Chapter 13 #2
It’s Eileen with her three daughters, all five grandsons, and her granddaughter standing in front of what looks like a lake with mountains in the background.
The Scottish Highlands, maybe. Almost all of them have Eileen’s flaming red hair except for two of the boys who are towhead blond, probably from their father’s side.
The kids range in age from what looks like sixteen down to a baby perched on Eileen’s hip.
She’s laughing in the photo, her head thrown back, one hand on the baby and the other reaching toward one of the teenagers who’s clearly just said something funny.
She looks happy. Deep-down-in-the-marrow happy. It makes my chest ache with a weird mix of relief and homesickness.
“She’s doing okay then?” Marcus asks, his voice losing the teasing edge. He leans in just enough to see the photo.
“Better than okay,” I whisper, running my finger over the photo’s edge.
My dearest Annie,
I’m writing to you from Robyn’s kitchen table, which has become my unofficial office now that I’ve moved in with her and Tom.
The view from here is straight out to the bay, and this morning the water was so still it looked like glass.
I watched a heron stand in the shallows for twenty minutes without moving.
I’ve decided that’s what I want to be in my next life—a heron.
Patient and unbothered with excellent posture.
We’ve just come back from Scotland, which is why you’re getting the Edinburgh postcard.
Keira’s been wanting to take the boys to see the Highlands for ages, and Shauna convinced us all to make a week of it.
We rented a cottage near Loch Lomond—far too small for ten people, but that was half the fun.
Conor, who’s fifteen now and thinks he’s too old for family trips, spent the entire time pretending to be miserable until we took him to a rugby match in Glasgow.
Then he was insufferable in an entirely different way.
He’s on the county team now, did I tell you?
The younger boys—Christopher, Jamie, and Simon—spent most of the trip trying to catch fish with their bare hands in the loch.
They didn’t catch a single thing, but they scared off every fish in a two-mile radius.
Noel, who’s only three, kept trying to follow them into the water until Shauna threatened to tie him to a tree.
Bella, the baby, slept through most of it on my hip, which is where she’s happiest. She’s got my hair, poor thing. She looks like a little lit match!
I’ve been keeping busy here. More busy than I probably should be at sixty-two, but I don’t know how to sit still.
I help Robyn with the B&B she runs—making breakfasts, frying eggs, changing linens, chatting with the guests who always want to know the best pub in town.
I’ve started a small garden behind the house.
Tomatoes, herbs, flowers that shouldn’t grow this close to the sea but do anyway because they’re stubborn, like me.
On Thursdays I mind the boys while Shauna works at the surgery.
We go down to the beach and they build elaborate sandcastles that get destroyed by the tide before we leave, and they’re always shocked, every single time.
I love it. All of it. The noise, the sand in the carpet, the way my days are never my own but finally feel like they belong to me in a way they didn’t before.
You asked in your last letter if I ever feel lost, now that I’m back here.
And the answer is yes, sometimes. But I’ve learned something about being lost, Annie love—it’s not always a bad thing.
Sometimes being lost just means you’re between one version of yourself and the next.
That space is sacred. It’s where you get to be nobody and everybody all at once.
You’re allowed to be nowhere for a while.
You’re allowed to not know what comes next.
I think about what I would do if I could go back to twenty-five.
If I could stand where you’re standing now, in a new city with a whole life stretched out in front of me.
I spent so much of my youth trying to be a woman who was approved of, making sure that I never caused a scene. What a terrible waste of time.
Now, I’d be a total riot. I’d tell myself to be ridiculous.
I’d stay out until the sky turned lilac and the only people left are the poets and the lunatics and the trash collectors.
I’d kiss people I had no business kissing, just for the story of it.
I’d eat breakfast at midnight in a diner.
I’d wear the dress that’s too short and I’d dance until my feet bled because being young is temporary and you shouldn’t waste any of it on being sensible.
I’d laugh too loud and read books that made me cry on park benches and I wouldn’t care who saw.
