Distance Between Lovers

Chapter one

2001

The morning her mother disappeared, Kate was whisked to her neighbor's house in her pajamas. She baked cookies amid a heavy hush that let her hear the dough rub against the bowl. With the house filling with chocolate chip aromas, a quiet restlessness nestled inside Kate.

The young girl's fears were louder and more noticeable than Ina's even voice. She knew something terrible had happened. Some terror had taken her breath away, but she couldn't remember what it was. There was a dark void where her heart had leapt to her mouth, swallowing her cry for her father, and each time she wanted to ask Ina, the woman's misty eyes and shaky smile stopped her.
When Nicholas took Kate home a few hours later, Kate stalled at their open front door before grasping her father's hand.  He led her through the living room and into her parent's bedroom, where empty drawers spilled out like mocking tongues. In the closet, Kathleen's good dresses remained on their hangers. Spaced apart in equal distance they looked like gagged sentry.  Nicholas took them down. Laying them across his arm like a comatose body he sniffed the garments, as if with his nose he would be given the whole sequence of events that led to Kathleen's departure. 
Kate waited wide eyed for Nicholas to grab her hand and follow her mothers' scent, or at least nod, satisfied with his discovery. When he looked at her his face was drawn. He shook his head as if the clothes across his arm had just taken their last breath.

Kate nodded, not knowing what else to do. The simple gesture released him from his reverie, and let him put the dresses in a drawer, where they would remain until after Kathleen's trial.

The next day Nicholas found Kate standing at the open drawer with her arm deep in cotton. When she looked at him, he saw a sadness in her eyes that was too deep for tears. They had gotten lost somewhere along the way.

He sat on the bed. With hands on her sides, he tried to sit her on his knees but felt her tense with the need to stay as she was, and his hands dropped.

"Kate...?"
She didn't answer but he was sure her small body relaxed with his voice. Looking over her shoulder, he saw her grip on a flowery dress, blue background with yellow petals, had eased. Nicholas sat for a long time as Kate's hand moved through the drawer and he thought her fingers were dancing around the loss of her mother.
She had always loved Kathleen's dresses. "Where's Mum?" came out low and haunting.

His heart stopped.  Their first day without Kathleen, his four year old had popped the question, mum? But he avoided answering with distractions of a cartoon and a walk. 

Now Kate's query had direction and it felled him. "I miss her...." Kate added, and her voice snuggled with bright colors. Nicholas blinked back tears.  When Kate turned, her eyes were wide with questions, like open goals. Curiosity had made her defenseless.

She watched her father's mouth unwrap like a fish outside water, and must have read the strain in it.  He took her hand, but in the next moment she slipped away, and ran with the easy grace of a child out of the bedroom. Her movements were light, but Nicholas couldn't gain comfort from that any more. The questions had floated between them and he had waited too long to answer. He had let her down. The next time he would be prepared.

While Kate slept that night, Nicholas phoned Ina. "I don't know what to tell Kate." he admitted, and heard her sigh before she hung up. She was the only person he could talk to about Kathleen; though they had hardly spoken since the day Kathleen discovered she was pregnant.  Their brief conversations had always taken place on Sunday, when Nicholas collected Ina's mother from the nursing home, and would inevitably leave the moment the old woman was settled in her seat and her wheelchair brought in.

For four years, Ina and Nicholas had not been able to look each other in the eye, but when he needed help it was Ina he ran to with his daughter in his arms. 
Within seconds of his phone call, Ina was standing at the door. Her brown eyes dug into him, so he could feel her anger. "You can't tell Kate the truth, that's what you're wondering isn't it?"
Nicholas stepped back, but she didn't enter. They'd been drawing lines between each other for years; it wasn't going to stop now.

"What if she remembers..." he asked.

"She's only four years old, whatever she remembers will fade."
 "And when she gets older.........?"
Ina shrugged, "you'll deal with it then."

She was watching him with intent, her scrutiny easing with his half hearted mumble of agreement. He was too tired to argue, and too sorrowful to wonder how he might speak about Kathleen's last moments with his daughter. Which ever way it was worded, there was no escaping the cruelty.
"Kathleen left, and that's all there is to it."
Nicholas nodded, unable to meet the woman's eyes. "I keep seeing her hands..."

"Don't." It was more plea than command, which surprised Nicholas. Her softness egged him on, gave him confidence he knew couldn't really exist. "I can't pretend nothing happened..."

"You should have known it would end like this." Ina told him.

