The Space Between Us

by Anna McPartlin

  Love,

  Eve

  Lily was desperately upset when Scott refused to leave his father to move in with her. He told her in no uncertain terms on the street outside his grandfather’s garage that he was old enough to decide where he wanted to live and he chose his dad. He wanted nothing to do with her, her new house, man and life, and Lily had no option but to accept his stance. Please forgive me, Scott. I miss you.

  Eve had not been so accepting. Cheeky little bastard. She watched Lily tear herself apart and even Clooney couldn’t make the pain go away.

  ‘The house will be empty and cold. What will he live on? Doesn’t he realize his father is never there? And when he’s frustrated, who does Scott think will be on the receiving end of his anger? He’ll twist him up and spit him out. He’ll spread his poison and make my son hate me. I might lose him for ever.’

  Clooney was soothing and sympathetic, Eve less so as she was bored of listening to Lily’s anxieties. ‘Put a sock in it, Lil, he’ll come around.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘Of course I do,’ Eve said, as though she was the oracle and was programmed to explain the human psyche.

  Lily argued that business wasn’t as complex as people, and although Eve always got it right in business, she was out of her depth when it came to understanding the needs of Lily’s children. Eve disagreed, believing that she was perfectly situated to see the world through their eyes. ‘They’re self-centred and self-righteous,’ she said, ‘and I’m self-centred and self-righteous so I think I’m the perfect person.’

  Eve went to the garage to try to talk to Scott, although she had promised Lily she wouldn’t interfere. Jack offered her tea and she politely declined, asking for just a few moments of Scott’s time. Jack was happy to let his grandson go for coffee with Eve, asking only that he brought one back when he returned.

  They sat together in a coffee shop, staring at one another sullenly.

  ‘You look more like your mum,’ she said.

  ‘So they say.’

  ‘Lucky for you,’ she said.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Did your dad ask you to stay with him?’

  ‘No, and it’s none of your business anyway.’

  ‘You’re right, it’s not. I just want to make sure that staying in that house was your idea.’

  ‘Why do you care?’

  ‘Because when I was your age I thought I had it all figured out and so did your mother, but here’s the thing: we didn’t have a clue. We hadn’t even begun to understand the world and the people around us.’

  ‘Well, I’m not you and this isn’t the eighteen-hundreds.’

  She laughed a little. ‘Funny,’ she said.

  ‘I’m staying because he’s my dad and it’s my home.’

  ‘I feel like I should say something to shine a light but I don’t know where to shine it.’

  ‘You sound like the nut-job who passes the garage every morning holding a placard with a picture of a foetus on it and shouting about its hands and feet.’

  ‘She gave me the finger yesterday,’ Eve said, and Scott smiled.

  He couldn’t help liking her. He’d noticed how beautiful she was, and even though she was on crutches, she still had a certain grace.

  Eve sighed. She hadn’t really thought it through. She hated Declan but his son loved him, and she wasn’t the heartless bitch she pretended to be. She needed to make sure that Declan hadn’t broken the terms of their agreement and it was clear he hadn’t. Scott wanted to stay with him for his own reasons.

  ‘So what’s this about shining a light?’ he said.

  ‘I did something that really hurt your mother years ago and I lost her and it was incredibly painful and …’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Picture your life without her – because if you think that stamping your feet and hiding in a corner is going to change the way things are you’re wrong. She’s left your dad, there’s no going back. Decide whether you love and respect her enough to support her or you don’t.’

  ‘She just walked out on him and us.’

  ‘I understand you love your father,’ she said, ‘but that’s not what happened.’

  ‘She’s destroyed him,’ he said, and he was quiet. His eyes filled.

  ‘She saved herself.’

  ‘You don’t understand.’

  ‘I promise I do, and I can see why you’d want to help and protect your father. It’s a good thing. But punishing your mother is wrong and you know it. The battle lines that were drawn are gone. You don’t need to pick one parent over the other. It’s time to move on.’

