The First Time I Said Goodbye (22 page)

“Santa’s been and the turkey’s in, and our Stella is getting married!” Kathleen declared, kissing her daughter on the cheek.

“It’s a Christmas miracle,” Peter teased. “Any man being mad enough to take on our Stella. Fair play to him. You have warned him, though, what she’s like? Maybe I’ll have a wee word with him myself later!”

Stella knew her brother was teasing and she playfully told him to get away on with himself.

“I will miss you, you know,” he said later as he helped her set up the train set Santa had brought for the younger boys.

She felt herself choke up and tried not to think of all the goodbyes she would have to say. Peter had watched out for her for as long as she could remember – not having him on hand to fight her battles for her would be strange and tough.

“I will have that word with him too,” he said. “Except I’ll be warning him not to hurt you. If he hurts you he will have me to answer to – and there is nowhere I won’t go to make sure my wee sister is safe and well.”

She hugged him and when they broke apart she noticed Seán looking at her as if she had two heads. “Crying at Christmas!” he said with all the dramatics you would expect from a six-year-old. “When Santa has been? You’re mad, Smella,” he laughed. “Mad, mad, mad as a mad thing!” He laughed and she revelled in his wide smile – still so babyish with just one missing tooth to show signs that he was growing into a big boy and she couldn’t help but pull him close to her and laugh as she smothered him in hugs. She reminded herself she needed to get as many hugs in now as possible.

* * *

Ray arrived in time for dinner, a smile on his face this time. He kissed her as he walked into the house, when they were out of the eye-line of the rest of the Hegartys, and she almost had to pinch herself to convince herself this was real. He was really there. They were really going to get married. Yesterday she had been so convinced it was all going so horribly, horribly wrong.

“I can’t believe I’m so lucky,” he whispered as he looked into her eyes. “We must get everything moving as soon as we can. All the paperwork. Your passport. Everything. I know it might be a little rushed and maybe not the day you dreamed of, but I will make it special.”

“Ray, would you not be so silly? The only thing I ever really dreamed of is that the man I marry loves the very bones of me and I love the very bones of him back.”

“Well, you have that, Stella Hegarty. And there was me, steadfast in my belief that I would not let a Derry girl win me over and you have won me over hook, line and sinker. Come here . . .” He pulled her into the good room. “I have something for you. It’s not a ring, not yet. And I was going to give it to you anyway but for now, until I can get a ring, this can be our token, proof of our engagement . . .”

He handed her a small green leather box which she opened to reveal a gold brooch, set with emeralds.

“Emeralds for my Irish girl,” he said.

She gasped at it. She had never owned anything so beautiful. She wasn’t even sure her mother owned anything so pretty. Even Mrs Murphy would be stunned into silence by this. Ray took the brooch from the box and pinned it to her dress, gently brushing close to her breast as he did, and her breath hitched in her throat. When he was done, and he stood back to look at her and she felt him gaze deep into her eyes, she had the urge to kiss him more passionately than ever before, right there and then – right in her mother’s good room while the Baby Jesus was lying innocent in the crib and she could hear the roars of laughter from children in the street playing in the snow. She blushed as the impure thoughts danced through her mind and she thought how she could barely wait until it was their wedding night and they truly belonged to each other.

Chapter 19

Don’t you remember how it felt? That Christmas morning? Don’t you remember how we kissed – how it felt so right? I’m pretty sure we could make it feel right again.

* * *

Derry, June 2010

Sam walked back into the bedroom where the letters, read and unread, were scattered over the bed. It seemed obvious to me that we were setting up some kind of council of war there for the day.

Sam had disappeared at one stage to phone Second Hand Rose and tell his staff he wouldn’t be in. I felt a little disappointed, to be honest. There was something comforting about that place and I kind of liked the idea of escaping into that calming alternative reality again. But even I knew now, as we delved deeper and deeper into my mother’s past, that this was crunch time.

I felt, in some ways, wracked with guilt. If it had been me who had handed these most personal of letters over to someone else and was waiting for their response, I would have driven myself sick with worry about it all. I would have been checking my cell every three minutes to see if they had sent me a message and fighting the urge to call. I didn’t like the thought that my mother could be driving herself mad with worry like that. Then again, as I had to remind myself, my mother was not me. She was likely to have adopted a calmer approach altogether. I’d rarely, if ever, seen my mother get rattled about anything. I’d
rarely, if ever, heard her utter a cross word (except, perhaps, when I refused to take Irish dancing lessons). I could count on one hand the times I had seen her cry – she wasn’t one to get sappy over advertisements on the TV. It took big things – returning to Ireland after almost fifty years, holding my father’s hand as she said her final goodbyes to him – to make her shed a tear.

That’s not to say she was cold – not really cold. She was a good mom. We were happy. She kept me in line. But she wasn’t the more affectionate of my parents. That was Daddy – always would be. As an adult I had come to realise she showed me her love by making sure I had clean, fresh clothes, that I had help with my homework, that there was food on the table, that she was there every day when I came in from school, that she would kiss me every night on the cheek before I went to bed. But with Daddy it was bear hugs, and ‘love yous’ and long chats into the small hours. He just loved me in a different way.

Now, reading my mother’s letters, I found it hard to square this passionate, tactile, affectionate woman with the lady I knew. But then, wasn’t this trip all about surprises?

Sam sat the coffee cups down on the dresser before climbing back beside me on the bed. We lay there for a bit, staring at the ceiling, listening to the world go about its morning outside while we lay, me in my pyjamas, Sam in his work suit minus his tie, thinking about what was unfolding. I started to wonder why he had made coffee. We sure as hell weren’t going to drink it. That would require too much thought – and all our internal memory was being gobbled up by the skeletons tumbling out of the closet. We read on, gripped by what was unfolding.

