The Visitors by Patrick O'Keeffe

kitchen doorway and shut the door behind me. I switched the light on and stared down that blue corridor my mother had painted. I think I helped her paint it, or that’s something I’d like to think—the short blue corridor that saw no daylight unless the bedroom doors were open—and that night I went down it I swear I smelled his sweat from all his years of hard work. Sweat that insulated him like a coat of armor. Like the shell of the turtle. This thing you forever wanted to run away from. A way you didn’t ever want to be. Back then when I slept in the bedroom with Stephen and Anthony he was the last to go to bed. Every night he knelt at his chair for an hour and prayed. When he got up he checked the back and front doors then slowly walked down the blue corridor in socks his dead wife had darned too many times. His rosary beads curled like a rattlesnake in the drawer behind his chair. Back then I waited for the almost soundless click of the kitchen door handle and his stockinged feet on the corridor floor. I stayed awake to hear. And those sounds still trap me in the oddest places—like waiting in the check-in line at an airport, or walking down a crowded American city sidewalk, or sitting alone with a book in the quietest corner of a used bookstore.
    That Sunday night I dreaded my few cowardly steps. Past the room on the right where I once slept with my two brothers. Three big boot holes in that door from when Anthony once wanted in and Stephen and I wouldn’t let him. Hannah and Tess’s room on the other side, where Hannah now slept on her own.
    I knocked on his door. He said to come in. I put one foot in the room, kept the other in the corridor, pulled the door against me like a shield, stuck my head in, and squeezed down on the door handle.
    —Take your weight off that handle, it’s in a tender way, he said.
    I let the handle go, but I didn’t move.
    He was sitting in his chair beside the bed. His back was to thewindow. The chair usually faced the window. He liked to stare out at his dead wife’s untended flower garden—his thin pale legs with the long and winding blue veins, the walking stick on the floor by the chair, and the red dressing robe that fell a few inches below his knees. The robe had black burn holes from the Sweet Aftons he’d stopped smoking the week after his wife died.
    —You didn’t come in to see me last evening or all day, he said.
    —You were sleeping. Hannah thought it best not to disturb you, I said.
    —So many are concerned about my well-being, he said. —What a lucky man I am. But you haven’t been down to see us in a very long while.
    —Busy in work, I said.
    —You were always a great one for the work. When are you going back?
    —Early train tomorrow, I said.
    —A very short visit. Like the Holy Father himself, he said. —So when are you going away?
    —The end of the week, I said.
    —You’re afraid to come into the room. You could at least dignify the man who raised you with that much.
    I opened the door and planted my feet in the room. He told me to close the door but to be extra careful of the tender handle. I did as he asked.
    My mother’s Mass shoes were on the small rug next to the bed. She bought that rug in Dublin years ago. Mothers and their children had traveled there by bus on a zoo day trip the Irish Countrywomen’s Association organized. It was springtime. My first time visiting Dublin. And it might have been my mother’s. I forget so much. And get so much wrong. On the dressing table their battered prayer books and his rosary beads. On the walls, the pictures of the Blessed Family, Padre Pio, and Saint Francis, who once sat atop the television. The heavy red curtains Auntie Tess sent from Dublin were open. The curtains reached the floor. The same sort of curtains hung in the boys’ and the girls’bedrooms. It was dusk. A blackbird was singing. He raised his face. That smile appeared. He said the blackbird sang morning and evening. He scattered bread