The Gravity of Love

by Noelle Harrison

  ‘Don’t leave me here,’ she said. ‘Take me with you.’

  He took her out of the dark hall into the kitchen. Sunshine was belting through the window, illuminating the squalor of the room as he sat her down on one of the chairs. She was shaking uncontrollably, her teeth chattering. He took a cardigan off the back of one of the chairs and put it round her shoulders.

  ‘You need to get dressed, and we need to get out of here before Jim wakes up.’

  Sammy staggered over to the kitchen counter and opened one of the drawers. She began pulling out tons of black-and-white photographs, throwing them onto the table in a pile.

  ‘We gotta take these with us,’ she said, her teeth chattering.

  Lewis picked one of the photographs out and what he saw made him want to vomit. It was Lizzie and Sammy, the two girls naked, wanton, with dog collars around their necks. He scrunched it up in his hand.

  ‘Jim used to make us,’ Sammy said. ‘He called us his bitches.’

  She was shaking as she spoke.

  ‘I wish you’d killed him now,’ Lewis said, his own voice so cold it shocked him.

  He drove Sammy to her flat in Camden and they staggered up the stairs together like two drunks. His whole body was aching with the beating Jim had given him. While Sammy collapsed onto the bed, he stumbled into her bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror above the sink. He had a broken nose and a cut lip, but apart from that, his face wasn’t too damaged, though when he took off his shirt his chest was covered in large purple bruises. As he touched them tentatively the door slid open. Sammy stood in front of him, looking at his damaged body.

  ‘I thought you were sleeping,’ he said to her.

  ‘I can’t sleep,’ she said. ‘I feel okay now, but look at you . . .’ She touched his chest with one of her fingers. He flinched in pain. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Here, it’s easier if I help you.’

  She made him sit down on the edge of the bath while she took some cotton wool and Dettol out of the bathroom cabinet.

  ‘I think you might have cracked a rib,’ she told him.

  ‘I have to get back to the hospital,’ he said, squeezing his eyes shut. ‘Lizzie.’

  ‘I can’t believe she’s dead,’ whispered Sammy.

  He should be on his way back to meet his mother. He needed to organise a funeral for his sister.

  ‘Oh God, Lizzie,’ he heard himself sob, the pain of his loss welling up inside him again.

  ‘Just take it easy,’ Sammy said, cradling his head against her chest. ‘You can stay here as long as you want.’

  He hadn’t gone back to the hospital. It had felt like the circumstances of his sister’s death had marooned Lewis and Sammy in her flat in Camden. Instead, as they drank mug after mug of tea together, Sammy told him about the circumstances surrounding Jim’s pornographic pictures of herself and Lizzie. She described orgies in the London house. All the things that she and Lizzie were made to do. Why hadn’t Lizzie told him?

  Sometime during those few hours in Sammy’s flat, Lewis decided that the best thing would be if he took the American girl back home to her family. He needed to rescue her. He had failed his sister, but he could still help Sammy. He would call her parents and ask them to wire the money for the tickets. Tell them their daughter needed help. They sounded like good people. Sammy was clearly too fragile to travel on her own, and he needed a break from everything in London.

  I’ll come back, he had told himself as they boarded the plane at Heathrow. I’ll just get Samantha home to her parents and then I’ll come back to London, back to Marnie and ask for her forgiveness. I will sort out everything with George. Make it right.

  But of course, Lewis never had.

  From Mayo to Dublin, Easter Monday, 27 March 1989

  Joy walked all the way through the small town of Ballycastle, still sleepy on this Easter Monday, without seeing a soul. She went down the hill and took a right. She was heading for the sea. She walked past tiny cottages, with scrappy dogs barking at her and tractors parked in the driveway. She walked past fields of tall swaying grass and others ploughed, the earth dark and moist, hedgerows thick with yellow gorse. Then she left the road, clambering over stone walls, prising apart rusty old barbed wire and walking across lumpy fields. She could not stop until she got to the sea.

  And here she was, standing on a slab of wet rock, blasted by salty spray, her hair flying around her, her hands tucked into her pockets, clutching that scrap of paper with her mother’s address on it. Finally she had a once upon a time.

