My Sister's Child

by Caroline Finnerty

  “So what did you tell her?” Isla asked as soon as Réiltín came back into the room.

  “I said I was asleep when the phone rang earlier but I’m on my way home now.”

  “You better go and get changed then.”

  Réiltín retuned a few minutes later in the outfit she had worn when she was supposed to be going to Fiona’s house, her face washed clean and her hair brushed. She stuffed the tiny dress back into the bag.

  “I’ll walk you home,” Isla said when Réiltín was ready to go.

  They chatted as they walked along, passing the Cash for Gold shop, the launderette, the taxi rank and the bargain store that traded on Isla’s street. Soon the shops became the up-market boutiques and fancy cafés that populated Réiltín’s area.

  “Aren’t you coming in?” Réiltín asked when they had reached Sandymount Heights.

  “Nah, I better head on. Your mum would be wondering why we’re coming in together anyway.”

  “I could just say that I met you on the road if she says anything.”

  “She’s not stupid, Réilt!”

  “But we haven’t seen you in ages – Mum will want to see you!”

  “I’m sorry, I’m supposed to be meeting someone,” she lied.

  “What’s going on, Isla?”

  Réiltín was looking at her with her green eyes with their flecks of hazel and Isla had to look away.

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, then, why aren’t you coming in to see Mum?”

  Isla knew that Réiltín was testing her. “Okay then, if it makes you feel better, then I will.” The last thing she wanted was for Réiltín to get a sense of what was going on between them.

  Isla followed Réiltín through to the back of the house and into the kitchen. She saw Oscar dozing in his basket in the corner, his paws twitching as he dreamt.

  “Oh hi, love. How was the sleepover?” Jo asked, hugging her daughter in close. She didn’t notice Isla lingering in the doorway behind her.

  “It was good – I’m wrecked though.”

  Isla was amazed at how easily the lies seemed to fall off her lips.

  “Hmmh, I bet you are. You probably were up chatting half the night. I remember those nights myself and we never slept a wink.” Jo leant in and kissed Réiltín on the head.

  Isla felt like an intruder, spying on a private moment between mother and daughter. There was a closeness like no other in that embrace. She felt the string tightening around her heart.

  Jo straightened up then and her eyes landed on Isla. “Oh – Isla – hi.”

  “I – I thought I’d drop over to see you.”

  “Sure, yes.”

  Réiltín yawned loudly. “I think I’ll go get some sleep, Mum. I’m wrecked.”

  “Oh to be fourteen again!” Jo admonished gently.

  They listened to Réiltín’s footsteps on the stairs growing fainter until it was just the two of them alone together.

  The silence between them was awkward and strained.

  “So how’ve you been?” Isla asked finally.

  “Okay, I guess. Busy in work but nothing unusual about that,” she replied brusquely. “How’ve you been?”

  “Okay too,” Isla said. “Trying to get my head around it all . . . you know?”

  Jo wouldn’t meet her eyes.

  “Please, Jo . . .”

  “Don’t start, Isla!”

  “Jo, I’m begging of you. I will never ask you for anything else ever again. Please, can you let me have that embryo? I’m actually begging here.”

  “I’ve already explained my reasons to you!” Jo said in an exasperated tone, the same kind you would use for a child who kept asking why they couldn’t have more sweets.

  “So that’s it – you’re refusing to give me an embryo, which my egg helped to create, even though you know that it is my only hope of having a child of my own and it is all because it ‘doesn’t sit easily’ with you?”

  “Why do I have to keep telling you – it’s not that simple! It’s not black and white, Isla! There are so many reasons. You never do anything the right way. You won’t commit to anyone. Why should you be able to waltz in and have a baby?”

  “I could say the same thing to you. Aren’t you forgetting how you had your baby? And for all I know it could be all those fertility drugs that I took for you that has me in this position! All that ‘shutting my cycle down’ crap, ‘down-regulating’ or whatever fancy name the doctors called it, and all those hormones can’t have been good for my body!”

