Stand by Me (16 page)
‘Oh, Domino.’ Greg put his arm around her and pulled her tightly to him. And although she hadn’t been able to let Brendan or Evelyn or Lily touch her since the baby’s birth, she was suddenly comforted by him. She didn’t know why she had poured out her darkest thoughts to Greg. She only knew that as he rocked her gently in his arms, she suddenly felt safer than she ever had before.
She went to see the doctor the following day. Brendan was with her in the surgery as Dr Stevenson examined her and listened to her. He told her that she was certainly depressed and that this happened with one in ten new mothers and she didn’t have to suffer on her own. He told her that he would arrange counselling for her, which would help her enormously because she’d see then that she wasn’t alone in the feelings that she was having. Additionally, he said, he was going to prescribe a course of antidepressants. It would take a few weeks for them to kick in, he told her, but they would make a big difference. He promised her that. She took the prescription and tucked it into her purse.
‘Things will get better, Dominique,’ said Dr Stevenson. ‘They really and truly will.’
She didn’t believe him. She didn’t believe anything anybody told her any more. But because Greg had begged her to do this, and because she trusted Greg, she would do whatever they wanted.
Chapter 8
The decibel level was off the scale. Even from the front bedroom upstairs, Dominique could hear the yells and shrieks as Kelly and her friends ran riot in the garden. It was impossible to believe, thought Dominique, that ten-year-old girls could make such noise. But they were like chattering magpies as they communicated at top speed and at the tops of their voices with each other.
They’d been at it for two hours already, and Dominique had come upstairs to give herself a momentary break from the bedlam. Linda and Cherise, two of her neighbours, whose daughters were also Kelly’s best friends, were still outside, supervising the bouncy castle and the face-painting for the younger children and trying to keep a modicum of control over the birthday group. It was a good thing, Dominique thought, that their new house in Terenure had such a big garden. At least it meant that there was plenty of room for the energetic children to work off their high spirits.
Dominique always thought of the house as new, even though they’d been in it for a number of years now. She’d been surprised the day Brendan had come home and told her that this was an opportunity they couldn’t turn down.
‘But I thought you liked it where we are,’ she said slowly. ‘We’ve got the place exactly how we want it.’ She’d looked around the kitchen - much bigger than it had been when they’d first moved in, because Brendan had built an extension that stretched the entire width of the back of the house. ‘It seems daft to move on now.’
‘I’m picking up this place at a great price because it needs a bit of work,’ Brendan had said. ‘And there’s demand for houses in this neck of the woods right now.’
‘How much work?’ Dominique knew that Brendan’s idea of ‘a bit of work’ and hers differed substantially. As far as Brendan was concerned, the extension had been a minor job. It had taken two months, during which Dominique had fought a losing battle with dust, grime and jackhammers (and, occasionally, her sanity).
‘A fair bit,’ he’d conceded, and then, seeing the expression on her face, added quickly, ‘But it’s priced cheaply because of it. It’s a great chance to pick up a fantastic property in a really good location and we’d be crazy to pass it up.’
He’d brought her to see the house, a red-brick Victorian building with a long, narrow south-facing back garden where overgrown bushes and grasses hid the path to a dilapidated shed. Her heart had sunk at the state of the garden, and at the peeling wallpaper and flaking paint in the high-ceilinged rooms of the house itself, but Brendan had insisted that she needed to look past the long grass and the cracked windows and imagine how it could look.
‘I wish I had that kind of imagination.’ All Dominique could see was months of work ahead of them.
‘I have,’ said Brendan.
She knew he had. He was a visionary when it came to buildings; an artist, she sometimes told him. She knew that when his heart was set on a property and he could see its potential, nothing could stop him. Brendan gutted the house in Terenure, rewired it, replastered the walls, sanded the beautiful wooden floorboards, which had been hidden beneath musty brown carpet, and replaced the cracked windows with double glazing. He bought a new shed and got the garden landscaped. By the time he’d finished, the place was unrecognisable. When it came to building and renovation, Brendan Delahaye knew what he was doing.
Over the last ten years, Brendan’s company had gone from strength to strength, building extensions for half of the housing estate in Firhouse (although none as lovely as their kitchen, Dominique thought complacently) as well as finishing and selling the development of six houses in Clondalkin. Even when times were quiet, Brendan was never out of work, and the money flowing through the books increased every month.
Dominique no longer did the accounting work for Brendan and the company. During her months of post-natal depression, when she was unable to do anything at all, he had brought in an accountant to look after things. Matthew Donnelly was the brother of Miley, who worked for Brendan on the sites. He was quite unlike Brendan and Miley, who would often sit in the kitchen in their cement-caked overalls and sweaty T-shirts, drinking cups of strong tea and talking about the next job. Matthew always wore three-piece suits and pastel-coloured shirts with white collars and cuffs. He changed the way the books were kept and spoke confidently about accurals and cashflow. His advice had left them with enough money to turn the Terenure house into something really special.
