by Maria Hoey
It was alright to begin with. When the first shock was over, their mother did cry and said over and over again that it was like a miracle. She kept touching Lilly’s hair – the perm had grown out and her natural hair looked as lovely as it did when she was fifteen.
But then Lilly tried to get her mother to notice the baby, to take her from Gayle and hold her. She said, “Mam, have you seen my baby? Look at my beautiful baby.”
But her mother only had eyes for Lilly. She barely looked at the baby. And the baby must have sensed something in the room because she started to cry and she wouldn’t stop. She just kept on and on crying at the top of her voice and Gayle said something to Eddie about trying the song he’d sung to her to calm her down on Christmas Eve. That was when Gayle noticed the expression on her mother’s face: it was as if, she had thought, someone had just slapped her. She started asking questions, she wanted times and dates, she wanted to know everything that had happened. But it wasn’t until she found out how long Lilly had been with Gayle and Eddie that Gayle realised how angry her mother really was.
Lilly didn’t seem to notice anything – she just kept going on about the baby, asking Gayle to let their mother have a turn at holding her. But Gayle could see that their mother did not want to hold her. Instead she had got up and started moving around the room, fussing about the flowers. She kept going on about the early tulips, how she should have put them in the hall instead of on the table on the landing. Then she said something about how Granny’s vase would look much better up there.
“Mam, leave it,” Gayle had told her. “What does that matter at a time like this?”
But her mother ignored her and rushed off. Lilly followed her into the hall so Eddie and Gayle went too. Their mother was standing with Granny’s vase in her hands; it was full of pink and white blossoms with long woody stems, so long they almost obscured her face. She was blathering on about them, about how she’d just swap the magnolia with the tulips, put the magnolia on the landing and the tulips in the hall where they’d get the light. She went up the stairs with the vase in her hands.
Gayle, distressed and with a terrible sense that everything was going wrong, had shouted at her: “Never mind the flowers! Forget the blasted flowers!”
Then Lilly said, “Yes, Mam, Gayle is right – forget the flowers. What do the flowers matter? Aren’t you happy that I’ve come home?”
Their mother was on the landing. She had her back to them and had been just about to put the vase down on the table there. When Lilly spoke, it seemed to Gayle that their mother froze. Still with her back to them, she stood there like some sort of statue with the vase in her hands. Then Lilly slipped up the stairs behind her, fast and light on her feet, and stood on the step just below her mother.
Their mother turned around slowly, and Gayle saw the look of rage on her face before she heard the words she spoke.
“Don’t you dare,” she said. “Don’t you dare come into my home after all these years and tell me what matters.”
Her hands came down and the vase struck Lilly on the right side of her head. There was a terrible sickening thump and Gayle watched as Lilly rocked on her heels. Her hand shot out and Gayle thought she was going to grab the banister and save herself but she didn’t. She fell in a sort of awful somersault. Afterwards, Eddie told Gayle that it wouldn’t have made any difference. Even if Lilly had managed to clutch the banister, it wasn’t the fall that killed her, it was the blow to the right temple. He knew right away that Lilly was dead although Gayle could not believe it, especially as there wasn’t even any blood, just a mark on the side of her head. Her mother came down the stairs and Gayle later thought that she too knew that Lilly was dead because she just knelt down and lifted Lilly’s head into her lap and she didn’t try to wake Lilly up – she just held her.
That was when their father came home. Gayle could remember hearing the key in the lock and how she had turned and stared at the door and waited for it to open. It took so long it was like slow motion. He must, she thought, have had a good few jars because he was stumbling a bit when he came in.
The baby stopped crying when she saw him and just stared at him. Her father saw Gayle first and he smiled and said something about her not telling them she was coming home. He said, “Jacqueline is away in Belfast for the weekend with some college thing – she’ll be sorry to have missed you.”
