Me, floating on my back, feet sticking up out of the salty blue of the sea. I put my hands on my belly. I don’t feel any different. Or wait… was that a flutter? The shift of a million cells working day and night to create this new life, this baby inside me. ‘I can’t wait to meet you,’ I say to myself, to my baby. But when I turn over and plunge again under the water, I gasp with the shock, my body immediately numb and a strange feeling in my stomach, cramp gripping my insides, cold settling into my bones. Eventually I pull myself out and shiver while I get dressed, my body getting colder and colder on the cycle home.
Later Nora and I stood in the church together, my body frozen, teeth chattering under Red’s old winter jumper I’d pulled from my wardrobe. I thought of Red in the warmth of San Francisco. I’d be there too, just as soon as Nora and I organised everything here. It would do me good to get away. I didn’t want to be in this house without Rosaleen.
But it was later that evening when I began to feel really unwell, when the pains in my stomach began to jar, causing my legs to wobble. Eventually, I fell onto my bed, the pain making me double up. I knew what was happening, but even when I saw the blood, I didn’t believe it. I didn’t want to believe it. And I lay there, quiet in that moment, when no one could tell me for sure that everything wasn’t okay. I had lost my grandmother and my child in one day. Lying on my bed, the house dark, writhing in agony, too much in pain and too confused to turn on the lights. Knowing I should go to hospital but that would make it real, official and all I wanted was a few moments longer with my baby. I was still a mother. In that space between life and death, between fantasy and reality, where a tiny part of me could still pretend that everything was all right.
*
Rosie was holding my hand. ‘Who looked after you?’ she said, quietly.
‘Nora. She… well, she was amazing. Stayed with me for months afterwards, refused to go down to West Cork,’ I said. ‘Which itself was a miracle, knowing that a tepee in Mizen Head was waiting for her. And a vat of something unspeakable involving lentils…’ I was desperately trying to make light of what happened. I didn’t want to burden Rosie. I didn’t want her to worry about me as well. ‘Yes. I remember she brewed me some kind of tea, involving liquorice root. She says it had healing properties. She was wrong. It just made me think I could never have a sherbet dip-dab ever again.’
Rosie very nearly laughed.
‘The thing is,’ I went on. ‘I didn’t think I’d recover, really. I had never thought that losing a baby, someone you had never met, something that was an accident, not planned, could mean… could mean so much.’ I managed to keep my voice steady, well aware that I didn’t want to freak Rosie out too much.
‘And that’s why you never swim there?’
I nodded. ‘I can’t. I just can’t.’
‘The point of all this, Rosie, why I’m burbling on, is that I do understand. I know what it’s like when you don’t know what’s coming next and you feel overwhelmed…’
‘That’s how I feel. I’m scared.’
We were still holding hands.
‘We all feel like that. Life is scary. The trick is just accepting that. Feel the fear, but know that things do get better. After all, I had you.’
Chapter Nineteen
Early the next morning, I rang Michael’s phone. I hadn’t slept well and had laid in bed wondering and worrying, thinking of my past and Rosie’s present and our future, wondering what it looked like. Michael needed to know what was going on in Rosie’s life and the fact that she very well might not be sitting her Leaving Cert this year and the sooner I told him and prepared him for disappointment the better. He was in Brussels as far as I knew.
‘Tabitha?’ He sounded half-asleep. It was eight a.m., surely, there was some kind of high-powered breakfast meeting he should be at?
‘Hi Michael,’ I said. ‘How’s it going?’
‘Pretty good,’ he said. ‘Just checking something. This thing is saying I slept for nine and half hours. No, sorry, nine and three-quarters. I could sleep longer. Getting ready for my big presentation tomorrow. And then there’s the vote at the end of the week. I’m not so much up to my eyes but am submerged.’ He paused. ‘So why are you ringing? Is there something wrong? A fuse gone? Your mother arrested?’ He laughed at his own joke.
‘Michael, this is actually pretty serious.’
‘What? She has been arrested. Listen, I can’t pull any strings. It would be against SIPL. If she is in some cell somewhere justice will have to be seen to be done.’
‘It’s Rosie,’ I said, ‘it’s about her exams.’
‘Tabitha,’ he said. ‘Anyone would think she was the only person who’d ever done an exam. It’s you, it is. Fussing. Just let her get on with it. She does so much better when you are not hovering around looking worried.’
‘Michael!’
‘Well, sometimes it has to be said. I’m not being personal, it’s just mothers. They’re rather suffocating at times. I mean, look at mine.’
‘It’s Rosie,’ I said, keeping my voice calm. ‘Just to let you know that she’s not going to be doing her exams. Not this year anyway. I’ve been thinking and thinking and maybe she can start again next year, this time with different expectations and goals.’
There was a noise that sounded like Michael falling off the bed. ‘What?’ He was muffled, and then clearer as he wrested back control of his phone. ‘Of course she’s going to do her exams! How can she not do them? It’s what you do. It’s what we all did.’ You could practically hear the whirring of his brain, as he tried to assimilate this new information. ‘You are born, you go to school, you learn how to read and write and then you do your exams. It’s how it’s been done for millennia. Unless you are mentally incapacitated or the academically disinclined and, as far as I am aware, our daughter is neither.’
No one witnessed my eye-roll. Michael was on another planet entirely.
‘She hasn’t been working,’ I said. ‘She’s been far too anxious.’
‘Anxious? It’s called the Leaving Cert. It’s supposed to make you anxious. It’s no walk in the park, you know. It’s not like Who Wants Be A Millionaire. Nice easy questions and phone a friend!’
‘She’s been having panic attacks,’ I pressed on. ‘Remember at your mother’s party?’
‘That was nothing. The room was too hot and she was being forced to talk to Imelda Goggins. That would induce panic in any right-minded person. I’ve spent my life perfecting disinterested interest and a healthy internal world when talking to people like her. Rosie just needs a bit more practice.’
‘Michael, listen to me.’ I could feel myself getting annoyed. ‘Rosie hasn’t actually done any work.’
‘But every time I ask, you say she’s up in her bedroom. Working.’
‘I was wrong.’
‘Wrong? I leave my daughter in your care and this happens!’ He blustered. ‘I am off trying to make Europe a better place for our citizens. And upholding standards in public life. And supporting the dairy farmers of Ireland and you take your eye off the ball…’
‘Michael. Just stop this. Okay? It’s no one’s fault. We’ve just got to look after Rosie…’ But then I heard his voice break. A wobble? Michael never wobbled. He was Teflon.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, dropping his voice so low I had to strain my ears. ‘I’m under a great deal of pressure, that’s all,’ he whispered into the phone. ‘This couldn’t have come at a worse time for me.’
‘What do you mean? It’s not about you. I think, Michael, that it might be a good idea if you…’
‘It’s just… I’ll talk to you later. Okay?’
‘Are you going to call Rosie, tell her that it’s okay, that you understand and that you love her despite her not going to college? Well, not this year anyway.’
‘She knows that anyway. She knows that I support her whatever she does. Even if she doesn’t…’ He stopped, as if the enormity of what he was contemplating was hitting him for the first time, his voice cracking at the horror and enormity, ‘even if she doesn’t go to Trinity.’
‘It’s disappointing, I know,’ I said.
‘I won’t be able to go back to sleep now,’ he said. ‘I may as well get up…’
‘And phone your daughter!’
*
After I’d put down the phone, I heard Rosie come downstairs. ‘Morning, sweetheart,’ I said. ‘I’m making pancakes.’
‘Oh God.’ She began to cry. ‘You’re trying to be some mum in an American sitcom.’