Quiet Neighbors

by Catriona McPherson

  Eddy, in another gesture she seemed to have learned from Lowell over the last few days, put her head in her hands and rubbed her face hard. When she looked up again, her mascara was smeared up to her eyebrows and down to her cheeks, which, along with the white face following all the upsets, made her look more Gothic than ever, with her sheet of black hair falling straight from her prominent parting.

  “What is going on?” she said. “I was fine with a mum and no dad. It’s not that unusual. Now, I just don’t know from one minute to the next. Maybe the toothbrush lab’s no good. Cost enough, mind you.”

  “I think they’re pretty accurate,” said Liam. “They’d get sued if they weren’t. And we looked into it, you know, for after, for if it doesn’t look enough like one of us to say for sure. Not that we care—that’s the whole point, but in case there was ever a bone marrow or a kidney type situation.”

  “Jesus, it’s not even born yet and you’re after its kidney!” said Eddy.

  “I think he meant in case the child ever needed one,” said Jude. “Right guys?”

  “So,” said Terry, well-used to ignoring Eddy, “have I got this right? You slept with her mum one night only and you’re definitely her dad—passed the paternity test and everything—but that would make her born when she wasn’t born?”

  “Sitting. Right. Here,” said Eddy.

  “Jaysis Gawd,” said Liam. “Are you serious? This is your big mystery? It’s like that old riddle about the surgeon. How long have youse all been scratching your heads when it’s right in front of you?”

  Lowell frowned and Eddy scowled, but Jude thought she could feel a glimmer of something, far off but getting closer, like a heat shine on a long straight road.

  Liam said, “If she’s nineteen—and she should know—and you’re her dad by a DNA test, but you didn’t sleep with Miranda until it was too late … it’s obvious.” He turned to Eddy. “Your mum’s not your mum, is she?”

  The heat shimmer was gone. In its place were letters three feet tall, laid out in front of Jude, spelling the answer to the question she hadn’t even asked. The answer to a hundred little questions she hadn’t even realised were nipping at her.

  Eddy said nothing, just sat as still as death. A girl in the family portrait looking out into the future, sharp and true, while around her, her parents were blurred, half lost and unknowable.

  “It explains a lot,” Jude said gently. “It explains what your mum was so sorry about, while she was dying. And it explains why she kept you away and then sent you back here. It explains the problem with your birth certificate, Eddy.”

  “Wait, hang on,” said Liam. “You can’t fake a birth certificate.”

  Then Eddy spoke. “Yeah, you can,” she said glumly. “If you’re a traveller in Ireland and you roll up with a baby you haven’t got round to registering yet, nobody puts you in jail for it. I’ve seen it, in the Community, loads of times. People having kids on their own and only getting it registered when they need the doctor.”

  “But Eddy, I don’t think Miranda faked your birth certificate,” Jude said. “I don’t think you’ve got one. Didn’t you always say she got bolshy if something official was going on? And she never took you west to the coast because to get into Ireland you need a passport, and to get a passport you need your papers?”

  “How can I not have a birth certificate?” Eddy said. “I mean, sure, yeah, I couldn’t find it, but I thought she’d lost it and I’d get a copy. This can’t be right. Mum freaked about forms because she didn’t like official stuff. Didn’t like Social Services and nosy parkers. Cos she’d been in the system herself. That’s all.”

  “That much is true,” Lowell said. “Miranda was rather down on officialdom even before you were born, Eddy. As you said, she had spent time in a children’s home and I think she had no great faith in social workers and whatnot.”

  “But the main thing,” Jude said, “is it makes sense of the night you were born.”

  Eddy turned slowly to face her as if she had string tied to her chin. “The night … ?”

  Jude nodded. “Mrs. Hewston isn’t as addled as we think,” she said. “You really were born right here at Jamaica House, like she said. But it was in the spring, when Miranda put forsythia branches in the vase in the porch and planted an asparagus bed. When Mrs. Hewston had her windows open to let the scent of the flowers drift in. And when Lowell was in Dallas.”

