Five firemen lifted my father into the ambulance. Beneath the plastic tubing, his face was still purple.
Coach took us to his house, never saying my father was dead, though he left right afterwards to help the police locate my mother. For dinner, Mrs. Jenkins heated up leftovers for bibimbap. Nobody ate but Callie’s tall brothers. That night I slept in her little sister’s bed, while her sister squeezed beside Callie. Callie said, “You’ll live with us.” She had already asked.
I couldn’t fall asleep. I kept seeing my father’s hand, like a purple leaf blown to the asphalt. But I must have slept because a knock at the door startled me awake, and light from the hallway creased the room.
“Aoife,” my mother said. “Come with me.”
She wore her nurse’s uniform. In her hands were the purple-and-gold Converse.
“I am very sorry about Daddy,” she said, giving me the sneakers.
Coach Jenkins drove us home in the squad car, saying he would bring the plumbing truck by in the morning. In our building, the old elevator, creaking and shuddering, carried us to our floor. My mother stank of sweat. The very first thing she did was put on the kettle for tea. She picked up the clothes from the floor, wrestled the overflowing trash into a plastic bag. The whistle blew and she poured the boiling water into the pot. As we drank the tea, my mother said she had seen him at the hospital, they had kept him for her, and he looked very peaceful.
“He never got back to Ballymagorry,” she said.
I had never seen my mother cry before.
I felt she wanted to comfort me or let me comfort her. But all I could think was, Well, madam, you’re the one who wanted to go to the beach. She went into the bedroom, which was cluttered with my father’s things. I lay sleepless on the sofa bed well into daylight, knowing there was no school for me that day. I didn’t care about the game. Any game.
My mother and I stayed in that apartment until I graduated from high school. Callie got a basketball scholarship to Stanford (because she was fast—now and always) and I got one to a Catholic university in Oregon. Right before Thanksgiving that first semester my mother called to say she was getting married to a man I had never heard her mention before, a Navy retiree. They were moving to Encinitas, to a little bungalow near the beach.