Page 25 of Pages of My Heart

Thomas

After finishing his lunch shift at the diner, Thomas stands on a street corner four blocks away, fidgeting anxiously as he waits for Charlie. Today, he’s going to tell him the truth.

Thomas’s mother is dead.

It happened on a Wednesday, more than a month ago now.

He had seen Charlie twice that week afterwards, but he couldn’t bring himself to share the news.

They had buried her Monday morning. No proper service, just Thomas, Bridget, Eddie, and Michael at the gravesite.

Maggie wasn’t even told. As far as she knew, their mother was already dead—a lie of convenience they had carried on for years.

After returning from the cemetery, Thomas had taken to bed, his limbs like lead, his thoughts turning to fog.

The next day, he couldn’t rise. Nor for many days thereafter.

He’s not sure how long he remained in bed before Charlie came to see him, although he remembers asking for him.

Or dreaming of him. He remembers the whispers too.

Bridget and Michael hovering like dark shadows over his bed, breathing horrid things into the stale room.

“This is what she was like before they took her away.”

“Dad always said Tom was most like her.”

“Imagine the gossip if he turns out as crazy as her.”

He’d cried silently for hours, slept for more, and in between stared at the patterned wallpaper until his eyes blurred into a kaleidoscope of grays.

His body could not grant him the energy to sit up, let alone stand.

He didn’t eat, he barely drank. He burns with shame knowing he soiled his bed more than once.

It was only Charlie coming to see him that broke through the numbness, and with each subsequent visit, Thomas’s mind had started to knit itself back together.

Dark thoughts were gradually replaced by Charlie’s smiling face, his body regaining its strength through gentle touches stolen when Bridget left the room, and the doubts sown by his siblings’ whispers slowly banished by the love and reassurance in Charlie’s tender words.

And still, it had taken weeks to fully recover.

Thomas’s lips curl into a smile as Charlie hops off a busy streetcar and approaches, his hands growing restless with the desire to reach out, to touch.

They go through their well-rehearsed routine for meeting in public—formal hellos and firm, business-like handshakes.

Then Thomas’s smile drops and he lowers his voice.

“I need to take you somewhere. There’s something I need to tell you.”

Charlie looks like he’s trying to read Thomas’s mind, chewing on his bottom lip like he often does when he’s nervous. “Okay. Is everything all right?”

“Yeah, but it’s something I should have told you earlier. I—I should have told you right away, but . . .” Thomas looks down at his shoes, shifting his weight and feeling uncomfortable in his own skin. “I don’t know why I didn’t, but I want to now. Come on, this way.”

It takes almost thirty minutes to reach the cemetery on foot. When it finally becomes clear that this is where Thomas is leading him, Charlie grabs his arm to stop him.

“What are we doing here?”

“It’ll be easier if I just show you.”

Concern is etched in the furrow between Charlie’s brows, but he doesn’t press any further.

They make their way through the gravestones in silence until they come to a row Thomas recognizes.

From there it’s not hard to find. It’s been four weeks, but the grave is still obviously fresh, the rectangle of tossed brown soil bereft of grass.

And there above it, a new addition: a small, simple place marker.

In loving memory of

Maeve O’Reilly

1889–1939

“Tommy? I—I don’t understand. I thought—”

Thomas cuts him off. “She died. Just before my . . . my episode. I think that’s what brought it on.” Thomas stares at the grave, trying to swallow down the hard, painful lump growing in his throat.

“When? Why didn’t you tell me?” Charlie takes hold of him by the shoulders, forcing him to turn so they are face to face. “Sweetheart, I—I . . .”

The pity in Charlie’s eyes is difficult to look at, and it soaks Thomas in a deluge of shame. And grief. An endless grief he hardly understands.

“She died the week before I got sick. I didn’t know how to tell you.

I couldn’t tell you. I thought if I didn’t say it out loud, I could pretend it didn’t happen.

I thought I could . . .” Thomas shakes his head, realizing how stupid he had been.

“I was ashamed.” His chin drops to his chest, tears spilling down over his cheeks.

