by Claire Allan
I closed the bathroom door between us and did my best to gulp some air, to try to steady my stomach. What I wanted to do was go back downstairs, or leave. But I knew they’d see it, all over my face. Shame leaves its mark.
I could feel my resolve to stay calm waver. Could feel heat prickling at the back of my neck, unshed tears stinging my eyes. I jumped when the bathroom door opened and he hobbled back out, grabbing on to my arm again. My whole body cringed, tensed with his touch.
When we got to his room, he sat on the side of the bed again. Took some deep breaths. He did look pale. Shaky. Unsure of himself. I revelled in that for a moment or two.
‘Could you help me?’ he asked, and I didn’t know what he meant.
‘Help me into bed,’ he added. ‘Like a good girl.’
There was something in the way he said it, something in the expression on his face that made me snap. I couldn’t do this any more.
Chapter Sixty-Two
Heidi
Now
I can hear Ciara moving around downstairs. I can hear her talking to someone. The noise is too muffled to make out whether she is talking to herself or maybe on the phone. I should have taken her mobile and thrown it across the room, too.
I look at my watch. It’s seventeen minutes since she spoke to Alex and he’s not here yet. I start to wonder, did she really speak to him at all? She could’ve faked the call for all I know. This could all be another move in her game. She is smarter than I’d ever given her credit for.
She’d painted a very public picture of me being on the brink of a breakdown while she’d, for all intents and purposes, maintained her poise. Any outpouring of emotion she’d shown had been perfectly in keeping with a grieving daughter.
And she was his daughter, after all. His blood ran in her veins. His sick and twisted blood.
I put Lily, who is now sleeping, into the centre of the bed, placing pillows on either side of her so that she can’t roll off, then kneel down and put my ear to the ground to see if I can make out exactly what Ciara is saying and to whom.
There is an urgency to her voice. A manic quality. I press my ear tighter against the well-worn carpet.
‘It has to be her,’ I hear her say. ‘She’s upstairs. Yes … I know … there’s no proof, but it makes total sense, don’t you see?’
The loud ringing of the doorbell makes me jump. It’s Alex, or at least I hope it’s Alex. Then again … What if he believes her too? What if they all believe her?
I stand up, glance back to Lily and, content that she is safe, I go to the bedroom door and pull it open. I tense when I hear Alex’s voice at the bottom of the stairs.
‘What is it, Ciara? Jesus, you look awful. Where’s Heidi? Her car’s outside. And Lily?’ The panic in his voice is evident.
‘Come in, come in,’ I hear Ciara say. ‘Let’s get a cup of tea and talk.’
She sounds so calm. So normal.
‘Ciara, you’re scaring me,’ Alex says. ‘Where’s my wife?’
From the top of the stairs I call out ‘I’m here,’ but there is no hiding the tremor in my voice. Alex looks up at me, his face a picture of complete confusion.
‘Heidi, what’s going on?’ he asks as Ciara glares at me defiantly.
I open my mouth to speak, but Ciara cuts in. ‘Heidi here has something to tell you. About what happened to Joe. About what she did, but don’t worry, because she had a good reason and the police will understand. We just have to stand firm together.’
Alex does not break his gaze from me.
I’m shaking my head. ‘That’s not it at all,’ I say, but I can see the fear on his face. The shock.
‘What’s she talking about?’ he asks.
‘I didn’t do anything. You have to believe me,’ I say. ‘It wasn’t me.’
‘It was self-defence,’ Ciara says, ignoring me. ‘We can tell the police it was self-defence. We’re going to tell them what he did, Alex. We’re going to tell everyone.’
Alex looks between the two of us. I gingerly take a few steps down towards him.
‘Alex, don’t listen to her … She has it all wrong.’
I’m forcing myself to maintain eye contact with him, even though every fibre of my body is screaming at me to look away.
‘Heidi …’ She says my name, just my name.
His face crumples. I can see I am losing him.
‘Why don’t we all sit down?’ Ciara says, and I follow her, limply, to the living room.
