Are They Here? · Cora West Whitman

My father had a difficult childhood. I know pieces of it. Enough to know that, for a time, he went to live with his aunt Nora Sheehan.

She had a map of Galway on her apartment wall. “This is where we come from,” she told him.

Aunt Nora came to live with my parents, my sister, and me when I was young. She slept in our den. I climbed into her lap and pressed my face into her shoulder. She smelled like baby powder.

She played tea parties with my imaginary friends: Tommy, Joe, and Sally. As I opened the front door to let them in, Aunt Nora would feel the cold air move through the house and call out, “Are they here?”

She pulled out their chairs. She poured their tea. She asked them how they’d been.

When Aunt Nora could no longer live with us, the map moved with her. We hung it above her bed.

I don’t remember who held the nail. I remember it mattered that we got it right.

The last time I saw her, she was dying. Her thin fingers laced through mine. I was twelve, maybe. She looked into me with her piercing blue eyes.

She told me she was scared.

I told her not to be afraid. I told her it would be okay. I held her hand tighter. I was terrified for her.

It was a promise no one could keep. You make it anyway.

At her funeral, I sat next to my father and watched a stream of men walk through the door, men neither of us recognized.

We learned who they were, one at a time. Aunt Nora had opened her home to boys who were struggling. Boys like my father.

One man with floppy black hair found my father in the crowd. “She fed me. She talked to me. She kept me straight. I don’t know where I’d be without her.”

My father sat very still. Neither of us spoke.

We buried her with her map of Galway.

Years later, I stood on the edge of Galway Bay and I wept. I knelt and sorted through the stones with my hands.

I brought my father a rock. It sat at the bottom of a gift bag, wrapped in yellow tissue paper. He reached in and looked at me.

“This feels like a rock.”

“It is,” I said. “From Galway.”