The First Time I Said Goodbye Read online

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names,

  characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the

  author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons,

  living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  Published 2013

  by Poolbeg Press Ltd

  123 Grange Hill, Baldoyle

  Dublin 13, Ireland

  E-mail: [email protected]

  www.poolbeg.com

  © Claire Allan 2013

  Copyright for typesetting, layout, design, ebook

  © Poolbeg Press Ltd

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  1

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 9781781991350

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  www.poolbeg.com

  About the author

  Claire Allan is from Derry, where she has worked as reporter and columnist with the Derry Journal since 1999.

  She shares a home with a long-suffering husband, two children who are growing up much too fast, and two cats – one of whom is officially (according to a vet) neurotic.

  When not writing or working, Claire enjoys reading, baking, spending time with friends, trying to keep up at circuit classes and avoiding soft play areas.

  The First Time I Said Goodbye is Claire’s seventh novel. You can follow Claire on Facebook or on Twitter @claireallan.

  Also by Claire Allan

  What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?

  If Only You Knew

  It's Got to be Perfect

  Jumping in Puddles

  Feels like Maybe

  Rainy Days and Tuesdays

  Published by Poolbeg

  For Avril and Bob, who inspired this story

  And for daddy’s girls everywhere

  Chapter 1

  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go. I did. I wanted to go with all my heart but I suppose in many ways I was a coward in the end. It was too much. There isn’t a day that has passed where I haven’t missed you.

  * * *

  Meadow Falls, Florida, USA, May 2010

  It seemed only right that it was raining. It would have been wrong if it had been anything but. You can’t bury someone on a sunny day. I couldn’t have buried him on a day when the sun was splitting the stones and the sprinklers were dancing around the lawns and when the Southern Belles were out in force, fanning themselves and thinking about getting back to the wake for an iced tea on the porch. Black on a sunny day wouldn’t have been at all comfortable. Not that the shift dress I wore was comfortable anyway. It was starchy, stiff, far removed from the comfortable clothes I usually slouched around in. “It suits you,” my mother said when I walked into the church. She was already sitting in the front pew, her hands crossed, her gaze fixed firmly ahead, her eyes hidden behind her sunglasses. She glanced at me only briefly as she told me I looked nice, and I sat beside her and reached for her hand. Now was not the time to brush off her compliment – to tell her I was afraid the dress might choke me or split at the seams. She had enough worries without me adding to them. I stared ahead too, trying to fix my gaze on whatever she was looking at, and squeezed her hand. She didn’t squeeze back, but she didn’t shrug me off either.

  We sat there, together, awaiting the big arrival. Waiting for my father to make his final journey into the church – neither of us being able to face walking in behind him, having people gawp at us in our grief, nudge each other at our tears, give us that pitying ‘poor them’ look. No, we had walked in separately, ahead of the congregation, and fixed our eyes forward, barely touching, and I tried not to breathe out. I heard the door of the church open, the footsteps of our fellow mourners, and I felt my mother breathe in – and as she exhaled there was a small shudder which revealed to me just how she was feeling. I squeezed her hand a little again as the music started to play – wanting to make it better for her – and wanting to make it better for myself, and I thanked God it was raining, because it would have been wrong to bury him on a sunny day.

  It would have felt all out of sorts, as if the world was spinning off its axis, to have had the sun smiling on us when inside there was a small part of me screaming as if I was still six years old and the only person who could make it better was my daddy – the daddy who was never coming back.

  * * *

  Craig’s arm slipped around my waist. I instinctively breathed in, away from him, and I tensed as I felt his hand take mine. He cuddled up closer to me, asking softly if I was awake. Yes. I was awake. I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to talk. I don’t think I had actually slept. Maybe I had. I vaguely recalled Liam Neeson walking into our room at three in the morning, so probably it was fair to say I had drifted off. The rest of the time, however, I had just lain there, looking at the red light on the clock, watching the numbers slowly changing. My father had been gone four days. I wondered when I would stop thinking of it in terms of days, in terms of weeks, in terms of time passing, and just think of him as gone. Maybe I never would. Maybe now I just had another day to mark – another day to count from. It was one day since his funeral. One day since I had stood at his graveside and willed my heart not to shatter as they lowered him into the ground. I was a grown woman. I was thirty-seven. Now was not the time to scream for “Daddy”. My mother had stood stoically. I’m not sure if she cried – she didn’t sniff. I didn’t notice a dabbing of eyes but I noticed her squeeze my hand a little tighter as we were invited forward to toss some soil into the grave on top of his casket. I hated that part. Even though I could feel the almost overpowering, claustrophobic warmth of Craig behind me, I had shuddered there in the clammy warmth of the graveyard. My mother had been led away by her friend Louisa, while I stood there and stared, entranced by the hole in the ground.

