Keeping Faith

She wrinkled her nose. “The chicken had a sweet sauce all over it, and I don’t eat beef. So Hannah didn’t know what her mother was telling you?”

“That’s what she claims.” He forced his mind away from Hannah and her news. “Brid, you’re worrying me with this food thing. There’s enough in there to feed an army. If you don’t like the chicken, find something else. Some bread or cheese or something.”

“For God’s sake, Liam.” She tossed the carrot she’d picked up onto the sand. “What’s it to you what I eat? You’re getting on my nerves, always watching me.”

“Who will, if I don’t? You’re not exactly doing much of a job yourself.”

“I’m fine. Leave off, will you? I swear, you’re like the bloody food police.”

Liam said nothing. Inside, they were singing “The Belle of Belfast City” and someone yelled for Brid to join them. She glanced over her shoulder but didn’t answer. Moments passed and then she put her arm around his shoulders, pressed him close.

“Sorry.”

He shrugged. She was a grown woman and it wasn’t his role to watch over her, but he couldn’t help how he felt.

“Do you believe that she didn’t know?” Brid asked.

“I’m not sure.” His thoughts back on Hannah’s bombshell, he picked at a bit of peeling paint on the railing. “You’d have to know her family. When one of them sneezes, the others not only know about it, they’re there with hankies and cough mixture. Hannah was always close to them. I can’t believe she didn’t know all about her mother’s conversation with me.”

“But she came to the club to see you,” Brid pointed out. “And she told you about your daughter. If she’d wanted you to think she’d had an abortion, why would she do that?”

Liam looked at her. Brid had a point. On the other hand, if Hannah wasn’t in on it, why had she never tried to communicate with him? She’d never sent so much as a single picture. Nothing. A daughter—and he had no idea what she looked like.

“It sounds to me as though the mother was trying to get rid of you,” Brid said. “Probably thought the abortion thing would do it.”

He considered. It wasn’t hard to imagine Margaret’s thinking. The family—to put it mildly—had never been particularly fond of him. Being a musician was bad enough, being an Irish musician was worse. Easy enough to imagine their thinking. He would take Hannah back to Ireland, leave her barefoot and pregnant in an unheated shack while he traipsed off around the world drinking and womanizing. Maybe they’d thought rescuing her from him was their only option.

“Did you love her?”

He shrugged.

“Come on, Liam. It’s me, Brid.”

“I used to.”

“Not anymore?”

“I don’t know. It’s been a long time.”

She laughed. “You should see yourself. Furiously picking the paint off the wood because this whole thing makes you squirm, doesn’t it? Talking about feelings?”

“‘Feelings,’” he sang, trying to distract her. There was nothing he hated more than rambling on about what was going on in his head. It was one of the things he and Hannah used to fight about. She was always trying to drag him into long, drawn-out talks. “Tell me what you’re thinking,” she’d say. “Tell me you love me. Why is it so hard for you to say it?”

He eased off another chip of paint, realized what he was doing and stopped. Hannah. He’d spent years hating her for what she’d done, or what he thought she’d done. Seeing her tonight was…he couldn’t believe it. She looked different…great, really. Enormous green eyes and a wee little face. He used to pull her leg about looking like a kitten. Now she looked all grown-up. The way you’d expect the mother of a six-year-old to look, he supposed.

“What now, then?” Brid asked. “What will you do?”

“I don’t know. I’m still trying to get used to the idea I’m a father.”

“Does she know about you? Your daughter, I mean?”

“I’ve no idea what they’ve told her.”

Brid lit a cigarette, waved out the match and tossed it onto the sand. “Want to know what I think you should do?”

He grinned. “Have I a choice?”

“No.” She spoke through a cloud of blue smoke. “If you’ve any sense, you’ll forget tonight ever happened. Getting involved will only cause trouble. The child’s here. You’re in Ireland. Music is your life. You spend half of it on the road and you know nothing at all about being a daddy.”

“That’s your opinion, is it?”

“It is. But from the look on your face, I’ve the feeling I might as well be talking to the wind. You’ll regret it though, Liam. I’m telling you. You’re not a daddy sort of fellow.”

HANNAH STOOD OUTSIDE her mother’s bedroom, trying to tell from the sounds inside whether Margaret was sleeping. The house had been in darkness when she got home from Fiddler’s Green. A note from Margaret on the kitchen table said she’d dropped Faith off at a friend’s house for a slumber party. Hannah raised her hand to knock, then stopped. Back in her own room, she sat on the bed. Maybe she needed to sort things out in her own mind before she spoke to Margaret.

