Miss You by Kate Eberlen Read Free Book Online Page A

while.
    Kev pushed the piano out on the stage, and played his party piece, ‘Danny Boy’, which he’d probably sung a few times in New York on St Patrick’s Day because it’s an
even bigger deal there than it is in Ireland. Kev’s singing was never as good as his dancing, but he could hold a tune well enough and the performance brought a stunned silence to the room
before people started clapping and telling him how proud his mother would have been.
    ‘Will you give us a song, Jim?’ someone called.
    After only a moment of protest, my father said, ‘Ach, go on then,’ and made his way to the stage, where he stood, leaning against the piano, and, with Kev accompanying him, sang the
Fureys’ ‘I Will Love You’.
    There wasn’t a dry eye in the house after that. For me, it wasn’t the words so much as seeing Kev and Dad together, and knowing how happy that would have made Mum. At the end, a
moment of reflective silence was broken by a small voice, surprisingly loud and clear next to me.
    ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are. Up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky. Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are!’
    There was something about the seriousness on Hope’s face and her stout little frame, with her fingers doing the twinkling actions she’d learned at school, that would have made it
comical if it hadn’t been so moving.
    When she finished, everyone clapped, but unlike Kevin and Dad, Hope didn’t bask in the attention. She didn’t actually seem to notice it.
    ‘What about you now, Teresa?’ my aunt Catriona called out. ‘We haven’t heard anything from you.’
    To be fair, she probably only meant to give me the opportunity, but she made it sound like I didn’t want to contribute.
    ‘I can’t sing,’ I protested.
    ‘That all right, Tree,’ Hope chimed up. ‘Everyone has things they’re good at and things they’re not so good at.’
    Which sounded so much like Mum that everyone except Hope laughed.
    ‘OK. This was Mum’s favourite poem,’ I said, wondering why I hadn’t thought of suggesting it for the service.
    ‘“The Lake Isle of Innisfree”.
    I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree.
    And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made.
    Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
    And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
    And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow . . .’
    As I spoke the words, slowly and evenly, trying to keep the wobble out of my voice and do her proud, I wondered whether Mum had yearned for peace and solitude away from the constant noisy chaos
of our family. And as I looked around the faces of her friends and relations, I thought that we were all perhaps thinking that the poem described a kind of heaven for her, which made us feel calmer
about the whole injustice of it. That’s probably why people talk about the consolation of poetry.
    When I’d finished, the room was quiet.
    ‘Bedtime,’ I said to Hope, taking the opportunity to say our goodbyes before the singing inevitably started up again, along with more drinking and the potential for the mood to
switch from affection to umbrage in a single sentence.
    Hope spotted the butterfly in the corner of the bathroom window when I was giving her a bath. One of those white ones with a tiny black spot on each wing. Cabbage White.
    ‘Want to get out,’ she said.
    So, without thinking about it really, I opened the window, and the butterfly flew into the dying light.
    It was only when I knelt down again and started lathering Hope’s hair that I wondered how the butterfly had got in. There was a buddleia in the back garden which attracted butterflies in
the summer, but usually those were orange, and I’d never seen one in the house before. Wasn’t it a bit late for butterflies anyway? Perhaps it had come in to get warm?
    Or perhaps the butterfly was the sign I’d asked Mum for, and all I’d done was let it out