by Lisa Cardiff
For nearly two months, they had a standing weekly dinner date on Thursday night. It had started simply enough. She ran into Peter late one Thursday night, and he asked if she wanted to get something to eat at an Italian restaurant down the street. They seemed to have endless things to talk about, and as she climbed into her taxi he said, “So next Thursday at the same time?” and Avery nodded.
A couple months into their weekly date, he asked her to come to his place after dinner. She had been debating whether she should take the relationship to the next step for weeks, but she always felt something was missing and she realized she was desperately trying to make something special out of their comfortable companionship. When she rebuffed his attempt to take the relationship further, he didn’t show any anger, passion, or any other discernible emotion. He accepted her rejection without question. Their late night dinners never happened again, and she and Peter fell into a friendly work relationship.
“I’m on my way out the door as soon as I can force Grace to leave,” Avery said, craning her neck to look for Grace. “I’ll be available by email to handle any questions while I’m out of town and, of course, you have my cell number. Call me if anything comes up.”
“Don’t worry about anything while you’re gone. Your work will still be here when you return,” he said, finishing off his champagne and placing the empty glass on a nearby table.
“Thanks, Peter,” Avery replied softly, her gaze thankful.
“By the way, the head of the Foundation’s Galway office called me today, and I mentioned you would be in town for a few weeks. He wants to meet our rising star. He’s a great contact for you if you want to continue moving up the ranks at the Foundation. He’s on the Board. It never hurts to have well placed friends.” Peter winked and shoved his hands into his pockets. “That is, if you have the time, but I think it might offer a reprieve from everything else.”
“I might actually do that,” she responded, pushing her blonde hair behind her ears. “I’ll probably be holed up for days sorting through all my mom’s personal effects. My Great Auntie Catherine is getting older, and she doesn’t have the energy to do it, and unfortunately, my mom is a crazy pack rat. She has boxes full of memorabilia, diaries, newspaper clippings and letters and other things she calls ‘the story of her life’.” When she noticed Peter’s blank look, she continued talking. “Scrapbooking—my mom wanted to put together some massive scrapbook of her life.”
She saw an indistinct thought glimmering behind his carefully hooded eyes quickly replaced with his usual look of bemused detachment. “It sounds as though you might have more than a few weeks undertaking on your hands so meeting with the Galway office might give you a well-deserved break. Are you going to rescue her project from the dust bins and finish it?”
“Not likely. I don’t think I could put the pieces of her life together. We’re not very close.” She paused and cleared her throat, attempting to redirect the conversation away from her mother. Even though Peter knew she didn’t talk to her mother often, she was never comfortable enough with him to explain the complexities of their relationship. “You’re probably right about needing a break from my mom and aunt. I’ll stop by the Galway office and introduce myself. Who knows? Maybe they will need some help, and I’ll have a legitimate excuse to spend time elsewhere.”
“Great.” Peter pulled out his IPhone and sifted through his contacts. “As we speak, Thomas Flannigan’s contact information is sitting in your email inbox. You know what,” he added, with a ghost of a smile barely curving the corners of his mouth, “there is a bar set up near the front. Let me buy you a drink and we can toast to a successful trip.”
“Thanks for the offer but I can’t. I need to find Grace so I actually make my flight tonight. Enjoy the exhibits. There are some interesting speakers scheduled later. I wish I could stay longer.”
“Don’t forget to enjoy your time off. You deserve it. Oh, and Avery, don’t hesitate to call me if you need anything. I will be there for you, even if you just want to talk,” he said, staring at her, his gaze inscrutable.
Avery smiled, puzzled by his last comment, and then turned to leave. Feeling his eyes boring into her back, she looked over her shoulder at Peter. He raised one eyebrow in question, but she merely shrugged her shoulders and continued weaving through the crowd, looking for Grace.
Chapter 2
The taxi’s ripped vinyl seats felt hard and cold, but after fourteen hours of being cramped in the cardboard seats in the economy section of a plane, the taxi felt almost luxurious. Watching from the backseat of the taxi as Ireland unfolded around her, Avery already felt homesick. She never understood why her mom left New York to live in Ireland with her Great Aunt Catherine. At the time, it seemed like a final blow in a long series of disappointments in her relationship with her mother. Later, she came to view it as one more example of her mother’s selfishness.
She still remembered that fateful fight when she was nine years old; an argument between her grandmother and Dierdre, as Avery now referred to her mother. After they both had thought she was asleep, she heard doors slamming and yelling downstairs. This was a common enough occurrence between Dierdre and Avery’s grandmother, but this didn’t stop Avery from creeping out of her room to hide in an alcove at the top of the stairs to listen. If nothing else, eavesdropping became a form of self-defense—it was the only way she knew what was going on in her life. Sometimes these late night arguments meant Dierdre had a new boyfriend or a new job or she wanted to drag her daughter to a new town again to “make a fresh start.” Dierdre could dissemble with the best of them.
“Where do you think you’re going this time?” Avery’s grandmother said, arching one eyebrow while she eyed piles of luggage haphazardly tossed on the floor next to the front door.
