ONCE I’VE READ all I can process, I pack the rest of my things.
I don’t leave Patrick’s room. I drift in and out of sleep. Though it’s only a matter of hours, it feels like days.
So much for the workshop at Saint Catherine’s. I don’t know if it’s the thought of losing that opportunity or losing the people here that makes me feel worse. Leaving this place feels like another death. The sadness crawls into all my corners and makes me want to hibernate.
“Josephine.” My mother’s voice shakes me awake. She opens the door to Patrick’s room and crouches next to the bed, eye level with me. Her clothes are wrinkled and her face is splotchy from crying. If she’s brushed her hair, it isn’t immediately evident.
I haven’t seen her in a month. I’ve barely spoken to her. But it isn’t the time away that makes her look like a stranger to me now. I stare at her through blurry tears.
“I’m so sorry.” She leans over to hug me, but I sit up and scoot back. She rises and sits on the edge of the bed. Folds her arms over her chest in a way that makes me think she’d crumble if she let go.
“When did you find out?” My voice scratches against my throat.
She shrugs, looking sideways out the window, where a line of blackbirds preen on the roofline across the street. “I always sort of knew.”
I narrow my eyes. “You knew? Before he…?”
She nods. “I didn’t know who. I just knew that he wasn’t always coming here for the band.”
I can’t wrap my head around how she tolerated this. “You didn’t care?”
“Of course I cared! But I didn’t think it was this kind of situation. I didn’t think there was a Patrick.” She laughs grimly. “I gave him room to be himself. He came home alive. That’s all I cared bout.”
“Except that last time, you mean.”
Her lip quivers. “Except the last time.”
I scrub my face with my hands and take a deep breath.
“George reached out to me on Facebook about a year after he passed. It was so hard to keep it from you, but you were finally getting better. I couldn’t tell you and ruin all that progress.”
I sniffle. “You have no idea about my progress. But I’m sorry you got hurt.”
Her face crumples. “Oh, honey. Not as sorry as I am that you did. I knew what I was getting myself into. He was a drug addict that came to me half dead to start with.”
My stomach rolls. It destroys me to hear her talk about him like that—with this tone of acknowledgement that he ruined her life. Does she regret having me? Did Julia regret having Patrick?
“He was this completely other person.” I stand and pick up the urn off the desk where I set it, turn it over in my hands. It’s still covered in river sediment. “Someone I didn’t even know.”
“He didn’t even know himself.” Mama steps beside me and drapes an arm around my shoulders. I don’t want it there, but I don’t shake it off. “But I knew him. And you are all the best parts of him.”
I put the urn in my suitcase and zip it. Mama stands there as I finish packing, make the bed, and tidy up. I look around at Patrick’s room when I finish. It seems empty without my things in it.
“Henry told me he showed you the letter,” she says.
“Yeah.”
“He sent that to her the day he passed.” She clears her throat. “He was devastated about her illness.”
“Is that why he started doing drugs again? He’d been clean.”
She touches my arm. “He thought he was going to dull his pain. But you have to understand, honey, that once an addict has been clean for so long, their body can’t tolerate the same amount of drugs they took before. He made a terrible mistake. The overdose was an accident.”
I give in and hug her. She feels so small and frail in my arms. She’s been carrying this secret around for a long time. Missing her husband, worried about her daughter. She’s just as lonely as I’ve been.
“I got us a hotel room,” she says, once the sniffling has subsided.
Inhale. Exhale. “Okay.”
“Patrick wants to see you. I think you should talk to him before we go.”
I’d rather claw my way through the brick of this building’s third story. But I know she’s right. I have a brother, and we have a lot to talk about. I pick at my fingernails.
“Is Henry down there?”
She shakes her head. “He left when I got here.”
: : : : :
Patrick sits across from me at the table in George’s kitchen.
It’s like seeing Pop looking back at me. So weird. And so obvious. I don’t know how I didn’t see it the moment I met him. Each time I start to talk, my eyes well up. I glance over at Mama and George in the lounge, where they sit ramrod straight, having tea and stilted conversation. They’re pretending not to listen to us.
“You—eh.” Patrick’s voice shakes a little. “You want to go for a walk?”
I nod.
In the alley behind the Fox Den, we walk side by side. Maybe it’ll be easier this way, to talk without having to look one another in the eyes. Before we get to the end of the alley, Patrick speaks up.
“I’m sorry.”
I look over at him. “Why are you sorry?”
He shrugs. “For not telling you straightaway? For going along with this charade because I thought honoring his last wish was the right thing to do? And, you know, for existing.” And then he laughs, but not because there’s anything funny about this. “I am the thing that ruined two families.”
I stop at the edge of the sidewalk. In all the time I’ve spent feeling sorry for myself—before this trip, before I knew, and since I found out—I never once considered that someone might have it worse than me. Patrick does, though. He is a living reminder of a mistake his mother tried to hide. And he didn’t lose one parent. He lost both.
As terrible as I feel, I can’t imagine how awful that burden would be on top of everything else. I shake my head at him. “Don’t say that. You didn’t ruin anything. Everyone loves you.”
“That’s debatable.” He leans against the side of the building. “Henry and I stopped getting along. He took up for Mum, because she was dying. I took up for Dad, but Dad couldn’t even look at me. I threw myself headlong into football for a distraction. Helped my game a bit, at least.” He half smiles.
I half smile back at him. We stand in silence for a few moments until someone turns the corner of the alley. Henry stops for a moment when he sees us there, then speeds past us toward the back door.
I want to tell him not to go, but I don’t say a word.
Patrick whispers, “Jesus, did you hit him?”
“What?” I turn to Patrick’s shocked expression. “No. Mons hit him.”
“Again?”
I nod.
When he gets to the back door and puts his key in, he glances over at me. His expression is loaded with longing. My heart squeezes and I take a mental snapshot.
Caption: why does it have to be this way
He disappears inside the building.
“What was that look? Is there… bloody hell. This is awkward. You aren’t related to him, but it’s weird, okay?” Patrick props his hands on his hips. I tear my eyes away from the closed back door. “I mean, if you two got married someday…”
Behind all the pain on Patrick’s face, there’s a hint of humor. Of teasing.
“We aren’t getting married.” I giggle. “We aren’t even speaking.”
“You said a lot with your eyes just now.”
“Yeah, we do that. It’s kind of our thing.”
I glance at the back door again, willing it to open. But it doesn’t.
“He fought us, you know.”
I look over at Patrick.
“On this whole thing. He said John was gone and we should do what’s best for you, and that the truth is always best served cold and up front.”
I swallow. “That sounds suspiciously like something he would say.”
“He stomped around yelling, threatening to tell you everything the moment you got here. Dad had to beg him. He finally agreed but said he wouldn’t lie to you if you came right out and asked.”
I think back on all the opportunities he had to come clean but didn’t.
“I was furious with him. This was a man’s final wish, and our mother’s final request, and he couldn’t honor it because it wasn’t convenient for him?” Patrick glances at the back door like he’s expecting him to come back, too. “We were going to tell you when I got back to London, just before you left to go home. He said that was manipulative, to wait until the last minute like that. I suppose I see his point now. Even though I worried he’d blow the whole thing before I got a chance to get to know you myself.”
When he looks back at me, his eyes are glassed over. My breath catches. They’re undeniably Pop’s eyes.
“Is that why you told me to avoid conversation with him?” I ask.
“Kinda, yeah. But also because he’s a bloody wanker.”
We both smile.
I lost my father. But maybe I gained a brother.