It took Holly a while to bring the conversation around to current events. Over dinner she told me about the hip-hop class, with full demonstrations and plenty of out-of-breath commentary; afterwards she got a start on her homework, with a lot less complaining than usual, and then curled up tight against me on the sofa to watch Hannah Montana. She was sucking on a strand of hair, which she hadn’t done in a while, and I could feel her thinking.
I didn’t push her. It wasn’t until she was tucked up in bed, with my arm around her and her hot milk all drunk and her bedtime story read, that she said, “Daddy.”
“What’s on your mind?”
“Are you going to get married?”
What the hell? “No, sweetie. Not a chance. Being married to your mammy was plenty for me. What put that into your head?”
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
Ma, it had to be; probably something about divorce and no remarrying in the Church. “Nope. I told you that last week, remember?”
Holly thought that over. “That girl Rosie who died,” she said. “The one you knew before I was born.”
“What about her?”
“Was she your girlfriend?”
“Yep, she was. I hadn’t met your mammy yet.”
“Were you going to marry her?”
“That was the plan, yeah.”
Blink. Her eyebrows, fine as brushstrokes, were pulled tight together; she was still concentrating hard. “Why didn’t you?”
“Rosie died before we could get that far.”
“But you said you didn’t even know she died, till now.”
“That’s right. I thought she’d dumped me.”
“Why didn’t you know?”
I said, “One day she just disappeared. She left behind a note saying she was moving to England, and I found it and figured it meant she was dumping me. It turns out I had that wrong.”
Holly said, “Daddy.”
“Yep.”
“Did somebody kill her?”
She was wearing her flowery pink-and-white pajamas that I had ironed for her earlier—Holly loves fresh-ironed clothes—and she had Clara perched on her pulled-up knees. In the soft golden halo from the bedside lamp she looked perfect and timeless as a little watercolor girl in a storybook. She terrified me. I would have given a limb to know that I was doing this conversation right, or even just that I wasn’t doing it too horrifically wrong.
I said, “It looks like that could have been what happened. It was a long, long time ago, so it’s hard to be sure about anything.”
Holly gazed into Clara’s eyes and thought about that. The strand of hair had found its way back into her mouth. “If I disappeared,” she said. “Would you think I had run away?”
Olivia had mentioned a nightmare. I said, “It wouldn’t matter what I thought. Even if I thought you’d hopped on a spaceship to another planet, I’d come looking for you, and I wouldn’t stop till I found you.”
Holly let out a deep sigh, and I felt her shoulder nudge in closer against me. For a second I thought I had accidentally managed to fix something. Then she said, “If you had married that girl Rosie. Would I never have been born?”
I detached the strand from her mouth and smoothed it into place. Her hair smelled of baby shampoo. “I don’t know how that stuff works, chickadee. It’s all very mysterious. All I know is that you’re you, and personally I think you’d have found a way to be you no matter what I did.”
Holly wriggled farther down in the bed. She said, in her ready-for-an-argument voice, “Sunday afternoon I want to go to Nana’s.”
And I could make chirpy chitchat with Shay across the good teacups. “Well,” I said, carefully. “We can have a think about that, see if it’ll fit with the rest of our plans. Any special reason?”
“Donna always gets to go over on Sundays, after her dad has his golf game. She says Nana makes a lovely dinner with apple tart and ice cream after, and sometimes Auntie Jackie does the girls’ hair all fancy, or sometimes everyone watches a DVD—Donna and Darren and Ashley and Louise get to take turns picking, but Auntie Carmel said if I was ever there I could have first pick. I never got to go because you didn’t know about me going over to Nana’s, but now that you do, I want to.”
I wondered if Ma and Da had signed some kind of treaty about Sunday afternoons, or if she just crushed a few happy pills into his lunch and then locked him in the bedroom with his floorboard naggin for company. “We’ll see how we get on.”
“One time Uncle Shay brought them all to the bike shop and let them try the bikes. And sometimes Uncle Kevin brings over his Wii and he has spare controllers, and Nana gives out because they jump around too much and she says they’ll have the house down.”
I tilted my head to get a proper look at Holly. She had Clara hugged a little too tight, but her face didn’t tell me anything. “Sweetheart,” I said. “You know Uncle Kevin won’t be there this Sunday, right?”
Holly’s head went down over Clara. “Yeah. Because he died.”
“That’s right, love.”
A quick glance at me. “Sometimes I forget. Like Sarah told me a joke today and I was going to tell him, only then after a while I remembered.”
“I know. That happens to me, too. It’s just your head getting used to things. It’ll stop in a while.”
