Best of Friends (49 page)

The sound of her sister’s voice set Erin off again, sobbing noisily into the phone.

“Jesus, are you all right? You’re not in trouble, are you? In hospital? Prison?”

A half-sob, half-laugh escaped from Erin. Trust Kerry to think of all the possibilities.
Midnight Express
had been one of her favourite films.

“No,” she said, snuffling. “I’m fine, living outside Cork, and I’m married.”

There was a silence at the other end of the phone. Erin could imagine what was going on in her sister’s mind: why the hell didn’t you contact us before now?

“I wrote, Kerry. I wrote lots of times and nobody answered. After that time you’d told me not to phone again, I thought you all hated me and didn’t want to hear from me.”

“You daft cow, course we wanted to hear from you,” said Kerry. “I shouldn’t have told you to stop phoning. I was angry, that’s all. Mum and Dad were in bits about it all and you’d never given them a chance to tell you about Shannon, not properly.”

“I’m so sorry,” Erin repeated. “I should never have run off like that …” She didn’t know why she kept crying but she couldn’t seem to stop.

“Are you all right?” asked Kerry.

“Yes,” said Erin, trying to stop crying. “I’m a bit emotional. I’ve wanted to do this for so long and I thought you’d all hate me …”

“You sure you’re not sick?” asked Kerry suspiciously.

“No. Pregnant,” sniffled Erin. “My hormones are all over the place.”

“Pregnant, huh? To think of all the effort I went to when you were a teenager telling you how not to become pregnant,” said Kerry in amusement. “Remember us going to the family planning clinic on Synge Street when you were going out with that Adrian bloke and I told you that you had to go on the pill or something?”

“And I didn’t want to go because there was no way I was going the whole hog with Adrian.” Erin remembered it so clearly.

Kerry had been an incredible older sister, really. She’d done her best to protect Erin from everything. Looking back, Erin could see that Kerry hadn’t wanted another member of the family going through the trauma of an unwanted pregnancy. But there had been more to it than just that. Kerry, for all her toughness and their daily arguments, had adored her baby sister and wanted to protect her from the world.

“You were so good to me,” Erin said softly.

“There you go. Water under the bridge.” She sounded like Kerry again: no time for crying over spilled milk. “I suppose you’d better come and see me, unless you’re the size of a house and can’t travel.”

“I can travel,” mumbled Erin.

“You, pregnant, wow. I never thought I’d see the day. Peter and I have two daughters.” Kerry’s voice was soft. “They’ll be thrilled to see an aunty from my side of the family.”

Meaning that Shannon still wasn’t around, Erin realised.

“Can I come to see you tomorrow?” she asked.

“Same old Erin,” teased Kerry. “Still the wild, impatient one with the red hair. It’s still red, isn’t it? You swore you hated red and wanted to be blonde.”

“Still a redhead,” Erin confirmed, then, going for the old family joke: “No hair, just a red head. And you?”

“Ah, it was costing a fortune keeping me platinum,” laughed Kerry. “I’m back to my natural mouse, or rather rat, with the odd blonde streak to remind me of my former glory.” She paused. “It’ll be good to see you, Erin.”

“Are you going to tell Mum and Dad I’ve been in touch?”

“We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” promised her sister. “I better give you directions to here.”

Erin climbed out of the bath, pulled on her dressing gown and took the phone into the bedroom to write down all the details. After Kerry had said goodbye, Erin remained sitting on her and Greg’s bed, staring at the bit of paper on which she’d written the directions. After so long, she was finally going to see her family. Kerry, Mum, Dad. She felt a surge of emotion at the thought of hugging her parents and having them forgive her, because they would, she knew it. And maybe she’d even meet Shannon. Or maybe not. Shannon had never been around but perhaps that was the way the family wanted it in order for the deception to work. Erin hoped that was the reason why Shannon had never returned. The alternative was too painful to consider.

For the first time in years, Erin allowed herself to think about her birth mother and her real reasons for leaving. There was no way that Shannon could be called her real mother: that had been Mum; Shannon didn’t deserve to be called that. After all, she’d left her child and had never come back. And she could have come back. It wasn’t like the story of countless women who’d been forced to give up children and regretted it for ever. They’d never known where their children were, they could only remember birthdays and tearfully wonder who their baby looked like as she or he grew up.

