The First Time I Said Goodbye (15 page)

“They think all Americans are really rich,” she had said.

He had tried to reassure her that that was not the case – that he was an ordinary man from an ordinary family. His father worked for the post office, his mother was a homemaker. They lived relatively simple lives. But, she had pointed out, a relatively simple life in America was still likely to be more exotic than a life in Derry – where there were eight of them crammed into a tiny house with one phone to service the whole street, where voting was not necessarily a right and a coat constituted an eiderdown on a cold night. He had probably never woken to ice on the inside of his windows or put paper in the bottom of his shoes to keep out the damp.

She had said all this light-heartedly, without a hint of bitterness in her voice. She was happy – her family was happy. There was always someone to talk to. He had his mom, his dad, his sister and that was it. And he couldn’t remember the last time their house had rung with laughter like the Hegarty house on that night. He had found himself vowing to learn the words to the songs they were singing – to brush up on his history to discuss what they were discussing, to think of ways to get his feet under the table a little further and, when he looked to his side, to see Stella there, laughing and joking, teasing her brothers and sister, he thought of how much he wanted to be a part of all this. Forever. How he wanted to create his own family with Stella. Christ, he loved her.

As their evening drew to a close, Stella walked him to the corner of the street, delighted to be alone in his company after the evening that had passed. She had noticed how he had looked at her, a smile always on his face, his eyes filled with love. She realised she had been smiling back at him and felt just as in love. She realised, she supposed, though she pushed the thought to the back of her mind, that they were perhaps playing at romance – playing at house. Neither of them, she imagined, were ready for the talk about where this was all going – not really. They just knew how they felt – how they were in love and if they didn’t think about it too much – the miles that would separate them at some stage – they could imagine it would all work out.

“Do I have the seal of approval?” Ray asked as they stood under the lamplight in the street.

“I think so,” Stella replied. “You have mine anyway.” She reached out and touched his cheek, her breath catching at the warmth of his skin.

“We’ll be happy,” he said, reaching for her hand and holding it to his cheek. “I will make you happy like this. Like your family. We will have a home ringing with love and laughter,” he said. “If you let me . . .”

She silenced him with a kiss, her heart thumping at how she could be happy. How he could be her happy ending.

Chapter 13

Am I sounding desperate? If I am, it is because I am desperate. So very desperate. Please, please, let me know you understand. Let me know you forgive me.

* * *

Derry, June 2010

Things I would have done differently if I could? Sure we all have regrets. Perhaps I would have tried harder at school. Perhaps I would have tried to persuade my father to stay in touch with his family more – but it was just his way that we were happy in our own unit. Perhaps I would have pushed him to come back to Ireland for a visit with my mother – perhaps she wouldn’t feel whatever longing she felt if she had been here before with him.

Perhaps, I thought as I walked back to Second Hand Rose, mulling over Dolores’ words, I wouldn’t have held on to things so tightly that didn’t work any more. I would have, maybe, told Craig it wasn’t working and that while I loved him I wasn’t sure I was in love with him. I wasn’t sure I ever had been, if the truth be told. Yes, I had moments of affection, of what I thought was love. I had moments of obsession when it seemed like the lyrics of ‘Groovy Kind of Love’ were meant just for us – and moments of lust. But shouldn’t love be more? Shouldn’t it be, even though it pained me to think it, what my mother had with Ray – the need to chase him down after all these years – something which, even though she found happiness elsewhere, always stayed at the back of her mind – was always in her thoughts? I felt a surge of inner guilt, as if I was betraying both Craig and my father by even thinking this way, but the truth was there.

Craig and I – we were trying to fit together. We were desperately trying to make it work, and only in the end making it seem more desperate than it needed to be. My daddy always said I was too loyal – and this was to my detriment in this case. My head, and my heart, hurt thinking about it – thinking of the messages I had sent to Craig telling him that I was happy here. Just thinking about it made me ache for him – but not in a physical way but more because I knew the hurt I was going to cause him.

I pushed open the glass door into the warm, beautiful atmosphere of a shop that already felt a little like home.

“Was she tough on you? Mum can be tough,” Sam said, looking up from his iPad and scanning my face for any sign of trauma.

I imagined the running make-up would give it away, so I rubbed at my face as if that would make it better.

“Not tough so much as, well . . . tough . . . but not in a bad way . . . I don’t think,” I jabbered. “But I’ll take a few minutes and fix my face if that is okay.”

“Ah now, a lunch break and taking a few minutes to fix your face. You just can’t get the free staff these days,” he said with a wink as I made to walk past him to the small staff room.

“Sam,” I said, turning back to face him, “do you ever think that you really have no idea what you are doing with your life?”

“All the time,” he said softly. “I just plod on and hope one day it clicks. I figure if you do no evil then someday the Karma Fairy has to pay you back in a nice way.”

“I hope you are right,” I said, walking on.

“So do I,” his voice carried to me.

I looked in the mirror – the calm collected 50s-siren look Sam had created for me had faded more than a little. I took a wet wipe from my handbag and roughly rubbed it over my face before smacking my cheeks to try and bring a little colour into them. I quickly applied some very basic and not at all glamorous make-up, lifted my cell and sent my mother a quick message inviting her for dinner that evening – giving her the option of choosing where since I didn’t know a thing about my surroundings. I was pretty sure that Sam wouldn’t mind a night off from baby-sitting me. My cell bleeped back at me almost as soon as the message was sent – as if my mother had been sitting on it, waiting for me to message her. Of course she would love to see me for dinner. She was sorry. So sorry. And she would explain and make it up to me. And she loved me.

I had to allow myself the time to think properly about how I felt, so I simply texted back that I loved her too and would see her at seven. Now I just had to tell Sam I wanted to leave work early to get home and fix my face properly.

