The Day I lost You

by Fionnuala Kearney

  ‘I’ve deleted it from my history. Promise to wipe the address from the memory bank – the one in my head, I mean.’ He caught the toast as it leapt upwards, buttered it and brought it to the table with a cup of black tea.

  Theo bit into it, licked the excess butter from his lips.

  ‘And that standing-on-your-head thing that you do, Dad. I’ve tried to do it, can’t get myself up, even against the wall.’

  Theo grinned, stood, straight away. ‘C’mon, I’ll help. He grabbed a cushion from the dining chair next to his and laid it on the floor near the wall. ‘Right. Kneel down, head forward and push yourself up a bit. I’ll do the rest for you.’

  Finn did as he was told and Theo caught his legs, pulled them up against the wall, and held them there.

  ‘Y-i-kes!’ Finn squealed. ‘Not sure I like this.’

  ‘Can you hold yourself there a moment?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Theo placed his head on the floor beside Finn’s. In one swift movement, they were side by side, upside down. His fingers splayed right next to Finn’s; he moved his hand to touch them. Finn opened his scrunched eyes.

  ‘Okay?’ Theo asked.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘So, just gently shut your eyes and think of good things. Think of the good things that happened to you today. Never allow any bad stuff in. It’s like a mini-meditation.’

  ‘I have a mini-headache.’

  ‘Ignore it.’

  They stayed there, both of them, until Finn curled himself down to a kneeling position after a couple of minutes.

  ‘Don’t stand up too quickly,’ Theo warned as he did the same. He went straight to the table and ate the remainder of the cold toast.

  ‘I suppose, I still don’t get why?’

  ‘Helps me relax, helps me filter the noise out.’

  Finn stood slowly.

  ‘Do you trust me, Finn?’ Theo asked his son, a memory of his own time reading the banned blog coming to mind.

  Finn sat next to him. ‘I think so. Yes,’ he said.

  ‘You may or may not have read about this already. Stand up a moment, come here; we need to move into the hall to do this.’

  He stood in the hallway at the end of the stairs, asked Finn to stand under the doorway in the kitchen, his back to him. ‘Right, I need you to fall back, in as straight a line as possible.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m here, right behind you. I won’t let you fall.’

  Theo thought he could hear Finn’s swallow.

  ‘I just fall back; I can’t look? I mean, how far away are you? What if I do fall?’ Finn asked.

  ‘You won’t. Cross your arms over your chest and just drop back.’

  Finn steadied himself on the doorway, moved back and forth a little. ‘I don’t think I can, Dad,’ he whispered.

  Theo approached, whispered in his son’s ear. ‘I will catch you. I will never let you fall. Trust me.’

  Finn nodded, stood very still and then let go.

  Theo caught him, right under his arms, his head falling against his stomach.

  Finn opened his eyes. ‘For a second there …’

  ‘Trust …’

  ‘I know.’ He threw his arms around his father. ‘I love you, Dad.’

  ‘You too, son.’ Theo squeezed his son hard and then thumped his back. ‘C’mon. It’s late. Bedtime, you have school tomorrow.’

  ‘Dad, one more thing.’ Finn stood back from Theo in the hall, made to go upstairs. ‘School … I’m nearly twelve, nearly in secondary. Can I start walking home from school? I think I’m ready.’

  Theo stared at the boy before him, the boy who would too soon have a growth spurt, then another; the boy who would, no doubt, do some foolish things over the years to come.

  ‘You’ll come straight home. Walk on the path, no dawdling?’

  Finn nodded. ‘Trust me,’ he said, and grinned.

  48. Jess

  Sometimes, I wish I could forget how to remember. I wouldn’t remember that Anna is dead. I wouldn’t remember that Gus, and not Sean, is Rose’s father. I wouldn’t remember that Sean leaving has presented me with dilemmas I would never have predicted. I should go, because moving away from Gus is a good idea, but moving away from Gus means leaving Leah behind. I should leave Leah behind because I’m not certain I trust myself to watch her life unfold in front of me when she’s married to a man I now consider unworthy of her.