Anger rose in his throat but that was nothing compared to the sinking desolation in his stomach.  With his silence, Ina turned to leave, but stopped to look back at him. He thought her face had softened somewhat. "Don't pretend you're innocent." And he wondered if she was thinking about Kathleen or her.

He closed the door to her retreating back and in the quiet, so full of memories and regrets he wondered whether he and Kathleen would have survived if Ina hadn't returned to Boston seven years ago.

It would have been a comfort to think that Ina's presence next door had doomed them from the start, but that was taking the easy option, putting the blame on some one else, when he knew deep down he was the guilty one. In the silent house where his daughter's sadness filtered through her slumber, he couldn't forget that in a cool hospital office he had betrayed Kathleen.
He sighed, taking in the smell of his house which had changed with the arrival of his baby girl. Still he thought he could detect the musty scent of bachelorhood and focused on it, so he might bring all his senses back to the time when it was only him, no Ina... no Kathleen... just a beginning...

                                                
                                                 
Chapter two

The beginning
1996

 

When the last of the mourners had gone, Nicholas turned on the lamp by the front window and switched off the main light. His mother had always hated the harshness of the living room's naked bulb. She told him once she thought its glare indecent. Today, he understood what she meant. It followed him like a stalker, and made him too conscious of his quivering half smiles. Shaking hands and accepting the pats on the back, Nicholas had longed to sit in silence under the lamp's soothing cover with the objects his mother had gathered to show seventy three years of life.

Only his brother remained now.  Stephano had arrived in the morning but had kept his distance all day. The idea that Ina's return next door might have caused Stephano to step away as soon as the handshake and details of the imminent departure were exchanged crossed Nicholas's mind, and stayed there.

Stephano looked more like their father with dark brown eyes and slender nose, which was a little too long for his face. His lips were wide and today they had been held in a smile that seemed pitying, as if he'd gotten the roles reversed, and had come to give his condolences.
Though Nicholas was taller with broad shoulders, his older sibling's confidence along with his haughty chin used to command more authority, but Nicholas felt his presence had diminished somewhat and thought it coincided with Ina's return to Boston.
"Mum left the house to you." Stephano told his blue eyed brother without preamble.

"How do you know?"
"She phoned when Ina came back, for some reason she thought I might want to join her but I have no interest in coming home."

"I'll bet, this is the perfect chance to forget about everything, including your failed marriage..."
 "Don't..."Stephano's shoulders sagged as he started towards the couch, facing the front window. Without the extra witnesses, Nicholas was finally allowed see how their mother's death had affected him. He seemed weighed down and weary. 

Nicholas sat in the armchair beside him. The chair had been hollowed from their father's weight, so he felt slightly off balance, but he thought his awkwardness was due more to the woman next door than the sloping seat.
Stephano's wife had been back two months, but only this morning, in the quiet hours before mass, she came to Nicholas and mumbled the word ‘divorce', like a child owing up to mischief.

"What happened between you and Ina?"

Stephano's face tightened with resolve. "Nothing...."

"You're getting a divorce."                           
 "I'm aware of that."

"We thought she came home because Bridgie fell, and for nearly two months she let us believe that was the case. Were ye ever planning on letting us know?"
"You know now."
 Nicholas could see no grey in Stephano's brown hair that was cut short around his face and neatly side parted. The cheeks had grown fuller but his skin remained sallow and smooth. Still he looked older than Nicholas had imagined he would. The brown eyes had lost some of their liveliness and the lips were tight, even as he tried to smile away the subject of Ina and their fifteen year marriage.
"Okay, we won't talk about Ina," Nicholas assented.
"Thanks," A smile ran across Stephano's lips, "So, where are you working now?" 
"I'm driving a cab."
"Since when...."

"July..."
"Three months, that's great."
Nicholas' eyes squinted with the effort not to tell Stephano to ‘fuck off'. He knew the look that would follow, not wounded or offended, but justified.

He realised his brother was doing this as a way to avoid the topic of their loss and act as if everything was normal, but it still riled him. It was similar to the way he used to tease Nicholas as a child by sticking a bony finger into his side. As they got older the teasing changed to Stephano annoying Nicholas about Ina.  Nicholas stayed silent then.  On the subject of Ina he could never deny his feelings, so when Stephano started dating the girl next door, Nicholas wondered if his brother was aware of his hurt and if he cared.
"Okay". In the next second Stephano was standing, looking as if he'd been waiting to go for hours. "I'll be in touch."

