The ‘sensible’ life will be waiting for you when you’re sixty, but right now? Right now you get to be nowhere. And nowhere, as it turns out, is exactly where you need to be.
Slán is never forever, a stór. We’ll see each other again. Until then, keep writing. Keep being exactly who you are.
All my love,
Eileen
Robyn, Keira, Shauna, Conor, Christopher, Jamie, Simon, Noel, Jack and Bella send theirs too
I press the paper against my collarbone. God, I miss her. It’s a physical ache that sits heavy in my chest and makes me feel like I’m constantly walking uphill.
I’m so deeply jealous of Robyn and Keira and Shauna and the red-headed baby and all those boys with their muddy rugby kits and their bare-handed fishing attempts it’s almost embarrassing. They get her every day. They get to walk into her kitchen and find fresh soda bread on the counter. They get to hear her laugh and watch her garden and listen to her stories about growing up in Ireland when everything was different.
I took it for granted. All those years I had her, I just assumed she’d always be there, like a permanent fixture of my childhood, like the gravity that kept me from floating away.
And then comes the thought I’ve been trying not to have, the one that sits in my chest like a stone: I wish I missed my own mother this way.
I wish I thought about her as much as I think about Eileen. I wish when I got mail I hoped it was from her. I wish I could picture her face and feel this same warmth instead of this complicated tangle of guilt and resentment and something that might be love but feels more like obligation.
I know she loves me. I do. The fact that she’s called me nineteen hundred times since she tracked down my number proves that, or at least proves something. But there’s always been this distance between us, this gap I could never figure out how to cross. Growing up, I always felt like she was never truly happy to be a parent. It’s as if she had a child because it was what you did in 1969 if you were Elaine Collier—you got married to one of the most successful men in Hollywood, you had his baby, you checked the boxes. The Collier line needed continuing, as if we were actual royalty instead of just people with money and a name that opened doors in certain circles.
She didn’t have me because she wanted to be a mother. She had me because it was expected of her. And I spent my entire childhood trying to figure out how to be a daughter she could be proud of, one worth the trouble.
My father was worse.Isworse. He’s gotten harsher as he’s gotten older, as if age has stripped away whatever thin veneer of patience he used to have. When I was little, he at least pretended to be interested in me, in my life. He’d ask about school, about my friends, about what I wanted to be when I grew up. But as I got older and it became apparent I wasn’t going to follow him into the family business—that I had no interest in becoming adirector or a producer or an actor, that I didn’t want any part of that world—he stopped pretending.
By the time I graduated college, he’d made it abundantly clear that I was a disappointment. The least I could do was marry well. Marry rich. Bring some more status to the family, make myself useful that way. And I ruined that, too.
My father hasn’t called me once since I left. I don’t know if that hurts more or less than my mother’s constant attempts.
“What’s the word from the motherland?” Marcus asks. He’s leaning against the counter, cradling a mug of coffee.
I smile a little, folding the letter carefully. “She told me to be more ridiculous.”
Marcus raises an eyebrow. “This woman clearly shouldn’t be giving anyone advice.”
I stick my tongue out at him and his laugh echoes as he walks down the hallway to his room.
* * *
“Hey, Stanley.”
Stanley looks up from his crossword, his face crinkling into that slow Cheshire grin that always makes me feel like I’ve actually made it home. “Miss Annie! You’re looking festive.”
I do a quick inventory of my person: salt-stained jeans, an oversized sweater that’s seen better decades, and a garment bag draped over my arm like a heavy, nylon wing.
“If you say so, Stanley. I feel more like a pack mule.”
The lobby has undergone a full-scale spooky makeover. There are paper bats dangling from the ceiling on invisible fishing lines, positioned at the perfect height to graze the foreheads of unsuspecting residents. Clusters of pumpkinshuddle in the corners, and fake cobwebs are stretched across the mailboxes in a way that’s going to make retrieving a gas bill a high-stakes agility test. A cardboard skeleton is propped up by the elevator, rocking what is definitely Stanley’s spare doorman cap at a rakish angle.
“Did you conquer the grid today?” I ask, nodding at the newspaper.
Stanley chuckles, a low, gravelly sound. “Stuck on seventeen across. ‘Goddess of wisdom.’ Six letters, ends in A.”
“Athena?”
“See, that’s what I thought, but then twenty-three down starts acting a fool.” He picks up his pencil, squinting at the squares. “I’ll get there. Or I’ll wait until I get home and let the wife humiliate me by solving it in ten seconds.”
The elevator dings—a cheerful, nostalgic ping—and he ushers me in, reaching past me to hit the button for the second floor. As the doors begin to slide shut, he digs into his jacket pocket. His hand emerges with a palmful of strawberry Crème Savers, the red-and-white wrappers crinkling. He drops them into my hand.