Then he spotted Eddie and Gayle thought: he still blames him for what happened to Lilly. It was so ridiculous that she almost laughed out loud. Then Eddie stood up from where he was kneeling and that was when her father saw Lilly, her head cradled in her mother’s lap.
That was when her mother said, “She’s come home, Frank. Lilly’s come home.”
Long afterwards, when she’d had nothing but time to process it, when every tiny detail of Gayle’s story had been etched so deeply into her brain that it seemed almost a memory of her own, Jacqueline would remember that first telling of what happened the night Lilly died as one long unbroken narrative. Perhaps, she reasoned, it was because, as she listened to Gayle, in some mysterious way she had managed to split herself in two. There was the half of her, the self which knew instinctively, which had always known that this story could never end well. And that self wanted to rush ahead to the last page, to put herself out of her misery, to know the worst once and for all and be done with it.
But there was the other half too, which listened to every word her sister spoke, and it was this self that interjected, forcing Gayle to stop, to explain, to repeat, to clarify or justify. And it was this self who demanded to know why and when and how, who uttered the small cries of disbelief, of denial and finally of horror and grief and rage.
Jacqueline, who had been sitting down when Gayle began speaking, found herself, as her sister fell silent, standing looking out of the window. She had no memory of having moved.
Without turning she said, “How could all of this be kept from me? All this time, how could you do that to me? Why wasn’t I told?”
She turned and faced her sister.
“There is no excuse, Jacqueline,” said Gayle. “You should have been told, I know you should. But Dad said no. He said the only good thing out of that awful night was that you hadn’t been there and he made us promise you would never know. You were only eighteen years old. He said it was too much, on top of all that had happened, to expect you to carry that secret too and it was better if you never knew.”
Jacqueline spun round. “How could he believe that, how could he think it was better, living my life not knowing if my sister was alive or dead?”
“He just did,” said Gayle.
“Then you should have made him see that he was wrong.”
“We tried, we really did.”
“We did,” said Eddie. “I thought Frank was wrong too and I told him so that night. I always thought you should have been told, but he wouldn’t have it. He said it was better if things went on as they were, rather than you finding out that Lilly was dead and it was your mother who killed her.”
Gayle’s hand went to her mouth. “Don’t say that, Eddie, don’t say killed – it was an accident. Mam didn’t mean to hurt Lilly. Lilly fell, she just fell …”
“It wasn’t the fall that killed her,” said Eddie. “It was the blow from the –”
“Oh, shut up, Eddie!” Gayle jumped to her feet. “Stop playing doctor!”
In some chamber of her mind Jacqueline registered it as the first time she had ever heard Gayle being unkind to him. She turned to Eddie.
“So you don’t believe it was an accident?” she said.
Eddie shook his head. “It all happened so quickly … I think your mother, the balance of her mind disturbed by an enormous shock –”
“Did she mean to kill her?” screamed Jacqueline.
“She meant to hit her,” said Eddie quietly. “That’s not the same as meaning to kill her.”
“She didn’t mean to kill her!” Gayle’s voice was a wail. “Alright, she hit her,
but only in a moment of anger. She never meant to kill her. I will never believe that – never, never, never! You don’t know, Jacqueline. You weren’t there and you’ll probably never be able to see it this way but you are so lucky. It was the worst day of my life, of all our lives and you weren’t there.”
“But I should have been told!” Jacqueline screamed again. “I had a right to know!”
“Please, please, will you both stop shouting,” said Eddie. “People will hear.” He got up and walked to the door and stared at it as though he expected it to burst open, then he went back to his seat again. “Come on, Gayle,” he said, “come and sit down and you too, Jacqueline. This isn’t doing any good, all this shouting and yelling at each other.”
Gayle went back to her seat but Jacqueline stayed where she was.
“And there was more to it than your right to know, Jacqueline,” said Eddie. “Of course you had a right to know and of course you should have been told. No-one is saying anything else. But, right then, at the time it happened, your father made a decision, for right or wrong, that the less people who knew about it the better.”