Dominique had known she couldn’t say no to the move, even though she really would have preferred to stay where she was, no matter how great the potential of the new house. She knew that she would do whatever Brendan wanted, because despite everything, he was still with her. She had been certain, ten years ago, that he would leave, and the idea had utterly terrified her. She wouldn’t have blamed him, of course. Who would? Why would anyone want to come home to a wife who didn’t care about anything? Who’d lost interest in everything, particularly in herself, so that she didn’t bother going to the hairdresser or going shopping any more, and sloped around the house in shapeless tracksuit bottoms, her hair long and unkempt, her face paler than ever and her expression mournful? She’d imagined him leaving her and taking Kelly with him, and even though she told herself that that would surely be a good thing, because she didn’t love the baby and he did, the idea filled her with dread. There were times when she couldn’t quite believe that he’d stuck it out until her depression had lifted, and times when she wondered why he had. But she wasn’t going to question him. She never questioned him. She never argued with him. And she allowed him to make all the important decisions about their lives.
Kelly’s well-being was her number-one priority now. During the weeks of counselling after her post-natal depression had been diagnosed, Dominique had learned that children who remembered having low levels of maternal care had a high risk of suffering post-natal depression themselves. She had learned, too, that Evelyn had suffered from what she still insisted on calling ‘the baby blues’ for a long time after her own birth. It explained a lot, Dominique thought, that Evelyn had been perfectly fine after she’d had Gabriel but not after her. She’d tried to talk to her mother about her experiences, but Evelyn had been withdrawn and uncommunicative. Dominique now understood better the distance she felt between herself and Evelyn, and understood, too, the closer bond Evelyn had with her brother. Understanding it didn’t make her feel any better about it, but it did help her to put it into context. Given that she had neglected Kelly for the first months of her life, Dominique was now very careful to make her daughter feel loved and wanted at every available opportunity. And since Kelly was the most important person in her life and she loved her totally and unconditionally, that wasn’t hard.
It had taken four months from the date of her visit to Dr Stevenson until the day she’d woken up without her first thought being about the heaviness of her body and the difficulty of getting out of bed. That day was the first when she hadn’t dreaded the empty hours stretching ahead of her. She realised that she had actually slept through the entire night and that, unexpectedly, she was cheered by the sunlight filtering through the slats in the window blinds and the sounds of the blackbirds on the roof of the house.
She’d pushed back the covers and opened the blinds and she’d seen the colours of the street for the first time in a long time. She’d seen Linda’s bright red car in the driveway next door. She’d seen the yellow and orange marigolds swaying in the pots outside Cherise’s front window. She’d noticed that Tess McDonagh had added a porch to the front of her house. (Had Brendan done it? she wondered. It was a design he favoured, but she couldn’t remember him ever talking about it as a job. But there was so much, she knew, that had passed her by over the last few months.) As her gaze moved along the road, she could see the blue sky and the white clouds and the green leaves on the trees. And all of these things made her smile.
She’d gone to the cot then, and looked inside. Her baby was staring up at her, her hazel eyes wide open, a puzzled expression on her face. And she’d leaned over the rail of the cot and picked her up and inhaled her sweet baby smell, and suddenly it didn’t remind her of being in the hospital at all. The scent of her baby was very, very different. She didn’t know how she could ever have thought otherwise.
I love you, she thought as she held her daughter close to her and kissed her soft face. I really and truly love you.
She’d taken time getting ready before going to her post-natal depression group meeting. She’d washed her hair and dried it with a hairdryer, instead of simply letting it dry by itself as she’d been doing for so long. She’d thought about what top to wear with the jeans that had once been a bit tight for her but now felt loose around her waist. She’d even pulled a pair of boots with heels from the back of the wardrobe.
She realised that she was looking forward to going out, even if it was only to the meeting. She’d never really seen the point of talking to a bunch of equally depressed women before. But that day it had been different. For the first time, she’d truly related to what the other women were saying. And she realised that her life wasn’t as bleak as she’d thought. She’d been excited afterwards, had actually hummed to herself as she tidied the house and roasted a chicken for dinner that evening. She’d phoned Greg too and told him how well she was feeling, and he’d been pleased and delighted for her and reminded her that she could, of course, call him any time. She said that she was sure he had better things to do in his life than worry about her, and he said that he wasn’t in the slightest bit worried about her but that he wanted her to know that she could always count on him.
Brendan had been overjoyed when he came home that night and found her sitting on the sofa with the baby in her arms, her hair smelling of apple shampoo as it gleamed under the glow of the recessed lights. He’d looked around the living room, which was clean and tidy even though there were stuffed toys on all the chairs. He’d smiled at her and she’d smiled back and then laughed. Which made the baby gurgle with laughter too.
But then, the next morning, the black clouds had rolled in again and the thoughts of getting up were too much to bear and she cried to herself because she hadn’t turned into the perfect wife and mother after all; she was still hopeless, useless Domino. And when Brendan came home, she simply fried a couple of eggs and shoved some frozen chips in the oven for his dinner and ignored the look of disappointment on his face. The house was a mess again too.
Later, when the good days began outweighing the bad ones, when the black clouds changed to lighter shades of grey and started to disappear altogether, Brendan told her that he could tell the state of her mind from the state of the kitchen. She apologised to him then, told him she was sorry to have caused so much trouble, to have messed up his life. A dark expression passed across his face but he told her not to worry about it. She’d been sick, he said. Not her fault. And so she ignored the ripples of fear that his expression had evoked in her and reminded herself that things were now on the up. Kelly was the best daughter in the world and she loved her and she loved Brendan. She couldn’t fix everything that had happened in the past but she could look forward to the future.
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