I glance back at Alex trailing dejectedly behind me, all colour drained from his face.
Clearing my throat, I speak. ‘Alex, you must believe me that I love you and I never meant to keep anything from you. I just … I just couldn’t bring myself to tell you the truth. I’ve never told anyone. I wouldn’t have told anyone … but Ciara …’
‘Don’t say it,’ he says, raising one hand, closing his eyes, shaking his head.
I half expect him to put his hands over his ears.
But I have to tell him anyway, because it just can’t stay hidden any more.
‘Joe hurt me,’ I say, closing my eyes because I can’t bear to see the look on Alex’s face when my words register with him. ‘He abused me,’ I say, my voice as small as it was when I was nine years old and heard that squeak of the floorboard. ‘He did things … And I didn’t know what to do because if I told anyone, he told me … he told me no one would believe me, or I’d have to go into a home and that no one would ever want me because I was too old for a family.’
The words are pouring out. ‘He hurt me and I swear, I didn’t do anything to encourage it. I told him to stop. So many times I told him to stop but he didn’t. He said … he said he couldn’t help it. And it was only because he loved me so much.’
I am bent double, my head in my hands, my chest as tight as if someone was squeezing it just as someone had squeezed Joe’s chest on the night he died.
I can’t speak any more, not for the moment. All I can do is cry, shame clawing at me. I hear Alex cry too. Alex, who never cries. The only time I’ve ever seen him shed a tear was the day Lily was born. The first time he held her in his arms and he vowed to protect her.
Ciara cuts in, ‘Anyone would understand. I understand. He was a monster, Alex. If he hurt Heidi and he hurt me, who else could he have hurt? He deserved to die. No one would blame Heidi for snapping – all that stress she was living under. I’ve told her I’ll tell the police what he did to me, too. And I can prove it.’
Chapter Sixty-Three
Ciara
Then
‘No!’ I told Joe, loudly and firmly.
I didn’t shout. I just made sure I was very clear. I would not help him into bed. I would not coddle and soothe. I would not show him the tenderness he had failed to show me. I stood far enough away from him that he could not take a hold of my wrist again. Not without standing up on the legs he had proclaimed were too wobbly.
‘You can manage it yourself,’ I added.
‘I’m not well, Ciara,’ he said. ‘I was only looking for a bit of help.’
With considerable effort, some of it put on for effect, in my opinion, he shuffled his way back onto the bed and pulled his legs in under the covers. With shaking hands, he lifted the cup of tea I had left him and took a sip.
‘Can I leave now?’ I asked him, all set to walk out.
‘Can we not talk first?’ he asked. ‘Don’t you think we’ve things to talk about? God knows I’m not going to be around for long. Can we not start to try to find a way to make peace with each other?’
‘I think we’ve gone beyond that,’ I told him.
He shook his head sadly. ‘It will destroy you, you know, in the long run. If you let the bitterness eat away at you.’
He looked so absolutely sanctimonious I had to restrain myself from lashing out at him.
‘But I’ll pray you’re able to find forgiveness in your heart towards me,’ he said. ‘For the hurt I caused you when I left. For how abandoned you must’ve fe
lt.’
‘Is that all we need to pray about?’ I asked him, incredulous that he could think my anger was just down to him walking away.
‘Forgiveness and peace of mind are the greatest things we can achieve in this life,’ he said.
‘I’ll forgive you, Dad, if you admit it.’
I was lying of course. I’d never be able to forgive it.
I crossed my arms in front of myself. Adopted the bravado that had been mine when I was a teenage girl. I may have been shaking inside but outwardly I looked in control.
One unkempt, grey-streaked eyebrow rose. A look of genuine bewilderment – or a very good impression of it at least. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said.
He actually had the brass neck to deny it.
‘Don’t you?’ I asked. ‘I know it’s been “our little secret” for a long time now, hasn’t it? “Don’t tell anyone, Ciara. They won’t understand.” Or how about “Mammy would only get cross” or the famous “This is how all daddies show their little girls they love them and I love you the most in the world.”’
