Down on Luck

He paused then, and I could tell what was coming. He put on a brave face, but I knew that Eoin McSteele was about to cry.

“I tried to get him to go into rehab, like Gavin suggested last time I talked to him, but he refused and ended up in the hospital. He’s got a real bad infection and it doesn’t look good. I need to know what to do. Gavin is down as next of kin. They won’t listen to me. We need to decide the next step.”

I reached into my purse and got out a fresh tissue, handing it to Eoin, which he took gratefully. What I really wanted to do was give him a hug but I restrained myself, not sure if he wanted me to.

“T’anks,” he said, blowing his nose so hard his glasses nearly came off.

“He never told me about that,” I said.

“I’m not surprised,” Eoin said, pocketing the tissue. “He likes ta keep his dark secrets in the past. He’d rat’er run from it than actually have to face dem.”

“Was he – violent?” I asked, remembering the scars I had seen on him when drying him off.

I didn’t say anything at the time, too blinded by love to think about what it might mean.

“Only when he had to. Ye gotta understand, we’re from a really rough neighborhood. Pretty much every boy over fifteen has at least one scar. It’s considered a sort o’ right o’ passage. Time was it used ta be guns and bombs back when Gavin was a teenager during da end o’ da Troubles, so we count ourselves kinda lucky we just gotta put up wit’ the occasional shankin’. Hurts like hellfire but everyone survives, mostly.”

The kid was young but had done a world of living that I could’t even imagine and seemed wise well beyond his years.

“Would you like to come in?” I finally asked.

“T’anks.”

“Eat what you want from the kitchen. Gavin should be back soon. He’s off to an audition. I’ll be locking the door when I leave.”

I locked the door and made my way down to get the bus home, fighting the hot rage stirring up inside me. Gavin had a lot of reasons to go to therapy and yet he had acted like he didn’t. Almost as if I was the strange one.

There was a lot he wasn’t telling me. And why should he? This was only a fake relationship. And I guess he really thought of this whole arrangement as only fake the entire time.

Chapter Thirteen

Maggie

I was always told not to use a cellphone while driving. But Gavin had driven me down to his place and I was taking the bus home, so I wasn’t driving.

Terrible images flashed through my head of what Gavin’s childhood might have been like. I might have seen too many movies, but I imagined bomb plots and gang fights with knives. I had heard about what Ireland had been like years ago, but I had figured that was just the North. Where all the bad news came from. Or rather good news sometimes, like when Britain finally withdrew their troops.

It could make someone my age think that it was all over long ago and that all the problems had been solved. They hadn’t been, though, and Gavin had been on the receiving end of a lot of them.

I was really confused, flitting between feeling as if I was falling for Gavin, feeling really bad for him, being really mad at him for lying to me and realizing that I never really knew him at all. Not the real him.

How could he keep such a major part of himself from me?

It was then that I felt the crushing weight of hypocrisy come down on me. My past wasn’t as deep and dark as his, but I wasn’t really open about it even with my therapist, either. At least not as much as Gavin seemed to think.

Dr. Benoit knew what had had happened with Kenny and Raquel, of course. It had been the effects of that that I was there to see her about, after all. But I meant everything before that. Before Raquel and her dad came to live with my mom and me.

My father’s death had gone entirely unsaid and that was no small matter. I supposed I hadn’t ever really dealt with it.

While I hated that Gavin had lied to me, I couldn’t really blame him for how he grew up. It wasn’t as if it was his fault. I just didn’t feel like I could risk it. If he could keep that secret, what else might he be hiding?

Was he violent? Eoin hadn’t seemed to think so, but his perspective could have been skewed by how he grew up.

I needed to talk to some one, and that was why I was on my cell phone on a bus.