“Why? Why couldn’t she just tell me?”
“If you knew the truth would you have laid off and let her be a teenager, or would you have tried to lock her down?”
I sunk the rest of my beer and tossed her the bottle. She caught it and put it in the bin, cracking open a new one for me.
“Tell me more about what happened.”
“Well, she came to me a few days before you guys left and told me, she showed me the pregnancy test. I asked her what she felt, and this smile was present that told me she wanted it. She wanted you. This was the universe’s way of keeping you, that you two were real. Finally, she got up the nerve to tell you and you’d gone, without so much as a note. She was devastated.”
“What happened?” I asked, feeling guilty even though it was the only thing I could think to do at the time.
“She looked for you everywhere, until I finally told her what Ace had told me when he left. You’d all joined the Nomads, and wouldn’t be back for a while.”
“Why’d she get an abortion if she wanted my baby?”
“Well, that may have a little to do with your mother.”
I felt the fury rise in my chest, remembering the things I overheard her say about Orla when I walked in earlier.She had never liked Orla. Never liked that I would do anything for her, even back then. The amount of times she had forbidden me from seeing her were too many to count.
“What did she do?”
“Release your grip on the bottle, Alex, before it shatters.”
I looked down to see my white knuckles around the beer bottle and instantly released it.
“Her mother and father had found her pregnancy test and a baby name book hidden under her bed. They confronted her with it and told her that she wouldn’t be keeping it. She told them she was, and they kicked her out. That day, her bag and clothes were thrown over the lawn. She came to me, and I tried to hide her in my house, but my father found her and told her she wasn’t to see me again. She hid out at the school, and slept in a classroom for weeks before I told Donovan about it. He found her and offered her a room at the clubhouse if she cleaned the bar after school. He even helped her with doctor’s appointments and the like. Maree was like a mother to her.”
“Get to the point, Sher.”
“Alex, don’t be a dick,” she said. “You need to hear the whole story.”
I waved her on, waiting to be told the reason why my mother interfered. “Maree took her down to the hospital for a check up, but something happened and she needed to leave Orla there. I ended up meeting her at the hospital and when I saw Louise, I knew it wasn’t going to be good. She had overheard the doctor telling Orla about the supplements she needed to be taking. She chased her out, and told her that you’d never want her back, that a baby wasn’t going to change things, and that you already had a new girl.”
“What?”
Sheridan shrugged. “I knew she was lying but she was telling a very hormonal girl whose life was about to change dramatically that she was unwanted, and her baby would be a bastard and never accepted. She told her that if she had the baby, she would make sure the clubhouse kicked her out because Peter O’Leary never wanted a bastard grandchild.”
I closed my eyes, feeling the pain in what Sheridan was telling me. The emotion in her eyes told me what it had done to Orla.
“My father knew?”
Sheridan shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. Louise, after all, wasn’t his wife so she didn’t get much timewith him.”
“I remember.”
The shame of being Peter’s illegitimate child in the clubhouse had followed me everywhere. My mother had always assumed when I was born that he would leave his wife, but he had other kids with his wife, there was no way he would. She’d been a marked woman ever since, never quite fitting in, always a club bunny, even though she never touched another man.
“I told Orla to tell him,” Sheridan added. “I told her that he would take care of her, because that was his grandbaby, but she never did. The next thing I knew, she was in hospital because she’d gone to some hack to get rid of it.”
“Why?”
“She couldn’t afford a medical abortion, and she needed consent from her parents since she was only seventeen,” Sheridan told me.
“They wouldn’t help?” I asked, incredulous. “They didn’t want her to have it in the first place!”
“The shame of it would have ended her father, I assume,” Sheridan shrugged. “That day she stopped speaking to them. She didn’t want to upset Maree, because she knew they’d tried to have kids and couldn’t, so she heard about someone who would do it for $100.”
I rubbed my hand down my face, realising now how bad that sounded. For a seventeen year old girl with nooptions, that probably sounded like a dream. “Who told her about it?”
