I’ll be home for Christmas

by Roisin Meaney

  ‘Everyone,’ she said, ‘I have an announcement to make.’

  They were all still looking at Tilly.

  ‘I’d like,’ Laura said, ‘to introduce my sister, Tilly.’

  For what seemed like an awfully long time nobody moved – unless you counted Poppy, who went on chewing her rabbit’s ear, oblivious to the drama that was unfolding.

  ‘She’s my sister,’ Laura repeated to the room at large, ‘if you can believe it. I have a sister I never knew about until today.’

  Tilly felt her throat tightening, tears threatening. No, she thought, don’t – but she might as well have asked the turkey to fly around the room. As the first tear rolled down her cheek, as she dashed it away, mortified, Laura said, ‘Hey, no need to cry, we’re not that bad’ – which of course made her ten times worse.

  Laura laughed softly and offered her a gold-coloured paper napkin from the table – and while Tilly was dabbing her eyes and trying desperately to pull herself together, aware of all four older children watching her with similarly opened mouths, the tall man, who had to be Laura’s husband, materialised beside her.

  ‘Gavin Connolly,’ he said, a broad smile on his lean freckled face, ‘your very surprised brother-in-law.’ His hand outstretched, before he changed his mind and gave her a quick hug. ‘Welcome to the family,’ he said, the words almost undoing her again.

  ‘Tell her who everyone is,’ Laura said, returning to the cooker – so he led Tilly around the table and began with the older woman, who turned out to be his mother, Gladys.

  She shook hands and said, ‘Well, that’s a bit of news alright’, her dubious tone leaving Tilly in some doubt as to whether it was welcome or otherwise.

  The American got to his feet and shook Tilly’s hand solemnly. ‘Larry Kawalski,’ he said. ‘Larry might be easier for everyone to remember. Pleased to make your acquaintance properly, miss.’ He actually looked in rather better humour now – maybe the turn of events had softened him up a bit. ‘Apologies about before,’ he added, in an undertone. ‘I was … not in the best of spirits.’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ Tilly murmured, which was quite true. His outburst on the doorstep seemed trivial now, washed away as it had been by what had followed it. She suspected it was something she might use to amuse people in years to come: her first encounter with her sister, right after the door had been slammed in her face.

  Then it was the turn of the children. ‘This is your auntie,’ Gavin told them, ‘Auntie Tilly.’ The little girls went on staring solemnly at her, thumbs by now installed in mouths, while Ben lifted his chin to display a thin zigzag line – a legacy, it transpired, from a tumble off his bike the previous summer: ‘I got five stitches, it was pumping.’ Tilly gathered it was his stock form of introduction, the easiest way for newcomers to differentiate between the brothers.

  ‘You’re their only aunt,’ Gavin said, bringing Tilly to her seat next to his mother. ‘I don’t have siblings’ – a sudden gap-toothed grin – ‘unless I have yet to meet them, of course.’ The last bit under his breath, audible only to her – maybe to ensure that his mother didn’t catch it, and be offended by the implication.

  And after that, the evening pretty much sailed along. After that, the evening was, well, quite wonderful. The turkey was applauded and carved and doled out – ‘Free range and organic, like all the island meat,’ Laura told them. The vegetables were distributed, the gravy and cranberry sauce passed around, and the dinner was eaten as Tilly filled in the people around her – Gavin, his mother and Mr Kawalski – on the events that had led to her discovery of an Irish sister.

  At the other end of the table Laura kept order among the younger diners, in between offering seconds and mopping up occasional splashes and wiping dribbles from chins as the dog, hovering about that area, enjoyed his own Christmas dinner from whatever dropped to the floor.

  And in due course Poppy demanded that she be fed too, so Gavin prepared her bottle while Tilly retrieved her from the playpen and tried to teach her how to say ‘Auntie Tilly’, with little success.

  And later, after the plates and dishes were piled up on the draining board and the pudding set alight to more applause, after it was sliced and doled out, and the accompaniments – brandy butter, cream, ice cream – passed around, two little princesses migrated to their father’s side and demanded that he make room for them on his lap, necessitating Poppy, who was by now gnawing contentedly on the handle of a wooden spoon, being passed back to Tilly.

