by Ross, Orna
I looked up into his eyes. Electric-grey, overflowing with love.
"Trust," he said again, a whisper this time.
My skin quivered, grew porous, opened. In that moment, I chose him.
Zach banished the gnarled thinking, the broken sleeps, the hours of staring out the kitchen window, by taking hold of my time. What I needed, he said, was less thought and more practice.
"Practice" as he used it was a Buddhist word, with a special meaning. Our days were to begin with meditation. In the morning, after giving Daddy a cup of tea, but before making his breakfast or organizing his meds, I was to sit down onto a cushion on the floor beside Zach, legs crossed and, for thirty minutes, focus my full attention onto my breathing. When thoughts arose in my mind -- as they would -- I was to label them "thinking", then bring my attention back to my breath. Especially my out-breath.
It sounded easy, but not for me. The first day I jumped up after two minutes, overwhelmed. Gently, insistently, Zach led me back. "You can't do it wrong, so long as you're sitting there," he said. "See the thought. Don't judge it. Just let it be. Then return to the breath."
I sat back down, quieted again, but as soon as I stilled, hurricanes of thought rushed in, firing me with feeling. Rebellion, restlessness, craving, agitation. I remembered how my dentist once burst an abscess on my tooth before the painkillers had kicked in. I recalled my first boyfriend Mossie Mangan, a boy from Doolough with a too-long chin, dumping me when it should have been the other way around. I felt the plug of dread begotten by my father that always sat in the pit of me. I could feel every layer of it. I imagined escaping him, going back home to Santa Paola or onwards, somewhere else, somewhere beyond him. What would such a place look like? It would have a flat, open plain, with the mountains far in the distance, a ranch, a paddock, horses in a corral...
Everything I had ever heard or seen or felt or even imagined seemed to be still in there, in my mind, and I didn't want to be sitting here with it. It could pounce, drive me over, send me insane. I might cut off my ear, or choke my father, or step into Doolough Lake, my pockets weighed with stones.
I didn't want to stay but on I sat. And after sitting, I felt better. Calmer and cleaner in my head, as if my brain had had a shower. And I was taller inside. Straighter.
Next came what Zach called freewriting. Writing fast, and by hand, those thoughts of mine for a twenty minute session. Opinion, idea, commentary, story. Nonsense, bitterness, pettiness, jokes. All to be placed upon the page, as mad and mixed up as it wanted to be.
"Think of meditation as one leg to take you to joy, and this as the other. You need them both to get moving."
Joy? Hah! But, like the meditation, I wasn't to judge what emerged during the writing. The meaning of what I was writing was secondary to the act of doing it.
Again, I resisted. I had Real Writing, my book, to be getting on with, much more important than these pages of mish-mash? And why use a pen when a typewriter was so much faster?
"Oh, fast," he said, as if speed were a vice.
"But you said to write as fast as possible."
"A fast pen is quite fast enough. This isn't a race. You're after depth, not distance." He pointed to the pages. "Look how much more of you is there than on a typewritten page."
"Hmmm."
"Your handwriting is as unique as your fingerprint. An expression of you. That's what we're after."
"Hmmm," I said again, even more skeptical.
"Trust me: the more you're resisting this, the more you need it. Come on, here's the pen. Another twenty minutes today, fast as you can, starting now. Go!"
He was right. As the days passed, I became aware of different dimensions in my inner life. Thoughts and feelings still tore through but as I stepped back to separate from them and observe them, they lost a lot of their power. Over time, a remarkably short time, my feelings shrank. I became big enough again to contain them.
I would never gain control of my mind or my heart. You can't command the ocean, or strap up the wind, but you can observe and get to know them. Zach gave me a structured way to do this, so I could flex and strengthen my inner self, so I could feel free and safe, whatever the outer circumstances.
Meditation and freewriting complete, it was time for breakfast. Daddy's first: some porridge or mashed banana or soft eggs. Going into his room was still an ordeal but with Zach out in the kitchen, within calling distance, it was an ordeal I could handle. Once Daddy was looked after, we took time over our own meal, and then it was down to three good hours working on the book.
Break at twelve-thirty. Prepare the soup or home-made blancmange or whatever slippery concoction was my father's lunch that day and bring it in to him while Zach prepared ours.
And after lunch, a walk. Daily practice number three.
"When Pauline is here," he said, "I will sometimes go with you. But it is important that you often go alone."
Right again. The step-by-stepness of those solitary hikes in the Wicklow hills somehow synchronized with the pages of free-writing now stacking up on my desk, and with the witnessed breaths of my morning meditations, and with the writing that was going in the book. Beat by beat, this "practice" began to give a rhythm to my days. I found myself beginning to smile again, to laugh, to listen to music. I started cooking us some of my favorite recipes from the café. I bought a camera and started taking photos of Doolough, of the mountains and the lake. My father was no longer the only focus of my day. At night Zach and I sat by the fire, murmuring quiet chat, or listening to a music show on Radio Éireann that played songs of the sixties.
With three simple tools -- meditation, walking and writing -- Zach nursed me back. The way he taught me was the way he followed himself. On the outside, we looked like two simple people living simple days. Inside, we were warriors, fighting a true fight.
