“I should just give up, really, shouldn’t I?” I said. My voice sounded thick, as though my nose was blocked, and I made myself laugh to show I wasn’t crying.
“What do you mean?” Linda asked.
“I can’t ever get the time back. And I can’t ever make it right. So it’s all pointless. It’s all stupid. I should just give up.”
“What ‘all’? What should you give up?”
“Just all of it. All of the trying.”
“Because people won’t forgive you?”
“Yeah.”
“I think that should mean the opposite of giving up.”
“What?”
“I don’t think they’ll forgive you whatever you do. So you could spend your whole life being as miserable as possible, because you made them as miserable as possible, and they wouldn’t forgive you. Or you could just have a normal life, just try, like the rest of us, just try to make things as good as they can be for you and Molly. And they wouldn’t forgive you. They don’t forgive you in either version. You can’t make things better for them. But there are two people you can make things better for.”
“One. Molly.”
“Two. Molly and you.”
I didn’t say anything. Pointlessness clogged my throat like hardened grease in a drain, and it wasn’t the pointlessness of trying to make people forgive me. It was the pointlessness of imagining a future for two people who would soon be wrenched apart.
“They’re taking her away,” I said. I hadn’t meant it as a retort, but that was how it came out. Clipped and snappy.
“Who? Social?” Linda asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Why?”
“Just not much of a mam, I suppose.”
“Not sure anyone feels like much of a mam.”
I laughed. It came out mean. “Like you’re not perfect,” I said.
“Me?” she said. “What? Have you seen the state of this place? It’s a shambles. We’ve got more kids than we can even nearly afford, and soon there’ll be another one. I mean, I love them, I love being their mammy. Of course I do. And I’m better at it than I’ve been at anything else. But perfect? Not even nearly. Not even close.”
“You seem pretty good to me,” I said.
She looked down, and pink crawled into her cheeks in blotches. It occurred to me that it might be the first time I had ever told her she was good at anything. She couldn’t stop the corners of her mouth dragging upward. It was obvious for me to want to go back in time and undo the big wrongs, but in that moment I would have settled for changing the small ones. I wished we could go back to being eight years old, just so I could be nicer to Linda, just so I could tell her she was good at handstands, a good best friend.
“Why do you think they’re going to take Molly?” she asked, scrubbing her face with her sleeve as if she could wipe away the blush.
“Her wrist,” I said.
“Is it broken?”
“Yeah.”
“Poor thing. Lily had a broken wrist last year.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. She liked it at first—the cast and everything—but by the end she was really bored. She wanted to go swimming and stuff. And the year before Jason broke his leg and Charlotte got this awful cut on her head. Any lower and it would have been her eye out. Felt like we lived in A and E that year.”
“Weren’t you worried?”
“Well, yeah. But they’re sturdy, little ones. They bounce back.”
“They’re not sturdy. They can get badly hurt. Really easily. Before you even know what you’re doing.”
“This isn’t like that. It was an accident.”
“She was on this wall. She wasn’t meant to be, but she climbed up. I wasn’t looking. I tried to get her down. I pulled her arm. She fell.”
“Exactly. That’s an accident. Jason broke his leg because I tripped and knocked into him at the top of the stairs. He fell the whole way down. I felt awful, but you just have to forget about it. You never mean to hurt them.”
We sat without speaking for a while. The dark outside made the French windows into a mirror, so I could see us at the table. Our reflections looked like women, which seemed wrong. In my head we were still two stringy kids, stealing sweets and walking on walls and turning ourselves upside down in handstands.
“Why did you come?” asked Linda.
“Don’t really know. I just found out about them taking Molly. Just yesterday. It made me want to come back.”
It was hard to believe Sasha’s call had been that recent. The time between then and now had expanded in a bubblegum stretch, feeling like weeks, not hours. It occurred to me that I should check how long it had been since the meeting. It occurred to me that I wouldn’t gain anything from knowing.
“So you didn’t come because of the calling? At all?” she said.
“What?”
“I just tried to call you a few times. And then a few weeks ago you picked up. And I thought maybe if you had dialed that number that told you who had been calling, you might have known it was me. And you might have come to see me.” Her voice got quieter as she
