Gordon #2
It’s a Tuesday morning when Sílbhe calls.
Cora is scrubbing the grates on the hob and working through the “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” in her head.
Some sequences she remembers instinctively, others she is less sure of and wonders if she’s adding her own bits of choreography to fill the gaps in her memory.
“Cora, are you alone?” The voice on the other end of the phone is so familiar, even though they rarely talk.
Cora avoids making outgoing calls that will show up on the bill, but her mum seems to have taken her lack of communication as a cue not to ring too often.
And somehow, it’s easier that way. “Can you speak?” Cora looks about, as if her mother might know something she doesn’t.
“Yes?” she replies, almost a question.
“I’ve had a letter from Maia, darling. I know what’s going on.”
Cora sits on the arm of the sofa, winded. And then reflexively stands, glancing through to the kitchen window to check he’s not coming back in a gap between patients.
“Mum, I don’t think—I’m not sure I can do this right now.”
“Is it true?” Cora says nothing and the silence stretches out across the telephone wires that connect them.
“I wish I’d known.” Still Cora says nothing.
She wonders how much Maia has said. Wonders how much Sílbhe knows.
“I know you can’t access your bank account, so I’m going to send a check for Maia.
She can get the cash out for you, and I want you to use the money to buy tickets to come here. ”
Cora laughs, a quick, sharp burst of disbelief she hadn’t intended to escape her. “The children don’t have access to their accounts, Mum. He takes care of all that.”
“You mean they’ve never got it? The money I send for them.”
“I’m sure it’s probably all safely tucked away somewhere for when they’re older. But they can’t just go into a bank and withdraw it. They don’t have bank cards or anything like that.”
The line goes quiet for a moment. “But I could send you cash in the post? And you’d get that? He’s at work when the morning post arrives, yes?”
Cora sighs. “It’s not that easy. If I tried to leave, I’d lose the children. He gets someone at the practice to prescribe for me, it’s all over my records—antipsychotics or something.”
“You’re psychotic?”
“No, of course not. But if even my own mother has to ask…It’s his insurance policy.
He’s made it look like I’m mad so I wouldn’t get the children.
He’s told me.” Her mother is silent. “But none of this matters; it’s really not that bad.
I don’t know what Maia’s told you, but I’m fine and the children are well looked after.
They have clean clothes, plenty to eat, after-school clubs, ballet…
” Cora falters at her distortion; the lessons aren’t Maia’s choice.
But then she presses on. “He doesn’t touch them.
They have everything they could wish for.
Some children are living in poverty, you know? ”
“But it’s not right, Cora.” She is still looking out of the window.
The longer the phone call goes on, the more convinced she is that he’s about to round the corner and come into view.
Sometimes he puts his key in the lock silently, hoping to catch her out.
She imagines him standing just inside the front door, listening now, without her even knowing he’s there.
“Just a second,” she says, and places the receiver on the table, while she peeks into the hallway.
When she picks up again, she’s firmer. She should never have let herself be drawn in like this.
The shock of her mother knowing, of realizing Maia had told her, the Irish lilt of home, have all caught her off-guard.
“Mum, I’m sorry Maia’s worried you. She should never have said anything. Everything is fine.”
“Think about it Cora, please.”
Cora thinks about it all the time. About Gordon turning eighteen. It’s only eleven years away and she’s lived like this far longer than that already. But she doesn’t tell her mother any of this.
When Maia gets home from school, Cora puts on a cartoon for Gordon to watch, fixes him a snack, and then follows Maia up to her room. She’s sitting on her bed, using a corner of almost-smooth sandpaper taken from the design and technology workroom at school to buff her nails to a glassy shine.
“You wrote to Grandma?”
Maia stops polishing and looks up, her face expectant. “Will she help us?”
Cora kneels on the floor in front of her. “I know things could be better,” she says, “but do you understand what might happen if you start involving other people like that?”
Maia looks down, fingers the sandpaper. “What?”
“I wouldn’t be allowed to keep you. No one would believe me. Dad’s a doctor. He’d make things look a certain way and the courts would award him custody. I might not even be allowed to see you.” Maia doesn’t say anything. “Nothing he can do to me would be worse than that.”
Maia thinks of her mother crouching over the bowl on the kitchen floor.
“What?” Cora asks, seeing the look that passes across her daughter’s face.
“I saw. The night I was sick. I saw.”
Cora feels as though she may crumple, but instead she straightens her spine, draws in her core, elongates her breath, feels her diaphragm rise.
“Don’t do that,” Maia says.
“What?”
“That. The ballet thing. It’s meant to help you perform on stage, not to fool your own daughter.”
Cora slumps, softly. “Is there anything you don’t notice?”
Their eyes meet for a moment, and the same sad, closed-mouth smile passes between them.
Maia traces over a smoothed nail with her fingertip.
She sees her mother tilt her wrist to check the time and Maia looks out of her bedroom window, craning to glimpse the end of the cul-de-sac. “He’s not coming yet,” she says.
“It would always be worse—the worst thing—to lose you and Gordon. To not be here for you. I have a choice,” she says, “and this is my choice.” Maia raises her eyebrows. “I do. I know it’s not much, but I do. This is my choice. Every time.”
“But couldn’t we just say what he’s like? Tell them we want to be with you. Surely, we’d get a say?”
Cora shakes her head. “He’d say I was an unfit mother.
They can’t let you stay with someone they think might harm you or who might not take proper care.
And your brother…he might not even want to stay with me,” she says, her voice barely a whisper.
She blinks, trying not to let it show how much it hurts to admit this.
Maia squeezes her hand. “I’m sorry. This isn’t how I wanted things to be.
I never wanted you to grow up having to see things like—” She stops, because saying it out loud makes it more real, more awful.
“I hope you won’t hate me for it. When you’re older. I hope you won’t think I was weak or—”
“Mum!” Gordon’s voice interrupts, calling up the stairs. Cora stands, joints clicking where she’s been kneeling. “Mum!” louder this time, his impatience obscuring her reply.
Her mother calls every day that week, even though Cora has stopped answering and lets the phone ring out into the quiet house, ready to pick up only if it’s Gordon’s voice on the answering machine.
She knows her mother will not put her at risk by leaving a message and she’s grateful.
She doesn’t want to hear the things that will undermine the careful scaffold she’s erected around her existence.
Without anyone to question it, she can almost let herself believe it’s normal.
But her mother’s words threaten the nuts and bolts, leaving her feeling that scaffold could all come crashing down.
And where would she be then? Still in the same place, in the same predicament, with no route out.
Five days after she last picked up the phone to her mother, there is a knock at the door and when Cora opens it, she sees a police officer, his hat beneath his arm.
She notices this detail and feels relieved, recalling something her father once said.
About how they only leave their hat on if they’ve come to tell you someone has died.
The police officer’s hair is cropped close to his head, and she can almost hear the buzz of the clippers he must use each morning, eyes tracking the razor’s progress in the mirror, the sink below lined with a thin veil of fuzz.
He is shuffley-footed as he tells her why he’s there, and it’s only when Cora says that her mother has dementia, explains how she is prone to making things up, that his face eases.
“Oh, thank God,” he laughs and then catches himself.
“Sorry, no offense. I didn’t mean it like that.
It’s just it would have been really awkward if it was true.
He’s my doctor. We had to draw straws down at the station to see who’d come out to this one,” he says.
“I’m the new boy. I think I’ll always draw the short one until someone else comes along. ”
She watches for a moment as he walks back up the drive. When he reaches the end, he returns his hat to his head. And she feels it then. The quiet death of something.