  “There have been studies done to show that they don’t have a long-term effect on the person.”

  “Really? All these medications are only a recent thing. Who’s to say that they won’t discover in a few years that actually they have made millions of women infertile just like me?”

  “Come on, Isla, there is no scientific proof about any of that!”

  “Not yet!” Isla sighed heavily. “Jo, I just don’t understand why you’re so against me using the embryo if you’re never going to use it.”

  “I just can’t do it. I’m sorry, Isla.”

  “Imagine if I said to you that it ‘doesn’t sit easily’ with me seeing Réiltín every day and knowing that genetically she is my child?”

  “Stop it, Isla, stop it right now – you’re crossing a line here!”

  “Or what? It’s the truth!”

  “Mum was right about you – you always have to cause trouble. You turn everything into one big long drama. All your life you’ve only ever thought about yourself. How must it have felt to be you growing up?” How wonderful it must feel to be free from everyone else’s expectations, she thought bitterly to herself.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “To grow up with no limits, no boundaries or expectations weighing you down! Unlike me!”

  “You’re talking crap, Jo. No one expected you to do anything.”

  “Didn’t they?”

  “No, they didn’t!”

  “And who brought you to school and held your hand when you were too shy to go past the other kids in the school yard? Who made your lunch and dinner too most days? I had to look after you – that’s the role I was given simply because I was born first. I had to be the good girl – sensible and reliable because no one else was going to do it! I had to protect you.”

  “No, you didn’t – no one asked you to!”

  “Well, somebody had to!”

  “Dad would have! You didn’t have to do all of that – no one forced you to – you chose it.”

  “You think I wanted that? Dad had so much on his plate trying to hold down his job in the recession of the eighties, deal with Mum and all that went with that and then look after us. Someone had to help him. You were lucky, you were assigned the fun role – you got to be wild and carefree. You didn’t have to care about what anyone thought, you were free from restraints – you could do whatever you wanted! You don’t know what it’s like having to think about other people’s needs before your own the whole time, thinking about what everyone else wants except what you yourself would like.”

  “You make it sound like you had such a hard life. It wasn’t just you that was affected, Jo – I had to deal with Mum too, you know.”

  “You don’t know the half of it. There is stuff about our childhood that you don’t even know because I shielded you from it.”

  “What do you want me to say? Thank you for being my protector? C’mon, Jo, that’s life. Some people get a bum deal, some don’t – yes, our childhood was shit but we just have to suck it up.”

  “No, Isla, I’m tired of sucking it up. I’m tired of always being the safety net for you. Worrying about you and hoping you’re not going to end up in another mess or, worse still, that I’m going to get a call to tell me that you’re in trouble somewhere.”

  “What has all this got to do with me having a baby?”

  “Because the point I am trying to make here is that you’re not able for the responsibility. And that�
�s what would happen if you had that embryo. I would end up picking up the pieces for you yet again. You’ve been running away from it your whole entire life. Even the day I got made managing partner, you got so drunk on the free champagne at the party the firm had thrown for me that I had to leave my own party early. Just for once it would have been nice to enjoy ‘my night’ without having to worry about somebody else. When Dad died you just flaked out on me – as usual I was left to sort everything out. I washed his clothes, ironed them, put them into bags and brought them down to the St Vincent de Paul. I sorted through all of his belongings. I was the one who had to put the house up for sale. Well, I’m sick of carrying the can for you! When are you going to grow up and take responsibility and be an adult?”

  “What’s going on, Mum?” It was Réiltín.

  They both swung around to the doorway.

  “What’s wrong, Little Star?” Jo asked, panicked.

  “I just wanted a glass of juice and then I come in and you two are going at it.”

  “I never heard you come in.”

  “Well, I didn’t know I had to knock before coming into my own kitchen,” Réiltín replied sarcastically before continuing over to the fridge.

