Now and Then

by Mary O'Sullivan

  “We had good fun, Mom,” he said. “We played football and had races.”

  His face was more animated than I had seen it for some time. The smile on his mouth was touching his eyes, making them sparkle in an un-Rob-like way.

  “I won,” Anna announced. “At everything.”

  “Me too,” Josh said.

  Anna began to tug on my hand. As I stood to follow her lead into the kitchen, I got the most wonderful aroma. I suddenly realised I was hungry.

  “We make surprises for you,” Anna said as she dragged me over to the counter where a batch of muffins was cooling on a wire tray.

  Mags was standing at the hob, wooden spoon in hand. Pots were bubbling and boiling. She turned towards me and smiled.

  “You have three great little bakers,” she said. “But you must eat your dinner before you get any cake. Isn’t that right, guys?”

  It was a relief to give in. To allow myself to be managed by Mags. To have her send the children to watch TV with Claire, to see a plate of delicious spaghetti bolognese placed in front of me. To feel cared for. Understood.

  “Eat up,” she ordered.

  I did as told, realising now why Claire was still living at home with her mother. It was a safe place to be. And Mags was a very talented cook.

  “How is he?” she asked.

  How did I answer that question? That I didn’t know because he would not talk to me? That it was clear he wanted his mother, not me, beside him?

  “He’s improved,” I said. “He’ll probably be moved out of Intensive Care soon. Having his mother with him now seems to be a comfort to him.”

  Mags was looking at me, her eyes narrowed. She knew. She had heard the hurt, the pain of rejection, in my voice.

  “He’s been through a lot. So have you,” she said.

  She turned away and began to move quietly around the kitchen, cleaning and tidying things away while I ate.

  Then she brought me a mug of coffee.

  “Let me call your little scallywags so that they can give you your muffin,” she said.

  They crowded around me, my precious children, presenting a muffin as if it were decorated with the crown jewels. It was so much better than that. They watched, wide-eyed, as I bit into the cake, clapped their hands as I made yum-yum sounds, laughed as I licked my lips. They cuddled into me as I put my arms around them. I closed my eyes and gloried in the warm weight of the twins on my knees, the soft touch of Rob’s silky hair against my face.

  By the time I opened my eyes again, Mags and Claire had gone. I would ring them later to thank them. I could cope now. With whatever lay ahead. Nothing mattered more than my children. I would always be there for them. All of them.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Ben was sleeping. Della could still discern the child in his features. The straight nose and high forehead. Very like his dad. In appearance only. Gavin had been strong. Dominant. In charge. The vulnerability showed in Ben’s mouth and the shadows in his eyes when he was unguarded.

  He muttered in his sleep. Della reached across and stroked his hair, realising only now that there were quite a few white hairs amongst the dark ones.

  His eyes opened.

  “What time is it?” he asked.

  “Almost nine o’clock at night. You’ve been asleep for a while.”

  “Why are you still here, Mom? You must be exhausted after your flight.”

  “I’m fine. Don’t you worry about me. Your only concern now is to get yourself better.”

  He shook his head. “It’s too late for me.”

  She caught his hand and held it tight. “I won’t hear any of that defeatist talk, Ben. You have the children to think of. And Leah.”

  “Leah? Jesus! I can’t even look her in the eye. She’d be better off without me.”

  Della sat back in her chair. She had suspected of course that history was repeating itself. That was why she had needed so desperately to be by his side. But she had hoped. Until now. She leaned towards him.

  “Why now, Ben? You’ve such a brilliant opportunity waiting for you in the States. All you have to do is meet Zack Milburg and –”

  “Mom! Stop! Face facts. That man would have no interest in employing an out-of-work, second-rate architect from Ireland. Even if I’m an in-law of his sister. You must admit my portfolio is far from impressive. He only employs the best. I don’t know why I let you persuade me that he was the answer to my prayers.”

  “You designed that block of apartments on the quay in Dublin. Your father invested in one. We still own it. Surely you’re proud of that?”

