Much as I enjoyed my independence, I wanted someone to share meals and watch TV with. I had gone to the movies on my own a lot. Apart from Milo, my longest relationship thus farhad been four months, and I didn’t have high expectations, but I fell for Fabian hard. He fulfilled all my desires, including the more intimate ones. I liked everything about him, and I learned to trust again. I told him all about Milo and what he had done to Ruby, our family being split down the middle, and Ruby’s subsequent alcoholism. He was horrified and angry on my behalf, and even though I no longer cried about it, he encouraged me to go back to a therapist. ‘You’ve been carrying around that guilt for years, guilt for bringing him to your home, for not believing your sister, for not being able to talk to her. You should see someone.’ And so I did.
I didn’t think it would help. However, I was able to rationalize everything, break down every part of the fallout, and realized that there was nothing I could have done. She didn’t say it directly, but my therapist clearly disapproved of my mother choosing one daughter over the other. I tried to explain that it wasn’t like that, but when I thought about it, Mom could have tried harder to get me to Dublin and she needn’t have done the whole move so suddenly. We were all still in shock. Dad had his church community and his business. Mom was right to take Ruby away to distract her from everything that had happened, but I needed the distraction too. I hadn’t wanted to go at the time, but she could have insisted. We could have gone to Dublin for the summer and then moved to another city where Dad had a church. I wondered why that had never been an option.
30
Ruby
I called the baby Lucy after her great-grandmother. She was such a perfect child, latched on to my breast easily, slept on schedule, rarely cried, gave us a real smile when she was about six weeks old. I felt like I was being rewarded for … what? I didn’t know.
Mom was helpful. She was only too delighted to have a baby to coo over. When we took Lucy to see her namesake for the first time, we managed to wedge her into the crook of Grandma’s good arm and the two of them stared deeply into each other’s eyes. It was beautiful to watch, and there were four generations of us in the room that day.
Lucy changed my life in a way I hadn’t imagined. It took quite an adjustment. In those early weeks, she was like an extra limb and a lot of work, but I didn’t begrudge a second of it. When she woke several times a night, I fought the exhaustion and relished looking at her beautiful face, which changed from day to day as the wrinkly newborn look smoothed out into peachy cheeks topped by a tuft of white-blonde hair. Mom thought she looked like me. We never speculated about who the father was, but I’d seen photos of me as a baby and Lucy was much more beautiful.
Despite all the exhaustion, I made it to my AA meetings two or three times a week. Jack had texted me to ask how the baby was doing, and I asked Mom to buy Jack a new jacket to replacethe one I’d destroyed on the way to the hospital. We arranged to have coffee after the next AA meeting. I had Lucy strapped to me during the meeting, sitting near the exit, ready to bolt if she started to cry.
In the café, I thanked Jack for taking me to the hospital (and for later rescuing my car and leaving it at Mom’s apartment). I could tell he was smitten by my daughter, and I felt proud, but then he asked, ‘I suppose the father isn’t on the scene?’
I immediately grew defensive. ‘I don’t think that’s any of your business.’
‘I’m not judging you,’ he said.
‘I’ve decided to raise her on my own – well, with Mom’s help.’ I was frosty.
‘That’s great. It’s cool that you have her support.’ He was contrite.
‘Yes, I’m lucky, I guess. What about your family?’ When he had shared in meetings, he had never mentioned parents or children or siblings, and now I wondered why not. Families were usually part of every recovery story.
His face darkened. ‘I have parents, but I don’t know if they’re dead or alive, and I don’t care. I had a sister but … but she died.’ His face was strained with emotion, and he kept it at bay by shaking a rattle at Lucy, who burbled obligingly at him.
‘I’m sorry to hear that. It must be tough.’
‘It is.’
Jack’s backstory was grim to say the least. His father had been physically abusive with him and his mother had squandered the money he had earned as a child actor. At one point his mother had chaperoned him when he was cast in a fairly big role, filming in LA, when he was ten years old. She abandoned him on arrival, and he stayed in his trailer on his own on location in the desert, or in hotel rooms, preyed upon by a persistent producer, untilJack attacked him with a broken bottle. It was all hushed up, but production stopped and Jack was sent home. His mother had no idea why, but Jack was greeted at home by an angry father who broke his arm and three ribs for losing the part. Jack was determined from a young age to be free of both parents and became the sole guardian of his little sister when he was just eighteen, but she was killed in a car accident four years afterwards.
We had a lot of shared interests. He ran a private acting school in the south inner city. He had given up acting a few years ago when his booze and coke addiction made him too unreliable to cast. His agent, Svetlana, was his mother figure. She had paid for Jack to go into Longhurst. He was paying her back slowly over the course of years, but he was also talent-spotting for her among his acting students.