  Jo flashed Isla a burning look and Isla knew that she was seething.

  “I’d better go.” Isla grabbed her bag and left.

  Chapter 24

  6 Lambay Grove

  Even though they were sisters, Jo firmly believed that she and Isla were completely different people. Although they were raised under the same roof, she felt that they’d had completely different upbringings. Being the elder sister always came with the burden of expectation. An expectation of responsibility. Jo had learned early on that her mother’s patience was in limited supply in the presence of a wayward younger sister and she’d had to take on the role of peacekeeper.

  Jo had spent most of her childhood trying her best to please her parents. She had tried so hard to be good. She did her best in school; she always did whatever it was that her mum and dad asked her to do. She kept her bedroom tidy, even when Isla scattered toys and clothes around it. She would watch Isla out on the road to make sure she wasn’t getting up to mischief, as she was wont to. She never gave their mum a cause for trouble because she had just wanted her to go back to the way she had been before things went all wrong.

  Everything had been going fine until they had moved to 6 Lambay Grove or at least that was the way it had seemed to the eight-year-old Jo.

  Their mum was pregnant again and they had needed more space. She also wanted to live closer to the sea. She was craving salty air and briny wind. Having grown up on the Isle of Skye in Scotland, she missed it. She missed the feel of it against her skin and the taste of it on her tongue. Jo still remembered Mrs Dunphy, the estate agent who had shown them around the house. She wore a matching candy-pink trouser suit, pink stiletto heels, pink handbag, pink nail polish and fuchsia lipstick. She extolled the virtues of all its ‘mod-cons’, which in 1980 amounted to a washing machine and built-in wardrobes. When they had got outside to the garden, her mum had said that you couldn’t swing a cat in it which Jo had thought was a very funny thing to say as she imagined a cat being swung around by its tail. Mrs Dunphy ignored her mother, turned to their dad instead and started making a big fuss over the garage where you could drive your car inside on cold nights.

  “Imagine that, Daph!” her dad had said, turning back to her mum, clearly won over. “Imagine not having to de-ice the car on a frosty morning!”

  Jo had watched as her mum lit up one of her slender More cigarettes and inhaled deeply, pulling the smoke back between her teeth. Seconds fell in a long pause until she exhaled a long plume into the air in front of them.

  In the car as they drove away, their dad had turned to their mum. “Well, Daph, what did you think of it?” he asked eagerly. “Is it the house for us?”

  “She looked like Barbie’s grandmother.”

  Jo and Isla had started to giggle from the backseat. Jo could see her dad looking back at them in his rear-view mirror.

  “I’m talking about the house, not her,” he said, “but I thought that she looked quite nice actually.”

  Jo could detect a wounded tone to his voice.

  “Well, there is no accounting for some people’s taste,” her mum had said, crossing her arms purposefully over her bump before turning her head away to stare out of the window.

  Their dad had sucked in sharply through his teeth and his fingers tightened around the polyester fur of the steering-wheel cover.

  They obviously came to an agreement because they bought the house and the baby was born three months after they moved in. Their mum’s sister Carole came over from where she lived in Fife in Scotland to give her a hand. Jo remembered it seemed like she had just gone home when their dad was asking her to come back over again because the baby had died.

  Jo had one clear memory of David: she was lying with her cheek pressed against the carpeted floor of their living room. The sun was coming in through the net curtains and making a holey pattern on the floor beside her. She was spreading her fingers out, letting their tips cover the circles. She was watching him lying back on a powder-blue rug, kicking out his little feet, balling his hands into fists and putting them into his dribbly mouth. He gurgled and squealed. But she wasn’t sure if the memory could be trusted. She didn’t know how reliable it was – maybe she’d just seen the image in an old photo or maybe it was someone else’s baby that she was recollecting. She did remember her mum crying though. Her tears for him lasted a lot longer than the time he was with them. She used to sit at their kitchen table chain-smoking all day long until the ash grew heavy and fell off the tip of the cigarette by itself and landed into the ashtray waiting beneath. She never had to check for it – it was like she always knew the ashtray would be there, ready for the fall. She would smoke the cigarette right down to the butt until she must have felt the heat on her fingertips. Eventually she would stub it out and light another one straightaway.

