Cathy Kelly 3-book Bundle (128 page)

Over the years, Rae had told her husband a little about her upbringing, but never the whole unvarnished truth. He’d seen the Hennesseys a few times on neutral territory, like the time they met up at a classy hotel in Limerick when Anton was little. Paudge and Glory were on their best behaviour because Rae had bluntly told them she’d cut them out of her life completely if they turned up drunk.

‘They’re not that bad,’ Will said.

‘Oh, they are,’ Rae interrupted darkly. ‘I heard someone say recently that forgiveness means realising that the past is never going to improve. Your past is your past and it’s a waste
of time to think “what if…?” I’m still not at that stage yet. I can’t forgive them for what they did to me and Jasmine.’

‘Maybe meeting Tricia will help,’ Will pointed out.

That had been a week ago. The following day, Rae had phoned the mobile number on Tricia’s letter. Will sat beside her in their bedroom – the only place where Geraldine wouldn’t interrupt.

‘Hello,’ said a bright voice.

Rae’s hand began to shake. ‘Is that Tricia O’Reilly?’ she said.

‘Yes, who’s this?’

Rae couldn’t speak. She might hang up, anything to avoid the anger Tricia would have for her. How could she not be angry? Rae had abandoned her forty-one years ago.

‘I’m hanging up,’ said the voice. ‘If this is a crank call –’

‘It’s not,’ whispered Rae. ‘It’s Rae Kerrigan, née Hennessey. I’m your birth mother.’

There was a power in words, after all, she thought suddenly.
I’m your birth mother.
She’d been waiting a lifetime to say that.

‘Oh my God,’ gasped the other voice. ‘It’s you.’

‘Yes.’ Rae breathed out. ‘I had a baby in the Blessed Helena Home on the date you were born. She was a little girl with dark brown hair. I’m tall, have dark hair, dark eyebrows and brown eyes.’

‘Do people say you look like that actress Ali MacGraw, the one who was in
Love Story
?’

Rae nodded tearfully and then realised that nods couldn’t be heard.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘I can’t believe this,’ the woman said. ‘I’m Tricia.’

‘I know. I’m Rae. I was Rae Hennessey when you were born and I’m Kerrigan now.’

‘Have you other children?’ Tricia asked hesitantly.

Rae knew the answer would hurt. She had a son whom
she hadn’t given up for adoption. But she’d been pregnant with Tricia in a different time, a different world.

‘I have a son who’s twenty-nine,’ she said. ‘I was pregnant with you when I was sixteen. I had no support. That’s why…’ She couldn’t finish the sentence, even though she wanted to explain it all instantly.

‘You know, I’ve waited years to find out all of this, but it’s a bit much in one go,’ Tricia said. ‘Can I call you back another time? Or would you not like that? Does anyone know about me?’

It was the most heartbreaking question Rae could imagine anyone having to ask.
Was I remembered in your life?

‘My husband knows and you can phone me on my mobile number when you feel up to it,’ Rae said calmly. She must be strong for her daughter’s sake. ‘Giving you up broke my heart. I thought about you every day of my life. Every single birthday, I cried. I wondered where you were, were your new family good to you, what was your life like? Giving you away was the biggest tragedy of my life, Tricia. I just want you to know that.’

There was silence on the other end of the phone.

‘Have you got a pen?’ Rae added.

She listed her phone number slowly.

‘Please call me,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ Tricia whispered and hung up.

Tricia had sent a text message two days later.

Can you meet me near my home? I live in Mullingar and I can’t travel much right now.

With shaking hands, Rae had replied. Tell me when and I’ll be there.

Will drove her to the hotel in Mullingar and said he’d sit in the bar and wait while she sat in reception, as agreed.

‘I won’t come out unless you want me to,’ he said. ‘Now, Rae, she might not turn up. You’ve got to be ready for that. These reunions don’t always work out the way you want them to.’

Rae smiled at him. He’d been researching it all on the Internet and was terrified in case Rae was hurt by this long-lost daughter.

‘I don’t think she can hurt me any more than I’ve hurt myself over the years,’ Rae said simply. ‘It’s been torture. She has a right to be angry with me.’

Will stared at her for a while. ‘I can understand why you didn’t tell me,’ he said, ‘but it still hurts to think of you keeping it to yourself for so long.’

