It looked like an accident, so we treated it like an accident. That’s what I want to tell her.
Come on now, Jacky, let’s admit it. That was no accident. Denial has never brought me an ounce of peace. It hasn’t protected me, and it hasn’t brought you back. All it does is accelerate this cycle of sadness that I can’t get out of.
Okay. Deep breath. Go for it, boy.
‘I had a girl at home. In Kilmarra, not Miltown. I never heard of Miltown before Tom started saying that’s where we came from.’
She looks confused, but she’s listening. And I think I need to speak to both of you now.
‘Lillian Kealey was her name. I had asked her to marry me.’
Teresa’s face falls, but she tries to keep it up. As though this doesn’t bother her. As though she isn’t disappointed.
‘Are you going to marry her?’
She asks. And I have to heave to get a breath into me. I shake my head.
‘She died.’
Her mouth falls open.
I’d like to tell her it’s fine, and that you’re in heaven, and that I’ve made my peace with it. But I can’t truthfully say that I believe in heaven, or that god that’s running it. I can’t bring myself to believe that there is anything but the brief time that we are alive, and the eternity where we are not.
I never questioned any of it until you died. But now that I’ve woken up from the numbness of the last year, I realise that god isn’t available to take issue with. And so I can’t comfortably blame anything on him. And so I have to face the reality of everything. This troubles me deeply.
What a strange thing it is, to be questioning heaven, when I’ve known it. Heaven was the pink of your best dress, and your knuckles on my door. Heaven was butter melting into bread made by your hands and laughter from your mouth. I knew Heaven every day, every time you looked at me. Maybe we don’t go there when we die, maybe we live there while we are alive.
I stammer my way through what I’ve started saying to Teresa.
‘I never faced it, you know? When she died, I never processed it. It’salways been too awful to think of.’
As suddenly as I felt nothing on the drive into Ballycrea, tonight I feel distraught, enraged, lightning cracking within me and no god to point it at. I’m hit with the realisation that my life was ruined, and I never got an apology. It looked like an accident, so it was treated like an accident. Maybe the reason I’ve never been able to move forward is that I’ve been trying to grieve an accident, when I know it all happened on purpose.
‘When I met you, I realised I can’t ignore it anymore.’
I take her hands, hoping that she is still with me.
‘I want to move forward with you, Teresa, but a lot of me is still in the past. With her.’
It might have been fine to go on ignoring things. I might have gotten away with it for years, for the rest of my life. But the inconvenient loveliness of Teresa has awakened something in me. I am reminded of what it is to be wanted, and to want another person. I am reminded of my body, of my heart and what it once meant to me to be a person. She looks at me, eyes wide, with bated breath. How long will she wait?
‘What happened to her?’
Let’s stop pretending it was predestination. It wasn’t an accident, or a divine plan acted through her. It was something she decided to do all by herself.
‘It was all covered up, you know? Made to look like an accident.’
As easy as breathing. Easy as loving you. As easy as comparing all the rest of the world to you. Those narrow little stairs. The stone slabbed floor that I wince to think about. No, it was no accident, was it, dear? I’ll say it if you will, Lillian.
‘She was pushed down the stairs.’
Teresa gasps, puts her hand to her mouth. And then blesses herself and swallows her drink. We are quiet for a minute, and then, just as I think she is going to get up and leave, she squeezes my hand.
‘What happened? Who pushed her?’
For many nights afterwards, I heard Tom talking things through with Anna while they thought I was asleep. Piecing it all together, writing the story. Walking through the whole thing without me. As though it had nothing to do with me. As though you weren’t my girl, just somebody I knew in passing. An accident, that’s always been the official line. That you slipped and fell. Sure it was easy enough to come up with. But I know that isn’t true.
‘I only know what I was told.’
