Two years and one month. A hundred and thirteen Sundays, and I know that because I went back and counted afterwards, which is a thing I did instead of sleeping.
She missed four. Three of them were a chest infection in the second winter and one was a Sunday when there’d been a thing with the fire alarm and everybody was in the garden at six. All four times, Kieran texted me before seven — she’s fine, it’s the chest thing again — because we had worked out early that a phone not ringing is unbearable when you have no way to check.
So when it got to ten past six on a Sunday in September and my phone hadn’t gone, I knew.
Not knew-knew. But I’d had my phone in my hand since about five to, which is something I had started doing at some point without noticing, and there was no text from Kieran, and there was no call, and I sat on my kitchen floor with my back against the dishwasher and waited until twenty past.
Then I called the home.
She had died at about half past two that afternoon, in her chair, in the day room, which is where she wanted to be and where she basically always was.
It was not sudden in the medical sense — she was eighty-nine and things had been going for a while — but it was sudden in the sense that mattered, which is that on the previous Sunday she had been extremely funny about a man called Ronnie and a disagreement over a parking space, and had told me I looked tired, which she could not possibly have known and said most weeks anyway, and had said love you, pet, and had let me go.
The woman on the phone was called Angela and she was on the evening shift and she was so kind to me that I had to stop talking twice.
She said Kieran had been there since three. She said she was sorry nobody had called me; my number was on the plan but the plan was for Sundays at six and it had been an afternoon and everything had happened at once.
Then she said: “She had a good morning. She was on about the roof.”
Kieran called me at about nine.
I don’t remember most of it. I remember that at one point he said, “I didn’t get to tell her,” and I said tell her what, and he said, “Anything. Any of it. I’ve had eleven years and I never got to tell her anything, because there was nobody to tell.”
And I said, “She knew you came.”
He said, “She didn’t. That’s the whole point. She didn’t know.”
And I said — and I have thought since about whether this was the right thing to say and I still think it was — I said:
“She told me about the boy. In January. She said he doesn’t come any more and she said tell him it’s all right. Kieran, she said tell him it’s all right. She was worried about whether you were all right.”
There was a very long silence on the phone.
Then he said, “She said that?”
I said she said exactly that. I said I’d written it down that night because I didn’t want to lose the words, and I had, and I read it to him off my phone.
Here is the thing I have not been able to get to the bottom of, two years on, and I have stopped trying.
Somewhere in Eileen Fahey, underneath eleven years of not knowing her grandson’s face, there was a woman who knew there was a boy, and that he had stopped coming, and that this might be something he felt bad about.
She could not hold his visits. Every fortnight for eleven years, gone within the hour. But she held that.
I don’t know what that means. I’ve asked two people who work in dementia care and they both said versions of the same thing, which is that what survives isn’t logical and isn’t ranked by importance and cannot be predicted, and that the things that last longest are often not facts but concerns. What you were worried about outlives what you knew.
She was worried about a boy. For eleven years, with almost everything else gone, she was worried that he might think she minded.
The funeral was in Lima, eleven days later, and Kieran asked me to come and I said I would and then spent a week convinced I shouldn’t.
I could not work out who I was going to be in that room.
I wasn’t family. I wasn’t a friend in any way anyone could see — I had never met her, I had never been in the same building as her, I would not have recognised her in the street. I had a hundred and thirteen phone calls and no photograph.
And the thing I actually could not get past: everyone there would have known Bernadette. Her actual daughter. And I was the woman who had been answering to her name for two years.
I said all of this to Kieran on the Thursday, badly, at some length.
He heard me out. Then he said, “There’s going to be about nine people there. Most of them are from the home.”
And then he said the sentence that got me in the car.
He said: “You’re the only person coming who talked to her every week.”