A Very Accidental Love Story Read online

  ‘Asleep hours ago,’ Helen smiles sweetly up at me from where she’s sprawled out in front of the TV, eating Haagen-Dazs straight from the tub. ‘Oh you should have seen her in the bath! She was so adorable! We had the BEST fun. Then she got into her little pink sleeper suit and insisted on me reading Sleeping Beauty to her … You know that’s her number one story now? And her new thing is that as soon as I’ve told it to her, she has to tell it back to me. She’s completely word perfect, her memory is just incredible you know, almost photographic, just like yours …’

  Helen happily chatters on while I stand rooted to the spot, fixing her with a borehole stare. No, I did not know Sleeping Beauty was now Lily’s favourite story. Or that she likes to tell it back to you as soon as you’re finished. I knew none of this; how could I? The one night I can get away from work relatively early to see her, I’m already too late.

  ‘I really wanted to do all that with her,’ I tell Helen, as a flood of disappointment suddenly makes me irrationally snappy. ‘Just once, just for tonight. I nearly crashed the car I rushed home that fast, I had to spin a pile of stories even just to get away this early …’

  ‘But it’s half eight at night!’ Helen insists. ‘The poor little thing was exhausted. We’d been to the park earlier today you see, to feed the ducks and the weather was so fine, we stayed there much longer than I’d planned. Then we came back here and had dinner, and of course by then, she was practically falling asleep into her spaghetti hoops. So what else was I to do?’

  I give a long, defeated sigh and tell her it’s okay, it’s not her fault. I was just looking forward to seeing my little girl, that’s all. But she knows me of old and knows only too well when to pay no attention to me when I’m ratty from sleep deprivation, so she quickly goes back to her TV show.

  ‘By the way, Sean called for you today,’ she calls over to me cheerily from the sofa as I tear open the post from the island in the centre of the kitchen.

  ‘Who the hell is Sean?’

  ‘Oh you know Sean, he’s the FedEx guy. Left a package on the hall table for you. He says he’s been delivering to you for years. Such a sweet guy; do you know he has a daughter exactly Lily’s age with another one on the way?’

  Vintage Helen, getting pally with all around her, entrancing everyone she meets with her natural charm and old-fashioned niceness. In the space of a few days, she’s also befriended the cleaning lady over big, bonding mugs of tea and whinges about the respective men in their lives, not to mention the gardener, who she’s now on first name terms with as well. Whereas the sum total of my knowledge about the cleaner is that her first name is Mary and that she has the permanently disappointed look about her of a woman whose husband left her for someone younger, but not before transferring all his assets into an offshore account. Wait and see though, I bet before the month is out Helen will end up going out on a drunken girlie night in Temple Bar with the cleaner and it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if she ended getting invited to the gardener’s house for a Sunday roast.

  Not that I’m holding any of this against her, it’s just a constant daily reminder of our sibling relationship; I’m permanently cast in the role of bad cop against her perennially popular good cop. I’m the green-faced Wicked Witch of the West to her Glinda, the Good Witch in the meringue dress that everyone loves and gravitates towards and wants to hang around with. This was our central casting as kids and this, it would seem, is how we still are.

  Then there’s the fact that she seems to be in constant and daily contact with our mother and feels the need to tell me this all the time. Now every family has someone like Helen; the glue person. The one who tries their level best to keep each one in check and fully informed about everyone else, no matter how much indifference and how many shrugged shoulders they come across. Since she moved in, Helen’s forever passing on little titbits of news, like, ‘Guess what? Mum’s just gone and bought a lovely new patio set for her back garden. The wooden one she had just fell apart after all that rain they had recently in Marbella, and you know how she’s had her eye on a cast iron one for ages now …’

  Have I ever had a conversation with my mother regarding patio sets? Didn’t even know she had a back garden. Last time I had a decent conversation with her was over a week ago and even then, she was only ringing up to talk to Lily.

