by Ciara Smyth
It’s hard to hate someone and love them at the same time.
The doorbell rang and Dad froze mid-fussing with a vase of flowers.
“Be nice,” he said, eyes narrowing.
I gave him my biggest, fakest grin. “I’m always nice.”
My face contorted into pursed lips when he wasn’t looking. I’d thought about it a lot and I convinced myself that it didn’t matter. I couldn’t stop him getting married and what would be the point even if I could? It wouldn’t make him love Mum again. This wasn’t going to play out like some dementia version of The Parent Trap. Besides, it was only a matter of time before this marriage went tits up too. That didn’t mean I liked it, but I only had to get through it for the summer.
So he was taking my home away from me—what did it matter? Everything good that had happened here was gone. Let’s raze the house to the ground for all I care. Being forced to choose between staying in Ireland, trapped with him, or leaving Mum behind, made my chest tight. I didn’t want to think about it. Maybe one of the two dozen CVs I’d put into shops around town before the exams could turn into a job and then I could stuff Oxford and get my own place. Mum could come live with me. Both problems solved. I made a mental note to chase up those CVs with a phone call.
Dad wove around me to the door and flung his arms wide.
“Come in, m’lady,” he said, and I could hear the goofy smile even if I couldn’t see it. Beth took a tentative step over the threshold. When they hugged, I caught her eye. She looked away and broke off the hug immediately.
“This looks incredible, Rob.” She had medium-brown skin, curly hair, and an English accent, but not like Ruby’s. Ruby’s accent was cute and her words sounded bubbly and joyful falling off her tongue. Beth sounded like she might read the news on the BBC. She shook her coat off, revealing an emerald-green sleeveless dress that showed off her tattoos. I knew she was the same age as Dad—some information about her had slipped through in spite of my best efforts—but (though it pained me to admit it) she looked effortlessly cool in a way Dad could never pull off. He always looked like he was trying too hard. Or maybe that was just because I knew firsthand how much time he spent doing his hair.
Dad took her coat and handbag and laid them gently on the back of an armchair. She looked at me. This was usually the moment where I’d make an excuse and leave the house.
“I’m so glad we have this a chance to get to know each other,” she said. “Your dad talks about you all the time.”
“OK,” I said flatly.
Dad shot me a look. He was standing halfway between us, still twisting a napkin in his hands. I shrugged at him. What was I supposed to say to that? I’m familiar with your existence and I disapprove. Seemed rude even for me.
“Saoirse, why don’t you sit down. Beth, you can come help me in the kitchen.”
I bristled. Why should she help? She didn’t live here.
On the other hand, I didn’t want to be handing her dinner—the urge to dump it in her lap would be too great.
I plonked myself at the table and scrolled through Twitter, pretending not to hear the giggling wafting out from the kitchen. When there was a crash and more giggling I instinctively glanced in that direction. I was punished with a glimpse of them full-on trading saliva. Gross.
I scanned the room for an overnight bag and thankfully didn’t see one. Unless she carried a pair of clean knickers and a toothbrush in her purse.
Gross. Why did my mind go there?
I tried to get invested in a thread about a guy who met the president when he was high. Perhaps I also searched to see if Ruby had an account, but if she did, I couldn’t find it.
When Dad and Beth finally emerged from the kitchen, Dad’s cheeks pink and Beth’s eyes twinkling, I rolled my eyes. The likelihood of me keeping dinner down was dwindling. Enjoy it while it lasts. At least one of you is going to get seriously burned by this hasty decision. My money was on Beth. Dad already had a track record of abandoning wives. It almost made me feel sorry for her. Run now, Beth! You better hope you don’t get a cold or anything. Dad will be off riding the next girl because he had to heat up chicken soup for a week and it was so hard on him.
I decided against issuing that particular warning. She’d made her bed, after all. It wasn’t my job to protect her from her own stupidity. Besides, maybe she’d dump Dad and he’d get a taste of his own medicine. A picture of Dad getting old alone nudged its way into my head. I pushed it away. It was too confusing. Instead I shoved a bit of dry unseasoned chicken into my gob and focused on that.
Another thought occurred to me, though. If Dad was so keen on substituting my mother with a younger, healthier model, then I couldn’t be sitting here all polite like she was a stranger. She’d already missed out on years of arguments and strops and sarcastic comments. I should make her feel more a part of the family.
“So should I call you New Mommy or . . . ?” I chewed on the chicken with my mouth open.
Dad opened his mouth to tell me off, or maybe that was his jaw dropping.
“I’m only messing with you. Breaking the ice, you know.” I gave them both my best innocent face. I think I wanted to start a row but to my surprise, Beth laughed.
At least she wasn’t a total dry shite.
The next hour was a mixture of the sound of scraping forks against our plates and stilted conversation about as interesting as the plain boiled rice I was shoveling into my mouth. Beth asked how I got on in my exams and what I wanted to study at uni and I made up some suitable non-sarcastic answers. At one point Dad managed somehow to segue a comment about avocados into a conversation about the death penalty to get me talking. I don’t know how he did it. That was his special skill.
“Right, but what if I was murdered. Would you not—”
“Dad, seriously, realistically, if anyone is going to murder you it’ll be me. So no.”