  I’ve tossed it round and round in my head, examined it every which way, and it always looks the same. I can read Anna’s phone and iPad legacies; learn that she loved him, that he loved her; but what I can’t do is place the ‘Him’ in Gus’s body and understand it or forgive him.

  I’m judging, I know. I close my eyes for fear of Anna’s image with her scolding eyes turning up on the seat there beside my hospital bed and telling me that I know nothing, that I know nothing of love unless it’s for her. I’m already arguing the point in my head. I loved Doug. I love Leah. I love Rose. I love Theo. My eyes open, blink rapidly several times. I’m confused – it’s all these drugs they’re pumping into me. Even forgetting what we have or may have become lately, Theo is my friend. He’s been my best friend and the thought of being hundreds of miles away from him, and not having him down the road, is filling me with a quiet despair I hadn’t expected.

  The doctors come and there’s less prodding and poking. One of them has a tap of my lungs on my back. I hear rather than see him as he says, ‘Clearing up nicely. How are you fixed if we let you home? Can you just take it easy for the next week or so?’

  I nod so much it makes me cough, which I try hard to swallow back in case he changes his mind. He’s now standing in front of me. He’s older, probably early sixties. He looks as if he’s the head honcho, has an air of respectability and reliability about him. The students here today, who hope to tread in his footsteps, are armed with their notebooks, and with serious expressions hang on his every word.

  ‘What about your daughter?’ he asks.

  I frown, wonder how he knows about Anna and what it has to do with me going home or not.

  ‘You’ll have some help with her, will you?’

  Rose. He means Rose.

  ‘Yes, I have lots of help,’ I say, wondering where it will come from.

  ‘Okay then. Let’s get you sorted out with a prescription for the rest of your antibiotics and a check-up back here next week. Finish the course,’ he says, ‘or we could see you back here very soon.’

  ‘Thank you.’ My heart skips at the thought of going home. And, immediately, I wish I could forget how to remember again. I wish my home wasn’t a home; I wish it was just a house I could leave without feeling the tug on my heart that I do. It’s where Anna spent half her life. It’s where Rose came home to from the hospital. Suddenly, I’m unsure of everything, and staying here in this bed with its hospital edition waffle blanket seems a better option. Suddenly, with Leah and Theo in work, I realize I would usually call Gus, ask him to come and take me home.

  Instead I wait for my discharge to be confirmed and I call a taxi.

  When I get home, there is such an air of quiet in the house that it’s almost palpable. I open the back door, allow some fresh air through, and fill my lungs greedily. I’m longing for a cup of my own coffee, take my time brewing one, just looking around. Yes, this house is a home. I’m not convinced that I can actually leave it.

  I march up the stairs, only to get halfway before I have to gasp for air and sit on one of the steps. I’m pissed off; I don’t have time for this healing thing. At the top, I turn right and walk into Anna’s room, step over Rose’s train set and several of her toys. If I didn’t know better, I would think Rose was slowly moving in here. Some of her small clothes lie on Anna’s bed and I pick them up for the wash. Beside her bed, sitting on top of her bedside table, is a small selection of photos scattered just under her night light. I pick one up. It’s one of Rose and me taken when she was tiny. She’s nestled into my arms and I look like I
remember feeling: nervous, terrified at this little thing coming into our home but thrilled all the same.

  Next to it is a group shot. It’s a big one, about six inches by eight, taken a couple of years ago. Anna and I are monkeying around, making faces by pulling on the edge of our mouths with our forefingers. Rose is giggling, watching her mum. Leah and Gus look on smiling. Dropping it onto the bed, I leave the room and head back downstairs. Panting, I grab my keys. Pug is missing. I miss Pug. To hell with this; I slowly walk to the car, get inside, put my seatbelt on and drive to Leah’s.

  ‘I’ve come for my dog,’ I say when he opens the door. Pug barks in the background and I walk past Gus, to the rear of the house, where she jumps up on my lower legs. I bend down to pick her up and cuddle her, my breathing still a little laboured.

  ‘Should you be out?’ he asks. ‘You still don’t sound so good.’

