Page 55 of A Miracle on Hope Street
‘What?’
‘I could have killed us.’
He just blurts it out again and then he bursts into tears. ‘I don’t think I will ever be able to forgive myself for what I did that night, or more so what I didn’t do and should have,’ he says. ‘I should have kept my eyes on the road. I shouldn’t have been driving at all and I shouldn’t have lost my temper but she kept pushing me. She just wouldn’t stop.’
I put down my coffee quickly.
‘What on earth do you mean, Michael? You could havekilled—’
‘We were having a row in the car,’ he says, composing himself slightly. ‘A stinker of a row over how she thought I didn’t like her family – which was absolute nonsense. It was almost Christmas, a really snowy night, and Liam was sleeping in the back seat. We were on our way back from Laura’s parents’ house and she’d had a few drinks and so had I.’
He stops at that.
‘Oh.’
He had been drinking. Oh no.
‘I’ve never forgiven myself and I’ve never had a drink of alcohol since that night,’ he says to me, wiping tears now from his face. ‘I can still hear Liam scream in the darkness and the sound of the radio and the squeal of the windscreen wipers. I can still hear it all so bloody clearly.’
‘Oh Michael, that’s so awful!’
I feel sick for him. All the guilt and the running away makes sense now. He made an almighty mistake by getting behind the wheel that night, but he doesn’t need a lecture from me on that as much as I could give it to him. He has been broken and has punished himself for long enough.
He rubs his face as if trying to erase some of the pain as he remembers it all.
‘I couldn’t look at them any more after it,’ he tells me. ‘I felt so guilty, so I just walked away and the saddest thing of all was, I think Laura was glad to see me go. She hated me as much as I hated myself, Ruth, and she didn’t try to stop me, not even once. How on earth can I ever get over all of that? How?’
He leans his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands and we both just sit there in thought as I try to absorb all that he has just told me.
‘And so you lived rough then? Did you not have anywhere else to go?
He shakes his head. ‘I hung out with friends for around six or seven months, sofa surfing and just bumming around,’ he says. ‘Gradually, I ran out of people to bunk in on. Who wants a grown man moping around their home for any length of time? I know I wouldn’t. On the night you saw me, I’d been lying rough for a while and I was so cold, so, so hungry and so empty that I thought the best thing for everyone was if I disappeared properly. Forever.’
‘No!’
‘And then you came along and looked right into my eyes and you made me feel like a person again, not just some loser who could have killed his family and ran away from it all,’ he says. ‘You made me feel alive, Ruth. You still do. You always make me feel so alive and like I’m worth something. Before that, I never felt worthy of anyone’s time or friendship.’
‘Michael, you can’t keep going over and over this, it’s not good for you,’ I say to him. ‘Come on, now. Look how far you’ve come from then? You’ve made a new life for yourself and everyone loves you around here. Gloria adores the ground you walk on and you know that I do too and Liam can still be part of all that, can’t he? You haven’t lost it all. You messed up big time by running away but look at what today is bringing to you just two years on? You can make this better again, Michael. Believe in yourself, please.’
He takes a deep breath in and then out again.
‘Laura and I were over a long time before that accident but we didn’t face up to that,’ he whispers. ‘We couldn’t say a kind word to each other and look where that brought us? Look what fighting does, Ruth? It left us lying in a ditch on a freezing cold winter’s night with our son in the back seat screaming with fear and a car boot full of Christmas presents that were never delivered.’
‘Yes, and now she is meeting you with a view to giving you a second chance with Liam,’ I say to him. ‘And maybe even a second chance with her? Who knows how you’ll feel when you see her?’
I want him to totally disagree with me on that one. I want him to say that no, that would never happen, that he has no intention of finding a second chance with Laura, but he doesn’t.
‘You’re remarkable, Ruth,’ is all that he says. ‘I don’ think I’ll ever meet anyone like you again, Ruth Ryans. You’re the best. You really are one in a million.’
I swallow. One in a million to many, but nottheone in a million to anyone, it seems.
He squeezes my hand and then stands up, fixing himself and trying to shake off his emotion before he leaves. I thought he would have stayed longer. I hoped he would have stayed longer.
‘I’ll catch up with you after and fill you in on how it goes,’ he says to me, his head low and his mood the same. ‘Please go easy on your mum if you ever do track her down, won’t you, Ruth? I kind of know how she feels and it sucks, big time.’
I can’t help but laugh at the irony of it all.
‘Michael, my mother left here almost sixteen years ago and peppered my life with sporadic visits until she eventually stopped doing even that. I think she has a lot of explaining to do, a lot more than even you do, but if and when I see her again I’ll give her a chance, yes. I’m too tired to fight anyway and it’s Christmas. No one wants to fight at Christmas, do they? I don’t want to fight any time of the year if truth be told.’