She nodded, combing Clara’s mane with her fingers. I said, “And you know everyone over at Nana’s is going to be pretty upset this weekend, right? It won’t be fun, like the times Donna’s told you about.”
“I know that. I want to go because I just want to be there.”
“OK, chickadee. We’ll see what we can do.”
Silence. Holly put a plait in Clara’s mane and examined it carefully. Then: “Daddy.”
“Yep.”
“When I think about Uncle Kevin. Sometimes I don’t cry.”
“That’s OK, sweetie. Nothing wrong with that. I don’t either.”
“If I cared about him, amn’t I supposed to cry?”
I said, “I don’t think there are any rules for how you’re supposed to act when someone you care about dies, sweetheart. I think you just have to figure it out as you go along. Sometimes you’ll feel like crying, sometimes you won’t, sometimes you’ll be raging at him for dying on you. You just have to remember that all of those are OK. So is whatever else your head comes up with.”
“On American Idol they always cry when they talk about someone who died.”
“Sure, but you’ve got to take that stuff with a grain of salt, sweetie. It’s telly.”
Holly shook her head hard, hair whipping her cheeks. “Daddy, no, it’s not like films, it’s real people. They tell you all their stories, like say if their granny was lovely and believed in them and then she died, and they always cry. Sometimes Paula cries too.”
“I bet she does. That doesn’t mean you’re supposed to, though. Everyone’s different. And I’ll tell you a secret: a lot of the time those people are putting it on, so they’ll get the votes.”
Holly still looked unconvinced. I remembered the first time I saw death in action: I was seven, some fifth cousin up on New Street had had a heart attack, and Ma brought the bunch of us to the wake. It went along much the same lines as Kevin’s: tears, laughs, stories, great towering piles of sandwiches, drinking and singing and dancing till all hours of the night—someone had brought an accordion, someone else had a full repertoire of Mario Lanza. As a beginner’s guide to coping with bereavement, it had been a hell of a lot healthier than anything involving Paula Abdul. It occurred to me to wonder, even taking into account Da’s contribution to the festivities, whether just possibly I should have brought Holly along to Kevin’s wake.
The idea of being in a room with Shay and not being able to beat him to splintered bloody pulp made me light-headed. I thought about being a teenage ape-boy and growing up in great dizzying leaps because Rosie needed me to, and about Da telling me that a man should know what he would die for. You do what your woman or your kid needs, even when it feels a lot harder than dying.
“Tell you what,” I said. “Sunday afternoon, we’ll go along to your nana’s, even if it’s only for a little while. There’ll be a fair bit of talk about your uncle Kevin, but I guarantee you everyone will deal with that their own way: they won’t all spend the whole time in tears, and they won’t think you’re doing anything wrong if you don’t do any crying at all. Think that might help you sort your head out?”
That perked Holly up. She was even looking at me, instead of at Clara. “Yeah. Probably.”
“Well, then,” I said. Something like ice water ran down my spine, but I was just going to have to put up with that like a big boy. “I guess that’s a plan.”
“Seriously? For definite?”
“Yeah. I’ll go ring your auntie Jackie right now, tell her to let your nana know we’ll be there.”
Holly said, “Good,” on another deep sigh. This time I felt her shoulders relax.
“And meanwhile, I bet everything would look brighter if you got a good night’s sleep. Bedtime.”
She wriggled down onto her back and stashed Clara under her chin. “Tuck me in.”
I tucked the duvet around her, just tight enough. “And no nightmares tonight, OK, chickadee? Only sweet dreams allowed. That’s an order.”
“OK.” Her eyes were already closing, and her fingers, curled in Clara’s mane, were starting to loosen. “Night-night, Daddy.”
“Night-night, sweetie.”
Way before then, I should have spotted it. I had spent almost fifteen years keeping myself and my boys and girls alive by never, ever missing the signs: the sharp burnt-paper smell in the air when you walk into a room, the raw animal edge to a voice in a casual phone call. It was bad enough I had somehow missed them in Kevin; I should never, in a million years, have missed them in Holly. I should have seen it flickering like heat lightning around the stuffed toys, filling up that cozy little bedroom like poison gas: danger.
Instead I eased myself off the bed, switched off the lamp and moved Holly’s bag so it wouldn’t block the night-light. She lifted her face towards me and murmured something; I leaned over to kiss her forehead, and she snuggled deeper into the duvet and let out a contented little breath. I took a long look at her, pale hair swirled on the pillow and lashes throwing spiky shadows onto her cheeks, and then I moved softly out of the room and closed the door behind me.