This Irish House (5 page)

Their eyes met and held. He saw air-light bones, straight, smoky hair and sharply honed Celtic features. For a moment his resolve wavered. He forced himself to remember who she was, who her husband was.

He stood, walked to the door and opened it. “Mr. Laverty,” he called out to the man behind the desk.

“Please take our prisoner back to his holding room.”

Kevin blanched and turned frightened eyes to his mother. “Mum?”

“Is that necessary?” Kate asked.

Neil's reply was clipped, impatient. “You tell me.”

Kate's voice changed and the temperature in the room seemed to drop. “It won't be for long, Kevin,” she said through thin lips. “Whatever happens, I'll see you again tonight.”

She waited until her son left the room. Furious, she turned toward the enemy. “You can't intimidate me, Mr. Anderson. I'm no poor, uneducated croppy. We both know you've nothing on Kevin. It's his word against your informant's who, I'm fairly sure, isn't a police officer. Am I right?”

“Almost.”

“Almost?”

“This is Northern Ireland. Do you really want to take a chance on Kevin's freedom?”

“This is a new Northern Ireland,” she shot back. “Illegal arrests and confessions obtained under torture no longer exist.”

“People are still dying, Mrs. Nolan. This is marching season. Belfast is a powder keg. I need someone.”

“You're not getting Kevin.”

“I have no one else.”

Her reserve broke. “That's what you all say,” she said bitterly. “You Protestants think nothing of risking one more Catholic life. You know nothing about us or what we've had to endure.”

He straightened and she noticed that his hands were balled in his pockets. “You're mistaken. I'm not a Protestant. I'm an Englishman down from London and I don't give a bloody damn about your absurd religious vendetta. I do care that people are dying on my watch and I'll do whatever I can and use whomever I can to stop it and that includes your son.”

Kate slung her purse over her shoulder. “I don't think so. I'll say good day for now but tomorrow I'll be back, with a lawyer.”

He held the door shut with his hand. “That won't be necessary. Credit me with enough experience to know that the charges against Kevin wouldn't hold up, however, I believe you're forgetting something.”

She waited.

“Kevin wasn't set up, Mrs. Nolan. The charges are real. Your son has a drug problem. This time we've no proof. The next time we will and I won't be so easy on him.”

“There won't be a next time.”

He sighed. “Believe it or not, I hope you're right.” “May I take my son home now?”

He opened the door and walked beside her to the front desk. “Release Kevin Nolan, Mr. Laverty,” he said quietly. “The charge against him has been dropped.”

K
evin leaned his forehead against the cool glass of the window and closed his eyes. God, he was tired. The cocaine rush had left his body, leaving him drained and heavy. His mouth was dry and his tongue felt so thick it nearly gagged him. He was thirsty but forming the words to ask his mother to pass one of the water bottles she always kept in the back seat was too much effort.

“Kevin.” Kate's voice pierced the fog shrouding his brain. “Tell me what happened.”

Nausea swept through him, waves of it pressing against his throat, rising from his stomach. Weakly he shook his head.

Relentlessly she persisted. “How long have you been doing this?”

“What?” he mumbled, keeping his eyes closed.

He heard her speak again but the words were jumbled. He couldn't make them out. If only he could he down. He would feel better after he slept. He would think of answers, well-crafted, dishonest answers that would satisfy her, answers that would stop her questions and wipe the pale, haunted look from her face. He hated her when she looked like that. No. Hate was too strong a word. Kevin didn't hate his mother. It wasn't possible to hate Kathleen Nolan. What he hated were her probing questions. He hated the worried frown between her eyes and the pain in her voice whenever she spoke to him. He hated the way she chewed her lips raw and the hesitant way she asked him to take out the garbage. He hated the beautiful, nourishing, abundant meals she insisted on cooking even when he wasn't hungry. He hated that she never swore or cried or lost her temper.

He hated other things, too, more and more with every passing week, things that had nothing to do with his mother. He hated the quiet of the house in Donegal, the boring drone of his instructors at school, the tight, disapproving look on his sister's face when he walked through the door long past dinner hour and, most of all, he hated the empty, too-large rooms that screamed out for the laughing, playful, complete family that had once been his.

Kevin missed his father. Six years had passed but his memories were as vital and whole and detailed as if they had taken place the day before. Patrick Nolan was the kind of man lesser mortals created legends around. Strong and competent, brilliant and charismatic, he was fair to adults and children alike. The very thought of him and what he'd lost closed the air passages in Kevin's throat and brought on the despised asthma inherited from his mother.

