Page 56 of Broken Country

“At the beginning, before the speeches.”

“With Leo, you mean?”

He nods.

“And?” My voice is calm, I am too good at this. Already I can pretend, effortlessly.

“You know what.”

“I don’t, Frank. I can’t read your mind.”

“You used to be able to.”

I hate his inverted smile, the corners of his mouth turned down. We were always so good at communicating without words. It meant we could leave parties early with nothing more than a raised eyebrow or a glance at the door.

“You’re annoyed with me for talking to Gabriel and Leo at the wedding, is that it?”

“I saw how you looked at him. Sorry if that makes me sound like a jealous freak.”

Frank smiles a little, his old self.

“Maybe. But you’re my jealous freak,” I say.

“Hope so.”

“You know so.”

And then we’re kissing and it doesn’t even feel wrong, kissing one man, and then another. They are different things.

This is a love story with too many beginnings. I refuse to think about how it is going to end.

Tuesday

When Bobby died, I left Frank for a while. My parents were living in Ireland by then and I went over for a visit.

As soon as I got there, I realized I didn’t want to come back.

“It’s helping me to be here,” I told Frank on the phone, soon after I’d arrived.

“Then you should stay,” Frank said, as I had known he would. “I want you to stay.”

The weeks ticked by. Our phone calls dwindled to almost nothing, Frank has never liked talking on the phone. I convinced myself this was a good thing, the only way for us to recover from what had happened was to stay apart. Frank didn’t have to wake up next to me every morning, knowing part of me would always blame him for not watching over Bobby. And I didn’t have to pretend I believed the story we told everyone, that it was an accident, accidents were an unfortunate, sometimes tragic part of farm life. Just look what happened to Frank’s mother. Instead, we could lick our wounds in private.

I came home because of Jimmy.

Nina traveled all the way to Cork to tell me how far things had fallen since I’d left. Jimmy had started drinking heavily again, she said. He was asked to leave the pub almost every night for picking fights and being obnoxious, as she put it. He had been found wandering through the village in the middle of the night, talking to himself. It felt as if he were losing his mind.

“Why, though?” my mother had asked her, notunderstanding. Bobby was our child, mine and Frank’s. There was no reason for Jimmy to fall apart.

“Isn’t it obvious? Jimmy has always blamed himself for what happened to Bobby. He thinks he should have watched over him. And he needs to know Frank hasn’t lost his wife as well as his son,” Nina said.

Even now, Jimmy still needs reassurance our shrunken family will stay the same. And that’s impossible to give. For the truth is, I’m not thinking about Frank, not if I can help it. I’m thinking about Gabriel.

The first time we made love was frantic and fevered, driven by our bodies more than our minds. Our minds, until then, had been trying to say no. It is different today.

We undress slowly and stand naked before each other. Anticipation that is exquisite, almost painful. An uprush of feeling, as if all our senses are magnified. I take my time to kiss the parts of him I have been noticing these past months, remembering how I loved them: his nose, his cheekbones, his prominent Adam’s apple. I know he is doing the same when he traces my profile with his forefinger, pausing at the channel above my top lip, which he used to say was exactly the right shape and size for his fingertip.

We move to the bed but continue our gentle rediscovery of one another. It feels dreamlike, this touching and kissing, we are suspended between fact and fantasy in our own perfect no-man’s-land.

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