by L.J. Shen
“Let me explain.”
She throws her head back and laughs, not an ounce of humor in her voice. “What’s to explain? That you’re a liar? That you’re a fraud? That you’re a shitty dad for sending your daughter to live with relatives while you screw your new wife, living the perfect double life?”
When she puts it like that, it does seem impossible to find justification for the clusterfuck I’ve created with my own hands (and cock). But it’s not that simple. I know this well, because I walked into this thing demanding revenge, but I never planned to take it this far.
Honestly, I thought Rory would be long gone. I expected her to quit.
“Rory…”
A car honks outside our door. Rory throws up her arms with faux delight.
“That’s my carriage, as you like to charmingly put it. I’ll see that our equally enchanting divorce papers hit your mail in a timely manner. Hey, Mal, remember our conversation about epic romance movies?”
I glower.
She is making fun of the breakdown of our marriage. No matter the fact that I was stupid enough to cause it, and she is clearly pissed off, I’m still finding it difficult to watch her shitting all over what we have.
Rory doesn’t wait for me to answer, making a show of bypassing me and throwing the door open. She stands on the threshold as she delivers her last line.
“You said all great romance movies have a scene where the woman drives the man. Here’s an unscripted twist: our romantic, amazing, sweet, perfect movie was a parody. Bravo.” She claps, taking a little bow. “You won the Razzie for this one, Mal. It really was that bad.”
Then she takes out the napkin—our napkin with the contract—from her bag and rips it to shreds in front of me, throwing the pieces in the air and watching them float down like confetti.
“The contract was dumb. So were we. Maybe it’s my fault. Maybe it’s in my DNA to attract lying asshats. But if I have to thank you for one thing, Malachy Doherty, it’s for opening my eyes to the fact that Callum was just as big a douchebag as you are. Congratulations. You’re just as bad as—what did you call him? Shiny Boyfriend? Make sure you give him a call and invite him next time you’re on the prowl.”
With that, she slams the door in my face and leaves.
Rory
Still reeling from finding out my husband has a secret daughter, and that he promised his family he’d keep me away, I show up just in time for my emergency meeting with Father Doherty at The Boar’s Head.
He is already there when I arrive, twiddling his thumbs and glancing left and right, like he’s committing some sort of crime. When I slide into the booth, he stands up and stares at the table, hard.
“On one hand, it is highly frowned upon for me to socialize with women of your age, publicly or otherwise. Especially at a pub. On the other, I am deeply worried for your wellbeing in Mal’s house when both Elaine and Lara are in Tolka.”
“Which one is which?” I plop down on the wooden seat opposite to him, cradling my tall glass of water. I don’t mention that I will no longer be staying at Mal’s house.
“Elaine is Kathleen’s mam; Lara is Mal’s.”
I didn’t even know my mother-in-law’s name, and just found out she’d likely to stab me in the eye before shaking my hand. What a wonderful start to obviously long-term marital bliss.
I rub a drop of water on the table, back and forth, wondering how this day could possibly get any worse. Of course, I believe it can. Today hasn’t met a negative challenge it couldn’t conquer. I wouldn’t be surprised if a UFO kidnapped me on my way to the airport to perform a full rectal examination on me, sending me back to Earth with nothing but lubricated ass cheeks, anal scars, and a T-shirt that says “My Wife Went to Kepler-22b and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt.”
“I’m guessing they both hate me.” I frown at my drink, because examining Father Doherty’s face is too painful.
He says nothing to that.
I should really get what I’m here for and move along. There’s a flight to New York in four hours, and I don’t want to miss it or I’ll have to stay another day.
Mal hasn’t kept something small from me. He kept an entire child, with personality and freckles and purple eyes and hobbies. And she’s my niece. My half-sister’s child. Why do people insist on hiding things from me?
Mom.
Father Doherty.
Mal.
Summer and Callum.
“Father?” I slant my head. “Is there anything more unholy than preventing justice? The truth is all around me. If I don’t get your version of things, I’ll get Ms. Patel’s. Or Maeve and Heather’s. Or Mal’s, eventually. We both know I’ll get a far worse version from any of them, or at the very least, not as accurate as yours.”
“I promised your—”
“Mother?” I arch an eyebrow, mustering the courage to lie to a priest. If I burst into flames right on the spot, I will only have myself to blame. “She told me her side of the story.”
“She did?” His eyes flare.
Bingo. They are in this together. I decide to run with the only thing I have. It’s a shot in the dark, but on the off-chance it’s a memory and not just a dream, I fire it out.
“Yeah. How she was here. How she ran with me.”
My heart is beating so hard and loud in my chest, I’m surprised he doesn’t hear it. Maybe he does, and he wants to spare me the embarrassment. It was just a dream. A nightmare of sorts. But it seemed so real.
To my surprise, Father Doherty plants his head inside his palms and bursts into tears—the gut-tearing sound of a mewling animal being ripped to shreds by a pack of coyotes.
“Please forgive us. All of us.”
“Tell me.” I lean down, careful not to touch him as I beg for more of his words. “Everything. Please. Don’t I deserve to know? There’s a chunk in my life—the first chunk, the most important chunk—that’s missing, and nobody here is telling me anything.”
