Blue Mercy E-Book

Ross Orna

• Herausgeber: WS
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 397

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

A literary family drama with patricide at its heart.

When Mercy Mulcahy was 40 years old, she was accused of killing her elderly and tyrannical father. Now, at the end of her life, she has completed a book about what really happened on that fateful night of Christmas Eve, 1989.

The tragic and beautiful Mercy has devoted her life to protecting Star from her grandfather. His behavior so blighted her own life as a child – she never wanted it to touch her darling daughter.

Yet Star refuses to read a word. Her contempt for Mercy is as painful as it is inexplicable. 

What has Mercy done? What is she hiding? Was her father's death, as many believe, an assisted suicide?

Or something even more sinister?

In this book, nothing is what it seems on the surface, and everywhere there are emotional twists and surprises.

Set in Ireland and California, Blue Mercy is a compelling family mystery, combing lyrical description with a page-turning style. 

Praise for Orna Ross and Blue Mercy

“A lyrical, gripping and heartbreakingly beautiful tale of love, loss and the ever-present possibility of redemption.” — WE Magazine for Women

“Epic sweep...ambitious scope... an intelligent book”. — Sunday Tribune

“A riveting story...vividly brought to life.” — Emigrant Online

Leseprobe

Blue Mercy

Orna Ross

Contents

Part One: Blue Mercy

Part Two: Starcloud

Part Three: Stardust

Part Four: Starstruck

Part Five: Starturn

Part Six: Starshell

Part Seven: Starcrossed

Part Eight: Starstream

Part Nine: Starburst

Part Ten: Starlight

Part One: Blue Mercy

Anactofmercythathasunanticipatedandinjuriousconsequences.

Anactofrevengethatturnsouttobeamercy.

[slang: Irish]

Star

2009

Shando pokes his head around the door, his duty check, and immediately is caught by the sight of her pages scattered across our bed. “How are you doing, hon?” he asks, dragging his gaze back up to me. “You okay? How far have you got?”

“Just to her arrest.”

The head nods, solemn. “Well done. The beginning will be hardest.”

“You do know it’s a sham?”

“Star… Please…”

“It is. Already it’s contradicting itself, twisting things up.”

“Honey, you’ve only read one chapter.”

“She begins with…” I falter over the date we never name. “She says nothing about my arrival that day.”

“Arrival?” he asks, face blank and solemn as a priest. “What day?”

“That Christmas. When Granddad died.” That day, my husband, dear, the one that almost destroyed us all.

“There’s loads about that, Star. And there’s loads about you. That’s why you need to read it.”

“You do know it begins with a letter from her —”

“Yes, yes,” he interrupts, not wanting me to say “boyfriend”. Stupid word for the lover, yes, lover, of a sixty-something-year-old woman. “I know it’s hard, hon, I do. I do. But trust me, you’ll be glad once you’ve read through to the end. ”

Wakeup, I want to shout at him. You’rebeinganidiot. Can’tyouseewhatshe’sdoing?

As always, words fail me. Words were her tool; they never come out right for me.

“I think you could do with a nap now,” he says, in his husband-knows-best voice. “Don’t you? Read a bit more later on?”

I let silence answer that suggestion.

“Take it in small bites, y’know?”

“I don’t have to read it at all.”

“Would you prefer to go down to the sitting-room? I’ve lit the fire down there.”

She’sbrainwashedyou! But has she? Or is it me who’s got it all wrong?

Doubt drags the words back down, unsaid.

“Look,” he says, “I’m going to take the kids out for an hour so you can get some rest. You’ll feel better after a nap.”

He makes his escape.

I don’t blame him, not really. If I could get away from myself, I’d be out of here too.

Time has sliced itself up since my mother died five days ago, and keeps shuffling itself like a deck of cards in my head. Two days in particular keep turning up on top: Christmas Eve 1989, the day Granddad died, twenty years back. And the day out I had with Mom at the end of last year, in Glendalough, when she tried — yet again — to push her manuscript onto me. BlueMercy. By Mercy Mulcahy. How typical of her, that title. Mercy, Mercy, always Mercy. Even now.

I’d recognised the manuscript the minute Mags, Mom’s lawyer, extracted it from her stack of deeds and testaments that morning. The reading of the will was supposed to be our last death-duty and Mags had arrived promptly at 10 a.m. and worked smartly through her list of legalities.

Blackberry Lodge, officially ours at last: tick.

Most of Mom’s money, also to us: tick.

Trust fund for the kids: tick.

A bequest each to Pauline and Marsha, her closest friends: tick.

A donation to the Right To Die Society: tick.

Just when it looked like we were done, Mags reached deeper into her satchel and pulled out this: six-hundred tattered and benighted pages held together by two criss-crossed pink elastics. And that damn title staring up at us. Everything in the room — husband, lawyer, furniture, fire — faded for me as she slid it across the polished table.

I paused a moment, then slid it right back.

