When Your Eyes Close

by Tanya Farrelly

  ‘Wednesday.’ Michelle tried to think that far ahead. If she had anything on, she’d cancel it. This was too important. ‘Yes, Wednesday would be great,’ she said. ‘I look forward to meeting you.’

  She was trembling with a mix of adrenalin and excitement when she hung up. She may not have got far with Lydia Davis, but she would have plenty to tell Nick when they met that night.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Nick

  ‘How are you feeling, Nick?’ Tessa sat forward in her seat and opened her notepad.

  ‘Better,’ he said. ‘At least with the cravings.’

  ‘Good. That’s great.’ She scribbled something on the pad. ‘Last time you took alcohol?’

  Nick thought for a moment. ‘Eleven days ago.’ He thought it best not to mention his little slip-up.

  ‘And are you using the techniques, are they helping?’

  Nick nodded. ‘Yes. I’d say so. I’m back working.’

  ‘That’s wonderful, Nick. And how about sleep? Are you sleeping okay? Any nightmares?’

  ‘Not so bad.’ He wondered if she noticed his evasiveness.

  She didn’t say anything, put down her pen and came around to his side of the desk. She smiled. ‘You’re doing really well, Nick. Now, whenever you’re ready, you can take a seat.’

  Nick sat back into the recliner. His feelings about being regressed, since he’d met Caitlin, were contradictory. He wanted to go back there, to find out more about his wife, Rachel, and his little girl. At the same time, he was afraid of what the sessions might uncover. He wasn’t sure if he could deal with what he might find.

  ‘Relax your limbs, Nick. Let that calm feeling wash over you, taking with it all the tension, all the anxiety …’ Tessa’s voice, soothing, lulled him backwards in time.

  His body grew slack as he followed Tessa into the past.

  ‘Okay, I’m going to bring you back slowly, Nick. Bit by bit, we’re going to revisit those moments when you felt good – when you didn’t rely on alcohol to bring about a false sense of fulfilment.’

  His life begins to unravel – moments glimpsed and then swept away again as his memory is set to rewind.

  He’s back in the house in Dalkey again, sitting outside on the terrace that looks over the sea. It’s one of those rare warm days when there isn’t a gale blowing across the bay. He’s relaxing, earbuds in, listening to music, the sun warm on his face. He doesn’t hear Susan come in, jumps when she lays a hand on his arm, and then laughs at his reaction.

  ‘Hey you,’ she says.

  ‘Jesus, you gave me a fright,’ he says.

  ‘Clearly.’ She grins, pulls out the other chair, sits next to him. ‘It’s not a bad life, is it?’ she says.

  He smiles. ‘Could be worse.’

  ‘Or better,’ she says.

  He looks at her. She seems in an oddly happy mood. ‘Come on,’ he says, ‘I know you have something to tell me?’

  ‘Well …’ She leans in towards him. ‘We’re going to be parents.’

  He sits up, at first, he doesn’t know how he feels, then the realization hits him. ‘Seriously? My God … when did …?’

  ‘I’ve suspected for a few weeks, but I didn’t want to say anything. I’ve just been to Doctor Breen and she confirmed it. Roughly eight weeks, she said.’

  Susan is looking at him, clearly delighted. She’s had more time to get over the shock, of course. He’s happy too, at least he thinks he is, but he also feels an overwhelming sense of responsibility.

  ‘You are happy?’ she says, frowning.

  ‘Yeah, of course, I mean … wow.’ He starts to laugh; his feelings are still ambivalent, but he doesn’t want to spoil it for Susan. It’s not like they hadn’t intended to have a family, they just hadn’t intended to start it this soon. They’d always been careful.

  ‘I’ve got a scan next Thursday. They won’t be able to tell the sex yet … not for another month or two, but … would you like to know?’

  He nods. ‘Why not? That way it’s easier to prepare, isn’t it?’ He doesn’t know why, but he already feels that it’s a girl. With that instinct comes worry, a sense of guilt, and he has no idea why. He would love a girl, would probably be one of those overprotective fathers that wouldn’t let any boy so much as look at her. He tries to shake his inexplicable feeling of guilt, of burden. He’s going to be a father. This is the glue they need, him and Susan, to really make a life.