  And after the Christmas cake was produced, prompting yet more applause, after it was cut and sampled – Laura’s first ever, Gavin told Tilly – after the crackers were pulled and their jokes groaned over, the boys left the table to resume throwing their rubber rings at a numbered wooden board, and Evie and Marian were brought up to bed by Gavin, and Poppy fell asleep on Tilly’s lap and was taken upstairs by Laura, and Tilly played with a little plastic fish that had come out of a cracker as Mr Kawalski quizzed her about the route she’d taken from Australia, and Gavin’s mother grimaced every time one of the boys’ rings slapped against the board.

  And when Gavin and Laura had both returned to the kitchen, and the boys had been sent up to bed with torches, and warnings about dire consequences if they didn’t brush their teeth, and if they weren’t asleep in ten minutes – when all of that had happened, Larry Kawalski, who looked in his late sixties, and who they’d learned was a recently retired car dealer from Cincinnati, accepted a glass of port from his hostess and told them why he’d come to spend Christmas on Roone.

  ‘Friends of my wife and I – Max and Ruthie Sherman, we lived across the street from them forever – they came to Ireland on vacation, maybe fifteen years ago. Toured around the west coast, took in a trip to Roone, stayed in the hotel for a coupla nights. Got home, showed us their snaps, told us we had to come see it. Paulina, my wife, fell in love with this place, this island, just from the pictures. She wanted so bad to come – she’d always wanted to see Ireland, even though we got no connection here, no family. But now it was Roone she wanted most of all.

  ‘I said yeah, yeah, sometime we’ll go, but we never did get round to it. I was busy with work, and we had the kids, three boys – and then in April I retired, and passed the business on to our middle kid, and I thought I’d surprise her for our fortieth wedding anniversary, which was day before yesterday. I had no idea what it might be like here in the wintertime, but I knew she wouldn’t mind about the weather, so in September I bought the air tickets and booked us into the hotel for a week.’

  Here he paused, and was silent for so long that Tilly wondered if that was it. But where was his wife? While they waited, one of the candles on the table spluttered and fizzled out.

  ‘End of October,’ he said then, more quietly, more slowly, his eyes on the thin trail of smoke that curled upwards from the extinguished candle, ‘she was driving home from visiting a friend on the other side of town, speeding ambulance went through a red light, drove into her at an intersection. She died a few hours later in the hospital.’

  His hands cradled the glass of port that he hadn’t yet touched. His face had an emptied-out look to it, his gaze on one of the remaining candles.

  ‘Max and Ruthie said no way should I come, our boys said it too. Nobody thought I should take this trip, everyone told me I was crazy, but I came anyway, because it’s what she woulda wanted, plain and simple. It’s what she woulda wanted,’ he repeated, lifting a hand to run it across his empty face.

  Nobody at all spoke. Tilly thought of him packing his brown leather case and making his way to the airport. Maybe being driven there by a disapproving son, who might have shaken his father’s hand at the departure gate and told him it wasn’t too late to change his mind.

  She imagined him getting on the plane and seeing the empty seat beside his. She thought of his angry face at the front door earlier, his rage that hadn’t been rage at all but loneliness and grief, and maybe terrible regret that he’d never brought her to Ireland, t
hat he’d left it too late to make her dream of seeing a small Irish island come true.

  At length he looked around the table and attempted a smile. ‘Sorry, folks,’ he said. ‘Guess I sorta spoiled the party’ – and they told him, no, not at all, but it was quieter after that. Gavin got up to put the kettle on, and Laura produced her guitar and led them in a few Christmas carols. Her voice reminded Tilly of Joni Mitchell’s.

  And later, after coffees and teas had been drunk, and the dishes piled up by the sink – ‘The washing-up can wait till morning,’ Laura said firmly – after they’d trooped upstairs with an assortment of candles and torches and hot-water bottles, and whispered their goodnights on the landing, Tilly got into pyjamas and stood at her bedroom window, arms wrapped tightly around herself, and thought of Australia where Christmas Day was already long over, and looked out into the black, black night, with a sky that held stars in formations she didn’t recognise, and she watched pale wisps of something – ashes from a fire? debris of some kind? – fluttering softly and silently to the ground.

