Tom
NO. WAIT. WHAT SHOULD I have said? It was an accident.
That’s the line, isn’t it? All the lies I’ve told fall down before me.
I can’t unpick them. Bloodied wool. Mammy in her bed.
Miltown and New York. A year of lying; I don’t even know what Bill thinks he knows about me anymore. What have I told him? What have I done?
All I’ve done is prepare for moments like this. But now that I am faced with it, I feel an unexpected wash of defeat. Of absolute exhaustion and nausea. Isn’t it always the way? You prepare for the worst, and when the worst happens, the preparations go away to nothing.
For a moment, they are quiet. Taking in what they have been told.
I see Bill joining up the dots. Understanding that perhaps Anna has always been dangerous, and that I still choose to leave her alone with Peggy; and I let her be alone with Betty; and that I have never had any control over her at all.
I could have left that lie in Kilmarra. That was the plan, wasn’t it?
But I can’t take it back now. They heard me.
I expect to be hit. I expect to be pushed down into the soil and kicked and left. But Bill stays calm.
‘Go down and get dressed, pet, and we’ll follow you.’
He tells Betty. I expect he will want to speak more frankly when she goes. It isn’t fair to make her go down to the house on her own. But Betty goes.
And once more, my expectations were wrong.
Every time Bill starts to speak, he falters, beaten by the gravity of it all.
I wish I could think of a way to talk this away, to erase what I said.
I wish he could ask me to hold him. To make it all better, the way he is always making things better for me.
This is something I know how to navigate.
I could show him, if he wanted to be shown.
‘Our mother used say that Anna was born during a storm. That was the reason for her swinging moods. For years, I believed that was true.’
I am trying to channel my mother now, who could talk anything down to nothing by a turn in the wind or an itch on the palm. Yes, the truths we are facing could be talked away, if I find the words.
‘I feel like my whole life revolves around her. I’ve to have a constant eye on her and her endless, delicate emotions. ’Tis cruel like, I don’t even know does she realise how much damage she’s done to me.’
Bill looks over to me, stony-eyed, as if to suggest his patience is up. It’s time to stop garnering pity. The jig is up, Tom, you’re caught out. I have to pull the veil off and reveal the hideous face of my family. Knock down everything I’ve worked so hard to build up.
‘Lillian Kealey died. And ’twas Anna killed her.’
I pray he will believe me.
My humiliation, my total and absolute heartbreak, and my greatest joy, when he says,
‘We’ll get this sorted out.’
I don’t know what to say to him. There were few times in my life I felt more fragile than this.
‘Do you believe in God, Tom?’
He asks me, and places a hand on my shoulder.
He is touching me. He is not afraid of me.
But what a question to ask. In a moment like this, how could I not believe in God?
When is He more present than in our guilt, or humiliation, or fear?
At His kindest, God is nothing more than a reminder of my failings, of my inability to be glorious. He comes to me often.
‘Of course, I believe in God.’
‘Then you had better pray for that girl.’
Given a moment of thought, I realise that since I met him, Bill has stood in as my God.