“I’ve been at war with myself,” Hallie said, her breath slowing as she calmed down. “One part of me convincing me to stay and that all was well, and the other part begging me to look and be aware.” She shifted on the grass and gazed over Colleen’s shoulder. “Do you have any idea what it is to be battling yourself? It drains you of so much . . . energy.” She looked back at Colleen. “He’s awful, isn’t he?”
“He doesn’t have to be all bad, Hallie. I know the good parts, too, but you have to decide what you can and cannot live with.”
“I know.” Hallie took her sister’s hands. “I love you. You know that, right? I didn’t stop just because you did.”
Colleen felt the thick sadness in her throat and tried to swallow. “I do love you, Hallie, but it’s the trust that I haven’t been able to find.”
“I know.” Hallie’s gaze became unfocused. “My God, my girls will be devastated if I leave him. They think he’s the bee’s knees. Daddy this and Daddy that and Daddy here and Daddy there.”
“He’ll still be their daddy.” Colleen was treading on unfamiliar territory, an unmapped land she didn’t truly understand because she didn’t have her own children, and yet she could have just as well been talking about their own dad.
“You’re the wrong person to complain to, Lena.” Hallie hesitated before she continued. “It feels like I’m losing everything that matters, except my girls. Dad’s disease isn’t a mistake he made. It’s not his fault. Here, between us, this is my fault. It was a mistake that I thought was saving my own heart. I thought I was finding the love of my life, but I’ve never been able to forgive myself. How could I expect you to forgive me? Now what, Lena? Now what do I do?”
“I have no idea.” Colleen closed her eyes. “Except this—do not do what I did.”
Hallie almost smiled. “No, I can’t run away . . .”
“In a way you can. You can leave him. But you have family here, Hallie. A house. A home. Come back to it if you don’t want the internal war of living with Walter.”
The sisters sat quietly then, the voices of others rumbling past, a foghorn sounding far off and a baby crying from a stroller only a few feet away. But they didn’t hear any of this, not with full awareness. They merely sat together in the silence between them, the silence that finally, finally spoke of sisterhood.
“What about you, Lena?”
“What about me?”
“What if you want to stay? What if you want to be here, too?”
“Hallie, if that happens, we’ll figure it out. Don’t use me as an excuse not to end your marriage.”
Hallie took in a gasp as if she’d been hit in the solar plexus. “Yes, I’ve been doing that for far, far too long.”
Chapter Twenty-five
We do not remember days, we remember moments.
Cesare Pavese, The Business of Living; Diaries 1935–1950
FIVE DAYS UNTIL THE PARTY . . .
The johnboat tipped and bounced against the dock as Colleen, Hallie and Dad sat on the bench, so close together that their legs and knees pressed together. Shane sat solo on the driver’s seat.
“Did we get a smaller boat?” Gavin asked as Shane pushed down on the throttle and the small motor pulsed to form a wake like the V of white birds flying across a pewter sky.
“No,” Colleen said. Seated next to Gavin, she placed her hand on his knee as they tilted forward with the momentum. “We just grew bigger.”
Gavin laughed and shifted his baseball cap on his head, lifted his face to the sun. “There is no place on this earth as beautiful as the rivers and marshes of our land. You know that, don’t you?” He asked this with his eyes closed so the siblings didn’t know to whom the question was directed. They all answered in the affirmative.
“It is the scend of the sea for us now.” Gavin leaned forward in the johnboat, upsetting the delicate balance. Each sister grabbed the side of the boat.
“The what?” Hallie asked.
“The scend,” Gavin insisted. “You know, I’ve told you this before.” His voice rose with the recent, increasingly frequent frustration of dementia sneaking in like fog in the night.
Colleen touched her dad’s shoulder, squeezed it. “Remind us.”
“Not send but scend.” He spelled the different words. “The surge behind the boat—the surge behind our life. When the tide and the wind and the wave are all pushing us forward. That is now.”
“Yes,” Colleen said. “That is now.” She understood he meant more than the wind and wave behind the boat, but of life’s current toward something they could not stop, a momentum beyond their control.
Slowly Shane eased the bright silver johnboat into the larger river channel, where sandbars appeared and disappeared twice a day; where the shrimp weren’t visible until you threw the net and lifted it with a great heave; where the water teemed with unseen life and slapped against the docks and shoreline with equal disregard. The humming motor and the swish-slap of river water on the hull lulled them all to silence. Colleen wondered what her dad and siblings were thinking, each with his or her own river of thought pulsing in different directions as complicated as the estuaries and creeks that spread from the main river, some reaching a dead end and others rejoining where they’d started.
Taking Dad out in the boat like this had been part of a well-laid plan. The night before, the three siblings had sat in the kitchen, playing an Ella Fitzgerald LP, and decided that the only way to understand the odd gap in Dad’s timeline was to ask him. To gently ask him in a place that felt utterly familiar and wholly belonging to him.
The river.
The last couple of days had been rough on all of them—Dad getting worse not by the hour but almost by the minute. His spatial sense seemed to be deteriorating; he tripped over stairs and stumbled over his own feet. He time traveled at least once a day—asking when Lena would be home from ballet or when his wife would return from her afternoon bridge game with the ladies.