  He sat silently for a moment or two. She wasn’t sure if he was going to get up and walk away or if he was actually considering his mother’s point of view.

  ‘I’ll come once a week for dinner,’ he said.

  ‘And two Sundays a month.’

  ‘One Sunday a month.’

  She smiled and put out her hand. He shook it. ‘That’s a good start,’ she said, and handed him fifty euro to pay for three coffees and a sandwich. ‘Keep the change.’ She left him to stand there and watch her make her way to the taxi she had waiting outside. Eve normally didn’t interfere in other people’s lives, she simply didn’t care enough, but Lily had always brought out the lioness in her.

  She felt elated and even a little smug as she sat in the back of the taxi. Lily felt too much guilt and loyalty to her children and their father, regardless of his actions, to fight for herself, but Eve wouldn’t rest until she had her children back and Declan was as alone and powerless as he deserved to be.

  The week before the wedding was busy. Lily spent most days cleaning the house that Eve had paid a team of cleaners to clean less than three months before. When she was alone she’d walk around it, listening to the faint echoes of her childhood. Her heart was so full she felt at times it would burst. Clooney helped her hang curtains and paint walls, and when the furniture finally arrived, he helped her move it in while Eve sat on the sofa and pointed her crutches towards walls and spaces.

  When the furniture was in, Lily and Clooney spent a day at IKEA. They came home in two cars filled with vases, pots, pans, china, duvet sets, pictures, picture frames, rugs and plants.

  Clooney seemed a little haunted, having lost all sense of time in the shop. ‘It’s just like Vegas but not fun.’

  When the house was pretty as a picture and her daughter’s room was ready and waiting, Lily drove up to her old house alone. She insisted that Clooney and Eve didn’t come. Although she was nervous of Declan, she felt stronger and she needed to show her daughter that, from now on, they were a team: she was Daisy’s mother and Daisy would come first. Clooney and Eve understood, and although they were both concerned about Lily being in Declan’s presence without them, they supported her decision.

  She rang the doorbell, her hand shaking a little. Adrenalin rushed through her and she was filled with trepidation and excitement.

  Declan opened the door. Daisy was sitting on the stairs with a large suitcase beside her. Lily said hello, and Declan glowered at her. She looked past him towards Daisy, whose eyes were red. ‘It’s time to go, Daisy,’ she said.

  Daisy stayed on the stairs.

  ‘Daisy, you can see your dad whenever you want,’ Lily said, but Daisy didn’t move.

  It was as though she was glued there.

  Declan turned to his daughter. When he spoke his voice was fragile and threatened to break. ‘Daisy, do what your mother says.’

  She met his stare and their eyes locked. ‘Do you really want me to go, Dad?’

  He bit the inside of his cheek and nodded once.

  Her eyes filled again and chubby tears fell. The sounds she made were of pure pain. She looked at her mother, silently begging her to make everything right. Lily wanted to run to her and hold her, but Declan was between them and an invisible wall prevented her entering. She was an uninvited vampire sucking the life out of her family. She was forced to observe the p
ain she had caused from a distance. Daisy stood up. When she tried to pick her case up, it was too heavy for her. Declan grabbed it and shoved it roughly at Lily. Daisy moved to walk past her dad and as she did he grasped her and held her tight.

  ‘I love you,’ he said, then pushed her away and closed the door, leaving her outside in tears.

  In their new home, Daisy lay on her new bed in her bright new room, looking out of the window towards the old swing-set and the rock wall that separated the back garden from Terry the Tourist’s old place.

  Lily had put Eve’s old desk back in the room. She’d spent hours painting it and putting up pictures of Daisy and her brother, Daisy and her dad, Daisy and her friends and Daisy and her mum. She’d covered the bed in a duvet with big flowers and pink cushions – Daisy loved pink. She’d hung a large framed photograph of Justin Bieber over the bed, and Clooney had spent an afternoon putting up a wall of bookshelves, which Lily had filled with all the second-hand copies she could find of books suitable for Daisy’s age group and little odds and ends she’d bought in IKEA that added colour and warmth to the room.

