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all in hand, so don’t you be worrying. I’ll do this for you, no bother at all.’ He saved you. He kept my girl alive, and for that I’ll be forever grateful to Him, sad as we may be about the passing of another.”
    I have no response to that, but I soften.
    He pulls his chair closer to my bedside, and it screeches along the floor.
    “And I believe in an afterlife,” he says, a little quieter now. “That I do. I believe in the paradise of heaven, up there in the clouds, and everyone that was once here is up there—including the sinners. God’s a forgiver, that I believe.”
    t h a n k s f o r t h e m e m o r i e s / 3 9
    “Everyone?” I fight the tears. I fight them from falling. “What about my baby, Dad? Is my baby there?”
    He looks pained. We hadn’t spoken much about my pregnancy. Only days ago we’d had a minor falling-out over my asking him to store our spare bed in his garage. I had started to prepare the nursery, you see . . . Oh dear, the nursery. The spare bed and junk just cleared out. The crib already purchased. Pretty yellow on the walls. “Buttercup Dream” with a little duckie border. Five months to go. Some people, my father included, would think preparing the nursery at four months is premature, but we’d been waiting six years for a baby, for this baby. Nothing premature about that.
    “Ah, love, you know I don’t know . . .”
    “I was going to call him Sean if it was a boy,” I hear myself finally say aloud. I have been saying these things in my head all day, over and over, and here they are now, spilling out of me instead of the tears.
    “Ah, that’s a nice name. Sean.”
    “Grace, if it was a girl. After Mum. She would have liked that.”
    His jaw sets at this, and he looks away. Anyone who doesn’t know him would think this has angered him. I know this is not the case. I know it’s the emotion gathering in his jaw, like a giant reservoir storing and locking it all away until absolutely necessary, waiting for those rare moments when the drought within him calls for those walls to break and for the emotions to gush.
    “But for some reason I thought it was a boy. I don’t know why, but I just felt it somehow. I could have been wrong. I was going to call him Sean,” I repeat.
    Dad nods. “That’s right. A fine name.”
    “I used to talk to him. Sing to him. I wonder if he heard.” My voice is far away. I feel like I’m calling out from the hollow of a tree, where I hide.
    4 0 / C e c e l i a A h e r n
    Silence while I imagine a future that will never be with little imaginary Sean. Of singing to him every night, of marshmallow skin and splashes at bathtime. Of chubby legs and bicycle rides. Of sand-castle architecture and football-related hotheaded tantrums. Anger at a missed life—no, worse, a lost life—overrides my thoughts.
    “I wonder if he even knew.”
    “Knew what, love?”
    “What was happening. What he would be missing. I hope he doesn’t blame me. I was all he had, and—” I stop. Torture over for now. I feel seconds away from screaming with such terror, I must stop.
    “Ah, love.” Dad takes my hand and squeezes it again, long and hard. He pats my hair, and with steady fingers takes the strands from my face and tucks them behind my ears. He hasn’t done that since I was a little girl.
    “If you want my tuppence worth, I think he’s in heaven, love. Oh, there’s no thinking involved—I know so. He’s up there with your mother, yes he is. Sitting on her lap while she plays rummy with Pauline, who’s robbing her blind and cackling away. She’s up there, all right.” He looks up and wags his forefinger at the ceiling. “Now, you take care of baby Sean for us, Gracie, you hear?”
    He looks back at me. “She’ll be tellin’ him all about you, she will, about when you were a baby, about the day you took your first steps, about the day you got your first tooth. She’ll tell him about your first day of school and your last day of school and every