It was the anniversary. Our annual celebration had reached its sixth year. It was something we’d decided one night not long after he was gone. The two of us sitting together in a café, nothing stronger than coffee between us, and Harry hammering the table with his fist, tears in his eyes, hissing angrily that he did not want us to be defined by the tragedy we had suffered. He refused to live his life governed by grief, to become one of those people paralyzed by the past, caught in the amber of loss. He said it and I watched him shaking with grief, barely able to control it, and I put out my hand to steady him. I held on to his arm, whispering to him, as he sobbed, that we didn’t need any anniversary Masses or weekly visits to a grave to get us through this. No reliving of all the fond memories; it would not bring Dillon back. Instead, I suggested that we would have one day every year—Dillon’s birthday—and it would be a day of celebration, just the two of us. He looked up at me then, caught by the idea, and listened as I went on: Each year, on that day, for the rest of our lives, no matter what happened between us in the future, on that one day we would go somewhere together for a meal, for a night, for a drink and a long walk; we would talk about him, about how much we had loved him, about how happy he had made us; we would get drunk, we would make love, we would cry, we would do whatever was needed to get through that day. It was a chance to distill and contain all the love and longing left after him.
Dillon was three years old when he died. And every year since we have observed this anniversary. Strange, as we no longer celebrated or even acknowledged our own birthdays. After what happened in Tangier, I couldn’t.
* * *
A
month ago. Driving to Kilkenny, where we were booked to spend the night in a stately home—log fires and tartan rugs and stags’ heads mounted over the billiards table, that kind of thing—we were talking about how some people would think us morbid, the way we still celebrated our son’s birthday five years after he had died.
“Take your brother, for instance,” Harry said.
“Mark? You’ve spoken to Mark about this?”
“No, but he did ask me once in that awkward way of his whether he should, ‘you know, send birthday cards for Dillon and stuff.’”
Harry had drifted into a mock imitation of Mark, with his halting speech and the nervous way he chewed his lip whenever dealing with something serious. I feigned shocked indignation, then broke into laughter, telling him to stop taking the piss out of my brother.
“No seriously, Robin! And as for your mother—Christ! When I told her we were going to Kilronan House for the night, she began waxing lyrical about how she had seen an article about it in
Image Interiors
and how some friend from her bridge club raved about it, and when I said that we were going there to celebrate Dillon’s birthday, her face kind of froze in horror. Seriously! I’m not making this shit up. It was like a death mask. That waxwork of Robespierre’s head after the guillotine. That’s what she reminded me of.”
“Stop. You love her really. Admit it.”
He smiled, and I turned my attention back to the countryside viewed through the windshield.
Something was nipping at the edges of my happiness. All the way from Dublin, I had harbored the feeling that I had forgotten something, and we were halfway to Kilkenny when I realized what it was: my birth control. I didn’t say anything to Harry, just sat there biting my lip and jigging my crossed legs, watching fields and hedgerows strip past, and trying to calculate how great a risk would it be if I took my pill tomorrow at lunchtime, when we got back home, rather than at nine o’clock that night, when I would normally take it. Was fifteen hours a big risk? Surely not. Not after nine careful years?
I told myself that as soon as we got home the next day, the minute I walked into the house, I would go upstairs and pop my pill.
Only I didn’t.
We got home after a night of too much wine, of making drunken, messy, soppy love. We both felt tired, and a little sad as we always did after that day, yet renewed as well, somehow fortified by it. I went upstairs, and I stood in the bathroom, looking at the foil pack of pills, seven empty blisters, fourteen bulging. I stared at the tiny letters—
SAT
—printed on the foil, and I thought to myself: No.
I suppose you might say that it was then that I made my decision. At that moment, it felt like the right thing to do. I didn’t discuss it with Harry; I knew already what his answer would be. In the past, whenever I had broached the issue, it had always been met with a refusal.
“I wouldn’t trust myself.”
That was what he always said. But the look in his eyes when they met mine said something else: that really what he was afraid of was the thought that I couldn’t trust him with another child. Not after Dillon.
But I did trust him. I understood somehow that it was guilt that held him back from wanting another baby, as if he needed to punish himself for leaving Dillon alone that night. And after five long years of watching him trapped and struggling with the burden of his self-loathing, I felt that something had to be done to release him from it.