But Shannon could have known what Erin looked like, she could have shared in her life. She simply hadn’t wanted to.

Erin reflected on what sort of person Shannon must be. Had she been too emotionally immature to cope with a child or had she been the sort of free spirit who thought babies were burdens and someone else would have been better taking care of her?

Erin tried to remember the woman in the photographs: she’d had the same red hair as Erin and the same shaped face, but her eyes had been blue like Kerry and Mum’s. Erin wondered if she’d inherited her startling amber eyes from her father. And who had he been? There were so many questions. But, Erin promised herself, she was going to find the answers. Years before, she’d run away and she regretted it deeply. Now, she was going to find out the truth about her birth, no matter how long it took.

Greg wanted to take the day off work to drive her to meet Kerry but Erin said no. She had to do this on her own.

“Are you sure?” he asked, and Erin hated to see the hurt in his eyes.

“Sure.” She pulled him close to her and kissed him. “If and when we go to see Mum and Dad, I’d love you to come with me, to introduce them to their new family,” she added, putting one of Greg’s hands on her belly. “But today I have to go on my own.”

She was still unsure about her reception from Kerry. There was nobody in the world with more fierce loyalty than her sister. In Kerry’s eyes, Erin had let everyone down. Nobody had spoken of Shannon much when Erin had been growing up, but Erin knew that Kerry had hated her sister for what she’d done to their mother. Erin prayed that Kerry wouldn’t hate her too for doing the same thing.

Kerry’s directions had been precise. On the Dublin road outside Portlaoise, Erin took a small road to the left, followed it for exactly three miles, turned right and drove for another mile, past a hamlet with two shops, a garage and a flower-bedecked pub. Kerry’s house was the third house down from the pub crossroads.

She spotted the place instantly. Kerry had described it as a renovated old two-storey house with a windmill in the garden. She hadn’t mentioned that the garden was a beautifully tended riot of colour. The whole place was so very not Kerry, a woman who’d said she’d die rather than live anywhere without access to twenty-four-hour shops, and who’d only notice flowers if they came in an expensive bouquet in the arms of a boyfriend.

Erin parked and got out of her car. She hadn’t even reached in for her handbag when the front door of the house opened and a woman emerged.

Kerry might have been thinner, older and her trademark blonde bob was now a feathery short cut, but the sight of her still moved Erin to tears. In Kerry’s arms was a squirming, vanilla-skinned child not more than one year old, and at her skirts, clutching a bit of denim fabric, was an exquisite little girl of perhaps five or six, her slanting dark eyes staring up at the stranger in wonder.

“Look at you,” smiled Kerry, gesturing at Erin’s belly. “Mummy.”

“And you,” said Erin, biting her lip to stop herself from having another crying binge.

“Say hello, Lianne.”

Lianne, the child hiding behind Kerry, said “hello” in a barely audible voice.

“Hello, Lianne,” said Erin, bending briefly down to smile warmly at her.

“And this is Kaylin.” The child in Kerry’s arms stopped squirming at the mention of her name and dimpled up at her mother.

“They’re beautiful.” Erin gazed at the new additions to her family and felt the weight of shame again. Through her own stupidity, she’d missed years of their and Kerry’s lives.

“I’m so sorry—” she began.

“It’s all right, Erin.” There was no bitterness or resentment in Kerry’s expression. “Come on inside and take the weight off the floor,” she added. “If you give me a craven apology, then I might let you have some of the chocolate-chip cookies Lianne and I made earlier.”

Emotion made Erin light-headed. She giggled. “Craven apology, what’s that?”

“I was going to ask for hands-and-knees stuff, but not with that belly,” Kerry pointed out. “No, under the circumstances, it’ll have to be a common or garden apology.”

“What’s a pology?” demanded Lianne, hanging back to look at the stranger as Kerry led the way into the house.

“It’s when you say sorry for doing something naughty,” Kerry said. “ ‘What’ is her favourite word,” she added quietly to Erin. “You wait till it’s your turn.”

“I can’t wait,” said Erin happily. She couldn’t believe how well it was working out. There was no awkwardness, no hesitancy. Erin was home and Kerry was happy to see her. The past nine years might never have happened.

