If You Could See Me Now (38 page)

Luke nodded.

“Would you mind if I came along sometimes?”

Luke smiled happily. “Yeah, that’d be cool.” He thought for a while. “We’re kind of the same now, aren’t we? My mom leaving is kinda like what your mom did, isn’t it?” Luke asked, breathing on the glass table and writing his name in the fog with his
finger.

Elizabeth’s body grew cold. “No,” she snapped, “it’s nothing like that at all.” She stood up from the table, switched on the light, and started wiping down the counter. “They are totally different people, it’s not the same at all.” Her voice trembled as she scrubbed furiously. Looking up to check on Luke, she caught sight of her reflection in the glass of the conservatory and froze. Gone was the composure, gone were her emotions; she looked like a possessed woman hiding from the truth, running from the world.

And then she knew.

And the memories that lurked in the dark corners of her mind began to creep ever so slowly into the light.

Chapter Thirty-Six

“Opal,” I called gently from
her office doorway. She seemed so brittle and I was afraid that the slightest noise would shatter her.

“Ivan.” She smiled tiredly, pinning her dreadlocks back from her face.

I could see myself in her shining eyes as I entered the room. “We’re all worried about you, is there anything we, I, can do to help?”

“Thank you, Ivan, but apart from keeping an eye on things around here, there’s really nothing anyone can do to help. I’m just so tired, I’ve been spending the past few nights at the hospital and I haven’t allowed myself to sleep. He’s only got days left now, I don’t want to miss it when he . . .” She looked away from Ivan and to the picture frame on her desk and when she spoke again her voice was trembling. “I just wish there was some way I could say good-bye to him, to let him know he’s not alone, that I’m by his side.” Her tears fell.

I went to her side and comforted her, feeling helpless and knowing that for once there was absolutely nothing I could do to help this friend. Or was there?

“Hold on a minute, Opal, maybe there is a way you can. I have an idea.” And with that I ran. ...

Elizabeth had made last-minute arrangements for Luke to sleep over at Sam’s house. She knew she needed to be alone that night; she could feel a change within her, a chill had entered her body and wouldn’t leave. She sat huddled up in her bed, wearing an oversized jumper covered by a blanket, desperate to keep warm.

Her stomach cramped with anticipation. The things that Ivan and Luke had said today had turned a key in her mind and had unlocked a chest of memories so terrifying that Elizabeth was afraid to close her eyes.

She gazed out the window through the open curtains at the moon, who gave her an encouraging nod, and she allowed herself to drift. She opened the lid of the chest, closed the lids of her eyes.

She was twelve years old. It was two weeks since her mother had brought her for a picnic in the
field, two weeks since she had told her she was going away, two weeks of waiting for her to come back. Outside Elizabeth’s bedroom, a screeching one-month-old Saoirse was held, hushed, and comforted by her father.

“Hush now, baby, hush.” She could hear his gentle tones getting louder and then quietening as he paced the
floor
of the bungalow in the late night hour. Outside, the wind howled, squeezing itself through the windows and door locks with a whistling sound. It raced in and danced around the rooms, taunting, teasing, and tickling Elizabeth as she lay in her bed, hands over her ears, tears falling down her cheeks.

Saoirse’s cries got louder, Brendan’s pleas got louder, and Elizabeth covered her head with her pillow.

“Please, Saoirse, please stop crying,” her father begged quietly and attempted a song, a lullaby that Elizabeth’s mother always sang to them. She clamped her hands over her ears harder, but still could hear Saoirse’s cries and her father’s tuneless song. Elizabeth sat up in her bed, her eyes stinging her from yet another night of tears and lack of sleep.

“You want your bottle?” her father asked gently over the roars. “No? Ah, love, what is it?” he asked in a pained voice. “I miss her too, love, I miss her too,” and he too began to cry. Saoirse, Brendan, and Elizabeth all cried for Gráinne together, yet all feeling alone, in their bungalow being blown about in the wind.

Suddenly, headlights appeared from the end of the long road. Elizabeth leaped out of her covers and sat at the end of her bed with her stomach twisted in excitement. It was her mother, it had to be, who else would be calling all the way down here at ten o’clock at night? Elizabeth bounced up and down at the end of her bed in delight.

The car pulled up outside the house, the car door opened, and out stepped Kathleen, Gráinne’s sister. Leaving the door open with the headlights still on and the wipers moving violently across the windscreen, she marched to the gate, pushed it open, causing it to creak, and banged on the door.

With a screaming Saoirse in his arms, Brendan opened the door. Elizabeth rushed to the keyhole of her bedroom door and looked out into the hall at the action.

“Is she here?” Kathleen demanded, without a hello or kind word.

“Sshh,” Brendan said. “I don’t want you waking Elizabeth.”

“As if she’s not already awake with all that screaming. What have you done to the poor child?” she asked incredulously.

“The child wants her mother,” he said in a raised voice. “Like us all,” he added in softer tones.

