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“Thanks, Joey,” I sniffled, wiping my nose with the back of my hand as I settled under the covers.
“No problem.”
Turning onto my side, I looked down at him lying on his bedroom floor.
His curtains were closed, but the streetlamps on the footpath outside the house cloaked the room in a dull hue of faded color, illuminating the shadows on my brother’s face.
“Hey, Joe?”
“Yeah?”
“Can you do me a favor?”
He tipped his chin up, letting me know he was listening.
“Please don’t do to me what Darren did to us.” Folding my hands under my cheek, I whispered, “Don’t leave me.”
“I won’t,” my brother vowed, tone laced with grit and sincerity. “I won’t ever leave you here with him.”
I breathed out a shaky breath. “Mam is never going to leave him—”
“Mam can do whatever the fuck she wants,” Joey interrupted, tone hardening. “She made her bed when she took him back last time. She can keep popping out his offspring and put up with his bullshit for the rest of her goddamn life for all I care. But you and me? We stick together.” He turned his face to me and said, “When I get out of this shithole, and I will get out, I’m taking you with me.”
Chewing on my lip, I asked, “What about the boys?”
Joey exhaled heavily but didn’t respond.
Nanny Murphy, our maternal great-grandmother, picked our younger brothers up from school every day and dropped them home, fed and watered and dressed for bed around 8:00 p.m. Nanny had done the same for Darren, Joey, and me up until we moved on to secondary school.
It was a strange arrangement considering she and my parents barely spoke, and one I had asked Nanny about. I wanted to know why at the age of eighty-one she continued to help my parents when they clearly didn’t appreciate her.
She had raised my mother and her sister, Alice, when their parents passed away when they were children, but you’d swear Nanny was a stranger the way our mother treated her.
Nanny told me that she didn’t do it for them. She did it for us. Because she loved us. And we were not to suffer for our parents’ poor decisions. She had toilet-trained every one of us when our mother was working all the hours God gave her and our father wasn’t interested.
Nanny Murphy had stepped in when our mother and father stepped out. Nanny made it clear that she would love and nurture every child born out of their fucked-up union because we were her great-grandbabies.
Tadhg, Ollie, and Sean were relatively protected from the tornado that was our father because we were lucky enough to have a great-grandmother who loved us.
The problem was, Nanny was pushing on in life, and she couldn’t do this forever. She couldn’t keep wading in and saving the day. Her health was fading, old age was setting in, and money was as tight for her as it was for us. Nanny didn’t have the money to feed us on top of our three younger brothers, and every time we ran to her with another problem, another wrinkle appeared on her face and another doctor’s appointment accrued.
It was for those and many more reasons why Joey and I had scaled back on our visits.
“They’re our brothers,” I whispered, dragging myself from my thoughts.
“I’m not their father,” Joey croaked out. “And who knows, maybe Mam will come to her senses before they completely fuck them up like they did us and Darren. Either way, there’s nothing I can do about it. I can’t take care of them, Shannon. I can’t afford it and I don’t have the time. I’m getting us out of here. That’s the best I can do.”
“You promise?”
He nodded. “As soon as I’m finished with school and settled in college next year, I’ll get a flat. It might take me some time to put together the cash and get on my feet, but I’ll get out of here, Shannon. I’ll get you out of here. I can fucking promise you that.”
“I believe you,” I told him.
And I did.
He’d been telling me this plan since Darren walked out the door five years ago and left us to deal with our father’s whiskey wrath alone.
I believed that my brother meant every word he was saying, every promise he was making.