I saw whatever colour was left in his sad, sorry, sick face drain away. He swallowed hard. I think, actually think, that he figured I’d either forgotten or would never have the nerve to bring it up again.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said, but the tremor in his voice, the slick of sweat breaking through on his forehead, let me know that I’d got to him.
‘Do you really need me to spell it out? In detail? Because I can do that, if you want? God knows the details have never left me. I can even go downstairs right now and spell it all out in glorious, multicoloured, revolting detail to Kathleen, and Heidi and Alex and Stella. And maybe Father Brennan would like to know, if he isn’t already keeping your secrets in the sanctity of the confessional. It’s amazing what can be forgiven with a couple of Hail Marys these days, isn’t it? Suffer the little children and all that nonsense. Or maybe I could tell Mammy. I don’t actually know, standing here now, why I never told her before.’
‘You’d break her,’ he mumbled. ‘You’d destroy her.’
‘What? What was that?’ I asked loudly, my confidence building as I saw him finally acknowledge what he’d done.
‘She’d never recover from it. Look, Ciara, be angry with me all you want. Hate me. Tell me to go to hell and sure, I’ll be going there soon anyway. But don’t destroy your mother. Not now when there’s nothing I can do to make it right.’
He looked pathetic. He looked scared and I revelled in it. He deserved to look scared. He wouldn’t get any sympathy from me for it. But he was right that it would destroy my mother, who, despite her unending loyalty to my father, would have been the first person to drag him to the police if only she’d known.
But her heart had been so hurt. She had been so broken I hadn’t wanted to break it further when he left. I’d known even then that she wouldn’t be able to bear it.
I looked at him, at his wringing of his hands, his hoping for a way to escape from that room. But he couldn’t. His legs were too weak. There was nowhere to run and this time I could set the rules.
‘You can start to make it right,’ I told him.
‘How? Tell me how.’
I looked around the room, looking for inspiration. I saw the leather diary and pen on his bed.
‘Write it down,’ I told him.
‘What? You can’t be serious.’
‘I’m very serious. Write it down. Confess to it. Write it on a page in that diary. Write that you are sorry. Write that you are twisted man. Tell them you hurt me.’
‘But your mother …’ he said, his face contorting with grief at the thought of having to ‘out’ himself.
‘I won’t show her. Unless I have to. That’s up to you, you can be the one who decides whether I have to or not, but I want it there just in case. And I want, no I need, for you to admit it.’
I could feel my composure start to crumble. All I had wanted, for so long, for the past twenty years, more than anything, was for him to say sorry. For him to admit he had damaged me so badly that I didn’t know what it was like to really care for someone, to love them in an un-abusive fashion. That I had wept buckets of tears for the girl who begged her abusive father to come back because that’s what she equated with love.
‘I can’t do that, love,’ he said, looking up at me. ‘Don’t make me!’ he pleaded.
I brushed away a tear that was threatening to fall, only to find another followed it.
Still, I took another deep breath.
‘You can, if you don’t want me to march downstairs right now and tell them all,’ I said as firmly as my voice would allow.
‘Ciara,’ he implored.
‘You want to make it right? Then make it right,’ I told him.
Then I watched as he put pen to paper, in the back of his leather-bound diary, and wrote the confession, and the apology, I had been waiting for all my life.
‘If you ever loved me at all,’ he said when he was done, ‘you’ll burn this diary when I’m gone. I’ve made mistakes, but no one else needs to be hurt by them.’
‘I’ll check, every day, that you’ve not destroyed those pages,’ I told him. ‘If I find you have, everyone will know. I don’t care how ill you are. I don’t care if you are taking your last breath. They will know.’
Defeated, he slumped back on his pillows and I left the room.
He was dead just two hours later.