"You can't stay any longer?"
He shook his head, more resolved than apologetic and Nicholas felt the pull of the house next door. Their neighbours lights could be seen from the living rooms side window, but the place seemed silent and ghostlike as if the occupants were waiting with bated breathe for Stephano to visit, or leave.
"Are you going to say goodbye to Ina...?" He hadn't said hello to her, but Nicholas couldn't help needle him.
"That was said a long time ago."

Not that long, Nicholas thought, Ina had only been back two months, but he said nothing as his brother picked up the small bag by the seat and moved towards the door. Stephano had rented a car and it was parked outside, with its nose pointed towards the airport, as if his first thought on arrival had been his escape.

Ina had spent most of her morning looking out for Stephano. To her mother, she looked like a love sick school girl as she observed her ex-husband step out of the car, lean in for a small leather bag he carried with him always, stand, lock the door, and turn towards his house.
When Stephano disappeared inside, Bridgie's gaze pulled Ina away from the window. Otherwise she may have stood there all day, watching for no other reason that it was easier to look than to think.
"You okay?" Bridgie was sitting on the couch under the window with her left leg imprisoned in a plaster Paris. Every morning, it was an effort to get the old woman to this seat but Ina refused to let her stay in bed all day.  Usually knitting needles danced between Bridgie's hands. Her fingers were so fast it was impossible to see the steps. But she hadn't knit since the day they found Maureen, unwilling to insult her friend by taking pleasure in anything just yet. 

Ina nodded, but her smile was too tight and rigid. "I'll be fine."
 "Stephano's here, isn't he?"
Another nod, followed by a strong desire to go out the door, down the steps and walk as far away from her street as possible, but she couldn't leave today, not with the funeral and her mother being unable to go. 

"Will you talk to him?"
Ina would have loved to say yes, if only to ease the woman with her white hair tied back in a bun, above light blue eyes that held a new twinkling of uncertainty since the fall, as if she'd been made to understand something she wasn't quite ready to grasp.  But her head shook.
Ina had only told her mother about the separation recently. Bridgie didn't know the details. Ina couldn't bring herself to talk about it, and even if the words could rise and make its way out of her throat, who could she tell.  Not her anxious aged mother, who had given her the perfect opportunity to come home without a truck load of questions. 
Ina still felt guilty for the surge of relief that rose when Bridgie's next door neighbour and best friend rang to tell her about the fall in the garden and ask if she could come home to help, because Bridgie was as stubborn as a mule and refused to go to the toilet in front of a stranger.
Ina thought she might be able to tell Maureen. She had imagined going into the house, having a cup of tea and letting it slip that her marriage with her son was over and she wasn't going back to California.
It would have been a comfort to say it aloud, but it would also have been impossible, because Maureen would have asked ‘why', and Ina would not have been able to shrug and pretend it was a mutual decision, that nothing had happened except a dissolving of love. The moment the reasons were brought to the table, she would not have been able to meet the old woman in the eye.
There were no friends she could divulge her secrets to. She started seeing Stephano as a freshman in College, and besides sitting together in the library and the odd coffee break she spent very little time with the students in her course.
She had two school friends, Cassie and Antoinette, and used to keep in touch with them for the first years in California. Antoinette managed to visit once, before she married and had four children in five years.  Inevitably letters between them dwindled from four a year to the odd Christmas card, and after ten years that tenuous link broke when Ina forgot to send the annual greeting, and also forgot to feel guilty.
It would be impossible to befriend them again. She considered contact, but felt she would be returning when she had nothing else to hold onto. It would look like they were her second choice, merely friends to fall back on when all else failed, and she couldn't really argue that it wasn't the case.
So that left Nicholas...Stephano's brother............
On the plane home, Ina sat at her window seat, staring at the pane of glass and barely seeing the clouds drifting by her as she remembered Stephano's reaction when she told him she was leaving. She recognised regret in his hanging lips, and hated his selfishness. His lament had nothing to do with losing her, and everything to do with losing face. Months earlier, Ina had managed to elicit from Stephano that he was sleeping with another woman.  That this confession came on the day Ina received results from her gynaecologist was not exactly Stephano's fault. Ina had been intent on goading him.
 "Will you talk to me please.......?" Stephano had begged an hour after Ina's quick phone call from the doctor's. He'd rushed home and found her in their bedroom. The top button of his shirt was open and his tie loose. 
"I'm fine," she answered, wondering where his jacket was, which should have told her she was anything but fine. Ina had stopped noticing small details about her husband a long time ago.
She was sitting on the bed with her back propped up by pillows. A magazine lay face down on her stretched legs. Her hands were by her sides and seemed lifeless to him.  

"I came home to talk to you."
"You didn't have to do that." The sarcasm was flattened by the monotone voice and the boredom in it.
"Of course I did, I'm your husband."
"Yeah..." 

