The following Friday she barged in with dinner for everyone. She did most of the talking. She even did the washing up, and just when we thought it was all over, she invited herself back again. And there was hardly any mention of Paloma except to say that she was studying, which is something I’d never seen Paloma doing—either at school or at home.
So then next time, Mrs. Killealy brought two bottles of champagne with dinner, and Dad was so nervous he drank it the way you might drink water if you were extremely thirsty, and they talked and talked and talked for the whole night.
She had some strong opinions about how to run a business:
“The only way to get ahead in life is to annihilate your rivals. Blow them out of the water. Sweep them away by whatever means necessary, that’s the trick.”
She sparkled with diamonds from her ears and her neck and her fingers. And she clamped her teeth together in an aggressive smile, and she nodded her head as she stood behind my dad and her bony fingers grabbed him by each shoulder and she squeezed them.
She snarled when she spoke and whenever she made a point, she leaned over and peered into my dad’s eyes and banged her bony fist on the table for emphasis so that the pepper pot shook.
And the sun, I swear, was coming up when she finally left, and I don’t know what they talked about but I do know that Dad was crying. Crying in front of Paloma Killealy’s mother who, it turned out, is divorced, not that Paloma ever told me anything about that. It was obvious by now that she was throwing herself at my dad.
And, at first, I thought how awful that was, but then I started to believe that maybe it could be a good thing. My mum had been dead for a long time. By now my dad had been talking more to Mrs. Killealy than I’d remembered him talking to anyone for years. I didn’t find out exactly what they’d been talking about until after I tried to kiss Paloma, but then Paloma told me. You see, Barney, there’s something about my mum’s death that I never knew, and now that I do know, I can’t go back and you can’t force me.
Barney said he wouldn’t dream of forcing me to do anything, that I had to do things of my own free will, and I said thanks.
the seventeenth slice
When you grow up by the sea there’s a kind of magic that never leaves you. The shimmery silver of salty mornings stays inside your bones. The rattling of windows on a winter night sharpens your senses. There’s always power and deceptiveness in a flat blue sea. I’m a coast-town girl. I know how quickly gentle water can turn into a black foaming mountain.
It couldn’t have been coincidence, like some people said. Paloma Killealy had definitely been avoiding me. I tried again and again to confront her. I had a shed load of questions to ask. I needed to talk to her about the time she’d spent with Oscar, and the rumors that had been spread about him, and maybe get to the bottom of everything that had happened. I kept on scurrying around the school looking for her, and that day after finishing my session with Katy Collopy, I saw her slender legs hurrying out of the school gates, and her hair doing that swishing thing it always does.
I was sick and tired of trying to get a hold of her. After school I texted Stevie and told him I was just about to call into her house.
Well, it was my house to be precise, but I wasn’t living in it. I knocked on the door with my fist, and then I hammered on it. And then I could hear that familiar noise of my own front door opening, and there was Paloma.
I couldn’t understand what the expression on her face meant: her lips were pressed together, her forehead puckered and her eyes half open as if she was squinting at a very bright, low sun. She stepped forward and put her arms around me.
“Oh Meg!” she said in a half whisper. “I’m so grateful to you for coming. You are so kind to come here to show your support at this difficult time. I want you to know how much I appreciate it.”
I’d been expecting a lot of things from my first meeting with Paloma Killealy, but the two things I hadn’t been expecting were affection or gratitude.
And then she was taking me by the hand as if I was a small child, and leading me into my own kitchen and inviting me to sit on one of my family’s kitchen chairs, at the table that me and Oscar had scratched our names on the bottom of when we were small. And I was saying,
“Please, Paloma, please, tell me what happened to him.”
My phone began to ring but I turned it off.
It was like being hypnotized and it felt funny being a stranger at my own table. She had a lovely smile and looking at it, I couldn’t imagine her ever wanting to do any harm to anyone.
She told me about how she’d done her best. She’d tried to protect him from other people’s bad opinion of him.
