I sat in the passenger seat and burst into tears. I hugged Mom tightly. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry for everything, Mom.’ Her stiffened body loosened in my arms.
‘I’m sorry too, darling. I should never have …’ She was afraid to speak the words. We drove away.
I did not tell her I was pregnant. She had said that as long as I stayed sober, Dad would support me financially. After a few fraught weeks at Mom’s, wearing increasingly baggy sweatshirts and disguising my nausea, it was agreed that I could move into Grandma’s house by myself. Mom gave me the new keys. I deferred college for a year. They were understanding when I told them I’d been in treatment for addiction. Even Professor White said, ‘I’m glad you got the help you needed. We’ll see you next September.’ After missing a year of school and then a year of college, I was going to be the oldest graduate of all my classmates, but that was the least of my concerns.
I had not arranged to travel to London for the abortion.I wasn’t ready to face up to it yet, but I could feel the baby kicking from time to time. I don’t know why I wasn’t more proactive about it. A trip to London for the procedure would take less than twenty-four hours. But I was too busy staying sober.
We’d had AA meetings in Longhurst, so I was used to the format, but I was still nervous going to my first one outside. I had a list of meetings I could go to in Dublin. There was one in a community centre nearby on a Tuesday at 9 a.m. I sat in my car until the last minute and then crept in and took a seat at the back. The chairs were arranged in a haphazard circle. There was tea and biscuits on a table at the other end of the room. People were still milling about, until a woman rang a bell and asked everyone to take a seat. I kept my head down and tried not to be seen, pulled a baseball cap low down on my head.
I had heard a lot of dramatic stories in rehab, but in this meeting, they talked about their recovery. There was an old man who had been sober for forty-two years who admitted that, even though he never felt a compulsion to drink again, he wasn’t going to take the risk and that’s why he came to meetings twice a week, to keep him on the straight and narrow. I couldn’t think beyond the end of the meeting, let alone forty years ahead. Others told of relationship difficulties: some were living with spouses in active addiction; others were finding it hard to rebuild trust in their relationships. One woman had relapsed after twenty-three years of sobriety. She couldn’t think of a single reason why. She had woken up on Tuesday of last week and opened the bottle of champagne that had been bought for her sister’s bachelorette party. A young guy told her it didn’t matter what the reason was. She had come back to the meeting, and she would receive all the support she needed.
Towards the end, the woman with the bell asked me directly if I was new. I introduced myself in the traditional way. Saying it in a room full of strangers, and meaning it, was liberating. It waslike stepping out from a shadow. I clarified that I wasn’t a tourist and lived nearby. I admitted to cocaine addiction too. I admitted this was my first meeting since rehab. Everyone applauded, but I was uncomfortable with that. ‘Maybe you can clap when I’ve been here a year,’ I said quietly.
‘No, this is the meeting that is worthy of applause,’ the woman said. ‘You have shown courage today. We don’t know you, but I can assure you that everyone in this room wants sobriety for you as much as they want it for themselves. It’s not impossible to stay sober on your own, but it’s much easier to get there with us.’
We ended with the serenity prayer, and then everyone said, ‘Keep coming back.’ Some of it was a bit corny to me, but it all meant something.
I did feel better after the meeting. It was full of all kinds of people. A boy, who looked like a teenager, came over and said, ‘Don’t think about a year, think about today. Try to stay sober today.’ It wasn’t like Longhurst, where everyone was wealthy, but as I’d listened, the stories were similar. Losing jobs, partners, being estranged from parents and children, destroying property. I was lucky, I still had Mom and Grandma. Judging by their clothes and accents and the level of grooming, addicts came in all shapes and sizes. Another woman came over and told me about a Narcotics Anonymous meeting that she went to. She said she’d be there on Sunday if I wanted to go.
As I got up to leave, a man stopped me on the way out. ‘Jack.’ I recognized him from my first visit to Longhurst. His demeanour was no different here. The hostility he had carried in his body was still there.