Including why seeing Liam tonight made her want to run around locking windows and doors. She got up, went down to the kitchen and microwaved a cup of chamomile tea, carried it up to her room and set it on the bedside table. Fully dressed, she lay down on the bed. Even in the familiar security of her room, she felt shaky and anxious, as though the stability of her life had been physically threatened.

Jen had advised her to move out immediately. “Your mother lied to you, Hannah. She told Liam you’d had an abortion. There’s no way you can go on living there.”

Most parents really only want to do what’s best for their children.

However misguided their motives. How many times had she had to remind herself of that when dealing with the parents of her students? But she hadn’t been a child. How was she ever supposed to trust Margaret again? She picked up the phone to call Deb. Changed her mind and set it down. Swung her legs off the bed and wandered over to the window. Stared out at the dark night.

The room overlooked the rose garden her father had started shortly after she was born. There were something like thirty or forty plants out there. He would mark special occasions with a new variety. She’d lost count of all the roses planted for her and Deb. A pink Tiffany when she graduated from high school, a yellow one whose name she could never remember when she got her degree from Cal State. Three or four, all white, to mark Faith’s various milestones.

The only occasion never commemorated with roses was her marriage to Liam. When she’d asked her dad about it, he’d said something about poor-quality roses that year, but she knew the real reason.

Liam. His music still played in her head, but the evening had already taken on a dreamlike quality. One minute he’d been there, close enough to touch. And then he was gone. Elusive as smoke.

It had always been that way with Liam. She’d met him during a trip to Ireland, a birthday present from her parents. He’d been playing in a Galway club that she’d wandered into one evening. During a break in the session, he’d come over to talk to her. He’d quoted poetry, made her laugh, hummed songs in her ear. Looking back, she knew she’d fallen in love with him that night.

Still, she’d left the club never expecting to see him again. The next morning her landlady had knocked on her door to say she had a caller. Barefoot, in a red tartan robe, she’d walked out to the top of the stairs. Liam stood at the foot, smiling in the pale sunlight, a bunch of daisies in his hand.

On her last day in Ireland, the countryside had bloomed with hawthorn hedges and primrose and the air had smelled of mowed hay and turf smoke. They’d taken a boat to Clare Island and stayed until dark. On the beach, with the moon beaming down on them, they’d made love. Afterward she’d looked up at the crescent of a new moon, like a fairy tiara in the dark sky; watched the silvery light on Liam’s face. Felt the fine sand slip between her fingers.

They’d kissed goodbye at the airport and, despite all his promises to stay in touch, she’d again had the feeling that this was it. That as magical and wonderful as the whole experience had seemed, it wasn’t quite real. Like trying to hold on to the memory of a dream. But, once more, Liam had surprised her. The day she’d opened the door to see him standing there had been as mind-blowing as opening the paper to see his picture. “Come with me,” he’d said.

In a celebratory mood after a show one night, they’d driven to Las Vegas. The wedding chapel was so hideously tacky, they’d both dissolved into fits of laughter. As they walked back out into the garish night, Liam had dumped a bag of silver paper horseshoes on her head. Her father had been incensed. Margaret had cried for days, a mini nervous breakdown, according to Helen.

After Liam went back to Ireland, the family quietly and efficiently fixed up the wreckage of her life. A family friend had taken care of the divorce. Helen had arranged the job at La Petite Ecole. The nursery, where Faith had slept until she was five, had been decorated by Margaret and her sisters who, when Faith decided she was too old for rainbows and kittens, had redecorated it to look like a tree house.

Liam’s name was seldom mentioned and, except for Faith, it sometimes seemed to Hannah that she’d dreamed the whole relationship.

Until tonight. She got up from the bed, padded out into the hallway and tapped on her mother’s door. Nothing. She started to knock again, then stopped. It was nearly one. Margaret would be groggy. Better to wait.

THE NEXT MORNING, Saturday, Hannah doubled her usual three-mile run. At the bottom of Termino, she glanced both ways at the traffic then sprinted across Livingstone Drive and Ocean Boulevard, past La Petite Ecole, around the end of the pier and the new Belmont Shore Brewery with its ocean-view patio; down along the footpath that paralleled the edge of the beach.

She’d started running soon after Faith was born, and her route never varied. A sprint along the beach then up the slope that led to the art museum on Ocean Boulevard, twice around Bixby Park where, as kids, she and Debra had been taken by their parents to hear Sunday afternoon concerts on the grass, then back down the slope for the return trip.