The Family Gift

by Cathy Kelly

  I breathe. In. Out. Slowly.

  I know Dan’s right, I know we have to deal with this like adults. But when it comes to my children, I stop being an adult and turn into something feral.

  ‘Will I open a bottle of wine?’ he says hopefully, clearly seeing my demonic-ness disappearing as I breathe.

  ‘You know I don’t like to drink during the week,’ I say sanctimoniously.

  I can’t help it.

  A snort escapes him.

  ‘Well, I don’t,’ I say.

  ‘I think I need one,’ says Dan, hastily getting up, opening the fridge and pulling out a beer.

  He’s not a big beer drinker, to be honest. That was another one of the things I liked about him. So many of the guys I used to meet at parties in my twenties appeared to feel that they were missing out if they weren’t almost comatose with drink halfway through the night. And a really good night for these fabulous menfolk would be had by a load of them coming together, filling themselves full of beer, having a big feed of burgers and chips before letting themselves loose to chat up women. As I said: classy. Not.

  Dan was never that guy.

  He sits down with his beer and looks at me.

  ‘What was I supposed to say?’ he demands finally, and he’s using that calm, measured voice he uses on radio interviews when a fellow guest is annoying him. ‘Elisa is Lexi’s birth mother . . .’

  I wince.

  He puts a hand on my arm but I ignore it.

  ‘And Mrs Markham—’

  ‘Why don’t you ever call her Adele Markham?’ I demand. ‘Why is she always Mrs Markham, like, Mrs Markham, can Elisa come out to play?’

  ‘Oh stop it. You’ve demonised her. Adele’s OK. Plus, when the adoption went through, we agreed to visitation so that the Markhams still got to see Lexi. We knew Lexi would be occasionally seeing . . .’ He pauses to find the words. ‘. . . The person who gave birth to her.’

  There’s a horrible silence.

  I get up, go to the fridge and shakily pour myself some white wine. So much for the sanctimoniousness.

  I don’t want Elisa to be my daughter’s birth mother. I don’t want her seeing Lexi.

  I’d been so happy to be able to adopt her, I’d have agreed to anything and look how that’s backfired.

  Meanwhile, Dan is into his explaining mode: his long legs are stretched out, his face is earnest, and you can see the intelligence burning inside him as he tries to help me grasp this knotty problem.

  Only thing is, my instinct and not my brain is running me.

  ‘I understand, darling,’ he’s saying. ‘You think messaging by WhatsApp is not the most grown-up way to start a correspondence about the daughter you share but that’s Elisa for you. I’m surprised she didn’t try a message on Instagram . . .’ he says, jokily, trying to lighten the atmosphere.

  ‘You follow her on Instagram?’ I ask, with narrow-eyed irritation.

  ‘I’m not on Instagram,’ he says, horrified. ‘Why would I be? It’s not my thing.’

  ‘OK. Sorry.’

  I sit down beside him. Despite my cauldron of burning rage against all the Markhams, poor Dan is stuck in the middle.

  ‘Show it to me.’

  Dan has very few WhatsApp groups. Mainly family ones: us, his family, my family, the guys he plays five-a-side football with on a Wednesday night, a few of his mates from college. Nothing that would make an irritated wife go postal. And there in the middle of all this innocence is a message from Elisa. Her tiny avatar is, obviously, a picture of her from the waist up, in a bikini with her boobs shoved up.

  ‘She’s really getting her money out of those, isn’t she?’ I say caustically. ‘You could do a paper on that. How much money a person can make out of fake boobs.’

  ‘I don’t know if she’s making much money out of them,’ he says thoughtfully as if he really was considering this for a financial analysis piece. ‘But she clearly paid a lot for them so she wants everyone to see them.’

  My husband: the economist.

  I read the message which was full of textspeak like the letter ‘u’ for you and ‘talk L8R’.

  ‘Honestly, considering she hasn’t talked properly to you for, what, four years, you’d think she’d make more of an effort. Would a phone call have hurt? Or actually spelling whole words?’