“Ah, Dotes, come on now.” Mags, the least doting woman in the world, had a habit of calling everyone Dotes. I shook my head. If I was ever going to read that thing, I would have taken it from Mom that day in Glendalough. If I hadn’t then, when she herself had put it into my lap and gripped my arm turning her big, mother-guilting eyes on me, why would I take it now?

Shan put his hand on my arm, much as Mom had done that day, and started to urge me — “Honey, don’t you think…?” — until he saw my face and stopped short.

As well he might.

Mags knew enough to stay silent too.

So we sat, three capable adults, gagged by awkwardness and respect for the dead but mostly by the memories swirling in the sticky silence. Clueless about what to do next, until I, sighing a sigh that even I could hear was petulant, snatched it up, and the other two rounded off the meeting as fast as they could.

Which is how I’ve ended up here, one chapter in, unable to go on. Unable, I say.

I’ll go downstairs to the sitting-room fire right now, and toss it in and watch it burn, I decide. I gather up the white pages, I tap the edges to line them up, sideways, lengthways. I pull them back into order, I snap their pink elastic band back on.

If I were to edit this book and ready it for publication, as she’d asked, I’d want to tell it my way. Not so much what happened on Christmas of 1989 as all that led up to it.

I, too, can hold a pen.

But Shando says no. It’s Mom’s book, he says, not mine. My job, if I took it on, wouldn’t be to “write back” but to ensure that what she wanted to say was said clearly and fully.

It sounds so fair, so right, so reasonable but she herself said I could do what I liked, so long as I read it. “It’s your story, too,” she’d said, as she was trying to persuade me not to give it back.

She’d sat so erect that day in Glendalough, on that bench in the churchyard, her legs angled both to one side, like a posh lady in a drawing-room. Old and ill and frail, a word I never expected to apply to Mom, but still arresting. The grey hair highlighted to a crisp ash-blonde. She wore it long, too long, some might say, for her age. Usually pinned into a coil at her crown but at that moment folded over one shoulder, falling like a curtain across the prosthetic breast that lurked under the elegant white shirt. The tips of her hair floated across the manuscript, where I’d just set it, back in her lap

A wave of claustrophobia cuts off my breath. Through the bedroom window, a glint from beyond the trees catches my attention. The lake. That’s it, not the fire, the lake.

I would take it down to the lake. Down there, I would know what to do.

They have a saying in this adopted country of mine: whensorrowsoursyourmilk, it’stimetomakecheese. A very Irish way of saying: count your blessings. As I make my way downstairs, slowly, like an invalid, I take myself to task, as I so often need to do.

Yes, it is true that my mother has jumped up out of her coffin, waving her manuscript like a traffic warden with a ticket. Yes, my husband has leapt to defend her, turning my mind down worn-out tracks I’d promised myself I’d never travel again. And yes, her passing has stirred up Granddad, has him rattling his old bones in our faces, showing us he isn’t dead and gone as we liked to pretend that the horrors of what happened still lurk just under everything else, easily — all too easily — resurrected to stalk our days again.

But it is also true that the same husband is kind and faithful, that we are as happy as can be expected in this lovely home we’ve created together, where we run our lovely business, and raise our two lovely, long-awaited, children. And that outside the window is our lovely garden among lovely grounds, five acres stretching towards the wilds of Wicklow, the loveliest county in Ireland.

So…

On the porch, I transfer my striped feet into the wellington boots that live by the door. The higgledy-piggledy porch is my favourite room in our house, with our walking boots and trainers, our coats and umbrellas, our backpacks and shopping bags. All the ordinary paraphernalia of country family life, looking almost holy to me today in the steely winter light. Lovely, lovely, lovely.

The door clicks shut behind me. It’s chilly out, and a small gust of wind whips up. Leaves from a pile in the corner swirl into it, dancing around each other, as if enjoying their freedom, oblivious to the reality that they are half dead already. Above, a last few cling to almost-bare branches. Their doomed tenacity makes me want to cry. When they fall, as they surely will, does that mean their efforts to hold for so long were wasted?

I cross the yard, heading up the back pathway through the trees. Before there was a house here, there was this lake and these woods and the wild Wicklow hills. We have to work hard to keep them from taking over again. They’re ready to do it. If we let off for the smallest while our cutting and trimming and weeding, our feeding the plants we want over the ones we don’t, in they’ll move, to swallow up our house and land. Nature. It doesn’t need us at all, but how we crave it.

That’s what brings all the people, the hikers and bikers, the day-trippers and weekenders, out here to Doolough. The sound of a different kind of silence to that in their bedrooms and kitchens.

At the lake, I put the manuscript on the ground, kneel on it and lean in to see my reflection in the murky water. I look old today, older than I am. In this posture, gravity pulls my jowls and chins forward. She was beautiful, I am not. Was that the fullness of our story?

She never lost her looks. Most Irish people do, develop in age the distinctive features other Americans and the English charmingly call “potato-head”. Not my mother. I think of her again that last day she spent out of the house on our trip to Glendalough. She had only twelve weeks left to live but was lovely as ever in her new, ever-more-fragile way. Knowing she was dying, as we did by then, I’d fixed us a day out together with the kids.

