Best of Friends (53 page)

“She hated school, that was for sure. I used to dread those parent÷teacher meetings because there was bound to be some drama over Shannon’s behaviour, this class she’d missed and that bit of homework she hadn’t ever bothered to do.”

Mum and Dad exchanged knowing glances, remembering.

“I’ll go out and chop some logs for the stove,” said Dad, getting to his feet. He patted Erin and Kerry on the shoulders as he walked by. It was a warm day and there was certainly no need for a fire, but Erin knew her father was uneasy at emotional conversations. He liked the simple things in life: for his family to get on, for peace to reign and for there to be no need of grave family conferences.

When he was gone, Mum resumed her story. “Your father never knew how to handle Shannon,” she said sorrowfully. “He adored her but he didn’t understand her. In your father’s and my time, people would have been glad of a chance of education and the possibility of going to college, but Shannon was having none of it. She couldn’t wait to leave school and go off travelling.”

“You must have hated it when I wanted to do the same thing,” put in Erin, wincing at the thought of how her mother must have experienced a feeling of
déjà vu
when she’d wanted money to travel for her eighteenth birthday.

“You were different,” Mum said kindly. “Shannon wanted to go off and save the world and never come back; you just wanted a bit of excitement.”

“Look how it turned out, though,” Erin said slowly.

“Ah, get down off the cross, Ms. Martyr,” grumbled Kerry. “Somebody else needs the wood.”

They all laughed.

“And then,” Mum took a sip of tea that had to be cold by now, “she came home one night and told us she was pregnant. It wasn’t the news we were dying to hear or anything, but we said we’d stand by her. We loved her—what else would we do? Your father said we could add on a bit to the house for another bedroom—this was when we lived in Raheny and the house was small, to be honest, too small for four of us and a baby. But Shannon said no way, she wasn’t having any of it. She wanted to travel and she would. She’d have the baby adopted; it wasn’t going to tie her down.”

Erin felt a heaviness in her heart at this. It was painful to hear how she hadn’t been wanted, how her mother had planned to give her away.

“I know this is hard for you to hear, love,” Mum said to Erin, “but I wanted to tell you the truth, the way it was. I owe you that much. I thought I could protect you with half-truths before and look how wrong I was, so this is the real story, warts and all.”

“I want to hear the truth.” Erin wasn’t lying, but she hadn’t thought it would be so painful.

“Are you sure?” Mum asked.

Erin nodded and glanced at Kerry, who was listening with the air of one who’d heard the story before and knew each and every twist of the tale.

“Your father and I couldn’t bear for you to be adopted and we told Shannon we’d bring you up. That did go on, you know, love,” she added earnestly. “There are lots of children in the world brought up by their grandparents, thinking their aunts and uncles are brothers and sisters. We just wanted the best for you both and that seemed to be it.”

“I know,” Erin said. “You were wonderful to do it, Mum, honestly. It was just a shock when I found out.”

Her mother’s lovely blue eyes clouded. “I should have told you before. Lord knows, we talked about it enough, but as you got older, and we hadn’t said anything, I didn’t know how to broach it. And then when you asked for your passport … It’s true what they say about making a tangled web when you start to deceive.”

Erin, afraid her mother was going to cry, and not wanting that, reached over and grasped her hands. “Let’s move on. Tell me about Shannon, what she’s like. Let’s talk about the good times and not the bad ones.” She could have talked for longer about when Shannon had become pregnant, and who her true father was, but she knew it would upset her mother.

“The good times … Lord,” her mother said, casting her mind back. “I remember when she and her friend Lorraine made their First Holy Communion and they got all this money from the neighbours and they bought themselves so many sweets I thought they’d be sick, but they weren’t. And Shannon had kept some chocolate bars she said she was sending to the poor people in the Third World because their children never got sweets.”

Mum’s face shone at the memory. “Oh, and the time she got it into her head that Father Ryan should get involved in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament because he was a religious man, after all, and she couldn’t imagine why he wasn’t rushing off to make placards and join her on marches. That was when she was fifteen. She met this local lad who was big into CND and that was when she got interested in campaigning for things that were important. Somebody has to think of the bigger picture, she used to say.”

