“Come in, pet,” Mrs Davidson said, leading her into the hall.
There was a silence about the house that seemed to match the seriousness of the situation. Stella was aware of a whispered conversation in the scullery as she walked past. Mrs Davidson led her upstairs to the bedroom she had been in, not that long ago, chatting excitedly to Molly about her wedding and the plans she had for her happy-ever-after.
“She had a decent night – well, compared to the night before. She’s still quite sore – but it’s her heart that is broken more than anything. She hasn’t spoken much, doll – but maybe she would talk to you, for her father and I can’t get through to her.” Mrs Davidson’s eyes were pleading – as if she were at the end of her tether. She didn’t look as if she had slept much herself.
Stella said she would do her best but already she felt a little out of her depth and started to wonder had she been wise to visit in the first place.
Mrs Davidson opened the door. Molly’s bedroom was in complete darkness. Mrs Davidson walked across the room and pulled the curtains open.
“You have a visitor,” she said to the lump in the bed. There was no movement. She opened the window slightly. “A bit of fresh air will do you good, pet,” she said and again there was no response.
Stella took a seat on the wooden chair beside the bed and noticed the bottle of pills on the small wooden table and the glass of water.
“Molly, it’s only me, Stella. I just called to see how you are.”
“I told my mother I didn’t want visitors,” Molly muttered, her voice muffled by the blankets hauled up around her face.
“She thought it might do you good,” Stella said. “She thought it might brighten you a bit. I just wanted to see how you were.”
There was a snort of derision from under the blanket. “The talk of the town, am I?” Molly said, her voice breaking. “The silly wee girl who had to be rescued? Who made an eejit of herself running off for a new life and coming back battered and bruised?”
The grief was evident in her voice – the shame and the embarrassment.
“No one . . . no one thinks you’re an eejit,” said Stella. “You weren’t to know. How could you have? Look, Molly, if anyone understands it’s me. Here I am waiting to run off into the sunset myself.”
“Well, I hope you’ll fare better than me,” Molly said, turning in the bed to show the fading bruises across her face and the fading cut from across her eyebrow.
Stella closed her eyes, so as to stop herself from gasping, and opened them again to see Molly looking at her square in the face, her eyes filled with tears.
“I’ve been such a fool,” she said. “I believed it all. That he loved me. That we would be happy. That what we would have there was better than what I had here and that it would all work out. I was smug about it, I admit. I just didn’t think.”
Stella reached out to her friend and held her hand as she cried.
“I made my vows in good faith,” Molly said. “I meant every word. The richer and poorer and the ‘in sickness and in health’ and even the better and worse. Was I wrong to run? Was this not the worse bit? Am I a sinner, Stella? Did I not take it seriously?”
The childish enthusiasm Stella had witnessed in this very room not more than a few months ago was gone – it was replaced by a pitiful sadness that made Stella’s very heart ache.
“No one thinks you’re a sinner, pet. Not even the Lord himself would expect you to stay there – not when he was hurting you like that.”
Molly reached up to her face, revealing her bruised hands. “He told me he would kill me,” she said softly. “That I was worth nothing to him and that he would kill me if I disobeyed him. I didn’t, Stella. I didn’t, I swear.”
“I know,” Stella said, forcing the words from her mouth as the shock seeped into her pores. “I know. You will get over this. I promise. You will be back on your feet before you know it – back at the dances and smiling like you were.”
Molly rolled over in bed again, facing the wall and pulled the blanket gingerly back over her face as if every movement sent a shockwave of pain through her body. The conversation was over and Stella sat for a moment before walking back down the stairs to the hopeful face of Mrs Davidson, who seemed to be waiting for a miracle.
“I imagine it will take a bit of time,” Stella said, feeling strangely out of place talking to the older woman in this way.
“Thanks, pet,” Mrs Davidson replied and Stella made her way back out onto the street not sure how she felt or why she had come in the first place.
She walked along Carlisle Road and glanced up to where the flat was before pulling her coat more tightly around her against the cold and walking home.
Dolores was helping with the washing when she arrived. “And where were you off to on this cold morning? You couldn’t have been sneaking off to see your fancy man since he is on the other side of the world.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Stella said dejectedly, setting about helping with the work.
“You’ve a terrible sour face on you,” Dolores teased. “But are you not going to ask me why I’ve such a smile on mine?”
Stella looked at her sister, who was beaming from ear to ear, and felt relieved that the focus of the conversation was being shifted from her.
“Well, why then?” she asked.
“I’ve met someone,” Dolores said. “At the dance last night. Hugh Doherty his name is, and Stella, he’s lovely.”
Smiling back and getting on with her work, Stella enjoyed listening to her sister’s tales if for no other reason than to distract her from her own thoughts. No good could come of them at all.
Chapter 24
Am I making it worse? All this time. I don’t know what else to do, Ray. I feel helpless – and hopeless and I just hope you will forgive me.