Grandmother, mother, children. Picnic lunch. Gentle tour of the monastic ruins. Soft stroll through the woodlands. All of which we enjoyed. And for the finale, my coupdegrace, I’d thought: a visit to the nearby churchyard at Laragh, where they’ve installed a sculpture, a bronze tribute to the story of Saint Kevin, the saint who’d settled on this site and turned it into a place of pilgrimage fourteen centuries ago.

So we drove up there, through the green drowsiness of a summer afternoon, and I settled her on a bench in front of the sculpture, while the children tried to climb and clamber over it. And I gave her the poem I’d photocopied and folded into my bag about the legend of Saint Kevin. Even I could tell it was good, how it asked us to imagine the saint holding out his hand in prayer, when a blackbird came and lay her eggs in his palm, and how he continued to hold his hand up and out for her, still and steady, for days, weeks, all through the nesting season, until her chicks were hatched and reared. It wasn’t by WB Yeats, her fave rave, but the other guy, the one who looks like a farmer. Heaney.

She appreciated the gesture, as I’d know she would, and read it aloud for us and we sat in silence afterwards.

“That’s one to learn off-by-heart,” she’d said, and asked me if I had and when I said I hadn’t, told me I must. “Poems have to become like the marrow in our bones to be appreciated,” she’d pronounced. “Learn it, Star. Do.”

All my life, she’d said things like this.

On that day, in the peace generated by the blackbird story, I was able to let it go, and even able to smile a moment later when I heard her murmuring a line. “It’s all imagined, anyway.”

I’d thought we were both happy, united for a few hours, by my bringing us both there, to the village where we’d run into such trouble before, after Granddad’s going. I’d thought we were enjoying a seemingly small but actually enormous great reward for having managed to make a life that worked, despite all. Silly me. A minute later, she was pulling her own surprise out of her bag, the BlueMercy script, and forcing it on me.

I told her what I’d so often told her before: “I’m never going to read it, Mom.”

“You must,” she’d said, putting her hand on my arm, giving me her best supplicating stare. And then: “It’s your story too, Star.”

I must. How had she never learned that was the worst possible way to get me to do anything?

My mother was a writer and a thinker and just about the last person anyone would expect to commit murder. Not just murder, patricide. Yet — strange thing — when she said she hadn’t done it, nobody believed her.

Now at the lakeside, kneeling on the BlueMercy manuscript I close my eyes to all that, as I have so many times before and call to mind again — like a litany — all the things I’ve made for myself, for all of us. Things I thought I’d never have: lovely husband, lovely children, lovely home. This place transformed from house of horrors to house of healing. I did that. Not alone, but it couldn’t have happened without me. My life has not been wasted. I am not a bad person.

That’s the thought that snaps me into standing, to assert again what should have been my birthright, but which I had to hand-stamp into myself. The right to do what’s right for me. Me, Mom.

I pick up the hateful pile of paper and pull off the elastic so determinedly that it breaks. I take a page and bunch it up and fling it, unread, into the lake.

It’s hard to fling paper. It doesn’t carry, there’s no satisfactory plop as it hits the water. It just hovers there, hardly touching the surface, wimpily uncertain. There are more than six hundred pages in this manuscript but I will clump each and every one into a paper ball. I will cast them, each and all, upon the lake. I will watch them, bob-bob-bobbing on the lapping shore, slowly soaking up the water that will see them sink.

Part Two: Starcloud

aregionwherestarsappeartobeespeciallynumerousandclosetogether.

Mercy

Christmas Eve 1989

EarlyonChristmasEvemorning, hoursbeforeZachleftorStararrived, myfatheraskedmetokillhim. I’dspentsomeofthatnightinachairattheendofhisbed. Atonepoint, hewokeandstartedtopanic, thenremembering, reacheduptopushthebuttonthatreleasedliquidmorphineintohisveins. Isawhimliebackintotheeffortofkeepinghisbreathinggoing, sohoarseandloud, asoundliketheseapressingthroughablow-hole.

“Better,” hesighed, asthepainreliefkickedin. “That’sbetter.”

Hishandwentuptopressthemachineagain, butIknewnothingwouldissuefromitagainsosoon. Maybehebelievedithad, becausehedroppedoffimmediatelyintoamoresettledsleepanddidn’twakeagainuntilbreakfasttime, whenIbroughthimthebowlofmashedbananaandyogurtthatwasallhecouldmanagefirstthing.

HiseyesclickedopenasIcameintotheroomandhesaid, inaclearvoice, “Ineedapill.”

“Whataboutthepump?”

“No, apill.”

Itookthecontainerfromitsplaceonthewindowledge, shookonepillintohishand. Hetooktheglassofwaterandgulpedtoswallow, hiswholethroatworkingoverit. Hecoughed, thendrankagain.

“Ineedmore.”

Ireachedforthejug.

“Morepills, Imean.”

“Youcan’t, youknowthat.”

