The Eternal Darkness of Spring

Written for a short story class. I personally love this story and wanted to share it with others.

Cieran had always loved springtime. He did not love it for the cliché reason that everything was turning green and being reborn and he did not love it because it was getting warm. In fact, he preferred the cold. Yet, he loved that moment, in the middle of March, when spring was just beginning. Dead branches would lie all over the ground, brown grass stuck up like little tufts of hair on the top of a newborn’s head. Then, ever so subtly, the sun would cross over the broken vegetation and there would be a moment of hope. At first, winter’s freezing air would try to push the moment away, but it would fail. Every living thing would reach towards the sun earnestly.

            Cieran looked out the window of his Dublin flat and watched the sun creep over the horizon to light the dirty street below. He smiled slightly as he watched the light, changing from red to yellow, reflect off of the puddles from the recent rainstorm. His smile turned to a frown as the garbage that littered the street came into view as well.  “Every good thing gets ruined by damn people,” he thought. Cieran felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to see Cara looking past him to the rising star on the horizon.

            “Morning,” he said quietly, not wanting to destroy the moment.

            She turned her gaze to him and smiled warmly, “Good morning. You’re up rather early. Did you sleep well?”

            “Nah,” he responded. “I had that f*****g dream again.”

            “Oh,” she said and let it go. Several years ago, he had invented the lie that he had a recurring nightmare that would wake him in the night and ruin his sleep. He didn’t want her to know that there were nights where he never went to sleep. He would just sit in the kitchen and stare out the window and think about his mother. This had been happening three or four times a month since they had left Belfast and moved to Dublin, five years ago.

            “Do ya want anything to eat?” Cara asked, opening the fridge.

            He shook his head and watched her as she grabbed eggs, milk, and bacon from the fridge. He saw the small scar above her left eye from the time when they were ten and she had fallen while they were playing outside. He watched as she pushed her auburn hair out of her face and remembered how they had gone to the Debs dance together in high school because they were both too scared to ask anyone else. The funny thing was, everyone at the dance thought that they were a couple and there were several comments about how the two of them were perfect together. Cieran and Cara had shared several laughs at this idea, and continued being friends for the next ten years.

            “It’s been one long f*****g decade,” he thought. He walked over to the fridge and reached past Cara to grab a beer.

            “Starting early aren’t you?” She said with a laugh.

            “Nah,” he answered. “Early would have been an hour ago. I’m just starting the day off right.”

            They proceeded to fall into the morning routine they had established since moving into the flat. Cara made breakfast, intentionally making too much for herself so, if he decided he was actually hungry, Cieran could eat as well. Cieran drank either coffee or beer, depending on his mood, and then went for a quick walk down the street to get the Irish Times from the corner store. When he returned twenty minutes later, Cara was sitting at the table. He joined her and the two of them silently read the paper.

            Cieran read a story about a recent IRA attack in Ulster that had killed three British soldiers.  As he read about the children who the soldiers had left behind, he thought about his father. Fifteen years ago, he had lived in Belfast with his parents, happy in his youthful ignorance of the world around him. One night his father was walking home from work when a man threw a Molotov cocktail through an apartment window across the street. Apparently, it had been the home of a British sympathizer. Hearing the tortured screams of the people inside, Cieran’s father ran into the building; saving two children and their mother before the roof collapsed on him. The newspapers called him a hero and praised him as a sign of the ‘good men of Ireland.’ A week later, at his funeral, which turned into a ceremonial event crowded with reporters, the city’s politicians gave his father a medal. Two years later, his mother went to the market and never came back; unable to handle Cieran’s resemblance to his father.

            Cara knocked Cieran out of his brooding by standing up and walking to the sink. She turned back to him and, after pausing for a moment, said, “You’ve been too quiet. What’s on your mind? Don’t tell me it’s nothing, I know ye better than anyone.”

            This was the moment he had known would come and yet had tried to delay for several days. He took a deep breath and said simply, “I want to leave.”

            She nodded, as if she understood his need to escape, and said, “We’ll find another apartment, maybe we can go to Cork. It’s been five years. Maybe it’s time for a change.”

            He frowned, not wanting to upset her but also wanting her to understand what he meant. He said, “No. I don’t just want to leave the flat Cara. I want to leave Ireland altogether. I can’t be happy here. I feel haunted by everything we tried to leave behind in Belfast. I want to get out of here.”