“Kevin,” his mother's voice intruded again. “I need an answer from you. The charge was a serious one.”

He stared out the window.

“For God's sake, Kevin.” Her voice broke. “This isn't a game. Please, talk to me.”

He couldn't look at her, couldn't manage the hurt in her eyes.

“I'm all right, Mum,” he mumbled. “You don't have to worry about me.”

“What were you doing miles away from home, with those people?”

He kept his eyes fixed on the bogs framed by the car window. Hacked open like a newly exposed wound, half the marsh lay dark, rich and wet. The paler half was home to stacks of dun-colored turf drying in the open air.
Ireland's
energy
source,
his father had told him.

“Kevin?”

He remembered his mother's question. “They're not so bad.” Out of the corner of his eye Kevin saw her hands clench around the steering wheel, her bones white beneath her skin. “I'm tired,” he said, hoping to ward off further questions. “They didn't let me sleep all night.”

“I'm tired too, Kevin,” she said, showing an unexpected flash of impatience, “and I never want this to happen again. I drove four hours through the dead of night to pick you up. You owe me some answers.”

“I said I was all right,” he said sullenly. “I've done nothing wrong.”

“You tested positive for an illegal drug. For—” she stumbled over the word “—for cocaine, for God's sake. How can you tell me that isn't wrong?”

He clenched his fists, but he didn't answer. There was no answer to such a question. By whose standards was it wrong? Was anyone worse off because he'd snorted a line? Or was it two? He couldn't remember.

She wasn't leaving it alone. “Who were the people you were with?”

He felt the blood rise in his throat.
Leave
me
alone.
Please,
just
leave
me
alone.
“I don't know.”

“Do you really expect me to believe that?”

His fists slammed down on the dashboard. “I don't fuckin' care what you believe,” he shouted. “Leave me alone.”

Kate slammed on the brakes. Kevin felt the back end of the car fishtail across the road. It leveled out again and rolled to a jarring stop. Two red spots of color stained his mother's cheeks. He watched as she carefully, without speaking, set the emergency brake, pulled out the keys, opened the door and began to walk back down the road.

A bevy of emotions rolled through Kevin's chest, anger, fear, shock, horror. In his mind the breach he'd just committed was nearly as great as the one that had landed him in a jail cell. Never had he used bold language with an adult. That it was his mother upon whom he'd inflicted such a perversion was more than he could bear. She had probably never heard such a word in her entire life. He was a misfit, in far too deeply to reverse himself. What was to become of him? If only he could turn back time. If only he could have stepped in front of the bullet that had taken his father's life. Patrick would be alive and his mother would be happy. Moaning, Kevin dropped his head into his hands and wept.

Kate looked at her watch. Ten minutes. Ten minutes had passed since she'd left the car and still the rage consumed her.
I
will
not
retaliate,
she promised herself.
I
will
not
scream
nor
swear
nor
verbally
shred
this
child
I've
created.

Her own mother had given her a deep-rooted terror of irrational anger. Eileen Connelly had none of Kate's scruples regarding corporal punishment. Without exception, she'd raised her seven children as she'd been raised, with an acerbic tongue and the back of a hairbrush. Kate, the oldest, had felt the sting of that brush more often than the others, more likely because of her birth order than her level of defiance. Even Eileen, short-tempered and filled with displaced anger over the disappointing sameness of her life, had balked at raising welts on the legs of a child younger than five. Kate's recollection of her home life was of an unhappy woman who had screamed and slapped her way through the lives of her children.

Eileen wasn't unusual. Only a handful of mothers in the Ireland of previous generations concerned themselves with what Kate considered rampant child abuse. The blatant use of the rod on her generation of children resulted in Kate's rabid desire to do differently. She would, she resolved, apologize to her children. She wouldn't raise her voice, refuse to listen or randomly dole out punishment that bore no logical relationship to the crime. She would, however, say
no
when necessary. She would establish boundaries and she would let her children suffer the consequences of inappropriate behavior. But how far and in what direction was a mother to allow those consequences to lead? Kevin was a child. Could any sensible mother allow her child's life to be endangered?

Keeping to the side of the road, she walked rapidly, her back stiff, her eyes straight ahead, missing the igloos of golden wheat, the stacks of drying turf, the boiling clouds, shaping and reshaping themselves, the pale yellow of a reluctant sun.

Damn,
damn,
damn.
Who
did
he
bloody
well
think
he
was?
Had
there
ever
been
a
child
so
indulged,
so
spoiled
by
parents
and
grandparents?
How
dare
he
speak
to
her
so?

