My anger had kept her far away for all those years. Now the train speeds towards my mother and each blurred village I see from the window makes my heart beat quicker. Baby Yvonne snuggles up against my hammering chest. But even her soft sighs can’t dissipate the panic that bubbles beneath.
‘Baby’s first trip?’ the woman with a leaky toddler opposite me asks kindly. I’m learning Yvonne’s tiny newness makes her a magnet for smiles. She’s eleven weeks old.
I nod, kissing the top of her downy head with care.
‘Anywhere nice?’
The innocuous question throws me.
‘To see her grandmother,’ I stammer back, surprising myself with the boldness of my statement.
‘How lovely,’ the woman tells me politely, jumping up to retrieve her own wiggly smile-magnet from the seat behind us where he’s trailing snot and apple juice. I hope it’s apple juice. Another blurred station comes and goes.
Lovely.
I roll that word around my head as Yvonne gulps and splutters against my breast, one jerking hand entwined in the straggles of my plait. It’s more accurate to say that this trip is necessary. Not lovely, exactly.
I picture the last time I saw Mother; Roe supporting her as she left the funeral home, the day before my siblings’ funeral mass. Her clothes dishevelled, her pretty face sunken in, like some great darkness had sucked out all her light, her chin bobbing against her chest. She had both hands curled up to her neck as if she was closing her top button against the cold – or shielding her heart, perhaps, from the exposure of the coldest day imaginable.
She was sent to a hospital, I was told. To get better. No charges brought. They were accidental deaths.
Then Father came home. He held me and cried into my unbrushed hair for too long, until I took a step back, uncomfortable. Blame choked me like bile. Where were you? I wanted to shout. Why did you let this happen to us?
But I swallowed that down and felt it turn into something else entirely. It was Aunt Roe who ironed the clothes they’d be buried in. Roe who sat with me the night of the funerals. Roe who slipped into the bed beside me when I woke up screaming for my siblings. Roe who didn’t abandon me like I’d abandoned myself every day since.
Father sat by the window for weeks afterwards, in one of the red patterned armchairs. He couldn’t stand to be in the back room – the one with the view of the lake. He never visited my mother in the hospital she was sent to either. ‘I can’t forgive how my children died,’ I heard him hiss to Roe, after they thought I’d long gone to bed.
‘Maria didn’t realise they’d come after her,’ Roe shot back. ‘It’s destroyed her too, Harold.’
In all those years, despite her own grief at losing Sammy and Brendan, Roe never said a bad word about her sister. They’d both grown up against a shared backdrop of joy that overnight turned to sorrow when their own mother disappeared, and their father died by suicide. Maybe it doesn’t harden you exactly, but it felt to me like Roe treated my mother’s mental health problems as a tragic inevitability.
I picture her sometimes, you know – my mother as a child herself, curled up small in that formal dusty dining room, watching her father’s legs swing from the ceiling. I wonder if she called out for her absent mother. But mostly I wonder, and worry, about the wounds motherhood can pass down through the generations.
A month after we lost Brendan and Sammy, Father returned to his new partner in Cork. My future plans were now in everybody else’s hands. Still Roe rubbed the slow circles across my back each night.
‘And would you want to go stay with your father?’ she’d asked a few times, a strange inflection to her voice. Each time, I’d shake my head sadly. I needed to be here. Under these exact stars, and she seemed to understand that too.
The train screeches and slows, and then everyone is stooping and scrambling to gather their things. We have arrived at Stanhope Square in Galway. The mother opposite me wrestles her toddler into a fluffy coat with patterned gloves attached to each sleeve with elastic. She smiles distractedly at me.
‘Good luck with your visit,’ she says, hitching the child to her hip and manoeuvring her way down the narrow aisle of the train using the headrests for support.
I murmur my thanks to the man next to me with a pea-coloured scarf who helps me lift down my new, stiff-at-the-joints buggy. Then, together, Yvonne and I begin the ten-minute journey towards Victory House – an independent-living facility I’d discovered my mother had been moved to five years ago. She can only leave with her supervisor, Roe explained, squeezing my hand as I told her of my decision to come. I imagine it as a life that’s been halved and quartered, cut into such fine slices that it’s no life at all.
I throw up some of my nerves in the public bathroom on the ground floor of the modern glass building – the buggy wedged in between the cubicle door and the toilet. Yvonne chews her fist cheerfully as I retch and dribble, eyes watering, still sending singsong sounds towards her.
We continue moving forward.
I press the polished brass button of the lift and close my eyes as we slowly rise.
On the second floor, I find the door of the apartment number I’ve been given for her wide open. I brace myself at the doorway, and though the light hasn’t changed even a fraction, my eyes feel as if they’ve opened on something far too bright.
I see her before she sees me. She’s sitting on the couch, facing away from me. I press my tongue into the sharpest ridges of my teeth. Inside pain matching outside pain. Her supervisor makes kitchen noises at the small galley sink nearby. I pull Yvonne’s woollen hat off so her face is more visible.