My voice sounds so urgent, so crisp, so wild, I scare even myself. I sound unhinged.
He looks up and exhales sharply. “I don’t know how much your mother has told you.”
“Then tell me everything. From the beginning.”
“When you weren’t even a year old, she decided to take a leap and give in to your father’s pleas to come to Ireland and try to work things out. She was lonely here. An outcast. She came to church often. Less to confess, more to…vent, I suppose. She told me—outside of the confession booth, of course—that two things brought her here. She wanted to try to help Glen get sober, but even more important, she didn’t want it on her conscience to have you live without a father knowing she didn’t even try. She moved in with him and they became—how do you call it?—an instant family, making Kathleen and her mother take the backseat in Glen’s life.”
Molten ache seeps under my skin. I had no idea Mom came here. I had no idea she ever set foot in Ireland. Why wouldn’t she tell me? Seems like the kind of thing she would gloat about. “Look. I tried.” Yet, she never mentioned it, even though she knew it would put her in a positive light.
“Continue.”
“Things weren’t easy for the couple. Glen struggled to stay sober for more than a few hours. Your mother felt lonely and isolated. She tried to befriend some of the village women, but naturally, they felt loyal to Elaine, who was absolutely devastated. Elaine—Kathleen’s mam—had held on to the hope she’d reunite with Glen for years after Kathleen was conceived. Debbie took this hope from her. Or so she felt.”
I realize he is saying this about a woman with whom he lives and is probably fond of. I refrain from letting a string of profanities exit my mouth.
“Okay,” I say, my heart pounding fast. “Then what happened?”
Father Doherty stares down at his hands on the table, like they’ve committed some sort of horrible crime.
“Your mother came to me one day and told me she would like to leave and take you back to America, that things had not worked out so
well between her and Glen. That was no secret. She said he’d been verbally abusive and prevented her from going out with you three separate times, accusing her of flirting with the villagers. We had a lengthy discussion, during which I gave her my opinion on the matter. Principally, that families should remain together and that she should consider encouraging Glen to try harder, perhaps by agreeing to his marriage proposal.”
I bite my lower lip. My mother was in an abusive relationship with my father, here in Ireland. And I gave her hell for putting a buffer between him and me.
“Then the weight of my words crashed down on me.” Father Doherty’s lower lip trembles, and he chokes on a sob that never quite makes it out of his throat. “She went back to Glen that day and told him she was willing to marry him if he went to rehab. He said she’d been nagging him for months and that he liked the drink better than he liked her. He sent her on her way. Debbie was relieved to leave. She tried to take you, but he wouldn’t let her—said you were going to stay with him because you didn’t need a pesky mother like her.
“They almost tore your limbs fighting over you, snatching you from each other. You were only a year old at the time, still so fragile. Finally, your mother took you. She gathered your passports and her bag and flew out the door. Glen grabbed a bottle of whiskey and threw it at her. Luckily, he missed. But the glass shattered against the wall and part of it…part of it…”
He swallows, his eyes shifting to the scar on my temple.
The one my mother told me I was born with.
Everything inside me shatters. Glen did this to me. He gave me this scar. Father Doherty squeezes his eyes shut, and when he opens them again, a zing of determination flashes through them.
“It cut you open. You were bleeding badly, and it was close to your eye. The blood came gushing out. I remember getting to their house shortly after the incident and throwing up from all the blood, which I knew belonged to an innocent baby. But Glen wasn’t shocked by what he’d done. He was too far gone, too drunk to realize his actions. He started chasing after your mother, who took off with you in her arms. She ran up the road on Main Street, toward the entrance of the town, to try to catch a cab to the hospital. He raced after her. People on the street noticed. They thought your mother was running away with you. She didn’t have the best reputation in Tolka. She was seen as the woman who came for the man Elaine had pined for all those years. Some of them ran after him and her, to see what went on.”
“The gray squirrel,” I say quietly.
He nods, his eyes telling me I’ve gotten exactly what he meant all those years ago.
A flashback of my dream shoots like an arrow through my head.
The mob.
Chasing after my mother.
With me, bleeding in her arms.
Father Doherty drops his head to his hands again. “I was looking for your mother at the exact same time she was running from him. First, I made a stop at Glen’s. When I saw the blood, I ran out and drove around the village, and when I found you, I immediately stopped my car and let your mother in. We drove to the hospital. The entire journey, I apologized for giving her the wrong advice instead of shelter.”
I rub my eyes, trying to keep myself together. It’s difficult, especially when I want to cry for my mom as much as for myself.
“It doesn’t make any sense.” I shake my head. “She always told me she’s never been to Ireland.”
“She wanted to protect you from the truth, to keep your scars minimal—on the surface—and make sure they only marred your skin, not your heart. She didn’t want you to know who your father really was that day. And after the incident, when you were discharged and Debbie went back to New Jersey, Glen was prosecuted and jailed for a couple years. He got sober in prison, but it didn’t last quite as long as we’d hoped. The time inside changed him, though. He no longer wanted anything to do with—”
“My mother and me?” I finish for him.
