Existing (31 page)

4
th
August 1994

Her name is Hallie. She’s a personal assistant of one of the other board members. She’s ten years younger than he is
, and it’s more than obvious when you look at her slim figure. Is that what it was? Did I get too fat when I was pregnant? A horrible thought consumes my every waking moment. Was he having an affair while I was carrying our baby? Was that why it took so long for us to get pregnant? Was he wasting his good sperm on someone else?

10
th
August 1994

I feel so bad for
Roisin. I’m so sorry that I’ve been such a bad Mommy. I play with her and I see her looking at my face and I know that she’s knows I’m not really there. I’m too busy thinking about what to do. I’m too busy planning our future. I have to leave Lance. I can’t be with a man who is unfaithful. It’s for the best. Everything I’m doing, I’m doing for her.

12
th
August 1994

She called me. How dare she call
me? She introduced herself and then told me she was fucking my husband and had been for a whole year. I couldn’t speak. I put the phone down and ran to the bathroom to be sick.

When I came back
, I found a voice message. She wants to meet. She wants to explain things.

13
th
August 1994

I haven’t eaten or slept for three whole days and I haven’t seen Lance since her pho
ne call. He’s been home but he moves through the house like a ghost after I’ve fallen asleep and leaves before I’ve woken up. Has she told him that she’s called me? Does he know that I know?

15
th
August 1994

I’m going to leave Roisin with my sister, Orla
, today. I have to leave her. I can’t take her with me. I’m meeting Hallie and I can’t imagine it’s going to be pleasant. Even though she can’t talk and probably won’t know what’s going on today, I still don’t want her there. I’m certainly not childish enough to take her there to shove Roisin in Hallie’s face. To show her how much her Father loved me at one point.

She wants to meet up on the cliffs at white top. I have no i
dea why she’s chosen that spot. I guess it’s because she won’t be seen or heard by anyone else, which means she’ll always be able to deny it’s ever happened. I haven’t packed yet, but I will when I get home and then we’ll leave. I wonder how many days it’ll be before he notices.

I pull back, feeling the dread and sadness in my heart like I did all those years ago, and want to cry. I need to push these feelings out of my heart somehow. Roisin throws the diary back under the bed when the front door opens. I see her eyes dart around the room. She now knows that her Father was having an affair with Hallie, and she knows how that made me feel. I hope I’ve done the right thing. I hope by me telling her what happened and how Hallie was already a part of her Father’s life, that she now understands the reason why Hallie hates her so much. It’s because Roisin looks like me. She’s a constant reminder to Hallie of what she did to me.

I want her to feel safe enough to
tell someone what Hallie’s been doing to her. I want her to be able to escape. She slowly and carefully pulls a sports bra on and rolls a white t-shirt on over it. She blows out a big breath out, obviously in an enormous amount of pain. She has to sit on the bed for a few minutes to steady herself before she pulls on her grey sweatpants. She stands slowly, throwing her arm across her rib cage and then walks down the hallway.

I don’t know who it is that’s home and I don’t care. When I
step off the bottom step, I see my father’s golf bag and his shoes leaving a huge puddle on the floor where Hallie beat me last night. I can hear him fumbling around in the kitchen.

I stand in the doorway and see him rifling through the drawer.
I watch him for a few seconds and then turn my back to him. I don’t want him seeing me yet. I need for him to talk to me first.

“Where’s Hallie?” I ask him.

“Oh,” he says, slamming a drawer shut. “I didn’t know anyone was home. I had to abandon golf because of the weather. Hallie has gone to pick Ava up from the sleepover.”

I look through the
hallway window and see the rain bouncing off the road. I don’t care what the weather is like. Tears are still slipping slowly down my face, which makes me glad that he can’t see me. I hear him open another drawer and sigh.

“How did my Mother die?”
I ask.

He stops rummagin
g around, making the house fall into an eerie silence. “I’ve told you this lots of times already, Roisin, and why are you not looking at me?”

“How did she die?”
I repeat.

“Why don’t you come and sit down and we can talk,” he says softly.

“I’m not moving and neither are you. How did my Mother die?”

“Roisin,” he says, “please don’t take that tone with me.”

I take a deep breath. “I found her diary.”

“Your Mother never kept a diary,
” he says quickly.

“Oh yes she did.”

I hear a chair scrape and feel relieved when I know he’s sitting down. “Are you going to look at me?”

“No.”

“Roisin, please,” he begs. I can tell that I’ve made him sad. Good.

“How did she die
, Dad?”

