Page 67 of Promise Me This

She never even looks at me.

We drive in silence, but not the comfortable kind. The kind that suffocates. The air turns to molasses around us, filling my lungs with that instead of air. I search my brain for the right words to repair the irreparable, and I come up empty.

When at last I come to a stop in front of the bed-and-breakfast, its vine-covered facade lit only by a gas lantern hung by the entrance, Leo reaches for the door immediately. She’s halfway turned toward the curb when I clamp a hand down on her knee, and she freezes in place.

Her face tilts in my direction, but she doesn’t lift her eyes to meet mine. Instead her lashes lay against her cheeks in solemnity. The corner of her mouth quivers, and it takes everything in me not to trace it with my thumb, to try to quell her shaking.

“I’m so sorry, Leo.” The words feel impossibly small for something of this magnitude, but they’re all I have. “You didn’t deserve that at all. I had no right—”

“It’s not your fault,” she whispers. It’s the last thing I expected her to say, and I have to force my jaw not to drop. Her gaze at last lifts to mine, and I swear I could drown in the sorrow that fills her eyes. “How could you have known? After all, I never told you.”

With that, she leaves, skirting around an elderly couple stepping out of the inn before I can even get out of the car. They glance from her retreating back to me with morbid curiosity painted on their faces. I ignore them as I lurch toward the door. I’m nearly certain I’m going to be sick on the sidewalk, but I force one foot in front of another, desperate to reach her, to apologize again, to absolve her of the guilt she’s falsely placed on herself.

When the hallway spreads out before me, she’s already gone. Her footsteps thunder up the distant staircase, but I remain halted in my tracks. Mam leans a hip against the makeshift front desk, arms crossed over her chest as she studies me.

“Care to explain?” she asks, one eyebrow perked.

“I think I just ruined everything,” I reply before stumbling into my mother’s embrace.

If I told Darren that my uselessness at work this week could be attributed to the same girl who nearly got me fired from my unpaid internship all those years ago, he’d probably threaten to castrate me.

I’ve joined our virtual stand-ups late each morning with undeniable bedhead and ducked out early nearly every afternoon. The reports I’m responsible for showed up a day past their due in his inbox, and on top of that I’ve been dodging his calls. I’m a wreck, and I have no way of masking it, so I go the route of avoidance instead.

“What have you brought for Leona today?” Niamh chirps, gazing at the small gift bag dangling from my clenched fist.

The sun is high and bright, beating down on my shoulders while I hold open the door for her to enter the bed-and-breakfast. It’s nearly lunchtime, and most of the guests are either long departed to their various excursions or checked out and moving on in their travels. I rolled out of bed too late to get Niamh here and attend stand-up, so I decided Mam didn’t need an extra set of hands at breakfast that badly and let my daughter sleep in for once instead.

“A pretty magnet I saw at the store.” I jiggle the bag at her for emphasis. “Think she’ll like it?”

Niamh’s nose scrunches up like she’s caught a whiff of something vile. “A maggot? Why not a toy? Or flowers? Rapunzel likes flowers!”

“A magnet, you maggot.” I ruffle her hair, which hangs in loose ringlets over her shoulders. No time for plaits today. “And what a coincidence; it happens to be a magnet that looks like a flower.”

She shrugs her shoulders and then breaks into a sprint down the hall, her light footsteps echoing as she makes her way to Mam’s room where her stash of stuffed animals awaits.

Mam is stoking the fire in the living room, sending showers of hissing embers onto the brick floor of the hearth. I join my hands at the base of my back, the small gift bag resting against my ass. Out of sight, out of further judgment by another Walsh woman.

“How’s it going today, Mam?”

“You’re awfully late,” she responds, ignoring my question. She stores the fire poker in the wrought-iron stand to the right of the hearth and turns to examine me. I swear her eyes glint with amusement at her sad, lovesick puppy of a son before the corners of her mouth turn downward. “Another bad day, I’m afraid. She’s still asleep last I checked.”

A wave of sour shame coats my stomach.

Mam nods once, as if satisfied by my discomfort, before reclining in the chaise to the right side of the fireplace. “And what are you after bringing our girl today?”

Despite everything that happened between us, and the sheer unlikelihood of reconciliation, a small thrill runs down my spine when Mam refers to Leona as our girl. Like she’s a part of the odd family Mam, Niamh, Padraig, and I have created. Like she belongs.

After all that she has lost, I wonder if she needs to hear that as much as I did. Possibly more.

I remove the small, metallic trinket from the bag, holding it up for Mam to see. She narrows her eyes like that might bring it into focus.

“It’s a poppy flower,” I explain, turning it over in my palm. “I saw it at the shop yesterday and thought she’d like it.”

In all honesty, Niamh had gone looking for a snack and found the cupboards barren due to my terrible parenting, and I was forced to trek to the store to replenish our supplies. In the checkout lane a tower of kitschy tourist items lay in wait, and when the bright red petals of the magnet caught my eye, I immediately thought of Leo. Not the version of her I know now, but the twenty-year-old American girl who’d just seen a field of poppies bloom in the Irish countryside for the first time in her life. For a moment I could still feel the excitement crackling off her. I could taste her salty skin as I laid her out on a blanket and kissed her in the middle of that field.

“I don’t know that she’s ready yet, son.” Mam gives a rueful smile. “She hasn’t come out of her room except to use the bathroom. I don’t think sausage rolls and little trinkets are quite enough to mend that type of grief.”

I wince but nod. When said aloud like that, my little attempts at brightening Leo’s days sound a lot more pathetic.

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