He called to mind the way he had comforted himself as a child with the stories of other musicians who had lost, or been neglected by, their mothers. It was doubtful that had these artists had a stable upbringing, with their mothers present for them, they would have been compelled to create the way they had. Or if they had ended up as musicians, perhaps their work would have lacked the fire that their childhood losses stoked.
It had been an escape, a fantasy, to identify with the list of talented artists that had turned their pain into something bigger to share with the world. And if he were honest, he’d admit that he had gone even further than identifying with them. At some point, he had twisted his own pain into an obsession for the exact purpose of having something to write about.
He and Conor had often talked of artists they admired and how when they got to a certain age they became fat with success and complacent in their music. They became uninspired and repetitive or just plain dull. At the corners of Gavin’s mind, he had worried that if he had a resolution with his mother, he might lose the thing that had driven him to creative heights. Sophie had often urged him to seek out his mother and he had been stubborn in his refusal, claiming it was his mother’s responsibility to make the first move. And while he did sincerely believe this, there was a part of him that feared he’d have nothing left to say if the wound he had so carefully cultivated over the years closed over.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN
Three-quarters of an hour passed before Gavin found the courage to get out of the car and make his way up the cobblestone path toward the house.
The Kelly-green door was partially open. Afternoon sunlight pouring through the window cast a warm golden glow over the small front room.
There was no one there to greet him, though he heard noises at the outside rear of the house. Stalling, he took in his surroundings rather than announce himself.
The room was sparsely furnished with a loveseat, a single recliner, and a side table in between. There was a battered steamer trunk positioned as a coffee table of sorts in front of the sitting area. A long narrow table sat under the large bay window. Two tall bookcases hugged the walls, and fine white lace curtains hung pulled back on either side of the window.
A large butcher block counter, scarred repeatedly by a florist’s knife, served as a bridge between the front room and a partially visible kitchen.
But Gavin’s eyes lingered on the pale pink roses in small mismatched vases on every surface, even crammed into nooks on the shelves of the bookcases. A quick estimate put the number of the vases scattered throughout the room at near three dozen.
The mini arrangements, along with the well-worn but comfortable surroundings, complete with framed Georgia O’Keeffe prints, gave Gavin a sense of familiarity.
The front door pushed all the way open then, as a plump woman, her brown curls strewn with gray, entered the room. As she looked up and made eye contact with Gavin, she dropped the large bunch of white French tulips in her hands, each stem making a dull thud on the wood floor as they scattered.
Gavin felt a sudden rush of bravado.
“Hello . . . Ma,” he said, nodding slightly.
Joy filled her face as her eyes welled with tears. She brought shaking fingers to her lips. Within a moment, she recovered herself.
“Gavin,” she said brightly. “My Gavin.”
She went to him without hesitation and wrapped her arms around him, locking his arms at his sides in an awkward embrace.
Gavin had waited so long, had hoped for this reception for so many years. But now that it was here, he saw clearly that nothing was ever resolved this simply. He looked down at the woman gripping him with familiarity, her face buried into his chest. He felt nothing.
Gently, he pulled away and looked at this stranger. Her face fell, but she shook it off with a small smile.
“Would you like a cuppa?” she asked.
“Sure, I’ll take tea,” he replied, glad for the delay this nicety would afford.
“I’ll be back in a sec. Sit down, please.”
After she left the room, Gavin spotted several old-fashioned photo albums on the side table. Curious to see what she held dear, he flipped open a book at random.
A newspaper clipping pasted to black paper caught him off guard. It was a review of the last show Rogue had in Dublin, including a photo of Gavin on stage, sweat dripping down his neck as he cradled the microphone in his hands. His eyes were closed in the shot, his face typically intense with the emotion of the song.
Gavin quickly leafed through the other pages, finding one article after another that centered on him in some way. Then he came to the full page shot of him and Sophie on their wedding day. It was the candid photo that most of the tabloids had featured. They had stolen away from the reception for what they thought was a private moment. They stood close together under the shade of a tree, he in his bespoke dark suit and she in her elegant wedding gown. Smiles lit up their faces as she grabbed his backside playfully.
“Oh, that’s my favorite, too,” Bernadette McManus said as she returned with a tray of tea and placed it on the steamer trunk. “Your Sophie seems like a wonderful girl. And so very beautiful, isn’t she?”
Gavin nodded dumbly.
“Sit, sit,” she said, full of nervous energy.
He gestured for her to take her seat first and then followed by sitting as well. They both reached for a cup of tea at the same moment, and Bernadette let out a giggle. It occurred to Gavin that she sounded childish and not at all how he remembered. Definitely not maternal. And then he caught the distinctive scent of whiskey, which triggered a sense memory he had long forgotten. Or buried. But now he clearly remembered that his mother had invariably taken, not a splash of milk, but rather a shot of whiskey in her tea. It had been the accepted norm in their house, even when his father prepared her morning cup.
“Care to add a taste of whiskey to my cup as well?” Gavin asked with a conspiratorial wink.