He sighs loudly. “She committed suicide.”

I shake my head. “Why would she do that?”

“Your Mother was depressed
, Roisin. Nobody knows what was going on in her head.”

“I do,” I tell him.

He grunts. “You were six months old, Roisin. You don’t know anything.” I can tell by his tone that he’s getting annoyed and angry.

“That’s where you’re wrong
, Dad. I’ve just told you that I have her diary.”

He huffs. “I honestly don’t think she kept a diary
, darling. If she did, then she was depressed, so she was probably writing a ton of stuff that didn’t make sense.”

“Did you love her?”
I demand.

“Of course I did,” he answers quickly
, sounding confused. “You know that.”

“Why do you think she was depressed?”
I push.

“Roisin
,” he says, “stop this.”

“Why
, Dad?” I can hear my voice getting higher and sharper with every stupid word that comes out of his mouth.

“It’s not going to help anything. It won’t bring her back.” He sniffs
, which makes me wonder if he’s upset or just cold from being out in the rain all morning.

I huff loudly. “Just answer the question
, please.”

“S
he was suffering from postpartum depression. Which doesn’t mean it was your fault or that she was depressed because she had given birth to you,” he rushes, “it’s just the body’s, well, more the brain’s way of trying to sort everything out. It’s a big thing having a baby.”

I shake my head and I know he can see me doing it. “That’s not why
she was prescribed those pills, Dad. You’re wrong.”

“Of course it was. She told me herself.”

I start to cry again and hear his chair move. “Stay where you are,” I snap.

“What is all this
, Roisin? Where has it all come from?”

“She
wasn’t depressed because of me,” I tell him.

“I know that
, darling. You can’t blame yourself, I’ve already-“

“It was you!” I spit through my teeth. “It was your fault.”

“No, Rose.”

“Yes,” I growl. “She knew what you were doing. You b
roke her and it killed her.”

“Rose, this needs to stop. I wasn’t my fault and it wasn’t your fault. She took her own life
, darling.”

“She
knew you were having an affair!” I shriek. “She knew you were fucking Hallie behind her back. How could you?!” I know he won’t like me cursing in front of him, but there’s no other word to describe what he did. Not in my mind anyway.

The room falls
silent. He doesn’t speak for a long time, and I’m just about to turn around to make sure he’s still there, when I hear him start to cry. For some reason, this infuriates me even more.

Headlights sudd
enly light up the hallway. I watch Ava jump out of the car and then I see
her
. I can’t do this now. I can’t let him see me when she’s in the room. She’ll make something up. I can’t face either of them, knowing what they did to my Mother. I can’t stand the fact that both of them made her feel like she couldn’t take any more.

I turn without another word to my father and limp down the hallway. I throw my arm around my rib cage, even though it doesn’
t stop any of the pains that cripple me, and push through the laundry room door and into the garage. I stand, panting and crying until I hear Hallie and Ava in the house, and then I push to button that opens the garage door and slip underneath it.

My feet sting and bleed as I wobble across the road. The rain that slams into my face is blinding and it’s already soaked through my top to my bra but I don’t care. I have to get away. I
reach the end of the street and as I look left and right, I feel my hair sticking to my face, making it slap into my eyes. I grit my teeth and turn left. The water running into the cuts on my face stings like mad, but it’s nothing compared to the pain in my heart. I have no idea how I’m going to be able to forgive my Father for what he did to my Mom. I certainly can’t forgive Hallie, but I won’t have to worry about that when I tell the police what she’s been doing to me.

I can hear my feet slapping against the concrete as I walk up the coastal road. I look ahead and can just about make out the street I’m heading for through the sheets of water that hammer down around me. The wind blows off the surface of the sea and slams into my side
, but I’m past caring.

I feel bad for
Ava because of what I’m about to do. I don’t want her to get hurt in any of this and I know she will. I can only imagine that the reason Hallie hates me so much is because I look like my Mother. I’m a constant reminder to her and my Father of the life he had before Hallie, or rather, his life during Hallie. She only has him completely because my Mother left us. I wonder if she tortures herself with that thought and plan to ask her when she’s in jail.

I turn on
to the street where I was last night and can’t believe how much has happened in the past twelve hours. My whole life has been turned upside down, but none of these people that sit in their big houses have any idea.

I walk up to the cream front door and
quickly knock five times. My body shakes as the cold starts to seep into my bones. I’m expecting Cabe to answer the door. I totally forgot that he lives here with other people, so when an attractive middle-aged woman with short, blonde hair swings the door wide open, I’m momentarily confused.