“I did my best to explain a few basic ground rules—ones that he hadn’t been able to pick up on his own. I thought I could give him some feedback, steer him in the right direction. But he didn’t do himself any favors. He used to make apple tarts. I mean seriously, who does that? What other boy do you know goes around baking things in their spare time? That’s not normal. Andy and Greg recorded this very silly apple-tart demonstration and him talking about his dead relatives, because they wanted to put it on YouTube. I told him that I reckoned he needed to give up the apple tarts. I told him it was too unusual. I thought I was doing him a favor.”
Paloma asked me if I’d like to join her in the living room and then she showed me the way as if I didn’t know where it was. We stood in front of the fire for a bit, and she kept talking about how attached she had been to Oscar, and how she forgave him for his weirdness, and what a good friend he had been in other ways, and how much she missed him and how she really did hope that it wasn’t her fault.
I hated myself and I hated my jealous, horrible heart. What was the point of being jealous of her now? She was beautiful. Oscar had been right about her having hair like golden silk. Her skin was so soft it glistened. It began to seem to me as if none of this was her fault. I didn’t want to bother her anymore. As I was about to leave, and tell her how sorry I was to have troubled her, she gave a little cry and said:
“Oh Meg,” and she sank into our sofa, and she began to sob.
“Tell me,” I said, “what’s making you cry like this?”
“Meg, you see the whole thing is my fault, and I’ve been living with it this whole time and I have no idea who to talk to about it, because you see, as soon as everyone knows, they’ll think so terribly badly of me.” She put her head in my lap and she began to sob and I stroked her golden silky hair and I felt sorry for her because she really did look so sad, and I asked her to explain.
“Oscar was desperately, deeply, and devastatingly in love.”
“With who?”
“Who do you think?” She frowned a little and pulled her hair back from her face and stretched her long neck.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“With me, of course. I think I must have broken his heart. Because there was never going to be a scene between me and Oscar. Dunno if you’ve heard but Andy and me are a couple now and goodness, poor Oscar, look, I know he had a thing for me, it was obvious, but . . . I never thought the consequences would be . . . Meg, and then he started acting kind of weird. I began to see things about him too. I mean, he was really popular when I first came but you see it turns out that he was a weirdo. He freaked me out.”
“What does that mean?”
“He used to look at me—in my bedroom. He used his telescope to try and get close-up views. He invaded my privacy. But look, I understood. I forgave him.”
“You’re making that up. Or you were imagining it. That doesn’t sound like him. Not the Oscar I knew.”
“Yeah, well ask anyone. It wasn’t just me. Loads of people had started to think he was strange.”
“People? What people?”
“Andy and Greg mainly, but others too. I tried to teach him. I tried to help him Meg, I honestly, truly did.”
A wave rippled through me as if a cruel wind had started to blow.
Everyone
might be right after all. Oscar really might be dead. Dead from obsessive love for a girl who didn’t love him back.
When I got up to say good-bye, we hugged again in the doorway. I felt comfort and warmth. She even smelled beautiful. Strawberries, almonds and roses were the kinds of things that Paloma Killealy smelled of. Good smells, and pure smells and things that it was difficult to be suspicious of.
But before I turned to leave, I could feel a shiver of something swimming around between us. Something secret. Something cruel.
When I got home I switched on my phone again and saw seven missed calls from Stevie, so I rang back.
“Meg!” he whispered. “Look, I’m sorry to be ringing you so late but I need to tell you something. It’s about Oscar. He’s not dead, Meg. He never died!”
“What?” I whispered back. “How do you know?”
“Because,” said Stevie, “he’s been in contact!”
I held my breath for a few seconds.
“In contact with you?”
“Yes!”
“How?”