  ‘Freya, that’s Elisa. A business like this current make-up deal is as close to an effort as she has ever come before to having a job, and I suspect that the current husband has had a bit of a financial meltdown, which is why she’s doing it.’

  ‘Really,’ I say. I’m a little shocked at how bitchy I sound. I modulate my tone. ‘Really,’ I say again, trying to put a little bit of sorrow into my voice.

  ‘Yeah, really. Why else would she be doing this? My mother keeps bumping into Adele in the supermarket.’ He pauses while I grin at him at the very thought of Adele Markham hiding behind giant stacks of special-offer loo roll in order to jump out at Dan’s poor mother, Betty.

  ‘She’s following your mother, you know. That’s why Betty barely dares come here, because she’s sure Adele Markham will be attached to her with superglue.’

  ‘Surely not?’ he says, in disbelief.

  I ignore this innocence. Any woman who can make a business out of flogging hall table lamps worth two grand to people with too much money is not beyond lurking in the supermarket aisles to get what she wants.

  Women should definitely be ruling the world: men just don’t get the nuances.

  ‘Anyway, whatever this new business is, I get the feeling that she wants to come back to Ireland, so that would imply that her marriage is on the skids.’

  ‘Yes it would, wouldn’t it,’ I say, shakiness coming back into my voice, ‘but she’s not coming back in and messing up our lives.’

  He holds up a hand.

  ‘No, she’s not coming back into our lives and messing things up, OK? Even if she does move back here. Lexi is our daughter. But you’ve got to face up to the facts, Freya. Elisa is Lexi’s birth mother and you always knew that at some point, she’d want to get to know her properly. We agreed on an open adoption. Make it easy and quick, that was our motto, remember?’

  ‘But it’s so soon—’

  I can feel the tears pooling in my eyes. Dan sees them and he pulls me close to him. Normally, his touch can soothe me but not tonight.

  ‘On the basis of the past, I thought Elisa would never be interested and eventually, one day in the future, when Lexi was older, an adult, she’d want to meet Elisa properly and talk to her.’

  I had all this planned in my head: Elisa would still be feckless, possibly really, really wrinkly as the sins of a lifelong aversion to suncream had caught up with her. Lexi would come back and tell me what a wonderful mother I was.

  In the best version of this fantasy, Elisa looked about twenty years older than I did, reeked of cigarette smoke and desperation, and asked for a loan.

  As I said, my inner bitch, Mildred, is inventive. OK, I’m inventive.

  Dan’s almost rocking me now and I can smell that end-of-day combination of the hint of aftershave and Dan’s own scent.

  ‘Lexi’s just a child now and is so impressionable,’ I say finally, reverting to the real world. ‘Plus, Elisa is possibly the worst role model on the planet. Do nothing in school. Party your way through your late teens and have a child so you can ignore her. Have I left anything out? Exactly what did you see in this paragon of womanhood, anyway?’

  I have asked him this question before and he’s never been able to give me a satisfactory answer.

  ‘You know,’ he sighs, ‘it’s hard to say. We were young, I was a bit of a nerd.’

  ‘You weren’t a nerd,’ I say loyally, ‘you were just quiet, and a late bloomer. But you were always good-looking.’

  He grins. ‘Thanks, honey,�
�� he says, ‘but when we were at school, I was quiet and I didn’t go out much. I stayed at home all the time, which pretty much qualifies you for being a nerd.’

  ‘And now, you’re one of Ireland’s hottest economists,’ I add. ‘So if that’s what nerds turn into, then, I ought to tell all our children to hang around nerds. Because nerds turn into nuggets of gold.’

  Dan laughs and kisses me.

  ‘Do you think they’ve gone to sleep?’ he says, hopefully, a glint in his eyes.

  I somehow manage a grin. ‘Sex, sex, sex – is that all you think about?’

  ‘Not all the time, no,’ he says, scratching the back of his head. ‘The male of the species is possibly more interested in sex than the female,’ he goes on. ‘It’s evolution, we need to spread our seed.’

  Which brings me back to Elisa. I know I’m like a dog with a bone, but I can’t help it.