"What's that supposed to mean?" Her small smile made him grimace. Humour was out of place today, to the point of being disturbing.
She shrugged, "I meant it in a, ‘if you say so', kind of way.

Stephano's body tightened in frustration. "Why are you acting like this?"
"I realise you'd like me to break down and sob in your arms, but I'm not in the mood."

"It's always about you, isn't it?"
Ina's glare was almost a relief. "You coming here is not for me. You want everyone to think you're the man who left everything to be with his wife. Such bullshit, especially since you've probably just fucked the reason you don't come home until eleven anymore."
 "I didn't come home to fight."

"Just for once, pretend you're not in a court room." Ina's narrowing eyes should have told him to beware, but he was trapped between concern and her coldness.  "Don't misunderstand, I don't pace the house waiting for you, but I do wonder what she's like.  Probably young and eager, where other men are led by their dick, you're blinded by ego. You need a woman to listen to you."
"At least she listens." Stephano spat.
"Does she respond to ‘go fetch' too?"

Stephano stared at her, dumbfounded that he'd actually admitted to seeing another woman, and his wife was sitting on the bed as if he'd just given her a weather report. Of course afterwards, he'd consider that the timing wasn't the best if a reaction was what he sought, but by then it would be too late. He'd already said, "How could anything grow inside you? You're as hard as fucking stone."
Ina looked away and in the seconds that followed she knew he pitied her. In their bright, large bedroom with the sun moving through the bay window, she wanted to scream against his sympathy. She found it viler than the anger which had dissected her hurt into nothing more than, ‘it serves you right'.

He moved closer to her, "Ina," his hand went to her arm but she pulled away.
"I'm sorry...."
The disgust in her face made him flinch. He was expecting to see her eyes wet with grief. For once he thought she might let go, and his surprise was an extra slap in her face.  . After fifteen years, Stephano still thought he had married a woman who would come back from the hospital with the results and cry, a wife that would listen to him talk about his lover and give a shit. 

"Why are you sorry......?" she asked with an even tone.

"That was cruel...." Eyes softer, head tilted. He was looking at her as if she was a Russian doll and would any minute open up to reveal another smaller, gentler version and then another.....she thought he wouldn't be happy until she was peeled away to leave a weeping mess on the floor.
"I wish you'd stop saying sorry......" she told him.

"One of us has to."

"It's too late for that."

"What do you mean?"
Ina shook her head, "never mind."  She dismissed him by closing her eyes.  There was no knowing how long he stood there waiting for her to look at him. She found no peace in the darkness behind her eyelids but she kept them shut until the sun had shifted and Stephano was gone.

In the following months Stephano's biting remarks about her barrenness managed to find a place deep within Ina. Every time she looked at him she was reminded of what she could not have. Whether she wanted a child with him was not the point, the issue was he was aware of her uselessness. She hated seeing herself through his eyes. His pitying smile made her want to scream, so she stayed away, moving from room to room in their big house as if they were playing an ever ending game of hide and seek, until eventually Stephano gave up coming home at all.
Four months after his confession of an affair, Ina went to his office and walked passed his secretary who tried to stop her with a raised hand and a half hearted yelp. The door opened to Stephano sitting at his desk opposite a young woman, whom Ina did not acknowledge. She knew Stephano and the look on his face, (pursed mouth and dewy eyes) when he was post-pre, or even ‘maybe' coital.
"I need to talk to you." Ina dressed in jeans, black t-shirt and scandals with her hair wild around her face, told him with such briskness Stephano nodded at the woman to go without taking his gaze completely off his wife, as if there was a chance she might attack.
The young woman obviously had the same idea, since she moved out of the room as far away from the cuckold wife as possible.
The door closed. Stephano sat back, feigning some semblance of control, "I see you dressed up for the occasion."

Ina smiled, "I thought you'd appreciate that."
"What do you want?"

"I'm leaving."

Stephano's eyes squinted. Ina knew this was a ploy to get some time, to gauge the type of reaction he should give. One of the reasons she started to dislike her husband was his inability to stop working.
She had understood the irony early on in their marriage that his constant need to pre-think everything he said and did was what kept him with her. What she hated, she also helped. Stephano insisted that she kept him on his toes, in constant training and battle. After her, he would be ready to deal with anyone. What he forgot in this little equation was his inability to deal with her.
"When will you be back?"

Straight to the issue, which made her ask, "What are you worried about?"
"Who said I was worried?"

Ina smiled, decided not to rile him about his hands joined on the table and too-steady gaze, "I won't be back. Will you miss me?"

