I didn’t lie. I took two sleeping pills and slept for eighteen hours. There is a moment, a small fragment of time where I am not quite awake. I roll onto my pillow and smile, snuggle into it because it smells like Declan. It is warm from my sleep, but there is still the distinct smell of his body on my pillow, in my sheets. And then, the moment slips, transforms and the flood of memories comes back. Joe in the hospital, Declan saying he’s my stepbrother.
I throw the pillow across the room and dart from my bed to strip the linens, the comforter off the mattress. I don’t want any reminders of him. Least of all in my bed where we first—if I could burn the sheets, I would. I think about it. The temperature is cold. I could easily throw the sheets into the fireplace and set them ablaze. Instead, I bundle them up and toss them in the washer, pouring two extra cups of fabric softener into the rising water.
I return to my room and sit on the bed, glancing at my cell on the table. I know I can’t avoid my reality forever, but it’s difficult to be mature, to be rational enough to plug my phone into the charger and filter through what I’m sure are a billion attempts of Ava and my friends trying to contact me.
The green light flickers and the welcome message swoops across the screen when I plug it into the charger. When it uploads fully, I see the message alert blinking. Twenty text messages. Twelve voice messages.
The majority of them are from Sayo. There are a few or more that are simple apologies. One that is a plea for me to call her because she’s worried. The final two are “stop being a bitch,” and then “I’m sorry. You’re not a bitch. I love you.” Similar messages come from Layla and Mollie, but those aren’t threatening, just mild concern, sympathy for the situation I’ve led myself into.
The rest are from Declan. After reading three “I love yous” and two “I’m sorrys” I delete the stream of his messages. The final text is from Joe and as I read it, tears collect in my eyes, make seeing the screen clearly impossible.
“You are my life. I am a gorram eejit. Please, sweetheart, forgive me.”
The phone slams against the bedside table when I throw it down. The tears threaten, wet my lashes but I won’t let them fall. Joe’s message rings in my ears; his heavy accent twisted around the geeky Browncoat reference makes my chest constrict and then I sit up straight, scared when a thought comes to me. My phone slips from my hand twice as I hurry to fan through my messages. His was from yesterday. Anything could have happened since then. There could have been a clot from his surgery, an infection. He could be dead now.
I debate calling him back, then decide I’m too cowardly to talk to him directly just yet, so I Google the number for the hospital and wait to be connected to the ICU.
“ICU”
“This is Autumn McShane. I’m calling for an update on my father, Joe Brady.”
“Just a moment please.”
The tap of nails on a keyboard and the woman’s breath on the receiver before she returns has me on edge, shaking my foot as I wait. “Ms. McShane, your father has been moved to a private room.”
“He’s out of ICU?”
“Yes and he’s asking for you.”
“He’s…is he alone?” I need to see for myself that Joe is well, but the idea of facing Declan, being close to him after our fight…well. No, I couldn’t bear it.
“Yes, we sent your stepbrother home.” I grimace at the term. It feels so unnatural. “That poor boy was a wreck and hadn’t slept in two days. Can I tell your father you’ll be in to see him?”
“I…I don’t think…”
“Ms. McShane, he’s refusing to eat until he sees you.”
Clever bastard. “Fine. I’ll be there in an hour.”
Why do hospitals have to make everything so sterile and bland looking? I imagine it’s to calm the patients or abate the worry and fear of the families. But beige? Every hospital I’ve ever visited had beige walls. The color of nothing; a boring, institutional brush of pigment meant to soothe. But it doesn’t soothe me. In the month that I was here after the accident, I stared at these walls, day after day, trying to evoke some color, some imaginary vision across these plain walls. Fairies with bright, green wings would have been nice. Rainbows or butterflies, something, anything, but boring ass beige.
The smell is almost as bad. Sterile, bleach, a too-clean scent that burns your nostrils. When I stand in front of Joe’s door, I almost turn around, flee from the room to return to the bland walls and overpowering cleanliness of the hallway. I swallow a lungful of air and push open the door. His face is tilted toward the TV, but I can see from his neck and arms that his color has returned. He reclines in the bed with a heart-shaped pillow over his chest. He’s cursing at the television as though Judge Joe Brown can hear anything he says. He did that when I was kid—yelling at the TV. Some things never change.
When I shut the door, Joe turns his head, glances once and mutes Judge Brown into silence.