Bernadette smiled eagerly. “Yes, of course. One more sec, then.” She jumped up and took his cup with her.
He watched with distraction as she left the room, trying to decipher the memories rushing back to him. It wasn’t exactly that his mother was a drunk but there was suddenly too much familiarity about alcohol. How did that never come to the forefront of his consciousness before now? Had he really suppressed it in his desire to anoint her to some sort of sainthood rather than acknowledge such a major flaw? He had always excused her running away as her reaction to the traumatic loss of her daughter. He had romanticized her pain and convinced himself that with time she would return, healed and ready to be a mother to him again. But the awareness of her reliance on alcohol now lent a different angle to things. He sighed audibly and looked back at the scrapbook to distract himself.
He came upon a clipping of Rogue’s sold out Wembley show. It had taken place after their last tour and was recorded as a combination CD/DVD package to fulfill their obligations to the label to produce another album. Ninety thousand fans had joined them that evening for the performance of their career. They had brought the house down in a wide-ranging two and a half hour concert celebration. This level of success was what he had hungered after for so many years precisely so that his mother might understand who he came to be, and therefore want to seek him out. But that hadn’t happened.
“I always knew you’d do something big, you know,” she said as she returned. She handed him his spiked tea. “I knew you had it in you, just waiting to come out.”
“That’s grand and all, but can we go back a few steps here?” Gavin said, unable to help himself.
“You’re right, I know it.” She nodded shortly and lowered her eyes deferentially as if accepting a scolding from a school master. “Where shall I start, then?”
“Tell me about the day you left and never came back.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT
After several false starts and draining half of her tea, Bernadette finally said, “What you have to know is
that I wasn’t right after the accident. I was healing on the outside but I was broken on the inside.”
“Weren’t we all?” Gavin replied, but not with anger.
“I know. I know what I did. But I didn’t plan it. I left hospital that day because I had to see your sister. I had to see her for myself. And when I did, after I convinced the nurse to take me to that awful morgue for a viewing, I almost lost my mind.”
Gavin looked at his mother, envisioning the trauma she had endured. The accident had flipped their car three times, leaving her with a broken collarbone and a concussion. It had also knocked his two-year-old sister out of her car seat restraints and killed her upon impact. He had walked away without so much as a bruise. His father was home with his older brother, Ian, who had taken ill. Because it was raining hard that morning, Bernadette had decided to drive Gavin to school. She’d taken his little sister along for the ride, hoping to lessen her contact with the flu germs in the house.
“You don’t have children yet,” she continued. “But when you do, you’ll know there is nothing that can drive you to madness like losing one of your babies.”
He didn’t correct her on the loss he had experienced, because though he knew his suffering was real, it still didn’t compare to losing a child of two years of age. Instead he said, “Okay, I get going away for a period. But you decided to lose all of your children.”
“I wasn’t rational. Lord knows I’m not claiming my thinking was on. It wasn’t.” She finished off her tea like a shot. “I had to be away from everything that reminded me of the pain—and the guilt. I would not have been able to live through your father’s careful acceptance of what I had done.”
“What you had done? What do you mean?”
“Well, I’m the reason Nora is dead, aren’t I?”
“It was slick with rain that day. That lorry ran into us. I knew as much on the day and I was only seven.”
“It got so twisted in my head, you see. I was convinced that I had somehow been to blame. And—”
“Because of your whiskey habit?”
She turned her face away as abruptly as if he had physically slapped her.
“Were you drunk that morning?” he asked when she didn’t speak for a lengthy moment.
“No.” She shook her head violently, with childlike gracelessness.
“I remember now.” He twisted his wedding ring to the left, then to the right and back to the middle again. “I can’t believe I blocked it out all these years. But now I remember your need for it throughout the day.”
“It’s medicinal.” She looked at him with imploring eyes. “I have a nervous condition and a nip here and there is what helps me function. I’m not a drunk, Gavin. You have to believe me.”
He didn’t know what to think. But he certainly hadn’t come here to accuse her of this.
“Just keep telling me what happened.”
She nodded eagerly, clearly grateful to drop the topic of her drinking. “I, em, I think it’s called ‘survivor’s guilt.’ I couldn’t fathom the part I had in losing your sister. And then it spiraled into a real breakdown as I was overcome with thinking that I’d do more harm than good to you boys if I came back. I know it makes no sense. I know that now. But back then, I feared somehow my other children would be next.”
“This idea can’t have lasted all these years. At some point you must have thought to return.”
“Aye, I did. So many times. But I had abandoned you all. I didn’t know what you’d do if I just showed up.”
That logic struck Gavin as terribly cruel. “You should have fucking tried,” he said.
“I did,” she said quickly. “I did come back once.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE
Gavin was frozen still at the idea that his mother had come back at some point. And he had never known. He wondered if Brendan, his father, had turned her away before he and his brother had a chance to see her. His father had never said a negative word against her, but he had acted as if she was a chapter in their lives that had closed.
“When was this?” he asked.