            “You can’t be happy?” she quietly asked, he knew she was trying to control her temper, “Cieran, do you even know what it means to be happy? If you left here tomorrow, would you know what you were looking for?”

            He looked down at the table, trying not to let her see the sadness in his eyes, “No, I don’t know. I only know that I can’t find it in this damn country.”

            She stepped forward, no longer trying to hide her frustration, “The war is over Cieran! It’s time to move on! You can’t let yourself be swallowed by your past.”

            “What if I can’t stop it?” he asked, his voice sounding desperate, “What if the only way for me to escape from my past is for me to leave this whole country behind?”

            She sighed and answered, “Cieran, if you are going to leave this place, you had better not think you are abandoning me. I will not let you leave me here alone just because you are scared of moving on. If you leave, I am coming with you.”

            Cieran raised an eyebrow, “You want to come with me? Even though I don’t know what I’m looking for? Why?”

            She laughed and said, “If I don’t come with you, you’ll never find your way out of the country. You’ll get lost just leaving the neighborhood, much less the city.”

            He joined her in laughing, something he hadn’t done in a very long while, and then stood up, pulling her into an embrace. As he held her close he kissed her forehead and said, “Thank you love. I’ll make this up to you someday. I swear.”

            Muffled against his chest she mumbled, “Damn right you will.”

***

            Cieran loaded the last box into the back of Seamus’ truck and turned to face Cara’s friend from the law firm where, until two days earlier, she had been a secretary. The other fellow was fat and had broken a disgusting sweat helping move most of Cieran and Cara’s stuff into a storage unit a few blocks away. It had only taken two weeks to pack up all of their belongings and now Cieran was feeling restless. He wanted to get out of Dublin as soon as possible. Pushing his long black hair out of his face, he continued eyeing the man who, until Cara had told him she had a friend to help them move, he had not known existed.

            “Thanks for the help,” Cieran said, wiping the sweat off his hand and extending it to Seamus.

            “No problem,” Seamus replied. “Cara’s one of our best people. We’re sad to see her go.”

            Cieran smiled and thought, “You’re just sad you don’t get to stare at her a*s anymore.” He turned away from Seamus as Cara came down the front steps and walked over to the two men. She thanked Seamus once more and then turned to Cieran.

            “Seamus said he can handle taking the last load to the warehouse, so let’s get going,” she said this with no real sense of urgency.

            He nodded, shook Seamus’ hand one more time and got into Cara’s old ’93 Volkswagen Jetta. They drove to the dock where they loaded the car into a container; it would be shipped to Cardiff the following week. Twenty minutes later they boarded the ferry that took them across the sea.

            Arriving in Holyhead, they decided to spend the night in a hotel before they headed south to Wales. Lying next to Cara on the bed in their shared room, Cieran realized that he had never really thought about what would happen when he left Ireland. Now that they had, a surge of guilt rose up from his gut; he had brought her here without so much as a basic plan. He looked at her, she was captivated by an article in The Times about one of the warlords in Africa. Suddenly, as if she sensed his gaze, she looked away from the paper and met his eyes.

            “I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

            The smile disappeared, “For what?”

            Cieran looked away, trying to think of the right words to say to her, finally he said, “I took you away from home. First, when we left Belfast and now that we’ve come here. I never asked you if you wanted to come, I just took for granted that you would come with me.”

            She frowned at him, saying, “Love, don’t feel that way. You didn’t force me to come with you. Just accept that I’m here and try to enjoy our little adventure.”

He squeezed her hand lightly and said, “I’ve never said thank you, cuisle mo chroí. You are too good to me.”

            She laughed, “I haven’t heard that phrase, ‘cuisle mo chroí’, in years! Your mother used to call you that when you were little and I used to make fun of you for being ‘the pulse of her heart’.”

            Cieran couldn’t help but chuckle when he thought about all the times that he had chased Cara around in the streets of Belfast because she had started mocking him about how sappy his mother was to him.

Cara smirked at him, “That’s the smile I’ve missed! Sometimes I’m convinced you have forgotten how to use those muscles in your mouth.” She stuck her tongue out at him, exactly like she used to when they were young.

For a brief second it felt like they were ten years old again and Cieran was able to forget about all the crap they’d been through.  He could almost hear the sound of his mother calling the two of them into the house for dinner. The muscles in his hands tensed as he thought about his mother. He immediately tried to clear his thoughts.