  Jo had minded Isla while their mum sat in her room and cried every day. Their childhood forced them to be united because, if they weren’t, they would never have survived. Their dad had tried his best but it never seemed to be enough for their mother.

  Whenever they saw his canary-yellow car coming around the corner to their cul-de-sac after his day’s work in the factory, they would run down to meet the car and jump in. She’d sit in the passenger seat and Isla would sit on their dad’s knee and steer the car home. Sometimes he’d jerk her arms left and right and they’d zigzag the whole way up the road to their house with the two of them screaming in that childish mix of pretend-fear and excitement.

  As soon as he came in the door, though, he would go straight over to their mum. He would give her a kiss on the cheek and ask her how her day had been but she would barely acknowledge him. Then he would go and start to make their dinner while their mum stayed staring off into whatever world she was living in after David died.

  Time went on in their cul-de-sac. Their mum went through the motions of life. She could be really hit and miss as a mother. Sometimes it seemed as though the darkness had lifted its lid a little and she would be full on, like it was her resolution to try harder. She would overcompensate by insisting on walking them to school even though they were past the age of needing her to accompany them. Sometimes it was plain embarrassing like when she would wear her dressing gown instead of her coat or slippers on her feet instead of shoes. She would wear wellies in the summertime and shorts in the wintertime. They would watch her walk out in the middle of traffic and bang on a car window for a light for her cigarette and if they wouldn’t give her one she’d weave her way through the other cars until someone would. Jo felt guilty even thinking it but she used to wish their mum could just be normal like the rest of the mothers. She wished she could have made more of an effort to fit in. She just wanted her to be like the ones that plaited their daughters’ hair every morning, made their lunches and pu
t them into Tupperware boxes, and parted with a kiss on the cheek. She wished her mum could have long conversations over the garden hedges of Lambay Grove like the other mothers as she pegged out washing. That’s all she wanted but her mum wasn’t friendly with the other women. Jo used to think that it was because they didn’t understand her accent and she would have to slow down and repeat what she was trying to say. But everyone said that she was a different woman after the baby died. She left with David.

  One time their mum was waiting at the school gate with a buggy and Jo had been so excited when she saw it. She thought they were baby-sitting a neighbour’s baby but, when she had got closer, she’d seen there was no baby in the buggy. Jo had got really angry with her that time and wouldn’t walk home with them so Isla and her mum walked on with the empty buggy. Isla had kept turning around to look back at her trailing behind them in the distance. Jo could still remember what she did then: she pointed her index finger to the side of her head and moved it around in a circular motion but Isla just looked back at her in confusion. Isla had turned away then because she was trying to keep up with their mother who was pulling her along by the wrist.

  Then there were other times when their mother would be too tired to even lift her head off the pillow to get them ready for school so Jo would step in and butter bread for Isla’s lunch, put it in her lunchbox and hold her hand as they walked to school. Jo always allowed Isla to have jam sandwiches and lots of biscuits as a snack instead of fruit like the other children in her class. Jo would make the dinner too but it was nearly always potatoes and baked beans. When convenience food arrived on the shelves, calling to housewives with the promise of no more drudgery at mealtimes, Jo was the one who brought the brightly coloured boxes home for them to try. Findus crispy pancakes, diarrhoea brown, oozing out through the goldfish-coloured breadcrumb coating put in a regular appearance. Jo could still see their half-moon shape sitting on her plate with the syrupy beans creeping closer until she was almost gagging but she had to eat them because she thought their dad liked them. Their dad, who Jo only found out in later years wasn’t a crispy-pancake fan either, ate them too and complimented Jo on the lovely dinner, so the crispy pancakes kept on coming.