  I’ve asked him this scores of times but I try it another way: rephrase it. Because I have to know.

  ‘I still can’t understand how you hooked up with Elisa. Was she different then, less pushy, less airheaded, less look at me, I’ve lots of money and it’s Daddy’s?’

  For a second Dan stares into the distance. In fairness to him, he doesn’t say, not again, Freya.

  ‘It wasn’t Love Story, Freya, I’ve told you endlessly. I don’t know how we ended up dating those few times,’ he says with a sigh. ‘We were immature and I’d known her at school, well sort of known her, I mean she wouldn’t have really known me, because as I said before . . .’

  I interject. ‘Yeah, nerd: got it.’

  ‘Exactly. When we met up again I was with a group of guys in town. You’ve heard this story so many times,’ he adds, exasperated.

  ‘I want to hear it again,’ I say, ‘in case I missed something important.’

  Dan laughs and pulls me properly onto his lap. He goes to the gym, cycles, swims, which is just as well because you need to be strong to haul me around. ‘You didn’t miss anything important. We just partied. Myself and the guys were on a roll then because being smart was suddenly cool. I’d written a few articles, Kevin was beginning his start-up: we were on that on-line Ones To Watch list and Elisa wanted to play outside her normal group. She was fed up with trust-fund babies and the jocks. We were the clever guys who were out of college then, or doing masters or PhDs, different from her normal crowd who were all suddenly boring now school was over. Peaked too early, while we’d finally stopped being the dorky kids with glasses and it turned out that having our heads in books all the time meant we were going places,’ he adds with some pride.

  ‘Plus, I had my James Dean leather jacket and that may have swung it in my favour. We dated for three weeks. OK? Three weeks. It was never serious. I guess I was flattered that she was interested in me, right? None of her crowd would have looked at me and my pals at school.’

  ‘So you get a rich chick with benefits and date the ex- coolest girl from school?’ I say.

  He ignores that. ‘I wasn’t dating anyone and we hooked up.’

  I wait for Mildred to chime in that Dan might still fancy her but sometimes, Mildred shuts up and lets my intelligent instincts take over. Dan had never loved Elisa, I was sure of that. Our marriage is rock solid.

  Really, chimes in Mildred. Then, why are you lying to him about how you’re going to a group for victim support . . .?

  I haven’t said that yet. I’ve said I’m going this week, I point out, silently.

  ‘You know everything, Freya. She got pregnant,’ he goes on, ‘and her family went mental because her grandmother, the one with all the money, is more Catholic than the Pope. Yadda yadda, you’ve heard it before.’

  ‘They must have hidden the newspapers from Granny,’ I reply smartly. Elisa had been all over the papers in those days, at the opening of every envelope in head-to-toe Gucci, looking champagne-dazed.

  ‘Her parents could have dealt with it but in her grandmother’s world, pregnancy equalled marriage or the trust fund dried up. Elisa needed hers – her family knew she was hardly going to be a career woman given her interest in school – or work, for that matter. It was wedding bells from then on.’

  ‘You could have said no,’ I point out. ‘You weren’t inheriting the bloody money. It was hardly the 1960s.’

  ‘Freya, you know how my mum is. She wasn’t able to say boo to a goose and my dad was the same. In their world, if you got a girl pregnant, you took responsibility, whatever that responsibility took. Normally it was just an angry father – in our case, it was a religious granny.’ He grinned, remembering. ‘Elisa was panicked.’

  Panicked she’d miss out on the loot, says Mildred.

  ‘And made it the wedding of the season.’

  ‘Oh, totally,’ he groans. ‘I heard some people were selling the invitations. She had four hundred on her side alone. And all the time I knew it was a mistake. Zed kept saying to me, “You’re mad. Mad, Dan. Don’t marry her, she’s not the woman for you, but . . .” ’

  I finish the sentence for him. ‘You did the honourable thing.’

  ‘Yup, that’s the problem with us nerds: honourable.’

  ‘And we got Lexi out of it,’ I say. ‘So you doing the honourable thing, and going out with crazy Elisa, all worked out in the end.’