  “Oh my word!” Lowell said. “And Mrs. Hewston was glued to the news.”

  “Right,” said Eddy. “OJ. October.”

  “No,” said Jude. “She never said OJ, did she? We added that bit. Eddy, what day did Miranda say was your birthday?”

  “April the nineteenth,” Eddy said.

  “Google it,” said Jude, nodding at Eddy’s phone.

  “There’s no need,” Lowell said. “I remember.”

  But Eddy’s thumbs moved faster than he spoke. “It says some guy called Timothy McVeigh blew up a place in Oklahoma.”

  “That’s actually pretty near Dallas,” Jude said. “Mrs. Hewston wasn’t too crazy to worry, in a funny sort of way.”

  “So … I really am Miranda’s?” Eddy said, her face screwed up in an effort to understand. “Dad, you must have forgotten. Maybe a party. You were smoking everything you could lay your hands on, pretty much, weren’t you? Dad?” Lowell stared at her but said nothing. “And I look like her,” Eddy insisted. “Everyone says so.”

  “No,” said Jude. “You remind everyone here of your mum—that’s true. But you don’t look like Miranda except for your black hair.”

  “It’s dyed,” Eddy said. “It’s no colour at all, really.”

  “Oh!” said Lowell, softly. “Why didn’t she tell me?”

  “What’s this now?” said Liam.

  “Maybe she didn’t know,” said Jude. “That does happen.”

  “But she was tiny!” Lowell had stood up and was walking towards the door to the dining room. “I showed you.”

  “Who was tiny?” Terry said.

  “I was tiny, Mum said,” Eddy shouted after Lowell. Then she slumped back in her chair. “Can I still call her that?”

  “Of course,” said Jude. “DNA doesn’t matter if she looked after you her whole life and loved you.” But as she said it, her mind flashed on a gold lipstick tube stuffed into the shriveled elastic strap of a vanity mirror for twenty years.

  Lowell was back, carrying one of the albums full of photographs and also a heavy silver frame. “What did you say?” he asked Eddy.

  “Mum said I was tiny,” Eddy repeated. “She said I was like a fairy. She called me her little changeling.”

  “Did she indeed?” said Lowell, sitting. “I recognised you as soon as you stepped into LG on that first day, you know. And then I convinced myself I was wrong. I told myself you looked like my mother.” He turned the silver frame to show them all. The woman in the photograph was as fine-boned as Eddy and as pale, but she had a swan-neck and a graceful jaw, deep-set hooded eyes, completely different from Eddy’s flattish oval, her little nose the only sharp thing on her face.

  Lowell opened the album to the photograph Jude knew he would, the last one of Miranda and her friend, Inez. Small, pale, lost Inez, who everyone forgot to mention because beside the other girl she simply faded until she had all but disappeared from view.

  This time, looking at her, Jude didn’t know how she could have missed it. They were identical apart from the hair: Inez’s a dazzling veil against the window and Eddy’s the same soft, draping sheet but dyed the impossible black that Jude kicked herself for not seeing through before now. They had the same slightly twisted little nose, the fine collarbones and tiny wrists. Inez’s breasts were high and round and her stomach flat behind a cheesecloth shirt, but the legs below it in their jeans were Eddy’s pipe-cleaner legs as plain as day.

  “That’s your mother
,” Lowell said. “Her name is Inez Cato and I loved her. She broke my heart when she left, and she’s just broken it again today. I have no earthly idea why she would do such a thing as to go and take you with her when she didn’t even wan—”

  “Don’t say that, Lowell,” said Jude. “Maybe she didn’t know how you felt. Maybe she thought you’d send her away anyway. We can’t know what was going on inside her head.”

  “Not until we find her!” said Eddy. “I mean, I’ll always love Mum—she’s my mum!—but if I can find this Inez woman … maybe I’ve got brothers and sisters!”

  “Of course she knew I loved her!” Lowell said. “I wanted to marry her. I gave her my mother’s ring and she accepted it.”

  “Did she take it with her?” said Terry. “If she absconded with a family heirloom you might be able to get official help tracing her.”

