He didn’t correct her on the loss he had experienced, because though he knew his suffering was real, it still didn’t compare to losing a child of two years of age. Instead he said, “Okay, I get going away for a period. But you decided to lose all of your children.”
“I wasn’t rational. Lord knows I’m not claiming my thinking was on. It wasn’t.” She finished off her tea like a shot. “I had to be away from everything that reminded me of the pain—and the guilt. I would not have been able to live through your father’s careful acceptance of what I had done.”
“What you had done? What do you mean?”
“Well, I’m the reason Nora is dead, aren’t I?”
“It was slick with rain that day,” he said. “That lorry ran into us. I knew as much on the day and I was only seven.”
“It got so twisted in my head, you see. I was convinced that I had somehow been to blame. And?—”
“Because of your whiskey habit?”
She turned her face away as abruptly as if he had physically slapped her.
“Were you drunk that morning?” he asked when she didn’t speak for a lengthy moment.
“No.” She shook her head violently, with childlike gracelessness.
“I remember now.” He twisted his wedding ring to the left, then to the right and back to the middle again. “I can’t believe I blocked it out all these years. But now I remember your need for it throughout the day.”
“It’s medicinal.” She looked at him with imploring eyes. “I have a nervous condition and a nip here and there is what helps me function. I’m not a drunk, Gavin. You have to believe me.”
He not only didn’t believe her, but her issues made him realize his own dependence problems had a hereditary basis. Still, it wasn’t why he had come here.
“Just keep telling me what happened.”
She nodded eagerly, clearly grateful to drop the topic of her drinking. “I, em, I think it’s called ‘survivor’s guilt.’ I couldn’t fathom the part I had in losing your sister. And then it spiraled into a real breakdown as I was overcome with thinking that I’d do more harm than good to you boys if I came back. I know it makes no sense. I know that now. But back then, I feared somehow my other children would be next.”
“This idea can’t have lasted all these years. At some point you must have thought to return.”
“Aye, I did. So many times. But I had abandoned you all. I didn’t know what you’d do if I just showed up.”
That logic struck Gavin as terribly cruel. “You should have fucking tried,” he said.
“I did,” she said quickly. “I did come back once.”
99
GAVIN
Gavin was frozen still at the idea that his mother had come back at some point. And he had never known. He wondered if Brendan, his father, had turned her away before he and his brother had a chance to see her. His father had never said a negative word against her, but he had acted as if she was a chapter in their lives that had closed.
“When was this?” he asked.
“It was about four months later. I went to yours and Ian’s school, thinking I’d walk you home and then have a talk with your Da. But seems Brendan had been called in to get you. I heard Ian teasing you about the school warning you’d have to repeat the year if you didn’t pull yourself around. Then your Da, he did this lovely thing. Do you remember?”
Of course he remembered. It had been one of the few times his father had mentioned her after she had disappeared. The memory was clear for that reason, and also because of the rare instance of his father showing him some tenderness.
“He got down on one knee before us, to look us in the eye,” Gavin said. “Then he said I had nothing to be ashamed of, because didn’t I remember Mammy always said I’d do great things. And then he told Ian to give us a break, that it’d been rough on us all but we had to look at us three as being a team now.”
“Exactly. I saw that and I knew you boys would be okay. It made me think God had it planned?—”
“Fuck the god that would orchestrate the death of a child and the abandonment of two others,” he said quickly, her invocation raising the incoherent rage he’d felt as an adolescent. “This kind of self-serving justification in God’s name is why I lost faith long ago.”
“It made me think God had it planned this way,” she repeated, undeterred, “so your Da could be the kind of father he never would have been if I’d been around.”
He wanted to shake her, to force her to see that her logic wasn’t just flawed but hurtful. “What bullshit. Take responsibility for the fact that you fucking walked away.Twice.”