Rae knew it would take a long time, if ever, before Will could understand, but she simply couldn’t think about that now. This moment was about her daughter and forty-one missing years.

As she sat waiting, Rae took out the letter Tricia had sent her and traced the signature.

Tricia. She had to stop thinking her daughter was called Jasmine.

Rae hoped she’d be able to make Tricia understand that, no matter how phoney it sounded, she
had
thought of her daughter every day for forty-one years.

In the early days, she’d thought of Jasmine with enormous pain and sorrow. And as the years had gone by, she’d wondered what her daughter was doing. The summer Jasmine would be doing exams, on her eighteenth birthday, at New Year. What did Jasmine look like now? Where was she? And, the worst fear of all, was she happy? Had she been adopted by people who’d love her and take care of her properly, the way sixteen-year-old Rae wouldn’t have been able to?

Rae had been staring down at her letter, but something made her look up just as a tall, pregnant woman with dark hair and dark eyebrows walked into the reception area. It was like looking into a mirror from twenty years ago. Rae stood up as the woman’s eyes found her.

‘I can’t believe it’s you,’ said Tricia, coming face to face with her mother.

Rae knew all the right things to do. Will had been telling her them in the car on the drive here. Don’t crowd her, don’t hug her. She might not want that level of intimacy yet.

But despite all this knowledge, she put her arms around her daughter.

Then they were both crying, dark heads beside each other, making the same husky noises as they cried.

‘We even sound the same,’ Rae sobbed. ‘You should sit, you’re pregnant.’

They sat and she wanted to go on touching Tricia, to run her fingers over her hair, her face, even the swelling belly inside which her grandchild was growing. But she forced herself to hold back a little. It had to be done at Tricia’s pace.

Tricia settled herself on an armchair beside Rae’s. As if regretting her earlier intimacy, she sat back in the chair a little, creating space between them.

‘Are you happy? Were you happy?’ Rae blurted out. ‘It’s all I ever wondered.’

‘Very happy,’ Tricia said. ‘My parents had only two children, me and my older brother, and they adored us. Ruined us, my mother used to tease us.’

Rae felt a twinge of pain at the way Tricia said ‘my mother’ with such affection. Of course, Rae hadn’t been her mother. The mother who’d reared her was the real mother. Rae knew that, but it still hurt.

‘Does she mind that you wanted to find me?’ she asked.

Tricia shook her head. ‘Quite the contrary. She wanted me to find you years ago and I refused. I thought it would be like telling her that she and my dad hadn’t done a good enough job. She passed away last year.’

Rae saw Tricia’s eyes brim up.

‘I wanted to find you then, but I couldn’t do that to her memory, if that makes sense. And then –’ She touched her belly. ‘Stephen and I got pregnant. We’ve been trying a long
time; we’d had fertility treatment, but it never worked. We’d given up hope, actually. And one day, bingo – I’m pregnant. I knew then that I had to see you to understand why.’

Rae nodded calmly but inside she was shaking. She knew that adopted women suffered huge sorrow when they themselves became mothers and realised what an enormous act giving up a baby was.
How could you give me away
? was what any mother or would-be mother would ask.

She said none of this. Instead, she smiled her warmest smile at Tricia and said: ‘That’s so wonderful.’

She couldn’t come out with the clichés like ‘It’s the most special time of your life’. After the alleged most special time of her own life, she’d handed her baby daughter over to a stranger.

Tricia beamed. It was like looking into a mirror, Rae thought with a pang. Her daughter had the same smile, the same dark brows that winged out at the sides, the same wide mouth.

Anton didn’t look like her at all. He was the image of his father. God, this all
hurt.

‘How far along are you?’

‘Eight weeks. We found out early and, once I knew I was pregnant, I started searching for you. I didn’t think it would all happen so quickly, to be honest.’

There was a pause in the conversation. The noise of the hotel reception went on around them: phones ringing, people carrying bags to and from the reception desk.

Rae had to say something. ‘I can’t imagine how hard all this has been for you,’ she began, ‘especially after losing your mother. But I have thought about you every day of my life, Tricia.’

Tricia was looking down at her lap, studying her fingers intently.

‘I’d like to explain it all to you so you understand why I
gave you away, but you may never understand because it was a different time, a different Ireland. Most of all I want you to understand that I loved you.’

There, she’d said it.

