Page 39 of The Dutch House

I was twenty-nine years old that day in the hospital. Maeve was thirty-six. The last time we’d seen Fluffy I’d been four. “Where?”

“Where do you think?”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“It really would have been better if I could have told you this in the car. I had it all planned.”

We saved our most important conversations for the car, butconsidering the circumstances we’d have to make do with the hospital room, the green tile floor and the low acoustical ceiling, the intermittent alert over the public address system that someone was coding. “When?”

“Sunday.” The top half of her bed was tilted slightly up. She stayed on her back but had turned her head to face me. “I’d just gotten out of church and I thought I’d swing by the Dutch House for a minute on my way home.”

“You live two blocks from the church.”

“Don’t interrupt. Not five minutes later another car pulls up behind me and a woman gets out and crosses the street. It’s Fluffy.”

“How in God’s name did you know it was Fluffy?”

“I just did. She’s got to be past fifty now, and she’s cut off all that hair. It’s still red though, or maybe she dyes it. It’s still fluffy. I remember her so clearly.”

So did I. “You got out of the car—”

“I watched her first. She was standing at the end of the driveway and I could tell she was thinking it over, like maybe she was going to walk up and knock on the door. She grew up there, you know, just like us.”

“Nothing like us.”

Maeve nodded into her pillow. “I crossed the street. I hadn’t set foot on that side of the street since the day we left and it made me feel a little sick if you want to know the truth. I kept thinking Andrea was going to come running down the driveway with a frying pan.”

“What did you say?”

“Just her name. I saidFiona, and she turned around. Oh, Danny, if you could have seen the look on her face.”

“She knew who you were?”

Maeve nodded again, her eyes feverish. “She said I looked like Mommy did when she was young. She said she would have known me anywhere.”

A young nurse in a white cap came in and when she saw us there she stopped. I was leaning so far over my chin was practically on Maeve’s shoulder.

“Is this a bad time?” the nurse asked.

“Such a bad time,” Maeve said. The nurse said something else but we didn’t pay any attention. She closed the door behind her and Maeve started again. “Fluffy said she’d just been passing through and she wondered if we still lived in the house.”

“And you said No, I just stalk the place.”

“I told her we had left in ’63 after Dad died. I shouldn’t have said it that way but I wasn’t thinking. As soon as it was out of my mouth, poor Fluffy turned red, her eyes filled up. I think she was hoping she was going to find him there. I think she’d come to see him.”

“So then what?”

“Well, she was crying, and I didn’t want to be standing out there on the wrong side of the street so I asked her to come and sit in my car so we could talk.”

I shook my head. “You and Fluffy parking in front of the Dutch House.”

“In a manner of speaking. Danny, it was the most amazing thing. When she got in the car, we were as close as you and I are now, and the way I felt—I was so incrediblyhappy, like my heart was going to break open. She was wearing this old blue cardigan and it was almost like I remembered it. I could have leaned over and kissed her. I’ve always had it in my mind that I hated Fluffy, that she had hit you and she had slept with Dad, but it turns out I don’t hate her at all. It’s like I’m incapable of hating anyone or anything in my life that came before Andrea, and those were the Fluffy days. She still has that pretty face,even now. I don’t know if you remember her face but it was soft, very Irish. All of her freckles are gone now but she still has those big green eyes.”

I said I remembered her eyes.

“I did a lot of talking at first. I told her about Dad getting married and Dad dying and Andrea throwing you out, and you know what she says?”

“What?”