* * *
Derry, June 2010
I woke to the shrill ring of my phone, although it took me a while to register what was going on. My head was still swimming just a little after the excesses of the night before even though I had been relatively sensible and had drunk the requisite pint of water before retiring for the night on Sam’s instructions. I wasn’t sure how long I had been asleep – I knew that it was light but as it was summer and the dawn started to crack shortly before five, that was no real indicator. My eyes and my brain still bleary, I reached for my cell and made several attempts to answer it, swiping my fingers – which appeared to be still asleep – across the screen and swearing under my breath. When it rang off, I slumped back on my pillow – focused on the screen and saw it was a missed call from Craig. A vague memory of the message I had sent him before I drifted off to sleep crept into my mind, but it didn’t make my heart sink. Looking at the time, I saw it had gone six. I had sent the message at two. He had taken four hours to call. It either meant, I reckoned, that he was so devastated by the news it had taken him four hours to compose himself enough to call me, or that he cared so little he had let it slide for a while. My bets were on the latter. Or somewhere in between. I didn’t regret sending the message – not one ounce. It had to be said and it had to be sent – and I felt, I dunno, even in my still semi-conscious state, relieved to have finally done it – to have pulled that Band-Aid off once and for all and exposed what had been so very rotten in the state of our relationship for so very long.
I’d have to call him, of course. I couldn’t be that person who let it all just go after our years together with a text message, but in that moment there was a part of me which was enjoying believing that maybe, just maybe, he was suffering a little.
Suffering just a little the way I had suffered.
While I had never told him I knew about how he had cheated on me – how I had witnessed the cheating in front of my eyes – it had eaten away at me. At us. Each and every time he had tried to comfort me I had felt myself pull from his grasp, even if only mentally. The thought of him with her, in her – it made my stomach turn.
I saw her once – in Wal
mart, as I was grocery shopping. I was pushing my cart along the aisles when I saw a wave of blonde hair in front of me and she turned to take something from the shelves. She looked like a nice person – not a stereotypical bit on the side. No short skirt and big boobs and high heels. Just a young woman, jeans and a T-shirt, a bright smile and a polite nod of the head towards me as she reached up past me to lift down a tin of beans.
I wondered did she know who I was? Or did she care? God knows, we didn’t live in a big place and Bake My Day was a popular bakery. My picture was in my house – the house she had been in at least once. Did Craig talk about me? Did he tell her I was a terrible partner and that I didn’t understand him? Did he tell her we didn’t have sex? Did he say he would leave me except that my father was dying and that he didn’t want to come across as the bad guy? Did he make up some sad story to cover for his unfaithfulness or did he not care? You would think after ten years together you would know a person – you would know how they think, or how they feel, what way they act and what they say. But I didn’t know him – not at all. I realised that now and I nodded back to the blonde woman with the shopping basket for one and went on my way.
My cell rang – Craig again. This time, more awake, I swiped my finger across the screen and answered the call.
“Craig,” I said, simply.
“What are you playing at, Annabel?” His voice was calm, jokey. Dismissive even. ‘Annabel goes off on one again’ – I could almost see him rolling his eyes. Laughing, getting ready to tell me I was being overly dramatic.
“I’m not playing at anything, Craig,” I said, trying to keep my tone soft. Trying not to show the anger that was threatening to bubble up and jump out.
“It’s over?” he said, and laughed at the end. “What do you mean, it’s over?”
His laughter, for some reason, brought tears to my eyes. Even in this – in breaking up – even now he could not understand where I was coming from. Or maybe he didn’t want to. Everything is okay with Annabel and Craig as long as the sun is shining and life doesn’t get in the way.
I took a deep breath. “I mean it’s over, Craig. I’m sorry. And I’m sorrier still to do this over the phone but now it seems so clear and it’s unfair on both of us to keep this hanging on for a minute longer than it needs to.”
“Anna,” his voice less mocking – more urgent this time, “you need to think about this. You need to calm down.”
“I have thought about it, Craig,” I started.
“What? Over a few glasses of Guinness with your cousin? Yes – perfect atmosphere to make life-altering decisions.”
I shook my head even though I knew he wouldn’t see the gesture and rubbed my temples. “No, Craig. Please listen – for once in your life, please listen. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. It’s just, away from it all, away from you, it has started to come into focus for the first time.”
He laughed again. A mocking bark of a laugh which felt like a punch in the stomach. “Off chasing the pot of gold at the end of some goddamn rainbow with your leprechaun friends. You were fine before you left. We were fine.”
“Were we? Really? That’s why you stalked around the house the day I left like a spoiled child. Because we were fine?”
“I didn’t want you to go. Was that so wrong of me?”
Whatever I had expected of Craig, I had not expected this – this lie upon lie about what he wanted. What he needed. That he thought we were okay.
“No,” I said. “But what was wrong of you, Craig, was you having sex with someone else while my father was dying.”
He was silent. I could hear him breathe softly down the phone line. I remembered all the times I had listened to his breathing softly: in the early days, when we had spent hours and hours together, I would lie awake and listen to him breathing, telling myself this was love. This is what it was. God, I was stupid. I had learned so much about love even in the last few days and it wasn’t what we had. It was so completely removed from what we had.
