One Night on the Island(69)

Mack





29 October


Boston


I KNOW WHAT ENDINGS FEEL LIKE


I haven’t let anyone know I’m coming home today. I’ve moved through the last couple of days on autopilot, away from Cleo, closer to the kids. I dragged my bags through Arrivals at Logan, acutely aware in a way I’ve never been before of the sheer scale of the place, the noise, the volume of people. In some ways, the anonymity of the city is welcome; in another way, I ache for the rhythmic sound of the ocean, the peaty, salted taste of Salvation air, the smell of Cleo’s hair.

I miss her violently. I swing between feeling like a fool for allowing things to spiral out of control and justifying it to myself as unavoidable. Damn, she was brave to lay it on the line, not knowing how I’d react. Truth is, the minute she lowered her defences, mine washed away like Salvation sand at high tide. It does her a great disservice to suggest that it was just a ‘right time, right place’ thing. If anything, it was a ‘right person, wrong time’ thing – for both of us. I have too much going on in my life, too many unresolved feelings here to contemplate moving on with a woman who lives half a world away. Besides, Cleo has too complicated a relationship with herself at the moment to be in the right place for a romantic partner. She’s craving a period of self-reliance – she needs to focus her love inwards before she can afford to give any away. Somewhere down the line, though, it’s inevitable that she’ll meet someone new and he’ll be the luckiest guy on the planet. I have no right to feel kicked in the teeth at the idea of her with someone else, but I do. I feel like I’ve crash-landed back on the unforgiving grey sofa in the furnished apartment I call home these days and it’s horrendous. I chose it purely because it’s ten minutes from the kids. I’ve no clue who lives next door. I don’t want to become part of the community or take in packages for the neighbours. Photographs of the boys are the only personal items I’ve bothered to put up. It would take me less than half an hour to clear my stuff out of here, intentionally ready at a moment’s notice to go home. Home. How much more complicated that is now that there’s Robert. And Cleo too, I guess. I’m going to have to tell Susie about her. Not that I feel as if I did anything wrong, but how can we discuss Robert without me being upfront too? Not that it’s the same thing. Cleo isn’t going to be part of the boys’ lives. She won’t help them with their homework or read them stories at night. They’ll never even know her name. The thought of Robert doing any of those things flattens me, a hard shove on my solar plexus that has me lying back on the sofa with a hand on my chest. I close my eyes and visualize myself back on Salvation Island. I’m standing on top of Wailing Hill and down below I can see lights in the windows of Otter Lodge and smoke rising from the chimney. It’s a little after five in the afternoon here in Boston, which makes it just after ten at night in Ireland. Cleo might be curled up on the sofa with her laptop, or perhaps she’s having trouble sleeping and is out on the porch steps looking at the stars with a shot of whiskey in her hands? God, if only I could snap my fingers and be next to her in a heartbeat. I press against my chest, feeling for the beating shard she embedded there, and in my head I walk down the hill to wrap a blanket around her shoulders. I hope she was right about the connection. I hope that wherever she is right now, she’s just paused and unexpectedly thought of me.

‘Mom?’

‘Mack!’ Her voice is shot through with surprised pleasure.

‘It’s good to hear you,’ I say, closing my eyes because I feel about thirteen again. I can see her settling on to the bench seat in the hallway, a mental throwback to the old landline phone that used to be there. She could sit anywhere she wants to answer calls these days, but she’s never gotten out of the habit of sitting at that hallway table.

‘The line is so clear,’ she says, pleased.

‘I’m not surprised,’ I say. ‘I’m in Boston.’

‘You’re home?’ she says, caught off guard. ‘Already?’

I hear concern slide into her tone at my early return. She knows how much going to Salvation meant to me, and that I wouldn’t be home early unless it was necessary.

‘Is everything okay with the boys?’

‘They’re fine, I’m fine. It just felt like the right time to come home,’ I say. She’s been a rock-solid support to me, gathering me in when I turned up on her porch and broke down not long after the separation happened, choking out my words because I just couldn’t figure out what I’d done so damn wrong. I don’t want to tell her about Robert over the phone, and I wouldn’t know where to start about Cleo. If I’ll ever even tell her. What would I say? Hey, Mom, guess what happened, I had myself some good old vacation sex! How immature does that make me sound? Besides, it doesn’t do justice to what happened in Otter Lodge. Should I tell her I fell in micro-love instead, and so it follows that I now have micro-heartbreak? If I had to find words for how I feel since leaving Salvation, I’d say I feel as if I lost something. Not like when you’ve misplaced your keys or your wallet. More like, say, if the Red Sox disappeared tomorrow, or if I couldn’t hold the familiar lines of my Leica in my hands. They’re foundation stones of who I am. I’d be less of a person without them in my life. So, yeah. I’ll probably never tell my mom about Cleo because I don’t have the right kind of words to convey her importance, or her absence. And here’s the thing – I have something to compare it against because this isn’t my first brush with the end of a love affair. The white-hot panic and brain-numbing shock of separation from Susie is an all-too-recent experience. I’ve had to get used to living without all the best parts of my life, the desolation of not being with my kids all the time, the twisted-knife pain of rejection by my wife, the profound loneliness of this condo and, in a way, the shame.