‘Are you for real this time?’ he said, still suspicious of me.
‘I’m here, I’m trying.’
‘Good for you,’ he said. I’m not sure he believed me.
24
The Incident
I didn’t think it through. If I had even waited until the next day, my temper would have abated. I would have seen how foolish my plan was, that destroying Milo would also destroy me, and many others. And I know he would have kept his word and not told Erin or anyone.
I gave the police all the evidence they needed. I didn’t think ahead to a court case. I never thought that Milo would go to prison.
Once the lies were told, I had to keep track of them. I didn’t know what to do. It had all gone too far. Dad withdrew Erin’s short story from theNew England Journal.Milo never found out it had been accepted.
Months later, I gave my testimony behind a screen so that I wouldn’t have to face the court, or the jury, or Milo. But it was all very exciting. Before we went to trial, I rehearsed my answers with the prosecutor. I enjoyed the attention and put in my best performance, acting nervous and terrified. I thought it would be all over in a few days. Instead, it went on for weeks. His defence attorney tried to trip me up and at times I got confused. He kept asking about the denim shorts. He also asked about how my clothes had come off, in what order. I contradicted myself but then said I was shocked, confused, and I didn’t remember. And that part was true. It was hard to remember things that didn’t happen. He suggested I must have removed them myself. I denied it. I answered the samequestions, asked in a hundred different ways. I was afraid of making a mistake but, before the final week of the trial, I knew that I was believed. Dad paid attention to me all the time and told me repeatedly that he loved me and that none of this was my fault. I guess I was easier to love now.
One strange thing was that, according to Dad, Principal Bermingham didn’t remember me asking permission to go home. He was adamant that I’d lied. But his lie worked in my favour. In court, I said I went home with a pain in my stomach. If he had remembered that I’d said I had menstrual cramps, then my lie would have been revealed by the forensic examiner who would have told the court that I wasn’t bleeding. But he also said I could not be trusted. I don’t know why he said that. My homeroom teacher verified that I had told her I wasn’t feeling well after first period that morning.
I told my mother the truth.
We were home alone. It had been a few weeks since the trial had ended and the next day Milo was to be sentenced. Dad was out and Erin was staying in Saima’s house. I think in those days she couldn’t bear to be around me. Mom had to be able to fix this. I sobbed my way through my story. I told her everything: how I’d wanted Milo to love me instead of Erin, how I’d come on to him, how I’d planted the evidence inside my body using the tissue. I told her how I had lied to the police, how the blood on his jacket was from where I’d banged my head, and how he had said we would keep it a secret to protect Erin and me. The bruises on my inner thighs, which matched his thumbs, were from when he tried to push me away, and he had gripped my wrists to keep me off him.
I didn’t need to tell Mom that I was Doug Cooper’s daughter, the Pastor of the Holy Divine Church, a sworn virgin who went to Bible Camp, who had felt sick that morning and came home alone to an empty house. All the odds were stacked against Milo.
‘You need to stop it, Mom. You need to help him,’ I begged her.
My mother slapped me across the face so hard I fell to the floor. In shock, I looked at her furious face.
‘Mother of God, you little bitch. How could you do that to him? To your sister?’ she screamed at me. She paced up and down the room, wringing her hands. ‘How did you even know what to do?’
I told her about Kenny Carter. She looked like she was going to be sick. I didn’t tell her about the twenty dollars. She sat and put her head on the table and covered it with her arms, breathing heavily, and stayed like that until I said, ‘Mom, what am I going to do?’
She whispered, ‘It’s too late now, don’t you see? You have had eight months to tell the truth, while Milo has begged for freedom. Nobody believed him when he said you had tried to seduce him. He couldn’t explain the DNA, could he? You scheming bitch.’ I had never seen Mom lose it this way before. Any trace of an American accent she’d picked up was gone, pure blasphemy and Irish rage pouring out of her. ‘Why did you do it?’
‘Erin gets everything she wants, all the time.’
