Finally, slowly, she perches on the far edge of the bed. A whole river of duvet between us.
"So talk," she says.
"Ladies first."
"I don't have anything interesting to say."
“Right. I'll start then.” I grin at the ceiling. "When I was eight, Ronan convinced me the attic was haunted by our great-grandfather's ghost, who died angry because someone drank his whiskey. So naturally, I stole a bottle of Da's Jameson to leave up there as a peace offering."
A beat. "You didn't."
"Oh, I did. Ronan drank half of it. He was thirteen. Puked in Ma's rose bushes. Ma thought the roses had been poisoned and nearly fired the gardener over it.”
The sound that comes out of Maeve is small—not quite a laugh, but close.
"That's insane."
"That was a typical day in the O’Rourke house." I roll onto my side to face her. "Cillian broke his arm jumping off the garage roof because Declan bet him a dollar he wouldn't. Declan paid up, too. Held the dollar over Cillian's cast at the hospital.Ma took the dollar and made them both scrub the kitchen floor for a month."
"Your mother made mob princes scrub floors."
"My mother would make the Pope scrub floors if he tracked mud in." I watch her shoulders gradually drop. "There were four of us. Four boys in this house, all of us convinced we were invincible. We fought like dogs and lied for each other like we were saints. This hallway right out there,” I point at the door. “Ronan and I greased it with furniture polish once, to see if we could skate down it in socks. Jamie's sleeping in the room I crashed into headfirst."
"Is that why you're like this?"
"Like what?"
"You know." She waves a hand at me.
"Devastatingly charming?"
"I was going to say concussed."
The laugh rips out of me before I can stop it, loud in the quiet room, and I catch it—the flicker at the corner of her mouth. She fights it, but loses. It's not a full smile, but it's the ghost of one.
"Your turn," I say.
The almost-smile dies. "My stories aren't like yours."
"Tell them anyway."
And slowly, she does.
She tells me about being fifteen when her da's face showed up on the news. About her ma wasting away after that, there but not there. About learning to forge her mother's signature on school forms and stretch a pound of ground beef. About being sixteen with a newborn brother in her arms because her mother couldn't get out of bed, and then…
Her voice goes toneless, with no inflection or emotion.
"She overdosed. At home. On a weekday morning.” Her thumbnail digs into the pad of her finger. "I was at school.Jamie was at school. Oisin was at a sitter's because I couldn’t trust my mother with him.”
She pauses for a long moment, and I just wait for her to continue.
"Cara had a stomachache that day and stayed home." She swallows audibly, and I know what’s coming isn’t going to be pretty. "She was six. Ma OD’d in the bathroom. Cara found her. And she didn't know what to do. She sat on the floor next to Mom and held her hand, waited for her to wake up or for someone to come home."
The room goes very still.
"For hours," Maeve whispers. "She sat there for hours. And she hasn't spoken since."
I picture the sweet, slightly shy, observant girl I met today as a six-year-old holding her dead mother's hand on a bathroom floor, waiting.