“I leave notes for him, down at the pier. In the beginning, I didn’t have a proper system. I’d put a lot of important things down on those bits of paper. Things I wanted him to tell me, or things I wanted him to know. But they all fluttered away in the wind out to sea. So I stopped for a while, but for the last few days I’ve been writing some more, and pinning them down at the bottom of the wall with a rock. Each time I checked, the notes hadn’t been moved. I was starting to lose hope. But tonight! When I went down there, all the notes were gone!! He’s been back, Meg. He’s here somewhere. He took the notes. Finally we have proof. Isn’t it fantastic?!”
It was hard not to have hope. It would have been great if Stevie had been right, and for a second, I believed he was. I wanted to. Of course I did. Who wouldn’t? I pictured Oscar at the pier again, picking up Stevie’s sweet notes and reading them, and I too could feel a rock load of weight lifting off me.
But then something else happened. Big tears tumbled onto my face, splatting the glass on my bedside table with transparent shiny little sunburst shapes.
“Stevie, it’s late. Let’s talk about this tomorrow,” I said. And to the sound of Stevie talking, breathless and delighted, I turned off the phone. If Oscar had seen any kind of note from Stevie pinned down like that at the end of the pier, he wouldn’t have stayed away. It just didn’t make sense anymore. An icy new feeling seeped over me. I threw my phone across the room, as if it was a bomb that was about to explode, but it just landed on the middle of my bed with a blunt thump.
Katy Collopy had been right. Stevie was in the grip of some kind of deep denial on account of how much he wanted Oscar to be alive, and Stevie’s hope was strong and it was as solid as a real object. My own hope was disappearing now, like something else had begun to die.
It was because of the things Paloma had told me. Stevie kept willing his lovely brother to be with us, but we had to accept that Oscar was gone. And it was because of Paloma and how beautiful she was and how Oscar had fallen in love with her. It wasn’t her fault that she didn’t love him back. You can’t help the way you feel. But the way he felt had been the thing that destroyed him. And now, the thought of him hurling himself off the pier seemed to have a logic to it that I’d never understood before.
I found myself facing the fact of Oscar’s death for the first time. It was like stumbling upon the foot of a stairway that I’d never noticed, and not being able to stop myself from walking relentlessly to the top.
Soon after that, Paloma and her mother got in contact with my parents and said they would be vacating our house earlier than planned. My parents said how thoughtful this was of them and they hoped we weren’t putting them out and they said not in the slightest, it was the least they could do and anyway they’d found somewhere “quite marvelous” to live.
Paloma’s mum had bought a five-bedroom house, even though she had only two people in her family. It was near the park. People said they had a tennis court in the back garden and an underground swimming pool.
At school, everyone seemed to have stopped talking about Oscar completely. I’d gone in early one day to rub the graffiti off his locker, but when I got there, the graffiti was already gone because his locker door had been pulled off, and someone must have cleared out whatever was in it because there was nothing there.
And I thought being back in my house was going to be helpful. I imagined it would make me feel normal and calm, but it didn’t. For one thing, I couldn’t bear to sleep in my room with Oscar’s window blank and silent in front of me. I didn’t even have to explain. My parents let me put the blow-up mattress in the living room, right up against the wall closest to Stevie’s room. I could see his candle, flickering and quivering away, never going out.
I whacked an old branch on Stevie’s like Oscar used to on mine, and I saw his shadow coming to the ledge and his smile reminded me so much of his brother that I thought it was possibly going to break my heart.
Stevie’s dad stopped me on the way to school one day and said how much he appreciated me keeping the “tradition of the windows” going and how much I was doing to keep Stevie cheerful and happy. It felt good—a bit like being a big sister maybe, keeping an eye on him like that, trying to get him to realize the terrible thing that had happened to his brother without letting it destroy him. I reminded Stevie about Paloma and how lovely she was and how much Oscar had liked her and I thought he was making sense of it too, and that it would be good for him. And we talked at the windows and I said to myself, if Oscar’s not coming back, at least I can mind Stevie and look out for him because I’m sure that’s what Oscar would have wanted.
