25 Years

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  “No, thanks,” Eileen said. “I’m fine.”

  Across the table, Kieran briefly met his daughter’s eye. He knew exactly what was coming next.

  “Eileen,” Tara said, her voice low and intense now, “I want so much to move to the States….”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  IF EILEEN HAD HELD any doubt that love could survive twenty-five years of separation, that it could, despite little or no nurturing, continue to send up fresh green shoots of incredible tenderness, Kieran’s obvious pain as his daughter spoke was all she needed to convince her.

  He looked baffled and sad and terribly weary and it killed her to watch him. She wished she could get up and walk around to where he sat, hold him. “It’s okay,” she would say, soothing him. “It’s okay. Everything will be fine.”

  A brief but intense flame of hatred for this girl disconcerted her. Looking at her from across the table, she couldn’t help but be reminded of Libby, the woman who had stolen Kieran away. And now Libby’s daughter was so casually inflicting pain on him. Describing in a fast, urgent voice the acting course she intended to take, the schools she’d heard of that offered day-care nurseries where she could leave the baby and then of course her husband would have to find a job.

  Something about the turquoise earrings the girl wore looked familiar. As she listened and nodded, Eileen tried to recall where she might’ve seen a similar pair. And then it came to her. They were the earrings she’d given to Deirdre who, Eileen could only surmise, had passed them on to Tara. With difficulty, Eileen brought her attention back to the moment, aware as she did that Kieran was watching her.

  “The thing is,” she finally interrupted after another five minutes or so of the girl’s nonstop monologue, “it’s not so easy to just pick up and leave everything—your home, your friends. The people who love you.” At this, she heard her voice crack. She drank some tea. “You really have no idea—”

  “I have Joe and the baby,” Tara said. “It’s not as though I’ll be alone. But, Eileen, what I wanted to ask you about is—”

  “Listen to Eileen, will you?” Kieran spoke sharply to his daughter. “Hear her out before you jump in.”

  “It’s more than just the loneliness,” Eileen explained. “You find yourself desperate for things you’d never imagine you’d even think about. Butter in America doesn’t taste quite the same as the butter we have here, the bread tasted all wrong to me, too. A bit sweet, so I couldn’t make a cheese sandwich, say…and that’s if I could find decent cheese, which most of the time I couldn’t. I know that sounds like a little thing, but, the little things begin to pile up.”

  She stopped, caught up in her memories but sensing that, while Kieran was listening intently, this wasn’t what his daughter—head bowed, playing with the fringes of her shawl—wanted to hear.

  “Tara.” Kieran nodded toward the doorway where an elderly woman seemed undecided whether to go or stay. “See if she wants tea, will you?”

  Tara frowned. “It’s almost past serving time,” she grumbled in a low voice, but rose, readjusted her shawl and with a long-suffering sigh went off to talk to the woman.

  Eileen met Kieran’s glance. “Not a happy camper, huh?”

  “She’s dead set on going and that’s all there is to it. Nothing you tell her that doesn’t fit her notion of the way things will be is going to sink in.”

  “It’s got to be tough for you.”

  “Ah…” He made a sweeping gesture with his hand.

  She thought of the way he’d so quickly brought up the issue, before they’d even left the airport. “I wish I could help in some way,” she said feeling ineffectual. What did she know about a parent’s pain?

  “You warned her that it wouldn’t be as easy as she thinks, but you can see for yourself, she has her mind set. And the trouble is, she’s looking at you and seeing that, despite everything, you’ve made a go of things. Well, more than that, you’re a success story, so of course she’s thinking she can do it, too.”

  Eileen’s breath caught. A moment that could change everything came and went. Another moment passed. She reached for her purse on the floor by her feet. “Well, I think the plans for tonight are dinner out. I should get going.”

  Kieran stood. “I’ll walk you home.”

  “Great.” Tara and everything else forgotten, her heart began to beat ridiculously fast and then, smiling up at him, she caught a glimpse of something so soft and tender it almost took her breath away.