Kerry led the way into a small kitchen with a sun-filled conservatory at one end. Lianne’s drawings covered the walls in the kitchen and a variety of brightly coloured pictures made with little palm prints were proof that Kaylin was getting in on the act.

“These pictures are lovely,” Erin praised Lianne.

Pride made the last of Lianne’s shyness disappear. “I can do horses too,” she said self-importantly. “Want to see me do one?”

“Oh yes,” said Erin gravely.

Lianne rushed off to drag paper and crayons from a drawer and then sat at the kitchen table to begin her masterpiece.

Kerry settled Kaylin in a high chair and gave her a beaker of juice before piling up some cushions on a wicker chair from the conservatory and pulling it into the kitchen proper.

“For your back,” she told Erin, who sank into it gratefully. “I noticed you looked a bit stiff.”

“I am,” Erin said. “However did you notice that?”

“My new vocation. I give healing massages in the alternative health centre.”

“You do?”

“I had a career change a few years ago. There’s only so much of your life you can spend in front of a computer typing reports, so I retrained.”

“Was this after the cancer?” Erin asked softly.

“Vanessa told you, huh? Big mouth.” Kerry put a plate of homemade cookies on the table.

“I should have been here.”

“It would have been nice to have you around,” Kerry admitted. “It was hard for Mum and Dad. They felt pretty helpless, but then, so did I.”

“Vanessa said you’re clear of it now.”

“Four years and counting,” Kerry said, crossing herself. “I’m on medication and I have regular checks, but I was one of the lucky ones.”

“A friend of mine died recently from breast cancer,” Erin said.

Kerry shot a quick, anxious glance at her older daughter and Erin mouthed the word “sorry.” But Lianne didn’t seem to have noticed the talk of death and was busily colouring in a bright orange and yellow pony with four of the longest, skinniest legs Erin had ever seen.

“I work with people with cancer now,” Kerry said in a low voice, rescuing Kaylin’s juice from where she’d flung it onto the table. She handed it back and Kaylin, delighted with this game, flung it again. “One of the programmes in the health centre is the cancer therapy. Massage is hugely beneficial to people recovering. After I got cancer, Peter and I downsized. We moved here with Lianne, I trained in massage and Peter got a job in a big garage in town.”

“This from the woman who hated the country and was afraid of cows,” Erin teased.

“I know,” laughed her sister. “But it’s lovely here, we’ve a great life and the girls love it. We’d adopted Lianne before I got cancer and we were trying to adopt another Chinese baby, so that was put on hold for a while. Kaylin came to us six months ago.” Kerry looked down at her daughter with utter adoration.

“Mummy, look, I’ve finished,” announced Lianne, beaming as she displayed her drawing.

“Darling, that’s beautiful, isn’t it, Aunty Erin?”

“Fantastic,” Erin said.

After a while, they sat outside in the garden while Kaylin played in her sand box and Lianne rushed around showing her new aunt all her toys and how clever she was with them. She was particularly proud of her cycling ability, and whizzed up and down the grass.

“Dervla from my class still has to use stabilisers but I don’t,” Lianne said, stopping beside Erin to let her admire the pink and purple bike.

While the children played, Erin told her sister about the missing years, of how much she loved Greg, of how thrilled they were about the baby—and how she’d always thought of home but had been afraid of her welcome. In turn, Kerry filled her in on how she’d met Peter (“I had this banged-up old car with a dodgy clutch and he worked in the garage down the road. I saw so much of him that we began going out and the rest is history.”) and on her parents’ decision to move house. She didn’t mention the circumstances that led her and Peter to adopt their two beautiful daughters and Erin didn’t ask. Kerry had been so welcoming to her, she couldn’t expect to be let in on every secret yet.

“Mum always wanted to live in the country, and when Cora Flaherty’s house was broken into, it was the beginning of the end for them. They never got the little bastards who did it,” Kerry said vehemently.

“And they’re happy?” Erin asked tentatively.

“Very. But they’ll be happier now they know you’re back. I told them this morning.”

Erin gasped. “And …?”

“And I had to practically phone for a fleet of security guards to stop them hopping into the car and driving up here. They can’t wait to see you, and Greg, and the bump.”

In true mummy fashion, Kerry had everything close by her, including tissues for baby emergencies. She handed a wedge of them to Erin.