Five more minutes passed. Clouds lined with light broke away and floated across a sky that would soon be blue. Kate's stride slowed, faltered. She felt better. Exercise always helped. Her rage began to dissipate. She was in control once again. Control was essential. Control was the way she lived her life. Control was power. She breathed, felt the sting of cold air deep in her parched lungs, coughed, and turned around. She'd forgotten her inhaler. Praying that she would make it back to the car before she fell into the throes of a full-scale asthma attack, she measured her pace. How could she have been so stupid?

Don't
panic,
mustn't
panic.
Forcing herself to remain calm, Kate concentrated on the road, on the air flowing into and out of her lungs, on the rise in the road, on the herbal smell of wet turf. Gradually her tension eased, her air passages cleared and her mind found a focus outside of the physical.

Kate thought back to the day she decided to have a second baby. She'd debated for a long time before coming to the decision. Children were a serious matter and she was naturally cautious, an observer rather than a participant. She took her lessons seriously, relegating firsthand experience to intrepid risk-takers like Patrick. Not for her the casual, take-it-for-granted notion that a married couple should automatically procreate. Children were investments in emotion that one couldn't begin to imagine before becoming a parent.

Until Deirdre was born, the words pain and pleasure conjured up dreamlike, surreal, polite images. From the day she'd given birth, terror, joy and heartbreak had been her constant companions. The color and heat of her love for her children consumed her, thrusting her forward, forcing her to grab on to life, to wade through the pain, to soar with pride, to be stronger, wiser, deeper than she really was.

Would she do it all again, knowing what she knew? Guiltily she pushed aside the thought. Hindsight was absurd. She would never deny her children. They enriched her, lifted her to heights she would never have reached. Where would she have been without them, after Patrick? Who would have kept her sane and given her life back to her? Kevin needed her. To be needed was balm to her spirit.

Even with the promise of sun, the morning was cold. Shivering, she shoved her hands into her pockets and increased her pace. She wasn't a trailblazer, not now, not ever. That had been Patrick's role. How often had she harangued him, begging him to step back, to allow someone else to lead, to be the martyr, the hero? He'd laughed at her.
Where
would
Ireland
be?
he'd admonished her,
without
the
likes
of
Eamon
de
Valera
or
Michael
Collins?
What
if
they'd
stepped
back?

Kate never answered, but she'd wondered about Michael Collins's fiancée, Kitty, the one who had never become his wife. What were her sentiments when they told her an assassin's bullet had found its way to the heart of her beloved? Was she grateful he'd died a hero's death or would she rather he'd been an ordinary man who came home at night and contented himself with telling his children stories beside a warm peat fire?

Her steps were slower now, her anger completely gone. It was safe to go back, to sit beside her son on the long drive home, to try to reach him somehow, this child she loved unconditionally and yet had lost somewhere along the way. If only she could pinpoint the exact moment he'd looked around for direction and in the looking found her wanting.

The wind came from the west, a cold stinging wind that reddened her cheeks and brought tears to her eyes. Her shortness of breath had completely disappeared. She began to run. She hadn't the shoes for it, but she ran anyway, the balls of her feet finding the grade of the road as they always did. She found her stride and her hands left her pockets, her arms swinging smoothly, alternating with the bend of her knees and the steady pound of her feet on the pavement.

Running was her drug. She'd taken it up after Patrick's death, her anger and pain diminishing in direct proportion to the miles she ran every day in the soft beauty of an Irish dawn. She'd kept at it over the years, challenging herself, five miles, seven, ten, until the euphoria peaked and her body toughened and she was able to manage one day and then the next and the one after that. Years passed, holidays, holy days, birthdays, she and Deirdre and Kevin, the three of them in a world without Patrick. It was bearable now, not easy, never easy. The sharpness had muted, the awful throat-closing tears that rose unexpectedly at the sound of his name or the accidental uncovering of a family photo were gone now, leaving instead a dullness, a hollow ache that nothing was quite able to fill.

She made it back to the car in half the time. Kevin's eyes were closed, his head thrown back against the headrest, his mouth slightly open. Kate opened the door carefully so as not to wake him and slid into the driver's seat. Then she looked, really looked at her son and her heart broke. All that was left of her chubby-cheeked baby was gone. In his place was a beautiful, too-thin, sharp-cheeked, square-jawed boy, a boy who would soon be a man. Where had the years gone and how had she managed to do such a dreadful job of raising Patrick's son?