“I’vehadenoughnowoflivinglikethis.” Hiseyeslockedontomine, astheyonlyeverhadoncebefore.

“Please.”

“Lettheoneyou’vejusthadtakeeffect,” Isaid. “You’llfeelbetterthen.”

“There’snobetterforme.” Heputhisfingersonmywrist, hisgripsurprisinglytight. “Please. Havemercy.”

Hegaveamacabregrin, maybeatthepunonmyname, ormaybebecausethepillwasalreadybeginningitswork. Ormaybeitwastheeffortofmakingtherequest, oftakingmyarm, ofsayingsuchwords.

“You’reaclevergirl, alwayswere,” hewhispered, eyelidsbeginningtodroop. “You’llknowwhattodo.”

Andhiseyesreleasedme, closedoverthefirstcomplimentheevergaveme.

So picture us at his funeral, the chief mourners, daughter and granddaughter of the deceased, in our places in the top pew, the back of our black coats to the rest of the congregation, absorbing their jabbing stares. Star’s appearance gave them extra ammunition for their loaded gossip: her too-black hair, stiffened into spikes, her bovver boots and ripped tights, her nose-ring and of course, her extraneous fat, five or six stone of it, carried like a soldier carries his pack.

I knew what they would be saying, not Pauline or a few kindly others, but most of them. Thatmustbethedaughter, isit, newlyarrivedfromAmerica? LordGod, thesizeofher. Andwhataget-uptoweartoafuneral. Andwherewasyermangone, theboyfriend? Whatwentonaboveinthathouseatall, atall?

The event was organised as my father had decreed. Remains to Stafford’s funeral parlour in town. No wake. High Mass in Doolough at 10 a.m. Six priests. AveMaria. BeNotAfraid. HowGreatThouArt. Sitting in the front aisle with Star, I hadn’t realised how many people were piling into the church behind us until it was over, when we turned to a full house, crowds bunched around the doors, upward of two hundred pairs of eyes nailing us as we followed the coffin down the aisle. The crowd parted for it, for us, then followed us out into the churchyard cemetery for the burial.

Through it all, Star and I had played our parts, standing and sitting as required, heads bowed, faces blank, though where I should have had a core, I had only space.

Afterwards, continuing under orders, we went to Maguires, the local pub, for a soup-and-sandwich lunch, and it was there, once people had settled in over their soup spoons, that Dr Keane — who had had his eyes on me ever since coming in — leaned across the table where I was sitting with Star and asked if he might have a word.

“Of course,” I’d said, pushing my untouched food aside.

Doctor Keane was Jimmy to my father, his oldest friend. Despite their different rankings in Doolough’s finely-tuned social scale, they were bonded by their active history in the Irish Civil War, when they both fought to uphold a Treaty with England that others thought a sordid compromise.

“We’ll step outside, if you don’t mind,” he’d said, causing a look to fly around the table.

I put down my napkin and followed him out through the crowd. Outside, he remarked on the cold, pulling his scarf tight around his ancient, scrawny throat. He offered me a cigarette, and when I shook my head he lit one for himself, and started talking about the funeral, praising my father and recounting some memories of their boyhood. When he couldn’t put off any longer what he had to say, he threw his cigarette to the ground and, keeping his eyes on it as he squashed it with the toe of his boot said, “The autopsy found something wasn’t right.”

At first, I didn’t let in what he was saying. “If everything was all right,” I said, “I guess he wouldn’t be dead.”

“This isn’t a joke, dear.” He looked at me over his glasses. “The cause of death was an overdose of morphine.”

“But that’s not —”

“It’s beyond doubt,” he interrupted. “The pathologist said she never saw so much morphine in a body.”

“The pump? Maybe the pump was faulty?”

“It’s been checked. The pump was fine.”

“The pills?”

“We don’t know. We were hoping you might be able to help us on that.”

“Help how?”

“Like I say, we don’t know. All we know is what the toxicology reports say. An unholy amount, apparently.”

Toxicology reports? Pathologist? Autopsy?

“Oh, doctor, you and Pauline know what it was like for my father at the end. Pain, baby food, sleepless nights… An animal in that condition would have been put out of its misery long ago.”

“If I were you, m’girl, I wouldn’t be going around saying things like that.”

“If he hadn’t died that day, he would have died another day soon.”

“Aren’t you wondering who did it?”

“Did what?”

“I’m telling you that somebody killed your father by giving him an overdose of morphine. And all you have to say to me is that whoever did it, did right.”

The nausea I had been feeling all day rose up my windpipe. “I just can’t believe that anybody did it. Who could have? Who would have?”

“Indeed.”

“Maybe… Could he have done it himself?”

“I spoke to him a week before he went. He said nothing that sounded suicidal to me.”

He tightened his scarf again.

“I wanted you to be told first; that’s only fair.”

I thought of the looks exchanged around the table as I got up to leave and realised I wasn’t the first to know. Already, he or the pathologist or somebody else had been talking. Maybe that’s why there had been so many at the funeral? They hadn’t come to pay their respects to the little-liked sergeant at all, but to take a look at the daughter who was rumoured to have seen him out.

