The Honey Queen

‘That won’t stop Martin. You know what he’s like: when he gets into something, he’s obsessed. The number one topic of conversation at dinner every night is either Martin’s latest haul of illegible records or how every kid in Dyanne’s class is going to a concert apart from her and it’s not fair that we don’t trust her, after all she’s nearly fifteen. We are a pair of fossils, she says. By the way, any chance you’d come to dinner on Friday?’

Lillie always said she was lucky to have such wonderful daughters-in-law.

‘It’s not luck,’ Daphne and Bethany would insist.

‘It’s because you’re the way you are. You never interfere,’ Bethany once told her.

‘But you know how to help when it’s needed,’ added Daphne.

Both of them knew girlfriends with mothers-in-law who needed to be locked up in high-security premises, if only there was a loophole in the legal system allowing for this. A special hard labour camp might be set up for those who continually brought meals over to their married sons’ homes ‘so they could eat proper food instead of takeout’.

Within weeks, Daphne had been proved right about her husband’s tenacity. Martin must have had termite blood somewhere in his genealogy because he’d burrowed into every crevice until he found out that Lillie had been given up for adoption in a Dublin convent by one Jennifer McCabe; father unknown.

Evan and Martin Maguire had conferred about this information, and then Martin had burrowed even deeper in the records to discover that Jennifer McCabe had subsequently married a Daniel Green, and from this union there was a son, Seth, now in his fifties.

Teaming up, just like they used to when they were kids, two years apart in age, Martin and Evan arrived at their mother’s home waving pieces of paper and airplane schedules.

They had her brother’s address and every detail they’d been able to glean about him from the Internet. Seth Green was an architect; he’d designed a school which had won an award, they told her delightedly.

‘What?’ Lillie stared at her sons, united in their happiness over this information.

‘We’ve found your brother!’ said Evan. ‘We haven’t contacted him yet, but we will if you say we can. He’s your family – our family. We’ll talk to him and then you can fly to see him. We’ll pay. Doris could go with you …’ Evan, cheerleader in the expedition, took after her with his strawberry blond hair and freckled Celtic skin. He had his father’s wonderful kindness too – it shone from his eyes. ‘Mum, the last six months or so have been so terrible for you. Maybe doing something new would help you recover from Dad’s death – not that you would ever recover,’ he added hastily. ‘But, you know …’

Both he and Martin looked at her expectantly, hoping and praying this plan would help. She could see it in their faces and she loved them for it, but it was all too much, too fast.

She might be able to smile at people from the safety of her Melbourne home, but away? In a foreign country with people she didn’t know and a brother who might hate the sight of her? As for Doris, she was so scared of flying there wasn’t a snowball’s hope in hell of getting her on a plane.

‘Let me get the iced tea out of the freezer and then we’ll talk,’ Lillie told her sons and left the room as fast as she could.

In her and Sam’s clapboard Victorian house with its pretty curlicued verandah and lush garden, the kitchen had been very much Lillie’s room. It wasn’t that Sam hadn’t cooked – his barbecue equipment had been treated as lovingly as a set of a carpenter’s tools, washed and put away carefully on the grill shelf after each use. But barbecuing was outdoor work.

The kitchen, with its verdant fern wallpaper, pots of Lillie’s beloved orchids on all surfaces, and the big old cream stove they’d had for thirty years, was her domain. She stood in it now and briefly wondered where the small tray was, where the tea glasses were. Shaken by the news that she had a brother, Lillie was suddenly overwhelmed by a wave of loneliness. She and Sam had often talked of travelling to Ireland.

‘We could kiss the Blarney Stone and see if the Wicklow and Kerry Mountains are as beautiful as they say,’ Sam said.

‘As if you need to kiss any Blarney Stone,’ she’d teased back.

He’d known that she didn’t want to search for her birth family. That had been the dream of a younger woman.

I know it’s out of love, but why do people keep coming up with things to make me feel better, Sam? she asked now, looking up.

She didn’t know where he was or if he heard her, but talking to him helped. She just wished he’d answer in some way.

Grief was a journey; she’d read that somewhere. A person didn’t get over it, they moved through it. One of the worst parts was not knowing where she was on the journey or if she was on it at all yet. The pain was still so bad. Perhaps she was only at the entrance to the grief journey, buying her ticket, looking out at an endless plain in front of her where people were to be seen shuffling along in parallel lines, time slowed to a snail’s pace.

‘Mum—’ called Martin.