As if she senses me, my mother suddenly turns and looks at me.
Her hair is long, thin – too long for her age. I grip the buggy handle tighter and take one step towards her. Her face is both different and immediately the same. New lines, a drag to her cheeks, that dreadful tilt of time. But still the same sunken face, the same unshakable sadness surrounds, an air of perpetual sorrow. I’d told her I was coming. The only letter I ever returned. I see her see me. I watch her slow, uncertain smile.
Then, ‘Oh, there you are,’ a bouncy woman with blonde curls calls, reaching into the pram to coo over the baby. It’s the supervisor, Angie. ‘You’ll have tea, I hope, Ally. It’s so wonderful to finally meet you. And who’s this little cutie?’
I stare blankly at her, unable to speak, unable to match her joyful energy. I glance back at the doorway behind me and then back at the baby.
I have to break the cycle.
‘Maria?’ The woman speaks slowly. ‘I’ll bring your tea, okay? Go on, sit down,’ the blonde urges cheerfully, and after depositing the teapot and fussing over the milk, she deposits a heaped plate of Jaffa Cakes and disappears outside the door, leaving it open.
Then it’s just us.
The baby hiccups.
Mother sits on the other side of the room, rubbing her hands on her knees nervously. She’s obviously made an effort. Her thin legs are swathed in a black velvet skirt. She’s wearing a delicate white blouse, and a Celtic cross on a silver chain around her neck. Her long hair is swept into a ponytail and her ankles are crossed. She’s still just staring as if she can’t quite believe I’m there. Through the open window I hear the steamy hiss of a bus pulling into a stop, seagulls cry manically. A door in a nearby hallway slams. The truth is that I actually thought I might find her as she once was. Preserved perfectly in a solution of the love we once shared.
Then it’s me that’s drowning. I want her to be back to who she was – who I know she really is. I want her sepia flares, her dedicated mirth, the smoke rings and husky stories. I want my mother’s apple-dapple smell and piano-player hands. I want the soft skim of her fingers along my scalp.
I want my mother.
I want my mother.
But all that’s left is this old woman with sore-looking knuckles. A face shadowed with regret. Eyes that remind me of my sister’s. I reach into the pram and feel the warmth of my daughter’s skin. I scoop her up and face her towards Maria.
‘This is Yvonne,’ I say, and the shadow of something crosses her face. I can’t say what exactly, but in that moment, I remember Mother’s capacity to love. I sit in the chair opposite her and wonder what I’d expected exactly. If I close my eyes, I can almost make myself believe I was still back there, in the suffocating water, pulling Sammy from Mother’s sad freezing arms. I try to remember that she didn’t bring them with her. They were just trying to save her.
If I close my eyes, I can see her plaiting our hair in front of the cartoons in the mornings before school, the lake through the window a flat dawn-blue, the smell of porridge in our small kitchen. And her voice behind me always reserving lovely words for those early school day mornings, perhaps afraid that once the light of day rose, she’d descend once more into her prison of despair and be unable to demonstrate her love as fluently. Those silvery mornings, she smoothed my unruly strands with her gentle fingers, winding the elastic bobbin around the thinner end of my braid. ‘You’ll go far in this world, Ally bird,’ she’d whisper, ‘You all will.’ My most precious things, she used to call us.
I know she loved me once. My neat plaits are proof.
I feel her eyes on me and decide to place Yvonne into her arms. Still, we say nothing at all. After a while, her stiff fingers twitch, considering perhaps. Then she finally curls them gently around the little bones of my daughter. I like to think that I sense something loosening in her.
I sit back and watch.
Yvonne coos and I see my mother’s arms pull her ever so slightly closer. The budding of something. Maybe.
She looks at me and a tear rolls down her cheek. Mine too. The bridge between what happened then and what’s happening now is left undefined.
This is all we have now.
All we have left.
But my guilt is still laced with the memory of how confidently she strode into that water, the only glance back when she was disturbed by my sister. And by my brother. I picture their empty faces. The football and the peach hat set out like props by the photos on the table during the wake. Two sets of blue, mud-splattered legs lying by the lake, one slightly longer than the other.
We stay like this for a while. The weight of what exactly this is hanging in the air like stars. I tell her with my eyes of how her love made me feel unconquerable, like I was floating. And when she was gone, I sank so far down.
You were the love of my life.
After a few minutes I gently take Yvonne from her. I linger a moment in front of my mother, noticing the faint scent of apples around her as I bend close. I think of her carefully getting dressed in anticipation of seeing the only child she has left. I put my hand on her arm so gently, I’ll wonder later if I did it at all. We leave the room, closing the door. The dreamcatcher I brought her rests on the coffee table, close to her knees, within reach of those long fingers that used to play with my hair.
On the train home, I picture Roe waiting for us in my apartment.
I picture the light in the window.