John followed more slowly. He stepped into the living room in time to see Kate walk out of the kitchen, holding her finger against her lips. She took one look at her daughter’s face and folded the girl into her arms.
“Everything’s all right, love,” she said, stroking the smooth dark head buried in her shoulder. “Kevin’s sleeping and I’ve decided to take the day off.” Over the girl’s head, her eyes met her father’s. “I’m making lunch. I hope you’re hungry.”
John shook his head. He knew that look. Kate’s relationship with food was a puzzle he’d never pieced together. He would get nothing out of her, not until she’d fed them all to satiation.
Over outrageous helpings of shepherd’s pie and green salad, John quizzed his daughter. Her answers were hesitant and too brief for satisfaction, as if She were reluctant to reveal a confidence.
“For Christ sake, Kathleen,” her father exploded in frustration. “Kevin’s dearer to me than my own sons. Deirdre and I want nothing but the best for him. How can we help if we don’t know the truth?”
“I don’t know the truth, Da,” she replied in her patient, low-pitched voice. “All I know is what Mr. Anderson told me. Kevin has a different story. I’m not blind nor am I naive. It’s possible that Kevin is involved in something very serious.”
“Why did they let him go?” Deirdre asked.
Kate shrugged. “Most likely the witness wasn’t reliable and they had no other evidence. Kevin hasn’t been in trouble before.” She fell silent, her brow furrowed.
“What is it?” her father asked.
“Mr. Anderson is a professional from London.”
“So?”
“He said—” She stopped.
“Aye?”
“It’s ridiculous, of course.”
“What is?”
“He thinks Kevin is heavily involved with drugs.”
Deirdre slumped in her chair. Suddenly her food tasted like sawdust. Someone had finally put the horrifying fear she’d carried around for months into words. But would her mother believe her?
“What do you think?” John demanded.
“I’m not sure.” Kate stirred the meat and potatoes with her fork. “I hardly see Kevin anymore. I have no influence over him. He comes and goes as he pleases. His friends are different. His marks in school are lower, but not seriously so.” She blinked back tears. “Somewhere, I lost him.”
“He’s angry all the time,” Deirdre volunteered.
Her mother nodded. “I know, love.” She lifted her head and looked directly at her father. “But that doesn’t mean he’s criminally involved enough to profit from selling narcotics. If he needs help, he’ll have it.”
John searched his daughter’s face. She was very like her mother in coloring and feature, but not at all in demeanor or temperament. He saw something behind the clear, lovely eyes that he hadn’t seen in quite a while, since the first years after Patrick’s death, a haunted empty look that twisted his heart. “Is there something else, Katie, something you haven’t told us?”
Kate chewed her lip, a nervous habit she’d passed on to her daughter. “Mr. Anderson tried to use Kevin as an informant.”
“What is he looking for?”
“It seems there’s been unusual drug trafficking in Belfast. He thinks the IRA is involved.”
John’s lips tightened. “Even if it is, how is Belfast different from any other city? Dublin has its drugs. So does London. And if the IRA is involved, Kevin wouldn’t fool them. They’d see right through him. It would be a death sentence.”
“I don’t think Mr. Anderson is overly concerned with the survival of one Catholic boy from the North.”
“What is he concerned about?”
“Maintaining order, preventing unnecessary deaths, doing his job.”
If she were anyone but Kate, he would have read sarcasm in her words. “There’s nothing wrong with that, lass.”
“Of course there isn’t. He’ll just have to do it without Kevin.”
Deirdre cleared her throat. “What will you do with Kevin?”
Kate opened her mouth and closed it again without speaking. “I don’t know.”
“He’ll be awake soon,” Deirdre persisted. “Are we going to go on as if nothing happened?”
“I haven’t really thought it through,” said Kate. “He’s not the easiest person for me to talk to.”
“Let me talk to him,” offered John.
“Thanks, Da. But he’s my son. I’ll handle this.”