  “But you didn’t know she was pregnant?” Jude said. “How long were you in Dallas?”

  “Less than a month,” Lowell said. “If Eddy was born on the nineteenth of April, even if she was early, Inez must have known. I would have noticed. We were, dear me, we were sharing a room.”

  “It happens,” said Jude. “Usually with young girls. How old was she?”

  “Twenty,” said Lowell. “And I was forty, to save you making calculations. I know it sounds tawdry but I loved her, and I thought she loved me. I thought we were going to live here together and she’d paint and take pictures and I’d potter around in the bookshop and we’d be happy.”

  “She didn’t nick your ring,” Eddy said. She hadn’t spoken for a moment or two and when she did her voice was gravelly. “She didn’t nick it. Mum had it. She gave it to me.”

  “What did you do with it?” said Lowell. Eddy put her hands in her cardigan pockets and balled them up into fists. “Did you sell it to buy your ticket here? Your price is far above rubies, you know,” he added gently.

  “You sold it once you knew we’d found you” said Liam. “So you could scarper!”

  “Talk sense,” Eddy said. “That was only today. How could I have sold it already?”

  “You’re not exactly denying it,” Terry countered.

  “I was scared!” Eddy said. “All that stuff you said about breach of contract and suing me. I only wanted to see my dad! I was always going to come back in time for the baby. Ask Jude! Before you started in on threatening me, I was totally coming back.”

  “Sorry,” said Terry. “Heightened emotion. We’ve waited so long.”

  “Lucky little baby this, isn’t it?” said Eddy, with tears in her eyes. “Two dads besotted with it, and a granddad. Not like me, eh? My mum just abandoned me with her pal and my dad just wants his precious diamond ring back.” She took one hand out of her pocket and threw it at Lowell. “Here!” she spat.

  He caught it in one hand and then opened his palm and regarded it calmly. It was a heavy, old-fashioned setting, as crusty as a barnacle and tarnished with dirt.

  “Eddy, that’s not fair,” Jude said. “He just said he’d rather have you.”

  “No he didn’t. He said some guff about rubies that could mean anything,” Eddy said. “And don’t blame Mum either. She gave it to me the night before she died and she told me if I went to Lowland Glen, to bury it in the garden. She probably meant here at the house, eh? But I didn’t know your name was the same as the shop, did I? So I buried it in the garden at the back of LG.”

  “That’s what you were doing that first day!” said Jude.

  “Yes. Fuck’s sake. Happy now?’ Eddy said. “And then I dug it up today. Because … ” She flashed a look at Liam. “All right, shoot me! I was scared.”

  “Did she say why she wanted you to bury it?” Jude said.

  “She was always burying something somewhere,” said Eddy. “Leather boots and dead things and sacral stones. I thought it was because it was my birthstone and this was going to be my home. I—I—I can’t take any more.”

  “Of course you can’t, you poor love,” said Jude, standing. “You need a hot bath and some soup in bed and a good night’s sleep. You need to put all of this out of your mind and let us see to it. We all care about you very much. And we’ll sort it out. It’ll be better in the morning.”

  Eddy had started listening with a wry look, but the tug of comfort was too much for her and she was on her feet, nodding, by the time Jude was done.

  “Shall I run your bath?” Jude said. Eddy shook her head. “Well, I’ll warm some pyjamas round a bottle. Shout down when you’re ready for them.”

  Eddy looked around the four of them, as if trying to think what to say, then gave up and trailed out of the room.

  “Is a hot bath safe?” said Terry.

  “It’s essential,” Jude told him. “She’s not a vessel, she’s a person.” Then she reached out and took the ring from Lowell.

  “My dear,” said Lowell, “why on earth would Miranda tell Eddy to bury Inez’s ring in my garden?” But Jude thought he wasn’t really asking. She thought somewhere, deep down inside, he already knew.

  “She meant to bring the baby back to you,” Jude said. “That’s why she made the trip here in the autumn of 1995 and slept with you. So that, a few years later, she could roll up with a kid about the right age and you’d believe her. But then she married that rotten Dave, and by the time she left him she didn’t trust men anymore. So she never returned.”