“Why were you ashamed? She’s your mom. It’s okay to be sad. It’s okay to cry and grieve. Hey, now—sweetheart, look at me.” Thomas breathes deeply, then lifts his eyes. Charlie’s warm fingers curl around his own. “Why do you feel ashamed?”

“Because I never went to visit her. She—she was there all alone. She died all alone.” The words start to tumble out of him then, his chest too cold and his heart racing too fast. “When Maggie was little, Bridge told her our mom was dead. She said we shouldn’t visit because Maggie might find out, and it was just better that way, to make a clean break.

She said mom didn’t remember us anyway, but .

. . I don’t know. She was my mom. I loved her, Charlie.

She was my mom, and I left her there to rot.

” His tears turn to wracking sobs, his lungs struggling for air as everything he’s been holding inside lurches out, reprehensible and ugly.

“Oh, sweetheart.” Charlie envelops him, and Thomas tucks his face into the curve of Charlie’s neck, fingers twisting desperately into the fabric of his wool coat. They remain locked together, Charlie stroking his back in circles until the shudders subside.

“And I hated her, too,” he whispers, defeated. “It seemed like she was always trying to leave us even when she was still there. Charlie, why weren’t we enough?” Thomas lifts his head, wiping at his face, embarrassed by his tears and his snotty nose. “Why wasn’t I enough?”

Charlie’s eyes are watery and filled with concern.

“Don’t think that. She was sick. And you were just a child when she went to Dunning.

You did what your big sis told ya to do.

” He places his hands on either side of Thomas’s face, running his thumbs over Thomas’s wet cheeks.

“Christ—I’m so sorry your ma died, sweetheart. ”

“They won’t even talk about it. Bridge and Michael. And what if I am like her? What if I get sick like that again? I’ll just be another burden on my family like she was, and . . . and on you. I—I would understand if you didn’t want to be with me anymore. You don’t owe me anything, and—”

“Stop it.” Charlie grips his face more firmly, brow knitting together. “Tommy, don’t talk like that. I’ll always want to be with you. You hear me? If you get sick again, then I’ll look after ya.”

“You won’t leave me?”

“Of course not. I love you, and it broke my fuckin’ heart that your family wasn’t looking after you like I could’ve. I wish you’d told me when your ma died. I wish I could’ve been there for you from the start.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Ain’t nothin’ to be sorry for, Red. C’mere.”

Charlie pulls him into another embrace. Thomas is grateful there are no other people around so he can melt against Charlie’s chest and rest his lips against the warm skin of his neck. He closes his eyes and allows Charlie’s body, Charlie’s scent, to comfort and soothe him.

Later that night, long after he and Charlie were forced to part ways, Thomas’s father, Patty, stumbles through the front door of the O’Reilly house, collapsing down onto the couch beside him.

He’s drunk, of course. His clothes are filthy, and the smell of alcohol, vomit, and body odor is a rancid mix that immediately permeates the room.

Patty had disappeared the day they got the call from Dunning that their mother was dead.

It’s not unusual for him to go missing for days at a time, but this is the longest Thomas can remember him being absent since he was a child.

“You look so much like her,” Patty slurs. A single tear slides down his father’s face and then his eyelids flutter closed. Thomas doesn’t respond, returning to the book in his lap but unable to absorb a single word.

“She’s the reason I’m like this, son. She was my world . . . my everything.”

Thomas cannot bear witness to his father’s grief tonight, so he stands and heads towards the stairs.

In the past he never understood why his father ended up this way, but now he does.

Because if he ever lost Charlie, he too, would become a shell of a man.

Thomas pauses at the bottom step, eyes falling closed as his chin drops to his chest.

“I loved her too.”

He lies awake for a long time that night.

So long, that his eyes adjust to the dark and the objects in his room start to appear distorted and grotesque.

Memories of his childhood come and go in quick succession.

Happy ones, tinted in soft pink and gold and aqua blue.

His mother laughing joyously in a floral dress, picking him up and twirling him around.

His father bringing home flowers for her that he stole from someone’s garden.

And then the memories bathed in red and silver and the coldest white.

His mother unable to rise from her bed. Muffled sobbing and his father’s voice, angry and frustrated.

Then red stained floors and the flash of silver from a kitchen knife.

Men in white coats and his mother’s piercing screams.