Deirdre interrupted them. “Kevin’s gone beyond talking, Mum. If Mr. Anderson is right and Kevin is involved with drugs, it’s going to take more than talk. You may have to insist on some kind of rehabilitation or counseling program. Kevin won’t like that. How will you make him go if he doesn’t want to?”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Collectively John, Kate and Deirdre, froze.
Kevin, thin as a deer rifle, stood at the entrance to the kitchen. His eyes were bright with anger and two spots of red colored his gaunt cheeks.
His mother was the first to recover. She wet her lips. “Sit down, Kevin. I’ll fill a plate for you while we talk.”
“There’s nothing I want to say.”
Kate’s temper, slow to rise, flared. “Then you’ll listen because I have a great deal to say.”
Kevin crossed his arms against his chest and didn’t move. “I suppose you’ve told Grandda and Deirdre everything.”
“I don’t know everything. This is a perfect opportunity for you to tell us your story.”
The boy’s lips remained mutinously sealed.
Deirdre spoke. “For pity’s sake, Kevin, be reasonable. We’re your family. We only want to help you. Do you think this is over? What happens the next time you’re arrested? Mum can’t help you forever.”
“There won’t be a next time.”
“How can you be sure of that?” his mother asked.
“I won’t go there again. Those chaps are nothing to me.”
“Why were you there last night?”
Kevin’s sigh was a mixture of anger and impatience.
“There was a party, that’s all. Leave it alone, will you, Mum?”
Kate stood and walked to the counter. Her hands shook. She willed herself to relax and began dishing man-size portions of meat pie and salad onto a plate. “Sit down, Kevin,” she said again. “You must be starving.”
“I’m not hungry at all.”
John spoke for the first time. “It’s time for me to be leavin’. Walk with me a bit, Kevin. I can use the company.”
“He hasn’t eaten, Da,” Kate protested.
“One missed meal won’t kill him. Besides, he said he wasn’t hungry.”
Kate gave up. “I’ll keep the food warm. Don’t be too long.”
Wisely John O’Donnell refrained from saying a word until they’d passed the long road leading to the ancient Norman castle, now a ruin by the sea’s edge.
“Do you know I’ve never been up to the castle?” he began conversationally.
Kevin stopped in the road and stared at him. “You’ve lived here all of your life.”
His grandfather nodded. “Still, for all that, I’ve never seen it.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t say. I suppose it never interested me, a rubble of broken stone.” The two walked on again. “Sometimes, what’s right there in front of a man escapes him. It takes someone new, an outsider, perhaps, to give him a different perspective.”
Kevin rested one hand on his grandfather’s shoulder, a gesture he’d assumed two years before when he’d overtaken the older man in height. “Is there a lesson in that, Grandda? Is that why you wanted me to come with you?”
“Don’t consider it even for a minute, Kevin, lad. I wanted my grandson’s company, nothing more.”
They continued for a few more minutes in silence. Then Kevin spoke. “Aren’t you going to ask me if I did it?”
“No.”
The words ratcheted out, one at a time. “I have problems, Grandda.”
“You and the rest of the world, Kevin, lad.”
“I can’t manage them the way everyone else can.”
“Why not?”
Kevin shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ll think about something and it gets bigger and bigger. Then my head hurts and my stomach heaves and I can’t stand it. That’s when I need the drugs.”
“What kind of drugs?”
“Mostly weed.”
“The man said it was cocaine.”
Kevin colored. “Sometimes it is.”
“That won’t take away the pain, lad. It only postpones it for a while and then it comes back just as strong as it ever was. That’s when you’ll need more and more because you never give yourself a chance to heal.”
“I’ll stop.”
“How?” John paused in front of the long, grass-rutted driveway that led to the home he’d lived in for more than forty years.
“I’ll just Stop, that’s all.”
“That isn’t the way it works, Kevin. You can’t do it alone. You’re goin’ to need some help.”
“I don’t need help. I just need everyone to leave me alone.”