  Once upon a time there was a raven-haired girl with the bluest eyes, who had a little baby just like her. But the wicked world said she couldn’t keep her baby so . . .

  Had her mother been riding towards the cliff that night intending to destroy the two of them? Could she not bear to be parted from Joy so much that she was willing to kill her own child?

  Grief scratched at Joy’s heart. No matter how crazy her behaviour had been, she couldn’t help feeling sorry for Aoife Martell. She wished she could tell Lewis her story. Everything about their parting yesterday felt incomplete.

  She stepped down onto another slab of rock and walked right to the edge of it. She could feel the pulse of the ocean coursing through her. She took the abalone shell out of her bag then crouched down and pushed it under the surface of the icy water. Its luminous splendour was magnified. It looked like last night’s liquid moonlight mixed in with the dusky pinks, purples and gold of an Arizona sunrise. She watched the water rippling over the shell, and she let go. The shell was buffeted by waves and then gradually dropped into the clear depths of the ocean. Let the sea carry it whatever way it would.

  Joy straightened up. Her fingertips were tingling from their contact with the sea. She wanted to get into the ocean, yet she knew that would be insanity. She resisted the urge just as she heard Eddie calling her.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s a bit dangerous to stand so close to the edge,’ he said as he joined her. ‘Step back.’

  He put a hand protectively on her arm, and she let him pull her back.

  ‘What are you doing out here?’ he said. ‘We should get going. I’ve booked us on flights out of Dublin tonight.’

  ‘Tonight?’ She was unable to hide the disappointment in her voice. ‘Can we not stay in Ireland longer?’

  ‘I’m sorry, baby; I have to get back. I was in the middle of a big deal when I took off after you. We need the money.’ He put his arm around her, kissing her cheek. She felt herself flinching. ‘Remember we’re going to Hawaii in a couple of weeks. It’ll actually be warm enough to get into the sea, rather than just look at it.’

  ‘I was thinking of going to London,’ she said, careful to avoid his gaze.

  ‘To see Ray?’

  ‘Yes, but not just that.’

  She told Eddie about her breakfast visitor, how Josie Whelan had related the story of her early life in Ballycastle and the tragedy that had befallen her mother.

  ‘So let’s get this straight,’ Eddie said as they walked back across the field to the road. ‘Some anonymous woman gave this Josie lady an address in London where your birth mother is supposed to be living?’

  ‘Yes. I want to go and see if she’s still there.’

  ‘But why, Joy?’ Eddie asked her. ‘Your birth mother has never tried to contact you. It wouldn’t be too hard if you were adopted through relatives in New York.’

  ‘But she gave birth to me, Eddie . . . she was so young . . .’

  ‘Darling, I think you’re hoping for something you will never get. This woman sounds unhinged. I mean, she tried to kill you when you were a baby, Joy.’

  ‘Josie doesn’t think she was trying to do that,’ Joy protested.

  ‘It looks pretty clear to me,’ Eddie said.

  He looked at her and sighed, and she could hear his exasperation tinged with anger.

  ‘Baby, please give it up. For me. I want to bring you home. Start over. Don’t you think our marriage is more important than all
of this?’

  She wondered what Lewis would advise her to do. She tried not to think of him, but she just couldn’t help it. Every second, her body was alive with the sensation of his touch.

  *

  Lewis dreamed he was in a red stone desert in Sedona on one of his hikes with Samantha. It was a dusty, parched trail, punctuated with fiery rock. They wound their way through prickly pear, crucifixion cacti and star-like desert flowers. Lewis turned to check that Samantha was still following him, but to his surprise he found Marnie walking behind him instead. He waited for her to catch up, but she hung back, forcing him to turn his back on her and keep climbing the trail.

  He saw bobcat paw prints in the sandy track, the markings of a predator, the shadow of himself. Up and up he climbed, all the time aware of his true love behind him, pushing him towards the sky. Thunder Mountain was to his left, and now he was on a high, craggy plateau, a finger of rock, jutting into the sky. He sat on the ledge, feet dangling over the edge. He could sense her approaching cautiously, creeping up like a shy animal, so he didn’t turn. He didn’t want to frighten her away.