Another difficult choice had been made—Hallie and the girls would move in with Gavin. Although it seemed a simple solution, it wasn’t. It was a decision fraught with heartache, and Dad asking again and again, Why? Why are you moving in? And Hallie having to explain again and again—I’ve left Walter. And their dad becoming concerned and upset once more.
But at this moment, out on the water, Gavin showed no concern for anything. His face was smooth and his grin relaxed, coming and going as easily as the clouds moving across the late afternoon sky. It was hot, yes, but they were accustomed to the August heat, and floating on the water was a perfect cure—the breeze whipping, the water cooling. A sailboat eased by and the man at the helm waved, and then a motorboat passed, pulling a pair of teenage boys on an inflatable tube, both screaming and loving the simple danger of being tossed off and into the water. The wake rocked them all back and forth as they held on to the sides of their own boat.
Shane slowed and drew near to one of the exposed sandbars, where spartina grass swayed, summer green and bent to the breeze. The tip of the sandbar, always exposed, was crusted with bleached oyster shells, tinkling like wind chimes in the wake of the tide. Shane expertly maneuvered the boat. There was the clanging of metal on metal as he yanked out the anchor and then the soft thud as he dropped it into the sand off the bow. From under the bench Colleen withdrew the cooler where she’d stashed a thermos of lemonade and bottles of water.
They jumped off the boat into the shin-deep water without talking, and with the practiced synchronicity of childhood. Hallie took the few steps to the sand line and dropped a blanket, stained and full of holes from its long and loving use. The rest of them ambled slowly to the blanket and then sat, chatting about the beauty of the breeze and what a stunning day it was for August when, without preamble, Hallie opened the discussion.
“Dad, we need you to tell us the truth about Ireland.” She drew her knees to her chest in a
silhouette so like her childhood self that Colleen thought maybe they had traveled back in time. Soon Mother would appear from behind the grasses carrying a wicker basket full of cut-up sandwiches, potato chips and apple slices, which would all soon be crunchy with sand.
“Hallie.” Shane spat her name and leaned forward, digging his hands into the sand. “That’s not the best way to start.”
“Start what?” Gavin sat with his hands behind him, propping himself in a half-reclining position on the blanket. “Am I being ambushed here? Are you going to leave me on this island to swim home?” His attempt at humor fell flat and into silence.
Colleen sat cross-legged, her hands wrapped around a cold water bottle, her heart hammering. She didn’t have a good feeling about this discussion. Some things were best left alone. Their dad was erratic now—sometimes fully Gavin and sometimes a man or young child they’d never met. He sang the lark song, humming or under his breath, all during the day. Something buried was pushing against the ground, forcing its way to the surface—a Lazarus of memory.
“I have never lied to you.” Gavin’s voice was strong. He seemed himself.
“I know.” Hallie lowered her voice and wrapped her arms tighter around her knees. “But you haven’t told us the truth about your time in Ireland.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, my darling.” He crossed one leg over the other and furrowed his brow.
“We want to know the full story. We love you and we want to know everything before you . . .”
“Before I forget,” he said clearly. He removed his sunglasses so they all saw the tears that gathered in his eyes and didn’t so much spill as seep into the wrinkles. “Oh, my children. I didn’t mean to lie to you. Sometimes when we honor someone’s request it hurts another. I never meant for such a thing.”
“Then tell us,” Shane said.
“If I tell you this story, I will betray your mother.”
Colleen’s pulse battered against her chest; the sun suddenly felt blazing and dizzying. Don’t, Dad, she wanted to scream. Don’t change everything. But she didn’t speak a word.
“Dad?” Shane asked.
Gavin’s gaze moved slowly to his son’s gaze. “Oh, son. I’m going to lose this piece of myself, aren’t I? Soon it will be gone and you will be feeding me with a spoon and I won’t know your name, will I? That is now my destiny. So I have a choice, don’t I? I can keep the story and allow it to be eaten alive by the disease or I can give it to you. Is giving it to all of you fair to you or to your mother?”
“Dad . . .” Colleen didn’t think the words before she spoke them. “Your story is our story. Can’t you see that?”
He held her gaze and then he said, “Perhaps you’re right.”
And so, Gavin Donohue spoke the tale of his Irish love. It was a slow telling, halting and starting again like an engine without enough oil. But the pieces of the story were intact—the story of his journey to Ireland, of meeting the first Colleen. Twilight fell long on the sandbar as the tide moved in, but it was Ireland that filtered into the Lowcountry evening air; the emerald world their dad took over an hour to describe. Fiddle music seemed to echo across the water. Galway Bay, winter whipped and fierce, raged at the sandbar instead of the calm May of Watersend, South Carolina. A pub, known dimly in a faded photo, sprang to life with boisterous County Clare villagers, with grief and love and laughter. And above all of this, and through it, “The Lark in the Clear Air” played on and on and on.
They arrived home in silence; enough had been said, the puttering of the boat and the whip of the wind were their companions. They docked and hugged each other good-bye without I love yous and see you laters, everyone absorbing what they had heard and now knew. When Shane and their dad had left for the pub and Hallie drove off to her children, Colleen slipped into her bedroom and began to compose the tale Gavin had told.