Then, without warning, Cara’s voice changed to a more serious tone, and she said, “I worry about you sometimes Cieran. I worry that you don’t remember what I feels like to be happy and just enjoy things for what they are.”

 His smile disappeared as quickly as it had arrived. The stress lines reappeared into the furrowed brow and slight frown he always wore. He sighed and laid his head back on his pillow and said, “I think we should try to get some sleep.” He rolled over on to his side and said no more, hoping that she would not try to pursue the conversation.

The next morning they dressed and grabbed breakfast in the hotel dining room. They barely spoke until they were on the train heading south to Cardiff. An hour into the four-hour train ride, knowing that he could not escape the conversation anymore.

 “Cieran,” she said, stopping hesitantly and then continuing on, “why have you started shutting me out?”

He looked out the window, at first trying to pretend he hadn’t heard her, but when she reiterated the question, he had no choice but to reply, his breath causing a thin layer of fog on the window, “I don’t want you to pity me.”

Her eyes widened and she said, “Pity? Why the bloody hell would I pity you? I worry, but I would never think to have pity for you.”

Cieran wished he could escape, wanting nothing more than to run to the dining car and grab a beer. He knew, however that she would never let him leave. They had been dancing around this issue for months now, but this was the first time she’d gotten him in a place where he couldn’t avoid the questioning look she was giving him. He hated that look; one eyebrow slightly raised, lips pursed tightly together, a slight smirk, it drove him crazy. With that look, back in high school, she had managed to convince him that the best thing for him was to tell her the names of every girl he had ever liked. Not to mention, every year, she managed to persuade him to tell her what he had gotten her for her birthday. This year he had not gotten her anything; not because he didn’t want to, but because he couldn’t afford it.

He turned to her and said, “We both know I’ve been miserable the last few months. I guess, I’ve been thinking a lot about my parents. I can’t seem to stop.

            Shifting in her chair so she could fully face him, she reached up and ran a hand along his cheek, saying, “Love, it’s normal to be thinking like this. You lost both of your parents in less than two years. Have you considered finding your mother?”

            He shook his head, “She made it clear in that letter she left me that she couldn’t stand to see me anymore. Apparently, I look too much like my da. F**k, if only she knew how hard it was for me to look in the mirror, seeing him, almost like a ghost constantly behind me.”

            Cara watched him for a moment, and then said, “Cieran, we will be alright. You don’t have to talk about this now if you don’t want to. Just know, I don’t think you look a thing like your dad. I think you look like the guy who used to chase me around with the hose, just to piss me off. “

            He smiled at her, thankful for her presence, “Let’s get some sleep,” he said quietly, “we’re both tired.”

***

            Cieran looked around the flat that he and Cara had found in St. David’s, Wales, and smiled. He unbuttoned his uniform shirt from the post office and threw it down on the chair in front of the TV. His muscles, sore from weeks of lifting heavy mail bags, begged for relief, but he refused to rest, instead he went to Cara’s bedroom, which doubled as her study. Opening the door, he saw she was bent over a piece of paper, scribbling furiously.

            Moving up behind her he said, “How’s the article coming?”

            She grinned as she glanced quickly over her shoulder at him, “Almost finished! How was work?”

            “Not bad,” he sighed and sat down on her bed, “Peter told me I was doing great for only being on the job for three months. I’ve got all my routes memorized finally.”

            She stood up and gave him a brief hug before sitting next to him and saying, “I’m so proud of you!”

            Feeling her hand on his knee, Cieran felt the usual surge of affection for her. He looked at the fingernails that she kept filed down so that she could hold her pencil easier. He looked at the graphite, buried under her nails, and thought about the last time he remembered her letting her hands get that dirty. She had been sitting outside her house with him, watching the cars drive by, when she saw the stray dog wander out into the middle of the road. Before either of them could react, a car came speeding down the street and hit the creature. Cieran watched quietly as Cara had raced out into the road and knelt by the dying dog, holding its head in her lap as it died.

He had watched her silent tears as he tried to tell her that they had to get someone who could dispose of the animal. He tried telling her about all the diseases but she had just said, “I’m not leaving him”, and then tried to pick up the dog. After several failed attempts, Cieran reached down and helped her pick up the dead mutt. They carried him all the way to the abandoned lot two blocks away and, after Cieran ran all the way back to the house to get a shovel, they dug a hole and placed the dog in it.