  Ahh, Lily. It seems that even a small child isn’t immune to Helen and her Miss Congeniality charm offensive. I’ve never seen anything like it; Lily took one look at this shadowy figure who she vaguely remembered from Christmas dinners, not to mention all the birthday cards and gifts that had been posted up from Cork over the years, and instantly idolised her Auntie Helen, practically from the moment she walked through the front door. Turns out Helen is a born natural with kids, the way she’s a born natural with everyone, and now on the rare occasions when I’m home, all I’ll get from Lily is a rough shove followed by, ‘NO! Not YOU, I want Auntie Helen to read me my storwy. Then Auntie Helen can gimme my bath and put me to bed.’

  Don’t get me wrong, of course I could kiss Helen’s feet, I’m that grateful to her, but that doesn’t mean it’s not killing me inside.

  No words to describe it, when you suddenly feel unwanted at home. When you’re superfluous under your own roof.

  ‘No, please don’t worry about rushing home, Eloise,’ Helen’s said to me time and again this week, ‘you don’t have to cancel your meeting and leave the office yet. Lily and I are having such a ball here! We’ve made cupcakes and I’m just teaching her how to ice them now. Stay in work, I know how important that is to you. And don’t worry, we’re all fine here, we’re having great fun!’

  So far, the pair of them have been to the park together, the movies, the Build-A-Bear factory at the Dundrum Town Centre; they’ve even had tea parties for all of Lily’s dolls in the back garden and picnics at Sandymount Strand. Everything that I want to do with Lily but can’t.

  So if I’m being brutally honest … I’m in equal parts grateful to her, but not a little jealous of her too. Burning childhood memories resurface; the way everyone, absolutely everyone just prefers her to me, she’s a bright light that people can’t help be drawn towards, moth-like. My own daughter, it would seem, included.

  ‘You know Eloise, I’ve been thinking,’ Helen beams over the top of the sofa at me, turning down the volume of the TV.

  ‘Umm?’ I mutter distractedly, my head buried deep in the pile of post that I’m still wading through.

  ‘Lily still hasn’t stopped talking about her dad you know, it’s become almost like an obsession with her.’

  This, by the way, is delivered with a look that might as well say, ‘if you were around more often, you’d know.’

  ‘Oh come on, not this again …’

  ‘Yes, this again. You have to listen to me, Eloise. It’s the first thing she talks about when she wakes up every morning, last thing she asks me about before I put her to bed. When am I meeting him, where is he, have you found him yet, where are you looking … the poor little thing’s not letting it drop. And to be honest, I don’t think this is something that’s just going to go quietly away all by itself, like you’d thought.’

  Okay, so now she has my attention.

  ‘So if you think about it,’ Helen goes on, pausing to dump the now empty tub of ice cream on the coffee table in front of her, then licking every single last dribble of chocolate sauce off the back of the spoon. ‘Would it be such a terrible thing if we did a bit of detective work and tracked him down? I mean, I’d be more than happy to make all the phone calls and do all the work for you. I know how busy you are, but trust me, you wouldn’t have to lift a finger. I’d report back to you at every stage and I wouldn’t do a thing without your say-so …’

  I stand stone still and throw her a look so icy that it could freeze mercury. At least, that’s what I hope it conveys. Lately Seth Coleman has been saying behind my back that my glacial stares, once so terrifying, are now starting to make me look a bit constipated.
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  ‘I mean … it absolutely goes without saying …’ she hastily backpedals, realising how unimpressed I am by all of this shitetalk. ‘Not that we’d want him to be a part of her life in any way at all. This is just so Lily can put a face to his name. That’s all. To help her get closure on this and you know … put it all to bed. She’s become unhealthily obsessed and I really think this is the best way to deal with the whole issue.’

  Helen trails off, waiting on my response. Then for good measure tacks on,

  ‘So, emm … What do you think then?’

  ‘Helen,’ I begin, arms folded, nearly swaying with tiredness by now, ‘Are you completely insane? Why are you even raising this subject? Lily isn’t quite three years old yet, she’ll have forgotten all about it in a few days.’