  The sun was fierce. She slipped in next to him on the edge of the rock, and the sun beat down upon them, yet the intensity of the heat felt good, as if it were cleansing him of the past. They looked at the view spread before them: a valley of red rock, all different heights, widths and shapes.

  ‘People can see all sorts of things in the shapes of the rocks,’ she said.

  Her voice was different. He turned to see that it was not Marnie who sat beside him, but Joy. She was his dream’s companion. He picked up Joy’s hand and held it in his. It was cool and soothing to feel the softness of her skin. He looked at the view again.

  Yet Lewis didn’t see the rocks as anything. He was looking at the spaces between the rocks, the deep Vs of blue sky. It was like the space between characters, holding the letters in, as the rocks were held in a matrix of surrounding space. It was like filling in the silences of his life and all the things unspoken. He understood that what was real might not be seen at first, like his love for Joy.

  In his dream he kissed Joy under the hot blue sky in the Arizona desert. He tasted her sweet saltiness, enfolded her in his arms and merged with her. He had never felt so part of a woman before – never been made to feel this complete.

  From the sky a storm erupted and rain poured down upon the desert, the ocean’s most ancient bed. It filled it in and became the sea. Joy took his hand and together they swam, riding waves of abandon. She took his heart within her hands, as if it was that abalone shell she so adored, and held it up to her ear to listen to it.

  When he woke again Lewis was no longer afraid. He was here in Marnie’s house, and he had lost her forever, but she had given him something back. It wasn’t just a daughter; it was the truth. Over the years he had clung to this fantasy of Marnie, using it to justify his unhappy marriage to Samantha. The feeling that he had married the wrong woman. But his Marnie was an ideal that had never really existed, and Joy . . . Joy was the here and now.

  *

  As soon as they left Ballycastle it began to rain. Despite the fact that Eddie had the heating turned up full in the rental car, Joy was cold. She pulled her jacket tight around her and wished she could put on Lewis’s sweater, but of course there would be questions about it, so she just shivered, her teeth chattering as she watched the road she and Lewis had taken to the west unwind before her in reverse.

  She had never seen so much rain. It felt as if the sky had been pried wide open, the rain falling at an unnaturally accelerated pace. The landscape was pulled taut by the density of it as the car pushed through the tension.

  ‘Christ, this country is miserable,’ Eddie said, hunched over the wheel as he peered out the windscreen. ‘I can hardly see out the car. What person could bear to live in such a climate?’

  ‘You liked it last night,’ Joy said. ‘You were singing in the pub with all your new friends.’

  ‘I was drunk, Joy,’ he snapped. ‘Now I’m sober, I can’t wait to get the hell out of here.’

  The rain hounded them out of Mayo and through Roscommon. Finally in Longford it lifted and Eddie put the foot down. She wanted to hang on to her past, what she had discovered, but her husband was driving her relentlessly away from it.

  Just outside of Kinnegad they pulled into a garage to get more gas. She found a restroom while Eddie went to pay.

  Joy looked in the cracked mirror at her own reflection. Lewis was right. Her newly curled hair did make her look a little different. She tried to smooth it down, but it just bounced right up again. She applied some lip salve and pinched her cheeks, but she looked tired, defeated. The spark had gone out of her.

  Eddie patted her knee as she settled back into the passenger seat. ‘Everything okay?’ he asked her.

  ‘Sure,’ she said.

  To her amazement the grey skies were lifting, and a glorious sun had turned the sky blue, a few stray puffs of white cloud the only reminder of the flood they had just driven through. The sun’s rays spilled through the windscreen of the car, blinding them. Eddie pulled out his sunglasses and she opened her bag, searching for her own sunglasses. As she did so she dropped the bag and everything tumbled out onto the floor of the car.

  ‘Still as clumsy as always,’ Eddie teased, bending over to help her pick up her stuff.

  ‘Hey, what’s this?’ He retrieved the sheet of paper with the hummingbird design that Lewis had made for her, lodged between her seat and the gearstick.