I’d get my heart broken and probably break a few hearts myself—not on purpose, but because I didn’t know yet that you could want someone and still be wrong for them, that loving someone doesn’t mean you get to keep them.
I’d make spectacular, wonderful, loud mistakes, and then I’d wake up and make ten more, because that’s what your twenties are for.
They’re for being wrong about things. They’re for changing your mind.
They’re for wanting something desperately one week and forgetting why the next.
They are the most intimate, honest, beautiful nothingness you’ll ever have.
So don’t you dare be sensible, Annie love.
Go be a disaster. Go be electric. Go find out exactly how much trouble you can get into before the sun comes up.
Be the girl who cries at movies and laughs at funerals and doesn’t know the difference between being in love and being in love with the idea of being in love.
Be the girl who doesn’t have it figured out yet, because the girls who have it figured out at twenty-five are lying, and where’s the fun in that?
The ‘sensible’ life will be waiting for you when you’re sixty, but right now? Right now you get to be nowhere. And nowhere, as it turns out, is exactly where you need to be.
Slán is never forever, a stór. We’ll see each other again. Until then, keep writing. Keep being exactly who you are.
All my love,
Eileen
Robyn, Keira, Shauna, Conor, Christopher, Jamie, Simon, Noel, Jack and Bella send theirs too
I press the paper against my collarbone. God, I miss her. It’s a physical ache that sits heavy in my chest and makes me feel like I’m constantly walking uphill.
I’m so deeply jealous of Robyn and Keira and Shauna and the red-headed baby and all those boys with their muddy rugby kits and their bare-handed fishing attempts it’s almost embarrassing.
They get her every day. They get to walk into her kitchen and find fresh soda bread on the counter.
They get to hear her laugh and watch her garden and listen to her stories about growing up in Ireland when everything was different.
I took it for granted. All those years I had her, I just assumed she’d always be there, like a permanent fixture of my childhood, like the gravity that kept me from floating away.
And then comes the thought I’ve been trying not to have, the one that sits in my chest like a stone: I wish I missed my own mother this way.
I wish I thought about her as much as I think about Eileen. I wish when I got mail I hoped it was from her. I wish I could picture her face and feel this same warmth instead of this complicated tangle of guilt and resentment and something that might be love but feels more like obligation.
I know she loves me. I do. The fact that she’s called me nineteen hundred times since she tracked down my number proves that, or at least proves something.
But there’s always been this distance between us, this gap I could never figure out how to cross.
Growing up, I always felt like she was never truly happy to be a parent.
It’s as if she had a child because it was what you did in 1969 if you were Elaine Collier—you got married to one of the most successful men in Hollywood, you had his baby, you checked the boxes.
The Collier line needed continuing, as if we were actual royalty instead of just people with money and a name that opened doors in certain circles.
She didn’t have me because she wanted to be a mother. She had me because it was expected of her. And I spent my entire childhood trying to figure out how to be a daughter she could be proud of, one worth the trouble.
My father was worse. Is worse. He’s gotten harsher as he’s gotten older, as if age has stripped away whatever thin veneer of patience he used to have.
When I was little, he at least pretended to be interested in me, in my life.
He’d ask about school, about my friends, about what I wanted to be when I grew up.
But as I got older and it became apparent I wasn’t going to follow him into the family business—that I had no interest in becoming a director or a producer or an actor, that I didn’t want any part of that world—he stopped pretending.
By the time I graduated college, he’d made it abundantly clear that I was a disappointment. The least I could do was marry well. Marry rich. Bring some more status to the family, make myself useful that way. And I ruined that, too.
My father hasn’t called me once since I left. I don’t know if that hurts more or less than my mother’s constant attempts.
“What’s the word from the motherland?” Marcus asks. He’s leaning against the counter, cradling a mug of coffee.
I smile a little, folding the letter carefully. “She told me to be more ridiculous.”
Marcus raises an eyebrow. “This woman clearly shouldn’t be giving anyone advice.”
I stick my tongue out at him and his laugh echoes as he walks down the hallway to his room.
* * *
“Hey, Stanley.”