  Daisy lay frozen despite all Lily’s efforts. She was worried about her dad and Scott, and she would miss her room, her piano, her house, her road, her world. She didn’t know how to be with her mother, what to say or do. She was still so angry, sad and scared and, no matter what Eve or anyone else said, it had been her mother who had walked out and left them. How could she just leave us?

  Downstairs Lily spoke in whispers to Clooney on the phone while she cooked, hoping the smell of fresh bread and Daisy’s favourite shepherd’s pie would coax her down the stairs and back into Lily’s life. Clooney counselled patience and waited impatiently for the time when they could be alone together again.

  Daisy did come down the stairs that evening, and picked at the food her mother had made for her. She grunted at Eve when she called in to say hello.

  ‘And here was I thinking we were past grunting. Oh, well!’ Eve said, and Lily saw her daughter fight to stop the corners of her mouth lifting.

  Over the next week it was sometimes easier and sometimes harder. When Daisy spoke to her father on the phone she would be silent and distant afterwards, and on one occasion, when Lily answered Daisy’s phone because her daughter was in the shower and Declan had rung three times in a row, she quickly realized he was drunk and wondered how many other calls he’d made in that state. She told him she’d appreciate if he wouldn’t call Daisy when he was drunk and hoped he’d make an effort to stay sober when she returned to stay with him the following weekend. He called her a whore.

  ‘Change the record, Declan.’

  ‘What was that you said, whore?’

  ‘Sober up.’

  ‘Don’t tell me what to do, bitch,’ he said. ‘I’ve had enough of that from your precious Eve.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ Lily said.

  ‘Don’t pretend you’re not in on it, you twisted bitch,’ he said, and hung up.

  Lily sat on her daughter’s bed, dumbfounded. Suddenly the change in his behaviour made sense. He hadn’t given Daisy up because it was the right thing to do. He’d given her up because he’d had to. He hadn’t aborted his war plan, he had simply lost the battle. She sat on the bed, wondering what Eve could have said to make him do something he didn’t want to do. It wasn’t long before she guessed what had happened.

  Eve was getting stronger and steadier by the day, the expensive and intensive physiotherapy and Pilates classes paying off. She was off her crutches and using a walking stick. Adam was very pleased with her recovery, and one evening two nights before the wedding, when Clooney had finally grabbed some time with Lily because Daisy was spending the night with Tess, he came to her apartment with a bottle of wine, a bunch of flowers and a takeaway. It was the first time they had had the place to themselves, and despite his previous stricture, they didn’t eat their takeaway, they didn’t drink their wine, and the bunch of flowers wilted on the counter as they enjoyed uninhibited and playful sex. They laughed and talked, pushed and prodded, came and came again. They showered and changed the sheets because they both had a weird thing about clean sheets, and they had sex again. Some time between four and five in the morning they heated up a spicy Indian dish and ate it before enjoying another roll in the hay.

  ‘That’s the most sex I’ve had in a very long time,’ she said.

  ‘You’re not alone.’

  ‘How sad are we?’

  ‘Watership Down sad,’ he said. He had remembered that she and Lily had watched Watership Down eight times.

  ‘That is sad,’ she said.

  Adam was quirky and funny and kind and interesting, and she liked that he was also a little lost, as she was. He was dispassionate about his career. He was tired of the same old same old, and needed a break or a new focus.

  ‘You can focus on me for a while,’ she said.

  ‘Only a while?’

  ‘You could go to hot countries and fix poor broken kids or you could invent a surgical tool that revolutionizes surgery or help discover a cure for bone cancer.’

  ‘All totally doable,’ he said, and laughed a little.

