Three Women (14 page)

‘
How are things? Hope you haven’t given up!
’

Erin smiled at the text from Matt, the guy she had met in the restaurant. She texted him back, telling him she seemed to have hit a brick wall.

‘
Brick walls are for breaking or kicking down
,’ he texted back. ‘
And I’m available!
’

Erin remembered that Matt had advised her not to give up and to use the information she already had. She had to sort out what she knew about Kate and what she needed to find out. There wasn’t a huge amount to go on, as all she had was her own birth certificate and Kate’s letter to her, but she phoned Matt and agreed to meet him for a sandwich at lunchtime at a pub round the corner from work.

‘Are you sure what I’m doing isn’t illegal, Matt? I don’t want to be arrested,’ Erin fretted.

‘If that was the case, almost every journalist and researcher and person trying to make a family tree would be in prison,’ he said firmly. ‘You are only looking at documents that are public records. And I presume if you do manage to trace this woman you have no plans to assassinate her?’

‘No, I just want to find out for myself … maybe see her – I don’t know …’

She listened as Matt, dark eyes serious, briefly outlined what she should do and where she should go, and told her to detail every name as a process of elimination would be needed.

‘You will probably find there are about a million Kate Flanagans and you are trying to discover which one is yours.’

Erin thanked him when they finished. Matt was such a nice guy – one of those long-haired arty types that had packed her college and spent their time trying to change the world with their films and music and art, and always seemed to be just scraping by.

Okay, she knew Kate was married, but she had absolutely no idea of her married name or who she had married or where she lived. But Kate had said that she had a son of twenty-three. That probably meant that Kate Flanagan must have been married by then to have him. If she was born in March 1985 and if her half-brother was twenty-three, then he was born between 1987 and 1988, so Kate must have got married some time between those dates. There was a three-year window of 1985 to 1988 – but would someone get married within a few months of having a baby and giving it up to be adopted? No, it was more likely Kate got married in 1986 at the earliest. She needed to check the official Registry of Marriages to see if she could find out.

Erin had to take a holiday day off work to go to the Central Office for Registering Births, Marriages and Deaths in the city centre. It was already warm outside, with the weather forecasters saying the day would be a scorcher. She was tempted to grab a towel and a book and her sun lotions and head to Sandymount Strand for a few hours and forget about ever trying to track Kate down, but something inside her said, ‘Focus. Do the proper research and get the information you need about your birth mother.’

Going into the office, she joined the queue and took a ticket. It was only 9.30 in the morning but already it was busy. She could see there were a lot of Americans researching their ancestry,
and
others trying to get information for their family trees. If anyone asked, that’s what she would say she was doing. She was nervous as hell and wasn’t sure what way the information she required was logged. Was it done alphabetically, or by year, or even place? She had no idea.

She went up to the help desk and asked about trying to trace the marriage of a relation.

‘What year?’ the girl at the counter asked.

‘Maybe 1986, or perhaps it was 1987,’ Erin replied. ‘I’m not quite sure.’

‘Do you know what month?’

‘No.’

‘Well then, you will have to start off with the first quarter, January to March, and I can let you have the second quarter too. Once you have finished with them, I can issue you with the two for the other half of that year,’ she explained. ‘If you take a seat at one of the desks, someone will bring it over to you.’

Erin sat down and waited. A man appeared with two massive books and placed them in front of her. Leather-bound, they were like giant ledgers and Erin felt immediately overwhelmed. This was like trying to find a needle in a flipping haystack. She opened the first page, 1 January 1986. The names of all the couples who got married on that day were listed alphabetically, line after line, giving the name of the groom, the name of the bride, their ages, where they were married, who married them, etc. She had no idea of the groom’s name, so she was going to have to trawl through every name until she spotted a Kate Flanagan getting married.

A Kate Flanagan got married on 8 January and another one on 12 January. Shit! This was going to be impossible!