  ‘Hummingbird Nurseries. Joy Sheldon,’ he read. ‘Create Your Oasis in the Desert.’ He chuckled. ‘Are you starting up a business, baby?’ He was grinning at her. It felt as if he was mocking her.

  ‘No, it’s just something a friend designed for me as a gift. In case I ever did want to do something.’

  ‘Hummingbird Nurseries?’ She could hear that familiar condescension back in his voice. ‘How would you be able to run a business?’

  Eddie and his all-knowing smirk. Joy looked past it – really looked into him. She felt jolted awake, for it dawned on her that she was not attracted to her husband any more. In this moment she could see that the young fearless cowboy she had once loved was gone forever.

  ‘You don’t need to do anything like that anyway. I keep telling you things are good. I can take care of you. You don’t need a job,’ Eddie continued.

  ‘It’s not just a job, Eddie,’ she said, trying not to betray her emotions. ‘It’s something I’ve always dreamed of doing.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Joy! Flowers? An oasis in the desert?’ He laughed, patting her knee again before turning on the ignition and pulling out of the garage.

  In Dublin Airport she followed her husband. He liked to be in charge, although only she could see that he was nervous of travelling, out of place, until he set foot on Arizonan soil again. He asked the check-in staff to allocate them seats beside the wings (the safest spot, he told her) and stocked up on candy to help them pop their ears, and Irish crisps, along with bottles of Guinness in the duty-free, for his friends to try back home. She didn’t want to buy a thing. Not one fluffy green shamrock key ring, or box of Kimberley biscuits, or postcard of the Emerald Isle.

  Looking at the postcards made her think of Lewis – and Marnie. It hurt her to imagine them together, even though she had never met the woman. She had no right to be jealous, but it twisted her up inside just to think of Lewis with her.

  Of course Eddie made sure they arrived at their gate well before boarding. He had bought a copy of The Irish Times and was reading it, while she fidgeted beside him. She couldn’t even open the magazine he had bought her.

  ‘What a depressing country,’ Eddie murmured to her. ‘No jobs, everyone leaving.’

  She felt defensive of Ireland. It was, after all, her birthplace. And yet she was too tired to argue back – and what could she say? She knew nothing about jobs or emigration.

  Their flight was called and Eddie jumped up, anxious to be one of the
first to board, but Joy was suddenly gripped by a fierce pain in her belly. Waves of nausea flooded over her. ‘I just have to go to the restroom; I’ll be back in a minute.’ She touched Eddie’s hand.

  ‘Now?’ Eddie said, annoyed. ‘But we’re boarding. Can’t you wait?’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘You go on and board. There’s loads of people queuing. I won’t be a minute. See.’ She pointed at the Ladies. ‘It’s just over there.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said, shrugging. ‘See you in a minute.’

  She scurried over to the restroom, but once she was inside its tiled walls, the feeling that she was going to be sick lifted. She leaned over the sink and splashed some water on her face then opened her purse and dabbed her cheeks with a tissue. She looked at her sad face in the mirror before pulling out the design Lewis had made her. She traced the image of the tiny hummingbird, imagining Lewis drawing it, creating the words to describe her business. Thinking about her and her dream. She felt her eyes watering. She couldn’t cry. Not now – not when she was about to get on a plane and sit next to her husband for seven hours. But it hurt to realise the truth. She loved Lewis. She loved him, and she would never see him again.

  She wiped her eyes, folded the drawing up before putting it back into her purse and pulling out her lipstick. She tried to paint some colour onto her wan face. But as she dropped the lipstick back into the purse, she saw the scrap of paper Josie Whelan had given her this morning. She took it out and read again her mother’s address in London.

  The last call for her flight sounded and yet still Joy didn’t move. She gripped that tiny piece of paper within her hands as if it was a treasure map. Something she must never lose again. She could feel her heart rate begin to quicken to hummingbird speed, and her cheeks were flushing with the sheer idea of her rebellion. Could she really do this? Until this very moment she hadn’t even considered it, but now she knew: there was no way she was going to get on that plane back to America.

  Lewis woke to a loud knock upon his door. He dragged himself out of his dream. Where was he? As he took in his surroundings – the art books, the graphic prints, the tasteful, minimalist furniture – he began to piece together the night before.