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had run out of subjects, it was arranged that Father Flood would say a mass for Rose at ten o’clock the following morning and that Mrs. Kehoe would attend, as would Tony and his mother. There would be the usual congregation as well, Father Flood said, and he would let them know before mass started that it was being said for the repose of the soul of someone very special and he would, before communion, say a few words about Rose and ask people to pray for her. He arranged to drive Tony home but waited tactfully in Mrs. Kehoe’s front room with Mrs. Kehoe as Tony embraced Eilis in the hall.
“I’m sorry I can’t talk,” she said.
“I’ve been thinking about it,” he said. “If one of my brothers had died, maybe that sounds selfish, but I was trying to imagine what you’re feeling.”
“I think about it,” Eilis said, “and I can’t bear it and then I forget about it for a minute and when it comes back it’s as though I just heard the news. I can’t get over it.”
“I wish I could stay with you,” he said.
“I’ll see you in the morning, and tell your mother not to come if it’s any trouble.”
“She’ll be there. Nothing is any trouble now,” he said.
Eilis looked at the pile of letters Rose had sent her, wondering if between sending one of these and sending the next Rose had learned that she was sick. Or if she had known before Eilis had left. It changed everything Eilis thought about her time in Brooklyn, it made everything that had happened to her seem small. She looked at Rose’s handwriting, its clarity and evenness, its sense of supreme self-possession and self-confidence, and she wondered whether, while writing some of these words, Rose had looked up and sighed and then, through sheer strength of will, steeled herself and carried on writing, not faltering for a single moment from her decision to let no one share her knowledge except the doctor who had told her.
It was strange, Eilis felt in the morning, how deeply she had slept and how instantaneously, on waking, she had known that she was not going to work but to a mass for Rose. Her sister, she knew, would still be in the house in Friary Street, they would take her to the cathedral later in the evening and she would be buried after mass in the morning. All of this seemed simple and clear and almost inevitable until she and Mrs. Kehoe set out together for the parish church. Walking the familiar street, passing people whom she did not know, Eilis realized that one of them could have died and not Rose, and this could be another spring morning, a hint of heat in the air, with her going to work as normal.
The idea of Rose dying in her sleep seemed unimaginable. Had she opened her eyes for a moment? Had she just lain still breathing the breath of sleep, and then, as though it were nothing, had her heart stopped and her breath? How could this happen? Had she cried out in the night and not been heard, or even murmured or whispered? Had she known something the previous evening? Something, anything, that might have given her a clue that this was her last day alive in the world?
She imagined Rose laid out now in the dark robes of the dead with candles flickering on the table. And later the coffin being closed, and the solemn faces of everyone in the hallway and outside in the street, her brothers wearing suits and black ties as they had at their father’s funeral. All morning at mass and back in Father Flood’s house, she went through each moment of Rose’s death and her removal.
The others were surprised, almost alarmed, when she said that she wanted to go to work that afternoon. She saw Mrs. Kehoe whispering about it to Father Flood. Tony asked her if she was sure, and when she insisted he said that he would walk with her to Bartocci’s and then meet her later back at Mrs. Kehoe’s. Mrs. Kehoe had invited him and Father Flood to have supper with the other lodgers followed by a rosary to be said for Rose’s soul.
Eilis went back to work the following day as well and was determined to go to her classes that evening. Since they could not go to a movie or a dance, she and Tony went to a