She wrote down the details on her notepad, but then when she figured out the ages of each she realized that they were both too old to be her mother.

This was going to take hours …

It was methodical and exhausting. She couldn’t believe quite how many Kate Flanagans there were and how many of them had got married during that time frame and were approximately the same age. As she worked through the registers, she soon had thirteen Kates on her list! She was on the third quarter of 1986 when she found the details of a fourteenth: a Kate Anne Flanagan who had got married on 23 September 1986.

Erin couldn’t believe it. This Kate had given a familiar address: the same Rathfarnham address as on Erin’s birth certificate. This must be the Kate she was looking for. It had to be. She had married a Patrick Cassidy from Galway and her birth date, 15 June, made her twenty-two years old – the right age – when she got married.

Erin was so excited. Carrying the book up to the desk, she gave the reference number for their marriage and paid, then waited as the girl printed out a copy of the marriage certificate for her.

Kate’s married name was Cassidy – Kate Cassidy. She now knew her mother’s full name … But how was she going to find out where she lived? The phone book was probably full of Cassidys, and what if their number was ex-directory or they didn’t use a landline?

Her half-brother’s birth had got her this far; maybe if she could find his birth certificate it would give her even more information.

She went back up to the central desk and this time requested
the
Register for Births for the first quarter of the year 1987. Two Kate Cassidys had given birth to baby daughters, and an Anna May Cassidy had given birth to twins, a boy and a girl … She went back up and got the massive book for the second quarter. She went through each day alphabetically, glad that at least the surname began with a C.

Then she stopped. She’d definitely found it. Kate Anne Cassidy,
née
Flanagan, had given birth to a baby boy, Sean, on 16 June 1987. Father: Patrick Cassidy, with an address in Dublin – 125 Bayview Park, Sutton. She had found her mother and where she lived – she had her address!

Kate wasn’t living down the country or miles away; she was living the other side of the city from her, probably only about eight or ten miles away at most.

Elated, Erin took out her iPhone, googled Directory Enquiries and put in the name Patrick Cassidy. She searched through the Dublin directory list and was amazed when she found a Patrick Cassidy living at 125 Bayview Park, Sutton. He and Kate and their family had never moved – she had found them!

Going home on the DART, she still couldn’t believe it. She had uncovered the information the adoption agency wouldn’t give her.

The girls were sitting out sunning themselves on the balcony by the time she got home.

‘Where were you all day?’ asked Nikki. ‘What were you doing?’

‘Researching,’ she grinned, helping herself to a chilled Corona from the fridge.

‘Boring …’

‘Actually it was fascinating, because I’m almost a hundred per cent sure that I’ve located my birth mother Kate’s home address!’

‘Wow … I thought that it was top secret and kept under lock and key!’ Claire said, looking up at her through her expensive Ray-Ban sunglasses.

‘Yes, but I’ve got it!’

‘Erin, that’s great,’ Nikki said, sipping a fizzy orange drink with ice. ‘Now you can find her if you want to.’

‘Yes.’ The decision was hers now.

ERIN SAT OUTSIDE
the house in bayview estate in her car, watching.

It seemed a nice house, in a good middle-class area, semi-detached, double-glazed windows, well maintained, with four bedrooms she guessed, a neat front garden with space for parking two cars, and a climber creeping over the front door and around the living-room window. Nothing special, but it probably had a fairly big back garden where the kids in the family had grown up and played and barbecued and done all the usual family stuff that nice ordinary families did.

She would sit out here in the car for a while and keep watching. There was nobody home yet – the house still empty, but she could wait.

Listening to the radio, Erin ate a bar of chocolate she’d bought in the petrol station down the road and sipped a bottle of chilled water. She had told Declan that she needed some time off and had left the office early.

She felt uncomfortable, like a voyeur, a stalker, hiding, trying
to
see into someone else’s life – a life she had absolutely no idea about.