‘Hold your horses,’ she called back, finding the cheerful mother voice she’d always been able to summon. Her sons had their own lives and families. Mothers cared for their sons, they didn’t expect the sons to have to care for them.

She carried the tray of iced teas into the living room.

‘Show all the documents to me,’ she said, sitting between them on the big old couch with the plaid pattern. ‘A brother!’

Seth Green had immediately responded to Martin’s email. Martin printed out the reply and read it to her, but Lillie didn’t like this email business. She was a letter or a phone call person. How could you tell what sort of person was writing to you on a computer when you had no voice to listen to or no signature to consider? Seth was apparently happy to hear about her and that was just fine, but nonetheless she felt stubborn. Seth and Frankie could visit her if they wanted to. She was busy, she told her sons.

Then, a fortnight ago, Seth had sent a letter via Martin, the letter that nestled in her handbag and called to her so that she read and reread it many times a day.

Her adopted mother, Charlotte, the only mother she’d ever known, had often talked about Lillie’s background and all she knew of it. She’d told her how in 1940s Ireland illegitimate children and their mothers were so badly treated that most women were forced to give their babies away in tragic circumstances. A nun called Sister Bernard had been travelling to Melbourne to join the Blessed Mary Convent in Beaumaris and she’d taken baby Lillie with her for adoption. Mother Joseph, who was in charge of the convent, knew how much Charlotte and Bill wanted a baby after all the miscarriages, and so baby Lillie had come into their lives.

As Martin proudly handed over the letter to his mother, Lillie knew that he hadn’t considered the possibility that she might not want to see her birth family. She’d thought it wouldn’t bother her, but at that exact moment, she discovered that there was still a tiny place inside her that ached with the pain of rejection.

For two weeks she’d been carrying the letter in her handbag. This morning, just as she was about to drive to the park for a walk with Doris and Viletta, something had made Lillie open her handbag and take out the now worn letter one more time.

Her mother had often told her the Irish had a way with words and it was true. The letter was proof of that. Such warmth and such pure honesty all wrapped up together. And all from someone she had never met. Crazy though it seemed, it was as if this person thousands of miles away could see into her heart and understand the hopelessness inside. Lillie wondered again if it was partly written by Seth’s wife. Because whoever had written the letter had gotten through to her in a way that nobody else had since Sam’s death.

Please come … I may be speaking out of turn because I’ve never suffered the sort of bereavement you have, Lillie, but it might help?

She stood in the hall, lost in thought. Outside, the sun was blazing down. It hadn’t been the best summer but now that autumn had arrived, the heat was blistering. Nearly forty-two degrees on the beach the day before, according to the radio. Even as a child, Lillie had never been a beach bunny. Not for her the shorts, skimpy vests and thongs that her friends ran about in.

‘It’s your creamy Celtic skin,’ Charlotte would say lovingly, covering the young Lillie with white zinc sun cream.

Years later, as a married woman, Lillie had pretended irritation with Sam that he, despite also being of Celtic descent, was blessed with jet-black hair and skin that tanned mahogany.

‘You’re only pretending you’ve got Irish blood,’ she’d tease. ‘You came from Sicily, no question.’

Not a freckle had ever dusted his strong, handsome face and the only time his tan faded was as he lay wasting away in the hospital bed. His skin turned a dull sepia colour, as if dying leached everything from a person.

‘I’m sorry, love. I don’t want to leave you and the kids, the grandkids …’

Those had been almost the last words he’d spoken to her and she treasured the memory.

Lillie had struggled to find words to comfort him. Then it had come to her, a gift to the dying, the only thing she could give him: ‘We all love you so much, Sam, but it’s the right time to go, it’s safe for you to go. We don’t want you to suffer any more.’

Saying it and meaning it were two entirely different things. In her breaking heart, Lillie didn’t want Sam to die. She could now understand people who kept loved ones alive for years even when they were in a vegetative state from which there was no return. The parting was so final.

But people sometimes needed to be told to go. One of the hospice nurses had explained that to her. Strong people like Sam, who had fiercely protected their families all their lives, found it hard to leave.

‘They worry there’s nobody there to take care of you all,’ the nurse had said. ‘You need to tell him it’s OK to go.’

And Lillie had.

When Sam had been dying, the hours seemed to fly past because she knew they were his last.

Since then, time had slowed to a snail’s pace …

Now, standing in the hall, she rubbed her eyes furiously as more tears arrived. She was so tired of crying.

Her cell phone pinged on the hall table with a text message.