The first thing Maeve remembered was the smell of rain on the steps of the Hugh Lane Gallery. She said it before she said my name, though my name did not come at all. “It always smells like wet coats here,” she whispered, looking up at the old building as if it had been waiting for her. I was standing beside her with two coffees going cold in my hands, trying not to let my face show what my chest was doing.
We had been married for nine years by then, together for twelve. We met in a queue outside a small gig near Whelan’s, both pretending we were only there because a friend had dragged us along. She told me that night she hated men who wore scarves indoors. I was wearing one. I married her anyway.
After the accident, the doctors said memory could return unevenly. Maeve had slipped on wet tiles outside our flat in Phibsborough and hit her head hard enough to make the whole world rearrange itself. She remembered her mother’s old phone number, the taste of vinegar on chips from Burdock’s, the exact bus route from Rathmines to town, and the name of a girl who bullied her in fourth class. She remembered the lyrics to songs she had not heard in twenty years. She remembered that she disliked coriander and that the Luas announcement at Abbey Street always made her laugh because it sounded too serious.
She remembered everything except me.
At first I tried to be brave in the tidy, useless way people expect. I brought photo albums to the hospital. I showed her pictures of us in Howth, in Galway, outside the registry office on Grand Canal Street, both of us squinting in the wind. I played her the song from our first dance. I wore the blue jumper she used to steal from me every winter. She smiled politely through all of it, the way you smile at someone explaining a film you have never seen.
“You seem very kind,” she said one afternoon, and I had to go into the corridor and put my hand against the wall because kindness felt like a demotion from husband.
When she came home, she moved through our flat like a guest in an Airbnb. She knew where the mugs were but not why one had a crack shaped like a river. She knew the way to the Spar but not that I always bought her the purple snack bars she claimed she didn’t like. She knew the city, but not the life we had built inside it.
The worst day, and somehow the best, happened in town three weeks after she was discharged. Her consultant had suggested familiar places without pressure, so I took her on a walk through Dublin. We passed the GPO, crossed towards Trinity, and ended up near St Stephen’s Green. It was one of those grey afternoons where the sky looks like it has given up but the city keeps going anyway.
Maeve stopped at the Fusiliers’ Arch and laughed suddenly. “I kissed someone here once,” she said.
I felt the old foolish hope rise in me. “You did.”
She turned to me, bright with recognition, but not of me. “He had terrible hair. Awful. Like he’d cut it himself with kitchen scissors.”
“He probably had,” I said.
“I can’t remember his face,” she said, still smiling. “But I remember thinking I would marry him if he asked.”
I looked down at my shoes. I had asked six years later, in our kitchen, after burning dinner so badly we ate toast over the sink. She had said yes with butter on her chin.
We sat on a bench by the pond. A child was
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