I sit awhile some evenings by my mother-in-law’s bed, and I watch her sleep. Triona doesn’t know I come here to the hospice on my own. It’s on my way home from the sites in Limerick, though, and I can’t pass without tipping in for a few minutes just. It’d feel wrong to drive past, even though I know that she’ll have Triona later in the evening and a parade of neighbors in from the parish. There’s something soothing about this place in a strange kind of way.
Now and again Marjorie wakes for a few seconds and she always smiles at me and says, Hello, Bobby. I feel a fool- ish kind of happiness that she always knows me. They have her on heavy drugs in here and she hardly even knows Triona sometimes, but my name she always gets right. Her brother was here a few days ago, and every time he spoke she looked at him and asked, Who have I in it? And he started to get upset, and nearly a bit panicky for a finish,saying, It’s me, Marjorie, it’s Liam, how don’t you know me? Then he started sniffing a bit and making things uncomfort- able so I told him to go on away and get a cup of tea for himself. He knew by me not to argue. Triona gave me a funny look but she said nothing.
There was a yahoo here last week in a stripy tracksuit causing awful trouble for the nurses downstairs. He was coming in to see his mother-in-law, too. I heard him down outside below Marjorie’s window roaring in at his wife, Tell your mother I love her. The security guards were standing near him and one of them was saying, We told you, Willy, you can’t be coming around here pissed and upsetting people, and still you keep doing it. The other security guard had a foreign accent, Slavic I’d say. He reminded me an awful lot of a fella I knew one time.
Willy Boy was still below when I was leaving. He had the sliding doorway blocked and there was a man behind him wanting to get in and an old couple inside waiting to get out but Willy was having none of it. He was holding tough in the doorway, squaring up. That fuzzing started in my head at the sight and the sound of him, and at the look of fear on the faces of the people around him, those good people, just being decent, carrying their sadness around quietly; that feeling like my ears and eyes were being strained by something in my brain, being pushed out against the edges of themselves. That’s been happening me a lot lately. When things go wrong on a job or when Seanie Shaper is mouthing, or dropping sly hints about what happened on his brother’s stag, or when my lad Rob is playing a match and the ref acts the prick. I don’t know if that’s always happened me and I just didn’t notice. I’m way more aware these days of the things my body is doing.
I walked out past the security guards and one of them made shapes to get me to wait but he thought better of it and just stood watching. Willy dropped his hands and stepped back out of my way at the sliding doors and he was all manners and apologies, sorry, sir, sorry, sorry. He never for a second expected my left elbow to meet his throat the way it did. I don’t know if he even knew what was after hit- ting him when he was lying on the concrete between the ambulance bay and the step of the door with his two hands up under his chin and a raspy kind of a wail coming out of him. I got him right on the windpipe. A sneaky shot, in fair- ness. All he deserved.
I took one look back on the way to my van and I could see the security guards looking down at Willy and Willy still flailing for air in a puddle on the ground and the people who had been trapped by Willy’s tantrum were walking out past him, giving him a wide berth, holding on to one another for comfort. I hate to see old people frightened like that, and for no reason beyond a gobshite not being able to conduct himself like a man is supposed to. As if the world isn’t hard enough a place for them already.
The old boy looked at me as I drove past. He had one hand on his wife’s back, guiding her gently along the path, and he raised his other hand to me, and he nodded and sort of smiled, a sad kind of knowing smile it was, and I winked at him. The peace I felt driving home, you wouldn’t believe. I’m not like my father was. I’m not.
There’s this thing that happens me now nearly every day. It feels like a stab of something in my middle, not pain exactly, just a kind of a force that takes the air out of me so that I have to stop what I’m doing for a few seconds until it passes. It only comes on me when I let my thoughts drift. It feels like all the things I’m worried about come together in one ball and the ball fires itself at me and hits me right in the center of myself. Someone putting their hand on Erin. A car pulling up alongside her and her being dragged into it. Rob getting bullied. Or showing off the way boys do, climbing something, falling. Getting dropped off his team. Triona getting sick. And the dealers never leave my mind. It’s nearly two years since I started seeing them. Penrose, Pitts, Braden, Dowel. They’re always, always on my mind. Triona is obsessed with them and every time I see Augie Penrose’s blacked-out Audi little bursts of light flash at the edges of my vision and something prickles and itches on my skin.
I got a good trick from the internet. This four-seven- eight breathing thing. It actually kind of works. I breathe in for four beats, hold it for seven, and exhale for eight. I feel things settling on the exhale, slowing and regularizing, my heart calming.
Excerpted from HEART, BE AT PEACE by Donal Ryan, published by Penguin Books, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC on May 19, 2026. Copyright © 2026 Donal Ryan
Image by Hubertine Heijermans
