Because these children are my future. And I can’t think of anything in the world that matters more than that right now.
8
MARTIN
I pourmyself another glass of scotch, and flip my phone over on the counter so I can’t see the messages staring back at me. I know I have to deal with them eventually, but right now, all I want is to be left the fuck alone.
I called out of my shift earlier today; too dangerous to go in feeling the way I am, distracted, my mind spinning out in a hundred different directions. Worst thing is that I can’t talk to anyone about it. If anyone at work even got the hint that I helped birth a pair of children that I had no idea were mine till hours later, it would rip my career apart at the seams.
I am meant to have my shit together in all the ways that matter, but this? This would follow me for the rest of my life. So I need to pretend, with every fiber of my being, that it never happened.
As if I could ever pull something like that off. I’m taking about children here, not some coffee spill that I’m trying to shift blame for. I can’t stop turning them over in my head, the sight of them in their beds, sleeping so peacefully, with no idea of the chaos their very existence has brought into my life.
And fuck, I feel guilty for even thinking of it like that. They’re people. Babies. They didn’t ask for any of this, to be turned into a problem the moment they come out of the womb. I loathe myself something awful for even thinking of them in those terms, but I can’t help it, not knowing what happened the last time I chose to reproduce.
I should have known the first time that I handed him to my father that my son was going to be a problem. Dad had looked down at him, with that no-nonsense Irish stare, and Thom stared back at him. My father glanced to me, his brow furrowed.
“He reminds me of you.”
Which, on the surface, shouldn’t have been anything other than an observation of fact. This was my son, after all—he was meant to look like me, I made up half of his DNA. But the way he said it, the onerous tone that he laced it with, told me it was more than just the way he looked.
Dad and I had a strained relationship, at best, when I lived in Ireland. I was an only child in a long line of sprawling great families, and he had piled every hope for our family’s future right onto my head.
Ever since I was a lad, he would talk to me like I should be out working, earning a living. He was a butcher himself, and had done his best to get me into the family trade, forcing me to spend weekends sluicing down the floors in the back room.Good for you to get your stomach right early, son,he had told me at the time. It didn’t take long for me to grow completely inured to the sight of blood, something that would go on to help me in my career in years to come.
But Ireland was as wild as I was back then, and soon I started noticing that about my homeland; the Troubles were not long put to rest, at least on paper, but some of that bubbling rebellion still lived beneath the surface. It was never hard to drink there, and I started spending my weekends away from the shop, out in a field with my school friends, passing about bottles of cider until we were too drunk to walk.
Of course, my father tried to bring me in hand, the way his father had done to him—with a raised voice, a clenched fist. He never struck me, but he intimidated me, left me frightened to set foot through the door, so I found other places to escape to. I’d sleep over with girlfriends if I wasn’t crashing on the park benches overnight, getting moved on by thegardiawho would bring me back to my drawn-faced mother come the morning. She would always embrace me before she sent me to bed, trying to cover for me so my father wouldn’t know I’d been out so late. Her way of maintaining the peace, or what little of it remained by then, at least.
I would eventually tell him, just to get the inevitable screaming row over with. At the worst of it, he backed me into the door and jabbed his finger outside.
“I don’t want you in this house!” he roared. “And if you think you have a place in the family business, you can forget it, boy!”
“I never wanted it anyway,” I snarled back at him, storming out of the door before he could say another word. I can’t even remember where I spent that night, it must have been with one of my friends—all I can think of is the way his voice rang in my ears, that feeling that I would never again be a real part of the family.
When one of my friends was injured in a motorcycle accident when I was seventeen, something shifted in me. I spent days with her at the hospital, watching as she struggled to walk again, and the effort the doctors and nurses poured into making things right inspired me. I had always done alright at school, even if I had been dragging my feet through it a bit, but I finally turned my attention to my studies, determined to prove to myself and my father that I wasn’t a complete washout. I might not have had a place in the family business, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t chase a dream of my own.
I got offered a spot at Trinity, which would have kept me close to my parents—but my grades were good enough and my enthusiasm impressive enough that I was offered an opportunity to study in Chicago alongside some of the best birth and pregnancy care specialists in the world.
“You should do what’s best for you, love,” Mum had told me, wearing a brave smile when I came to her with the two options. By then, my father and I had reconciled enough for me to have moved back into the house, but the tension was still thick most of the time. If we had been getting on better by then, perhaps I would have taken the spot closer to home. But at the bottom of my heart, I knew I wouldn’t be able to relax as long as I was living in this house. Wouldn’t be able to fully dedicate myself to the career I wanted so badly.
I took the scholarship in America, hugged my mum goodbye at the airport and shook Dad’s hand. He slapped me on the shoulder, his voice gruff. “I’m proud of you, son,” he told me. But the edge to his tone informed me of everything I needed to know. He was hurt, hurt by the knowledge that I had decided to leave, that I had given up on proving myself as part of the family lineage.
We stayed in touch, of course we did, and I traveled back to see them over the holidays. And then it was whenever I could get time off from work, and then it was when Martha and I could find childcare for our son, who hated flying so much that it was virtually impossible.
By the time my father died, Thom was six, and I hadn’t been back to Ireland in nearly three years. Mum wasn’t long for this world after him. They had been together since they were teenagers, and it seemed as though she hardly knew how to exist without him.
And just like that, I was alone. I had Martha, of course, and the uneasy family we had made, but things were never the same after that. I poured all my effort into my son and my job, hoping that if I could fill the space, I wouldn’t feel that aching void that seemed to sit so heavy in my chest day in and day out. Martha did her best to help me through it, but with me so closed off, there was little she or anyone could have done to fix it.
And my father’s words rang in my ears for years after he spoke them. Reminding me that my son, Thomas, could carry the darkness that I had in me when I was a teenager. As a father now, I can’t imagine speaking to him the way my father spoke to me, but it doesn’t matter. There is some congealed dark matter inside of me, left there by those uneasy, uneven years, and my son did not escape it.
He lives in this city, somewhere. I keep this apartment for work, but I’ve never given him the address. He’s never asked for it either.
He doesn’t want anything to do with me, likely because I won’t give him the money or bailouts that his mother can’t stop herself from providing him. I don’t blame her; in some ways,it’s reflective of how perfect her own family life is, that she can’t imagine giving up on her child no matter how hard things get.
She keeps me updated on what’s going on in his life—when he dates, when he gets a job, when he inevitably loses it for blowing up at his boss over some imagined slight, what pills he’s using or not using—and I can practically feel the way the walls have closed in on her, leaving her no way out of the nightmare he’s built.
What if he finds out about the twins? I don’t see how he could, but the thought makes my stomach knot. I don’t even want to think what he might do to them. He’s been violent before, ended up with a couple of assault charges that wound up getting dropped when the people pressing them were intimidated out of going through with it. I can only imagine how he would react if he knew that there were other children in the picture, children of mine.