“But what if—”
“Oh God, make it stop,” I wailed.
Once we’d all choked down dinner, Dad cleared the table and Beth settled on the sofa. She looked out of place. She didn’t belong on our sofa.
I couldn’t help but be reminded of the first time I’d met her. I’d been out with Mum, maybe a week after she’d moved out at most, and when I came home Beth was there, looking guilty in the same spot on the couch. Dad had tried to act casual.
“How was your mum?” he said, after Beth had jumped out of the seat like it was on fire and made some flimsy excuse to leave. “Did you do anything nice?”
“Who was that?” I said sharply, ignoring his attempt at diversion.
“Hmmm? Oh, Beth, an advertising client.” He skittered out of the living room into the kitchen and I followed him. Dad was a web developer and worked with loads of advertising people. The client thing could have been true. She looked like the kind of person who worked in advertising. That’s the best kind of lie, isn’t it? The one that’s technically true.
“Why was she here?” I took a seat at the small breakfast table and kept my voice purposefully steady. I wanted him to convince me. A sick feeling in my stomach had started churning the moment I saw her and I wanted it to go away. I really wanted to be wrong.
“She lives nearby. I said I’d meet her here to discuss some things so I could be home early for a change.”
He started pulling pots and pans out of the cupboards. I watched him pretend to examine a package of dried pasta as though the nutritional information was suddenly important to him.
“So how was your mum?” he asked again.
I felt myself detach from the moment. The sick feeling in my stomach faded away.
“Did you sleep with her?” I felt like I was watching the scene unfold instead of participating in it. Like it was all happening in the mirror.
“What? Saoirse!”
I didn’t reply, didn’t lay out my case. I waited. I wanted to see what he was going to say. It was strange watching him, his face, his body language giving away every thought as clearly
as if I could read his mind. I watched the shift from indignation to resignation.
Finally, he sat opposite me at the table and put his head in his hands, flattening his hair to his scalp, his forehead wrinkling so hard it would give him a headache later.
When he spoke, he spoke to the table.
“I didn’t want you to find out this way. We met a few months ago and we got along. We’ve been on a few dates. I meant to tell you, but I wanted to wait until I knew it was going to be something.”
It helped that he sounded like a character from a TV show. That he was such a cliché, it made the whole thing feel less real.
“But Mum,” I said. “You’re cheating on her.”
I remembered them telling me about the divorce, emphasizing how it was only on paper. Was that always a lie?
“Saoirse, your mum’s condition deteriorated a long time ago. She doesn’t even know who I am.”
“That bit is new,” I objected.
“It’s been at least a year, love.”
A year is not that long.
“I wasn’t looking for someone,” he said as though that was a defense.
When I didn’t say, Oh, well, it’s all right if she just fell in your lap then, he continued. “Sometimes when I visit Liz she thinks I’m one of the staff. Twenty years we were together and when she looks at me like I’m a stranger it kills me. I know it isn’t true and she can’t help it, but some days it feels like it all meant nothing to her.”
That winded me. She looked at me that way too. Did that mean all the years she’d been my mum meant nothing? Did it stop counting the first time she called me Claire, her sister’s name, or the tenth, or the two hundredth?
I could understand Dad feeling the way he did, but I could not understand him giving up and abandoning her for someone fresh.
“Is this why you put her in the home? So you could go off with someone else?”
He flinched.
“God. No. Of course not. You know that we weren’t able to look after her here. It wasn’t safe anymore. She needs 24-7 care. You know that,” he said, and locked eyes with me. “You agreed to that.”
Disgust roiled in my stomach. He’d been pushing to get rid of her for ages before I finally gave in. I stood up, pushing the chair back against the tiles with a screech.
“I don’t ever want to see that woman here again.”
“Saoirse . . . ,” he called after me limply. He wanted me to understand what it was like for him so I could feel sorry for him because he’d spent the last few years looking after my mother, the woman he married. The whole “in sickness and health” thing must have passed him by. He wanted me to understand why he needed to cheat on her. But in the end, his desire to avoid fighting about it was stronger.
I sought refuge at Hannah’s house for three days. He tried calling, but I ignored him. Eventually, her parents told me I had to go home, which was a bit rich considering the number of nights Hannah had spent at my house. The number of times she’d come around to my place to talk to my mum about her problems because her own parents always made her feel worse. I hadn’t really noticed that I was going to her a lot more often than she was coming round to me at that point. A few weeks later she left me.
Things thawed with Dad after a while, of course. I didn’t know how to stay angry and I didn’t know how to stop being angry and I wasn’t sure which one I wanted more. The energy it takes to keep hating someone that much is hard to sustain. But I never really forgave him. We eased into a fragile peace, but it was never the same. Before Beth, I thought Dad and I were in it together. Even though I didn’t always agree with what he thought was best, I thought at least it hurt him as much as it hurt me. After Beth I was alone.
“How about a film, then?” Dad stood, hands on hips, surveying us both and looking too pleased with himself. “We haven’t watched Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum since it came out.”
“I don’t think so,” I said coldly. “I don’t like those mental hospital ones. They’re offensive.”