  ‘Where are you, Nick?’ Tessa’s voice intrudes on the scene.

  ‘At home. Susan’s come in. She’s told me we’re going to have a baby.’

  ‘Does that make you happy?’

  ‘Yes.’ He’s aware even as he says it that it’s not entirely true, but it’s what people expect him to say. He can’t say that he doesn’t know. That he needs time to figure out if he’s truly happy. And he can’t explain this feeling; this sense of foreboding. He tries to reason with himself, thinks that maybe every new parent feels this … He’s still trying to work it out when the scene flashes forward …

  He gets the call at work. It’s Susan’s friend, Anna, telling him to get to the hospital – that something’s happened. He asks her if Susan’s okay. ‘Just get here,’ she says. He checks his mobile: five missed calls from Susan over an hour ago; two more from a number he doesn’t recognize. He gets a text from Anna on the way to the hospital giving him the name of the ward and the number of the room Susan is in.

  Susan looks terrible. She’s not crying when he gets there, but it’s clear that she has been. Her face is swollen and red.

  ‘What happened?’ he says.

  Susan looks at him, stonily. ‘This is your fault,’ she says.

  He is shocked by the venom with which she spews the words. ‘What … the baby?’

  ‘Dead,’ she says. ‘The baby’s dead.’

  He collapses into the chair that Anna has vacated. She’s standing, awkwardly. ‘I’ll leave you …’ she says.

  ‘Don’t.’ The word is an order.

  ‘What happened?’ he tries again. Susan turns on her side away from him. Anna puts a hand on his arm, mouths something sympathetic, but he shakes her off. ‘Where’s the doctor?’ he says.

  He accosts a young Filipino nurse who comes into the ward. ‘I want to speak to a doctor.’

  ‘I’m afraid they’re on the wards,’ she tells him.

  ‘Well, this is a ward, isn’t it?’ he barks. ‘I want to know what happened here.’

  ‘I’ll try and call a doctor now,’ the nurse tells him, and is immediately called away by another woman buzzing for assistance. He storms out to the nurse’s station looking for answers since his wife refuses to even look at him.

  ‘Nick? Are you okay?’ Tessa’s voice again. He reached towards it, wanted her to take him from that place, from that memory. She hadn’t taken him back far enough. She needed to take him back further, to before the bad stuff, before his marriage caved in. Before the blame began.

  ‘Nick …’ Tessa was calling his name, bringing him out of it.

  He began to surface as she counted from one to five, her voice soothing. When he opened his eyes, they stung, and he realized that he’d been crying. Embarrassed, he rubbed at his eyes with the sleeve of his sweater. Tessa told him to take his time, asked him if he’d like a glass of water, but he shook his head and told her he was all right.

  At the desk, she sat back and looked at him. ‘Unfortunately, we can’t avoid the bad things, Nick. We need to access them to get to the core of the problem, find out what it is that’s making you want to escape through alcohol.’

  ‘She blamed me. The baby died, and Susan blamed me. She said I didn’t want it and that the baby knew.’

  Tessa nodded. ‘I’m sorry, Nick.’

  ‘It seemed irrational, but the doctors said it was normal, that she was taking the trauma out on me. But I knew it was more than that, that she was right. It wasn’t that I didn’t want the baby, I wanted it more than anything. But I couldn’t be that baby’s f
ather and I couldn’t figure why … now I think I do. It’s to do with the past. I must have known, in my subconscious, what had happened … what I’d done to Rachel and Caitlin.’

  Tessa leaned her elbows on the desk, looked at him from over the steeple of her fingers. She didn’t say anything, forced him to go on.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ he said again. ‘But what happened before, it’s part of what tore my marriage apart. I was afraid that if I had another child …’

  She waited until he had trailed off. ‘What happened after the miscarriage, Nick?’

