore – when Joel walks in and right behind him is Saoirse. She looks different at close range. More freckles, less perfect.
“You must be Joel’s little brother,” she says. Jewel’s lattle brather.
I know better than to answer.
They go down the hall to his room and close the door, whatever they’re doing drowned out by Joel’s Fisher stereo system with the XP-60 speakers pumping out a bass tone so deep it makes my jaw vibrate.
Then it’s a Friday night in early November and they’re riding around in our mother’s Rambler. I always pictured it as Saoirse’s hair’s blowing out the window like a party streamer, drunk after two beers and singing this old Irish song about some poor girl who loves a boy who won’t love her back. Joel is distracted to the point of disorientation. He thinks they’re on Concord Street but they’re really on Fountain Street where the road goes sharply left instead of right and they go careening over the curb, through the guardrail and down an embankment, the descent destroying the undercarriage of the car piece by piece. The car somehow ends up tipped on its side, leaning against a tree beyond which lies twenty feet of steady drop all the way down to the reservoir. It could have been – should have been – the end of them.
By the time my mother and I show up, there are two fire trucks, two police cars, and an ambulance. The fire department has to wriggle them out of the car, starting with Saoirse, then Joel who needs two of them to slide him onto a stretcher and haul him up the steep, stony incline. We can hear him shouting her name – SER-SHA! – and her singsong return of Jewel! Jewel! Jewel!
Saoirse’s right arm is broken and her concussion, thankfully, miraculously, is only a grade one; Joel’s left ankle is fractured and his left shoulder dislocated. The next day they’re both out of the hospital and the day after that the whole student exchange thing is officially annulled. Saoirse’s mother gets on a flight from Ireland to bring her injured daughter home. Joel is forbidden to see her, talk to her, offer any kind of goodbye. Still he has his best friend David Canova drive to our house and David and I carry Joel down the driveway and slide him into the car’s backseat. The three of us head over to the Bell house clear across town, Joel wincing with every turn and bump. When we get there he insists on going up the walkway under his own power. He rings the doorbell with the tip of one of his crutches. No one answers; he rings again. And again. He never stops.
PETER GORDON’s recent work has appeared in The Nervous Breakdown and is forthcoming in North American Review and Heavy Feather Review.