I flushed the pills down the toilet. What the hell, I told myself as I watched the water swirling in the bowl, each little blue tablet washed away. Let’s just see what happens. That was a month ago, and in all that time I hadn’t said one word about it to Harry. I kept searching for the right moment to bring it up, but it never came. Now the fuse was lit, and it was too late for a discussion. And when I considered that in the coolness of our little office on that snowy morning, I felt the first quiver of doubt passing through me.
* * *
“Hello?”
“Hello, love. I’m glad I caught you.”
“Mum. How are you?”
“Frozen. Your father keeps turning off the heat. All this talk of austerity has gone to his head.”
I sat on the bottom step of the stairs and cradled the phone to my ear. In the background I could hear the clink of cutlery against crockery and pictured my mother at the kitchen table with her blond hair neat as a wig, her face fully made-up, and a cashmere shawl draped over her shoulders as she wrapped herself around a steaming mug of coffee.
“The only room in the house with any warmth is the kitchen. Jim has this notion that if we turn off the range we won’t be able to turn it back on again.”
“And I suppose you’re happy to perpetuate that myth?”
“Of course. Not a word to him, now, do you hear me?”
“Your secret is safe.”
“How about you, love? How are you coping with this cold weather?”
“Well, I’m sitting here in the hall and there’s a crack above the front door and the back door won’t close properly, so it’s a bit like sitting in a wind tunnel.”
“I can imagine. That creepy old house. I feel cold just thinking about it. Why you didn’t find yourselves a nice modern place with insulation and central heating is beyond me. I said it at the time, but you insisted on buying Mark’s share of that house and living in it. There was no reasoning with you. And I know, I know,” she said, cutting me off before I could offer my defense. “It was Granny’s house and you didn’t want a stranger living in it.”
“We love this house, Mum.”
“Love is all very well. I just hope you are warmly dressed.”
“I’m wearing tights under my jeans, and a thermal vest underneath a flannel shirt and a fleece.”
“You sound like a dustbin man. What are you two doing with yourselves today, anyway?”
I stared at the scraper in my hand.
“I’m stripping wallpaper, and Harry’s gone into town.”
“Oh.” There was the slightest pause, and then she said, “He hasn’t gone on that march, has he?”
The march. The Irish populace rising up in protest at the government and the banks and the IMF and the EU and all the other bogeymen who claimed to be rescuing us. I could see my mother clearly, fingering her pearls like worry beads, a look of distaste spreading across her face at the shameful prospect of her son-in-law caught on TV looking militant behind an Irish Congress of Trade Unions banner or tossing a petrol bomb or attacking a Guard with a bottle.
“No, Mum. He’s gone into the studio. He’s clearing out the rest of his stuff today, remember?”
“Ah. Yes, I’d forgotten.” Then, after a pause, she added, “He’ll miss that place.”
“I know. It’s hard for him.”
“Still,” she continued, more briskly now, “no point wasting money on rent for a big cold cellar in town when you have all that unused space at home.”
“Yes, Mum,” I replied, but even as she said the words and I knew they made sense, I felt that small niggle of doubt, and thought of how quiet Harry became lately any time we talked of moving his work space to the garage adjoining the house. He loved his studio. He loved the solitude and privacy of it. I knew that. But it didn’t make financial sense. And then I remembered that last night, as we were standing alongside each other at the sink, doing the dishes, I had offered to help with the move. “No, Robin,” he had said, his voice deadened and flat, his eyes fixed on the dish in his hand, and I had felt the defeat coming off him in waves. With a sudden twinge of remorse, I’d sensed that perhaps it was a mistake. He could be so vulnerable.
“Mind you,” my mother was saying, “if anyone should be marching, it’s you.”
“Me?”
“Yes! Haven’t architects been hit badly by this crisis?”
“Well, yes, but—”
“How many days a week are you working now? Four? Three?”
“Three and a half.”
“Three and a half. And a mortgage to pay on a house that’s falling down about your ears.”
I felt my heart hardening, and knew the conversation was reaching that tipping point beyond which it would descend into irritated sniping on her part and sullen bullishness on mine.
