best, though.’
‘That poor little girl has no idea,’ she says to me. ‘Her little face will … oh, how are you going to tell her, Juliette? You’re her whole world.’
Helen is at breaking point now as this all sinks in. I do not want to see this so I look away.
‘Don’t, Helen. Please don’t say “poor Rosie” and don’t you dare cry again. I don’t want you to be so sad.’
But she’s off. It’s hitting home with my sister that my life is about to end while hers and Rosie’s and Dan’s lives will all change dramatically.
‘You do know I will look after her as best I can,’ she sniffles. ‘It won’t be the same as you, I mean, it won’t be as good as you, but I’ll do my very best by her and Brian will help out too of course. I promise you we will do our best. We’ll try and let her have her own room. My boys can bunk in together, it won’t do them a bit of harm and—’
‘We’ve had this conversation before, Helen. I know you will look after her for me,’ I tell my sister. ‘You’ve already told me all of this.’
‘What I’m trying to say is that she doesn’t need him, Juliette,’ Helen tells me. ‘She doesn’t need a stranger entering her life with everything else that’s going on. She’s got me and Dan and Brian and the kids. Think about it. Think about Rosie. Please.’
‘But what if I’m not her whole world?’ I suggest to her. ‘What if there is another world out there for her and just by bringing her there, it might give her some options? What if …?’
I shrug and she squeezes my hand, wiping her eyes with the other and shaking her head. She is right, of course. My big sister Helen, mother of three, wife of one, and wise old owl, has always been right. She was not surprised when, sixteen years ago, I arrived back from a summer backpacking around Ireland with more baggage than I’d left home with. Not that I was ever overly promiscuous, but more that I was the careless sort who never thought anything would ever happen to me. Happy-go-lucky and carefree, I wouldn’t have recognised trouble if it had stared me in the face. In fact, I still probably wouldn’t.
‘Gullible,’ was my mother’s way of putting it. ‘Our Juliette would believe anything you told her and go back for more. She’s as gullible as a fish.’
I’ve learned to shrug it off and accept that they might be right; but gullible, careless, silly or whatever way they wanted to look at me, I’ve managed very well, thank you very much, since my Emerald Isle vacation all those summers ago. Rosie has never wanted for anything, despite not having a father figure in her life … well apart from Dan of course, but he was more like a friend to her. So why do I want to start picking at holes that aren’t there, by digging into my sketchy past? Why am I potentially going to turn her whole world upside down and leave a terrible mess behind, when I could leave well alone safe in the knowledge that she will be just fine?
It’s because I know that someday she will want to know who he is, and I’m the only one who can tell her.
It’s because I do believe that there is another world waiting for her over there.
‘I promise I will say nothing to Rosie until I know more about him,’ I tell my sister and I can see her tongue twist into syllables and words she cannot get out quickly enough to stop me so I keep talking. ‘It’s what I’ve always thought I should do, you know, even though I’ve never mentioned it much. He might not be there anymore. I might not find him. I could have every door shut in my face, but imagine it was you. Imagine you had a child that you didn’t know about. I don’t think it’s so wrong to tell someone the truth, do you?’
But Helen isn’t listening to one word I say. She is miles away. She looks like she is already in a place where I don’t exist anymore, where this seat I am on is empty already – where I’m gone.
‘She writes to him, you know,’ I tell my sister and her reaction is just as I thought it would be.
‘No way,’ she says, the sorrow etched in her saddened eyes. ‘Does she really?’
‘She’s been doing it for a while now. She doesn’t have a clue that I know so don’t say anything to her. I didn’t read a lot of it. No more than a few lines, but she’s pining for a man she doesn’t know one thing about. Please don’t deny her the right to have this last chance of knowing where she came from, Helen.’
Helen twists her hands together and takes a deep breath, looks away and the tears threaten to spill again.
‘She breaks my heart,’ she says. ‘You break my heart. You are so much braver than I could ever be, Juliette, you know that. I hope it works out for you both, I really do, but my hard, cynical knowledge of the world is just so frightened it will all go horribly wrong.’
‘I want to go there to make some new memories with Rosie,’ I try to reassure her. ‘I want to awaken her senses to everything that this beautiful world has to offer – so that when I go she will remember all the positive things I have told her and shown her, and not just the darkness of sickness and death. Simple things over seven days, just Rosie and I, away from it all where I can teach her some of life’s greatest lessons as I know them.’
For the first time in my life I think I have silenced my sister.
‘That’s a pretty amazing way to look at it,’ she eventually says.
‘I’ll stay there for one week,’ I promise my sister. ‘We’ll sail over on the ferry tomorrow at our leisure, stress-free, and it will be like a holiday for us both; our last holiday together. I will make a list of things for us to do, but this time I’ll break my habit of making lists and not completing them. We will complete this one. We’ll share some bonding time. Anything else that happens will be secondary, I promise.’
Helen takes a deep breath in and then out again. She rubs her eyebrows with her eyes closed.
‘I just hope this works out for you because this is hard enough as it is,’ she tells me. ‘I don’t want to see you make it worse. Please don’t make it worse.’
‘I won’t make it worse, I swear to you,’ I tell her. ‘I’m going to take the ferry in the morning and spend seven days by the sea with my precious girl in the place where she came from. There’s no time like the present and like you said, it’s not every day you turn forty, is it?’
Helen wipes her eyes and smiles.
‘You are the most determined, stubborn person I know,’ she tells me.
‘That’s the second time I’ve heard that today,’ I reply.
‘Well, you go and do what you have to do in your favourite place in the world, sister,’ she tells me. ‘I will always be right behind you and I’ll still be here if it all goes tits up. Now, let’s go upstairs and I’ll help you pack for your trip down memory lane you absolute …’
I don’t wait around for her to finish her sentence. I am already on my way up the stairs.
I agree to meet Dan at my favourite coffee shop, just around the corner from our family home, and when I see him walk past the window my stomach gives a leap. My hands are shaking as I lift my cup, and I take a small sip just to give myself something to do. I don’t want a coffee and I certainly don’t want to be telling Dan what I