“Autumn Honor.” My name comes from his mouth in a low, amazed whisper. He reaches for me, beckons me over, but I don’t take his hand. Instead I sit in a chair next to him. The recliner is soft, fake leather that is indented for a shape much larger than my own. It smells like Declan. He must have slept in this chair. I jerk from the chair, come to sit the windowsill. Joe’s eyes never leave me.
“Why aren’t you eating?”
“Haven’t had much of an appetite. Besides, there’s never good nosh in hospital.”
I keep my tone light, unaffected. “If you refuse to eat, they’ll find a way to feed you. You don’t want that, trust me,” I say, remembering the intrusive feel of the I.V. tube in my arm. I carried a scar from it for weeks after my release. “I didn’t have much of an appetite when I was here a few months back.”
“I hate to think of you here, alone.”
“Yeah, well, not much can be done about that.” I look out of the window. “I’ve been alone a lot.”
“Autumn—”
“I’m here,” I say, interrupting the apology I can hear in his voice. “You should eat. That was the deal, right?”
“I want to talk to you first, love.”
My lower eyelids twitch as though I can’t decide what dirty expression to give him. “Seems like you should have talked to me eight years ago. Hell, you should have talked to me months ago when you came back to town. It would have saved us all a lot of trouble.”
“I know you’re angry.”
“Angry, Joe? No, I’m not angry. I’m disgusted. I’m embarrassed, I feel like an idiot since my father and my…and Declan lied to me, but angry? No, I passed angry when I was fifteen and you had been gone a year.”
He tilts his head back and I can see the frustration on his face, in the way he pounds his fist against the mattress. “I couldn’t bear it, love. I saw you and you let me hold you. You let me give you the only thing I could, comfort. And then we spent time together and I knew you were hurting. I knew all this pain was laid at my feet, wasn’t it? Your mother’s death, had I been here, perhaps she’d still be alive. And Deco, ah, I saw you two together and I thought, ‘Now this is good. This would be good for the pair of you.’ You’re so similar, cut from the same cloth. You love the game, your books and things, you both even kept your mothers’ names. And you’ve both lost so much, suffered so much. I didn’t want to bring back the past and cause you more pain.”
My mouth falls open. “So you lied to me? You wouldn’t let Declan tell me this truth? That was your solution? Avoidance? Non-disclosures? Jesus, Joe.”
“I never said I wasn’t a right selfish bastard. I know well what I am. I was scared, dammit!” He pushes the pillow toward his chest when a weak cough racks his chest. His wince is fierce and I know his pain is far worse than he’s letting on.
Fear clots on my tongue. I’m immeasurably pissed at him, but I don’t want him hurting. I don’t welcome his pain. “We shouldn’t be fighting. Not until you’ve healed.”
“Then let me explain. Please, love.” He holds out his hand, his eyes pleading. “Come sit next to me and let me explain this whole mess to you.” My feet move on their own, but when I reach his bed, I stop, uncertain with what to do with my hands, unsure if I want him touching me. I choose, instead, to grab a pillow, to sit on the foot of his bed and cradle it in my lap. Joe nods, resigned and lets his outstretched hand fall to his side.
“I was young, you see, no more than twenty-two and I was smitten with Moira, the loveliest girl in our village. Everyone fancied her, and why wouldn’t they? Lovely as she was and, as I say, I was young, naïve and likely a rubbish choice for her, but still I convinced her to have me. She was up the pole, um, pregnant, you see, and being the eejit I was, I assumed the baby was mine. But when she had her boy two months sooner than she was supposed to, I realized that he wasn’t mine. I hadn’t been with her at that time and so I left, heartbroken, angry and came here where a few of my mates lived. I was a rotten bastard for a solid year, drinking, chasing women, getting up to nothing good a’tall and then, one day, I see this vision, a proper lady sitting under the oaks near the courtyard. She was reading a book, her eyes wide and eager and I thought, ‘Well, now, Joe, she’s a real angel.’ And so I chatted her up, used my best lines and still she turned me down flat. I couldn’t let that stand and so I kept after her. For weeks. I followed her into the library, over at McKinney’s, at the matches until finally, finally she threw her arms up and agreed to one date.
“One date was all it took. Your mum and I fell in love quick like and it was no more than two months later that I knew she was the one for me. There was a great many lads trying to catch her eye and I couldn’t have that so I asked her to marry me. To my amazement, she agreed, but as I say, I was young, a proper eejit and I never got my divorce from Moira.” My eyes close, knowing now what had caused all of this heartache. Joe rushes to explain. “I’d always intended to, but time has a way of slipping from you, doesn’t it? I never told Evelyn about my life back home. And so we went on, married and happy and I didn’t care I was breaking the law, didn’t care about anything but your mum and her smile and her belly swelling with my baby. With you, love.
