Page 158 of Tangled Up In You

Joy filled her face as her eyes welled with tears. She brought shaking fingers to her lips. Within a moment, she recovered herself.

“Gavin,” she said brightly. “My Gavin.”

She went to him without hesitation and wrapped her arms around him, locking his arms into an awkward embrace.

Gavin had waited so long, had hoped for this reception for so many years. But now that it was here, he saw clearly that nothing was ever resolved this simply. He looked down at the woman gripping him with familiarity, her face buried into his chest. He felt nothing.

Gently, he pulled away and looked at this stranger. Her face fell, but she shook it off with a small smile.

“Would you like a cuppa?” she asked.

“Sure, I’ll take tea,” he replied, glad for the delay this nicety would afford.

“I’ll be back in a sec. Sit down, please.”

After she left the room, he spotted several old-fashioned photo albums on the side table. Curious to see what she held dear, he flipped open a book at random.

A newspaper clipping pasted to black paper caught him off guard. It was a review of the last show Rogue had in Dublin, complete with a photo of him on stage, sweat dripping down his neck as he cradled the microphone in his hands. His eyes were closed in the shot, his face typically intense with the emotion of the song.

He quickly leafed through the other pages, finding one article after another that centered on him in some way. Then he came to the full-page shot of him and Sophie on their wedding day. It was the candid photo that most of the tabloids had featured. They had stolen away from the reception for what they thought was a private moment. They stood close together under the shade of a tree, he in his bespoke dark suit and she in her elegant wedding gown. Smiles lit up their faces as she grabbed his backside playfully.

“Oh, that’s my favorite, too,” Bernadette McManus said as she returned with a tray of tea and placed it on the steamer trunk. “Your Sophie seems like a wonderful girl. And so very beautiful, isn’t she?”

Gavin nodded dumbly.

“Sit, sit,” she said, full of nervous energy.

He gestured for her to take her seat first and then followed by sitting as well. They both reached for a cup of tea at the same moment, and Bernadette let out a giggle. It occurred to Gavin that she sounded childish and not at all how he remembered. Definitely not maternal. And then he caught the distinctive scent of whiskey, which triggered a sense memory he had long forgotten. Or buried. But now he clearly remembered that his mother had invariably taken not a splash of milk, but rather a shot of whiskey in her tea. It had been the accepted norm in their house, even when his father prepared her morning cup.

“Care to add a taste of whiskey to my cup as well?” Gavin asked with a conspiratorial wink.

She smiled eagerly. “Yes, of course. One more sec, then.” She jumped up and took his cup with her.

He watched with distraction as she left the room, trying to decipher the memories rushing back to him. It wasn’t exactly that his mother was a drunk, but there was suddenly too much familiarity about alcohol. How had that never come to the forefront of his consciousness before now? Had he really suppressed it in his desire to anoint her to some sort of sainthood rather than acknowledge such a major flaw? He had always excused her running away as her reaction to the traumatic loss of her daughter. He had romanticized her pain and convinced himself that with time she would return, healed and ready to be a mother to him again. But the awareness of her reliance on alcohol now lent a different filter to things. He sighed audibly and looked back at the scrapbook to distract himself.

He came upon a clipping of Rogue’s sold-out Wembley show. It had taken place after their last tour and was recorded as a combination CD/DVD package to fulfill their obligations to the label to produce another album. Ninety thousand fans had joined them that evening for the performance of their career. They had brought the house down in a wide-ranging two-and-a-half-hour concert celebration. That level of success was what he had hungered after for so many years precisely so that his mother might understand who he’d come to be, and therefore want to seek him out. But that hadn’t happened.

“I always knew you’d do something big, you know,” she said as she returned. She handed him his spiked tea. “I knew you had it in you, just waiting to come out.”

“That’s grand and all, but can we go back a few steps here?” he said, unable to help himself.

“You’re right, I know it.” She nodded shortly and lowered her eyes deferentially as if accepting a scolding from a schoolmaster. “Where shall I start, then?”

“Tell me about the day you left and never came back.”

98

GAVIN

After several false starts and draining half of her tea, Bernadette finally said, “What you have to know is that I wasn’t right after the accident. I was healing on the outside but I was broken on the inside.”

“Weren’t we all?” Gavin replied, but not with anger.

“I know. I know what I did. But I didn’t plan it. I left hospital that day because I had to see your sister. I had to see her for myself. And when I did, after I convinced the nurse to take me to that awful morgue for a viewing, I almost lost my mind.”

Gavin looked at his mother, envisioning the trauma she had endured. The accident had flipped their car three times, leaving her with a broken collarbone and a concussion. It had also knocked his two-year-old sister out of her car seat restraints and killed her upon impact. Gavin had walked away without so much as a bruise. His father was home with his older brother, Ian, who had taken ill. Because it was raining hard that morning, Bernadette had decided to drive Gavin to school. She’d taken his little sister along for the ride, hoping to lessen her contact with the flu germs in the house.

“You don’t have children yet,” she continued. “But when you do, you’ll know there is nothing that can drive you to madness like losing one of your babies.”

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