"What are you talking about?"
 "Mum fell and broke her hip. I need to take care of her and I'm not coming back."
Stephano was surprised to see her gaze soften, "there's no point in pretending any more."
 He nodded, took a breath, and then made his final mistake with Ina, "what are you going to tell them?"
Any gentleness she was feeling towards him crumpled, always the same, always looking at the bigger frigging picture, which was so much more important than two people separating after fifteen years. "Of course what will people think........"
 "I'd just like to know." Stephano replied firmly, while his insides were a mess. He knew he'd fucked up royally. He had another woman and had hardly seen his wife in months. Stephano was the baddie; no amount of explaining about how his wife made him feel worthless would take away Audrey, or the horrid words he had spoken. 

"I'm not sure" She told him before turning away.
 "Ina!"
Her hand was on the door when she turned around, "You can relax. Mum doesn't need the worry right now. I won't tell them anything yet."
"Are you filing for divorce?"
"Yes," she answered, swinging the door opened and walking out.  Her disgust was anchored with the relief that Stephano couldn't plead innocence, so he would keep silent and give her time at home without questions.
But no matter how long she had, she thought she would never be able to speak to Nicholas. 

It wasn't the fact that he was Stephano's brother. Neither man was inclined to form opinions or speculate about the other. Whatever Stephano did with his life was his business, and Stephano had long ago stopped taking his younger brother seriously. Instead he laughed about the way Nicholas moved from one relationship to the other or from one awful apartment to the next. Nicholas was, as Stephano used to say, "...blowin in the wind", to which Ina would add, "full of it, more like."
It was Nicholas' ease that Ina abhorred, no matter what he had done or how he lived he showed nothing but an unaffected simplicity, which didn't sit well with Ina as she witnessed first- hand what he was capable of.
Ina saw the effect Nicholas had on girls. Walking into school with him, she felt longing skim across her body to his, and heard the enamoured giggles, while he walked undeterred, which annoyed her. She refused to believe he didn't know what his body was capable of and started to think of him as dishonest.
With side glances, she saw the soft stubble edging toward his confident lips and his eyes turned inward, and urged animosity towards him. She began to hate the untidiness of his cheeks, the sarcasm in his mouth and the selfishness in his outlook, until she stopped walking to school with him altogether. 
Nicholas was the first boy to make Ina's legs tremble and from a life time of living with a husband's desertion, she viewed this as weakness.  She had grown up without a father. Her mother had to work long hours in a shop Ina refused to remember the name of, as if with enough denial Bridgie would be a woman of fine suits and business acumen, who no man would argue with and every one wanted. A woman Ina was determined to be. She was not willing to let any one distract her, least of all her next door neighbour. 
Days after she made this decision. Nicholas went to Ina and sat beside her in her small kitchen as she continued studying. After moments of silence he nudged her elbow and asked in a soft voice, "what's up?"
"Nothing, I'm just busy, you might not care about school but I do. I want to get out of here some day."
She felt his wound, it snuggled in the place between them but rather than make her sorry, his hurt made her heart go colder. She was in charge of this relationship, and she was choosing to trample all over it, otherwise she didn't know what would happen.

When Ina was going to California with Stephano, Nicholas reminded her of those words, "you always said you wanted to get out of here." And she thought he was implying she was weak, that after all her effort she fell into the need for a man, but Nicholas always thought of Ina as not part of, or belonging to his brother at all. The small girl with the wild hair and the angriest brown eyes he had ever seen was too independent and fierce, and Stephano too distracted with himself.
After the incident in the kitchen Ina hardly spoke to Nicholas until one of her friends begged her to set them up. "Please, let me just sit with him for a while otherwise I think I'll die."
"But you can't trust him".

"You used to be friends," the girl answered, "what happened?"
Ina shrugged, "we're just different."