Jacqueline stared at him as the meaning of what he had said hit home. “You mean that I couldn’t be relied on to keep quiet, don’t you? That I couldn’t be relied upon to go along with a cover-up?”
As neither Gayle nor Eddie spoke, Jacqueline, her legs suddenly feeling as though they might no longer support her, crossed the room quickly and sank into her chair.
“What did they do with her?” she said. “Where is she? Where’s Lilly?”
Chapter 53
AFTERWARDS
Gayle looked at Eddie, her eyes stricken, all anger forgotten.
Eddie sat forward in his seat. “This is for me to tell. Gayle had no part in it. It was just your father and me.” He entwined his fingers and dropped them between his knees. “There’s no easy way to say this, Jacqueline, so I’m just going to say it. We took her out to sea – we got my grandfather’s boat and we took her far out to sea …” As Jacqueline made an inarticulate sound, he said plaintively, “He didn’t know what else to do, and it had to be somewhere. I couldn’t let Frank do it on his own so we did it together. And even then it almost killed him. He tried to make it right, he even said a prayer for Lilly and –”
Jacqueline stumbled for the door.
“Where are you going?” Gayle wailed.
Jacqueline felt her almost on her heels and stabbed her hands blindly behind her back. “Don’t follow me, Gayle, just leave me alone. I need to be alone.”
Before the door slammed behind her, she heard Eddie telling Gayle to let her go.
The garden was a blaze of sunshine, and everything silver on the bicycle shimmered as she approached. She yanked it toward her and used her sleeve to wipe the saddle, still damp from the rain. She told herself not to think. All that mattered was to put as much distance as possible between herself and those two people. If she’d had a car she would have been miles away already. She turned right outside the house and, climbing on, cycled in the opposite direction from the town. The saddle was too low and the handlebars needed adjusting. She had to lean forward more than was comfortable and her back would surely complain later. An image flashed before her eyes of Lilly’s body lying in the hall of the house on Blackberry Lane and she wobbled and dismounted. Concentrate, she told herself, concentrate on the physical act of cycling. She got back up and forced herself to think only of her feet pushing against the pedals, the pull of the muscles in her calves and abdomen, her body strong and able for the task in hand. She almost lost her nerve as she approached the crest of the hill and saw the steep road unrolled before her, then she propelled herself forward and took her feet from the pedals. As she coasted down the hill, the wind roared in her ears, the hedges and the road beneath the wheels blurred. The sea, glimpsed from above, was a long band of dancing silver light. Halfway down the hill she opened her mouth and a sound issued from her, a long primeval roar of grief and helpless rage. The wind picked it up and whistled it back to her like a high desolate keening wail that did not end until the bicycle, running out of hill, came gradually and naturally to a standstill.
At the foot of the hill she turned left. She followed a narrow and rutted lane with a glimpse of the sea at its end. On either side the hedges were bursting with enormous lush and creamy elderflower blossoms and spotted with yellow dog daisy buttons that winked in the sunlight as she passed. Jacqueline became aware of the sun on her head and arms and the tightness around her eyes where the tears had dried on her skin. As she cycled alongside the sea, the movement of the bicycle combined with the quality of the light on the water felt almost hypnotic. The thought came to her that this could be any road, any place – more than that, it could be any time, any year of her life, any day, any moment – it was as though she were cycling out of time.
They were sitting where she had left them, side by side on the sofa, no longer holding hands. A plate of sandwiches had replaced the biscuits and Eddie had one in his hands. He put it down quickly as Jacqueline came in and wiped at his lips.
Gayle, who had been slumped to one side in her seat, got up and came toward her. “Jacqueline, we’ve been so worried. Are you alright?”
Eddie said dryly, “I don’t imagine she is, love.”
“I’m fine,” said Jacqueline.
“But where have you been – you haven’t, you didn’t …?”
“Go to the nearest police station?” said Jacqueline. “No, I didn’t and I haven’t. For God’s sake, Gayle, sit down – you look like crap.”