“Let me bury him,” Cara had said quietly.

Cieran watched as her bloodstained, dirty hands lifted shovelfuls of dirt and slowly returned the unfortunate beast to the earth. After she finished packing down the soil, she turned away from the grave, without saying a word, and walked away. He watched her for a few seconds and then looked back at the resting place of the unknown dog. “Is this what awaits us all?” he thought, then had followed after Cara.

She removed her hand from his knee, he barely noticed as she stood up. She headed for the bedroom door but before she crossed the threshold she asked, “I’m going to make dinner soon, do you want a beer?”

            He nodded, and moved to the chair at her desk. Looking over the paper she’d been working on, he noticed that it wasn’t an article for the newspaper. It was a letter addressed to Miriam McCullough. Cieran felt his hands clench immediately and he started breathing harder. He stood up quickly, taking the letter with him, and stormed out into the kitchen.

            “Why are you writing to my mother?” he demanded of Cara, who was bent over in the fridge, looking in the back for something elusive.

            Without standing up she responded, “She wrote to me first. Right before we left Dublin she sent a letter saying she’d used a private investigator to find us. She asked me if she could come visit you. She wants to see you, see how you are doing.”

            “If she wanted to know that,” Cieran said between clenched teeth, “she shouldn’t have left. She doesn’t get the right to find us now and find out how we’re ‘making do’.”

            Cara stood up quickly and said, “How long can you stay angry at her? Did you ever think that maybe the reason you aren’t happy anywhere is because you hold on to that anger at your mother?”

            He slammed his fist on the doorway, “Damn it Cara! My mother gave up being part of my life when she left me to fend for myself! I will never forgive her for that,” he paused, trying to regain control of his anger. He breathed in and out deeply a few times before saying, much quieter, “My anger at my mother doesn’t matter. Don’t write to her. She doesn’t deserve it.”

            Cara moved in his way, stopping him from leaving. She stared intently at him, saying, “Let her visit Cieran. She is your mother! She made a mistake, but so have you! You’ve been trying out run her for years! See her!”

            Cieran wanted to argue, he wanted to tell her that she was wrong and that he hadn’t been moving them from place to place in an attempt to outrun that goddamn memory. That day, when he was 13, when his mother had told him she was going to the store for a few minutes. He remembered how he had sat around for six hours, waiting for her to come home, before he realized that she wasn’t. He had searched her room, looking for a clue as to where she went. All he found was a brief note that had said she was sick of being reminded of Cieran’s father every time she saw him and how she couldn’t handle being a single mother anymore. Cieran couldn’t argue though, because he knew that Cara was right.

            Taking a deep breath, looking Cara in the eyes, he said, “If you want her to come, she can.”

            He turned away from his friend and walked back to the bedroom, shutting the door loudly behind him.

***

            Cieran was sitting in the living room, watching the evening news, when the door to the apartment opened. He did not look to see who was entering, hoping silently that Cara had changed her mind on the way to the train station and that she would go to her bedroom as she usually did after work. This hopeful thought lasted until she walked in to the living room, followed by an older woman with short gray hair. He continued staring at the television, not really understanding what he was watching, desiring a way of avoiding the guest.

            “Cieran,” Cara said softly, trying to get his attention.

            Before she could say anything else, the other woman spoke up, “Maybe I shouldn’t have come. Maybe this was a bad idea.”
            Cara looked at her and said, with a smile, “No, Miriam, it’s ok, I’ll talk to-“

            “Maybe it was a bad idea,” Cieran interrupted, standing up suddenly, “I don’t know what you expected. I haven’t seen you in fifteen years. I am not about to jump up in joy at seeing you.”

            Miriam stayed silent for a moment, looking uneasy. She took a deep breath and said, “I know you hate me Cieran. I do. I haven’t forgiven myself for leaving you. Everyday, I wonder why I didn’t have the strength to stay. I don’t expect you to forgive me Cieran, I just wanted to see you.”

As they stared at each other, Cieran finally started to really see his mother. He hadn’t noticed when she walked in that she was not aging well; her eyes rested in shallow sockets and her hair was thinning out. She looked like she hadn’t been well in quite some time. He noticed that her clothes were sagging off of her skin, as if they were reminding her of a body she no longer had.