  It’s still there for him, too.

  The rain had started—or never stopped. Misty mornings had a way of turning into rainy afternoons, or vice versa, and the prospect of rain seemed always just over the mountains. In drought-ridden California, rain was another of those things she’d missed desperately, welcoming every meager drop that fell on the dusty palms that lined her street. Now as they walked down the gravel road that led away from the lodge to join with the main road into town, Eileen lifted her face to the soft wet air, absorbing it like a thirsty plant.

  Eileen and Kieran taking a walk together.

  Inside the folds of her mother’s coat, her body felt warm with promise.

  “What’s his name then?” Kieran asked, out of the blue.

  “Whose name?”

  “The gentleman friend. Your mother never told me his name.”

  Eileen dug her hands deep into the pockets of the coat, looked at her feet in their absurd little boots. In her peripheral vision, she caught Kieran’s sideways glance. “Fauntleroy.” The name had just popped into her head.

  “Fauntleroy.” A moment later, he asked, “That would be his last name?”

  “It would,” she said. “Little Lord is his first name. First and second actually.”

  “He’s a famous person and you’re not able to tell me?”

  She grinned. “Yeah, that’s it. He’s married to a famous actress. If word got out that I was the other woman, she’d kill me.” And then she said, “Kieran, there is no gentleman friend.”

  “So what your mother’s been saying…?”

  She sighed. God, she wanted to drop this whole stupid story, to just be Eileen. “My mom kept writing me all these damn letters, worrying about did I have someone? Wasn’t it time I settled down with one person instead of going from one man to another? On and on, blah, blah, blah. Finally I just invented the gentleman friend to shut her up.”

  “Could you not have told her it was none of her business?”

  “Hah!” She shot him a look. “Have you ever tried saying anything like that to my mom?”

  He laughed. “You’ve a point there.”

  They’d reached the Strand now, big bay-windowed houses along the seafront where the well-off had once lived. People like Dr. Connaughton, who used to run the local hospital and had delivered half the people in town, a solicitor from London who only came to Clonkill on fishing holidays. As a girl, she’d thought them the grandest places anyone could possibly have. Now they looked forlorn, aging dowagers staring out at the unchanging sea.

  “So,” she challenged Kieran. “Share and share alike. I told you about my gentleman friend, or lack of. What about you?”

  “Do I have someone? Is that what you’re asking?”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  They kept walking, past St. Augustine’s Abbey with its high walls topped by bits of broken glass, which she and Libby had once tried to scale. On down the steep narrow road that wound under the mossy stone bridge and around to the harbor.

  The sea was out, fishing boats like stranded beasts rested on their sides in the mud. A dog, chasing a seagull, barked at the distant edge of the water. The sun was setting, streaking everything with bronze highlights, vivid in the gathering gloom.

  “I was seeing a woman in Galway for a while,” Kieran said. “But…there’s really been no one important…since Libby.”

  “I’m sorry about Libby, Kieran. I should’ve said it long before now, but…I wrote you so many letters. Somehow I cou
ld never get the words just right.”

  He said something she didn’t catch, and put his arm around her shoulder. The effect was electrifying. The solid weight of him, his physical closeness, the side of his body—hips, thighs—brushing hers. All that the gesture implied. They walked a few more steps, then stopped. Wordlessly, he pulled her to him and kissed her. She wanted to crawl inside him. His lips pressing harder, harder, her mouth opening to his. Teeth, tongue. His hands clutching her hair now, backing her against the railing.

  Afterward, she stared at him, dazed. He looked as stunned as she felt. A physical and emotional ambush that had left his mouth swollen, his eyes feverish and distracted. Tears clogged her throat, stung her nose. Kieran. Oh, Kieran. She took his face in her hands and kissed him on the lips, a soft, soft, gentle kiss that spoke of everything she didn’t know how to say.

  “I’VE NO IDEA what’s wrong with everyone,” Deirdre said huffily after Kieran had snapped at her for the second time in an hour over a minor transgression, the last being that peas were on the dinner menu for the third night in a row and would it be asking too much to have a little variety once in a while. “What with Tara slamming out of the place.”