After Doctor Keane delivered his bombshell, I had to go back into the pub and stay to the very end, my mind clanging with his insinuations. Star sat opposite me at our table, chewing on her pudgy fingers, and I switched out of the talk too, let the conversation churn around me as we waited, waited, for them all to finish. It was hours before they cleared, but eventually only the freeloaders and alcoholics were left and Pauline, more attuned to the niceties of Doolough behaviour than me, said it would be okay to go.

“I will never, ever set foot in that place again,” I said to Star as we walked out together. “Never, never, never.”

“Ah, now,” said Pauline, coming out behind us, putting an arm around us both. “I thought it all went off grand.”

Mikey, her husband, had the car waiting outside for us and Star and I sat in the back. Exhausted, I was grateful for everyone’s silence. We drove through Doolough, past the school and the smattering of houses known as the heart of the village, out onto the Avoca Road. Past the high walls of Doolough House. Past the police barracks. As the car drew towards Blackberry Lodge, I said: “You can drop us here, Mikey, at the end of the lane. We’d be glad of the fresh air.”

“Are you sure?” asked Pauline. “Do you not want me to come up with ye?”

“Not at all, Pauline,” I said. “You’ve done so much already.”

She patted my hand. “You let Star look after you now.” She twisted her head round to Star, looking for a response. When it didn’t come, she got out of her front seat and folded it forward. I climbed out and we waited side-by-side, trying not to see Star’s struggle to extract herself. Why are fat people’s exertions always so painful to watch?

“I’ll be round tomorrow at one o’clock,” Pauline said, to distract us. “I’ll bring a bit of dinner.”

“Thank you so much for everything,” I said again.

“You’re sure you’re all right?”

“Positive.”

Star was out. Now it was her turn for a Pauline patting. “It’s great you’re here now, love. Your poor mam has been a slave to your granddad’s illness these past months.”

Star nodded, ambiguous.

“Ring me, won’t you, if you need anything,” Pauline said, sitting back in. “Even if it’s the middle of the night.”

“You’re too good, Pauline.” I closed the door on her. “Thanks, Mikey.”

“Thank you,” said Star, her only contribution since we’d left the pub.

We waved and they were gone, the chuggy sound of their engine carrying across the fields as my daughter and I turned and walked up the lane back to the house where I was raised. Or reared, as they like to say in Ireland, as if you were one of the beasts of the field. I matched my pace to Star’s slower, more tentative, steps — the heavier Star becomes, the less solid she feels, somehow — and we walked up the lane in gathering darkness, two feet by two crunching on the gravel.

The short day was coming to a close; December light, pale as water, was fading fast. We could see the house, as you couldn’t in summer, through the trees: tall, white, Georgian, protected by a circle of faithful ash trees, with two chimneys either end of the roof in which jackdaws nested and cawed. Is it an Irish or an American saying, that when it comes to money or possessions, “you can’t take it with you”? If you could take anything to the place beyond, Blackberry Lodge would have been it for my father. There had always been questions about how he, a Garda sergeant, could have accumulated the money to buy it.

Eight windows — six in a row above the door, one large long one down either side of it — stared down at us. It was ours now, this house, unless my father had a surprise waiting for us in his will. I didn’t want it.

All I wanted was to talk, properly, to Star. Since she’d arrived on Christmas Eve, she and I had had no time together. My father died that night and since then it had been nothing but people coming and going and funeral arrangements and things to do. Now I needed to get her to myself. I wanted to show her Doolough and all the beauty spots of County Wicklow. Our old way of being together had imploded and we needed time if we were to replace it with something new, something better.

Yet I didn't know how to ask, or tell her any of this. Imagine that: lost for words with your own daughter. The breach of adolescence, the generation gap is no secret but it’s like other women telling you about their birth pains. You only dimly perceive what you’re being told, until your own experience smacks you into knowing. And Star and I had complicating factors, if ever a mother and daughter had. Her refusal to discuss that was making other talk impossible.

I ushered her through the back door, followed in behind her. Beneath those dyed and gelled spikes, just below her hairline, was a birthmark about a square inch in size, the shape — if you closed your eyes and tilted your sight a certain way — of a five-cornered star. When she was a baby, I used to kiss that mark after every feed. Ididmybest, Star. I wanted to scream at the spine so hunched against me as I followed it into the house. Ididmybest. Even as I was thinking it, I despised the thought. The anthem of the failed mother.

Instead I needed to find words that might reach through that anger of hers and persuade her to stay on. She’d said she was leaving in the morning but I knew if we were to salvage anything to take into a shared future, I had to get her to stay.

In the kitchen, I put on the kettle and had an idea. I’d show her some of the family photographs and letters that I had found in my father’s bureau. Draw her in, then ask her to stay on, at least for a few days.

I went to fetch them from the bureau in the sitting room while she made tea. I’d been meaning to sort them, arrange them into albums, another one of those endeavours I’d not got round to doing. Caring for my father had been a round-the-clock job.