“Offensive how?” Dad rolled his eyes.
“How are they not offensive? People with mental illness are inherently scary?” I said, getting annoyed.
“Maybe it’s a commentary on the mental health system causing iatrogenic harm to a traumatized population,” Dad said, clearly pleased with his big words.
“And then they die and become scary ghosts?” Beth chimed in, skeptical.
We both looked at her for a moment.
“Exactly,” I said. “Even if what you said was remotely accurate, how would making their spirits the villains be sensitive?”
“Well, what about—”
Then I realized I’d got sucked into another debate. Dad already knew I hated “asylum horror.” Mum hated it too. She was a therapist, after all. She hated the idea of locking people away from the rest of the world just because they were struggling. She always said that wasn’t compassion or care, it was fear. Was that what we’d done to her? If she’d been here, if she’d been well, she would have shut him down immediately. I wanted her here to say something smart and thoughtful that would make him get quiet and then nod and say you’re right, love. She was so good at that. I wanted her here on my side. But it was just me.
I decided to pull the rip cord on this terrible evening.
“I don’t have time for this. I have to go to someone’s birthday thing,” I said.
“Whose birthday?” Dad eyed me suspiciously. He checked his watch. “It’s kind of late.”
“All right, Grandpa. It’s Ruby’s birthday thing.”
“Who’s Ruby?”
“A girl. A friend. She’s new.”
I thought for sure he’d put his foot down. Then I’d have to sneak out and it would be a whole thing. We’d already played that game last week; I wasn’t ready for another round. Instead, Dad got a twinkle in his eye.
“Ohhhh,” he said slowly, “a new ‘friend.’ Ruby, eh?” He winked at me and I felt all my insides cringe.
“Dad, no—”
“Saoirse is a lesbian,” Dad explained meaningfully to Beth, who to her credit didn’t seem to know how to respond to this proclamation. If I was in a better mood I might have joked that genuflection would suffice.
“Dad, Ruby isn’t—”
“Go on, Saoirse, get out of here. Go say hello to Ruby for me.” He said her name in a way that made it sound like “Ruby and Saoirse sitting in a tree” would follow if I didn’t scarper posthaste.
I clenched my teeth to stop from saying something that might devolve into another argument.
“That’s totally the first thing I’ll do. Tell her that my father who she’s never met says hello. That’s not weird at all.”
“Ah now”—he grinned goofily—“I suppose your old dad will be the last thing on your mind when you see her. Young love and all that.”
“Please stop.” I shuddered.
Beth gave me a meek wave. Dad yelled after me that he still had some good points to make about the film Gothika. I slammed the door behind me.
Good thing I’d done my eyeliner after all.
6.
My neighborhood is nice. When I was little I thought it was “normal”—the kind of place most people lived. But I can see now that we have it really good compared to a lot of people. Things got a bit tighter after Mum went into full-time care—we paid extra to put her in the best home—but we were able to do that and I think that makes us really lucky.
Oliver’s neighborhood is many levels beyond that. The houses slowly got bigger and bigger until you couldn’t see the houses anymore because they were at the end of long driveways and stone walls. It isn’t a manor or anything, but it is really big and has gardens (plural) and a pond and that sort of thing. I specifically knew that homes in this area cost a clean fortune because Hannah used to want to live in this really pretty gray-brick one with a legit turret. It was for sale last year so we looked up the estate agent’s website and concluded that we would never be able to afford a
nything like it. We recalibrated and set our sights on living anywhere, as long as it was together.
Three months later she’d broken up with me so I don’t know if she ever really meant it when we talked about the future together. That was one of the hardest things about breaking up. It’s not a pair of bookends, the beginning and the end. It’s the unraveling of the future. The flat we would never move into together, the cat we would never pick up from the shelter. It was all the times I wouldn’t hear her go on and on about some boring film I couldn’t sit through, or the way I wouldn’t see her do that silly tap dance she does when she’s trying on new shoes. It’s all the things we used to do that we’d never do again and all the things we’d never do for the first time together.
As I put my finger up to the Quinns’ doorbell, I realized I hadn’t told anyone I was coming. I hadn’t brought a gift or even a card. What was I doing here? Coming round here to see her again would give off some serious looking-for-a-relationship vibes and that was against the rules.
Or was I overthinking it? We could be friends, right? Ruby didn’t have any friends here and neither did I. Who couldn’t use a casual friend for the summer?
I stood for a minute, weighing up the options. If I wanted to be friends, maybe I should come back tomorrow. In daylight. Like a normal person. With a belated birthday card and an apology.
The front door opened.
Shit.
“You have to press it to make it do that sound, you know.” Oliver stood in the doorway wearing a button-down shirt and actual khaki chinos.
“You look like the lost member of One Direction,” I said.
“There will be a reunion and I’m ready for it,” Oliver said. “How did you get through the security?”
“What security?”
“The big gate down the street to keep the riffraff out.”
“You’re rich, I’m not. Ha ha.”
“Well, I wasn’t expecting you, so I had to resort to something easy. I should have gone the slut-shaming route.”
“A missed opportunity,” I replied dryly. “How’d you know I was out here?”