“I only did that,” he stuttered, “because you were lost to me. I didn’t know how to get you back and I was lonely.”
“I can’t say I can tell you how you could have got me back, Craig, but I can tell you that having sex with someone else was not the way to go about it.” The tears that had been threatening to fall started to slide down my face but I didn’t want to give in to them so I hastily brushed them away. “I saw. I came home and I saw it. The two of you. And I don’t know how many times and I don’t know if she was the only one and, you know what, part of me doesn’t need to know because what difference would it make anyway? It was one thing, Craig, but it wasn’t everything. Don’t you know we have been broken for a long time? And I’m just admitting it openly first.”
“It didn’t mean anything.”
“If it didn’t, why did you risk us for it?”
“People make mistakes, Annabel. You’re not perfect.”
“I never said I was.”
“You pushed me away. You had no time for me.”
“My father was dying!” I almost roared – the words sounding as harsh as the experience was as I let them out.
“But you weren’t. You gave up on life. You gave up on us the day he had his diagnosis and there was no getting you back.”
He might have had a point. Perhaps. Perhaps I did give up on life. In the very moment I learned my father would die a part of me died too. And the part that was still living? That part didn’t want to go on. She didn’t want to wake up every day to the knowledge that death was coming. She didn’t want to watch her hero fade before her eyes. She didn’t want to face a world without her father. So perhaps I did give up. Perhaps I crawled into some far unreachable place where I tried, and failed, to shield myself from the pain that was to come. But he was my daddy; the man who had carried me on his shoulders when I was a little girl; who had put my hair in lopsided pigtails and beamed so proudly; who had been the person who taught me to ride my bicycle; who cheered the loudest when I graduated, and who was first through the door at Bake My Day when we opened. And the world was taking him from me and there was nothing I could do it about. Nothing. No amount of money would save him. No amount of prayer would make a difference. He was going. And I wanted to go too.
But maybe even more than that I wanted someone to hold me up – to listen to me cry. To take it on the chin when I shouted. To tell me they were just as angry as I was and damn right, it wasn’t fair. It was rubbish. I wanted that person to be Craig – and it wasn’t. It never was. I didn’t give up on us. I just realised there wasn’t really an ‘us’ there to begin with.
“I’m sorry,” was all I could muster.
I could be angry, I realised. And I was – but more than that I was sad. And more than sad I was relieved.
“You’re making a mistake,” he said.
“I don’t think so. We shouldn’t hurt each other any more,” I said, and ended the call before switching my phone off.
Then I lay back, in the soft light of the Derry morning on the bed that I had all to myself and I waited for the tears to start falling properly. I waited for the sobs and the heartbreak and the questions over whether or not I had done the right thing. I waited for the horrors to hit and the urge to call him back and say it was all a mistake to come. But none of that happened.
Instead, I fell back into a sleep where I dreamt I had one last day with my daddy – sitting in the garden, holding his hands – still warm, not cold as they had been the last time I held him – and he was telling me he loved me and that all would be okay.
I woke, gasping, half expecting him to be in the room with me but while he was, obviously, not there, I could feel his warmth around me, telling me it would be okay. And if Daddy said it would be okay, it would be.
* * *
Sitting in Dolores’ front room, I tried to imagine the life I had read about so much in my mother’s letters. I tried to think about my grandparents, whose faces stared down at me from the walls,
and how they made this house a home, even in tough times. I imagined my Uncle Seán as the gap-toothed boy my mother had written about, even though he was now a grandfather. I imagined my mother laying the table in the impossibly small kitchen – which of course Dolores had remodelled numerous times since she had taken over ownership of the family home – and I imagined the night my mother and Ray stood in this room toasting their engagement. I closed my eyes and tried to feel the echoes of the world I had come to know so much about in the last few days – to try and understand them all better. Especially my mother.
I felt a peace towards her now. An understanding of why she did what she did. An understanding that she loved my father very much but that before him there had been someone else – someone she had loved desperately, whom circumstance had kept her from.
I still had questions of course – pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that needed piecing together and now that I had read the letters I needed to know the rest.
Dolores had smiled at me when I turned up at her door, then looked over my shoulder expecting Sam to be there.
“He’s gone to work,” I explained and she nodded.
“He loves that job. Loves that shop. Works too hard sometimes too. I’m glad you’re here making him take some time off for a change.”
“I don’t think he considers it work most of the time,” I laughed as she poured me a cup of tea and directed me to the front room. “Says it’s like playing dress-up for a reason.”
Her shoulders stiffened at this remark. “Yes, well. He always was a little flamboyant,” she sniffed.
“Auntie Dolores,” I began but she turned to leave the room.
“I’ll just go and get your mother so you can concentrate on matters concerning your own family.”
With that she was gone and I tried to marry the impression of a young, flighty, carefree woman painted in my mother’s letters with the woman in front of me who seemed to deny her son so much.
The First Time I Said Goodbye Page 21