“She liked the idea of campaigning more than anything else,” Kerry interrupted. “When she got bored with CND, she moved on to the next thing. Remember that group who were going to travel to the States to protest about some secret military testing on Native American lands? She got interested in that because she wanted to go to the U.S. If they’d been based in the North Pole, she wouldn’t have been so keen, would she?”

“Ah, don’t be so hard on her,” pleaded their mother. “Her heart is in the right place. She’s an idealist, that’s all.”

Kerry shot a wry look at Erin that said she didn’t agree with this analysis but wasn’t going to start a row by saying so.

Mum talked for ages about how kind Shannon was but that she’d always been a bit other-worldly and wasn’t the most practical of people. That’s why she’d known it was better for her and not Shannon to bring up Erin. “With the best will in the world, she’d have had you living with strangers in some caravan on a protest site if we’d let her take you.”

“So she did want me, when she was older?” Erin asked eagerly.

“Not entirely.” Mum was cagey.

Kerry couldn’t stand the edited highlights anymore. “When you were eight, she was going out with a guy and he had a three-year-old daughter, so Shannon thought you might live with them and be company for his kid. That’s how much she wanted you.”

“That’s when I remember meeting her,” Erin recalled grimly.

“Yeah, she came back because she thought you might be useful to her.”

“Kerry! Don’t talk like that,” said Mum.

“It’s the truth, Mum.” Kerry was unapologetic. “She came back six years ago because she hoped we’d lend her money for that stupid hostel, and the only reason we know where she lives now is because she likes to think there’s money on tap nearby. I hope you haven’t been giving her any,” she added.

“I haven’t,” said Mum, and both Erin and Kerry knew she was lying.

“Is she bad with money?” asked Erin.

“She doesn’t understand that you have to earn it,” Kerry said caustically.

“Oh.”

Peter arrived back with the girls and Kerry went off to greet them.

“She’s angry with Shannon for what she did to you and me,” Mum said. “But I don’t want you to think badly of Shannon; she’s not a bad person at all. She’s just what they call a free spirit; she doesn’t want to be tied down. I longed for her to be like all my friends’ daughters: happy to marry, settle down, have children, but she wasn’t made like that.

“It was her choice and it’s wrong of us all to punish her for that. Maybe I was the one who made a mistake. Maybe I should have forced her to take care of you and that would have changed her.”

“If she didn’t want to, she didn’t want to,” Erin pointed out. “You can’t make people do things.”

“I know. And we loved you so much, it was a joy to rear you.”

Erin’s smile lit up her face. That was worth all the tales of how Shannon hadn’t wanted her: Mum and Dad did and that was what mattered.

An hour after leaving her parents’ house, Erin stood outside Shannon’s apartment building and told herself that if she saw a woman in a television show doing something this mutton-headed, she’d change channels. But then, every part of her life connected with Shannon had the faintly unreal air of a television show. It was the Shannon effect, she decided.

She’d got the address from her mother, and when it was time to go, instead of driving back to Greg and the hotel, Erin had set off to find Shannon. She had some time to spare, as Greg was sure to be working in the hotel room, and the whole family weren’t scheduled to meet again until seven, when they were going to have dinner. Erin knew that if she told Greg or Kerry that she was going to find Shannon, they’d want to come with her. But this was something she had to do on her own.

Shannon lived in Wexford town in an apartment in an old house with an imposing address. But somehow Rectory Lodge sounded much better than this place looked. On a busy street with shops and cafés all around, Rectory Lodge was a rambling old house that would cost more to tear down than it was worth. Erin stood beside the peeling black door and scanned the names under the doorbells. “Shannon & William” was written in flowing script under bell number six. Thinking of how hard most people tried to hide behind the anonymity of initials on their apartment buildings, Erin thought it was sort of naïve of Shannon to trumpet her name so publicly. But perhaps William, whoever he was, was built like a linebacker and saved Shannon from men who tried to come on to her. Erin didn’t know why, but she’d imagined that Shannon had lots of people do that to her. Men would like the glint in her eye and fancy their chances when the redhead smiled back in that knowing way. And Shannon probably spent her life saying, “But I only smiled at him, that’s all. It was just a laugh.”