  “I’m tired, Mom. I need to rest and so do you. Just go now. Tell Leah I’ll see her tomorrow.”

  “I won’t be seeing Leah tonight. I’m staying in town.”

  “Oh! I bet you’re booked into the hotel across the street from the hospital. You’re camping out here just in case I let the family secret slip.”

  Della sat still, hands clasped together in her lap. She had heard it all before. Had felt the lash of his anger and self-hatred. She had absorbed the poison then. Been strong enough for them both. She closed her eyes for a moment, praying for the energy to be his strength this time around also. Leah would not understand. She had not been there when he had been pulled from the river. Lifeless. Vomiting water as the paramedics worked on him. Later, vomiting toxins when he overdosed. Pumping fountains of blood when he slashed his wrist. Crying bitter, bitter tears each time he realised he was still alive.

  She opened her eyes and smiled at him.

  “It’s not a secret, Ben. It’s just not anyone else’s business.”

  “Not even my wife’s business? For fuck’s sake, Mom, I spent three months in the psychiatric unit of the Booly Clinic. I was utterly insane with sadness. That’s what it was, insanity, even if the rip-off clinic dressed it up as hormone imbalance. What if my children have my manic-depressive gene?”

  “Language! Don’t be vulgar, please, Ben. You had an episode when you were sixteen. That’s twenty years ago and there’s never been a recurrence. What happened last night was an accident. Wasn’t it?”

  Ben pulled himself up to a sitting position. He leaned forward and stared into his mother’s face. She had been treated kindly by time. It would never have been Della’s style to have her life story written on her face for all the world to see. She should have several lines for her husband’s affairs, another for his sudden death, and a great big gouge across her forehead for her youngest son’s weakness and failures. His madness. Instead she had tolerated her husband’s indiscretions, bore his death with fortitude, referred to her son’s suicide attempts as ‘an episode’ and kept her face unlined by life.

  He flopped back against his pillows. He was too exhausted to marshal the confused thoughts in his mind. Had he stumbled thoughtlessly down the cliff and been trapped by the high tide, or had he deliberately sat and waited for death to wash over him in the dark and freezing cave? Did he love and admire his mother or did he hate her? And his wife, the one he had, not the one he had wished he had. Ellen Riggs had been a distraction. A humiliating self-delusion. What about Leah? The disappointment she tried to hide. The way she never complained about having to be the breadwinner, but yet he felt her resentment. Every order she issued, every list she wrote, every detail of childcare she organised, was an indictment of his failure.

  “They suggested that I talk to a member of the psychiatric team,” he said.

  “And?”

  He stared at her, his eyes now so dark she could not read any expression in them.

  “You think I would volunteer to put myself through all that shit again? As you already said, what happened at the beach was an accident. I confirmed that. They agreed there was no need for psychiatric assessment.”

  Before Della could react, a nurse came to the bedside and began checking monitors.

  “You need to rest, Ben,” she said. “And Mrs. Parrish, I’m sure you need some rest too.”

  “No. I’m good, thank you.”


  “Your son must have quiet now. He’s been through a serious trauma. Goodnight, Mrs Parrish.”

  Della’s expression flashed from shock to disapproval. She stood, put on her coat and picked her handbag up from the floor.

  Ben would have laughed if he had the energy. It was the first time he had seen anyone getting the better of Della Parrish.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, Ben. Sleep tight.”

  Then she was gone. Head in the air, back ramrod straight. With her went any chance he had of making sense of what had happened. Any chance he had of finding a way through the maze of unanswered questions. Through the weight of sadness pressing on his chest.

  He turned his head so that the nurse would not see this grown man cry for his mother.

  Get up, Leah, I told myself. Make decisions. Organise groceries, laundry, house-cleaning.