  “But the ring?” said Lowell. “Why did Inez give Miranda her ring? And where is she?”

  “Oh, Lowell,” said Jude. “Ten years you said one end of that bloody asparagus bed was giving you bumper crops and the other end was only so-so. You couldn’t get that just from burying a placenta, could you?”

  Twenty-Nine

  Jude knew the jig was up. A police tent draws the press like jam draws wasps, and by lunchtime the next day there were two outside broadcast vans and a clutch of print reporters gathered beside Lowell’s garden wall.

  Even without the incidentals—the pregnant teenager and the two waiting dads living in the house; the mysterious London stranger who seemed to have unearthed it all somehow; and the fire in a graveyard, difficult to connect in any sensible way but irresistibly creepy—even without all of that, an exhumation was big news. The worst thing was that they’d got hold of Lowell’s hobby. Someone he had outbid at an auction told the press that Lowland Glen collected corpse portraits, and the headline writers went into orbit. The one comfort was that, unbelievably, Mrs. Hewston kept out of it.

  Only that saved Eddy from a meltdown. Lowell and Jude told her together, as gently as they could, the next morning, but her breathing grew fast and shallow as she listened and by the time Lowell had finished speaking, hot tears were spilling down her cheeks and she was shouting.

  “Miranda killed her?” she blared, sitting up in her bed with the covers pushed to her waist. Jude wondered how she could ever have doubted the pregnancy. In the thin nightie the massive swell of Eddy’s stomach seemed to pulse. “She’s dead? She killed her and stole me?”

  “Your mother—” Lowell began.

  “She’s not my mother!” Eddy screamed, high as a train whistle.

  Hovering at her bedroom door, Terry cleared his throat. “You should try and stay calm,” he managed to get out before Lowell wheeled round and marched over to him.

  “You”—he poked a finger into Terry’s chest—“might think you bought my daughter, but you are mistaken. She will shout and swear as much as she needs to while learning this news and if you don’t like it you can jolly well lump it.”

  “Fucking hell, Dad,” said Eddy.

  “Good girl,” said Lowell, coming back. “That’s more like it.” He resettled himself on the edge of Eddy’s bed and took her hand.

  Jude took her other one, ice-cold with shock, and squeezed it.

  “I meant Inez,” Lowell said. “I have many, many things to tell
you about Inez, when you’re ready.”

  “But why did she do it?” Eddy said. “If Mum had loved you—if she had wanted to get rid of Inez to get you—that would be nearly … but why did she do it?”

  She was so very far from ready. Miranda was her mother, and it was Miranda’s motives and actions that were filling her head. Jude supposed there would be a stage when she realised what she had lost with Inez’s death. She hoped there wouldn’t be a time when she realised what a close call it was—how easy it would have been for Miranda simply to kill them both; snuff the life out of the baby and bury her too. And the more Jude thought about it, the more the idea gathered a head of steam. Miranda had risked a lot over the years to keep Eddy. There had to be a reason.

  “We don’t know that she did anything,” Jude found herself saying. “We don’t actually know if Inez is dead—we need to wait and see what happens out there. And even if she is, we don’t know why she died. Maybe Miranda did no more than hide her body and take you.”

  Eddy blinked once or twice and then lay back against her pillows. “That does make tons more sense,” she said. “If Inez died and Miranda told people, I’d have ended up in care, wouldn’t I? I’d have ended up in a children’s home, Social Services and all that. She’d have done a lot to stop that happening.”

  “At great personal risk to herself, I might add,” said Lowell. “She loved you.”

  Eddy nodded. “You know when she came back, Dad? In the October? Did she ask you about moving away?” She searched Lowell’s face hungrily. “Cos you know what occurred to me? She couldn’t live here, knowing that Inez was … could she? She’d go ape. Did she try to persuade you to move but you said no and she couldn’t explain why and so she was kind of stuck? Did she?”

  “Um, dear me,” said Lowell. “It was one evening and it was years ago. I can’t honestly remember anything like that.”