Over the next few months, Jack became a good friend. I eventually moved back into my newly renovated home two months later than planned.
In AA meetings we talked a lot about forgiveness. Forgiving others and forgiving ourselves. That was Jack’s stumbling block. And mine. He could not forgive his parents for their violence and neglect. He blamed himself for his sister’s death. The day she died he had been too hungover to collect her from school. She should never have been in the neighbour’s car. I knew that guilt and the inability to forgive oneself. I could never explain why out loud, but I understood him more than he realized.
In September, I went back to college with renewed intentions. I expressed milk every morning, and sometimes if that didn’t work, Mom would bring Lucy into college so that I could feed her. The first week was the hardest. I missed Lucy and nearly gave up altogether. Some of my fellow students loved the scandal of having an alcoholic mother in their midst, but most were kind. Lindsay Dillon let me know that she was glad I had cleanedup my act. There were others too. My college friends Jane andSinéadwere exceptionally helpful. They took it upon themselves to make sure I was eating properly and to call me on weekends. I wasn’t friendless in college. Some people thought it was cool to hang out with someone like me. But my AA family had become much more important. They were my first port of call when I felt overwhelmed, and I often did.
There was a social worker in Trinity who helped me navigate all the necessary supports I would need, and Mom stepped up in a way she never had before. I think she was delighted to be useful. Mom insisted she was well able to take care of a newborn. She still had a part-time job as a school administrator that she loved and I guess the school loved her too. They were flexible. She worked four half-days per week and was allowed to arrange her hours around my college classes. When Lucy was six months old, she would join a daycare nursery in college.
Tentatively, I began to make real friends in college. I sought out Lindsay and apologized to her and Stuart. Stuart had moved into Lindsay’s apartment. They accepted my apology and wished me well with parenthood. I had a reputation to live down at college. At first, the old drinking crowd thought I wasn’t drinking because of the baby and, while that was partly true, I was quick to tell them I was in recovery now. Thankfully, they drifted away.
Jack relapsed only once in that first year, when his mother died. He heard about it from a distant cousin. He didn’t turn up at any meetings for a few days and, when I asked around, nobody had seen him. When that turned into two weeks, I texted him. He didn’t reply. I was worried. I didn’t know who his sponsor was – in fact, I wasn’t even sure if he had a sponsor. People often took their time finding the right person.
I didn’t know whether I should call his colleagues at theacting school or his agent, Svetlana, but after three weeks he turned up at a meeting, red-eyed and dishevelled. He admitted to his relapse and asked for support from the group. It was hard for somebody like Jack to humble himself like that, but he knew he had thrown away a whole year of sobriety. It was only after that meeting that I began to see him in a different light. He broke down in the meeting and told the story about his mother in LA. Now she was dead, and he still couldn’t forgive her. He was vulnerable that day.
I took him back to my house, made him a proper meal and let Lucy crawl all over him. There was no question of anything romantic happening between us, but that was his first time in my house. I explained it had been my grandma’s and showed off my new extension. He asked me who had paid for my stay at Longhurst. I told him about Dad, the pastor and investment broker.
‘You have never had to worry about money, then?’
I hadn’t realized how privileged I was. Obviously, I knew that I was wealthier than most people in my class in school and college, and in AA rooms, but when Jack began to explain the sacrifices he had made to put food on the table for his little sister, Barb, I could understand how oblivion might often have been the better option and how that downward spiral was inevitable. He had no safety net. He was not equipped or mature enough to look after himself at that time, let alone a little girl seven years younger than him. The example his parents had given him of how to look after a child was terrible, but he tried his best. He refused to pull her out of school for acting jobs that came up. He felt terribly uneducated because of the amount of school he had missed. But without acting income from Barb, and his own sporadic earnings and then his addiction, they fell into poverty. I had never known poverty. I thought for the first time about how blessed I was. I’d never had to struggle financially for anything.The Bank of Dad had paid for my rehab and the house extension. And I still received a generous monthly allowance.
Jack was quick to get back on the wagon. He found out that his father was in some grim nursing home on the edge of an industrial estate. He was torn about whether he should go and see him or not. I offered to go with him if he wanted but he said no. He tortured himself for months, but he did go in the end. Later, he told me his dad was a shrivelled-up husk of a man in a bed. He had no idea who Jack was but smiled at him when he came in. Language was beyond him, but he grinned happily when Jack said hello. He reached out and put his hand in Jack’s. There was going to be no apology, no acknowledgement of the damage and chaos he had wreaked on two young lives, but Jack said it was hugely emotional for him. He was able to tell his father he forgave him and emerged into the sunlight feeling at peace for the first time. He never visited again and heard he had died a few weeks later.