  Instead, I continued to sit and watch my children sleeping. I saw myself in Anna, Ben in the boys. I tried to see the people they would become. Anna could be anything from a teacher to the Taoiseach. She probably already knew where her life was headed and was steering towards her goal. Josh was quiet and caring. He might be an environmentalist or a social worker. Though he had a lovely sense of fun that might tempt him into a less intense career path. He would be a good husband and father. And then there was Rob. I sat longer beside his bed than the twins. His future was harder to imagine. He could be an architect like his father. He was artistically as well as intellectually gifted. But as I watched him sleep I imagined him as an astronomer. Or an astrophysicist, not that I was sure what that entailed, but it sounded like something he would love. Studying the Universe. Discovering new planets. Observing. Being alone, his intellect roaming the galaxies, solving the mysteries of life. I kissed him softly on the forehead and crept out of his room.

  Back in the kitchen, I sat at the table, sipping my hot milk, even though my aching limbs told me I would sleep tonight even if I drank coffee before bed. Mags had rung earlier and offered to babysit the children tomorrow afternoon while I went to the hospital. An offer I gladly accepted.

  That thought reminded me that Ben’s phone was still in the lounge. I should put it on charge overnight and take it in to him. At least I would be able to say good morning and goodnight to him without putting him through the obvious pain of having to look me in the eye. I brought his phone back to the kitchen and plugged it into the charger. Finished my milk, I rinsed my mug and put it in the dishwasher, then went around the house ensuring doors and windows were locked, taking comfort from the mundane routine.

  Last check was on Ben’s phone to make sure it was charging. It was up to ten per cent already. I wondered if it was password protected. Mine was. My head was still debating whether I should try or not when my hand reached out and switched on his phone. Then I knew. He did not have a password. But he certainly had a lot of messages waiting to be read. They were mostly from his mother. One from Ellen Riggs. The last message was from Hugh. His brother. Hugh, the perfect. Hugh, the high achiever. Hugh of the seven bedrooms and swimming pool. My hand overruled my head again. I opened the message.

  You’ve got to tell Leah. She has a right to know the truth. Especially now.

  I dropped the phone as if it was burning me. It was. Hugh’s words were searing into my brain. What had I a right to know? Had Ben, after all, had an affair with Ellen Riggs? Did he intend to go and live alone in the States, leaving me and the children behind in Paircmoor? No! I knew without a trace of doubt that he loved the children too much to abandon them. So, did he intend to take the children and leave me behind?

  I flopped onto a chair by the table. I was finding it hard to breathe. Ben had a secret. His brother knew what it was. It was a given his mother would know too. Probably what they were whispering about in the hospital. Could it be that this secret was so big and so dark it had almost cost Ben his life? I remembered now moments when his eyes seemed haunted. Times I spoke to him and he didn’t even hear because his thoughts were so far away. Things I should have been concerned about if I had not been so busy organising.

  If I had not been so busy keeping a secret of my own.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Sunday 28th November 2010

  Ben woke to the sound of two nurses whispering as they stood at the end of his bed. They were the night-shift staff and would soon be going off duty. He gathered from their conversation that they had received notification of cutbacks in staff numbers. They were outraged, their whispers becoming louder as their anger grew. No consultation, they said. No consideration for the patients, for the standard of care. For their right to work after all their years of studying and training. He could empathise. They would have a hard road to travel, from rage to accepting their own powerlessness. Emigration might be their only option. He should tell them to go now. While they still had the courage. Before they were destroyed by self-doubt. He would have told them, except that he was reliving the day the redundancy memo had been circulated in his office.

  Yes, he too had felt the outrage, ranted at the unfairness of protecting profits and sacrificing employees. His anger had been on behalf of the unfortunate people who would receive notice. Not himself. He knew he was an essential cog in the Walton, Walton & Meade firm. One of their best architects. The main driving force behind the acclaimed waterside apartment block. Innovative, yet sympathetic to the surrounding environment. A triumph of design, the press reports had said.

  It is with deep regret we must inform you . . .