“It was about four months later. I went to yours and Ian’s school, thinking I’d walk you home and then have a talk with your Da. But seems Brendan had been called in to get you. I heard Ian teasing you about the school warning you’d have to repeat the year if you didn’t pull yourself around. Then your Da, he did this lovely thing. Do you remember?”
Of course he remembered. It had been one of the few times his father had mentioned her after she had disappeared. The memory was clear for that reason and also because of the rare instance of his father showing him some tenderness.
“He got down on one knee before us, so as to look us in the eye,” Gavin said. “Then he said I had nothing to be ashamed of because, didn’t I remember Mammy always said I’d do great things. And then he told Ian to give us a break, that it’d been rough on us all but we had to look at us three as being a team now.”
“Exactly. I saw that and I knew you boys would be okay. It made me think God had it planned—”
“Fuck the god that would orchestrate the death of a child and the abandonment of two others,” he said quickly, her invocation raising the incoherent rage he’d felt as an adolescent. ”This kind of self-serving justification in God’s name is why I lost faith long ago.”
“It made me think God had it planned this way,” she repeated, undeterred, “so your Da could be the kind of father he never would have been if I’d been around.”
He wanted to shake her, to force her to see that her logic wasn’t just flawed but hurtful. “What bullshit. Take responsibility for the fact that you fucking walked away. Twice.”
“It was for the best,” she said, ignoring him again. “I was in no position to be a mother, a wife. It’s taken me so long to come to terms with myself. By the time I felt capable of returning, I knew it would have only made things worse for you all.”
Her inability to acknowledge the damage of her actions was hard to bear. He took a deep breath and decided his only choice was to pursue a different direction. “What about later, then? We did grow up, you know?”
She met his stare with silence.
Gavin stood up and paced the small room.
“Your absence, your abandoning me has defined my life. Everything I am is a result of your decision to run away and not face your problems like a fucking adult.”
“Ah, but look what you’ve made of yourself. Mr. Rock Star.” She tried for a coquettish smile and he felt revulsion.
“Who are you, even?” he asked.
“I’m me. I did what I did and there’s nothing I can do about it now.” She retreated into herself then, staring at some middle distance. “I did what I did for Maria,” she sang softly.
Gavin shook his head in frustration and confusion. He vaguely recognized the song she had sung apropos of nothing as the cheesy 1971 hit “I Did What I Did For Maria” by Tony Christie, but for the life of him, he couldn’t understand what she was getting at. Her explanations and moods were all over the map. Perhaps she really had gone mad with the accident and was left in this perpetual state of teetering on the edge ever since.
“Do you know that I was desperate to be a famous singer so you’d have an easy time of it when you decided to find me?” he asked and then laughed softly at himself.
“I’ve always followed your news stories. I’ve seen the way you played it off as if I were dead.”
“And?”
“I decided to stay that way,” she replied meekly.
Gavin watched her for a long moment, slowly understanding that she enjoyed the solitary life she had established for herself. She hadn’t wanted to be found.
He shook his head. “So once you had run away from your family, you found you quite liked the single life, aye? Is that it? Better off with no children, no husband?”
“No, not exactly. Gavin, I love you and your brother. I do. I couldn’t imagine that I’d ever be capable of giving the way you needed
it. Something in me died when Nora died. I’m not who I used to be.”
“You should have fucking tried,” Gavin said with disgust. “You don’t walk away. You don’t do that to those you’re supposed to love.”
Bernadette nodded contritely but said nothing more. The look of sympathy on her face was so at odds with the rationalizations she had given him thus far that he found the attempt pointless. And then he realized she hadn’t apologized for leaving.
Gavin turned away from her and looked out the front window. The sky had gone pale as the sun began its descent. The disappointment of this encounter threatened to overwhelm him. But he soon found he shared something with his mother. He had done exactly what she had done. He had walked away from Sophie when things got tough.
“You know,” he said softly, “it was a bleedin’ miracle, I was still able to learn what it feels like to be loved. I’ve been loved beyond all limits since I was sixteen.” He turned to her. “I don’t want to be like you. I don’t want to reject those that love me.”
Bernadette’s eyes filled with tears. “I’m sorry, Gavin. I am so very sorry for the damage I’ve done.”
There it finally was. The apology.
He waited for it to have the impact he thought it should. But it didn’t heal him the way he had fantasized it would. It didn’t make up for anything. Nor should it have, he realized. What had happened couldn’t be undone.
Subconsciously, he had known this would be the case. He had nurtured his hurt and loss all these years with the buried understanding that the artistic benefit he reaped was more rewarding than any kind of resolution he might get by tracking down his mother. It wasn’t his pride that kept him from seeking her out. It was the fear that he’d find it was all as simple as what Ian said: their mother couldn’t be bothered.
And at this point, the life he had lived as a result of both of their actions and his response to it couldn’t be altered. The truth was, he wouldn’t want it to be. For all his faults, he was the passionate and brilliant singer-songwriter of one of the best bands in the world, and she had set that into motion by leaving.
Tangled Up In You: A Rogue Series Novel Page 33