Now I laid them out on the table in front of Star. The first one that caught her eye was one of Daddy and me at the beach. Me, aged seven or eight, in a hoop-striped swimming costume with a frilly skirt piece, standing in front of a sandcastle. My father, already old, sitting upright on a plaid rug behind me, his shirt buttons undone, showing grey hair across his chest. Both of us squinting into the sun.

“You were so cute,” Star said, her voice wistful, as if she was looking at her own memory, not mine. “Who took this?”

“It couldn’t have been my mother. She was long dead by then.” My mother had died when I was three.

“It’s so sad that you never really knew her.”

I nod. She’d been saying that her whole life long and yes, my mother’s absence must have affected me, but it’s not something I’ve ever felt directly; you can’t miss what you’ve never known.

Had she lived, would my father have been different? I don’t think so. Nobody could ever rein that man in. I have only one image of her, more imagination than memory. I see us as two shimmering figures of fear, one small, one adult size, standing in front of him.

“Star, won’t you stay another day? I could do with some help tomorrow, clearing your granddad’s things.”

“You should have thought of that before you told me a pack of lies, Mom.” This was the nub of the latest injury. My father had told her that Zach spent some time here before she arrived.

“I’d just like you to stay on now for a couple of days. Now you’re here.”

“Oh, yes, nowI’mhere.”

“What does that mean?”

“What if I hadn’t decided to come, Mom? How long would I have had to wait before you’d have got in touch with me?”

I braced myself for the attack but when it came, it wasn’t about him. Not directly.

“Not a word, nothing, for months. I had to fly 6,000 miles. I had to hire a car in a strange city, not knowing who’d be here when I arrived. And if I hadn’t come…?” She broke off, her jowls shuddering with anger. “I get why you ran off, just about, but what I don’t accept, Mom, what you can’t really, in all honesty, expect me to accept, is what came after.”

For a moment, I was tempted to do what she was doing – to let myself think of nothing but me-me-me. What would I say to her?

Cut me a break, Star.

Don’t ask any more of me than you ask of yourself.

Move on.

Let me and Zach be.

I didn’t say any of it, of course. Star was American; I, for all the years in Santa Paola, was still of Ireland and in Ireland, in my day at least, the national motto was: “Whatever you say, say nothing”.

And I was the mother, trained into biting my tongue. Daughterly anger we might survive, but maternal self-pity would kill us off. I’d let Zach go so I could make a play for Star. I would do everything in my power now to heal our breach.

But how? “It’s all so complicated,” I ventured.

“Complicated? To pick up a telephone and call me? To tell —”

“I didn’t think you wanted to hear from me. You said —”

“We both said a lot of things that day, Mom.”

In fact, I’d said very little. It was she who had ranted and raved before stomping out of the house, but this didn’t seem like the time to say so. It felt so forced, this anger of hers, so unable to see anything beyond itself. What about all the years before my unintended mistake, day after day after day of mothering and giving? Did that not count for anything? Should that not be weighed against my sin?

And what of her sins, worse than anything I’d done. Was all this anger an attempt to deflect from that?

Oh, Star, my daughter dear, go easy on me. Go easy, or you might come to regret it.

Next morning, we sat in her little hire car. She had allowed herself to be persuaded to stay one more day by the prospects of a trip to Glendalough. It was a morning that the Irish winter occasionally throws up, just when you despair that the ceiling of grey cloud above has turned solid. A day that seemed to have wandered backwards out of springtime, with a clear-blue sky and golden light. A gift of a day.

I breathed deep as we drove, trying to inhale some of its tranquility and unwind. Our little car was climbing, engine whining as we negotiated the bends further up, and up. More accustomed to an automatic, Star kept crunching the gearstick. As we topped the crest, a bog-plain opened out, tufted peat and raw earth stretching on all sides for miles.

“What do you think of the scenery?” I asked.

“Sure, it’s pretty.”

It was the wrong word for the ruggedness of Wicklow, but we were together, my daughter and I, taking a day trip.

“What time do you think we’ll be back?” she asked.

“I’m not sure. I thought we’d make a day of it, have a spot of lunch?”

“I have to leave in the afternoon.”

“Oh.”

“Mom, don’t give me ‘oh’. You know. I told you.”

“But not where you’re planning on going.”

“Mount Mellaray Abbey.”

“What?”

“A monastery in County Waterford,” she said.

“I know what it is. It’s well known.” An enclosed order of Cistercians on the bare, windblown slopes of Knockmealdown Mountains. “Star, are you sure?”

“I’d better tell you. In March, I’m going to be confirmed.”

It was so long since I heard the word used in this context that for a minute I failed to recognise it. “Confirmed?” I repeated, puzzled. Then I realised. “Confirmed as a Roman Catholic?”

“Yes. I’ve been going to Mass and taking classes.”

“Since when?”

“Since… Oh, a long time.”

