This Must Be the Place by Maggie O'Farrell Page B

those letters, thirteen times ten makes a hundred and thirty. Mine and Niall’s together makes two hundred and sixty. I wonder what Mom did with them. Did she burn them, throw them in the trash? The thought makes me cry even more and Niall is scratching, and Dad says more. He says that for a long time he tried to see us every week but Mom always managed to thwart him, in one way or another. He says he spent all his money on court cases to gain more time with us and to try to enforce the time he was supposed to have, but it didn’t work. He was totally broke when he went away – ‘broke and broken-hearted’ – and then he met this woman and married her. He says he flew in this morning with the express purpose of tracking us down. ‘I was at Newark airport – about to go visit my dad, actually – and I’ve been thinking for a while that Niall is over twenty-one now. Legally an adult. So I’ve been planning to come, to give seeing you another go. But there I was, in the States, so I just got on a plane for California and I decided I wasn’t going to leave until I found you both. And here we are.’
    He sits back in the booth. He picks up a spoon and looks at it as if he’s never seen one before. ‘I never gave up on the hope I might see you both again,’ he says, apparently to the spoon. ‘There wasn’t a day, an hour, a minute when I didn’t think about you. I want you always to know that.’
    I have no idea what to do with this information so I take a huge slurp of my soda and it’s gone kind of flat but, even so, it floods the back of my throat and I gag and cough, and Niall has to smack me on the back and he smacks me way too hard because he’s never been able to gauge the appropriate amount of pressure for things – he’s forever breaking jars or taps or window catches by accident. And while I’m coughing, I hear Niall say, ‘So whereabouts do you live?’
    Dad says, or seems to say, ‘Island.’
    ‘What?’ I get out. ‘An island? Like, a tropical island?’
    ‘Not an – the.’
    ‘The island?’
    ‘The country,’ Niall says, ‘not the land form.’
    I almost start crying again because I can’t understand what everyone is talking about and Niall just seems to get Dad, in the way he only ever got me, and I feel left out, and I hate feeling left out when it’s Niall because Niall is the only one I’m 100 per cent sure will never leave me out of anything – no matter how young or dumb I am, I know he’ll include me in everything – and suddenly it seems there’s this whole other unit I never knew about, with this man I don’t remember.
    ‘Island, island, island,’ Niall is saying.
    ‘Island, island,’ Dad is saying, ‘you’ve never heard of island?’
    ‘Of course I’ve heard of islands!’ I shriek. ‘I just don’t get—’
    Then I hear Dad say, ‘Where the Sullivans came from,’ and the penny drops.
    ‘Ireland,’ I say, and everyone breathes again. ‘As in part of England.’
    Dad goes to speak, then changes his mind. ‘Yup,’ he says instead. ‘You got it.’
    ‘Strictly speaking,’ Niall says, ‘it’s not part of England. It’s been an independent state, politically and fiscally, since—’
    ‘It’s next to England,’ Dad says hastily, giving me a smile, and I want to smile back, seeing him do this normal-dad stuff, smoothing things over between me and Niall, and again I feel that rearing sensation of something far away yet close, and I wonder if he used to do this when we were kids. He must have done.
    ‘And you’re married?’ I say.
    He nods.
    ‘What’s her name?’
    Oddly, he seems to hesitate. ‘Claudette.’
    ‘French?’ Niall asks.
    ‘Half,’ Dad says, and it strikes me that he does the thing Niall does, missing out words that other people consider mandatory, and I wonder if Niall got it from him.
    A thought strikes me and I sit up straight. ‘Do you have kids? I mean, other kids?’
    Dad nods again. ‘I do.’
    ‘How many?’
    ‘Two.