I THOUGHT OF WEXFORD THIS MORNING. THAT LONG, hot summer in 1995 – the last year I considered myself a free woman. The good weather was part of the reason why Joe had pestered me for so long: ‘It would do us all the world of good,’ he kept saying, ‘especially Amy.’ But what he really meant was that it would do me the world of good.
Joe, I realise now, was handicapped when it came to dealing with his feelings towards me, especially where my bouts of depression were concerned, being a man with a mind that never entertained self-indulgent notions. With Joe, it was always about finding solutions, moving forward, no need to dwell on anything for too long, too much thinking can cloud your brain, no point in letting all that ‘overanalysing malarkey’, as he called it, get in the way of things. At times, especially near the end, he became more like a surrogate father than a husband. I guess, though, that was as much my fault as his. By the time of Amy’s last birthday, our daily conversations had slid into the type of exchanges you would normally have with neighbours or mild acquaintances. But, in fairness, I should shoulder most of the blame. I was the one who married him on false pretences. At least at the time, Joe was honest in his belief about loving me.
The drive down to Wexford was tedious. I felt locked in – with my own husband and daughter. What kind of person feels that way about her own family? Joe’s positivity irritated me, too. The music was loud, him singing at the top of his voice, getting Amy to join in from the back seat whenever a song came on they both knew. Now, when I remember back then, I know if I had the ability to turn back time I would go back to that very moment, stop it right there and ask both of them what they were thinking. I could probably guess at Joe’s thoughts, but Amy’s thoughts – what were they?
The pretence we were somehow a normal family going away on holiday irked me as well. I allowed my annoyance with Joe to get in the way of any link I might have had with Amy. I never got to the point where I asked, or wondered, what her thoughts were. But if I’m being brutally honest, I’d have to admit that I barely thought about her on that drive down to Wexford. I’m not the first parent to fool themselves into thinking their children will always be around, that we can pick up wherever we left off, whenever we want to. We forget – I forgot – that life doesn’t work that way, that things happen that we cannot know about, unless we ask.
Apart from the singing and the humidity in the car, when I try to remember that drive I do recall that Amy’s mood was more subdued than normal. At the time, I had taken it as a blessing. She’d made the effort to join in with the singing when her father prompted her, but it must have been just pretence. Was it a pretence for Joe, or for me, or for both of us? Either way, I made no effort to join in with them. I was like some closed-up machine, thinking only about how much I missed Andrew. It had been seven months since our affair had ended and although there were times, thanks to the antidepressants and the alcohol, that I managed to shelve the hurt, I had never got him completely out of my head. I became like some silly adolescent with exaggerated notions of obsession, imagining ways we might meet up, or how it would feel to talk to him again, to be able to share the silliest of things, to have him back in my life.
I must have appeared quite alien to both of them, doing nothing other than staring out the car window as they sang summer songs at the tops of their voices, a wife and a mother who paid more attention to the landscape than to the people who shared her life. In a way, I think I looked on both of them as the enemy, because they were the reason I had to pretend, to take part, to behave as normal. I remember wondering what Joe’s expectations were – just because I’d reluctantly agreed to go didn’t mean I was going to magically transform into a happy-clappy red coat. And again, I made the mistake of putting Joe and Amy together, as if they were both the one person and should be treated as such. Wasn’t that what I did? Hadn’t I let the distance between Joe and me forge a distance between me and Amy? I should have tried. I should have done that much at least.