Gayle sat down again. “What are you going to do, Jacqueline?”
“Do? Do about what? What can I possibly do that will change a single thing?”
“I understand that you must be shocked,” said Gayle, “and angry and confused. I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to scream at me right now. And I’ll understand if you can never forgive me.”
“You understand nothing, Gayle,” said Jacqueline. She thought about the sound that had issued involuntarily from her throat as she had coasted downhill on the bicycle, that scream of rage that the wind had turned to a keening wail. “Now, will you explain to me again why nobody told me?”
“We should have,” said Gayle, “there’s no excuse. I wanted to and I told Dad I was going to. And I came close to telling you so many times, that first year. And Mam wanted to tell you too. That day when she was dying, I think she was trying to tell you then. I know Dad thought she was, and in a way I really hoped she would.”
“I thought she was asking me to tell the truth before it was too late,” said Jacqueline.
“The truth about what?” said Gayle.
“About what I did that day, how I blackmailed Lilly, how it was my fault she went out at all that night.” She came and sat down in the armchair opposite them. “But it was the other way around – Mam was trying to tell me what she’d done.”
“She wanted to tell everyone,” said Gayle, “but Dad made her see she couldn’t.”
“But after she was gone,” said Jacqueline, “why didn’t you tell me then?”
“Dad said it was too late to tell you then, that it would only steal your peace.”
“My peace? What bloody peace? I haven’t had a moment’s peace since that summer.”
“I know that,” said Gayle, “but it wasn’t that simple, Jacqueline. The longer we kept the secret, the harder it was to ever tell the truth. Because there wasn’t just one lie anymore, there was a whole bunch of lies. And I know this is going to sound crazy to you, Jacqueline, but as time went on I think I almost made myself believe that it had never happened, that she never had come back.”
Jacqueline thought of something. “The anniversary,” she said. “Every year you came home for it, every year we marked that day in July. And all the time everyone but me knew it was nothing, just another day. And every February the day that really counted just came and went and I had no idea of what it meant.”
“I know and
I’m so sorry!” Gayle began to sob and would not stop.
Eventually Eddie pulled her against his chest and held her there.
Jacqueline got up and went back to the window. “Tell me, Gayle,” she said, “did you ever ask Lilly how she could do that to us, stay away so long and leave us in agony like that?”
“I did ask her, I did. I asked her how she could have left us for all those years not knowing if she was alive or dead. She just said she’d never intended it that way, that at first it had just seemed like a big adventure. And then she was having so much fun with Luca that she just couldn’t bear to go back and be made to live like a child again. She thought about sending a postcard, just to let us know she was alive but she never got around to doing it. Then as time went on, it was just too hard to tell the truth, it had all gone too far. She said she thought about us a lot, Mam and Dad and me and you. She asked about you – ‘Little Jacks’ she called you.”
Jacqueline leaned in and rested her forehead against the window glass. A thrush was pecking at the ground. Its speckled breast reminded her suddenly of Regina Quinn’s blouse.
She said, “And what about her baby? I’ve been waiting for you to tell me, Gayle, or perhaps you think that’s something I shouldn’t know either? What happened to Lilly’s baby?”
When she turned, Gayle had straightened up and was holding Eddie’s hands once more.
“You’re wrong, Jacqueline,” said Gayle. “That, above all else, I’ve wanted to tell you a million times. Alison – Alison is Lilly’s baby.”
“Alison,” Jacqueline repeated, “Alison is Lilly’s baby.” She wondered if she was still a little hysterical, if she would be a little hysterical for the rest of her life. “Of course she is. She has his eyes.” She thought, I saw it but I didn’t see it: Luca’s smile, that blue-black hair. Alison is Luca’s child. Lilly is dead but her child is alive and she is Alison. Alison whom she had known but never really known. Alison, not Gayle’s at all, but Lilly’s, a living part of Lilly. If she had known, if she had only known …