I had a fast, queasy flash of retrospective panic: if I had known that Alicia Rowan and my mother had been close, I would never have gone near that house. "I think she's all right," I said. "As much as one could expect. She still has Jamie's room the way it was."
My mother clicked her tongue unhappily. We washed up in silence for some time: clink of cutlery, Peter Falk cunningly interrogating someone in the next room. Outside the window, a pair of magpies landed on the grass and started picking over the tiny garden, discussing it raucously as they went.
"Shoo," my mother said automatically, rapping the glass, and sighed. "I suppose I've never forgiven myself for losing touch with Alicia. She'd no one else. She was such a sweet girl, a real innocent-she was still hoping Jamie's father would leave his wife, after all that time, and they'd be a family… Did she ever marry?"
"No. But she doesn't seem unhappy, really. She teaches yoga." The suds in the basin had turned lukewarm and clammy; I reached for the kettle and added more hot water.
"That's one reason we moved away, you know," my mother said. She had her back to me, sorting cutlery into a drawer. "I couldn't face them-Alicia and Angela and Joseph. I had my son back safe and sound, and they were going through hell… I could hardly go out of the house, in case I'd meet them. I know it sounds mad, but I felt guilty. I thought they must hate me for having you safe. I don't see how they could help it."
This took me aback. I suppose all children are self-centered; it had never occurred to me, at any rate, that the move might have been for anyone's benefit but my own. "I never really thought about that," I said. "Selfish brat that I was."
"You were a little darling," my mother said, unexpectedly. "The most affectionate child that ever lived. When you came in from school or playing, you'd always give me a massive hug and a kiss-even when you were almost as big as me-and say, 'Did you miss me, Mammy?' Half the time you'd have something for me, a pretty stone or a flower. I still have most of them kept."
"Me?" I was glad I hadn't brought Cassie. I could practically see the wicked glint in her eye if she'd heard this.
"Yes, you. That's why I was so worried when we couldn't find you that day." She gave my arm a sudden, almost violent little squeeze; even after all these years, I heard the strain in her voice. "I was panicking, you know. Everyone was saying, 'Sure, they've only run away from home, children do that, we'll have them found in no time…' But I said, 'No. Not Adam.' You were a sweet boy; kind. I knew you wouldn't do that to us."
Hearing the name cast in her voice sent something through me, something fast and primeval and dangerous. "I don't remember myself as a particularly angelic child," I said.
My mother smiled, out the kitchen window; the abstracted look on her face, remembering things I didn't, made me edgy. "Ah, not angelic. But thoughtful. You were growing up fast, that year. You made Peter and Jamie stop tormenting that poor wee boy, what was his name? The one with the glasses and the awful mammy who did the flowers for the church?"
"Willy Little?" I said. "That wasn't me, that was Peter. I would have been perfectly happy to go on tormenting him till the cows came home."
"No, that was you," my mother said firmly. "The three of you did something or other that made him cry, and it upset you so badly, you decided you'd have to leave the poor boy alone. You were worried that Peter and Jamie wouldn't understand. Do you not remember?"
"Not really," I said. Actually, this bothered me more than anything in this whole uncomfortable conversation. You'd think I'd have preferred her version of the story to my own, but I didn't. It was entirely possible, of course, that she had unconsciously recast me as the hero, or that I had done it myself, lied to her at the time; but over the past few weeks I had come to think of my memories as solid, shining little things, to be hunted out and treasured, and it was deeply unsettling to think that they might be fool's gold, tricky and fog-shaped and not at all what they seemed. "If there aren't any more dishes, I should probably go in and talk to Dad for a while."
"He'll like that. Off you go-I can finish up here. Bring a couple of cans of Guinness with you; they're in the fridge."
"Thanks for the dinner," I said. "It was delicious."
"Adam," my mother said suddenly, as I turned to leave; and that swift treacherous thing hit me under the breastbone again, and oh, God how I wanted to be that sweet child for one more moment, how I wanted to spin around and bury my face in her warm toast-smelling shoulder and tell her through great tearing sobs what these last weeks had been. I thought of what her face would look like if I actually did it, and bit my cheek hard to keep back an insane crack of laughter.
"I just wanted you to know," she said timidly, twisting the dishcloth in her hands. "We did our best for you, after. Sometimes I worry that we did it all wrong… But we were afraid that whoever had-you know-that whoever it was would come back and…We were just trying to do what would be best for you."
"I know, Mum," I said. "It's fine," and, with the sensation of some huge and narrow escape, I went out to the sitting room to watch Columbo with my father.
"How's work treating you?" my father said, during an ad break. He rummaged down the side of a cushion for the remote control and lowered the sound on the TV.
"Fine," I said. On the screen, a small child sitting on a toilet was conversing vehemently with a green, fanged cartoon creature surrounded by vapor trails.
"You're a good lad," my father said, staring at the TV as if mesmerized by this. He took a swig from his can of Guinness. "You've always been a good lad."
"Thanks," I said. Clearly he and my mother had had some kind of conversation about me, in preparation for this afternoon, although for the life of me I couldn't figure out what it might have entailed.
"And work's all right for you."
"Yes. Fine."
"That's grand, then," my father said, and turned the volume up again.
I got back to the apartment around eight. I went into the kitchen and started making myself a sandwich, ham and Heather's low-fat cheese-I'd forgotten to go shopping. The Guinness had left me bloated and uncomfortable-I'm not a beer drinker, but my father gets worried if I ask for anything else; he considers men drinking spirits to be a sign of either incipient alcoholism or incipient homosexuality-and I had some hazy paradoxical idea that eating something would soak up the beer and make me feel better. Heather was in the sitting room. Her Sunday evenings are devoted to something she calls "Me Time," a process involving Sex and the City DVDs, a wide variety of mystifying implements and a lot of bustling between the bathroom and the sitting room with a look of grim, righteous determination.
My phone beeped. Cassie: Give me a lift 2 court 2moro? Grown-up clothes + golf cart + weather =very bad look.
"Oh, shit," I said aloud. The Kavanagh case, an old woman beaten to death in Limerick during a break-in, sometime the year before: Cassie and I were giving evidence first thing in the morning. The prosecutor had been in to prep us, and we'd reminded each other on Friday and everything, but I'd promptly managed to forget all about it.
"What's wrong?" Heather piped eagerly, hurrying out of the sitting room at the prospect of an opening for conversation. I threw the cheese back into the fridge and slammed the door on it, not that that would do much good: Heather knows to a millimeter how much of everything she has left, and once sulked till I bought her a new bar of fancy organic soap because I'd come in drunk and washed my hands with hers. "Are you all right?" She was in her dressing gown, with what looked like Saran Wrap around her head, and she smelled of a headache-inducing array of flowery, chemical things.