  “We should go,” Craig had said and I’d glanced up to see we were all but alone in the cemetery, the majority of mourners having clambered into their cars and the waiting limos to be ferried back to the golf club for lunch.

  I was shivering in the rain – my neck cold as the drops slid down my back. They weren’t cold. I knew they could no
t be and yet they felt like ice. I felt like ice.

  “I don’t want to leave him,” I muttered.

  “Then stay here as long as you need,” he said softly and he let me stand there until I was shivering so hard that my teeth were chattering. I felt . . . I felt confused. Broken. Torn.

  “We’ll get you warm, we’ll get you changed and then we’ll go on to Green Acres,” he said softly, leading me away, and in a haze of pain and grief I’m almost ashamed to admit that my only thought was that I didn’t own a single other thing in black and I would look like an insensitive heel at my own father’s wake.

  I found the next most suitable thing I owned – a soft grey cashmere dress – and I quickly showered, put on some fresh make-up and tousled my short blonde hair, grateful I didn’t have a look that required more work, before breathing deeply and telling Craig we were good to go again.

  “You’re doing well,” he said. “You’re getting through this.”

  I smiled – a weak, watery smile – gratefully clinging on to whatever hint of reassurance I could find, regardless of where it came from.

  “No choice but to keep on going,” I said. “Time to go and mingle with the mourners, I suppose. To listen to them all tell me how he has gone to a better place, and isn’t in pain any more and how he was a good man.”

  “He was a good man.”

  “I know. And I know folks mean well . . . but . . . you know . . .” I said, drifting off. Platitudes wouldn’t make it better – no matter how well intentioned.

  * * *

  My mother had taken off her sunglasses by the time I arrived at Green Acres. She was sitting in a circle of friends, smiling and nodding. I was sure she was listening to the platitudes and being my mother – ever polite and afraid to offend – she was smiling at them. Part of me wanted to run over and tell her she didn’t have to do that – but she would have killed me stone dead if I had made a scene. She would have glared at me, her lilting Irish accent which remained despite her many years away from home ringing in my ears: ‘Don’t you make a holy show of me or yourself, Annabel.’ So I nodded in her general direction and set about fixing my own weak smile on and promising myself that I would not make a show of myself – not one bit. And I didn’t. I behaved myself right until the very moment when the last guest went home and then I drank three glasses of wine straight, cried all over my mother who ended up soothing me as if she herself wasn’t hurting, and had to have Craig tuck me into bed where I spent the following ten hours watching the clock flicker and change.

  “We could go for a drive today,” he said, in the half light. “Get out of here – clear our heads.”

  “I need to go and help my mom,” I said. “I was pathetic yesterday. I need to be there for her.”

  “You’ve been at her side for weeks, Annabel. You need a break. You will burn out – if you haven’t already.” His tone had veered from concerned to snippy.

  My own mood changed just as quickly. “I’ve been at her side for weeks, so I can’t just leave her now,” I said, turning to face him. “He’s gone. I can’t just leave her in limbo now and clear off because the nasty business of the funeral is done with. She’s spent her last few months caring for him. What in hell is she supposed to do now that she doesn’t have that any more?”

  Of course, I knew as I spoke that it was me that I was worried about – that without having to run to the hospital, pace the wards, feed my father softened food gently, hold his hand and read to him that I might be the one to fall apart. That I would have to finally accept this loss – and deal with everything else I had put on the back burner while I devoted my life to caring for the wonderful man who had always made me feel important.

  My mother? Of course I worried about her too. She seemed calm – too calm – and that unnerved me. Then again everything unnerved me at the moment.

  “She might want some space?” Craig offered and I shrugged his arm, which suddenly felt too heavy, away from me. “We might need some space from all this?”

  “Not now, Craig,” I said, sitting up and grabbing my robe from where I had thrown it on the floor.

  He rolled back away from me. I knew without looking at him that he would be crestfallen – just as I knew I was pushing him away. But grief does funny things and I kind of wished it was socially acceptable to walk around wearing a T-shirt that said “I’m grieving. Allow me to be a bit mad” on it, because then I wouldn’t have to try and make people understand. Surely they should know just how raw and horrible this felt? Surely they had all been there?