And our chats were really good until the evening he came to the window and he said, Meg, you’ve been lying to me and I want you to go away and never talk to me again.
the eighteenth slice
I told Barney how, totally by mistake, Paloma told me something about my mum who is dead. She’d heard about that whole terrible accident that killed my mum and hurt Stevie. And what she told me made me realize exactly how worthless I was.
In school, the day after I’d tried to kiss her, Paloma had called me over.
“Oscar, Oscar,” she’d shouted right in the middle of the school yard, and I ran over to her and she asked me to tell everyone what I had wanted to do to her the day before. And, of course, that was private so I wasn’t going to announce it to the rest of the class, but everyone had gathered around, and Paloma goes, “Oscar Dunleavy tried to kiss me last night, didn’t you, Osc?” And a few people started to laugh. And I laughed as well because I didn’t want it to get nasty.
So I laughed a bit more and so did she and then she leaned over and whispered in my ear. “See this, Oscar? Everybody’s laughing at you now. You didn’t honestly think that you and me were going to be, you know, that there was ever going to be an ‘us’? That’s not a possibility. That’s never been a possibility.” I told her that was fine with me, that seriously, she didn’t need to keep going on about it, but Paloma never stopped talking until she was ready to.
“I was being nice to you,” she continued. “And of course we can always be friends.”
“You don’t have to be nice to me if you don’t want to,” I said.
“Oh but I like being nice to you. On account of how brave I think you are.”
And I said, “Brave? What do you mean, brave?”
And she said, “I mean courageous. I mean strong. I can only imagine how guilty you must have been feeling for your whole life.”
“Guilty? Why should I be feeling guilty?” I’d asked her.
“Because of Stevie and your mother,” she’d said, slowly. “I honestly don’t know how you manage to stay so cheerful. You are resilient, Oscar—keeping going the way you’ve done since Stevie’s accident. Guilt must be such a difficult thing to live with,” she said, and the way she spoke was full of some kind of explosive meaning that I didn’t yet understand.
&
nbsp; “You know, seeing him every day in his wheelchair, and knowing, that’s the awful thing, knowing that it’s you who put him there.”
“Paloma, what are you saying? It was an accident. A car accident. Someone crashed into us—it wasn’t even the man’s fault.”
“It’s always somebody’s fault,” she said, looking carefully at my face, and then she said, “Oscar, you don’t have to keep the secret from me, because I know. My mum told me. She had this long conversation with your dad the other night. You poor thing, Oscar. That’s a terrible burden to carry, and I just want to say maximum respect for being so okay about it, and for not letting it weigh you down.”
I told her I’d be very interested to hear the parts of the story Dad had told.
So then she told me the story. The story of my family that nobody had ever bothered to tell me even though it turns out I’d played the main part.
“Your dad told my mum the bit about how he’d been keeping his sorrow to himself for a long time. My mother is good at getting information out of people. I’ve seen how she does it. Usually she keeps filling up their wine glass even though they don’t want any more wine, and she gets them to tell parts of the story of their life that they’ve never told anyone.
“He told her the bit about how you and your family had been on the way to Galway, and how everyone was happy and excited because you were going to the beach. The sun was high in the sky because you’d started out late, and Stevie was strapped into his car seat and you were singing some song that you used to sing and you were only six but you were smiley and buzzy the way only six-year-old children can be, and your mum was driving. Your dad said he couldn’t remember why it wasn’t him who was driving. He explained the bit about how much you loved your brother, even then, when he was tiny, and he told my mum that Stevie must have been bored or maybe hungry or something, on account of you being late setting out. Your dad kept explaining to my mum that he should really have given you some lunch before you left but he was the one who insisted that you press on. And your dad is sure Stevie started to hold out his arms to you, because you said, ‘Mum, Dad, Stevie wants to get out,’ and your dad explained how he kept saying, ‘No matter what Stevie does, do not let him out of that car seat, not until we find somewhere to stop.’ I mean you were going to stop, but you were on the highway. You had to find somewhere, you see.
The Apple Tart of Hope Page 11