"Please," her friend begged.
When Ina arrived at Nicholas' house with a girl and introduced them with more animation and friendliness than he'd seen in a long time, he believed she had thawed towards him, deciding not to waste the years of friendship they had shared. Only six months older than Nicholas, Ina was closer in age to him than Stephano and they'd grown up playing together.
The relief he felt was thorough. As he watched her smile and felt her hand on his arm, Nicholas thought the feeling that warmed him up was like an orgasm, only it lasted longer, and in that brief moment, with the idea of sex moving through his body, he considered Ina might become more than a friend, some one whom he could love and maybe that was why she'd affected him so much with her coldness. His lips came down to brush her cheeks, but she moved away to whisper, "She really likes you, will you ask her out?"
Nicholas was seventeen. The other girl was pretty. She had long dark hair, big blue eyes and a lovely figure under her tight sweater. He shrugged, whether he was in love or not could wait for another moment. At least Ina trusted him with her friend, and had come to ask for a favour. "Okay."   He answered, taking his lips away from her cheek before they touched, not realising that this was as much test as trust and once his relationship with the friend was finished, he would never get close to Ina again.
While the dark haired girl would refuse to talk to Ina because she insisted, "you knew he was seeing other people. How could you not, he lives next door."  Ina couldn't argue, because she had hoped for that kind of ending and an excuse to push Nicholas out of her life for good. 
A year after that disastrous relationship with the dark haired girl ended, Nicholas decided to go New York and Ina went to Boston University to study business and accountancy. Nicholas rented a room in the Upper East Side, and within days of arrival met Angie, who studied Philosophy in Binghamton University. Angie introduced him to LSD and to the owner of a student Bar in Manhattan who gave him work. His life in New York was made up of work, acid, and Angie, which grew stale pretty quickly. When she was tripping, Angie talked about finding her source and understanding the universe, and when she was straight she hardly talked at all. She'd sit hugging her legs and staring out the window like some hippy from the sixties who'd just found herself in the 80's. She had a scared, wary look about her, and no matter how he tried to bring her out, she remained stubbornly silent.

Work wasn't much better. Having to converse and be nice to the clientele was not something Nicholas was good at, his rigid smile was unbelievable and the quickness of his retreat viewed as arrogant. He started to feel his job was an extension of his life with Angie, who was attending college less and less, so he was slipping into the role of minding her.

Three months after he disembarked from his bus at Port Authority, he took the return back to Boston without telling his boss or Angie and felt such a relief that he swore he'd never leave Boston again. 
In Somerville, Nicholas returned to find the girl who had slipped through his fingers in a relationship with his ambitious brother. "So, you got what you wanted in the end?" He chided Ina the first night he met her leaving his house. Her lipstick was smudged at the edges and his breath was reeking of beer. Ina looked at him with narrow eyes and didn't answer.  Nicholas watched her disappear, not entirely sure what he had meant, but unable to forget his strong desire to hurt her. Unwilling to go into the house where she had lain, he turned around and went down the steps, trying to believe that he saw uncertainty in her eyes. He had wanted to tell her that she was a liar, but with her lack of response and the anguish felt when she walked away, he resolved to no longer care what Ina thought of him. So by the time her engagement was announced he felt just about capable of chuckling.

Throughout his adult life, Nicholas could be brought back to adolescence with the aid of a woman's touch or scent. His body would react in the same way it had twenty years earlier with the release of pent up feeling that he had confused again and again with love.
The day he saw Ina walk out of her house to the letter box, wearing jeans and a black t-shirt above bare feet with her hair pulled back in a messy pony tail, was one of those times when his body and mind were thrown back, and he was again the nineteen year old boy who refused to give a damn what Ina thought.
Still he wondered if through the corner of her eye, Ina had seen him sitting on the porch and didn't care to acknowledge him. He rose and walked inside and found his mother at the kitchen table doing the cross words.  "You got home late last night."

Nicholas shrugged. There was no need to answer the familiar statement. He'd long ago realised that Maureen meant nothing by it.
"Ina's back."
Maureen looked up at her son, and raised her eyes to heaven in a silent beseech to give her patience, "I told you already. I phoned her when Bridgie fell. She got here yesterday and thank god too, Bridgie was going mad in the nursing home."
"When's Stephano coming...?"
"I don't think he is. It's not a holiday. She's here to take care of her mother, so leave her alone."
"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means don't be asking loads of questions."

"When do I ever ask Ina questions?"

Maureen raised her eyebrows with the sound of Ina's name coming from Nicholas' lips. There was more than a hint of derision there. She put the pen down and gazed at Nicholas, "I think Ina and Stephano are having problems. She was very quiet when I asked about him, and whenever I phoned he was never there. He always had to call me back."
"Did you ask her?"
"No, she'll tell me in her own time."
"Well I promise to leave her alone."
"Good," she picked up her pen and focused on the news paper again. Nicholas saw the good humoured smile at the edge of her lips.
A week after his first sighting of Ina, Nicholas came home to check on his mum and found Ina sitting at the kitchen table with an empty coffee cup cradled in her hands. She smiled at him when he entered, but he took nothing from this gesture. She seemed too detached, and the smile too automatic, like something she had waiting in reserve. He noticed the lack of gaiety in her eyes for the brief second she looked at him, before she rose.
"I better go back to mum." Her words were directed at no one and twirled around the emptiness of the room. Nicholas felt like grabbing her shoulders and forcing attention, but instead he simply asked, "How's Stephano?"
When she looked at him, the irritation in her eyes bidden by his aggressive tone made him want to laugh. "Fine"!
She threw the word like a brick before she turned to Maureen, "see you later." Her iciness brought from Nicholas presence meant she walked with more authority out the door than she did coming in.