“Back to Ireland. I already talked to Auntie Catherine and she’s happy to have our company.”
Avery gasped at hearing her mother’s plans, but she quickly covered her mouth. She curled into a ball to make herself smaller, praying they wouldn’t notice she was nearby. She didn’t want to move again. She hated going to new schools and trying to find new friends.
“I hope you’re not planning to drag Avery halfway across the world with you. I will not allow it. This was not part of the agreement. She needs stability and normalcy. Everyone agreed to that, even you. Do you understand what you’re doing to her by dragging us from place to place? She is becoming a victim of your whims.”
“What’s to allow? She’s my daughter,” Dierdre scoffed. “This is none of your business. The deal was that you go where I go. I don’t even know why we’re having this conversation. Don’t try to tell me what to do or where to take my daughter—”
“No,” Avery’s grandmother interrupted. “She is more my daughter than yours. I took responsibility for her when you didn’t. Without this arrangement, both of you would be roaming the streets or worse. By virtue of everything we have done for you, we have a claim on her and her future.”
Dierdre eyed the woman she called her mother with a mixture of pleading and resentment. “I’m going to find Cian and to do that I need Avery. He’s her father. He should be able to tell me what is wrong with Avery. You’ve seen that marking on her wrist! I didn’t want to listen to him before. I ran away from him, but he owes me an explanation.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s nothing more than a birthmark. She’s just a confused little girl with a vivid imagination.”
As Avery huddled at the top of the stairs lightly tracing the interlocking circular birthmark on her wrist, she whispered her father’s name to see how it felt on her lips. This was the first time she’d heard her father’s name; finally, a name to associate with all the yearning she felt for this person she didn’t know. She’d spent so many hours daydreaming about this man, her father. She invented scenarios where she would get a letter from her father begging her to live with him or where he showed up at her home overjoyed he had finally
found her. All of her fantasies involved her father taking her someplace where she would be safe, loved, and accepted. Not like here, with her mother.
Dierdre looked at her mother pointedly. “Oh please, you don’t believe that. You wouldn’t be involved if that was the case. She taught herself Gaelic. For Christ’s sake, she can speak it fluently, and I seriously doubt she has even heard the language. I grew up in Ireland and I hardly know more than a handful of words.” Dierdre paused and when she resumed speaking her voice was thick with emotion. “Then, there are those strange dreams she has. She makes me uncomfortable, looking at me with those all-knowing eyes. It’s as if she can control me or see through me, get in my head and bend me to her will if she tried. She responds to ideas I don’t say out loud.” She looked at the floor.
“You should count your blessings. You have an exceptionally gifted and perceptive ten-year-old daughter. It’s nothing more than that.”
“I’m not that naïve anymore.” She raised her head to lock eyes with her mother. “Cian is the key. Everything will make sense when I talk to him. Maybe he will still want to raise his daughter. God knows I don’t have the energy to raise her anymore. She isn’t natural. I want freedom and a real life.”
“How can you say that? You thought he was a danger to Avery’s life. What would he do to her? Do you even care? The Foundation will never allow it. That was not the agreement. You don’t care about what’s best for Avery, you just want to chase after the next boy,” she bit out, disapproval dripping from her words.
Dierdre drew in a long breath to calm her nerves and lowered her voice. “You know that’s not true. Just because I don’t understand my daughter doesn’t mean that I don’t love her. It’s just…” Dierdre’s voice trailed off as she stared blankly at the door. “I don’t know anymore. Who was I to hide Avery from him—to do what we did? Years ago, I was afraid of him. I felt betrayed by him and thought I was doing the right thing by giving Avery a chance at a normal life, but now?” She lowered her eyes in resignation. “It might be best if he took her. Maybe she belongs with him. I can’t pretend she’s normal anymore. You might be able to, but I’m done deluding myself.”
“You’re being ridiculous. I won’t let you do this to Avery and neither will the Foundation. You made a deal. She’s staying with me. I’m tired of you dragging us from town to town. Have you stopped to consider that her fanciful imagination is your fault? You move her around so much that Avery hasn’t had the opportunity to be a normal child and make friends. She would be like any other child if you let her put some roots down. Right now, her only friends are her books, so it’s not surprising that she acts a little different.”
Her mother’s words hung in the air, and like a knife they cut through all the illusions Avery had invented in her mind. She didn’t belong anywhere because deep down she was different. Her mother didn’t want her and neither did her dad. As her vision blurred from tears silently streaming down her face, she wrapped her hands around her stomach to hold in an overwhelming pain that threatened to swallow her whole.
Perhaps her father could never be the safe haven she yearned for, but she vowed she would make more of effort to fit in and hide all those things that frightened her mom. Maybe then her mother would love her and want her in her life forever. She would behave like every other kid. All those unsaid thoughts people had that she could hear so clearly—almost as if they were saying them out loud—they would be her secret. Even if it killed her, no one would know she was different. If she tried hard enough, she would be normal.
Over time, she realized the problem with secrets was that you have to believe your lies or the secrets make you different.
