He looked affronted. ‘I was hiding it from Finn and Isla. I didn’t read it.’
I took another gulp of beer and took a brief look at the picture of a dolphin before handing it back. ‘She’s still legally your wife.Feel free to read it if you want. Preferably out loud, so we can share the pain. Although I understand completely if you’d rather use it as a dartboard.’
Dad took a moment to read the card before replying. ‘“Having the best time exploring Madeira, but just found a restaurant serving Yorkshire pudding that had me yearning for England. Am wondering if my journey might be drawing to an end.” Three exclamation marks. “I could be seeing you very soon.” Four exclamation marks and a smiley face. “Love, Mum.”’
‘What?’
Almost the moment Mum said goodbye to her last foster child, the remnant of mental health that she’d been clinging onto had disintegrated. She’d then spent almost a year recovering from what she’d described as a ‘compassion-fatigue-induced breakdown’. This had increasingly included references to how she’d no identity outside her caring role and needed to ‘find out who Helen is’. When Dad had pointed out that he’d frequently encouraged her to take time off for herself, it had only led to arguments.
The longer she’d spent talking to her online support group for ‘Invisible Women’, the more she’d fixated on how she’d sacrificed her best decades to other people.
Six months after her eldest daughter’s wedding, two months before her youngest’s marriage had fallen apart, my mother had decided that the only way to make a full recovery was to take some proper time out for herself. Without breathing a word to any of us, she’d sold her car and raided their savings account to buy a ticket on a year-long world cruise.
When challenged about what this meant for her marriage, she’d replied that she wasn’t equipped to make that decision while still living with her ‘enabler’, and the least we all owed her was some space to decide if the ‘new Helen includes being Tony’s wife’.
Months after the cruise had finished, she’d been lingering in Spain when the Covid pandemic hit. This had become the perfect excuse to avoid deciding whether this break was a break-up. Dad, still holding out hope that the woman he’d been with for almost forty years would eventually come to her senses, had refused to push her for an answer.
Since the borders had reopened, she’d set sail again, getting random jobs on other cruises, according to the postcards sporadically arriving from all around the world. These were posted to me and Nicky, never her husband. She usually sent something on our birthdays, but ‘hope you have a lovely day!’ scrawled on the back of a photo of a Greek island means little when the sender doesn’t bother finding out whether your day was, in fact, lovely, or whether it included a cry mid morning about how much you missed your mother or how upset you were at the way she treated your father. She refused to have a phone and was a ghost online. We’d had a couple of calls a year that were more static than words, where the most we’d been able to share was that everyone was alive and well. Isla couldn’t remember meeting her grandma, and Mum’s insistence that she needed a total break from bearing her family’s burdens meant I’d not told her about my marriage ending. We assumed she stalked the public Facebook account Nicky and I set up, because a few months after I’d posted a picture of my new cottage on there, a place Mum would have known well, a postcard arrived at that address. On our angrier days, we had to talk each other out of deleting the account because she didn’t deserve to know anything about us or her grandchildren.
It had taken a long time to stop waiting for her to come home. Because Dad never spoke about it, we had no idea whether he was still waiting. Eventually, Nicky and I had decided that all we could do was try to be such wonderful sisters, as well as brilliant daughters to our dad, we’d barely notice Mum had vanished.
We did notice.
Like a splinter stuck under a fingernail, the pain of which sometimes dulled thanks to the busyness of everything else but at other times was impossible to ignore. After sharing our mum for so many years, we didn’t find it easy to forgive her for abandoning us now.
‘What does she mean, she could be seeing us very soon? Does that include you?’
The ulcer-like ball of anger that made itself present every time I wanted to phone her started to throb.
‘It’s been nearly four months since she’s called. For all she knows, I’ve moved away. You could have found a new partner. Or died!’
‘She’d have seen that on Facebook.’ Dad gave my hand a gentle squeeze.
‘If she’s bothered to go online and check the account since she last stepped on shore.’ My voice trembled with painful rage. ‘How are you not fuming about this? She left you and didn’t even have the guts to admit it. She never shows any interest, ever, in how her children are or what we’re doing, so why would she want to come back?’
‘I suppose one upside of her paying a visit is that we can finally ask some of these difficult questions.’ Dad rubbed his forehead. ‘I have been angry. But I’m also worried about the woman I’ve been married to for most of my life. I’m scared about the “new Helen”, while unable to stop hoping she might have found the old Helen I fell in love with. At least if she comes home, I can know for sure.’
‘I think I’d rather not know,’ I whispered. I couldn’t comprehend upping and leaving my loving husband and children without any way of keeping in touch.
Which always drew me back to one thought, slithering about in the deep, dark depths of me.
What if, no matter what Mum said, or how much Nicky insisted I was wrong, she still blamed me for what happened? In the lowest moments of her illness, when she’d complained about how we’d all sided against her, I’d known exactly what she referred to. What I’d done at sixteen had not only wrecked the future family she’d longed for, ending three children’s hopes of a family in the process, it had been the fatal wound that eventually destroyed our family, too.
And now she was threatening to come back?
This, on top of having spent a day watching my ex-husband lovingly stroking his new partner’s baby bump while she took photos, felt like way too much.
6
THEN
‘You really don’t have to do this,’ I muttered to Jonah, having found him sitting in the living room in front of a coffee table covered in presents, balloons bobbing around his legs. To no one’s surprise, a longer-term foster carer hadn’t suddenly become available in the last few hours, and Jonah would be staying with us for another night. Foster carers were in short enough supply as it was. Foster carers with space for an older teenage boy were on the endangered-species list.
He shrugged, giving me a rueful glance from under the scraggly fringe that had escaped his hood. ‘It’s less awkward than hiding upstairs. But I can go if you want. Let you do your family thing.’
I tried to hide my surprise at this response. When Nicky referred to Jonah as a vampire, she didn’t mean the pleasant,Twilightkind. We were in the same class for only two subjects, history and science, and since joining our school he’d been slinking in late to a seat at the back and spending most lessons staring out of the window with his earphones in, reading books that only I knew he’d taken out on my library card or with his head on his desk, asleep. Anyone else would have been therecipient of our history teacher’s caustic tongue-lashing at the very least, if not kicked out. My best friend, Alicia, decided Mr Matthews was scared to confront such a blatant rebel.
‘That’s ridiculous. He isn’t scared of a student. He probably weighs twice as much as Jonah,’ my other friend in the class, Katie, said as we walked to our English lesson a couple of weeks ago.