  ‘But she hasn’t forgotten, that’s the whole point that you’re missing!’ Helen insists, forcefully coming right back at me. ‘You work twenty-four-seven; you haven’t heard her asking about him morning, noon and night …’

  ‘Oh here we go,’ I sigh deeply, sinking exhaustedly down into the armchair opposite her and kicking off unforgiving high shoes which have been pinching me since I first put them on … at five this morning. ‘Throw in the absentee mother jibe, why don’t you. Go for it, play the low card.’

  Then I remember my manners, remember just how much I owe her for being here when I’d no one else to turn to.

  ‘Sorry, I really didn’t mean to sound so grouchy,’ I compose myself and apologise.

  ‘That’s okay. I think that after almost twenty-eight years, I’m well used to you by now,’ she smiles benignly, then looks back at me expectantly, clearly waiting on a fuller discussion to follow.

  ‘Thing is, I’m very, very tired, Helen. I’ve had the longest day in the longest week you can possibly imagine. Tracing Lily’s father is completely out of the question and to be perfectly honest, I’m not a hundred percent certain that I appreciate you even bringing it up.’

  ‘But I’m only doing it for Lily,’ she says sweetly, refusing to get riled.

  Which of course only riles me up even more.

  ‘Because you know, this isn’t a bullet that you can dodge that easily,’ she chatters on easily, ignoring the waves of boxed fury emanating from my corner of the room. ‘Sooner or later, the day will come when she’s going to track him down for herself, you know.’

  ‘Yeah, fine, maybe when she’s eighteen, so why don’t I just cross that bridge when I come to it? I’ve told you Helen, it’s completely out of the question. I won’t have some total stranger barging his way into my baby’s life and maybe even letting her down and wanting nothing to do with her. Which he’d be perfectly entitled to do, you know. I’m only trying to protect her, that’s all’.

  ‘But you’re completely missing the point,’ says Helen calmly, reasonably. ‘She’s not a baby any more, she’s a little girl. And all kids want is to be normal, to be the same as the others. If you won’t do this for your own reasons, then at least do it for Lily. Let her just put a face to the word daddy, then let it go. She’s already well able to understand that you’re not with her dad, but just let her get this out of her little system. Then next time other kids in a playground ask her about her father, she can be one of them and answer truthfully about where he is and what he’s like, instead of having to tell the world that she doesn’t even know where he is or what his name is. It’s this whole mystery surrounding him that’s making her so obsessed.’

  ‘You’re completely exaggerating, she is not obsessed …’

  ‘Oh no? Do you realise that every picture she’s drawn with her new colouring set is of her dad? Then today we got the bus to the park and she waddled up and asked the driver was he her dad. Same thing to a guy serving on the till in Tesco. Then later on she was watching a DVD of Shrek while I was getting dinner and now she’s got it into her head that her father is king of some faraway kingdom.’

  ‘Well … This is just a phase and she’ll soon grow out of it.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because kids do.’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  Which of course, suddenly stops me dead in my tracks.

  ‘I’m sorry … What did you just say?’

  ‘Eloise, do you honestly think that I spent my whole childhood and adulthood not wondering about my own natural parents? Who they were and where they were from? And what were the reasons why they’d given me up for adoption? Do you really think that’s not something that obsessed me for just about as long as I can remember?’

  ‘But, you never mentioned anything before …’

  My voice gets increasingly smaller and smaller then trails off into nothing. Because the thought is unspoken between us. Why would Helen tell me, of all people? Why would anyone bother to tell me anything about their private life? Even if she had phoned me to talk, chances are all she would have got would have been my voicemail, or else a promise from my assistant to get the message to me. Which, I shamefacedly have to admit, the chances of my returning would have been slim to none.

  Have to say I’m feeling very, very small right now. Something that’s happening far too often lately.

  Thankfully Helen is too humane to really hammer the point home though and I feel an even deeper surge of gratitude towards her for this small mercy.

  ‘You see,’ she goes on to explain, distractedly picking up one of Lily’s stuffed cats from the floor in front of her and thoughtfully playing with it, ‘because our parents were fantastic to me and I loved them both so much, it seemed almost like ingratitude to want to know who my real family were. But that didn’t stop me from always wondering, and in later life, becoming absolutely determined to find out the truth about my birth family. Who were they, why they gave me up, all of that.’