“Look, Mum, I really should get back to my—”
“Of course! Sorry, love. But look, before you go, can I just check with you about Christmas?”
“Christmas?” I said, my heart giving a little lurch at what I knew was coming next.
“I thought I would make sure that you and Harry are still coming here for Christmas.”
“Well—”
“Because Mark rang last night and broke the news to us that he is going to be spending Christmas in Vancouver with this new squeeze of his, Suzie.”
“Her name is Suki, Mum.”
“God, yes it is. Although I can’t say it with a straight face. It’s like something you’d call the cat.”
I laughed despite myself, and then I decided it was best just to tell her, rather than avoiding the issue for weeks and forcing myself to blurt out on Christmas Eve that Harry and I had decided to spend this Christmas at home, in our house.
There followed one shocked moment of silence.
Then she said, “But you always come to us.”
“I know, Mum, but this year, we thought it would be nice to spend it in the house, especially after all the work we’ve been doing…”
My voice trailed off. It sounded pathetic and threadbare, even to me.
Into the silence, my mother breathed her discontent. She said, “I suppose this is Harry’s idea?”
A flare of annoyance sparked inside me. Not this again, I thought.
“Actually, it was mine,” I said archly. “I was the one who wanted to spend it here.”
“I see.”
She let a minute pass, then spoke with weary resignation: “Well, you always were headstrong. Never one to seek advice, or take it when it was offered. Insistent on doing your own thing, regardless of the consequences.”
The words hung in the air between us. We both knew she was thinking about Tangier. I felt a tightening around my heart. For five years there had been an unspoken “I told you so” hovering around her—words that, if spoken, would poison the love between us.
I almost hung up the phone. But instead I did something even more foolish.
“Why don’t you and Dad come to us?”
“Come to you?” she asked. “But you have no heating!”
“I promise, Mum,” I told her, “if you come to us for Christmas, we will have heating. There will be roast goose and wine and champagne and a Christmas tree and presents and heating.”
“Well, I don’t know, love,” she said, her voice thin and doubtful. “I’ll have to see what your father says.”
“Okay. Just think about it, Mum.”
“I will. Thank you. Take care now, love. And stay warm!”
She hung up and I sat on the step, looking at the phone and thinking.
Fuck
.
Now I had two things to worry about telling Harry.
* * *
I
spent the morning hacking away at wallpaper, and in the afternoon I took a long, hot bath. It is one of my favorite things—a hot bath while listening to the radio and drinking a glass of red wine. I avoided the wine, and after ten minutes of radio commentary that covered the freezing weather conditions along the east coast and the advance of the march toward Government Buildings, I switched it off and wallowed in silence. In the stillness of the water, I peered down at my body, looking for symptoms of pregnancy. My tummy was flat and smooth—no stretch marks, no telltale signs of a previous birth. I tested my breasts for a new fullness or sensitivity, but there was nothing different.
The water was cooling, but I didn’t want to get out yet, not ready to bare my naked flesh to the cold air of the room. And as I looked about—at the mold spots on the ceiling, the walls weeping with damp, the ancient avocado bathroom suite, the lino on the floor curling at the edges—I was overcome with a sense of panic. Every room in this house was still a work in progress. But now there was a clock ticking. How on earth were we going to get it ready in time?
Calm down, Robin, I told myself. The baby will be born in the summer. At least we won’t have to worry about the heating until the autumn. But the worry had started, and now I was like someone picking at a scab. I couldn’t leave it alone.
I thought about the house falling down around us. Mum was right: we should have sold it when we had the chance. We would have gotten a decent price for it—enough to buy a small but comfortable house in a nice area, with no mortgage to worry about. Instead we were stuck with a crumbling old pile whose value had plummeted in the four years we had owned it. And while at the time of purchase, we had thought it the bargain of a lifetime, now that my working week had been cut back and there was talk of further reductions, or even redundancies, it all seemed like a terrible risk. I had not factored in a pregnancy—how would work respond to that? Plus, the art market was suffering with the recession, so Harry’s future seemed uncertain. He was excited about the new stuff he was doing, yet it felt like a long time since he had sold anything major.