Star was baptised for the same reason her father and I got married: because, in the 1970s, nuns and priests and Christian Brothers provided what was considered the best public education in America. We couldn’t afford to pay school fees, but we wanted the best for our darling, so we decided to capitalise on our Irish Catholic backgrounds. We married and had Star baptised Maria Bernadette, the name she took through school and college and out into the world, though to us she was always Star.

And though she got plenty of Jesus, Mary and holy St Joseph at school, at home we counterbalanced it with our secular view of life.

She’d moved on from the church as she moved on from pretty much everything we gave her, to become angry and rebellious. A punk rocker for a while. A surly challenge to her teachers. How could somebody like that sign up for the Roman Catholic Church?

Her father would have cried to hear it, and I couldn’t help but think it was just another way to get at me.

“I’m always surprised when young people sign up for organised religion,” I said.

“I’m not asking your permission, Mom. I’m just telling you.”

“I didn’t mean…” I let my explanation trail away. It wasn’t important. “You’ll be interested in where we are going then,” I said, as we began our descent into a sheer-sided, wood-covered valley, down towards the two elongated lakes that gave this ancient settlement its name. “Glendalough was once the Christian capital of Ireland.”

We parked in the lot by the lake and as we emerged from the car, the mountains seemed to have closed in around us and the quiet was palpable, inescapable, underlined by the distant, humming rush of Poulnapass Waterfall. I felt its peace settle in me, felt my blood slow, my muscles unclench.

Star was finally impressed. “Wow! This place is something.”

We set off. My daughter is no walker. Because of her size, she was propelled not by her legs but by her belly, her steps somehow delicate as well as full of effort, as if the force of gravity was precarious for her. I knew each pace brought her discomfort and that, in a few moments, her forehead would be lined with a sheen of sweat. Yet it was good for her to walk, surely? Not to give in to her disinclination? I fell into a slow step beside her.

Groups and couples passed us in their colored rainwear, their faces ruddy with fresh air, nodding and smiling. I took her up the back way, through the ruins, the remains of cloisters and chapels left over from the monastic heyday.

“That round tower is sure something,” she said, as we stood at the base of it, looking up. “What was it for?”

“A beacon for pilgrims. A bell tower. A refuge when the Vikings came to plunder.”

“Hard to imagine plundering Vikings now. It’s so peaceful.”

And it was. That’s why I write it out here. I want to record how Glendalough worked its magic on us, how Star and I laid down our differences for a while, how we walked around the sacred stones put down by monks a millennium before to mark out their holy ground and sat for a long time after in comfortable silence. How, on that morning before she left me for good, before the police came calling, before I knew the worst, she and I were happy among the graves of Glendalough, almost at peace with one another.

Until, on the way back, I made the mistake of driving us home through Laragh.

“Laragh,” Star murmured as we passed the road sign. “Laragh…?”

“Yes,” I said, thinking she was asking directions. “If you drive on through the village and turn —”

“Laragh? Isn’t that where Dad came from?”

I had forgotten she knew that. I had half-forgotten I knew it myself. “Yes, it is.”

“Oh, my God, Mom, you are unbelievable!” She jerked the car to a stop, making the car behind us blare its horn.

“Star!”

“Don’t you think, Mom,” she said speaking slowly, like I was a child. Or an idiot. “Don’t you think I might be interested in seeing the house where my father grew up?”

“Gosh, honey, I don’t think I even know where your dad’s home place is. Once before I tried to find it, from his description, but I couldn’t be sure…”

“But not to even say.”

“I’m sorry.” Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry…

She interlaced her fingers on the steering wheel, rested her forehead on them. Then: “Were you never in it?”

“No. No, your dad and I left Ireland very soon after we met. I never knew his parents.”

“Didn’t you ever come back?”

“Not together. I don’t think he ever did.”

“Why? I’ve never been able to understand that. What had they done to him?”

“He never told me. He flatly refused to talk about them.”

“You should have made him. Maybe if he had talked…”

This is a new riff on her old refrain, her father’s failings were always my fault.

“All right then,” I said. “Let’s see if we can find anything.”

I directed her to turn at the bridge, near the old mill, and we drove up to the house that I believed might have belonged to Brendan’s family, parked the car a little way beyond, walked back to look at it. A bungalow, low and squat, without a single attractive feature except the shrubbery.

“The garden’s pretty, isn’t it?” I said. “Even at this time of year. Somebody in there has green fingers.”

“I think we should go in,” Star said.

“Absolutely not. I’m not even sure it’s the right house and even if it is, they could well be dead by now. And even if they aren’t, what on earth do you think we can go in there and say? ‘Oh, hi! I was married to your son, the one who left when he was eighteen and never contacted you again. This is your granddaughter. Nice to meet you.’”

“But, Mom, they don’t know whether he is alive or dead. Whatever happened, that’s just not right.”

“I know, honey. But going in there and putting the heart crossways in some old person is not going to give your dad’s story a happy ending.”

“They might not even know I exist.”

“It’s too late, Star.”

“No. Don’t say that. I hate those words.”

“If you want to do this, you’ll have to do it another day. On your own.”

“Or on my own, now.”

