Stay by Aislinn Hunter

McDonalds. A guy in his early twenties plays a guitar, the case laying open in front of him. Abbey recognizes the song: “The Sisters of Mercy.” Cohen is as popular in Ireland as he is at home. Abbey had all of his CDs back in Windsor.
    Halfway to Angela’s, Abbey’s pace falls into a rhythm, her eyes to the ground. The whole idea of moving to Ireland had been to get away, to get out from under her father’s thumb. To figure out who she was without him. And it was working. She’d started reading history books and philosophy texts she’d found at a booksale in the Quays. She realized she had an appreciation for art. And then there was Dermot, opening her up to all kinds of new ideas and ways of thinking. The world had gone technicolour and Abbey was happy to be standing in the middle of it, in awe.
    For years Frank had been saying he was dying, but the blood tests, the X-rays, all came back negative. When Abbey was twenty and thinking about going away to University—Toronto or Queen’s—Frank went on disability. He told her he’d been blacking out, that his blood pressure was through the roof. He figured it was a tumour—fifteen years of jackhammers; roadwork that jarred parts of you loose until it all balled itself up somewhere, took root. He said he’d been coughing up bits of blood. After a while he asked Abbey to move back in, short-term, to help him with the rent. The night she came home with her bags, she found him passed out on the kitchen floor. She was never sure if it was from drinking or if he was really hurt. There was a piss stain onthe front of his jeans. That’s when it started: Frank would sit her down in the living room, telling her he had something to say, as if she was a recorder, as if she cared about his childhood, about how hard done by he was, had always been. Frank could list it on his fingers: First his mother dying after giving birth to him; then his father giving Frank to the Gowan family down the road. Just for a while, he’d said. But George Shaw never came back for his son. He walked by the house on his way to work at the dairy and never even looked up at the door. The Shaws lived ten houses away in that same small town. All those years Frank grew up in the Gowan house, guessing and guessing, but never knowing. And the Shaws never offered so much as a word, never said, yes, you’re one of us, or even “maybe.”
    At first Abbey listened to Frank because he was sick and she didn’t know what else to do. And because it was funny and sad to hear him talk about her mother. He told Abbey how he met Karen at a bar, how she walked in wearing a mini skirt and leg warmers, sat down on the bar stool, peeled them off. Frank one of ten guys all trying to get over to her first. Abbey listened because he needed her to and because she half-hoped that somewhere in the chronology of his life she might find her own answers. “I’m dying, Ab.” Frank said it over and over again for four years, practically willing the diagnosis. But, in a way, when Abbey thinks about it now, he’d been flailing his whole life. What was that poem, the one from English 220? The one about waving. No, that was it: “Not Waving, But Drowning.” His whole life was one long drowning. Abbey sat on the couch, listening to appease him. Waiting, in her own way, for him to die, so her life could begin.

Arrivals
    DERMOT’S hand has gone white from Deirdre’s squeezing. Faherty is telling her she’s hours away yet, to take it easy. Down the road an ambulance siren wails. Dermot goes to the window, pulls back the curtain, but can’t see the street, sees instead an alder tree lifting up its leaves in the moonlight, the sloped roofs of the houses beyond. When he turns back to Deirdre she and her mother are lying side by side on the bed, Deirdre’s head propped up with a pillow, her breathing slow. The lilies he picked up off the floor are on the mattress between them. And for a second there is a sweetness to the two of