The phone call came from Derry, and everything changed. My brother, Brian, rang, only he didn’t—he got his wife, Anne, to phone for him. I listened until I’d got the gist; then I made her go and get Brian.
“I’m not being uncivil,” I told Anne. “But it’s his mother we’re talking about, not yours. Some things even Brian has to do for himself.”
I heard Anne put down the phone; then I heard footsteps and voices off, then footsteps again and the phone being lifted.
“Yes, Ellen,” Brian’s voice said down the line.
It was strange hearing Brian. If you’d asked me I’d have said I’d forgotten what his voice even sounded like, but the minute I heard it I knew every nuance and inflection—I even knew what his face looked like as he talked.
Only I didn’t. It was more than ten years since I’d laid eyes on Brian; he might be fat and bald for all I knew, he might have grey hair and reading glasses. He might have three toes missing from his right foot or no right foot at all.
But if he did, all that was in the future. For the moment I spoke to the brother who lived in my mind.
“Cancer,” I said to Liam, the word sounding strange, as though I was being needlessly melodramatic. “It seems she had a mastectomy two years ago, but she wouldn’t let them tell me. This is a secondary—something called ‘metastatic liver cancer.’ They’re talking containment, not cure.”
Liam stirred in his chair, but he didn’t speak; he waited for me to go on.
“Brian said she’s been living with them for the last two months. Anne’s off work, and the Macmillan nurse has been calling in. She took bad four nights ago, and now she’s in the hospital. They told him she might have as much as two months, but more likely it’ll be weeks…No one’s mentioned sending her home.”
We had ordered the children next door to do their homework, had banished them, unfed, and with no explanation. They were too surprised to object. Now Liam was searching my face, but I kept it blank and calm. Liam had never been to Derry, had never met any of my family; my life up there predated him and belonged entirely to me.
There was power in that and also safety: I could dispense information as I felt inclined, could tell him or withhold from him, I didn’t have to let him see what I didn’t want seen.
So I talked on, my voice as flat and dead as my face, and I knew as clear as I knew anything that keeping him shut out like this was dangerous and wrong. But I was a long way off from myself, and I couldn’t get back. I didn’t want to get back; I was too afraid of what might be there waiting for me if I did.
“How many hours’ drive to Derry?” Liam asked. “Five? Six? We’ll bring the children. When do you want us to leave?”
“I don’t.”
“Wait till she’s nearer the end? You’d be taking a bit of a chance, wouldn’t you? But if you want to be there when she dies…?”
“You’re not listening to me, Liam,” I said. “I’m not going. Not now, not next week, not next month, never. And neither are they.”
“Ellen, she’s your mother, you have to go—”
“Have to? Who says? Why do I have to?” So much for flat and dead—I could hear the hysteria rise in my voice.
“Because you’ll regret it for the rest of your life if you don’t.”
Liam’s mother had died of a stroke when Andrew was not quite two and I was heavy with Suzanna. It was a long vigil, and they were all there—her husband, children, grandchildren; her brothers and her only sister. I wasn’t. Liam had said I was better off at home; he said everyone would understand. But I hadn’t stayed away on my own account, I’d stayed away for Maura herself. I’d liked Maura; she was a big-boned, overweight countrywoman, red-faced and dowdy, with wonderful deep, warm eyes. She was devout, too—Liam was anxious when he brought me there first, for all that he swore to me he wasn’t. But she’d never said a word about my not being Catholic, or our not being married, or Andrew not being christened, not a word. Maybe she’d felt for me because I was a stranger, or maybe she’d liked me as I’d liked her. Whatever it was, she’d always taken my part.
Liam had thought it the best of deaths, but I hadn’t. I wouldn’t want to die like that myself, everyone pressing and watching, I’d want a bit of privacy and peace. So I’d cast around for something to do for her, and staying away was all I’d been able to think of.
But that was Maura. It wasn’t why I wouldn’t go North to see my own mother.
“It’s the last chance we’ll have to set things right,” he told me now. “She’ll see her grandchildren before she dies.”
I sat there, my belly full of this cold emptiness, waiting for the surge of anger that would protect me from despair. It didn’t come. Instead I felt tears rising up in me, and I pushed them down. I looked for the thing that comes through me and into my hands, but it wasn’t there; my body felt only numbness and exhaustion. I stood up and crossed to the sink, ran cold water into it, fetched potatoes from the larder, the tears running soundlessly down my face. Liam got up from his seat and tried to hold me, but I pushed him away.
“I have to make the dinner,” I said.
“Dinner can wait. Leave that, Ellen. Sit down; we have to talk.”
“Talk? What for? What’s there to say? She’s my mother, this is my business, not yours. But I can’t stop you going if that’s what you want. Do what you want—you will, anyway—but I’m not going and neither are they, and that’s flat.” I dumped the potatoes into the water and covered my face with my hands. My whole body shook with those great gulping sobs I thought I’d left behind me in some childhood drawer with the ankle socks.
Liam had the wit to sit himself down again and wait. Gradually the heaving died down, but the tears still came; they slid under my hands and ran down my wrists and soaked themselves into my sleeves. At last I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, blew my nose in a tea towel, and turned to face him.
“I know she’s my mother, you don’t have to keep saying it,” I said. “But I don’t want to see her again. And I never want to forgive her. Never, ever, ever, Liam. That’s what I’m saying, and that’s what I mean.”
“Why?”
I stared.
He stared back, waiting.
“You know well why,” I said slowly.
“No,” he said, “you’re wrong, I don’t know. I know you don’t like her. But I don’t know what she did to you to deserve the way you feel.”
I couldn’t speak.
“What did she do to you that’s so bad, Ellen, tell me that? Not come to our wedding? I wrote to ask her—you didn’t. It was obvious you didn’t want her there.”
“She never came to see the children—”
“You’d have shut the door in her face if she had—”
I put my hands over my ears like a child.
“She made me what I am.”
That