Yes, she thought, something had always been whispering, a certain knowing lurking at the edges of her consciousness, the gap of a secret where her mother’s full attention might have been. Why had her mother insisted on calling her Lena, never by her full name? Now Colleen knew . . .
Colleen wrote so quickly that she misspelled words, shortened sentences. She would clean it later, but she needed to get it all down, everything her dad had said as best she could remember. The truth had struck her like a body blow and she still felt numb. Because she’d learned today that she had another mother, another woman to be called by the same name.
THE MEMORY BOOK
Gavin Donohue’s Story
Her name was Colleen O’Shea, and you met on an unseasonably warm September day in County Clare, Ireland.
As you stepped inside, the O’Shea pub was resonant with the sounds of a woman playing the fiddle and singing softly, “Dear thoughts are in my mind and my soul it soars enchanted . . . as I hear the sweet lark sing in the clear air of the day.”
You’d stumbled into an evening of mourning for a local couple who’d passed to the next world only days before in a terrible car accident. The Irish mourn this way—completely and with their entire being. There can be nothing held back. How else can one celebrate a life? they asked.
The woman playing the fiddle was young and lithe, dark curls falling over her left shoulder and the fiddle propped on her right. Her face was half-hidden behind the fall of her hair, behind the curls alive with her every movement. You saw her lips, parted in mourning for the sadness to escape. Her elbow flew up and down as her hand drew the bow across the strings.
You sat in the only free chair in the pub and, in reverence and awe, asked the man next to you, “What is her name?”
“Why you wantin’ to know?” he asked in his Irish brogue, his eyes screwed tight in distrust and grief.
“Her music is so lonesome and beautiful. I wonder who she is.”
“It’s her mum and da that have passed. It was the last of her immediate family.”
You looked at that woman who had lost so much and you wanted to save her from all tragedy and pain. You wanted to take that fiddle from her hands and take her in your arms. You didn’t understand why; you had never seen her before that moment when you absently walked into a pub for a pint of Guinness. But who knows when a life will change? Who knows when a decision alters the course of all other decisions?
When she was finished, you went straight to her and introduced yourself: Gavin Donohue from America.
You believed you would be there for only three more months, in that land of brilliant emerald and lush gold. You believed you’d tour, drink dark beer and research your family’s heritage before returning to the life and the high school sweetheart waiting for you at home. But that’s not what destiny had planned for you.
Within weeks, you canceled your flight home and you settled in County Clare with Colleen O’Shea. Gradually she told you of her homeland’s history, its people, its music and its mythology. She fell in love with you as you fell in love with her, as the bow flitted across the fiddle strings and her voice rang out clear and resonant.
There was the awful pain of explaining this turn of events to Elizabeth, whom you loved and had promised to return to although you weren’t yet engaged. You felt grief for what you left behind; you felt pain for Elizabeth, and yet you understood that you were answering a call to love in a way you never had before.
You were married on a cliff overlooking Galway Bay—on a windy day with thunderheads on the horizon. You weren’t of her strict Catholic upbringing and couldn’t marry in the church and yet her cousin, a Protestant cleric from town, performed the ceremony and you promised to love her for all your life. Together you settled into a small thatch-roof home that had once belonged to her departed parents. You took a job in her family’s pub, where you’d met that night of her parents’ wake, and started to have the tiniest bit of an Irish accent.
The Gaelic language slowly infused your speech until
you learned enough to speak it in sorrow or joy—a few lines when needed.
Six months later, you discovered that the joy of that love had grown. Colleen carried your child and now she had a family again, and you were her family, and the child inside was her family.
You had goals and dreams—together you and Colleen would raise a family on the shore of a bay where your ancestors had originated before they boarded an immigrant ship and arrived on the shores of America to start a new life. You would help her carry on the family business.
Colleen went into labor on a frigid March day, two weeks early. Between labor pains and the stop signs that you ran, you rejoiced at the goodness of the world and the imminent arrival of your child.
The devastation happened quickly and without warning. Colleen lost consciousness when you were still within miles of the hospital. But maybe, you thought, this was normal—the pain of birth and the loss of blood, which was evident on her dress, on the car seat. But it was too much blood, wasn’t it? Too much.
They saved your little girl, but not your wife. Placenta previa they called it.
With all the love you had inside, you bundled up that little girl and you returned to your family in Virginia to begin again. You’d been gone for almost two years and you returned with a one-month-old baby daughter. The extended Irish family of O’Sheas understood your departure—there was no immediate family to keep you there. Your first love, Elizabeth, had waited. Yes, she’d remained true, always believing you’d return. Love, she’d said, brings home those who are meant to come home.
“I’ve always been yours,” she said. “And I will still be yours.”
But she had one condition—that no one would ever know of the great love from which your daughter, called Colleen after her mother, had been conceived. That no one could ever know that Colleen belonged to anyone but Elizabeth, and her name would be Lena. And she loved that baby as her own, and she promised that she always would.
The Favorite Daughter Page 23