Chapter 12 #2
Later, as the car whines up the hill and he sits forward in the driver’s seat, face up at the windscreen focusing on the bits of road he glimpses in the moment after the wipers have passed across, she tells him about work.
About the regulars who come in and order the same sandwich every day.
“Mrs. McCarthy from the hardware store. You know her?”
“Know of,” Cian says.
“She went to pay this morning and said, ‘Oh, look now, it’s one of yours,’ as she handed over a coin in sterling.”
“Oh?” His eyes are still on the road, but she knows he’s listening, guessing she has more to say.
“We get them every now and then. Rita doesn’t mind exchanging them when the rate’s in our favor, though maybe that’ll change once we switch over to euros.”
Cian turns the blower down a notch and it’s quieter, the rush of air filling the space between them less intense. “I’ll turn it back up if it starts to fog over,” he tells her. And then, “You’ve mixed feelings?”
She doesn’t say anything, only feels her eyes prickle unexpectedly. He glances across. Sílbhe’s told him the regulars call her the English Girl, and he wonders if she still hankers for home.
“Yeah. I’m just being silly, though.”
He reaches over, touches her arm. “Small things like these, they’re a connection, aren’t they.”
“I still miss her.” Her voice splinters as she says the words. She wipes at her face with the scratchy wool of her winter coat.
“I only met your mam down in the town a time or two, when she was still just a wee small thing. But you know, Maia, if you ever get to wanting to talk about her—how you remember her, like—then I’d want to hear. Although staying quiet…she’s just as much in your heart that way too, of course.”
Maia smiles at Cian’s tender awkwardness and at being given this opportunity to remember, to say the good bits out loud. “She was beautiful. And even though she never danced after—after she had us, she had this grace. You could just tell.”
Cian only nods his head, so she goes on.
“And she loved books. He didn’t let her have her own, but she liked reading to me, my books.
Every night before he came home. Anne of Green Gables.
Little Women. To Kill a Mockingbird. She was still reading to me—to us—right up until the end.
Whatever I chose from the school library.
She never judged, never said, Not this one, or, You shouldn’t be reading that.
I can still remember it. That feeling of being read to, of being wrapped up in her voice, those words, whatever place the story had taken us to.
It sounds stupid, but it was like a magic carpet. ”
“Getting away from it all for a time?”
“Yeah, as if we’d actually gone somewhere together.
I mean, away from that house, from him.” She stares at the flakes splodging against her window, at the gentle etching of Cian’s reflection caught in the glass.
“She was a good mum. She wanted the best for us. That’s why she stayed.
” She wipes at her face again. “I hate that it’s all—I was only going to tell you the good stuff.
But it’s all tied up with him. I never knew her without him. Or only for those weeks in the refuge.”
“How was she then?”
“I can hardly remember. There were so many other families—women and children—crammed in. Some of them we had something in common with. Beyond that, I mean. But others we’d just try to work around.
They weren’t necessarily who we’d have chosen to share a kitchen with.
And people weren’t always at their best. Everyone’d been through a lot.
Mum had someone to talk to about stuff while we were there—a case worker or something—but with us she was just Mum.
I think she must have been scared, though. ”
“For sure,” Cian says, shifting gear to slow for an oncoming car.
“I’d never really been scared. For myself, I mean, before that.
But I was once we’d gone there. They came sometimes.
The men. I don’t know how they found out where their wives were, but they came and banged on the door and shouted.
Not him, others. But I felt like he might, at any moment.
Or that he might snatch me off the street on my way back from school. ”
“Was it just the once? That you stayed there?”
“Yeah. But then she got a letter. From the court or something. And she knew he’d probably get custody. So we went home and part of me was relieved.”
Cian nods. “Understandable.”
Maia focuses on the windscreen. On the snow and the white edgeless landscape beyond. “I was fourteen when it happened; Julian’s age now.”
“You don’t have to tell me, you know,” he says. “But you can. If it helps.”
“How much do you know?” she asks.
“Not a lot. It wasn’t reported in Ireland. And the internet wasn’t about in the same way. Your grandmother told me a bit, but I didn’t want to, well, you know, pry. But I hear her being interviewed on the radio now and again. Believe it or not, I have Woman’s Hour on every morning in my studio.”
He lets out a small chuckle and Maia laughs too. “I should’ve guessed.”
He smiles. “I think a lot of men listen in, you know.”
“What do you hear? What does she say, I mean? Grandma Sílbhe.”