  “When was that?” Kieran roused himself from the gloom that had descended after dropping Eileen off at her mother’s, a gloom more pronounced because of the euphoria he’d felt just a short while before. This is how it will be when she goes back to the States. He glanced at his watch. Dinner would be served in half an hour and she was needed to wait tables.

  “Whatever it was Eileen said to her—”

  “Eileen’s not to blame,” he said. “It’s time Tara grew up a bit. She seems to forget she has a child now.” He stopped, his head too full of Eileen at the moment to tackle anything else. “Deirdre,” he said. “Sit down.”

  She did. Arms folded across her chest, she waited.

  “I’m about to make an awful fool of myself.”

  “Eileen?”

  “I wasn’t prepared for it,” he said. “I laughed when your mother warned me…how did she put it? Something about not getting my hopes up. I may even have made a joke of it.”

  Deirdre folded her arms across her chest. “They say there’s no fool like an old fool.”

  Kieran laughed. “Ah jays, thanks Deirdre. That’s all I needed to hear.”

  “Well catch yourself, Kieran. She’s a woman you knew as a girl, that’s all there is to it. Now she’s back with her bleached hair and fancy clothes and maybe that appeals to you, sure there’s no accounting for taste.”

  “That’s not fair,” he said rushing to Eileen’s defense. “You’re making her sound like a tart. She’s a good-looking woman.”

  “And what is it you have in common with her? What do you say to each other?”

  He shrugged, trying to recall. “Nothing much, I suppose. It’s just…nice to spend time with her.”

  “Well I’d say make the most of it then, before she goes back to America the week after next.”

  “TARA’S ON THE PHONE for you,” Eileen’s mother called from the kitchen, where the only phone in the house sat on a lace doily on top of a little table. “Eileen!”

  “I heard you, Mom.” She’d been lying on the couch in the front room, flipping through magazines and seeing Kieran’s face on every page. Now she wondered why his daughter was calling. Maybe the girl had seen her father having his face kissed off and was seeking an explanation.

  In the kitchen, her mother was using the moment to describe to Tara all the gifts Eileen had brought from America. “…lovely cashmere twin set. Pale blue, not just any old blue, a bit of mauve in it, you only see the color in more expensive things. Of course everything Eileen has is—”

  Eileen grabbed the phone. “Sorry,” she said, the apology meant both for her mother and Tara. “Hi. What’s up?”

  “You left your boots at the lodge today,” Tara said. “I thought you might be looking for them.”

  Eileen frowned. “My boots?”

  “In a bag under the table where you’d been sitting. My da recognized them, said they were yours.”

  “Oh, oh, oh,” Eileen said, enlightenment dawning. My brain’s addled from kissing your father. “Actually I was going to ask if you’d like them. Your dad had said something about them being the style?”

  Tara’s breath was audible. “Oh, Eileen, they’re gorgeous. But I couldn’t take them from you—”

  “Sure you could. Do they fit okay?”

  “Only as though they were made just for me.” She laughed. “I had to try them on, of course. They’re exactly the style I saw this actress on a chat show wearing. Eileen, really, I don’t know what to say. I’ve never had anything so expensive. Are you sure? Really?”

  “Really.” A complex swell of emotion washed over her; the feel-good pleasure of making someone happy mixing uneasily with shame over this ongoing charade and the fear that she’d inadvertently strengthened Tara’s determination to leave Ireland for a place where she, too, could afford Italian leather boots.

  “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” Tara said. “I’m never going to take them off.” She paused. “Eileen, do you mind if I ask you something?”

  Immediately wary, Eileen began thinking of excuses to get off the phone. “Uh…”

  “It’s about my father.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Well, I know you were…sweethearts, I suppose you’d say, before he married my mother and…” She laughed. “From the way he’s been behaving since you arrived, I’ve a suspicion that, well you know, that it wouldn’t take much to get things going again.”