  She kissed him. ‘You can be and do anything you want, Adam. You’re an amazing surgeon. You’re just a little bored right now.’

  He exhaled and raised his hands in the air. ‘I am so bored. If I have to replace one more hip …’ He shook his fist at the ceiling in mock anger. She laughed at him and he turned back to face her. ‘What about you? Are you going to take up knitting or painting or bridge? I hear water aerobics is popular with the retired community.’

  ‘Nah, I’m just going to lie here with you.’

  ‘John and Yoko style.’

  ‘I’d like to think we have better hair,’ she said.

  Eve had realized that she needed to make life changes two weeks after she’d returned from her father’s funeral to her home and work in New York. She’d felt homesick, agitated and restless, and a mild collision with a New York taxi had been the last straw. She had been working ridiculous hours, trying to make up for so much time away. She was exhausted, her head was pounding, and when she was standing at the side of the road, with the Irish-Italian taxi driver screaming at her, she remained silent, trying to work out what had happened. She hadn’t fallen asleep. She hadn’t been talking on the phone and, because she was tired, she had been extra careful to maintain her alertness and watch the road. He had seemed so far ahead. She’d thought there was at least another two car lengths between them. She’d heard the crash and felt the jolt before she’d seen the back of the car. His yelling faded into the background.

  Oh, no. Not yet. I haven’t lived yet.

  That evening she made the decision to stop and look around her, to be present and part of the real world, to engage with people, family and friends. Now that she was doing just that, each moment carried a certain beauty and resonance and it was good enough for her. Eve Hayes was finally fulfilled and content.

  ‘What would you most like to do tomorrow?’ Adam asked.

  ‘It’s five a.m. – it is tomorrow.’

  ‘OK, what would you most like to do when we wake up?’

  ‘I’d like to take out my dad’s old boat and his water-skis –’

  ‘Out of the question. Next.’

  ‘OK. Forget the water-skis.’

  ‘Let’s do it,’ he said, and kissed her. They fell asleep some time after six.

  They didn’t hear Clooney return at just before eight. He’d had a long night too. He and Lily hadn’t slept a wink. They didn’t want to sleep because their time together was so limited that they couldn’t afford to miss a minute. Up to that night they had grabbed a coffee here and there and they’d had a drink together while Daisy was in the cinema one Tuesday evening. They had phoned and texted one another but Lily had missed his touch and Clooney had missed hers. He was growing restless. Eve didn’t need him any more and Lily was starting a new life, one that he couldn’t be a part of, at least for a whi
le. He’d accepted the job in Peru and had two weeks left before he was due to fly out. The contract was for six months.

  ‘Six months is no time,’ he said, when they were lying together, gazing into each other’s eyes, the way that new lovers do.

  ‘It’ll fly by and, besides, I told you I might come and see you,’ she said.

  ‘A lot will have changed in six months,’ he said.

  ‘Daisy will be settled and Scott, well, hopefully he’ll have forgiven me a little.’

  ‘And you might have met someone else.’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I could really do with time off for good behaviour.’

  ‘I don’t mind if you do. I just want you to be happy.’

  ‘I know that,’ she said.

  The next morning he had left early to avoid any collision with Daisy. He kissed her and told her he loved her and would always love her. There was no promise accompanying his words. It was simply a statement of fact.

  ‘I love you too,’ she said. She winked at him and grinned. ‘Now get out.’

  They were both big and bold enough to know that their relationship was not the stuff of legends. He might find an exotic lover and she might fall for one of the many men who would pursue her in his absence. They weren’t foolish but they were hopeful that, some day and somehow, they would find their way back to one another. If it’s meant to be it’s meant to be.

  Scott promised to stay at home the weekend Daisy returned to her dad’s house. He told his mother she needn’t worry. He and his dad would take good care of Daisy. ‘We’ve had plenty of practice,’ he said, because although he was thawing towards her he was still angry – since she’d left his father had seemed to suffer a lot.