Broken Country (Reese’s Book Club)

42. Tuesday

Tuesday

When Bobby died, I left Frank for a while. My parents were living in Ireland by then and I went over for a visit.

As soon as I got there, I realized I didn’t want to come back.

“It’s helping me to be here,” I told Frank on the phone, soon after I’d arrived.

“Then you should stay,” Frank said, as I had known he would. “I want you to stay.”

The weeks ticked by. Our phone calls dwindled to almost nothing, Frank has never liked talking on the phone. I convinced myself this was a good thing, the only way for us to recover from what had happened was to stay apart. Frank didn’t have to wake up next to me every morning, knowing part of me would always blame him for not watching over Bobby. And I didn’t have to pretend I believed the story we told everyone, that it was an accident, accidents were an unfortunate, sometimes tragic part of farm life. Just look what happened to Frank’s mother. Instead, we could lick our wounds in private.

I came home because of Jimmy.

Nina traveled all the way to Cork to tell me how far things had fallen since I’d left. Jimmy had started drinking heavily again, she said. He was asked to leave the pub almost every night for picking fights and being obnoxious, as she put it. He had been found wandering through the village in the middle of the night, talking to himself. It felt as if he were losing his mind.

“Why, though?” my mother had asked her, not understanding. Bobby was our child, mine and Frank’s. There was no reason for Jimmy to fall apart.

“Isn’t it obvious? Jimmy has always blamed himself for what happened to Bobby. He thinks he should have watched over him. And he needs to know Frank hasn’t lost his wife as well as his son,” Nina said.

Even now, Jimmy still needs reassurance our shrunken family will stay the same. And that’s impossible to give. For the truth is, I’m not thinking about Frank, not if I can help it. I’m thinking about Gabriel.

The first time we made love was frantic and fevered, driven by our bodies more than our minds. Our minds, until then, had been trying to say no. It is different today.

We undress slowly and stand naked before each other. Anticipation that is exquisite, almost painful. An uprush of feeling, as if all our senses are magnified. I take my time to kiss the parts of him I have been noticing these past months, remembering how I loved them: his nose, his cheekbones, his prominent Adam’s apple. I know he is doing the same when he traces my profile with his forefinger, pausing at the channel above my top lip, which he used to say was exactly the right shape and size for his fingertip.

We move to the bed but continue our gentle rediscovery of one another. It feels dreamlike, this touching and kissing, we are suspended between fact and fantasy in our own perfect no-man’s-land.

When Gabriel is inside me, raised up on his hands, pressing into me with the same slow, deep rhythm of long ago, it is almost more than I can bear. I am so immersed in the sensation of this, in the familiarity of our two bodies being together once more. Perhaps he sees pain on my face for Gabriel asks: “What’s wrong?”

The only thing I can find to explain is: “I remember.”

There is such feeling in his voice when Gabriel says: “I remember.”

And there’s no need to say anything else.

I was right, our lovemaking is more than sex, more than love, it is pure, unadulterated nostalgia and there is nothing more intoxicating than that. I wonder if it is always like this when you sleep with someone you once loved long ago. The knowledge of that first time is hardwired into your physiology. It feels raw and right and so real, everything else fades, just the two of us in high relief. In bed I feel more myself with Gabriel, or rather, more like the carefree young woman I was before heartbreak altered me, and tragedy molded me into someone I never wanted to be. It’s addictive, this temporary shedding of skin, this glimpse of the person Gabriel remembers.

With him, for a few hours, I get to be unbroken.

Afterward, we lie in each other’s arms until it’s time for me to collect Leo. We keep the bedroom curtains closed, existing in a lamplit glow like creatures of night. And we talk. We talk about everything.

I ask him about his first book deal, what it felt like being published at twenty-four.

“For a long time, I felt like an impostor. That I hadn’t earned it. Emperor’s new clothes kind of thing.”

“And now?”

He smiles. “Good days and bad days. You think that the second and third will be easier. Not in my experience. If anything, they get harder.” He pauses. Looks at me. “Why aren’t you writing poetry?”

“How do you know I’m not?”

“I just know.”

His voice when he says this—quiet, considered, compassionate—takes me right back. Gabriel understands what it feels like to want something so badly and be afraid you’ll never get it. The undertow that pulses beneath the dream, the voice of doubt— What if I’m not good enough? The temptation to give up before you have had time to find out. It was once the thing that bound us together.

“It’s not that I don’t want to” is the only thing I can find to say.

I associate poetry with moments of great happiness in my life: As a young woman who loved to daydream, then during that first passionate love affair with Gabriel, and even, in snatched moments, as a young mother when I’d scribble lines down, here and there.

If I were to answer Gabriel properly I would say: Because I’m scared. Because when I open up a blank page I think I’m only going to see one thing. Bobby.

Gabriel takes my hand. “It’s there for you waiting, whenever you’re ready. It never really goes away.”

He tells me about Louisa and the guilt he feels over their failed marriage, even though she was the one who fell in love with someone else. “It is an awful thing,” he says, “when the love between you is uneven. I pretended, of course, but Louisa wasn’t fooled. I know I hurt her.”

We talk about Leo, his struggle to fit in at the village school. How we need to find a way of changing that.

I say out loud the thing I most dread. “Do you think you should move to the States? So Leo can be close to his mother?”

Gabriel looks at me in shock. “How can you say that? After this?”

“Because it scares me.”

“It’s not going to happen. Not now.”

“You promise?”

“I do.”

It is only the second day of our affair and we are filled with hope and optimism.

How quickly I have become used to my double life. Yesterday, walking into the playground, I worried the guilt must be written on my face; this afternoon, I’m already at ease. Greeting Leo with a quick hug, not caring about the eyes of the other waiting mothers whose scrutiny I always feel, no matter how much they try to hide it. I hear the question that buzzes between them in my absence—what must it be like spending time with a child, day after day, who is not your own? A boy not so far off in age from the one you lost?

It is not a question I could easily answer. Leo is very different to Bobby. For one thing, he seems young for his age, whereas Bobby, who spent so much of his time helping the men on the farm, often seemed older than his years. In the brief time I have with Leo after school each day, my concern is only that I should make his life a little more enjoyable. Curb the missing of his mother, for a short while, if I can.

We are in the kitchen waiting for a shepherd’s pie to cook when Gabriel comes in. He spies a bag of sweets on the kitchen table between us and snatches it up.

“You might have said,” he says, popping a humbug into his mouth.

Leo grins up at him, he loves it when Gabriel is around. “Sorry, Dad. We went to the shop after school.”

“What are you playing?”

Leo and I are midway through a card game, writing down our scores on a piece of paper.

“Rummy.”

“I used to love that.” He pulls out a chair and sits down opposite us. “Room for a third?”

“More the merrier,” I say, and I don’t know who is more elated—me or Leo.

Is it wrong, the surge of contentment I feel as I shuffle the pack and deal out cards to Gabriel, to Leo, to me? The sweet simplicity of us as a three, two adults, one child, engaged in a game I once played with my own parents.

Every day can be like this. Every day can be me and my borrowed family.