Page 56 of A Miracle on Hope Street
‘I’ll come food shopping with you tomorrow,’ he says with a smile. ‘We can prep the dinner and give the place a clean-up and get rocking around that Christmas tree, what do you think? Can you believe it’s Christmas Eve tomorrow already, Ruth? Despite all of this, we’re going to have a lovely day, I just know it.’
I look around the old, musty dining room and I want to get away from here, to embrace the chance of a fresh start, a new beginning. I look out at theFor Salesign in the garden of this house that is so haunted by memories and I make an inward pledge to really push for a sale once Christmas has been and gone.
‘Christmas Eve again,’ I say to him. ‘Yes, let’s try and make this a good one for all the people who need it just as much as we do too. Today is a good day, Michael. Go and show Laura that you’re a changed man and I’m sure she’ll be glad to have you back in her life.’
‘Back in Liam’s life is where I want to be more than anywhere, Ruth,’ he says. ‘Come here and give me a hug.’
He puts his arms around me and I know it’s selfish, but I fear that today is going to take Michael away from me, so I savour this moment, lost in his arms, and I swallow back tears, determined not to get caught up in something that I sensed was coming even if I didn’t know exactly when or what it might be.
If something or someone is too good to be true, they probably are.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Ruth. Thanks for listening, as always,’ he says, in total oblivion to how much he is tearing up my heart inside.
He kisses me slowly on the cheek and it’s enough to make my head spin.
‘Good luck,’ I say to him for what seems like the hundredth time today and then I watch him walk down the steep little set of steps onto the street below, into his car and across the city where he’ll meet the mysterious Laura, the mother of his child and the one who holds the key to his future in her hands.
I close the door and lean against it in thought. From a portrait on the wall that was taken on her thirtieth birthday, my mother’s sad eyes look right across at me and I reach across and touch her solemn face.
Herthirtiethbirthday . . . she was just a few years younger than I am now and she had two children of ten and nine by then. She was so young, and she looked so sad. Maybe she was always sad, ever since she came here as an eighteen-year-old girl, in a foreign country, far away from her own family and friends, in love with her university lecturer who was fifteen years her senior, her university degree forgotten as she was plunged into early motherhood and marriage.
I think of Paul Connolly who left this world at only twenty years old, with still so much to learn and so much to live for. My mother was his age when she had me – just a baby, too.
Yes, she has hurt me. Yes, she has wronged us all, but what if there’s more to it than what I have known for all these years? I finally see her now as a human being and someone with a heart and feelings and not only a mother – she’s a person who is living with guilt and regret just like Michael is. Michael, who has gone now to try and make amends, just like she is trying to do with me.
I think of Marian who misses her two daughters who are travelling the world and I realise that the empathy I feel for Marian and all her longing and loss could be related exactly to how my mother feels now, as she too learns to live without her daughters, for reasons that I still have to explore.
I think of Kelly, the single parent who knows the difficulties of sharing custody after a marriage break-up and all the pain it brings. Maybe my mother felt that we were better off with our father than we were with her? I still need to know why.
I think of Nicholas the pianist, the man who is bursting with talent yet through life and the circumstances it brought his way, feels no longer able to share it, even though it is killing him slowly. Maybe my mother too had a talent that she never got to explore or some other similar sense of unfulfillment in the way life and the circumstances it brought her?
I think of Molly Flowers and how, even though to the outside world she has a husband she loves and a healthy young son, she still feels so lonely and longs sometimes to run away from it all and never come back. Maybe my mother felt that way too but the urge became too strong to be just a wonder.
It’s time I made contact with her and started to find out if any of these circumstances made her leave us like she did. I’ll get this afternoon over with first and then I’m going to make that call and try to find some answers.
It is Christmas, after all and if I can reach out to strangers and give them a chance, surely, as Michael said, I can do it for my own flesh and blood.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Carlingford is a rugged and exceptionally beautiful mountainside medieval town on Ireland’s ‘ancient’ East coast with breathtaking views over its famous lough, and even with the grey mood that this late-December day brings, I have to stop myself from taking in too much of the scenery rather than concentrate on the road and where I’m going. I’ve listened to the radio for the past sixty minutes, answering silly quiz questions out loud even though no one can hear me, and then Ally called me, so I chatted to her on loudspeaker about the best way to cook a turkey.
As I drive, I can’t help but let flashbacks from our family’s past run through my mind. As well as that holiday in the rain in Rossnowlagh, we used to visit our grandparents, our beloved late Nonno and Nonna in Italy as often as we could and we all enjoyed the intense change of climate and the simplicity of the cuisine and I recall how my mother would burst into vibrant life when she was there, so much so that it irritated my father as she became a very different person, almost unrecognisable to the sullen, lost young woman she was when we were at home in Ireland.
They always seemed to argue on the way home from those holidays in Italy, and no matter how good a time Ally and I would have had, it was always ruined by their sharpness of tongue and accusations of her wanting to be there with them rather than back at home with us. I never could understand why they couldn’t have accepted that we could all have the best of both worlds.
Most of the time at home was spent watching her cook or read all sorts of exotic books on European heroines who she’d drool over, and if she wasn’t cooking or reading, she’d be lost in thought so much that it sometimes felt like she wasn’t even there with us at all.
I wonder how long she had been miserable for, how long she put up with feeling so out of her natural habitat.
‘Come un uccello intrappolato,’I once heard her say to my father in the middle of one of their arguments.
Like a trapped bird.
Just like my new friend Nicholas, who is no longer able to play his music . . .
As I approach the town of Carlingford I pull the car in on a grass verge and I sit there, frozen in time, as some of her words come flooding back to me and I begin to see the bigger picture in my head after all these years.
Since she left us, I’ve held on to remembering only all the good times like the Christmas charades by the fireside, the feeling I’d get when I’d see her laugh out loud at one of Dad’s silly jokes, the way she’d gush when they came home from a night out at the theatre or better, the opera that she adored, or how she’d teach me to cook some of her favourite family recipes and tell me stories of her childhood back in a place called Emilia-Romagna where the mountains and sea were within arms’ reach and where she lived with her brothers and sisters, her mother and father and her darling grandparents (all in the same house) until they passed away just before she came to Ireland to study English at the age of just eighteen years old.