* * *

“Look, you can get me on my mobile if you need me,” Sam said, typing his number into my cell so that I would have easy access to it. “I’m just meeting a few friends for coffee but if it all goes a bit tits-up, I can be there soon.”

I thanked him and assured him that it was only my mother that I was meeting, but we both knew it was more than just a simple breaking of bread with a relative. We had chatted that afternoon in the shop – the mid-afternoon providing a lull in browsers and shoppers which freed us up to drink more coffee and gossip more.

“She must have really loved him,” Sam said. “That’s not to imply she didn’t love your dad – but, wow, to come back to try and see him again, after all these years . . .”

“Unfinished business,” I said, wondering would I ever feel so strongly about someone that even after 50 years I still felt as if a part of me was missing without them.

“Either that or the grief for your dad has sent her completely doolally,” he offered with a smile and I suddenly wasn’t sure which version of events I would prefer to be true.

I had left the fancy dress from earlier aside, despite Sam’s protests that it made me look amazing, and had slipped into something a little more comfortable instead – some jeans from my suitcase, a fitted white T and a scarf from the shop he insisted I wore to make me look a little glam. “Fake it till you make it,” he said, adding, “I know that sounds very Gok Wan and probably makes me sound more of a raging homosexual than I really am, but I like to see you look a little more confident, cousin – and if you can’t feel it right now then you can at least look a little more glam.”

I’d fixed my hair, put on some fresh make-up, slipped my feet into a pair of pumps and grabbed my cardigan from the end of the bed.

Sam drove me to the restaurant my mother had been assured would meet our supposed exacting standards. We didn’t feel that we had to correct anyone by telling them we had no exacting standards and, with the exception of my father’s funeral, I couldn’t remember the last time we had eaten out.

My mother was standing, fidgeting with her hands, at the door of Brown’s Restaurant as we pulled up.

“You know you can get me any time,” Sam reminded me as I kissed him on the cheek and stepped out of the car.

My mother looked more diminished than I remembered even though it had been barely twenty-four hours since I had last seen her. She looked tired – perhaps even more tired than on the nights she had sat up by my father’s bed, mopping his brow and adjusting his morphine through the night. She looked, well, vaguely lost and I felt the tables turn between us and I knew it was time for me to be the mom and her to be the child who needed a little bit of reassurance.

“You should have told me,” I said, stepping out and hugging her. “You should have been able to tell me.”

“I didn’t know how,” she muttered, allowing me to hug her. “I know I’ve been very foolish, Annabel, I know I have hurt you. I just didn’t think – I was so caught up in everything and I needed to be here and somehow I thought I would find the words but they never came and before I knew it we were on the plane and it seemed real and scary and I didn’t know how.”

“One word at a time, Mom,” I said, trying to hold back the mixed bag of feelings which were coursing through me. “Let’s get a seat, and then just one word at a time.”

* * *

“Your father and I never had secrets,” my mom said while we waited for our bottle of wine to be brought to the table. “I don’t want you to think I ever betrayed him, Annabel. I never did.”

I didn’t speak. If the truth be told, I wasn’t sure I could speak.

“I loved your father very much but, and I know this will be hard for you to hear, he was gone from me a long time before he died. We knew that, him and I. We knew as he got sicker that what we always had had changed irreparably.”

I felt tears sting at my eyes but I pushed them back, aware that the waitress would arrive soon with our bottle of Sauvignon and I didn’t want to make yet another public show of myself. I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.

“I know you probably think who am I to carry on like this – at my age? That I should have more sense about me, that when he died a part of me should have lain down and died with him. And it did, you know, and it won’t ever come back. There isn’t a night since he died that I haven’t cried myself to sleep – but it won’t bring him back. Your dad and I knew this. He told me, pet – he told me that when he was gone I was to look for Ray. I was to look for him and get the closure I never had all these years. That doesn’t mean to run off with him into the sunset – it just means to close the book on what happened all those years ago.”

“So what did happen all those years ago, Mom? You loved him. Presumably he loved you too – and what, it just didn’t work out? That happens, you know. What I don’t understand is why you have held on to it all these years.”

“There’s a part of you, Annabel, that always holds on to the first time you said goodbye. Especially when you didn’t realise you were saying it at the time. Yes, I loved him. I loved the very bones of him – he gave me a confidence I never thought I could find. We were, I thought, a perfect match and we were bound for our happy ending. You know how you just know it’s meant to be? When you don’t have to question it? When you don’t have to force it? You don’t even have to think about it all that much – it’s just there. It’s just who we were. It was never meant to end – not the way it did anyway, and perhaps I have been a silly old woman to hold on to it all these years. But I never got to say what I needed to say.”

She fished in her bag and pulled out a small sheaf of letters – old, crinkled, yellowing. “I never got to tell him I’m sorry. That’s all I ever wanted to do. I broke his heart, Annabel. I broke his heart and I never got the chance to explain – not properly.” She handed me the letters. “I don’t expect you to take it all in – not straight away. But it’s there – these are the letters I wrote after he went back to America. They were sent back to me . . . return to sender . . . unopened. I just wanted him to know I was sorry.”

I handled them – they were now open – she had obviously reread them over the years. I wanted to hand them back to her straight away – felt as if I was seeing something I shouldn’t be. But she was insistent as my hand pushed them back towards her.

“It was never simple, Annabel. And this? It isn’t about love – not really. Not love now. I’m not silly, I’m not some hopeless romantic. I know what real life is like, Annabel.”

She spoke in hushed, rushed tones as if she was telling me off, as if embarrassed at the same time, and I supposed this was awkward for her – discussing her love life with me.