  SATURDAY

  26 DECEMBER

  ST STEPHEN’S DAY

  In living memory, it hadn’t happened. Ninety-two-year-old Patsy McDonagh, officially Roone’s oldest resident since the death of one-hundred-and-one-year-old Gerry Bannagher two years earlier, had never seen snow on Roone, and he’d been fairly sure his parents hadn’t either – which meant, if his memory could be trusted, that it was well over a century since the island had experienced a white Christmas, or a white any other occasion.

  Maybe it had never happened at all. Certainly there was no historical record of it that anyone knew about. Maybe this was Roone’s first ever snowfall.

  Thnow! Thnow! Evie and Marian had cried, as they’d come trotting in as usual to wake their mother. Well used to seeing it on DVDs and in picture books, no trouble identifying it this morning from their bedroom window.

  Shush, Laura had whispered, eyes still closed, don’t wake Poppy. She’d pulled back the duvet to let them climb in as usual – but for once her bed didn’t interest them. Thnow, they insisted, Mama, wook, wook – and nothing would satisfy them till Laura had given in and dragged herself upright, and allowed them to lead her to the window to see it for herself.

  And she had to admit it was worth the trip. In the morning light it gleamed softly, the powdery white that had settled on everything, trees, fields, barns, roofs. It must have fallen all night. It must have emptied itself out of the heavens hour after hour as they slept.

  The sky was a swipe of yellowish grey above it, the rising sun a pale, shimmering disc spilling its lemony light into a sea that was dotted with the dark hulks of familiar trawlers. Fishermen putting Christmas behind them already, business as usual, thnow or no thnow.

  It was magical, no other word for it. It was a morning to rejoice in, a morning to count your blessings in. It was a morning to hope fervently that you were spared long enough to appreciate lots of other similar magical mornings.

  Snow had been predicted, for the north and west of the country only: Dublin was probably as green and as grey as ever. And it wasn’t expected to last – even as they were forecasting it, the weather people were urging children to make the most of the snow. Gone as soon as it arrived, they said. A thaw setting in this afternoon, rain on the way tomorrow, they said.

  But today it was here.

  ‘Come on,’ Laura whispered, ‘let’s get dressed’ – because even though it was far too early, and she could as usual have done with considerably more sleep, having been up with Poppy in the night, there was going to be no more rest with the girls so keyed up. No matter: she had plenty to get up for, with the house full of people, Gladys leaving and Susan—

  Her thoughts snapped to a halt. Gladys. Dear God, would the snow change her plans? Would they be stuck with her for another day? Presumably the ferry would be operating as usual, with the trawlers out and the sea so calm – but there would need to be public transport on the other side to bring her back to Dublin. Let the buses and trains be running today, let the country not have ground to a standstill, like it sometimes did when the snow came.

  She checked her phone and found it still useless. They’d have to consult with Leo later on: he’d know what the story was on the other side. Whenever Roone was cut off, Leo was their link to the mainland. Gavin could go to the pier after breakfast and talk to him.

  And Susan, who was due to arrive from Dublin today. Would the weather change her plans too? Would she hear about snow in the west and decide to postpone her trip? With the phones still down they had no way of communicating, but Laura hoped fervently she’d show up.

  She needed someone to talk to.

  All very well to acknowledge Tilly publicly last evening, to welcome her into the household, but she was still a virtual stranger. Presumably the notion of having a sister would eventually become less startling, but so far Laura was still feeling her way around it, still trying to come to terms with this astonishing information and all its repercussions.

  You might have told me, Gavin had said as they’d been getting ready for bed. Not sounding cross, more disappointed.

  Told you what? But she’d known what.

  That you had a sister.

  I was busy, she replied. I was up to my eyes. I was coming to terms with it myself. All true, nothing he could argue with – but he was right, she should have told him; he shouldn’t have had that sprung on him, along with everyone else. He was her husband.

