Chapter 96
96
GAVIN
T he treadmill was at a six percent incline and the speed was at eight, pushing Gavin to the point where his legs burned. Even breaths were starting to slip away but he kept going, willing himself to get lost in Arctic Monkeys’ brilliant album AM. Singer Alex Turner was a friend and hadn’t taken the least offense to Gavin’s dig at his voice on the Sean Reynolds chat show. Their friendship was based on playful slagging like that, though it was usually done privately.
As he swiped at the sweat dripping down his forehead and temples, a flash of the previous night’s dream came to him. It was fleeting, though, and he struggled to grasp what it had been. But with each increasingly heavy footfall the image repeated in his mind. He finally pulled the emergency stop cord on the machine, took several gulps of water, and headed to his writing room.
He woke the MacBook Pro and opened a search engine. But his fingers hesitated over the keyboard. Suddenly, he felt ridiculous. This dream had sent him chasing after . . . what?
Something about the rose in his mother’s hair. But what did it have to do with anything? He couldn’t remember her ever having worn flowers in her hair, though she had loved to garden and bring fresh flowers inside.
He meditated on the particular connection between roses and his mother for several minutes. That soon led to another excavated memory, that of his normally non-demonstrative father calling his mother “my little rose” when he thought the children were out of earshot.
“Rose,” Gavin said aloud.
He then typed “Rose McManus” into the search engine.
The results were nothing he connected with. He then typed in “Rose” with his mother’s maiden name and found even fewer hits. He thought for a moment more and then typed in “my little rose” and “flowers.”
When the screen refreshed, there was only one result that jumped out at him. It was a phone directory listing for “My Little Rose Flower Shop” in County Wexford. The exact town was called Rosslare Strand, a place he had never been. He remembered that she had often spoken about the garden she could have had if only they lived in sunnier southern Ireland. A town like Rosslare, in the southeastern part of the country, was exactly where she could grow those treasured flowers.
He knew this was where he would find his mother.
The mother who had abandoned her family after the car crash that had killed his baby sister. The mother who by running away had motivated him to funnel his anger and sadness and wounded sensitivity into becoming one of the most famous rock singers of his time.