On entering she had considered telling Maureen the truth, but couldn't do it, even with the soft sympathy on the older woman's face which was like a magnet drawing the words out.

"Why did you do that?" Maureen cried, while Ina walked down their front steps fuming with Nicholas' childishness.

"Jesus." his mother stood quickly, ignoring her son's shocked face which was bordering on laughter. "Don't you think its time ye stopped fighting. It's getting a bit ridiculous."
He never thought his relationship with Ina was noticeable. Maureen was at the door when he answered, "It's not my fault," and regretted immediately the petulance of his statement.

While next door, it was the quietness of their phone that made Bridgie suspicious and forced Ina to tell her "its over."  Like all mothers, Bridgie asked questions, but was met with a blank wall of silence. She worried for the change in her daughter and felt uncomfortable with her reticence towards Maureen, until Maureen told her when Ina was out shopping, "You don't have to look so anxious whenever you see me. I know something's wrong and I understand it's not your place."
Bridgie's "thank you," was as much candour as she could afford her best friend.

During those days when Ina searched quietly for a job, and the hours stretched, she would never have believed that Nicholas would be the one she would open to voluntarily.
But on the morning of Maureen's funeral, dressed in a new black skirt and white blouse, Ina moved slowly to the house next door and found Nicholas in the kitchen, looking out the window. The silence of the room was heavy with his grief, so she had to take a deep breath on entering like some one diving into water. 

He didn't turn around, maybe she would have been silent if he did, or maybe with his face before her, bringing back the way he looked two days ago with Maureen lifeless in his hands, she would have said more.

"We..." was quiet, though she felt it was snapped up by the room and its sound heightened. She cleared her throat and saw his head fall. "Nicholas, we're getting divorced."
Nicholas' nod let Ina walk away from the memory of Maureen slumped on the floor by the sink.  Ina had been the first to find Maureen after the brain haemorrhage. One side of the curtain rail had been ripped from the wall. Its links splattered onto the sideboard and ground looked like the remnants of a fight.

For a moment Ina stood transfixed, focusing on the grey curtain, and trying not to look at the body, hoping that if the tragedy was not witnessed it might change. Her lack of belief might let the woman breathe, but her tears betrayed her.
She stepped cautiously to Maureen and knelt to take her hand. The warmth was seeping out, so the first instant of heated touch grew cold within the next. Ina lifted

Maureen's head and the ice blue eyes made her cry out. With a hand on either cheek she lowered the face down and stayed, gasping in sobs, witnessing episodes of her life with Maureen, as if the woman had not enough time to see them, and Ina had stepped inside the loosened threads.
When her legs grew stiff she rose and went to the phone, hardly registering her movements. Her body was on auto pilot as she dialled the hospital and the number she found for Nicholas written in tidy penmanship within the pages of a small black book by the phone. "It's your mum," brought a deep breath, "you better come."
There was silence on the other end. The fact that Ina was ringing him added to the foreboding. She wouldn't call unless it was absolutely necessary. By the time Nicholas' car swerved in front of the house and ran up the steps, his body was so heavy, it was bordering on numbness.
Ina was standing in the living room. She had tried sitting but was too restless, her body and mind were trying to keep ahead of the facts that crashed on her when Nicholas entered. He stopped inside the front door. Above his trembling lips, his eyes were so beseeching she went to him without thinking, and fell into his chest. Her arms wrapping around the solidness of his back were a strait jacket to keep him there, to give him a few more moments before everything changed. His hands stayed by his side. She felt him look for his mother.

"Where is she?" said so matter of factly she knew how much it cost to ask this. By the time the words were aired, he had almost lost himself.
When she didn't answer the sob tore upward and he pleaded, "Ina!" She moved back, took his hand and felt like a child leading another into a nightmare as she led him to the kitchen door.
His scream made her muscles tighten in an effort to keep the sound locked out, his push sent her towards the wall, though neither were aware of it, their bodies were somewhere else, floating between Maureen's plane and theirs, lost in the middle, just as his voice had been.
She watched him kneel beside his mother and take her to him, saw the tears hit white hair, like water falling on withered ground, heard his cries, and could not move away from his openness. She believed he was so completely caught up in the pale skin before him and his love for his mother that he had forgotten her presence until he turned and his eyes begged her to change what was happening, to do something that could not be done. 
This glance towards her, this sharing of the need to hope that ‘This is not happening', Ina could not forget.