  ‘Susan came home from the hospital. She barely spoke to me for weeks. We skirted round one another. Then she said that we should try again, that she wanted a baby. I didn’t know if it was a good idea – I thought she was trying to replace the dead child. I told her maybe we ought to wait, give it time. She accused me again of not wanting a child, and I gave in, thought it might be the only thing that would fix us. I needn’t have worried. Nothing happened after that. We tried for months, and nothing.’

  ‘Did either of you talk to anyone at the time – a counsellor?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And Susan … do you talk now? Did your marriage end amicably?’

  Nick looked at his hands. ‘Not exactly. Things got worse. I started staying out, avoided going home. We don’t really keep in touch. She texts sometimes, sends a card at Christmas. I think she’s met someone. I hope she has.’

  Tessa tapped the pen on the pad. She hadn’t written anything while he was talking. ‘You could be right, Nick,’ she said.

  He looked at her. ‘What about?’

  ‘The past – what happened before affecting your decisions in this life.’

  ‘You do believe that it’s true then – that it’s not just confabulation?’

  ‘It’s a possibility, Nick. And if that’s the case, we must let the memories come. I checked the dates, the circumstances. It’s not something I’m comfortable with … not something that should have happened, but it has and there doesn’t seem to be another explanation for it. I don’t want you to repress it – or to try to keep it from me if something further happens in these sessions. I’m not encouraging you to actively pursue it either, I want you to understand that. But hypnosis is about uncovering the suppressed, and if the problems in your previous life are the underlying cause of your alcoholism, then they need to be acknowledged – and I’m willing to do that.’

  Tessa sat back after this long speech, asking Nick if he understood.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Don’t think I’m comfortable with it either, but I need to find out everything.’

  ‘What’s your schedule like next week?’ she asked. ‘Does Monday work for you?’

  ‘Monday? Sure,’ he said. That was only three days away. Clearly, Tessa thought the quicker they dealt with the past, the sooner he could be healed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Caitlin

  The florist hadn’t been able to tell Caitlin anything. An order had been placed over the phone; the message delivered as it had been dictated by the caller. ‘Well, how did he pay for them?’ Caitlin had asked. ‘He must have given you the name on his debit or credit card?’

  ‘I’m sorry, we can’t give out that kind of information,’ the woman had told her.

  Damn her to hell, Caitlin thought as she hung up. It was there on file, of course, if anyone ever decided to take her seriously. She couldn’t phone the guards and tell them that someone had anonymously sent her flowers though, they’d laugh at her.

  She’d kept the flowers, not because she wanted them, but because she was afraid that in discarding them, she might get rid of a clue – something that would lead her to the person that had sent them. It was impossible, she knew. What would she find among the bouquet apart from the card? Regardless, they stood now in a vase in the hall and were the first thing she saw when she came through the door. If only they were from David, but she knew that they couldn’t be.

  And then there was Andy. She felt bad about the way she’d spoken to him. He’d stayed over to make sure she was okay, and she’d repaid him with cold indifference, no, not even that, what she’d shown that morning was contempt. She took out her phone to text him, then changed her mind. A text was too impersonal, a cop out from having to talk to him. She’d call him as soon as she could, much as she didn’t feel like talking.

  She had never been one to have a large circle of friends, instead getting fixed on one person. David had been that person from the moment they’d started going out. She hadn’t pursued him, hadn’t needed to. She’d stayed distant enough to lure him and it wasn’t long until she’d had him hooked. She hadn’t been good at keeping in touch with the few friends she had and so it had been natural that Andy was the one she’d turned to – their mutual friend. Someone who cared for David almost as much as she did. Others had of course been concerned about David’s disappearance, at least in the beginning. Weren’t people always interested in tragedy, in the novelty of it?

  She remembered when the other kids had found out that she was adopted. She’d been five years old and had gone to live in a new neighbourhood where she knew no one. Her parents had been dead only a few months and she’d been trying hard to get used to her new home and to the woman who had adopted her – she always felt it was the woman who had adopted her, the man gave her no reason to believe that he’d ever wanted her. When he left just a year after she’d gone to live with them, she wasn’t sorry, but then the woman began to act differently too. She was cold, withdrawn, and Caitlin felt that she blamed her for the man leaving. When she thought about it now, she wondered that they had ever passed the stringent tests that couples were put through before they were finally allowed to adopt. The process itself took a minimum of two years, which had given them plenty of time to think about it.