  “Hmm,” Eileen said, noncommittally, curious to see where this would lead. “And?”

  “And, well this will strike you as a bit far-fetched, I’m sure.” Again she laughed. “But it’s the way my mind works. I was thinking to myself, now what if Eileen feels the same way about Daddy and—this is the bit I’m getting to—what if we all went to America? That way Daddy would see Stella grow up and I’d be there and you, too. You know the funny thing is now I’ve said it, it seems like the only thing to do. I was trying to explain this to Daddy just the other day. It’s called synchronicity. “That’s why Eileen’s here,” I said.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “OH YOU CAN FIND all sorts of things in the bogs, “Deirdre was telling the cluster of schoolchildren who sat in the small amphitheater of the bogland interpretive center. “Even a body or two.”

  “Eww,” the kids squealed in unison.

  “And here’s something to tell your mammies,” she suggested. “In the old, old days, before my time even…” she paused for a laugh “…people would put their butter in the bogs to preserve it, the same way you’d use a fridge today.”

  “Ew,” the kids squealed again.

  In the back row, Eileen smiled—at the children’s response as well as for Deirdre, who was clearly in her element. A pity, she found herself echoing her mother’s oft-repeated lament, that Deirdre had never had children of her own. A few minutes later, after the room had been darkened for a slide presentation, she closed her eyes, letting her thoughts wander. It seemed no time at all that she and Kieran and Libby, then the age of these children, had gone off on bog field trips. There’d been no amphitheater then, but she could still recall the eerie, solitary sense of standing with the fog falling all around them, the cold wind in their faces.

  Absorbed at the time, she’d jumped ten feet when Kieran had crept up behind to touch the back of her neck with a piece of rotting wood. He’d also known some pretty spooky bog stories of headless men and skeletons. She’d have to ask if he still remembered them.

  Kieran. Had his daughter shared her mass emigration plan with him, she wondered. He’d rung that morning early to see if she’d like to join him. He was taking a group of guests for a horseback ride along the beach. She’d declined. For one reason, she didn’t know how to ride a horse—a detail she’d chosen not to share. So much fabrication and dissembling already, what was
one small omission? She’d also promised to visit Deirdre at the center. Deirdre’s volunteer work with various preservations groups was clearly an important and admirable focus of her life. Since expensive gifts were not the way to Deirdre’s heart, Eileen had decided the least she could do was show a little interest in her sister’s work.

  “I DIDN’T REALIZE the bogs were so endangered,” she told Deirdre later as they ate cucumber-and-tomato salads and buttered brown bread in the center’s cheerful little café. “I guess they just seem like something that has always been and always will be.”

  “Nothing lasts forever,” Deirdre said cryptically.

  “Yeah, I guess.” Eileen drank a sip of strong tea from a sturdy white mug, which did in fact have the look of something that could last forever. Deirdre was right though, things changed. Some for the good, some not so good. And some things, herself for instance, only appeared to have changed. Superficially at that. She’d tried to call Mr. Schwartz that morning and, for the third time, there’d been no answer. Not wanting him to go to the expense of an overseas call, which he well might, she hadn’t left a number. Now she felt a vague unease. If he didn’t answer the next time, she’d leave a number and tell him to call collect.

  “Not exactly great dining, is it?” Deirdre nodded at Eileen’s untouched plate. “Sorry, but I’m not the fancy restaurant type.”

  Eileen picked up her fork. “This is fine, Deirdre, really.”

  “Mammy has applied for a credit card,” Deirdre said.

  “What?”

  “A credit card. Never had one before in her life, but this morning she tells me she’s applied for one.”

  “Why?” Eileen gaped at her sister, mystified. “I don’t understand. What does she need to buy that—”

  “It’s to impress you,” Deirdre said flatly. “She’d kill me if she knew I was telling you this, but it’s something you need to know. She’s got it into her head to book a fancy hotel in Dublin. Three hundred Euros a night, if you please, but nothing’s too good for our Eileen.”