“Are you okay?” she asks
with a soft, concerned voice. “Can I help you?”

I
realize that I made a mistake coming here when I look into her steady, pale blue eyes. I shouldn’t be dropping all of this on his head. “I-I-I’m sorry,” I say through the chatter of my teeth. “I shouldn’t have come here.”

I turn and hobble down the path. I have nowhere else to go. I can’t walk all the way to Charlotte
’s house. I’m not sure I can even make it back home because of the state that my feet are in.

“Rose, is that you?”
Cabe calls.

I freeze mid-
step and turn, brushing the hair off that’s plastered to my face. “Cabe, I-”

I stop talking and snap my head away from him
when I hear a screeching noise. I watch, as if it’s in slow motion, as the car skids toward me before it ploughs straight into me. I’m suddenly upside down, staring at the road, and then something red flashes before me. The last thing I see is glass. The last thing I hear is the crack of my skull and then I feel, see, and hear nothing.

I run
alongside the doctors as they wheel the stretcher quickly down the corridor and burst into the emergency room.

“Are you a relative?”

Cabe tries to push past the nurse that’s wearing a navy uniform.

“I’m
sorry, sir. Relatives only,” she tells him.

He looks at his
Mother and begs for her to do something so he can be with Roisin. I’m grateful to this young man, who ran out of his house and gathered my daughter in his arms when I couldn’t. I’m grateful to his Mother for shielding Roisin from the rain with an umbrella while they waited for the ambulance to arrive. I’m grateful for whatever it is that he’s said and done that caused Roisin to feel that it was safe to go to him to ask for help.

“I’m sorry
, Cabe. They have rules which we must obey and respect,” his Mother says.

He breaks down there and then in his Mother’s arm
s and sobs into her neck in the middle of the busy corridor. “It was my fault, Mom. I called out to her when she was in the road.”

“No
, sweetheart,” she soothes gently, “it’s not your fault.”

“Did you see her face
, Mom?”

She rubs the back of his head with her flat palm and squeezes her eyes together. “Yes
, I did.”

“She came to school in her first week with a black eye. The next week she had these huge gashes down her back. I should have done something.”

She pulls him back and grips his shoulders. “What could you have done? Did you ask Rose about them?”

He nods. “She got really
pissed off with me though and told me she wasn’t going to speak to me if I asked her about them again.”

She smiles gently. “You did what you could. Ros
e was new. You didn’t know her. You probably did a lot more than anyone else.”

Cabe pulls away from his Mother and paces up and down the corridors with his hands clasped behind his head. “This isn’t right
, Mom. If someone at home is doing this to her, then is it right that we say nothing?”

His Mother considers this for a moment. “Let’s go home. We’ll talk to your Father and then we’ll call the
police.”

He nods. “I don’t
want to leave her.”

“They will be op
erating on her for a few hours. There’s nothing you can do anyway, sweetheart.”

He nods a
nd walks slowly down the hallway. She throws her arm around him and pulls him into her. “Is she your girlfriend?”

He sniffs. “
It’s complicated.”

She blinks at him. “W
hat’s complicated about love, Cabe?”

I watch him look up at his Mother with tears in his eyes before they disappear through the door and out of view.

I take a deep breath and float back into the operating room, where they’ve cut open my daughter’s broken rib cage to repair her ruptured spleen.

I
float around the room, hating myself for what I’ve done to her. This is my fault. I should have left it all alone. I should have just allowed her to move on with her life like she was doing. If I hadn’t persuaded her to move to Oregon, then they wouldn’t be here and Hallie wouldn’t have had another reason to hate Roisin. Ever since the move, Roisin has suffered even more abuse. If I hadn’t told her about the diary, she wouldn’t have had that conversation with her Father and she wouldn’t have run out of the house like that.

I slide down the w
all and pull my knees in toward my chest.

“Please be okay,” I whisper. “Please survive this.”

I can hear the beeps of the machine that chime in time with the rise and fall of her chest. Roisin is physically destroyed and it’s breaking my heart to see her this way. It’s been five hours since the red Nissan skidded into her, causing her to fly through the air like a rag doll. It’s been two hours since she was wheeled out of the operating room and her Father still isn’t here. I wasn’t sure how angry Roisin was with her Father, but I imagine the fact that she fled the house with no shoes on suggests she was very angry. I don’t want her to be angry with Lance. He’s more than paid for what he did, and he’s her Father. He doesn’t beat her, and I’m more than sure that he doesn’t know about the beatings so he can’t do anything to stop them.