‘Mum always told me that whoever my birth mother was must have loved me to have given me up.’

At that moment, Rae felt a passionate affection for the woman who’d reared her daughter.

‘She was right. The nuns told me I couldn’t care for you and that the only kind thing was to give you up,’ Rae said, forcing herself to be calm and not cry. ‘I wanted to keep you, you see. When they took you, they pulled you out of my arms.’

Tricia’s head was to one side as she listened, almost detached. It was probably easier that way, Rae knew: to remove oneself from this difficult information.

‘I’d love to tell you everything,’ Rae went on. ‘Would you like to hear?’

‘Yes,’ said Tricia.

Rae nodded. She’d been through this so many times in her head: explaining to her daughter why she’d given her up for adoption. The dream-like explanations had been simpler. Now that she was sitting opposite this brighteyed, intelligent woman, she felt as if all the imaginary conversations had been geared towards a child and not a grown-up.

‘It’s almost impossible to explain what it was like forty-two years ago, finding out I was pregnant. They were different times,’ Rae started off. ‘Having a child as an unmarried teenager then was just about the worst thing you could do. It’s almost unbelievable to think of how shocking it was then. If you admitted you’d killed someone, I think people would have been less shocked. Women who had babies outside marriage were shunned. The nuns didn’t talk about it in school,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Not even to say, “Don’t do
this.” It was that unthinkable. They didn’t talk about sex at all, but we knew to be afraid of getting pregnant.’

‘But you did,’ said Tricia.

Rae watched her daughter’s face and wondered if Tricia’s expression was a little cold? Perhaps she was imagining it. How to explain that she hadn’t been recklessly and joyfully having sex with everyone, that it hadn’t been like that. She suddenly could see her mother’s cold face saying, ‘You’re up the pole, aren’t you?’ and she shuddered at the memory.

‘I did get pregnant,’ Rae said finally. ‘I didn’t tell the boy I was pregnant. I’m sure it became known in the area that I’d gone into an unmarried mother’s home. His name was Davie Sullivan.’ It felt odd saying his name after all these years, but if Tricia wanted to know, she’d want to know it all. Poor Davie. Rae wondered where he was now – flirting with jail like so many of the Sullivans, or still there in their hometown, not knowing he had a daughter of forty-one? Ten minutes in his uncle’s shop had changed her and Tricia’s lives forever. It had changed Tricia’s adoptive parents’ lives too. But Davie’s? Had his life changed?

‘I never saw him again. My family weren’t…’ she struggled for the right word ‘…supportive. They weren’t the sort of people who could cope with my pregnancy.’

‘They were religious?’ asked Tricia.

Rae wanted to laugh at the notion, but she wouldn’t. Tricia would not be touched by Paudge and Glory Hennessey any more than need be. She didn’t have to know what sort of people they were. Even if she’d been raised at a distance from them, she shouldn’t have to feel the touch of their bitterness and dysfunction. Rae could protect her from them like any mother would. ‘No, they weren’t religious. They weren’t the right people to be parents, Tricia. Some people aren’t. They’re both dead a few years.’

Perhaps one day she could tell Tricia the truth, but not yet. Perhaps there would never be a ‘some day’.

‘I went by myself to the home and stayed there till you were born.’ It was Rae’s turn to look down at her hands. She wasn’t seeing them: she was seeing the small room in the home where Jasmine had been born, and the room where they’d taken her away from Rae. ‘I said I was going to raise you myself, but the nuns kept at me, convincing me I couldn’t. I had no support. I’d be on my own with you and no money. If anything happened to me, you’d go back to my parents.’ Sister Veronica’s face was in her mind now. Those honeyed words with their powerful message.
You don’t want your daughter to end up like you, do you? Unloved and alone.

The cool softness of her daughter’s hand on hers brought her out of the past. Tricia’s fingers were long and elegant, like Rae’s own hands.

‘Mum told me what it was like in those days,’ Tricia said softly. ‘She told me that it wasn’t easy then. They were so grateful for having us, my brother and I. They told me how much they thanked you and my brother’s mother. Thanks to you, we had a family.’

Rae nodded and took the tissue Tricia offered.

‘Let’s go into the bar and have tea or something,’ Tricia said.

‘My husband, Will, is in there,’ said Rae.

Tricia laughed. ‘My husband, Stephen, is in there too.’