“Give her to me,” Kathleen said.

“You’re wet.” Brendan stepped away from her and his arms tightened around the tiny bundle.

“Is she here?” Kathleen asked again, her voice still angry. She was still standing outside the front door, she hadn’t asked to come in, and she hadn’t been invited.

“Of course she’s not here.” Brendan bounced Saoirse around, trying to calm her. “I thought you’d taken her to that magical place that would cure her forever,” he said angrily.

Kathleen sighed. “It was supposed to be the best place, Brendan, better than the other ones, anyhow. Anyway,” she mumbled the next few words, “she’s gone.”

“Gone? What do you mean gone?”

“She was missing this morning from her room, nobody’s seen her.”

“Has a habit of disappearing in the night, does your mother,” Brendan said angrily, rocking Saoirse. “Well, if she’s not where you sent her, you don’t need to look far from here. Sure won’t she be in Flanagan’s.”

Elizabeth’s eyes widened and she gasped. Her mother was here in Baile na gCroíthe; she hadn’t left her after all.

In between their bitter exchanges, Saoirse wailed.

“For Christ’s sake, Brendan, can you not quieten her?” Kathleen complained. “You know I can take the children, they can live with me and Alan in—”

“They’re
my
children and you won’t take them from me like you did Gráinne,” he bellowed. Saoirse’s wails quietened.

There was a long silence between the two.

“Be off with you.” Her father spoke weakly, as though his earlier boom had broken his voice.

The front door closed and Elizabeth watched as Kathleen banged the gate shut and got into her car. Elizabeth watched from the window as it sped off, the lights disappearing into the distance, along with Elizabeth’s hopes of going with her to see her mother.

A glimmer of hope remained. Her father had mentioned Flanagan’s. Elizabeth knew where that was, she passed it every day, going to school. She would pack her bag,
find her mother, and live with her away from her screaming little sister and father and they would go on adventures every day.

The handle on the door shook and she dived into bed and pretended to be asleep. Squeezing her eyes tightly shut, she decided that as soon as her father had gone to bed, she would make her own way to Flanagan’s.

She would sneak out into the night just like her mother.

“Are you sure this is going to work?” Opal stood against the wall of the hospital ward, her hands trembling as they clasped and unclasped themselves against her anxiety-filled stomach.

Ivan looked at her with uncertain eyes. “It’s worth a try.”

They could see Geoffrey in his private room through the glass in the corridor. He was hooked up to a ventilator, his mouth covered by the oxygen mask, and around him contraptions beeped while wires ran from his body into machines. In the center of all this action, his body lay still and calm, his chest rising and falling rhythmically. They were surrounded by that eerie sound that only hospitals provided, the sound of everyone waiting, of being in between one timeless place and another.

As soon as the nurses who were tending to Geoffrey opened the door to leave, Opal and Ivan entered.

“Here she is,” Olivia spoke from beside Geoffrey’s bed, as Opal entered.

His eyes shot open quickly and he began to look around wildly, searching the room.

“She’s on your left-hand side, dear, she’s holding your hand,” Olivia said gently.

Geoffrey attempted to speak, his sound coming out muffled from under the mask. Opal’s hand
flew to her mouth, her eyes
filled, and the lump in her throat was visible. It was a language that only Olivia could understand; the words of a dying man.

Olivia nodded as he made sounds; her eyes
filled and, when she spoke, Ivan could no longer stay in the room.

“He said to tell you, that his heart has ached every moment you were apart, dear Opal.”

Ivan stepped out of the room through the open door and walked as quickly as he could down the hall and out of the hospital.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Outside
Elizabeth’s bedroom
window on Fuchsia Lane, the rain began to fall, hitting off the bedroom window like pebbles and sounding like coins being jigged about in a collection jar. The wind began warming its vocal cords for the night and Elizabeth, tucked up in bed, was transported back to that night she had journeyed out in the late winter darkness to
find her mother.

She had packed her schoolbag with only a few things—underwear, two jumpers and skirts, the book her mother had given her, and her teddy. Her money box had revealed £
4.42
and after wrapping her raincoat around her favorite
floral dress and stepping into her red Wellington boots, she set out into the cold night. She climbed the small garden wall to avoid the sound of the gate alerting her father, who these days slept like the farmyard dog with one ear pricked. She walked alongside the bushes so as not to be spotted walking up the straight road; the wind pushed and pulled the branches, causing them to scrape her face and legs and causing wet kisses from soggy leaves to brush against her skin. The wind was vicious that night, it whipped her legs and stung her ears and cheeks, blowing against her face so hard it took her breath away. Within minutes of walking up the road, her
fingers, nose, and lips were numb and her body was freezing to the bone, but the thought of seeing her mother that night kept her going. And on she journeyed.

Twenty minutes later she arrived at the bridge to Baile na gCroíthe. She had never seen the town at eleven o’clock at night; it was like a ghost town, dark, empty, and silent, as if it were about to bear witness to something and never speak a word of it.