I have so much hatred for Glen right now, I’m afraid I’m capable of digging up his grave just so I can kill him all over again. My poor mom. She dealt with everything all by herself.
And let me think she was the coldhearted one between them.
“Well, yes.” Father Doherty rubs his cheek, embarrassed on Glen’s behalf.
“I don’t understand any of this. Then why did my mother show me letters and gifts from him every birthday and Christmas? He always gave me the thoughtful presents. The ones that meant something.”
“It was important to your mother to make you believe you meant something to him. She took the role of the martyr, even though it killed her. She took the blame for the fact that you and your father weren’t in contact, not wanting you to feel rejected by Glen. She gathered the letters you sent him, read them, and made sure you thought he bought you all the things you wanted. But she was the one doing all the buying. And when you asked something that was specific to Ireland—a chocolate bar or Irish music—I’d buy it for you, and your mother would pay me back, despite my refusal to accept her money.”
“She wrote the letters on his behalf?” My eyes flare.
He nods solemnly.
“And the child support?”
Father Doherty shakes his head.
Jesus. Glen didn’t pay. It was just Mom and me.
He sighs. “She only wanted the best for you. She would send me your gifts, spending hundreds of dollars a year, so I could send them back to you and have it appear completely authentic.”
I remember the Irish stamps, the wrinkly boxes that put butterflies in my stomach. I’ve never wanted to hug my mother tighter. A rush of sympathy for her courses through me. She’s been through so much, and I’ve been a brat to her. The entire time, I thought she was jealous of the relationship I wanted to have with Glen.
“Is that why Kathleen hated me so much? Because I took her father, monopolized his time, then sent him to jail for a while?”
He sighs again, evidently feeling the strain of having to admit just how awful the man who left me his DNA and a mountain of daddy issues was.
“Kathleen was desperate for love. Always had been. Feeling loved was a need for her akin to breathing. Glen limited their communication to Sunday visits, and even then, he took more interest in Mal and his music than in her. But Kathleen wasn’t jealous of Mal. She’d always loved that boy, since they were wee babies. In her head, I suppose, it was the easiest to blame you. Then, when you visited here after he died, she was worried you showed up solely for the inheritance. Your mother sent me a letter informing me of your arrival, so I waited for you. When we met, I wanted to keep you as far away from Kathleen as I could. I sent you to Mal, after warning him never to tell you the truth about Glen and your scar. But then you both went to Kathleen, and she realized not only did you take her father, you were also about to take the lad she’d been in love with since birth.”
“Hold on.” I lift a hand. “Mal was aware of all of this? He knew this when I came here at eighteen?”
But, of course, he knew. If Maeve and Heather knew my story—and they didn’t even have the slightest business knowing me—how could Mal not?
By the pained look on Father Doherty’s face, I realize he did not think this implication through.
“He didn’t mean…”
“I have to go.” I dart up, my throat itching with the ball of tears lodged inside it. No truer words have ever been spoken by me. I have to leave. Not just The Boar’s Head, but Tolka, too. I have to leave Ireland behind. Every green, rolling hill, charming, cobblestoned pathway, and red door is haunting me.
I have to listen to my mother, who’s been telling me, begging me, warning me about this place. Telling me to run away and never look back. Maybe I can get the marriage with Mal annulled. It hasn’t even been a week.
Mal. Mal, Mal, Mal.
A secret daughter.
The truth about my father.
The lying, deceiving, manipulative piece of—
“Wait!” Father Doherty rises to h
is feet, staggering forward, holding on to the edges of the table. He’s so frail that he groans involuntarily as he does. He puts his hand on his lower back, wheezing.
I stop, my shoulders sagging. “Do you need me to call you a cab?” I ask, my voice softening.
He shakes his head. “Please don’t be mad at him. He just did as he was told. He, like your mother, like myself, didn’t want the truth to consume you, to have your past dictate your future.”
With all due respect, Father Doherty sounds like a fortune cookie. I’m not going to accept this excuse.
“It’s not for him to decide what I should or shouldn’t know. Or for you. Or for her. For anyone.” I let out a feral yelp, throwing my hands in the air.
All heads in the pub snap toward me, and I turn my volume down a notch, leaning forward and whispering hotly, “No one ever appointed Mal to be my Prince Charming, and if he were such thing to me, he’d be doing a crappy job. I deserved to know. I came to him begging for answers. He lured me into his net and made me think it was of my own free will. I never would have…”
Slept with him had I been up to speed on what my father had done.
Let him hold me all night.
Fallen in love with him.
My relationship with Mal would have been completely different, had he told me the truth when I met him the first time.
Then something else occurs to me.
“Tell me, Father, did Tamsin celebrate her birthday recently?”
The glitter.
The cake Mal baked.
The present.
Father Doherty showing up at Ms. Patel’s newsagents unexpectedly, buying booze.
Of course, that’s another event I was shunned from because I’m the daughter of the devil—the devil whose only crime was trying to save me from my father.
“Yes.” He tucks his chin, staring at his shoes. “Her seventh.”
“I see.”
For the first time in my life, I can say this with certainty. I do see. And as precious as Tamsin is, I cannot afford to stick around and watch her grow.