“Have you ever been in love like that, Sam?” I asked, the letters read and cast aside.

He gestured around them. “I am fast approaching forty. I think if I had ever been in love like that there would be a fair chance I wouldn’t be a single man, now isn’t there?”

“It doesn’t always work out,” I said, gesturing to the letters. “And I would say from those they were pretty much madly in love.”

Sam rolled onto his side to face me and rested his head on his hand. “Cousin dear. I wish I could say yes. Part of me wishes there was a ‘big one that got away’ story, but there isn’t. Maybe I’m doing it wrong but I seem to have stumbled from one disaster of a fling to another. The longest I’ve been with someone was eight months and even then that only worked, I think, because we were long distance. In real terms we probably spent a fortnight together. I’m not sure I’m relationship material.”

“Do you want to be? Do you think it’s a matter of meeting the right person? If your ‘Ray’ was to walk in here now . . .”

“All dressed up like Richard Gere in
An Officer and a Gentleman
? I could go for that.”

He laughed and rolled onto his back but I recognised that certain hollow echo in his voice.

“So what went wrong? Was it the distance? Was it too hard?”

“Something like that,” he said, picking an imaginary piece of fluff off the immaculate eiderdown. “When it reaches a stage where your significant other really wants to meet your parents but you know that’s not entirely possible, it doesn’t always go down well.” His voice was softer now, more serious.

I reached out and took his hand. “Would she not come round? I mean, if you were happy. Surely all she wants is for you to be happy?”

“She’s not a bad person, Annabel,” he said. “But she is stuck in her ways. And why wouldn’t she be? It’s just a shame.”

It
was
a shame, I thought as he got up to sip from his coffee cup. And if I was being honest with myself I was shocked Dolores could act in such a manner. She who preached to me the very day before about accepting people for who they were.

I shook my head. “Do you ever talk about it?”

He shook his head then shrugged his shoulders. “Been there, done that. It doesn’t end well. I mean, I’m sure once I find the man of my dreams I’ll fight hard enough and my mother can go hang but . . .”

“But you haven’t yet? Or this is putting you off?”

He laughed, a short bitter laugh. “You Americans and your crazy ways. Always trying to analyse everything. There is no need to come over all Dr Phil on me. It’s not some big psychological block, you know. It just is what it is.” He paused and we were both lost in our thoughts for a moment.

“Of course I’d love to find someone. I’d love to have a civil ceremony and settle down and become a living cliché of a middle-aged, settled, boring gay man but, as the song says, you can’t always get what you want.”

“But if you try . . .” I offered.

“Tell me this, cousin,” he asked. “Do you believe in the big love affair? I mean, we’re reading about it here but it went wrong, didn’t it? And look around you? How many people do you know who are truly, madly, can’t be without each other in love?”

“You’re very cynical,” I said, but even as I spoke I wondered if he had a point. Sure people loved each other but does being in love last forever? Do people settle? Had I settled?

“Are you happy then?” he asked. “With your man who you barely speak of? Is he the one? Does he love you like no other? Would he, like Ray, trudge through the snow to propose to you on Christmas Eve?”

I felt those blasted tears prick at my eyes again. “No,” I muttered, shaking my head. “He wouldn’t.”

I felt disloyal talking about him, letting anyone have a hint that all was not well, but at the same time I had been holding all this in now for so long.

I never told anyone about Craig’s infidelity. I never even let Craig know that I knew. Part of it was selfish, I know. I had enough on my plate and I just couldn’t face another drama – instead allowing myself to stay part of a relationship where I could barely think about him touching me without thinking of him touching her. But I only had a finite amount of emotional energy and in those moments when I was trying to make sense of it all I realised there was only one man who deserved my tears in those weeks and months. And it wasn’t Craig.

Perhaps it was then I started to close myself off from him – or perhaps I had already been closed off anyway. Maybe it was my fault – maybe all the doubts and niggling fears I’d had over the last few years had been felt by him too.

I spent even less time at home, initially working longer hours at the bakery and then, as my father’s illness progressed, spending more time at home. There were many nights spent in my old bedroom, with all the vestiges of my teenage years staring down at me as I tossed and turned in a bed that no longer felt like my own.

Craig seemed not to notice for a while and I’m not sure if that made things better or worse, easier or harder. I would have liked to think that me cutting myself off from him would set alarm bells ringing loudly in his ears. But I think, perhaps, instead he revelled in his new-found freedom. On those nights alone in my bedroom in my parents’ house, listening to my mother crying in the den after Daddy had gone to sleep, I tried not to think about what might or might not have been going on back home in my bed.

Not that it felt like my bed any more either.

He did catch on eventually, I suppose. On one of my less frequent stop-overs at home, as I gathered fresh laundry, took a long hot shower and made myself some soup, he prowled around as if trying to think of something to say. I didn’t, again, have the emotional energy for small talk so I went about my business.

Eventually he spoke, his voice low, wounded even, as if it were he who was hurting. “What’s going on, Bella?”

“What do you mean?” I asked him, knowing full well I was teetering on the edge of facetiousness.

“You seem distant? What’s wrong?”

I turned the burner off under the pot of soup I had been heating and turned to face him. I realised it was probably the first time I had looked directly in his eyes in a month. “What’s wrong? I’m assuming you’re looking for an answer more complicated than my father is dying?”

He shook his head, ran his fingers through his hair and slumped back against the worktops. “I can’t figure you out. I can’t get inside your head. It’s more than your dad. I know it. I feel it.”

I noticed his fist had tightened, could see the whites of his knuckles. I could feel the vibes of frustration bounce off him but I knew if I spoke, if I started, that too much would be said. Too much would be done that couldn’t be undone.