Page 58 of Secrets in the Snow
‘He’s too caught up with his life in America,’ I told Camille, even though the thought of him makes my partially empty stomach lurch. ‘It’s too complicated for me right now, but yes, I’ll speak to him. We can still be friends, even if it makes me sad to think how much I’d hoped we could be so much more.’
Camille shook her curls and we stared at the garden together.
‘You know,’ she piped up just when I was getting used to the silence. ‘When I first met Paddy, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Like you, I’d been let down and broken by a rotter beforehand and I believed that no one would want me.’
I leaned back in my wooden garden chair and felt the September sun on my face, listening to what new revelation Camille was going to come out with to knock me into shape when it came to my own life.
‘I pushed him away at first,’ she said, laughing now at the memory. ‘But he persisted. The more I pushed him, the more he insisted that he wasn’t going away and that he would prove me wrong. He told me I was the most beautiful woman he had ever met at a time when I felt frumpy and down, but it was only when I could look in the mirrorand see what he saw that I knew I could believe him and give our love a chance.’
I opened my eyes and looked across at Camille.
‘Aidan Murphy can’t change your mind,’ she told me. ‘And I can’t change your mind by coming here and making you eat when you don’t want to, or convince you to talk to him when you don’t want to. Only you can do that, Roisin. So, sit in your pyjamas all day every day if you want, skip work if that’s what makes you feel good, and drink your whisky until it comes out of your ears, because until you can see what I can see, you’ll never do a thing about it.’
She stood up, holding her coffee cup with both hands.
I realized right then by looking at her with her dangly green earrings, her multi-coloured Moroccan style dress, her freshly applied make-up and her present way of thinking, that she was in a totally different world to me. I was lost and trapped in a dense fog, and she was right. It was only me who could find my way out of it.
I realized that it was never going to be all about what Jude said, it wasn’t about blaming my mother, it’s not about Ben or Mabel or Aidan.
It’s all down to me.
At the end of September I unroll the map of Ireland I keep in a drawer up in my spare room and I pin it on the wall. I slip a hairpin out of my hair and close my eyes, and thenI stab the map with my makeshift weapon and open my eyes in anticipation.
I do it again, and again and again, but no matter how many times I try to replicate my bravery from before, it just isn’t happening. I don’t feel inspired by any of the places I land on, nor do I feel the desire to find out anything about them, and it’s only when I tear the map with frustration that I realize, I’ve no idea where I want to go next, but what I do know for sure is that my chapter here in Ballybray has ended. I need to move on.
So I pull on a dress from my bedroom floor, I brush through my sticky hair, pull it back into a bun, and leave the house quickly so I can be back in time for Ben coming home from school.
‘You might remember me,’ I tell the ruddy-faced estate agent who picks up on my out-of-town accent immediately. ‘I bought No. 3 Teapot Row from you about five years ago.’
He puts down a brochure he is holding and looks up at me over his glasses. He is almost retirement age, I’m guessing, but dresses like he’s ten years older, with trousers that go way up his back, held up by braces, and a shirt that needs to be tucked in at the sides.
‘Of course I remember you, and if all my customers were as decisive as you are, Miss O’Connor, I’d have a lot more hair on my head,’ he says, laughing out loud at his own joke.
‘I’d like to put my house on the market,’ I tell him, barely able to hold back the sadness of my decision as my eyes well up at the thought of another new beginning. ‘I’d like to put it on the market straight away. I want to leave Ballybray.’
31.
‘But where will we go?’ Ben asks me over breakfast the next morning when I tell him my plans to pack up once more and start again. ‘I don’t want to leave Ballybray. I want to stay here with Gino and my friends at school.’
My head races with so many options and paths to choose in life next, but I know what Ben is saying is true and that his happiness has to be paramount in whatever I decide upon.
‘Look, nothing is for definite yet, but I just think it would be nice to maybe live by the sea?’ I suggest. ‘Gino lives out in Dunfanaghy, which is just a few miles away. Oh, I’m sorry, Ben, but I just think that with Mabel gone almost a year now, there are too many memories here that I’d rather try and move on from. We can remember her always, but I’m finding it hard to be here without her.’
Ben walks to the sink and rinses out his cereal bowl, puts it on the draining board with a little more force than he probably should and looks at me with tear-filled eyes.
‘You were happy in Ballybray when Aidan was here,weren’t you?’ he says, pleading with me. ‘Why doesn’t he come here any more? Why did he have to go back to stupid New York anyhow? I hate New York and I hate you for ruining everything! It’s not fair!’
I stand there open-mouthed as he grabs his coat from the hallway and makes his way towards the front door with his schoolbag dwarfing him on his back as always. He is eleven years old now and has much more to say than the little six-year-old I once led by the hand up the garden path outside.
‘Ben!’ I call after him, following him up the hallway. ‘Ben, don’t run off on me like that!’
But he has already slammed the door behind him and is making his own way to school. I should go after him and try to explain more, but it’s safe for him to walk down to the village this term, and he’s been enjoying the independence so far, so instead I plonk down on the sofa, curl into a ball, and cry for some direction.
Damn you Aidan Murphy and your precious business in America. Damn you for making me love you like I still do.
The days pass by in a hazy blur and, as the season changes fully into autumn in October with the most magnificent display of red, gold, green and amber leaves falling on the footpaths of Ballybray, as always my mind turns to Mabel and the prospect of her final message.
In just over a month it will be a full year now since we last saw her, and the gaping hole she’s left in our livesbecomes more evident as each day passes as her house lies empty next door.