John considered arguing with the boy and decided against it. Was there ever a sixteen-year-old lad in the world who didn’t think he had all the answers? It was only after years of living that a man knew how much he didn’t know.
“Well, that’s all right then. If you need a bit of help along the way, be sure and let me know. I’ve had a few of my own demons to work out and I don’t have all that much to occupy me these days.”
Kevin grinned and John’s heart twisted. That wayward mischievous turning of the mouth was Patrick’s legacy, not Kate’s. John wished, more than anything in the world, that the boy had turned out more like his mother.
He gestured toward the house. “Will you come up for a spell?”
“I can’t. Mum will worry.”
“We’ll call her.”
“Not this time, Grandda.”
John pulled the boy into his arms for a brief, hard hug, then released him. “Go home, Kevin. Take care of yourself.”
Again, the quick, magnetic smile, so like his father’s. Then he turned and walked away.
John watched him until he disappeared around the bend. He had other grandchildren, a slew of them, but Kate’s children tore at his heart. Patrick’s death had made them vulnerable, he told himself. But deep down he knew it was more than that. He’d kept silent about so many things. He was sorry for it now, but wisdom comes with hindsight and he wasn’t so sure he would have done it any differently if he had to do it over again. It was too late to say anything. Kate and the children had their memories. They were all that was left to them.
John O’Donnell could have told his daughter that no man is perfect, that they all have their troubles as well as their secrets. He could have told her that love comes in many shapes and what a man means when he tells a woman he loves her may be not at all what she’s hearing or expecting. He could have told her that love sometimes paints a mask over the facts and blinds a woman to the truth beneath and that, rarely, is a man worthy of the kind of regard that dries up a woman before her time.
But he did none of those things. He hadn’t done them when it mattered and up until now he’d seen no point in changing his mind. But six years was long enough and his family wasn’t healing. They lived in the shadow of a man whose memory threatened to squeeze the very life from them all.
Five
Deirdre looked around the room she shared with her roommate, Maggie Drummond. Something felt out of place and yet nothing really needed to be done. She hadn’t really settled into life at Queen’s. It had the best physical science department in all of Ireland, she reminded herself frequently, it wasn’t all that far from home and the campus was truly lovely. Yet, there was something uncomfortable about living in her father’s native city.
The truth of the matter was, Deirdre lived in a state of perpetual turmoil. No one, looking at her smooth features and composed expression would have guessed, but the truth of it was her current state had existed for so long that nothing else felt normal.
She knew there must have a been a time, long ago in the hazy past, when morning seeped into her consciousness heralding nothing more than an empty contentment, a mild curiosity over what the day would bring: sounds of the world awakening around her, a milk truck lurching across broken pavement, church bells signaling early Mass, tractor fumes, the sweet smell of unearthed peat bogs dark and loamy in the morning mist, car engines roaring to life, friendly greetings between neighbors who’d lived alongside one another from birth, her mother’s bread rising in the kitchen, bacon and sausage sizzling on the stove, the sweet predictable flow of a life she had taken for granted.
It had ended abruptly, cut short by an act so heinous that her mind erased all memory of the details, leaving her with an odd secondhand awareness, as if she’d never been there, never seen the masked men who’d snuffed out her father’s life before its time. Her therapist told her it was normal for a child to blot out painful memories. Humans were instinctively programmed for survival and she could not have survived the horrible truth of that day and still retain a hold on her sanity.
Deirdre had come to terms with the random horror of it all, but she’d developed a litany of worries. She worried about her mother crossing the checkpoints. She worried about her brother and his nefarious nightlife. She worried about her grandfather and the new slowness in his step. She worried about the sudden bend in the M32 and what the swerving cars meant for vehicles traveling in the other direction. She worried about her classmates at Queen’s and whether the friendly banter carried messages she couldn’t understand. Leaving her room at night to attend a study group at a neighboring dormitory required great gulps of air, several turns around the floor and recitation of a meaningless mantra that wiped her mind clear of the terrifying thoughts never far from the surface.