While the ambulance came, and when Ina explained to Bridgie about the loss of her friend and held her slight trembling body, Nicholas's face kept coming into her mind.
The fact that she had hoped as he had, by keeping her eyes away from Maureen so her lack of acceptance might bring her back to life made it more poignant, because she knew she wouldn't have done that with anyone else in the room. It would have been impossible to share that vulnerability.

Two days later, she walked to Nicholas' house. For what he had revealed to her, she wanted to give him something back. She didn't want to think it was because Stephano was coming within the hour, though she knew if she didn't say anything she would be waiting to feel the disclosure in the air, as if the moment she was discussed by the brother's, the atmosphere would change.  She wanted to let it out first, and it had to be to Nicholas. Then she could rid herself of the feeling that she owed him something.
Nicholas had been staring out the kitchen window, trying not to see his mother's long slender fingers withered with age grab the curtain and the look of dismay on her face when the railing threw itself into the air, and let her fall from her high height.
The notion of her defenceless, and the guilt for not being there when she needed him was eating him up, making him witness the scene so many times in the last twenty four hours he felt years had passed since Maureen died. 
 He was thinking that he would never put curtains up in this window again when he heard Ina's intake of breath.

"We..." For a moment he thought she was speaking of them. We...you and me, he felt the numbness that had moved in to spar with grieve dissolve. His hands holding the sink grew moist. ‘We', then silence, as if the years that had spread behind them was coming back to her, and needed to be ordered and understood.
His head bent.

"Nicholas, we're getting divorced." His lips barely moved. To anyone watching it would have looked like an ironic smile, but the relief in it was childlike. For all his imaginings, "we" coming from Ina scared the hell out of him.

He heard her leave and whispered his thanks, not sure what he was thanking her for most, telling him something he knew was difficult to share, or letting him forget for a sweet moment his loss.

Ina had made him feel lighter so when he saw her at the funeral, he held her hand and looked into her eyes as he would have done with a life long friend. He took comfort in her presence, not noticing Stephano's unease when she stood before him.
Ina's eyes met Stephano's and he saw the answers to all his questions in her detachment.  Within seconds she was gone, letting the next person pay their respects, and affording none to her ex husband.
She could not go to his house after the funeral. Her presence would not help Stephano, especially when she could not offer him the sympathy he deserved. Instead he would be reminded of all the times she chided him for not phoning his mother, and being too selfish to think of others. Weeks before leaving on one of Stephano's rare visits home, she had attacked him. "In the world of Stephano Giovanni, no one is worth the effort you expect to be given to you."

"At least I feel something. Jesus, you don't even warm up in bed, it's like being with a corpse."
"Didn't stop you," she had retaliated. They had gotten mean in the end. Stephano's spite was an effort to get something more than cold evaluation, while Ina's malice was because she'd stayed with him too long. Towards the end she was the selfish one.
The day after the funeral, when Nicholas was bidden by Bridgie to visit and talk about the funeral and mutual friends, Ina wasn't able for his presence.
Nicholas was sitting in the living room when she returned from a walk, and his body seemed to take up the whole house, making her chest tighten with the need for space.

He smiled at her, but what she gave back made his eyes narrow. It was not the first time Ina made him angry, but he had never felt it to such an extent. She had nodded at Nicholas in a brisk manner before moving into the kitchen where the sound of a saucepan being taken out of the press could not cover up her lack of hospitability

"Ina, could you put on some coffee"? Bridgie smiled at him, though her eyes showed their unease. "I'm afraid I'm not much of a hostess these days."

 Ina was fixing coffee when she felt Nicholas at the kitchen door. "Your mum needs her medication." The grasp on the jug tightened with her nod. She felt his eyes on knuckles. "Are you okay?"
"Yes..." That hard tone again, the word fell at his feet. Nicholas had believed Ina coming into his kitchen might have let them start from scratch, but watching her spoon coffee in the percolator he realised they were too old for that. The Ina he had known years ago had disappeared. He'd never learned how to talk to this one.
"Stephano went yesterday."
She nodded, and pressed the on button. "I'll get the pills in a minute."

There was nothing left to say. He turned and went back to Bridgie, sat long enough to be polite, but left before the coffee was finished brewing and Ina had managed to move from her position in front of the counter.

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