“No, please, Rachel. Go ahead.”
I always said that I would not be one of those mothers that puts a tea towel over her child’s head while he feeds. I found it prudish and weird. We all know what’s happening under there! Now, I hated myself for not being a tea-towel mother. Deenie Harrington could see my enormous purple nipple.
His lips smack against me. It’s embarrassingly noisy, and I can feel my face going crimson. “You’re so natural,” she says. “Such an earth mother.”
No one ever says “earth mother” to petite women.
“You must be wondering why I wanted to speak to you.”
“A little.”
She allows herself full eye contact with Shay, and with my boob. “I’ve wondered a lot, about you.”
“I’ve thought a lot about you, too.”
“It never happened, did it, Rachel?”
My arms freeze. Shay can feel me stiffening, and moves his arms and legs around in protest.
“What do you mean?”
“You never slept with him, did you?”
“Why would you say that?”
I am, yet again, in another impossible situation with Deenie Byrne. How can I admit it now, without telling her everything? Did she know about James Devlin already?
“I cheated,” she says. “Years later, I cheated. With a man I worked with. You actually met him, I think. Sandy hair?”
“Yes, I remember. That dinner party.”
She gives a hollow laugh. “Yes, that terrible dinner party.” She continues. “But Fred knew right away because the way I spoke about Dominic changed. It was right there, in the texture or something, like every sentence had new bumps and grooves on it. He said to me, a month in—Deenie, you’re sleeping with him, aren’t you? And I broke completely, and said yes.”
“Wow. All right. So you were kind of even.”
“Kind of,” she says. “Fred wasn’t a psychopath. Isn’t. The way he spoke about you, Rachel, when we were at home alone together. All those months when you were hanging around. He was obviously very fond of you, but it wasn’t how someone talks about their lover, even their secret lover.”
“How?” I ask.
“It was because he was so fond of you, that was the giveaway. He was always saying, Rachel is a great girl, Rachel is going places. Rachel should be given a chance. Rachel picks the wrong men. It was too wholesome. If he was sleeping with you, he would never talk to me like that, would he?”
“No,” I say. “I suppose not.”
I feel like someone who has been on death row for years, and am experiencing a strange release at finally having my number called.
“We went to therapy. We worked on our marriage. We were better for it, in the end. He was so good with my mother, Rachel. You wouldn’t believe.” Her voice cracked slightly, overwhelmed by her husband in his former role as carer, and not as patient. “But all those years after, being open, and talking about our fears, not once did I get any clarity on The Rachel Incident.”
“The Rachel Incident?” I ask. “That’s what you called it?”
“That’s what I called it.” She shrugs. “It’s been like my Bermuda Triangle, Rachel. I know that he disappeared inside there for a while, but I don’t know how, or why, or what it meant to him.”
I nod again.
“And now I can’t ask him. So many of those memories are just gone. So much language. I might never know. I hate that I’m asking you, but I’m asking you.”
“Asking me what?”
Deenie runs her finger around the circumference of her coffee saucer. “Did you sleep with my husband, and were you his mistress?”
I have no intention of lying to Deenie, but I don’t have the strength to deconstruct this alternate reality that I accepted to protect Dr. Byrne’s queerness and my friend’s anonymity.
“No, I never slept with him.”
“But you were pregnant.”
“Yes. I was.”
“With…who was that boy? The one I accused you of making up?”
“Carey,” I say. Then I remember the rules, about not calling him that any more. “James Carey. He’s my husband, now.”
She looks to Shay. “And him…?”
“Yes. He’s Shay’s dad.”
“You stayed together? All that time? After…?”
“No, we reconnected, a few years ago. It’s a long story. But I was never pregnant with Fred’s kid. I was just…I was backed into a corner, and he wanted you to believe that we were sleeping together, so I decided to make the best out of it.”
Her body sways forward, like she is trying to nod but can only bow. A whole world, shattered in one breath. Thank God, her phone rings. The letters DOM appear on her screen. She frowns at it, mutes the call.
“Dom,” I say. “Is that…?”
“Yes,” she answers. “Dominic. The one you met.”
“So he’s still…?”
“Yes. We’re sort of. We’re together.”
I want to maintain a look of zero judgement. After all, her lying cheating husband was in a coma for some time, and would not be returning to his original personality. I had no idea what she was dealing with.
“He loves me. You know? He did then, too. He was married before but he’s not any more. We found each other again, a bit like you and your Carey.”
“And what about Dr. Byrne?” I was in no position to ask the question, but we had been through too much together. I needed to know.
“Well, we’re still married. And I’m his carer, officially. But Dominic and I live together now.”
I can’t resist digging more.
“Kids?” I say, without much tact.
“He has two.” She smiles. “Boy and a girl. They’re lovely.”
She looks, for a moment, genuinely happy. Relief floods my guts, because what a good stepmother Deenie must be. And God, how terrible it would be if she had nothing.
“I need to know, Rachel.”
She waits for me to volunteer information.
“Rachel, please.”
The Rachel Incident. The idea of being a figure in their lives, the same way they were phantoms in mine.
“The receipts,” she urges. “They were to your house.”
“Yes. But it wasn’t me,” I respond uncertainly. “It was…it was someone else.”
The slow, rocking bow again. Whatever colour Deenie had in her white face has drained out of it. “Who?”
It is twelve years ago again, and I am sitting on the couch in Shandon Street, weeping for my broken heart. My old professor amiably accepts my rage that he had dared to dock me for late essays when he was using my house for sex. James leans against the living-room wall, sternly telling Dr. Byrne to be kinder to me. Why can’t anyone love me like this? I had thought. Why are they making it work, when I can’t?
But that wasn’t making it work. Whatever came after was. Whatever Deenie and Dr. Byrne did or said or promised in the long marriage that followed me and James. A story I won’t ever know.
I put Shay back in his buggy. Fiddle with the straps, the clips, the little hat.
“I can’t tell you that,” I say. I unzip my handbag, take out my pen and paper. “It’s not my story.”
I write down his name and his email address. I know about making things work, too.