‘No!’ I told Joe, loudly and firmly.
I didn’t shout. I just made sure I was very clear. I would not help him into bed. I would not coddle and soothe. I would not show him the tenderness he had failed to show me. I stood far enough away from him that he could not take a hold of my wrist again. Not without standing up on the legs he had proclaimed were too wobbly.
‘You can manage it yourself,’ I added.
‘I’m not well, Ciara,’ he said. ‘I was only looking for a bit of help.’
With considerable effort, some of it put on for effect, in my opinion, he shuffled his way back onto the bed and pulled his legs in under the covers. With shaking hands, he lifted the cup of tea I had left him and took a sip.
‘Can I leave now?’ I asked him, all set to walk out.
‘Can we not talk first?’ he asked. ‘Don’t you think we’ve things to talk about? God knows I’m not going to be around for long. Can we not start to try to find a way to make peace with each other?’
‘I think we’ve gone beyond that,’ I told him.
He shook his head sadly. ‘It will destroy you, you know, in the long run. If you let the bitterness eat away at you.’
He looked so absolutely sanctimonious I had to restrain myself from lashing out at him.
‘But I’ll pray you’re able to find forgiveness in your heart towards me,’ he said. ‘For the hurt I caused you when I left. For how abandoned you must’ve felt.’
‘Is that all we need to pray about?’ I asked him, incredulous that he could think my anger was just down to him walking away.
‘Forgiveness and peace of mind are the greatest things we can achieve in this life,’ he said.
‘I’ll forgive you, Dad, if you admit it.’
I was lying of course. I’d never be able to forgive it.
I crossed my arms in front of myself. Adopted the bravado that had been mine when I was a teenage girl. I may have been shaking inside but outwardly I looked in control.
One unkempt, grey-streaked eyebrow rose. A look of genuine bewilderment – or a very good impression of it at least. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said.
He actually had the brass neck to deny it.
‘Don’t you?’ I asked. ‘I know it’s been “our little secret” for a long time now, hasn’t it? “Don’t tell anyone, Ciara. They won’t understand.” Or how about “Mammy would only get cross” or the famous “This is how all daddies show their little girls they love them and I love you the most in the world.”’
I saw whatever colour was left in his sad, sorry, sick face drain away. He swallowed hard. I think, actually think, that he figured I’d either forgotten or would never have the nerve to bring it up again.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said, but the tremor in his voice, the slick of sweat breaking through on his forehead, let me know that I’d got to him.
‘Do you really need me to spell it out? In detail? Because I can do that, if you want? God knows the details have never left me. I can even go downstairs right now and spell it all out in glorious, multicoloured, revolting detail to Kathleen, and Heidi and Alex and Stella. And maybe Father Brennan would like to know, if he isn’t already keeping your secrets in the sanctity of the confessional. It’s amazing what can be forgiven with a couple of Hail Marys these days, isn’t it? Suffer the little children and all that nonsense. Or maybe I could tell Mammy. I don’t actually know, standing here now, why I never told her before.’
‘You’d break her,’ he mumbled. ‘You’d destroy her.’
‘What? What was that?’ I asked loudly, my confidence building as I saw him finally acknowledge what he’d done.
‘She’d never recover from it. Look, Ciara, be angry with me all you want. Hate me. Tell me to go to hell and sure, I’ll be going there soon anyway. But don’t destroy your mother. Not now when there’s nothing I can do to make it right.’
He looked pathetic. He looked scared and I revelled in it. He deserved to look scared. He wouldn’t get any sympathy from me for it. But he was right that it would destroy my mother, who, despite her unending loyalty to my father, would have been the first person to drag him to the police if only she’d known.
But her heart had been so hurt. She had been so broken I hadn’t wanted to break it further when he left. I’d known even then that she wouldn’t be able to bear it.
I looked at him, at his wringing of his hands, his hoping for a way to escape from that room. But he couldn’t. His legs were too weak. There was nowhere to run and this time I could set the rules.
‘You can start to make it right,’ I told him.
‘How? Tell me how.’
I looked around the room, looking for inspiration. I saw the leather diary and pen on his bed.
‘Write it down,’ I told him.
‘What? You can’t be serious.’
‘I’m very serious. Write it down. Confess to it. Write it on a page in that diary. Write that you are sorry. Write that you are twisted man. Tell them you hurt me.’
‘But your mother …’ he said, his face contorting with grief at the thought of having to ‘out’ himself.
‘I won’t show her. Unless I have to. That’s up to you, you can be the one who decides whether I have to or not, but I want it there just in case. And I want, no I need, for you to admit it.’
I could feel my composure start to crumble. All I had wanted, for so long, for the past twenty years, more than anything, was for him to say sorry. For him to admit he had damaged me so badly that I didn’t know what it was like to really care for someone, to love them in an un-abusive fashion. That I had wept buckets of tears for the girl who begged her abusive father to come back because that’s what she equated with love.
‘I can’t do that, love,’ he said, looking up at me. ‘Don’t make me!’ he pleaded.
I brushed away a tear that was threatening to fall, only to find another followed it.
Still, I took another deep breath.
‘You can, if you don’t want me to march downstairs right now and tell them all,’ I said as firmly as my voice would allow.
‘Ciara,’ he implored.
‘You want to make it right? Then make it right,’ I told him.
Then I watched as he put pen to paper, in the back of his leather-bound diary, and wrote the confession, and the apology, I had been waiting for all my life.
‘If you ever loved me at all,’ he said when he was done, ‘you’ll burn this diary when I’m gone. I’ve made mistakes, but no one else needs to be hurt by them.’
‘I’ll check, every day, that you’ve not destroyed those pages,’ I told him. ‘If I find you have, everyone will know. I don’t care how ill you are. I don’t care if you are taking your last breath. They will know.’
Defeated, he slumped back on his pillows and I left the room.
He was dead just two hours later.