  ‘What? You were hoping I’d be struck mute, that I’d lost my voice for good? No such luck, Gus.’ I take a seat at my daughter’s lover’s dining table and put Pug on my lap. ‘I’ll have coffee, one of those ones from your posh machine, black, no sugar.’

  He doesn’t know where to look, heads to the coffee machine on the far side of the room. He rubs his hands on his jeans. An image of those sweaty hands on my daughter’s skin invades my brain and I blink it away.

  ‘We really loved each other,’ he begins to talk, doesn’t look at me. ‘I want you to know that. She was both the greatest love of my life and the greatest problem.’

  I wince on Leah’s behalf.

  ‘But I love Leah too. And she had given up so much for me. When we met, you know I told her I didn’t want any more children, I already had one. She readily agreed, became a stepmother to Jen. I love Leah too. Sounds so simple …’

  ‘Please. You’ll get no sympathy here.’

  ‘I’m not looking for sympathy, just trying to explain how an impossible situation began.’ He hands me a cup of coffee, doesn’t have one himself, puts his mobile phone on the table and sits opposite me.

  ‘I don’t want to know, Gus.’ My tone, still a little husky, is also very matter of fact. ‘My daughter was barely an adult when you started an affair with her. What I do want to know is what you expect me to do now?’

  ‘How did you find out?’ He moves his chair. Though there’s a table between us, he seems to want to distance himself further from me.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Answer the question. How do I go on knowing what I know? That you impregnated my daughter, had a child with her while staying with your wife, my sister, who had already agreed not to have your children.’ I bang the cup on the table; it splashes everywhere and the normally house-proud-to-the-point-of-OCD Gus doesn’t even flinch. ‘She had your child and you allowed Sean to become involved.’

  He holds a hand up. ‘Whatever else I did, I had no hand in that. I wanted no part in that.’

  I let out a breath, slowly. ‘She was pregnant again.’

  His features fold.

  ‘You asked her to have a termination.’

  ‘Yes,’ he whispers. ‘And she was livid, had finished with me. I’m not sure she was ever going to forgive me for that.’

  Tears slide down Gus’s cheeks and I look away. I have no interest in his sadness.

  ‘She finished it?’

  ‘Yes. And she meant it this time. I’d pushed her too far.’

  ‘She realized you’d never leave Leah.’

  He says nothing, prods his brow with two pointed fingers.

  ‘And why would you? Look around you, Gus. You have the “perfect” home, the “perfect” wife. It doesn’t matter whose life you ruined on the way to “having it all”.’

  ‘I didn’t ruin Anna’s life.’

  ‘I loved you, Gus. You were a brother to me.’

  His Adam’s apple moves as he swallows hard.

  ‘Your phone.’ I nod my head towards it. ‘How did you do it?’

  ‘I have two,’ he whispers, ‘one is for work. I keep a password and lock on it. Anna only ever used the work number to contact me.’

  ‘Still risky.’ I raise an eyebrow.

  ‘I was careful.’

  ‘I bet you were.’ I resist the urge to rush to the other side of the table I remember Leah buying and throttling him. ‘I need to know, what you’d have done.’

  He shrugs, glances around the room, as if he’ll find the answer written on a wall somewhere.

  ‘What would you have done had she lived?’

  ‘I’d have gone on loving her!’ he cries. ‘I loved her. I really did. This time she meant it when she finished with me and I would have respected that. Again. We were apart for longer than we were ever together. I respected it then too.’

  ‘And Rose?’

  He hesitates a moment. ‘I always got to see her grow up anyway. Anna would have let that continue. Ultimately, she didn’t want to hurt Leah any more than I did, any more than I do.’

  I sit there, Pug on my lap, looking to lick my face, my brother-in-law staring at me as if the next words out of my mouth are life threatening.

  ‘Are you going to tell her?’ he asks quietly.

  There it is, the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.

  ‘If this was the movies, I’d say, “No, Gus, I’m not, but you are.”’

  He leans forward on the table, puts his head in his hands, and mutters the word ‘No’ over and over again quietly, rhythmically. I stroke the dog’s head in tandem with his words. ‘What’s to be gained?’ He has the gaunt expression of a desperate man.

  ‘Truth?’

