Chapter 24
SHE TOOK THE CHAIR BY LYDIA’S BED, HER FACE expressionless.
She wore a blue jacket and grey skirt. Her eyes were red and swollen, her hands tight around the handle of the bag she perched on her lap.
Lydia said nothing, not knowing what to expect, or the right thing to say, or if there even was a right thing.
Eventually Kathleen spoke. ‘You hurt your face,’ she said. No smile, but no anger either. Her voice was quiet and calm.
‘I fell. I’m OK.’
‘And the baby?’
‘She’s in the neonatal ward. They’re going to keep her for a while. She’s very tiny, but I think she’s OK too.’
Kathleen nodded, her gaze dropping to the handbag. More silence. Eventually she spoke again. ‘I was hard on you,’ she said, her voice little more than a whisper. ‘I said things I shouldn’t have.’
She opened the bag and took a tissue from it and pressed it to her eyes in turn. She looked up, and Lydia saw the raw grief. Still in so much pain.
‘I miss him.’ Kathleen wept. ‘Every day, every minute. He’s always in my head.
I’m gone mad with missing him.’ She gave a wet sniff.
‘But I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.
I shouldn’t.’ Pressing her lips together.
Another sniff. ‘I want to say sorry, Lydia. I want to say how sorry I am for being so hard on you.’
‘I’m sorry too, Kathleen. I miss him so much.’ Both crying now, Lydia using the sheet to dab her eyes until Kathleen found another tissue and passed it over.
‘I wanted a local girl for Damien,’ she said, through her tears. ‘I wanted him to get married and stay in his house, like Tom had. I was afraid he might move to Dublin – and then when he didn’t, when he bought Chance House instead, I was afraid he’d lose everything.’
She pulled out fresh tissues, handed one to Lydia.
‘Damien told me buying the house was all his idea, but I didn’t believe him.
I got it into my head that you were behind it, and I didn’t want anyone telling me I was wrong.
And then, when we lost him—’ She broke off, interrupted by fresh tears, and Lydia waited.
‘When we lost him, I told myself it wouldn’t have happened if he’d never met you. I needed to make sense of it. I needed someone to blame, so I blamed you.
‘When Marian rang us earlier to give us your news, it – I don’t know, maybe it was the shock I needed. I thought if anything happened to the baby, to Damien’s baby, then maybe it would be my fault, for treating you so badly.’
‘No,’ Lydia put in quickly. ‘She’ll be fine, Kathleen. None of this is your fault.’
‘I was very unkind,’ Kathleen said, ‘and you didn’t deserve it, and I’m sorry, Lydia. I’m very sorry. I am truly sorry.’
She put out a hand blindly, and Lydia caught it. The skin was rough and cold. ‘Can we be friends?’ she asked Lydia. ‘Can we do that? I don’t want to lose my grandchild too.’
‘I’d love that, Kathleen.’ Lydia found the bell to summon the nurse. ‘We’ll go to see her.’
‘Brendan is waiting outside. Can he come too?’ So the three of them travelled to the incubator, Brendan in his good suit waiting at the window for his turn while Kathleen saw her granddaughter for the first time.
‘She has his chin. She has Damien’s chin. It’s my father’s chin too.’
The nurse was a different one since Lydia’s last visit. ‘She’s a strong little thing,’ she told them. ‘Whatever you did during your pregnancy,’ she said to Lydia, ‘she came on really well.’
‘Yoga,’ Kathleen said. ‘Lydia is a yoga teacher. And she cycles too.’ The nurse said that must be it, plenty of exercise, and Lydia understood that Kathleen was doing what she could to mend fences.
Brendan, when it was his turn to come in, gazed silently into the incubator for what felt like a long time to Lydia. He swallowed a few times. He blinked rapidly. ‘Bless her,’ he said eventually, his voice unsteady. ‘Tiny little thing.’
Did he see his son in her face? Did he see Damien’s chin? Maybe.
‘You and Kathleen are alright now,’ he said, his eyes still on his new granddaughter.
‘We are, Brendan. We’re fine now.’
She was sure when they left she’d collapse into sleep, but it didn’t come, or not right away.
Instead she thought about Kathleen, and what it must have taken for her to come to the hospital and say all she’d said. She hoped it would give her some peace.
She thought about her daughter, spending her first night out of the womb under the same roof as her mother. In good shape, and soon, hopefully, allowed home to Chance House.
Home to Chance House.
She thought about Andrew, and the idea he’d mooted that she’d turned down, shying away from taking on that enormous project by herself.
But now, after one of the most momentous days of her life, maybe because of the day’s dramatic happenings, it was beginning to seem like something she could tackle – with lots of help.
Could it be the different life she needed?
Finally, she sifted through the people she’d come to know since relocating from Dublin, trying to find one who might help her with the baby, if it turned out that she was to stay living in Chance House.
Someone reliable and available. Someone she could live with – because whoever she chose would need to move into the apartment, at least for a while.
And just before she drifted towards sleep, a name came to her.