  ‘But Helen,’ I say, a bit softer now, ‘Mum and Dad adored you, idolised you.’ You were like their little treasure. I want to tack on, and we both know that I was the also-ran daughter, the difficult one, the one they always had to worry about, but somehow there’s no need to. It’s unspoken between us. She already knows.

  ‘I know all that and believe me, I couldn’t have been more grateful to either of them. Or, God knows, have had a happier childhood. But you’re missing the point. Because no matter how loving a family you grow up in, knowing you’re adopted still leaves a scar. You spend so much time wondering. Think about it. Your mother, the person who’s supposed to love you and protect you more than anyone else in the world, gives you away. The first thing that happens to you in the first few days of life is that you’re rejected. And I just had to find out why. And also to let her know that I was okay and thank God, that things had worked out well for me. So, it took me years to pluck up the courage, but eventually I decided to do a bit of detective work. I told our mum of course; I’d die if she thought I was doing anything behind her back. But she understood that this was something I absolutely needed to do and she was incredibly supportive. Came with me to the adoption agency and everything.’

  ‘And …?’ I manage to get out, overwhelmed by the tidal wave of guilt at not being there for her. At not even knowing about this before now.

  ‘I was too late. My birth mother had passed away about two years previously. She’d had breast cancer and apparently died very young, in her early fifties. She was only sixteen when she had me and it turned out my biological father, her boyfriend, had been killed by a drunk driver in a car crash shortly before I was born, which was why I was put up for adoption in the first place. She was grieving, I imagine, and felt she couldn’t cope with a new baby on top of everything else she was going through. I don’t even blame her either – chances are I’d have done exactly the same thing in her shoes. She was only sixteen for God’s sake, she was still a kid herself.

  ‘But please listen to me on this Eloise,’ Helen says gently, leaning forward and looking at me intently, ‘I now have to spend the rest of my life living with the fact that I was too late. That if I’d gone about tracking down my bi
rth mother years ago, I may have been able to meet her, might even struck up some kind of a relationship with her. Maybe I could even have seen her before she passed away. But I kept putting it off and now I have to live with the what-ifs. All I’m saying is, don’t put Lily through what I’ve been through. She’s obsessed about finding her real dad just like I was and it’s not going to go away. So please, for her sake, deal with this now, while there’s still time. She has a right to know, just like I did. And our mum supported me when I went digging for the truth, so why not do the same for Lily?’

  Oh God, I think, looking sympathetically across at her. I feel so awful for Helen, for what the poor girl had to go through. And could she have a point? Is this whole thing turning into an obsession for Lily that won’t go away until she finally finds out who her father is? Then one awful mental image after another starts to crowd in on me; of the child sitting on a bus today and asking the driver if he is her dad. Of her not even being able to enjoy a harmless TV movie without fantasising about who her real dad is … Drawing pictures of him …

  Who knows what’s going through her little mind?

  Helen knows me well and must sense that I’m wavering, because next thing she’s sitting cross-legged on the sofa in the Lotus position, looking serenely calm, fair hair neatly flicked over her shoulder.

  ‘Aren’t you in the least bit curious yourself,’ she puts it to me, ‘to know anything at all about him? I mean, he must come from good stock, he’s got to be intelligent, because Lily couldn’t just get it from you and you alone. Sure, just look at her. She’s so alert and advanced for her age, don’t you think so?’

  I nod, tears of pride surprising me by stinging my eyes. Lily is incredibly bright; I’ve no doubt about that. She never even had baby-talk, she started speaking words clearly and distinctly at eighteen months and by aged two, she was talking in whole sentences, like a proper little lady. Already she’s learning to read and can assemble all her own toys and even more impressive, can amuse and entertain herself for hours without getting bored. She even surprised me by being musical at a very young age and when I bought her a piano, she took to it like a duck to water. She’s too young for proper lessons yet, but the second she is old enough, I’ve been intending to hire private tuition. To be perfectly honest, I’m only itching for her to turn three so I can get a proper IQ test done on her. Because I know she’ll score high, just know it.