Zach loved Ireland. He loved the Wicklow hills, the mystery that hung about the mountain peaks and the lakes. He began to speak of finding a space where he could offer workshops or even retreats. Which gave rise to an idea in me. One evening, as we sat by the window looking out at the trees, I said to him, "These workshops of yours, would you want to run them in the city? Or the country?"
"Oh, the country, definitely."
"What about here?"
"You mean around Doolough?"
"I mean this house."
The location was perfect: isolated and on the doorstep of some of the finest scenery in Ireland but close enough to a main road to take a car to Dublin in less than an hour. The house would need refurbishment but...
"Daddy won't last forever. You could do it here when -- after -- he's gone."
"Are you serious, Mercy?"
"I think so. Yes, yes I am." The idea excited me. To see this house come to life again, and used for such a purpose. It would reverse the rot.
"Does this mean that you want to help? Do you see it as something we could do, together?"
That I could not give him. I was with him now because I'd needed him so badly but, as my strength returned, I could feel our time together running out. Even Zach wasn't magic enough to overcome over the problem of Star.
"It was just a thought," I said. "That man in there is a tough old boot. He could see us all out yet."
And then it came: the call I had been dreading and craving. I was in the porch, in search of a rain mac for my walk, when the phone started to ring. My thoughts did the quick calculation: 4pm in Ireland, too early in LA for it to be her.
And yet I knew it was her, before I even picked it up. And it was.
"Hi Mom, it's me."
It gave me a moment's vertigo to hear her. I backed against the wall to steady myself. "Star. Darling, how are you?"
She answered in a new voice, crisp and clipped, repeating prepared sentences. She was well. She was taking time out. She was thinking of coming to Ireland.
"Star, that's wonderful. Absolutely wonderful."
"Provided he's not there, of course."
"He..? Um no, n
o of course not."
Okay then. She would come. She should be with me by Christmas Eve. She talked on, about flights and arrival times, but I was only half-listening.
"Mom?"
Hearing her voice was making me lonely for California, for the past, for warm nights and beach days, Marsha and the café, the click of palm trees and the dart of lizards, the evenings, watching the hazy sun sink into the hazy sea. Evenings here crawled over the mountains, ever earlier and colder as we approached Christmas.
I asked, "Are you at home?"
"Yes."
"In the hall or the kitchen?"
"I'm in the hall," she said. "Are you listening to me?"
"Of course I am. I just wanted to imagine you there."
"For Chrissakes, Mom. Don't put me off coming before I even leave."
"No, sorry, of course not. Are you --"
"Look, I have to go. We'll talk when I get there, okay? Bye."
And so we have come round to the beginning. To where there is nothing left to do but tell. No, says my mothering instinct. Keep silent. Make something up. Protect. Go on protecting. But I did not write all these words to sully them at the end with a lie. I have to tell my truth, if only to the page.
Or maybe to the police?
My trial begins in three weeks, Mags says. If I am going to speak, it must be now. I think Mags knows.
I have started to imagine the trial. Star has been recalled to Ireland for it, as has Zach. I have started to imagine them, sitting beside each other each morning in the courtroom, leaving together each afternoon, side-by-side all day. While I will be brought to and from the defendant's stand, alone.
Last time I saw Zach, he said, "Don't worry about Maria, Mercy. She will be okay. Her warrior spirit will win through."
Maria.
Warrior spirit.
He knew a different person.
He and I are estranged. Since that Christmas Eve when she telephoned to say she was coming over and I told him he'd have to go. I've had nothing from him since but that inadequate letter about his friend the mountain, but they are in touch.
He'd tried to persuade me, told me there was nothing to fear, that to get beyond this thing – this admittedly terrible thing, just as terrible for him – we had to go through it. Enough time had passed for us to be able to sit down together and understand what it all might mean and how to go forward.
I should telephone Star back and tell her so and that we would all be spending Christmas together. If I didn't, he would.
"Oh no, you won't."
"You did tell her I was here, Mercy?"
He wanted me to be better, stronger, than I was.
"I can't," I said, jumping out of my seat, pacing the room. "I can't do it, Zach. I won't do it and you can't make me."
The only way I could cope with the horror of it all was to have only one of them in front of me at a time.
So this time, I chose Star.
I didn't blame her for being angry. I deserved all she dealt out when she arrived. The accident of being loved by the man who had rejected her was a cruel mischance but taking him into my father's house, being with him after finding out what he had been to her: that she would never forgive.
That I only did it because I was in terrible need would hold no water with Star. So she arrived with her anger, her blistering anger that wanted to fire the fields and poison the rivers, that wanted to hurt everybody in the whole wide world, especially me. Only such an anger could have led her into killing my father. She had little time for him, I knew, but that degree of hatred was something she reserved only for me. She did it to punish me or maybe even to see me off to prison so she and Zach could be together.
Or so I had long believed.
Unless...
Unless. Such a small word, so often used, so rarely noticed. Not a word to announce itself, yet as soon as it came to my attention, I wondered why I hadn't paid it consideration before. It had grown in me, over my months here in this house, through all the writing about her and my father, through the healing time with Zach, so that now it seemed a lever, lifting possibilities many times its size.
