Cecelia Ahern - If You Could See Me Now

For as long as Elizabeth could remember, she looked after herself and her silent, brooding father and didn’t ask when her mother would be home. She knew in her heart that her mother would eventually return, cheeks flushed, eyes bright, and speaking breathlessly of the world and all it had to offer. She would waft into their lives like a fresh summer breeze bringing excitement and hope. The feel of their bungalow farmhouse always changed when she returned; the four walls absorbed her enthusiasm. Elizabeth would sit at the end of her mother’s bed, listening to stories, giddy with delight. This ambience would last for only a few days until her mother quickly tired of sharing stories rather than making new ones.

Often she brought back mementos such as shells, stones, leaves. Elizabeth could recall a vase of long fresh grasses that sat in the center of the dining room table as though they were the most exotic plants ever created. When asked about the field they were pulled from, her mother just winked and tipped her nose, promising Elizabeth that she would understand some day. Her father would sit silently in his chair by the fireplace, reading his paper but never turning the page as he got lost in his wife’s world of words.

When Elizabeth was twelve years old her mother became pregnant again and, despite the newborn baby being named Saoirse, this child didn’t offer the freedom her mother craved, and so she set off on another expedition. And didn’t return. Her father, Brendan, had no interest in the new baby and waited in silence by the fire for his wife to return. Reading his paper but never turning the page. For years. Forever. Soon Elizabeth’s heart grew weary of awaiting her mother’s return and Saoirse became Elizabeth’s responsibility.

Saoirse had inherited her father’s Celtic looks of strawberry-blond hair and fair skin, while Elizabeth was the image of her mother. Olive skin, chocolate hair, almost black eyes; in their blood from the Spanish influence thousands of years before. As she grew from adolescence, Elizabeth resembled her mother more and more, and she knew her father found it difficult. She grew to hate herself for it, and along with making the effort of trying to have conversations with her father she tried even harder to prove, to her father and to herself, that she was nothing like her mother, that she was capable of loyalty.

When Elizabeth finished school at eighteen she was faced with the choice of moving to Cork to attend university, a decision that took all her courage to make. Her father regarded her acceptance of the course as abandonment; he saw any friendship she created with anyone as abandonment. He craved attention, always demanding to be the only person in his daughters’ lives, as though that would prevent them from moving away from him. Well, he almost succeeded and certainly was part of the reason for Elizabeth’s lack of a social life or circle of friends. She had been conditioned to walk away when polite conversation was started, knowing she would pay for any unnecessary time spent away from the farm with sullen words and disapproving glares. In any case, looking after Saoirse as well as going to school was a full-time job. Nevertheless, Brendan accused her of being like her mother, of thinking she was above him and superior to Baile na gCroíthe.

She had begun to understand how her mother must have felt living in such a suffocating home where she felt bored and trapped by marriage and motherhood. Like her mother, she found the small town claustrophobic. It was a place where every action of every person was monitored, frowned upon, commented on, kept, and stored for gossip. A place that managed to attract the tourists but repel the women of the Egan family. Elizabeth felt the dull farmhouse was dipped in darkness, with no sense of time. It was as though even the grandfather clock in the hall was waiting for her mother to return.

“And, Luke, where is he?” Marie asked over the phone, bringing Elizabeth swiftly back to the present.

Elizabeth replied bitterly, “Do you really think Saoirse would take him with her?”

Silence.

Elizabeth sighed. “He’s here.”

Saoirse was more than just a name to call Elizabeth’s sister. To her sister it was an identity, a way of life. Everything the name represented was passed into her blood. She was fiery, independent, wild, and free. Saorise followed the pattern of the mother she could not remember, to such a degree that Elizabeth found herself watching Saoirse to keep her from disappearing like their mother. But Elizabeth kept losing sight of her. Saoirse became pregnant at sixteen and no one knew who the father was, not even Saoirse. Once she had the baby she didn’t care much for naming him but, when pressed, she gave her baby boy a name that was like a wish. Lucky. So Elizabeth named him Luke. And at the age of twenty-eight, Elizabeth found herself once again responsible for a child who wasn’t her own.

There was never as much as a flicker of recognition in Saoirse’s eyes when she looked at Luke. It startled Elizabeth to see that there was no bond, no connection at all. Granted, Elizabeth had made a pact with herself never to have children. She had raised herself and raised her sister; she had no desire to raise anybody else. It was time to look after herself. After having slaved away at school and college she had been successful in starting up her own interior design business. She had reached her goals by being in control, maintaining order, not losing sight of herself, always being realistic, believing in fact and not dreams, and above all, applying herself and working hard. Her mother’s and sister’s example had taught her that she wouldn’t get anywhere by following wistful dreams.

Despite that pact with herself, there was no one else in the family capable of providing Luke with a good life, so Elizabeth found herself thirty-four years old and living alone with a six-year-old in a house she had made her haven, the place she could retreat to and feel safe. Alone because love was one of those feelings that you could never have control of. And she needed to be in control. She had loved before, had been loved, had tasted what it was to dream, and had felt what it was to dance on air. She had also learned what it was to cruelly land back on the earth with a thud. Having to take care of her sister’s child had sent her love away and there had been no one since. She had learned not to lose control of her feelings again.

The front door banged shut and she heard the patter of little feet running down the hall.

“Luke!” she called, putting her hand over the receiver.

“Yeah?” he asked innocently, blue eyes and blond hair appearing from around the doorway.

“ Yes, not yeah ,” she corrected him sternly. Her voice was full of the authority she had become a pro at over the years.

“Yes,” he repeated.

“What are you doing?”

Luke stepped out of the doorway into the hall and Elizabeth’s eyes immediately went to his grass-stained knees.

“Me and Ivan are just going to play on the computer,” he explained.

“Ivan and I,” she corrected him and continued listening to Marie at the other end of the phone arranging to send a Garda car out. Luke looked at his aunt and returned to the playroom.

“Hold on a minute,” Elizabeth shouted down the phone, finally registering what Luke had just told her. She jumped up from her chair, bumping the table leg and spilling her espresso onto the glass. She swore. The black wrought-iron legs of the chair screeched against the marble. Holding the phone to her chest, she raced down the long hall to the playroom. She tucked her head around the corner and saw Luke sitting on the floor, eyes glued to the TV screen. Here and his bedroom were the only rooms in the house she allowed his toys. Taking care of a child had not succeeded in changing her as many thought it would; he hadn’t softened her views in any way. She had visited many of Luke’s friends’ houses, picking him up or dropping him off, so full of toys lying around they tripped up everyone who dared walk in their path. She reluctantly had cups of coffee with the mothers while sitting on teddies, surrounded by bottles, formula, and nappies. But not in her home. Edith had been told the rules at the beginning of their working relationship and she had followed them. As Luke grew up and understood Elizabeth’s ways, he obediently respected her wishes and contained his playing to the one room she had dedicated to his needs.