  * * *

  My mother sat on her bed, folding clothes and putting them into bin bags. T-shirts he barely wore, chinos that had become baggy and loose on him over the last few months.

  “I’m packing them up,” she said as I walked in, pushing her hair off her face and curling it behind her left ear.

  “You don’t have to do that now,” I said.

  “I know. But it has to be done sometime.”

  “But not now, Mom,” I said. “You don’t have to do it now.”

  “Annabel, pet, I know this is awful but I’ve been living with it for a long time. I knew this day would come. I was ready for it – sort of.”

  I didn’t understand that, how she could be ready for it. Sure we had all known this wasn’t going to end well but that didn’t mean I didn’t feel every shred of breath leave my body in the moment the breath had left his.

  “I was there for him, Annabel. I was there and loyal and I loved him, right to the end. I always will love him but he’s gone and, sweetheart, he’s not coming back. So I need to move on.”

  She spoke so calmly that I felt the room swim a little. It was almost as if she were talking about paying the bills, or doing the grocery shopping. Something which might as well be done now. Not something that had ripped our lives apart. I rested my hand on the chair by her dressing table and looked at her again.

  “I want to go home to Ireland,” she said, folding his shirt – his checked shirt, the one he had worn when we went to the coast and walked along the beach. I had teased him for ogling the young, surgically modified women in their bikinis and he had told me he only had eyes for my mother. I looked at it: empty, folded, slipped into a bag. “And I’d love you to come with me.”

  I looked at her as if she were mad. She was mad. Maybe she needed the “Grief makes you do funny things” T as well?

  “Don’t look at me like that, Annabel,” she said, lifting another shirt, folding it and placing it in the box marked for Goodwill.

  Feeling churlish, I reached in past her and took it back out again, holding it tight in my arms, trying to get some hint of him back. All I could smell was her detergent and fabric softener – not a hint of coffee or musky aftershave. Not a hint of my dad.

  “You want to go back to Ireland? And you want me to go with you?”

  “It’s not that hard to take in, is it?” my mother said, her face set in a way that let me know she was very much determined to go ahead with her plans – with or without me.

  “But, Mom, you have a life here. I have a life here. I have the bakery. I have Craig. We have this house – your friends, your colleagues, your life.” I was clutching at straws, of course. Straws of what I had, before. What I had before he was sick. When everything changed. What I really wanted to say of course was that I could not even begin to imagine how she could want to walk away from our home and our life, even though there was a part of me which wanted to walk away from my own life. I knew she was grieving but . . . I felt something constrict in my throat.

  “Who said anything about walking away? I just want to visit. It’s been a long time. I need to get away, don’t you understand that? Everything has been on hold for so long . . . Everything has been so hard. Illness and death. Even this damn house – it doesn’t smell like home any more. It smells of antiseptic and illness and the perfume of strangers come to pay their last respects. I just want to go home again. I’d love you to come with me – to see Ireland. Di
dn’t we always talk about going? When you were small? Wouldn’t it give us both a lift?”

  Chapter 2

  I never imagined we wouldn’t be together. From the moment I met you I knew I had to be with you. I can’t breathe without you, but I can’t think of another way. Not without breaking hearts all around me. Do you understand? It’s easier to break mine than theirs. I’m just so sorry, my darling, that you are caught in the crossfire.

  * * *

  I had never been to Ireland before. It was one of those trips we always talked about but never quite got round to taking. My Irish family members were people I knew from birthday cards, phone calls and, latterly, Facebook. Ireland was somewhere my mother spoke of wistfully – regaling tales of Irish dancing, dew-dappled mornings, the craic and the singing. I grew up on a diet of Maeve Binchy books and an annual family viewing of The Quiet Man. I am pretty sure my mother had hoped that one day I would enter the Rose of Tralee, but as my teens turned into my twenties and my twenties into my thirties and I showed no sign nor interest in reciting a poem or dancing a jig on Irish national television she let the dream slide. Dad, well, to him I was his all-American girl born on the fourth of July – my mother had a battle with him not to call me Sam.

  “Sure, there’s already a Sam in our family,” she argued, my Aunt Dolores having delivered a boy by that very name a year before.

  “Yes, but he’s a he and lives thousands of miles away,” my father had argued.

  My mother had fixed him with a steely glare – not too unlike the one Maureen O’Hara gives John Wayne in The Quiet Man – and told him there would be no such name. So he had retaliated and vetoed her choice of Aoibheann (“Who on earth could pronounce that?” he had asked) and they had settled for the non-controversial name of Annabel.