It kept buzzing around my brain, like a fat bee banging against my skull. Unless, unless...
So let me write down a series of events that have taken hold of my imagination. Imagine them yourself. It is our visit back here in 1986 and I have gone to Dublin to the book launch. Daddy and Star leave the house at about four o'clock to go blackberry picking, promising Rose they'll be back for tea. He brings Star to the brambles on the upper field, then down towards the lake. They hardly speak. He is twisted inside thoughts of his own and Star is miserable, guilty about not having gone to Dublin, wondering why her grandfather has brought her out if he is going to be so silent. Not knowing what she should know about him.
They pass through the high field, black and brown cows munching grass and one raising its head to look at them. The pigeons are loud in the trees as they approach the woodland that thickens round the lake in summer. My father steps into the drowsy mass of green and my daughter follows. Imagine. Imagine. The trees smell of fresh breezes and the breeze smells of the earth. It swooshes through the branches above, making a sound like the sea.
Her hair gets caught in a branch and she has to stop to pick out the pine needles. He chivvies her, his nerves always at him. "Come on, come on."
The trunks of the trees draw closer together, the light dims. He stops against a fallen bough near the lake.
"I don't like it here, Granddad."
"Don't you, now?"
A rattle in his voice makes her look into his face and see something. She feels what is coming her way before she knows that such a thing can be.
She moves to turn.
He catches her by the wrist.
She shouts: "No!"
He says, "Now, now. Don't be like that."
He pulls her down. Down into a secret that is the drowsy dull light of the lake, and the pigeons cooing, and the wavy wind in the trees, and the ground going from under her feet, and the berries spilling out of the can, and the twig digging into her back...
"No!" she tries again and he claps his hand over the sound.
Then it is the weight of him urging down on her. His knee thrusting hers apart. His mouth by her ear, breath wet and hot. The splaying of her open. The burning of him in her. The green scum on the edge of the lake lap, lap, lapping. The ferns curling away. And nothing ever again as it was.
This is what I need to know. Did this happen? Was this part of the mix of motives? If it was, how can I have her further punished? If it is all pure fancy, if the real reason was revenge on me and Zach, how can I not?
And what of Zach? Does he know the the depth and capacity of her anger? She wouldn't have told him, I was pretty sure of that, but he was an intuitive man. Surely, if he suspected, that would be the end of her and him. Which was -- come on, out with it, tell the worst -- what a part of me, a deep-down, low-buried, loathsome part of me wanted.
Unless...
We began each morning of the trial with a man banging his tipstaff on the ground and shouting, "All Rise!" Once he had alerted us, the judge followed in, overweight and bewigged, in dark-rimmed, Buddy Holly glasses, with an irritating way of tenderly placing his well-upholstered posterior upon the well-upholstered bench. Settled, he would take a brisk look at me over his glasses, then nod at counsel and we were off on another day.
Around me, mouths opened and closed, opened and closed, around the same questions over and again. The pump. The pills. Pauline. Zach. Star. Me. My father. Yet, much to Mags's surprise, the trial seemed to be going our way. She was taking the line that too much of the Department of Public Prosecution's evidence was circumstantial and was doing a great job of persuading the court that I was not the only person who might have done the deed.
As things looked better and better for me, I felt less and less present. All this courtroom chatter didn't seem real. Or relevant. What seemed important was Zach and Star
, sitting beside each other each day. Zach's grey eyes looked at me and seemed to ask me every question under the sun. Star's blue eyes looked at me and were blank as a doll's. I saw those four eyes all day in court and, when I was ushered back to my cell, I saw them still. I saw them while I was awake and while I slept.
By day, when I controlled the dreams, I configured up for myself and my daughter a world where none of this had happened, where we went to the mall to shop, where we enjoyed pizza and ice-cream sodas together, where she introduced me to some nice boy I'd never met before and I was happy for her. An ordinary, normal mother and daughter. What we hadn't been for so long.
How long?
I had no answers. I had no words. I didn't even know what to wish for.
What lay ahead for me, if Mags got me off? My heart forever whispering for Zach, a longing for the only man I'd ever really wanted. A proper man, strong enough to be gentle, and the only man I couldn't have. But my blood whispering for Star.
I couldn't think about "guilty" or "not guilty" because there was no freedom for me, either way. The choice between a physical prison or an emotional one? No choice at all.
Lover? Daughter? My mind's eye played with one and then the other until some mouth would open around some new set of words that would drag me back into that horrible courtroom, back to unreal questions for which there were no answers.
Days droned past. The cyst of trepidation inside me solidified.
Then came an exchange between Zach and Star, a small moment that told me what to do. While the prosecutor, Manny Bradshaw, was cross-examining Dr Keane, Star leaned sideways to whisper something in Zach's ear. He shook his head at whatever she asked, then reached across and patted her hand, a small protective pat. She turned from him to hide her expression, so he didn't see the look that crossed her face but I, sitting opposite in the defendant's dock, viewed it straight on.