Deirdre was afraid of dying and, more than anyone, she understood how quickly the life force could escape the living. One could bear death. She knew that. She’d done so once already and lived through it. But she didn’t think she could bear it again, not yet anyway.
Dreams interrupted her sleep, one in particular sending her to the edge of a panic that left her trembling and weak with nausea. Blue-and-white parakeets lived in wire cages in the middle of a courtyard more typical of tropical climates than of Ireland. Lurching unsteadily through the maze of cages, Deirdre managed to tip them over, freeing the birds and sending them to the four corners of the courtyard. Three cats, larger than life and predatorial, crept out of the corners toward the domesticated birds. Despite every effort to contain the cats in her arms, three of them were too much for her. Inevitably they wriggled out of her grasp and stalked the birds. She woke terrified, just as a feline paw reached out to embed its claws into the breast of an innocent bird.
Deirdre no longer met with her therapist. She felt odd and more than a bit embarrassed sharing her intimate thoughts with a stranger. She’d begged her mother to allow her to stop attending the sessions. Kate had spoken with the doctor and then reluctantly agreed. For the most part Deirdre was relieved, although she would have liked the woman’s opinion on the bird dream.
Just now she was in a bad way. It was the end of the term. Exam results would be posted, blue papers with black marks, flapping in the wind, secured to a flat wall behind the gothic spires, Queen’s pride, announcing who had matriculated. Scores were numbered, of course, but by this time everyone knew whose number belonged to whom.
It wasn’t the marks Deirdre was afraid of, it was the crowds. She hated the press of wool-damp bodies leaning into her, hot breath against the back of her neck, harsh voices in her ear, insistent arms pushing her aside, propelling their way to the front of the queue. Americans called it invading one’s sense of space. Deirdre rather liked that phrase. There was no sense of space in the common areas of the
university. Students jostled one another, shared tables and blew cigarette smoke into each other’s faces with cheerful regularity. No one else seemed to mind, just Deirdre, and yet she said nothing.
Steps sounded on the stairs. She held her breath. It wasn’t her roommate. Maggie’s shift was over at midnight and it wasn’t much past six o’clock. A sharp rap sounded on the wooden door. She slid off the bed, crossed the room, opened the door and breathed a sigh of relief. “Uncle Liam.” Her voice was a raspy whisper. “You scared me.”
The crease in Liam Nolan’s forehead deepened with his frown. “It’s early yet, love. Surely you’re up to entertaining a visitor or two before dinner.”
Deirdre forced a smile. “I wasn’t expecting anyone. What are you doing here?”
“I’m for takin’ you out to a decent meal and a bit of the craic. Are you agreeable?”
The bubble of worry inside her chest dissipated for the moment. Liam was family. She reached for her coat.
“Where shall we go?”
Liam stroked his chin. “The White Swan has a good Irish band playin’ tonight.”
Tucking her hand inside her uncle’s arm, Deirdre stepped out into the hallway and locked the door behind her. “I’ve never eaten there. Is the food good?”
Liam grinned. “As good as Irish food gets.”
Deirdre punched him playfully. “You know perfectly well that the best food anywhere comes from Mum’s kitchen.”
Liam shortened his steps to suit hers. “How is Kate?” he asked casually.
A full minute passed before Deirdre answered. “Well enough.”
“That sounds a bit evasive, lass. Come now. We’re family. Out with it.”
Deirdre sighed. “It’s Kevin.”
“What trouble is the lad into now?”
“He was arrested.”
Liam’s face stilled. “On what charge?”
“I don’t know if Mum would want me to tell you.”
“Tell me anyway.”
Deirdre closed her eyes and blurted out the ugly words. “Possession of cocaine.”
Liam exploded. “Sweet Jesus! Where did he get that? Did they let him out?”
“They never kept him. Mum said they had no real evidence.”
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