  The letter had been hand-delivered to his desk. He had read it three times before he got past that opening line and three more times before he believed that he, Ben Parrish, was being thrown on the scrapheap. There had been redundancy pay, soon dwindled away on paying the huge mortgage on his devalued Dublin home. If it hadn’t been for his mother, they could have become homeless. In his blacker moments since, he felt that would have been a better option than being buried alive in Paircmoor. Della was to blame for financing Leah’s fantasy of living happily ever after in the arsehole of the country. She also was to blame for the fact that his teenage problems had to be kept secret. Especially from Leah. His darkness. His despair. He remembered the bite of the knife as it had sliced into his wrist, the spurt of blood, the drifting off into blessed oblivion, then waking up in hospital, hooked up to a blood transfusion. He remembered the times he had stashed his pills, then swallowed them when he had an overwhelming will to die and none to live, only to wake up to stomach-pumps in Intensive Care. And there had been the peace of drifting away in the embrace of the icy cold river, only to wake to the ubiquitous beeps of the monitors. Just like now. So many secrets.

  The nurses had stopped whispering. One stood beside him and the other checked the screens. Ben didn’t need to see any readouts. He heard his quickened heartbeat thump in his ears. Felt how thready and erratic his pulse was. Fear, his constant companion, was coursing through his veins. The sadness, the deep, deep, despair, was oozing from its dark hiding place. From the past. From his gut. From his cells. From the DNA he had passed on to his children.

  “Ben! Take deep breaths,” the nurse beside him ordered. “Stay calm.”

  “Leah!” he gasped. “My wife! I need to talk to my wife!”

  He saw his mother approach just before the effort to breathe became too much.

  The second Della opened the door to Intensive Care, she knew Ben was in trouble. One nurse was leaning over him and another was managing the numerous instruments attached to him. Della rushed to his bedside. He had an oxygen mask on and the nurse was urging him to slow his breathing.

  “The doctor,” Della said. “Have you called the doctor?”

  The nurse glanced at her. Then she nodded to her colleague who came and caught Della by the arm.

  “It would be better if you waited outside, please. The waiting room is first door on your right down the corridor.”

  “I know that! I’m Della Parrish. Ben’s mother. What’s going on with him? Why isn’t the
re a doctor with him?”

  All the time Della was asking questions, the nurse was leading her firmly towards the door.

  “He needs rest and quiet now. The doctor will check on him later.”

  “I demand the consultant sees him now! He has private health care, you know.”

  They were at the door of the waiting room by now. The nurse opened the door and led Della to a chair inside.

  Della opened her mouth to speak but the nurse got there first.

  “Let me assure you, Mrs Parrish,” she said. “It doesn’t matter to us whether patients have private or public healthcare cover. Everyone gets the attention they need. There’s a tea and coffee dispenser up the corridor if you want a drink. Make yourself comfortable.”

  The nurse went out, closed the door and disappeared in a haze of self-righteousness. Della sat there fuming. That snotty girl was just a whippersnapper. Very unlikely that she was a mother. Or that she had any understanding of what that meant. The all-consuming love, more intense than any other. The instinctive urge to protect your child, to shelter him from danger. From life. And, yes, there comes a letting-go time when the child becomes an adult and the mother becomes dispensable. Unless the child has a vulnerability. A need to be protected from himself. Unless that man-child is Ben. She knew from past experience that Ben was having a panic attack. He needed to hear her voice. Those nurses had no right to deny her access to her son. To deny Ben the support only his mother could give.

  Della’s hands began to shake. The trembling unsettled her. Overwhelmed her with unfamiliar feelings of doubt, and a coldness in the pit of her stomach she identified as fear. She could no longer deny it was happening again – a replay of Ben’s nightmarish sixteenth year. Panic attacks and self-harm attempts. Rants followed by long silences. A palpable sadness. Had the idea of going to the States been the trigger? Had it been too much of a challenge for him? But why, why? It would have been a way out for him and his family. He hated Paircmoor, didn’t he? So, as his mother, she had to help. Had to plan an escape route. She could have talked Zach Milburg into giving Ben a job, no matter what Hugh said to the contrary. She had done what she had thought was right. Hadn’t she?