Julian #2
Sometimes, in the middle of the night, Julian climbs into bed with Maia, snuggling his small body against her.
He falls asleep twirling her hair around his fingers in the dark, his soft, wispy breath on the back of her neck.
On those nights, she stays awake as long as she can, and only when she feels her eyes beginning to close against her will does she carry Julian back to his own bed.
She lays him down, covers him over, then returns to her crinkling waterproof sheets.
Each morning, she strips her bed, loads the linens into the washing machine and when she gets home from school, they have been blown crisp by the wind, and Grandma Sílbhe has put them back on her bed again.
Her shame is held wordlessly between them, even though she knows she isn’t judged for it.
“Who wouldn’t after what you’ve been through?
” her grandmother said the first time. But still, Julian is nine years younger and keeps his bedsheets dry.
Sometimes, she runs her hand across his mattress to check, and then feels bad for being disappointed.
It’s not the retirement Sílbhe had planned.
She’d imagined a slow winding-down into the penultimate stage of life.
Wasn’t that how it went? Childhood, early adulthood, marriage, children, midlife, retirement, until finally…
But that was before the children arrived.
Would she have used that time differently had she known?
Sewn more quilts, read more books, gone to Venice?
Found love again, she thinks, in more honest moments.
She’d known Cian since school. There was always something between them.
She can still remember his soft, boyish lips at sixteen, simultaneously eager and gentle.
But then she’d met Hugh, and Cian had met…
She can’t remember her name now. It was so long ago, or perhaps she was just too taken with Hugh to care.
They’d lost touch. But then, a few years ago, in the aftermath of torrential rain, she’d taken a different route home when the bridge was closed, and her car had hiccupped to a stop on the unfamiliar ribbon of gray tarmac that threaded its way through the craggy land.
She’d sat for a while, let the engine click and sigh as it cooled, but when she turned the key, there was still nothing, so she set off on foot.
A mile up the road, the light beginning to fade, she’d seen the silhouette of a house emerging from behind a hill as she drew closer.
It was unlit, but still, she’d walked around its side, hoping she might find someone who could help.
There was a small studio, separate from the main building, a glow at the window.
She’d knocked, and when Cian came to the door she’d felt relief, surprise.
But also something else: like an expectation being met, as though somewhere in the background of those years since Hugh had passed she’d known their paths would cross again.
Cian had smiled, opened his arms—a gesture both passive and confident—requiring her to choose to step into them.
“Well, if I didn’t always know you’d be turning up at my door like this someday. What took you so long?” he said. “Will we go over to the house? I’ll turn off the soldering iron and we can go over and have a drink.”
He unplugged the iron, a black whisper of smoke fading from its tip, and she noticed the stack of small, cream boxes embossed with his last name then.
She recognized them from the window of the jewelers down in the town, but she’d never made the connection; Brennan isn’t an uncommon name around here.
She’d seen him a few more times. Cian was interested and interesting, with things to say about books and art and politics, and when he asked her about her life with Hugh—about her daughter in England—he did so with warmth and generosity.
Meeting Cian again felt like cracking open an oyster and finding a pearl inside.
Dropping her home after dinner one night, he reached across the space between their seats, and she found herself leaning toward him too.
His kiss felt familiar, and when she went inside, she stood with her back against the closed door, giddy, like a teenager again.
That night, she sat at her dresser, ran a finger across her lips, then turned toward the photo of Hugh, gone over twenty years.
His smile in the picture always seemed to be encouraging her.
Go on, do it. What have you got to lose?
Maybe she was just seeing what she wanted to see, she told herself.
Foolish old woman. But still, she found herself gently twisting the rings from her finger and placing them in the small ceramic dish he’d bought her one Christmas. There.
But then, only a few days later, she received the call.
A call that had seen her frantically throwing things into a suitcase, forgetting what she really needed; she’d had to buy underwear at the airport.
When they returned a few weeks later, she was overwhelmed.
By the loss of her own beloved daughter.
By caring for two children newly afraid of the dark, who flinched when a log popped and hissed on the fire, and flew together like magnets if she dropped a saucepan lid.
And the idea of Cian Brennan…well, she’d barely stopped to consider it.
He’d come over late one evening when Maia and Julian were finally asleep.
She’d stood in the doorway, him in the cold.
She only realizes now, all this time later, that he was in shirtsleeves, his coat probably in the car; he’d expected to be invited in.
She told him in short, halting sentences what had happened, trying to choose words and phrases that wouldn’t conjure images in his head.
But still, it was enough. He opened his arms to her, but she stayed in the doorway.
“Cian, about—” She knew us was the right word to use, but she couldn’t. She felt for her wedding ring and his gaze dropped to her hands.
“Us?” he asked. And then, palms up in submission, he said, “I understand. It’s not our time.
” She nodded, grateful he’d said it for her.
“But if you need me. For anything. Anything at all,” and she bent her head again and he knew he’d said enough.
He touched her arm, his rough hand crackling against the static fibers of her wool sweater, and then he’d turned to get back in his car.
A part of her wanted to stay on the threshold between two worlds and watch him go, but the open door was letting cold air into the house, and she didn’t want to risk the children waking and not finding her where they expected.
She doesn’t resent them, even now, two years on. Only him—their father. And God.
She feels such a ferocious need to inhabit her current life that it dispels tiredness, casts off any idea of impending retirement, of self-interest, of following her own path.
She’s all they have. Her life was not set up for having young children again.
She’s forty-five minutes from the nearest secondary school and although Maia could catch the bus the last leg of the journey, it would only save twenty minutes and Sílbhe doesn’t seek shortcuts.
Not where they’re concerned. Their evenings are taken up with ballet, an art club for Julian.
Counseling for each of them. Her included, although she fits her own sessions in during the day while they’re at school, taking an early morning slot so they don’t have to witness her looking puffy-eyed at pickup.
Heroic, brave, some young woman on the radio called her when she’d interviewed Sílbhe about domestic homicide, but that wasn’t how it felt.
She feels like she’s been spun around in the washer, then hung out to be blown dry with Maia’s sheets on the line.
But she’s also energized, forced into an unasked-for second youth.
What else could she do? What else would anyone do?