“She said the most dangerous time is just before a woman leaves, or just after. That that’s the time when the—the risk to life is greatest,” he says, not knowing how to tread around it, how to find the right words.
“She said that’s why women stay, because leaving a man like that is even more dangerous. ”
“He was always awful to her,” she says. “But not like—I hadn’t known what he might be capable of, until that night.
We were in the next room. He’d put something in front of the door, so I couldn’t get in.
I couldn’t get to her. I couldn’t help her.
I put my hands over Julian’s ears. But that meant I couldn’t cover my own. So I heard.”
Cian shakes his head.
“The sounds. Even now, I can hear them. They replay in my mind like a tape on loop. I don’t know how he’d found out we were leaving again.”
“He was a doctor?”
“Yeah,” she says. And she knows the implication.
That there were endless ways he might have found out.
That his practice—his colleagues—may have even had links with the refuge, with caring for the women there.
It’s something she’s often thought about.
Her mother’s situation was even more impossible because of what he did.
Who he was. “Bastard,” she adds, the word catching in her throat.
Cian has never heard Maia swear and his eyebrows raise involuntarily. He hopes she didn’t see. “No word is too bad for that man,” he says. “You can say whatever you want about him. I’ll understand. Or try to.”
A few weeks later, when Cian has left for the evening, Maia is clearing away the dinner plates and finds one of his cream Brennan boxes on her place setting.
When she opens it, she lifts the satin cover and finds a thin wafer of silver, the face of a pound coin impressed upon it.
She sinks down into her chair and stares at this beautiful thing resting in the flat of her palm.
It is queueing in the school canteen; Mrs. Radley handing over babysitting money—hers, if only for a while.
It is England, which is Mum and home. And now, it is Cian taking care—bending over his workbench to make something just for her.
She looks at its intricate face imprinted with a rose, a leek, a thistle, clover.
She’s never studied the coin like this before.
But there’s a comfort in seeing it captured in the delicacy of this thing Cian has made for her.
Later, sitting on Julian’s bed, she says, “Did you know he was making it?”
She holds it out for him to inspect, its chain falling between her fingers.
He doesn’t take it but concedes, “Yeah, it’s nice what he’s done.
Just pressing it into clay silver like this.
Stops it looking like a medallion, you know?
” He doesn’t say that he wouldn’t want this.
That he can’t understand why she would either. He hates England.
“I’m so touched he made it for me.” She runs a thumb across it, tracing the swell and relief of the markings. They sit, each with their own thoughts, until Maia says, “What do you think the deal is? Between him and Gran?”
Julian shrugs. “I don’t know. Nothing, I don’t suppose. He’s just here, isn’t he.”
“I think they make each other happy,” Maia says.
Julian bends the wire of a paperclip, flexing it as far as it will go without the brittle metal snapping. “I guess. Aren’t they too old, though?”
“What? To be happy? To be in love?” She pokes him in the ribs. “She’s sixty-seven, she should have a life apart from us, you know.”
He brushes her away. They don’t have that easy draw toward fun she imagines regular siblings might have. There’s a seriousness in how they are together, and her moment of mock playfulness—of pretending to be someone else—leaves her feeling stupid.
She yawns self-consciously, then stands to leave, and Julian can tell he’s hurt her. “Sorry,” he says.
“It’s okay,” she replies, not turning back. “Night.”
“Love you,” he says, when she’s at the door.
“Yeah, you too,” she says, but Julian can almost hear the sadness in her footsteps as she retreats down the hall.
Maia’s words about Cian and Sílbhe stay with him.
And as he works away in Cian’s studio, thoughts drift in and out of his mind like water along the channels around a sandcastle.
The hours rush by like minutes. He wonders about what they were like when they were younger, before his grandmother married.
He wonders how it would change things to have Cian become a more central part of their lives.
And realizes he’s already integral to their day to day, and he’s okay with that.
A couple of weeks later, before he knows he’s about to speak, he finds himself saying, “Will you be marrying her? My grandma?” He regrets how possessive the my sounds, and adds, “Sílbhe, I mean.” He knows the flush of Cian’s cheeks without looking up.
“Have I done something to upset you? Overstepped?” Cian asks.
Julian shakes his head. “I just mean that it would be fine with me. If you did. With Maia too.”
“Oh,” says Cian. “Well, thank you very much. That’s good of you to mention it.” And then a few moments later, “But I think your grandma might have something to say about that.”
“Aye, you’d need to ask her,” Julian says, a smile hovering around his lips as he squeezes a band of metal between pliers.