One More for Christmas

“What an inspiring story. To be able to do all that when you had lost the man you loved.” Mary put her cup down. “Did you have no one to support you? Talk to you?”

“I’d moved to a new area, and I didn’t know anyone. And I’m not sure I would have talked anyway. I think I knew, even then, that I needed to listen to my own voice.”

Mary broke a cookie in half. “I don’t know how I would have managed in those early days if I hadn’t had my friends and family. Someone from the village dropped by every day for the first two months. And it’s true that I didn’t always want the food, and there were times when I wished they’d leave me alone so that I could just grieve in peace, but I’m glad they didn’t. It forced me to get up and live life, even though that life had shrunk to less than half its original size.” Mary sighed. “You should have had that support, Gayle. No one should have to cope with the death of a loved one alone.”

She could change the subject. She probably should change the subject.

“He didn’t die. At least, not then.” She didn’t know what made her speak about something she’d never spoken about before. Maybe it was Mary’s kindness. Maybe it was simply that this new shift in her life had torn open something she’d kept safely inside her. “I left him.” She glanced at Mary, expecting to see shock and instead saw sympathy.

“That can’t have been an easy decision to make.”

“In fact it was an easy decision, although not so easy to execute.” Gayle’s mouth felt dry. “The first time he hit me was right here in Scotland, on our honeymoon.”

“Oh Gayle.” Now there was shock, and also a glimpse of anger that didn’t seem to fit mild Mary.

“I probably should have walked out right there and then, but it’s so easy to make excuses and to convince yourself it won’t happen again. I met him at college. I was in my second year, and I’d just lost both my parents in a traffic accident. We were very close. The closest family you could imagine. Only child. Treasured daughter. I was their princess.” Gayle rubbed her hand over her neck, wondering how it was possible to still miss her parents when it had been so many years. “I had an idyllic childhood, which at the time was wonderful, but it in no way prepared me for the harsh reality of life. Losing them together like

that, so suddenly, was like being marooned on an island with no survival skills. I felt alone. Afraid. I had no idea how to cope. I went back to college because I didn’t know what else to do, but it felt like a different place and I felt like a different person. I had no idea how to function. I’d been truly loved, and now I had no one. And then I met Ray. He was fifteen years older than me. Maybe that was what drew him to me. A cliché, I know, but I wonder now if I was looking for some sort of parental type support.” It had taken her years to figure that out, but Mary didn’t seem surprised.

“That makes perfect sense. You were lost with no map. He offered a safe place.” She topped up Gayle’s tea and pushed the cup toward her. “Drink something.”

Gayle took one sip and then another, then closed her hands round the mug taking comfort from the warmth.

“I leaned on him. You’re right that with him I felt safe, which is ironic looking back on it. Most of the students I mixed with seemed as flaky as me, and then there was this guy with money and an apartment, who seemed to have all the answers. He was patient, kind, and he took care of me. And then I found out I was pregnant.”

“That must have been a frightening thing.”

“It was. I wanted to finish college, I knew I needed to finish college. I had to make a life for myself. And I think I knew then that although on the surface I was coping better, I wasn’t really. I wasn’t really caring for myself, so how could I care for a baby? I’d gone from one cosseted life to another. Being with him absolved me of the need to take control and be a responsible adult. But he was delighted by the fact I was pregnant. He didn’t want me to worry about finishing college. He would look after me. With hindsight, I should have seen a red flag, but I was an emotional mess and I took the easy path. I married him.”

“And you came to Scotland.”

“Yes. It was beautiful, and I remember being happy. Until the day he hit me—I don’t even remember why. Something I did. Something I said. And I was shocked. No one had ever hit me before. My parents were loving, if anything they were overindulgent. I had no experience of abuse of any kind.”

“You didn’t walk out then?”

“No. He was mortified and apologetic. Blamed it on work stress, drinking too much—I don’t know. I can’t remember that part, either. But I accepted his promise that he would never do it again.” She was almost too embarrassed to admit her stupidity. “I believed him.”

“Why wouldn’t you?” Mary thumped her mug down on the table. “You’d never been given reason not to trust people before.” Her visible outrage made Gayle feel better about something that had troubled her for decades.

“Reflecting on it later, I decided I just didn’t want to see it. He was the one who had supported me after I’d lost my parents. I had no confidence in my ability to be self-sufficient.” She breathed. “Things seemed to settle down. He had angry moments, but he didn’t hit me again. Until Samantha was seven months old. I was six months pregnant with Ella when he threw me down the stairs. I don’t know how I didn’t lose the baby. Somehow I managed to twist myself and landed on my back and not my stomach. Samantha was screaming and I saw him pick her up and shake her. That was it. That was the moment I knew I had to get away. It wasn’t just me who was in danger, it was my daughter and my unborn child. So I left. It was Christmas, and from then on I always associated Christmas with that awful day.” She reached for her tea, but her hand was shaking so badly most of it slopped on the table. “I’m sorry. I’m—”

“Don’t.” Mary reached for a cloth, her movements calm and quiet. “Don’t apologize for being upset about something that would have broken most people.”

“It was right then, at the lowest point of my life, that I realized the only person I could rely on was myself. I had no loving parents to cushion me from life. No partner—because in no way were Ray and I ever partners. I had no qualifications and no career prospects. I’d thought about working, of course, but Ray had insisted it was better if I stayed at home with the children, and as he earned plenty there was no need for me to work. I hadn’t finished college. It didn’t even occur to me that it would be sensible for me to have a way to earn a living in case I needed to do that one day. Without the girls I don’t know what I would have done, but I had them and they were my motivation for everything.”

“So what did you do?”

“I was lucky that I had a small amount of money that my parents left. Fortunately I’d never told Ray about it. Three months after I left him, the police came to my door. He’d wrapped his car around a tree. He’d been drinking. I went into labor that night. They put the baby in my arms, and I felt this tiny scrap of flesh and a ton weight of responsibility. I had a ten-month-old and a newborn. That was the point in my life when I grew up.”

“I would have been crushed by it,” Mary murmured. “Flattened.”

“I was. Thinking about the enormity of it, the hugeness of what lay ahead, froze me. So I narrowed my field of vision. I dealt with the problem that was in front of me. And then the next problem. I found a home day care provider who lived in the same block as me, and worked two jobs to pay for it. Hardly saw the girls, but I did what I had to. I finished college, and spent every moment of every day applying for jobs. To start with I got nowhere, and then I was offered a job on a graduate program with a consultancy firm. They’d decided they needed to hire more women. It was a box ticking exercise, but I didn’t even care. It grew from there. I constructed a new life from the rubble of the old one.”

And maybe that was something to be proud of. Maybe not all her choices had been bad.

Mary didn’t seem to think so.

“And you did that while raising two beautiful girls.” She paused. “Did you tell them the truth about their father?”