“Are you sick?” he asked, trying not to let his voice betray his concern; he did not want to feel anything for this woman.

She nodded slowly, “I was diagnosed with breast cancer about six months ago. I have been getting chemotherapy, but it hasn’t helped much.”

Cara let out a gasp. She gave Miriam a hug while saying, “I’m so sorry!”

Cieran watched the two women for a moment. He knew that he was supposed to care, that he was supposed to express his concern for his mother. He was supposed to offer condolences to her, tell her that he would help her through it all. But as he watched the two of them, holding each other, he realized, he felt nothing for his mother; no anger, no frustration, no sadness.

He cleared his throat, interrupting the two women’s embrace, he said, “I’m sorry to hear you are sick. If you came looking for absolution from me, you can leave knowing you have it. I don’t hold anything against you any more. Maybe in another life we could have had the perfect family, but as it is, I’ve made my way. I’ve survived all these years without you, and it seems that, up until now, you have done the same without me. I don’t see a reason for us to pretend like we suddenly need each other.”

Miriam did not seem taken aback by his coldness. She nodded, giving a small smile. “It seems that you’ve grown up without me.  I’m sorry it all happened like this, Cieran. I really am. I love you, I always will.”

Cieran nodded slightly, he said simply, “I know.”

***

Two months later, Cieran received a small envelope in the mail. When he opened it, he found a small newspaper clipping and a note. He quietly read the note; it was from a good friend of his mother’s. She said that Miriam had asked her to send him her obituary when she died. Cieran looked at the newspaper clipping, seeing a picture of his mother, from when she was younger, staring up at him. Below it was a brief description of her life, or at least, the life she wanted to be remembered for. He gave a small laugh when it said that she left behind one son. Still smiling, he walked out of the living room into the kitchen.

Cara was sitting at the table, writing out some checks for various bills. He walked over and sat down. He put the clipping down in front of her and watched her while she read it. She looked up at him, tears forming in her eyes.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

He nodded, “I’m fine. We made our peace. It’s done.”

She stood up and grabbed a beer for each of them out of the fridge. He took a sip and said, “It’s a weird feeling though.”

            “What is?” she asked.

            “I’m the last of my family. It feels weird, knowing that I’m really alone now.”

“You’re never alone cuisle mo chroí,”she said quietly.

He put his beer down and moved to embrace her. She wrapped her arms tightly around him, and he felt, for the first time in many years, that things were going to be ok. He smiled at her and held her tight. The tightness that had been in his chest, all of the guilt, the sadness, the anger, it all released as he stood in the kitchen, holding Cara in his arms.

***

Cieran stared at Cara, standing before him in her wedding dress. He smiled as he took in how beautiful she looked. The morning sun, coming through the stained glass windows of the church, highlighted her brown hair, making it seem as if it was changing colors. Around her neck was the locket that he had given her last Christmas. Two years had passed since they left Ireland on their journey to find happiness. Now, he realized, they had finally found it.

He stepped forward and said, “Are you ready love?”

She laughed, “As ready as I can be. I’m a bit nervous.”

He took her hand in his and said, his voice reassuring, “You’ll be fine, if you get really nervous, just remember, nothing is going to change after this.”

“Of course it will change,” she said quickly, “how could it not?”

Before he could answer, the priest opened the door to the sanctuary and told them that it was time. Giving her one last kiss on the cheek, Cieran left the room and headed to the altar. Taking his place, he waited, hearing the organ start and seeing the doors open and watching as Cara gracefully walked down the aisle, towards her husband. As she passed him, Cieran gave her one last smile, before she stood next to Paul, the groom.

After the wedding was over and everyone had begun getting thoroughly drunk at the reception, Cieran stood outside the parish hall. He looked out at the dead trees and smiled, the hopeful light was shining on them again. Feeling a hand on his shoulder, he turned to see Cara, smiling at him.

            “Had enough to drink yet?” she said with a grin.

            “Never enough to drink,” he said with a laugh.

            He looked at her, noticing how beautiful she was in her wedding dress. He remembered a time when he’d thought that maybe she would wear that dress for him. Now, he realized, he didn’t care who she wore the dress for. He didn’t need her to be his wife, his lover, or anything other than what she had always been. He smiled, feeling his body relax a little, as she handed him a drink.

            “Smile more,” she said, “it looks good on you.”           

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