He sits up straighter in his bed, fidgeting with the lines from his IV, his attention down at those clear tubes. “Years passed and I pushed Moira and her boy out of my head and why wouldn’t I, happy as I was with my two girls, laughing, living? Then I get a call from a mate of mine. He tells me Moira is dying. That I must come home to see to her affairs since I was still legally her husband. You were just a girl, barely a teenager and your mum threw such a fit because I couldn’t tell her why I had to go, you see. My folks had been dead many years and I had no siblings so she assumed there would be no reason to go back. She wanted to come along with me, but I was such a coward. How could I tell her the truth? I couldn’t risk her hating me. I didn’t want to break up our family.”
My father covers his face, holds his hands still as though the memories are too much, the pain he caused too heavy for him to carry on his own. He looks so weak just now, cowering from the truth, hiding his shame between his long fingers. Despite myself, I slide closer toward him, my knee just inches from his leg. “But she found out anyway, did Evelyn. I don’t know how, but she found out. And before I left she told me she didn’t know if she wanted me to come back. I told her Moira would be dead soon, that a divorce would only upset her. Evelyn didn’t like that and so I left with her spitting mad at me. I got home and there was Declan, scrawny, scared little lad. He knew I wasn’t his da. He’d never met the man, and I knew none of this whole mess had been his fault. So I took care of him. I wanted him to come back with me once Moira passed.
Joe’s hands fall and he stares at me, shaking, likely at his own stupidity, maybe at the distance between us on his bed. “I phoned your mum. Explained everything and she wouldn’t have it. Said she never wanted you to find out what I’d done, how stupid I’d been. So I came back, tried to make amends, begged her to forgive me, but she’d have none of it. She said I’d betrayed you both, and I had, hadn’t I? She…she didn’t want me anymore. She told me to leave.”
My father was never a crier. He thought it a weakness to let anyone see him upset and aside from that day at the cemetery, I’ve never seen him cry. Until now. He swipes at the moisture underneath his eyes as though they are a nuisance and I slide closer, take his hand. “I went back to Galloway, back to Moira and Declan and I was there no more than a week and she died. Evelyn hated me. She didn’t want me, and here was this boy so gripped with hurt, so scared and he wanted me to make things better. And I couldn’t have you, either of you, anymore. I had ruined our lives, destroyed our family and I wanted to come home, to apologize, but how could I after what I’d done? How could I come home with this strange lad and confess to you what I’d done? And I couldn’t leave him, Autumn. I was all he had.”
He pulls his hand away from me, rubbing his fingers against his face to dry it clean. “But I prayed for you every day. I prayed that God would let me back, that Evelyn, that you, would forgive me. I wrote you letters, so many letters, love. Every week, sometimes twice a week, because I missed you so much. I hurt from how I missed you.” He points to a bag next to the window. I grab it, hand it to him. “I never gave you your birthday present and I know it’s perhaps too late, perhaps it won’t mean much to you, but I have these for you.”
Joe unzips the bag and withdraws stacks and stacks of letters, bound together with twine, the same twine Declan used to wrap my birthday present. There are hundreds and I have to hold them in my lap, on the bed as Joe continues to hand them to me. These letters are my father’s life, Declan’s, journaled and recorded for all the memories we couldn’t share.
“A letter for every time I thought of you.” He grabs my hand. “If you’ll let me, love, I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to make amends for the pain I’ve caused, for all those lies. For breaking your heart and your mother’s. I swear to you, I will.”
When his grip on my hand tightens, and he inclines forward, the letters scatter around me, some slip to the floor but I don’t care. There has been too much pain, too many disappointments and I nearly lost it all. Lies do that. Secrets do. They bend your life so that the only thing that is left is your anger, your tight hold onto the poison that only you die from. I’m tired of it. I watch the thick lines on Joe’s forehead, the bushy whiskers against his chin and decide to leave the past to rest. The name hitches on the tip of my tongue and when my father cups my face, kisses me, it leaves my mouth with ease. “Daddy…”
He holds me and his tears are heavy, streaming down his face. Quick and unexpected, the panic forms in my chest, bubbles until I feel a catch just above my heart. But my father senses this, feels the rigid shake of my limbs, the thumping beat of my pulse and he pulls me down to his side, wraps his arms around me and hums low; a hypnotic melody I have not heard since I was fourteen. My father’s voice, singing to me, chasing away the monsters, chasing away the panic from the room.