It was about 4.45 when she spotted the silver Golf drive up the road, indicating as it turned into the driveway of number 125; a dark-haired woman getting out, a tall skinny teenage girl in a school uniform slamming the passenger door and running ahead to open the front door as the woman lifted what looked like a bag of groceries from the boot and locked the car.

‘Turn around,’ Erin wished silently. ‘Let me see you.’ But all she got was a glimpse of the woman’s grey cardigan and jeans as she disappeared inside.

She sat there, hoping that her mother would come back out again. She waited and waited but Kate didn’t appear.

An hour later she saw the tall, loping figure of a guy of about twenty with a heavy backpack, engrossed in texting on his phone as he turned into the house. He must be one of her sons. Well built and rugged, with wild fair hair, he looked kind of fun and reminded her a bit of Jack, who always looked like he should be on some sort of sports ground rather than doing mundane normal stuff like studying or working.

Kate was probably inside starting to make dinner for her family. She wondered if she was a good cook. Did they all eat together and chat around the table? What kind of family were they? Twenty minutes later another car turned into the driveway – a black jeep – and she held her breath as a man got out of it, lifting some folders and a laptop case. He was average height, she guessed; the same unruly hair as the son, but his was grey and shorter, his blue-and-white shirt highlighting his large stomach and chest. He looked kind of handsome in a stocky sort of way.

As he shut the door, Erin felt herself shut out, excluded from the life these people had built and created for themselves. She had no connection with them – not really.

Had Kate thought about her over the years, worried about her, wondered if she was happy or sad, and if the adoption had worked out? Tried to imagine what she was doing with her life? Or had Kate simply put it all behind her and blocked out the fact that she’d ever had a child and given her away? Did Kate guess she was so close by now, so near her?

In a minute or two she could be at their front door, introducing herself, interrupting their family meal like some mad suicide bomber with her explosive strapped to her chest, coming among them ready to blow their safe family life apart.

Had Kate ever told her husband she’d had a baby? Told her daughter she had a sister? Confided in her sons?

Erin considered it, wanting just to get it over – talk to the woman, meet her, look into her eyes and see the truth of it. But she thought of the kid in her school uniform. She was only sixteen – a bad age for a girl to find out she had an illegitimate half-sister. The girl didn’t deserve that.

Erin’s heart was pounding in her chest, her adrenalin high, but not high enough for her to cross that driveway and invade their space. It was Kate she wanted to talk to, to meet and confront. She didn’t want to hurt or embarrass anyone else. God knows what kind of lies her natural mother had told to protect her secret. She’d wait. Come back tomorrow, try to get Kate Flanagan on her own. This was between the two of them – that is, if there was any kind of connection between them other than just blood.

For years she had played the scene in her head, a continuous loop of the various scenarios that might be acted out the day
she
met her birth mother. What would they say to each other? Would there be an instant rapport? Would they fall into each other’s arms? Or would Kate simply say that she had no interest in a relationship with her?

Erin had absolutely no idea what the outcome would be, but she had come too far and waited too long to be deterred, and tomorrow she would definitely go and meet Kate. She was determined to find out the truth about her birth and discover who she really was.

Inside, someone drew the curtains, the warm glow of yellow light the only thing visible from the window.

Turning her ignition, she started the engine and drove back out of the estate and headed for home. She’d waited so long for this, the day she would see her birth mother. Another day would make no difference.

ERIN DROVE ACROSS
the east link bridge and over to the Cassidys’ house again the next day. She parked her little silver Polo a bit down the road. Kate’s car was in the driveway and the windows were open upstairs, so she presumed that Kate was at home.

As she walked up the driveway towards the blue front door she noticed through the sitting-room window a marmalade-coloured cat sitting on a chair staring out at her. She was definitely in the right place.

Taking a breath, psyching herself up not to be afraid and to keep her resolve, she rang the door bell … She rang it again …

It seemed to take ages. Her heart was hammering in her chest … and then the front door swung open.