Chapter Sixty-Four
Heidi
Now
Ciara springs from her seat and rushes from the room to fetch the ‘proof’ she claims to have. I look at Alex, who quickly turns his head from watching her leave to look at me. He looks so sad. So incredibly sad that I want to apologise to him for telling him. I want to apologise for putting the demons in his head. It was bad enough that they were in mine to begin with.
‘Heidi …’ he says and shakes his head.
He looks so sad. So disappointed in me.
‘I didn’t want you to see me as a victim,’ I blurt out, voicing my worst fears publicly. ‘I didn’t want you to know how damaged I was. Maybe you wouldn’t want to be with me. Maybe you wouldn’t want to have a family with me. I was so messed up, for so long. But I can promise you, whatever happened to Joe, it wasn’t anything to do with me. I’m safe to be around. Our daughter is safe with me.’
He has his head in his hands and I just want to get through to him. If I don’t have him on my side then I might as well have killed Joe because nothing else will matter.
I pull back just a little and reach for him, put my hand to his cheek.
‘Let’s get away from here. Now. Ciara’s not right. She’s been setting me up, Alex. I feel it. She’s been making me out to be crazy, but I’m not. We can go to the police and tell them that she’s been setting me up.’
I’m aware I’m speaking too fast, the words tumbling from my mouth. And I know that to Alex, who surely must be trying to take everything in, this will only serve to make him wonder if I’m mad, after all.
I can hear Ciara move about upstairs. I can hear her footsteps creak on the floorboards overhead. She’s in Joe’s room. I hear her swear.
‘We don’t have long. I’ll run and get Lily and we can go,’ I say, trying to work out how I can get to my daughter without alerting Ciara to my plans to leave.
‘I can’t do that,’ he says, to my horror.
I blink at him, wondering if I heard him right.
‘I can’t run from this any more,’ he says. ‘I never should’ve tried. It only made things so much worse. I’m so sorry, Heidi. I’m so sorry for not telling you before now. It was me. I did it. I killed him.’
Chapter Sixty-Five
Alex
Then
I’d wished I still smoked. Or there had been someone in the house who I could have cadged a cigarette off. The only ‘smoker’ there was Ciara and she used those stupid e-cig things. It wasn’t the same. Not at all.
Work had been full-on. I’d wondered if half of my colleagues had any competency at all, because none of them seemed to be able to manage when anything out of the ordinary happened.
That day, one of my more annoying colleagues, a graduate called Dean, had stood over me huffing and puffing. He’s the kind of person who has all the academic skills needed to score him a first-class honours but none of the common sense required to function in the real world. He’d been feeling under pressure to get the intranet system he was working on for a local firm up and running. And he’d been quite happy to pass all that stress on to me.
By the time I’d arrived at Aberfoyle Crescent, to be met with an atmosphere so thick with tension you nearly needed an oxygen tank to breathe, I was already on my last nerve.
Heidi seemed quite close to being on hers, too. Ever since Joe had taken ill, she had been put upon to care for him. I’d watched as, with every visit, she became less and less happy.
She withdrew more and more from me and as much as I tried to reach her, there was something untouchable between us. A sadness of sorts.
I saw it on her face when I came back to the house on that night. She was fidgety. Uptight. Despite the cold weather, she went to stand outside. Said she needed air and I followed her. Wishing for that elusive cigarette. Maybe a glass of wine. Maybe a time when Heidi and I could just be a part of our own little family again without all this noise around us.
‘You seem tense,’ I said.
At least she smiled – that kind of twisted ‘you don’t say’, but there was a warmth to it. I wrapped my arms around her and told her I loved her. I could feel the thunder of her heart against my chest and I wished I could take away all her stress – to see her happy again.
I figured it might help if I offered to do a little more to help with Joe, though there was something about him that made me feel uncomfortable. I put it down to his self-assuredness, his arrogance. I knew the type well.
There was something sly about him, too. He gave off bad vibes, although I could never quite put my finger on why. What I did know was that Joe McKee liked to be in control as much as he liked to be the centre of attention. I’d seen enough of him over the years to figure that out.