  ‘Why? Even Anna thought it was overrated.’

  ‘Anna was honest and true until you embroiled her in your mess.’ I spit the words out.

  ‘Anna could be selfish as much as anyone else. She knew the score with me, Jess. It wasn’t as if I ever lied to her.’

  I close my eyes, know that there’s some truth in what he says. She wasn’t handcuffed, she wasn’t raped – she went willingly into the relationship.

  ‘We were both to blame. She—’

  ‘Don’t.’ I won’t have him badmouth her.

  ‘I just want you to understand, to try and explain.’

  ‘I’m going now, Gus.’ I stand up. ‘I’m going to get Rose. It was you who was picking her up?’

  He nods.

  ‘No need now.’

  I am halfway down the hallway when he calls to me. ‘She’s a wonderful child, Jess. You and Anna have done a wonderful job. There’s no reason why you can’t carry that on. There’s no reason why anything has to change.’

  I march back to him as quickly as my legs and lungs allow, face up to him. ‘What sort of fucking idiot are you? Anna is dead. The moment she was swept away by that snow, everything changed for me. Yet you, who loved her so much, are sitting here carrying on. Life goes on, blah, blah, blah. You disgust me.’

  He looks down at the table, probably to avoid my pneumonic spit. ‘I disgust me too … and you’re wrong. I meant there’s no reason why anything has to change for Rose. Nothing is the same any more.’

  ‘Yeah, well, you look fine to me.’ I turn my back on him again, stomp towards the front door.

  ‘I loved her,’ he yells.

  ‘You don’t know the meaning of the word,’ I shout back. And then I see her – my heart almost stops in my chest. Jen, his sixteen-year-old daughter, sitting halfway up the stairs, face blank. I stare so hard that he comes to see what I’m looking at and I can tell straight away he had no idea she was even home.

  ‘I have to get Rose,’ I say, and leave the house. In the car, I try and regulate my breathing, turn the ignition on and head towards the school to pick up Rose. Shit. Dread courses through my veins. It’s one thing if it was my choice to tell or not to tell. It’s another thing completely if it gets tossed cavalierly at Leah by an already angry stepdaughter.

  49. Anna

  Raw Honey Blogspot 07/12/2014

  M has hurt his foot so won’t be joining us today.
It’s so gorgeous out there – metres deep in places of fresh powder – and I’m itching to get going. A few of the others have bad heads after doing Jägermeister shots until the early hours and I’ve been running around hurrying them all up, yelling that the fresh air will cure them.

  Talking to M last night just about life and stuff, I learned that he meditates! Told me he discovered it when his marriage to his childhood sweetheart ended in divorce after only a year. We had a long, long chat and he’s promised to teach me some ‘meditation techniques for idiots’ this week. The biggest joy in life, according to M, is learning to be still; being grateful for the now; delighting in what we have rather than coveting what we think we’d like. Usually, according to M, what we think we want isn’t always good for us anyway.

  M’s words have had a strangely calming influence and forced me, in the early hours of this morning, to face that my life for the last few years has been so many lies. My affair; my hurting another woman I love, even if she never knew; my involving S in the lie; Gramps … A termination; a deed where I have to convince myself a cluster of cells isn’t life when I really believe it is.

  I’m angry at myself for doing so much in the name of love. It was love. I still ache at the thought of not having Him in my life, but was it all worth it? M is probably right. ‘What we think we want isn’t always good for us.’

  So, my task for today – when I’m out there amongst the beauty of those mountains, swallowing that clean air that I’m lucky enough to be enjoying – is to just stop a moment and try being still. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?

  Ha! M a guru!

  I have, without realizing it, been sitting ten feet away from Yoda in work!

  Text from Anna’s phone, 7 December 2014

  Mama! I tried to call you but you’re not answering! It’s a gorgeous day – reminds me of the first time I came skiing with Gramps and you. I couldn’t believe the sky could be so blue, the pines so green, and the sun so warm, yet the air and ground frozen. I’m off out now. I’ll FaceTime you when I get back. Give my Rose a squishy hug from me and I’m blowing you both a kiss. Love you both to the stars and beyond xx