Tangled Up In You (Rogue #1)

Chapter 97

97

GAVIN

T he small village of Rosslare was a seaside resort, attracting local tourism to its swimming beaches and golf courses. Gavin drove through the town proper, noting the abundance of cheery yellow-painted buildings edging around the coast, before finding his way to the outskirts. It was late afternoon when he pulled the Mercedes to a stop in front of the address listed for the My Little Rose Flower Shop. It had only taken two hours to drive south to this spot. His mother had been an easy drive away all this time.

The flower shop was a private home with every bit of land surrounding it used for gardening, either in planters, in neat rows in the earth, or in a greenhouse. Though there was a small plaque noting that the home also housed the business of My Little Rose Flower Shop, it was clear that whatever was sold was secondary to the pleasure of gardening.

He took a deep breath and told himself to get out of the car and approach the front door. But he stayed quite still, comfortably ensconced in the rich leather of the driver’s seat, his thoughts drifting.

He called to mind the way he had comforted himself as a child with the stories of other musicians who had lost, or been neglected by, their mothers. If those artists had had a stable upbringing, with their mothers present for them, it was doubtful that they would have been compelled to create the way they had. Or if they had ended up as musicians, perhaps their work would have lacked the fire that their childhood losses stoked.

It had been an escape, a fantasy, to identify with the list of talented artists that had turned their pain into something bigger to share with the world. And if he were honest, he’d admit that he had gone even further than identifying with them. At some point, he had twisted his own pain into an obsession for the exact purpose of having something to write about.

He and Conor had often talked of artists they admired, and how when they got to a certain age they became fat with success and complacent in their music. They became uninspired and repetitive, or just plain dull. At the corners of Gavin’s mind, he had worried that if he had a resolution with his mother, he might lose the thing that had driven him to creative heights. Sophie had often urged him to seek out his mother and he had been stubborn in his refusal, claiming it was his mother’s responsibility to make the first move. And while he did sincerely believe this, there was a part of him that feared he’d have nothing left to say if the wound he had so carefully cultivated over the years closed over. Three-quarters of an hour passed before Gavin found the courage to get out of the car and make his way up the cobblestone path toward the house.

The Kelly-green front door was partially open. Looking inside, he could see the afternoon sunlight pouring through the window, casting a warm golden glow over the small front room.

There was no one there to greet him, though he could hear noises at the outside rear of the house. Figuring there was nothing left to lose now, he stepped inside and took in his surroundings.

The room was sparsely furnished with a loveseat, a single recliner, and a side table in between. There was a battered steamer trunk positioned as a coffee table of sorts in front of the sitting area. A long, narrow table sat under the large bay window. Two tall bookcases hugged the walls, and fine white lace curtains hung pulled back on either side of the window.

A large, scarred butcher-block counter, served as a bridge between the front room and a partially visible kitchen.

But his eyes lingered on the pale pink roses in small mismatched vases on every surface, even crammed into nooks on the bookcases. A quick estimate put the number of vases scattered throughout the room at nearly three dozen.

The mini arrangements, along with the well-worn but comfortable surroundings, complete with framed Georgia O’Keeffe prints, gave him a sense of familiarity.

The front door was pulled all the way open then, as a plump woman, her brown curls strewn with gray, entered the room. As she looked up and made eye contact with Gavin, she dropped the large bunch of long stem white tulips in her hands, each stem making a dull thud on the wood floor as they scattered.

Gavin felt a sudden rush of bravado.

“Hello . . . Ma,” he said, nodding slightly.

Joy filled her face as her eyes welled with tears. She brought shaking fingers to her lips. Within a moment, she recovered herself.

“Gavin,” she said brightly. “My Gavin.”

She went to him without hesitation and wrapped her arms around him, locking his arms into an awkward embrace.

Gavin had waited so long, had hoped for this reception for so many years. But now that it was here, he saw clearly that nothing was ever resolved this simply. He looked down at the woman gripping him with familiarity, her face buried into his chest. He felt nothing.

Gently, he pulled away and looked at this stranger. Her face fell, but she shook it off with a small smile.

“Would you like a cuppa?” she asked.

“Sure, I’ll take tea,” he replied, glad for the delay this nicety would afford.

“I’ll be back in a sec. Sit down, please.”

After she left the room, he spotted several old-fashioned photo albums on the side table. Curious to see what she held dear, he flipped open a book at random.

A newspaper clipping pasted to black paper caught him off guard. It was a review of the last show Rogue had in Dublin, complete with a photo of him on stage, sweat dripping down his neck as he cradled the microphone in his hands. His eyes were closed in the shot, his face typically intense with the emotion of the song.

He quickly leafed through the other pages, finding one article after another that centered on him in some way. Then he came to the full-page shot of him and Sophie on their wedding day. It was the candid photo that most of the tabloids had featured. They had stolen away from the reception for what they thought was a private moment. They stood close together under the shade of a tree, he in his bespoke dark suit and she in her elegant wedding gown. Smiles lit up their faces as she grabbed his backside playfully.

“Oh, that’s my favorite, too,” Bernadette McManus said as she returned with a tray of tea and placed it on the steamer trunk. “Your Sophie seems like a wonderful girl. And so very beautiful, isn’t she?”

Gavin nodded dumbly.

“Sit, sit,” she said, full of nervous energy.

He gestured for her to take her seat first and then followed by sitting as well. They both reached for a cup of tea at the same moment, and Bernadette let out a giggle. It occurred to Gavin that she sounded childish and not at all how he remembered. Definitely not maternal. And then he caught the distinctive scent of whiskey, which triggered a sense memory he had long forgotten. Or buried. But now he clearly remembered that his mother had invariably taken not a splash of milk, but rather a shot of whiskey in her tea. It had been the accepted norm in their house, even when his father prepared her morning cup.

“Care to add a taste of whiskey to my cup as well?” Gavin asked with a conspiratorial wink.

She smiled eagerly. “Yes, of course. One more sec, then.” She jumped up and took his cup with her.

He watched with distraction as she left the room, trying to decipher the memories rushing back to him. It wasn’t exactly that his mother was a drunk, but there was suddenly too much familiarity about alcohol. How had that never come to the forefront of his consciousness before now? Had he really suppressed it in his desire to anoint her to some sort of sainthood rather than acknowledge such a major flaw? He had always excused her running away as her reaction to the traumatic loss of her daughter. He had romanticized her pain and convinced himself that with time she would return, healed and ready to be a mother to him again. But the awareness of her reliance on alcohol now lent a different filter to things. He sighed audibly and looked back at the scrapbook to distract himself.

He came upon a clipping of Rogue’s sold-out Wembley show. It had taken place after their last tour and was recorded as a combination CD/DVD package to fulfill their obligations to the label to produce another album. Ninety thousand fans had joined them that evening for the performance of their career. They had brought the house down in a wide-ranging two-and-a-half-hour concert celebration. That level of success was what he had hungered after for so many years precisely so that his mother might understand who he’d come to be, and therefore want to seek him out. But that hadn’t happened.

“I always knew you’d do something big, you know,” she said as she returned. She handed him his spiked tea. “I knew you had it in you, just waiting to come out.”

“That’s grand and all, but can we go back a few steps here?” he said, unable to help himself.

“You’re right, I know it.” She nodded shortly and lowered her eyes deferentially as if accepting a scolding from a schoolmaster. “Where shall I start, then?”

“Tell me about the day you left and never came back.”