In the end, Avery’s grandmother won. Dierdre didn’t take Avery to Ireland. Avery’s grandmother successfully argued that it wasn’t safe for Avery to travel to a foreign country until Dierdre could provide a stable environment for her daughter. Dierdre caved, but she insisted that she would come back for Avery when she found Cian.
Avery spent the next nine years of her life torn between a bone-jarring fear her mother would return to take her somewhere new and a heartbreaking dread her mother wouldn’t come back for her. Only when she left home for college did she realize she was safe from her mother’s threats and the internal emotional torture her mother’s abandonment created. Dierdre no longer had any control over her life. She no longer had the power to rip Avery out of the life she made for herself or abandon her with another stranger. With that knowledge, Avery was able to find some small, albeit shaky, peace.
The taxi made a sharp turn around a corner, snapping Avery out of her private thoughts. The taxi veered left and stopped in front of the Harbour Hotel in the heart of Galway. Stepping out of the taxi onto the sidewalk, a brisk breeze swept through the layers of her clothing. Her skinned roughened by goose bumps, she wrapped her arms around her body, hastily paid the driver, then ran into the hotel lobby, dragging two pieces of luggage behind her. The lobby wasn’t old enough to be quaint, and it wasn’t grand enough to inspire wonder. Nevertheless, it looked clean, relatively modern, and it would provide a place of solitude when she needed to escape from her aunt’s house.
“Good evening,” a hotel clerk said, his distinct Galway dialect sending a tingle of familiar anticipation down her spine. “Do you have a reservation?”
“Yes. My name is Avery Conner. Here’s my email confirmation.” Avery pulled a folded piece of paper out of her purse and set it on the counter.
While the clerk busily typed on her computer, Avery wandered to the concierge’s desk to peruse tourist brochures.
“Miss Conner, your key is ready.”
“Thanks,” Avery said.
“The concierge has left for the night, but I can leave her a message if you would like any specific information.”
“No, the brochures will work for now.”
“Have you ever been to Galway before?” The clerk asked.
Avery paused. “Yes. I mean no, but I have family here.”
“Welcome to the ‘City of the Tribes.’ Galway is known as Ireland’s Cultural Heart. There is so much to see here from the Spanish Arch to Shop Street, and we have a vibrant music scene. We even have some neighborhoods that are designated as Gaeltachtai, which means it is an Irish-speaking zone.”
“That sounds wonderful. Can you suggest someplace to eat before I go to bed—nothing too fancy?”
“The hotel has a restaurant, but if you prefer to see the town, there are several restaurants on Quay Street, which is only a three-minute walk from our front door. What kind of food do you want?”
“It doesn’t matter. Just highlight a few places on the map and I’ll find something.”
A few minutes later Avery entered her hotel room armed with a map and her luggage. The room was small by American standards but contemporary and clean. It had a queen bed, a desk, and a lounge chair pushed in the corner. The décor wasn’t elaborate, but the colors were soothing.
She tossed her bag on the luggage rack then walked to the window and pushed the curtains aside. The room overlooked Galway’s docks. Tucked in a residential area in the city center, it was quiet but within walking distance of most of Galway’s attractions.
After deliberating for a few minutes, she picked up the phone to call her aunt to let her know she arrived and to make arrangements to see her mother. There was no reason to procrastinate.
“Hello,” her aunt said.
“Auntie Catherine, it’s me, Avery.”
“It is good to hear your voice. Where are you?”
“I just checked into my hotel, and I’m about to run out for dinner before I go to sleep. What time should I come by tomorrow?”
“Your mother has been very weak these past few days. It’s a good thing you finally agreed to make the trip to say goodbye to her. I don’t think she has much time left.”
Avery refused to respond to her aunt’s passive aggressive comment. She concentrated on ignoring her urge to lash o
ut at her aunt.
When the silence became uncomfortable, her aunt resumed the conversation. “Anyway, your mother is more lucid in the afternoons. If you can spare an hour or so of your vacation, two or three o’clock would be the best time to stop by the house.”
“Of course that works for me. You know, this isn’t a vacation. I came to Ireland to see Dierdre. I don’t have anything else on my itinerary,” Avery snapped defensively. She always suspected her aunt blamed her for Dierdre’s shortcomings and inadequacies.
“Okay. I’ll plan to be home around that time. Your visit means a lot to Dierdre. She isn’t good at sharing her feelings, but she loves you. She made a lot of sacrifices for you. Having you wasn’t an easy decision. It changed her life forever.”
Exasperated, Avery took a deep breath and stared absently out the window. “Sure. Being a single mother probably ranks right up there with being an abandoned child in terms of ease of life,” Avery replied coolly. “Regardless, I really don’t want to get into this again. I’m tired and hungry.”
“You’re right. I wasn’t trying to offend you. I simply wanted to remind you to show your mother some compassion tomorrow. Her choices wear on her.”
Avery let out a frustrated sigh. “I can imagine leaving your child is a difficult decision, and while I can’t pretend to understand her or any of her reasons for abandoning me, my purpose in coming was not to add to her guilt or stress. I came because you said she wanted to talk to me, and I wanted to have the chance to say goodbye.”
