Chapter 24 #4
Julian is reading an email thanking him for the samples and confirming a large order when he answers his phone. He has never heard Cian cry before.
When he arrives at the house, it breaks something open in him and they cling, arms tight around one another.
Inside, Cian pours two large measures of single malt, and they quietly toast Sílbhe’s life as they wait for the sound of Maia’s car coming up the track.
That evening, it is just the three of them.
Orla and Meg offer to come, but it feels right this way.
They sit at the table until the early hours, talking, laughing, crying.
Cian still hasn’t slept, but when he thinks of going to bed, he cannot face Sílbhe not being there beside him.
And so he stays in the kitchen with Maia and Julian and the warmth of traded memories.
A clarity exists amongst them, that they have shared their lives with someone quietly magnificent.
When the coroner’s report comes, they learn she’d lived with a hole in the heart. That she probably never knew, but that, still, it is a miracle she lived to see eighty-eight. And they wonder again at what she gave to them. How she lived for them, and because of them. And in spite of everything.
Now, Julian walks back into his empty studio, having said goodbye to his first wholesale consignment bound for England.
He sits down at his workbench, puts on the glasses he’s still getting used to wearing, and, without any kind of plan, spends the day just playing.
Seeing where the metal takes him. It’s ages since he’s done this.
For the last few years, when he’s sat down to design, the anxious question of what might sell has always been whirring in the back of his mind.
But now, he’s smoothing the outline of a heart.
It’s like the birthmark on his forearm, he realizes.
Both gently misshapen. He thinks of his mum, as he often does lately.
Thinks of how she must have once looked on—touched, even—this raised part of his skin.
Smaller and darker then, but still. He’s surprised to find there’s a comfort in this tangible link with his past. With her.
As he works on, thoughts of Orla drift into his head.
He remembers her manhandling one of her giant tessellating artworks down the stairs, bubble-wrapped for a courier collection.
He can’t recall the exact timing, but probably in the years between telling her about his mum and finally getting together.
“Will I give you a hand with that?” he’d said, trying to step in to take some of its weight.
But she’d breezed past him as though it were nothing, and as he’d continued up the stairs, he’d looked over the banister to check she was still managing on the flight below.
“You think I can’t tell when your eyes are on me, Jules?
Don’t you be doubting me now. She may be small, but she is mighty,” she’d called out.
He could hear her smiling, even with her cheek pressed up against the height of the package.
So Orla. So fearless in being exactly who she was.
She’s teaching the girls to be that way too.
On her first World Book Day, Niamh had gone into school dressed as a giant hot-air balloon from A Voyage in the Clouds.
A brown cardboard box around her middle and a tier of long, sausage-shaped balloons gathered between two circular frames suspended above her head.
Julian had worried some kid might burst them, but Orla had said, “It’ll take more than a burst balloon to bring that girl down.
” And Julian had thought, But there are twenty-four.
Twenty-four balloons in that costume that could pop.
In the event, most of them had burst on impact while Niamh was playing football in the playground.
“You tell Daddy what the score was, though!” was all Orla had said.
As he files down the silver he’s working on, Julian can almost see her sitting on the sofa—their sofa, not the sofa at her parents’, where she most likely is now—with Aoife on her knee, Niamh beside her, tickling them, kissing them, rapping lightly on the tops of their heads, “Who’s going to get covered in Mummy’s love?
” and then spreading out her fingers, “Splat!” as she pretends to crack an egg, love trickling down through their hair.
He takes his phone out of his pocket, goes to check the time, and sees her name. Popped home for a bit—do you have time to meet? She has never stopped calling it home, he notices.
Are you still there? I can be back in ten, Jx, he types, already halfway out the door.
As he locks up the studio, he glances at his phone and sees the “…” of a reply coming.
Great. I’ve waited for you. Ox
He has always loved that when she signs off with just her initial and a kiss, she’s a creature that’s strong and unbreakable. Ox. His ox.
He wishes he’d told her about the Liberty order, so she’d know he’s changing.
He stops on the stairs, gets out his phone, hovers over the image of the consignment, then presses send, as if dispatching some sort of carrier pigeon to race ahead of him.
Outside, he starts to jog down Dooley Street.
He knows she’ll still be there, but suddenly he doesn’t want to waste another minute.
He doesn’t understand why—how—the strangeness of this time has torn at the threads that once bound them so tightly, but he’s sure there must still be time to restitch them.
As he jogs, he feels his own hope catching like a kite on the wind, and he runs faster, wanting to send it higher, wanting to believe in happy endings.
Wanting every grandiose, heartfelt thing he’s seen in films to course through his life with Orla, and to feel it all.
To really feel it. He wants to serenade her with a boombox.
To stand in the rain for the moment when they come together, water tracking down their faces.
But then—like a stylus being pulled across a vinyl record—these thoughts screech to a halt and he feels suddenly ridiculous.
He can almost hear Maia’s and Meg’s laughter.
But then there is Cian’s voice willing him on, “Pack it in. Just go for it, son!” And Julian smiles and picks up the pace again, because, yes, he wants to live a big and fearless life.
He wants to argue because they have something worth saving.
He wants to kick a skirting board in protest, and for both of them to laugh at his stubbed toes and petulance, because neither of them is scared.
Because he is nothing like his father and these things will not unleash a monster hidden deep inside.
Instead, he is love, and fury, and sorrow, and euphoria, and all the things that will make their story continue together.
He runs past the shop where he’d once hunted down her pregnancy cravings.
Julian, or ginger snaps? Eejit, he thinks, realizing she has always been choosing him.
It was him who’d left things hanging: Orla, or history?
Orla, or the risk that he might hurt her?
He feels it now. That there was never a choice to make.
He’s sold to England, and it hasn’t killed him.
Hasn’t changed a thing, except lift the stone in his chest. He sidesteps two council workers in protective clothing carrying a wasps’ nest from the stairwell beside the dry cleaner’s, dodges a woman who has paused in the middle of the pavement for some reason only she can know, and keeps going, rounding the corner by the phone box, home finally in view.
Inside the house, Orla paces. All these months Jules must have been working away on this house, on that order—overcoming his fears, for her—and she hadn’t realized.
She wonders what it’s cost him to sell to England.
If she’s forced him into it. Or if, perhaps, this shift came from him.
She studies the spines of their books, takes in the ornaments on the mantelpiece, and wonders if they’re still charged with that thing—that essence—of their life together.
Something to them, and nothing to anyone else.
She pauses at a glass paperweight that holds a world inside and runs a finger across its surface, leaving a trail in the dust.
Outside, she hears footsteps thudding down the street.
Hears them stop at the front door. Hears the pant of ragged breath.
A key in the lock. She looks up. Jules stands in the doorway looking like he’s just sprinted a marathon, hands on his knees, catching himself for a moment, grinning up into her uncertainty.
He straightens, exhales. “Orla, I feckin’ love you, all right.
Come home. You’re meant to be here, with me. ”
She feels an apple bob of surprise in her chest—at his words, at this more certain version of the Julian she knows—and she smiles, dimple-cheeked.
It takes only three strides for him to cross their small front room, but somehow, she feels as though he’s moving in slow motion, as though with each step she has time to absorb every detail.
Then his arms are around her. “Will you be coming back to me?” he says into her hair.
And she nods against his chest, the dust already falling from her finger, its particles dispersing around the room, as she grips the fabric of his jacket, feels the warmth of his neck, the spring of his hair, the glorious burn of being fully loved.