  His face breaks into a huge smile.

  ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘it all worked out in the end. Freya, Elisa has never stuck with anything in her life. But we have to give her the benefit of the doubt, for Lexi’s sake. Our aim is to make sure that Lexi doesn’t get hurt. But,’ he goes on, ‘we have to help her see Elisa if she wants to.’

  Give Elisa the benefit of the doubt? Mildred is in my head telling me we needed a staple gun so I could go confront Elisa. No, a nail gun like builders use! Channel your inner Robert de Niro . . . I wonder is Mildred the worst part of me with no added filter.

  ‘We are going to manage it,’ Dan says, ‘I promise you. I love you, love our family. Elisa can’t harm us.’

  Finally, I relax against him on the couch. He’s right. We are rock solid, truly.

  Only in my own head are Dan and Elisa a once-great romance.

  9

  Difficult roads lead to the most precious destinations

  I have the nightmare again.

  I’m never in a garage on my own and it’s never the garage I was mugged in.

  It’s always somewhere utterly innocuous like the supermarket car park where in reality, you are never more than five yards from a person pushing a trolley and looking exhausted.

  I’m always with the children. Sometimes, all three of them.

  They’re smaller: babies, wriggly as puppies, and I’m trying to hold on to them all as I run, screaming, away from a man who is bearing down on us with menace.

  In the nightmare, he’s huge, giant-sized.

  Only I can save my babies but I keep letting them slip from my grip, keep having to stop and hoist them up again as he comes after us. The atmosphere is dark and full of dread and when I wake, I lie in that half-alert horror of not knowing what’s real and what’s not.

  Am I safe?

  Beside me, Dan is sleeping. My heartbeat gradually slows, but I’m wet with sweat and I feel the nausea the nightmare always brings.

  I shove back the duvet and stagger, because my head is woozy, to the bathroom where I shut the door quietly and turn on the mini light over the sink.

  The me in the mirror looks ghostly, with huge violet circles under my eyes and my hair stuck to my skull with sweat. It’s only half four in the morning but I cannot go back to sleep, not when The Fear is there in the background, waiting to pull me in again. I prefer exhaustion and relying on caffeine all day to that.

  I sink onto the cold floor and cry, giant heaves where no actual tears emerge.

  I hate this but how do I escape it?

  I
have to be strong, strong for everyone.

  Once the heaving is over, I pull on my dressing gown, grab my phone and socks, and check on the children. They’re safe.

  I know they’re safe. I’m safe, but still . . .

  Downstairs, I make coffee and turn the TV on low to watch something mindless.

  I used to have the nightmares in the old house but I was so sure that here, I’d be better. Except I’m not. And I’ve so successfully downplayed what happened to me, that I can’t now come out and talk about how it’s affected me. I’m so lucky! Look at all the things I have. My darling children, Dan, my family, my career. Dad’s stroke, Mum’s devastation and Scarlett’s pain are enormous aches in my heart, and they’re real aches.

  Not nightmares conjured up by someone who should be able to get better on her own. I like watching car-crash TV but I don’t want my life to be like that.

  I especially don’t want Dan to know.

  The thing is, if Dan knew how traumatised I still am by the mugging, he’d go into caveman meltdown.

  Behind his civilised front, Dan is waay more Viking than me. All I’ve got is the hair: he’s got the attitude.

  Two years before Teddy was born, he trained for and completed an Ironman triathlon event. This means running, cycling and swimming an amount that no human should be able to do. But Dan and his brother, Zed did it because it was there. This is code for any number of the dense things men do.

  I told him that he needed to get all that sort of bravado out of his mind with the Ironman because mountain- biking, parachuting and climbing mountains are all there and he is not allowed to do any of them. He’s no use to me dead.

  Zed, whom I love but not hopelessly the way I do my beloved Dan, is allowed to fling himself off cliffs if he wants as I have no power over him. I can live without Zed: I could not live without Dan.

  Watching Dad has made me all too aware what can happen to people, what happens out of the blue every moment of every day.