  And her father, their father, he needed to know. It would be unforgivable to keep the information from him, even if his ex-wife had chosen to do just that. Ironic that he was acquiring two new children at this time, one as yet unborn, the other an unknown quantity until now. Laura wondered what his reaction would be to Tilly, coming so close on the heels of Susan’s pregnancy. She might run the idea of telling him by Susan, see what she thought was the best way to handle it.

  And of course Susan herself was involved too, having just come into possession of a new stepdaughter. So many ramifications, so many people affected by Tilly’s arrival. But she existed, and she was here, and they would have to make space for her. And to give her her due, she was doing what she could to fit in. Laura had seen her helping Gavin with Poppy at the dinner table last evening, and she’d given a hand when Laura was doling out the pudding and cake too. She was trying her best; you had to acknowledge that.

  And she’d definitely got Evie and Marian’s vote. See the way they’d drifted to her end of the table as soon as Laura had released them from their seats, see how they’d climbed onto their father’s lap just so they could have a good look at her – fascinated, no doubt, by her exotic accent.

  At one stage, Laura had seen Evie reach across and give Tilly’s hair a series of light little pats with her hand, in exactly the same way that she used to pat Laura’s hair, before Nell chopped it off.

  And when you thought about it, wasn’t it good to discover that you had a sister, a full blood sister, whatever the circumstances of your discovery? Wasn’t it marvellous to find someone with such a strong genetic connection to you, regardless of the hows and whys?

  Wasn’t it?

  After breakfast Laura would bring her next door, introduce her to Nell and the others. She’d been planning to call there anyway with the bag of apples from the fallen tree – Nell was far better at making tarts, and with any luck she’d send one back to Walter’s Place. And maybe it was just a case of getting used to Tilly, maybe a bond would develop as they got to know one another. Not that they’d have much time to do that, with Tilly leaving in four days, but they could try.

  Laura finished pulling on her clothes, the girls practically dancing with impatience. Amazingly, Poppy slept on, undisturbed by their excitement. Gavin was up and gone, sneaking out as he generally did while Laura was still asleep. Checking on the animals, no doubt, who’d spent the night in Donal Murphy’s shed down the way. Plenty of clearing up still to be done outside too.

&n
bsp; He should talk to Damien Kiely about getting a new shed built across the field, well out of range of the remaining trees. Maybe with a sliding door this time, something that couldn’t be torn away like the last one. She’d say it when she saw him.

  Laura shepherded the girls back to their room, where she dressed them in plenty of woolly layers, explaining that their princess dresses would get too wet in the snow. The corridor as they tiptoed through was silent, everyone still asleep. Passing Gladys’s room, Laura was reminded of the previous morning’s drama, and wondered whether to put her head around the door now to make sure the woman was still alive. No, that would be fussing. Gladys would outlive them all, just to annoy her.

  No sound from Tilly or Larry’s room. Poor old Larry – who would have guessed his sad story? Coming here to pay tribute, you could say, to his dead wife’s wish – and then to have to deal with the storm, and his hotel ceiling falling in, as if he’d needed anything else to go wrong. Thank God the brown leather suitcase had shown up, less than half an hour after Tilly’s arrival.

  Gavin had lit the kitchen stove; the chill was ebbing from the room. He’d also tackled the considerable amount of washing-up that had been waiting – but the kettle sitting on the cooker was still cold to the touch, which meant he’d used lukewarm tap water, the heat gone out of it since the night before. Laura would have to give everything another wash when she got the chance.

  He’d meant well. He always meant well.

  As she was tipping Sugar Puffs into bowls and filling plastic beakers with orange juice she heard sounds from the room directly above.

  ‘That’ll be the boys,’ she said – and in less than a minute she heard the small thump of their footsteps on the stairs. They burst into the kitchen, every bit as excited as their sisters.

  ‘We don’t want breakfast, we’re not hungry.’

  ‘Yeah – can we go out now?’

  Laura filled two more bowls with cereal. ‘The snow will still be there when you’ve eaten,’ she told them. ‘It’s not going to vanish in ten minutes.’