“Okay. Give me the keys and I’ll wait for you in the car.”

She rummaged in her bag, handed them across. I turned and began to walk back down the hill. I hadn’t got far when she called me. “Stop. Wait.”

I turned.

“Maybe you’re right,” she puffed, as she caught up.

“You could write to them first. That might be an approach.”

“I probably won’t even do that. As usual I’m a funk.”

“You just want to know more about him.” I took her arm. She let me and I gave it a squeeze. “It’s natural.”

But that only set her off again. “Why didn’t you tell me more when I was growing up, Mom? Why did you keep it all from me?”

“Star, I’ve admitted that was a mistake. I did what I thought was best.”

“It wasn’t.”

“I know. You’ve said. And I’m sorry.”

Over and over: the same thing. Was she never going to let it go? These reproaches were the flip side to the excessive love she used to lavish on me when she was little: “I love you, Mommy,” holding my head in place with her two little hands, so I couldn’t look away from her.

Twice in my life I had wronged her, she believed. The first time with her father and in her mind, our recent travails were connected with that. A connection she would never explain and I could never fathom.

I realised I was going to have to say something, take hold of the subject we were both avoiding. “This isn’t just about Brendan, is it?”

“Mom, don’t. I’m warning you, just don’t.”

“I gave up Zach for you, Star. It’s finished, forever.” There it was, out in the open.

She snatched back her arm.

“Why does that mean nothing to you, Star? Do you know how hard that was?”

“Okay, Mom, that’s it. This sham of a day is now officially over.”

“I know it’s hard for you to talk about it, honey. But we have to. Please.”

“Dr Aintree told me this would happen.”

I was hardly listening. Amanda Aintree was her therapist, a good doctor. A good woman. I was regretting what I’d just said about Zach and trying to find persuasive words that might work.

“She warned me, told me you’d try to annihilate me again.”

That snapped me to attention. Amanda would never say a thing like that, would she? “Annihilate you?”

“We are driving home now, Mom, and then I am going to pack and leave as planned.”

“Annihilate you, Star? You have got to be joking. Annihilate?”

On the drive back to Doolough, she turned on the radio and refused to talk. Once we arrived back at the house, I said to her, “Will you help me clear away your granddad’s things before you go?”

If I could get her to hold off until darkness, she might stay one more night. I might get another chance in the morning. She didn’t want to help but she could hardly say no, so we set to it, working through the house with black plastic sacks, separately and in silence, like burglars.

My father was a hoarder. He hadn’t smoked for years but he’d kept all his old pipes in a shoebox. Of footwear, old and new, I counted seventy-eight pairs: wellington boots, walking boots, best shoes and second-best and long past their best. Wardrobes and cupboards were emptied of clothes and knick-knacks. Ornaments and pictures, brass plates and candlesticks, holy water fonts and ancient bedside lamps were boxed for charity.

As the shelves and drawers emptied and the bags and boxes filled, I felt them separate from their owner, become pure junk. The blue woollen hat he wore when fishing was repellent, greasy at the edges, but most of all, redundant. Dead.

It took us over two hours, to clear out everywhere except my bedroom and the parlour. “They’ve already been sorted,” I lied, suddenly shy of bringing her into those two rooms that Zach and I had made our own.

She took a carriage clock as a memento, along with the photograph of my parents on the cliff. I brought out the last of the bags and, when I came back into the kitchen, I was shocked to find her beside the stove, crying. Star never cried, not any more, or not any more with me.

“Darling?” I crossed the room, put my arms around her shoulders, and she let me, just about, her spine stiff as a tree, but only for a few seconds before shimmying away, dabbing each eye dry with the back of her wrist. “Oh, Mom…”

“It’s okay, Star. I understand. You have to go.” I knew what I had to do now was to keep talking, fill the space between us with meaningless sound, hums and burbles and fuzzy static to get us through to goodbye and beyond. “And thanks for helping with the clearing. I needed to get as much of Granddad out of here as I could.”

I imagined myself stripping further back after she was gone, taking up the carpets and polishing up the wooden floors. I fed myself that vision in my head and I liked it. Painting every wall white. Turning this place into a new blank canvas.

“It’s too cold to go down to the gate,” I said, knowing that if I did, I’d break too. “I’ll wave you off from upstairs.”

I left her then and went up to the spare bedroom. This was my favourite room in the house, a gable-end room with a window on three sides. I went to the one that overlooked the drive. It was only four-thirty in the afternoon, but the day had already faded to dusk. I could barely make her out below, head bent to the soft rain that had started to fall, one hand holding her coat together, backpack in her heartbreaking, chubby grip. She threw it onto the back seat and waved up to me once, unseeing. Then she folded herself in behind the steering wheel.

The car lights came on, front and back, and the red vehicle slipped down the lane. Moran’s dog, who hung around every part of the neighbourhood, went running after the back wheels — bark, bark, bark! —until the car sped up and he relinquished it.

I watched on. It turned the corner, out onto the road and I followed its lights as they blurred and faded into the endless Irish rain.