  The kids at school had been interested, wanted to know who she was and where she came from, and what had happened to her parents. She told them that her parents had died in an accident – that was what the adults had told her – and she was too little to understand anything else. She’d only discovered the truth by accident, searching one day through a box of papers in Violet’s room, she’d found them – newspaper cuttings that told the real story. She was twelve years old at the time, old enough to understand, but with too many years of ingrained love for her parents to change her mind about them. For years, she’d comforted herself with memories of the three of them – herself and her mother and father – a happy family. The violence of their deaths stunned her, didn’t tally at all with the people she’d known as her parents.

  The couple who adopted her had lost a little girl. Caitlin had seen the photos the first time she’d gone to the house, and she’d thought that she was going to have a new sister. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that, but there was no other child. She had died, been taken from them suddenly with a fever. She was the replacement, the same age as the little girl, Becky, had been when she’d died. They looked quite alike – both dark-haired, blue-eyed girls. It was the reason she’d been chosen. The woman had chosen her to continue where Becky had stopped, but she was different from Becky, and the man despised her for it.

  Life continued with the woman. She wasn’t unkind to her, but she was distant. And maybe she was right in blaming Caitlin for the man’s leaving – though she couldn’t think what she might have done to make him dislike her. As an adult, she’d decided that she wasn’t to blame, that the man would have left anyway, that whatever had existed between the man and the woman had been torn asunder by the grief they’d suffered.

  She didn’t refer to the woman as ‘mother’ even though she’d told her to. Caitlin already had a mother and no stranger was ever going to take her place. She didn’t address her as anything until she was twelve when she began to call her Violet.

  Violet didn’t object to this. She’d long given up hope of replacing Becky. She did her duties mechanically, fed and clothed Caitlin, gave her a good education. They
got on well enough, but at a distance. They were neither family nor friends. Nowadays, Caitlin kept in touch with Violet, but infrequently. They didn’t have much to talk about, and she phoned her only as a duty. There were far worse fates that could have befallen her if Violet had not adopted her. What she felt for her most was a sense of pity that nothing she wanted had come to her. When the man left, no one else had come along, so it was just the two of them. She supposed that Violet was glad of her for company, but she never particularly showed it. They were two strangers thrown together by their equally ill circumstances, but no feelings of warmth grew between them as they might have done.

  Over time, the children at school teased her about being adopted. Whereas in the beginning they were curious, sympathetic even, their knowledge turned to ammunition whenever a childish disagreement broke out. She remembered the chants of ‘Go home and tell your mammy’ and then ‘she can’t, her mammy’s dead’. Those were tough times, but she never told Violet. Instead, she ignored the jibes and stayed with her one friend – a girl called Linda Doherty who’d sat next to her on her first day. They’d remained friends until they’d parted ways to go to different secondary schools, and in time their friendship, too, had fizzled out.

  Caitlin opened the door to see the flowers on the hall table. She sighed and went upstairs to change into her jogging clothes. She thought of the friends she and David had spent time with, those who’d disappeared not even six months after he had – a gradual withdrawal, unreturned calls. When she realized that she was the one making all the effort, that it was she who initiated every meeting, she stopped, and the phone, for the most part, remained silent. Only Andy and Gillian called consistently to make sure that she was okay.

  Andy. She flopped down cross-legged on the bed and picked up the phone. It’d be best to get it over with. She wanted to apologize before Wednesday came around again and she had to face him. Wednesdays had been the best day of the week for her over the past six months – the social element was good for her, as much as she felt like locking herself away. But now there was the person masquerading as David on Twitter to worry about. Would he be there again this week? And what could she do about it? She wasn’t going to change her habits because of some creep who thought he’d scare her. She wasn’t going to be intimidated like that.