Page 44 of Keeping 13

The friendship contract.

Fuck.

Carefully refolding the letter, I tucked it into my bedside locker and sighed.

Be okay,I mentally prayed.Please be okay, Shannon like the river.

11

Homeward Bound

Shannon

I had always felt unsteady. For most of my life, I remained in a state of constant unease, trying and failing to predict the next bad move, the move that would bring pain and misery.

As I stood in the doorway of my childhood bedroom on Thursday afternoon, I felt more unnerved and doubtful than ever before, because I couldn’t predict the danger. I just knew it was lurking somewhere. My body was on high alert; the survival instinct inside of my head was screaming at me that I wasn’t safe. Feeling powerless, I took stock of my room and noted that it looked exactly the same as it always did: small, neat, and tidy.

“I’ll get you some new stuff for in here,” Darren announced as he stepped around me and placed my hospital bag on the foot of my single bed. “Some new paint and curtains. A new bedspread. Whatever you want, Shannon. Just tell me what colors you’d like and I’ll get it done.”

How about a new life? Or a new family? Or just some inner peace?“I’m fine,” I replied, throat still raw and hoarse. “I don’t need you to buy me anything.” Forcing my legs to move, something I was finding difficult since stepping through the front door earlier, I walked over to my bed and sat down.

My mind automatically shifted to the memory of Johnny sprawled out on my mattress teaching me maths, and my lips tipped up. But then I made the mistake of glancing at the wall beside the door and my one good memory of this house obliterated into thin air, replaced with the memory of my father throwing me against the wall so hard that my head made a dent in the plaster. I was seven at the time and had refused to hand over my First Communion money. That had been a mistake. One I had paid for with both my money and my body.

“Are you okay?” Darren asked, dragging me from my dark thoughts. “Shannon?”

“Where is everyone?” I asked, forcing the memories back down.

“The boys are over at Nanny’s,” he explained. “I couldn’t take them with me to pick you up, and Mam’s at that class Patricia organized.” Patricia being the social worker assigned to our family, and the class being a parenting skills group. I almost rolled my eyes at the notion. What were they going to teach her there? Not to let her husband beat her children? Not to run off for days and leave her children without food? Not to take to her bed for weeks on end and leave us to fend for ourselves?

Common sense should have told her all that.

Of course, the social workers didn’t know all this. They were fed the “poor battered wife trying desperately to keep her children safe” line Darren had made us rehearse until we were blue in the face. I cringed at the thought of how he worded that spiel to the younger boys. They must be feeling so confused.

She’s as much of a victim as the rest of us,Darren had said. To a point, I agreed with him, or at least I used to. But there came a time in life when I stopped making excuses for my mother, and that time came and went months ago.

“Do you want to talk?” Darren asked, hovering in the doorway now. “About Dad?”

I shook my head.

“Are you sure?”

I gave him a blank stare. I wasn’t sure what he was expecting me to do. Confide in him? I didn’t think so. He was as much of a stranger to me as the countless authority figures I’d been forced to speak to.To lie to.

“What about Joey?” I asked the question that was most important to me. “Where is he?”

Darren sighed heavily. “I don’t know.”

“Well, has he been home?” I asked, my tone hardening with my outrage. “Has he slept here since you got back?”

He shook his head. “Haven’t seen him since the hospital.”

“Did you call his girlfriend?” I demanded, feeling my pulse flutter wildly. “Do you know if he’s with Aoife?”

“Joey’s his own man,” Darren replied. “He’s an adult. Over eighteen—”

“Barely,” I choked out. It suited them for Joey to be gone. Without Joey, everything would fall back into place. Joey was a complication neither Mam nor Darren seemed to want to deal with. “He turned eighteen at Christmas, and he’s still in school. That hardly makes him an adult.”

“Shannon, if he wants to stay out, there’s nothing I can do about it.”

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