Erin pushed the bell. It was so old that she had to push hard and, even then, she wondered if it had rung because it didn’t look reliable.

“Oh, if you’re looking for Shannon, she’s out,” said a voice, and a girl dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, with her arms full of packages, pushed past breezily. “You could wait on her landing if you’d like,” the girl added, taking in Erin’s pregnant figure. “There’s no chair or anything but you could sit on a step.”

“No, thanks, I’ll wait in one of the cafés,” Erin replied. “You don’t know when she’ll be back, do you?”

The girl shrugged and shoved the door open with her foot on account of the packages. Erin marvelled at the notion of leaving the front door unlocked in this day and age.

“Dunno when she’ll be back,” said the girl. “But she went out when I did and it looked like she was going for groceries. Shouldn’t be long.” She peered at Erin curiously. “You’re dead like her, though. You her sister or something?”

“Something,” Erin said.

In Coffee A Go Go across the street, she allowed herself a decaf latte and drank it deeply, thinking of the gorgeous lattes she used to get from a tiny coffee shop near the office in Chicago. How many times had she daydreamed away her lunchtime imagining this moment?

She kept watch on Rectory Lodge but, even so, she almost missed the slender figure who swept across the street and, despite the bags of groceries, ran lightly up the steps to the black door. The woman wore a long cream cardigan that covered her up, and Erin couldn’t get a look at her face, but her hair flowed free in a long tangle of red. Erin would recognise that colour of hair anywhere. It was just like her own. Draining her coffee, she left money on the table and hurried across the street. She opened the door, ignoring the musty smell of old damp carpet. Up the stairs she went. The first landing contained flats three and four. One and two must be on the ground floor, she figured, going up again. The damp scent was worse on the second landing, and if Erin had looked she’d have seen that the carpet was tattered beyond repair. But she didn’t look. Her eyes were fixed on number six, a plain green door that had been left ajar. Stopping to catch her breath, she waited a beat and then knocked. “Hiya, Ciara, is that you? The door’s open. Come on in. I got milk.”

Erin touched the door, waiting to wake up and discover that she’d imagined it and this was all a dream. But the door was real. She pushed and found herself in a big, high-ceilinged room painted apple green with an open door leading to what must be the bedroom. Postcards and posters for anti-war and anti-globalisation rallies decorated one wall and an old couch covered with several tatty throws dominated the room. Two peeling sash windows overlooked the street, and one section of the room had been turned into a shabby kitchenette where an elderly oven sat among a group of free-standing cupboards, painted a perkier French Golden Delicious green. A scarred foldaway table with three unmatching chairs was pushed against one wall and the two grocery bags had been dumped there casually. A small collection of vinyl records was stacked on a low shelving unit beside a portable record player of such vintage that Erin reckoned it must be antique. The room would have looked like a cheap student bedsit to Erin’s eyes except it lacked the modern paraphernalia that students these days owned, like high-tech TVs, CD players and shiny racing bikes. By comparison with the student digs Erin had known, this room was cheaper than cheap. It was not what she’d expected by any stretch of the imagination. Unless her mother didn’t have a penny to her name, this could not be her home, and such obvious penury didn’t fit in with the picture of Shannon’s hedonistic, free-spirited lifestyle. Mum and Kerry had said she wasn’t good with money, but she couldn’t be that broke. Who would leave their family for this?

A bustling from the open bedroom door told her that the occupant was in there and Erin had a moment’s anxiety about being in the wrong place. She could see herself being thrown out of the flat with cries of “Police!” echoing in her ears and …

A woman suddenly emerged from the bedroom and Erin’s thoughts of being in the wrong flat vanished.

Standing there with a quizzical look on her face was a woman the mirror image of Erin. The same copper hair, the same almond-shaped eyes, the same narrow face with a proud nose over a full upper lip.

The girl outside the building had been right when she thought the two of them were sisters, Erin realised. This woman did not look anything like the mid-forties she had to be. Thirty-six at a push, but no more. Her skin was unlined and faintly freckled. Proof, Erin thought bitterly, that no responsibility was the ultimate in anti-ageing treatments.