In The Name Of My Father Chapter: 40
The shocking truth…
Sara and Richard were polite, but cautious, in welcoming the group to their home.
Ailsa was nervous, relieved she had brought everyone involved, key players in her story, her father, Cam, Jim, and Father Brannan.
“It’s a little scratchy,” Jim warned, “but the evidence is here. I’m sure you will recognize Alistair’s voice.”
With the recording played, silence filled the room.
A palpable, shocked silence.
A larger-than-life, silence.
An if-only, silence.
Eyes locked with eyes, then held the floor, as each came to terms with all they had heard.
Eventually Jim took it upon himself to speak.
“I’ve been asked to do many things in my career, but this one has taken the gut-wrenching prize. Frankly, given its age, I hadn’t held hope of retrieving much, but scratchy as it is, the evidence is irrefutable.”
A weight of respectful silence, more powerful than words, enveloped the room, each person wrapped in their personal thoughts, all of them carrying their own sadness.
“I was totally ill-prepared for what I’ve just heard,” Richard said. “It’s chilling to say the least of it. All those years ago…we’d given up on ever really knowing.”
“But it’s Alistair’s voice alright,” Sara added. “Those last few hours of his life must have been dreadful…maybe I should have said, the last few seconds. The hour before that was hard, but at least he was going to be free.”
Silence once again, give or take the odd stir of emotion…the pervasive quiet of a group of people breaking on the inside, unable to credit all they had heard.
“There’s nothing easy about being the bearer of tawdry news. I still struggle with it, but the fact that the recording had been in Cam’s drawer all this time, totally undisturbed, is truly amazing. How easily it could have been lost,” Jim trailed off.
“And we’d never have known,” whispered Sara. “But now we do, Ailsa, thanks to your tenacity.”
“I have a confession to make Sara,” Cam said, looking sadly at her. “All those years ago, I knew that Helen was carrying Alistair’s baby. I couldn’t bring myself to tell you, because I just didn’t know how. She was a beautiful young woman you know…beautiful in every way, a wonderful, dedicated student destined for success, but then, she and Alistair met and they just clicked. He was desperately unhappy. They shared so many interests and values, so kept bumping into one another.
“She attended Alistair’s funeral with a friend. I allowed that to happen because she needed to say goodbye to him. You asked that only family attend the burial mass, and I kept to that, except, and believe me I prayed hard about this, I allowed her to sit in the sacristy, with a friend, because I saw her as family…she would have been, had Alistair lived. The child she carried I considered to be one of you back then. She still is.
“The other thing is that, and I’m ashamed to admit it, I’d promised I would look out for Helen, but…look I could use all sorts of excuses, but the fact is I didn’t do my job. Ever since, I have had to live with my failure as a priest…and then I got the call from Father Brannan…and now, well this is my hope, I HOPE I can use the rest of my life to atone for my past failure.”
“So much water under the bridge, and now so much more to wade through,” Sara sobbed, twisting her handkerchief through her fingers.”
“Is that how you feel?” Ailsa asked.
“It’s not about you Ailsa. It’s more about where and how we gather the threads of all of this. It’s one of the reasons I couldn’t have your grandmother here. I had to be absolutely certain of everything before I told her. But now, any niggling doubts I had, have been totally allayed. I just need to get my head around how we move on from here.
“How do I break such news to my mother?”
A truth revealed…
Ailsa’s mobile rang.
It was Sara.
“Hi Ailsa, just wanted you to know I haven’t forgotten you. I’ve spent the last few days turning myself inside out wondering how I could break your story to Mom.”
“I’m so sorry! I can only imagine. It’s worried me too!”
“I suppose neither of us wants to be held responsible for her demise, given her age, but then out of the blue she tells me she had a vivid dream about Alistair.”
“She did?”
“Seems he was urging her to walk through a door and she was scared, thinking that it meant that my sisters and I were conspiring to put her into an old folks’ home. ‘Over my dead body,’ she thought, and then she woke up in a lather of perspiration. ‘So are you?’” she asked me.
“I’ll answer that one when it’s signed, sealed and delivered,” I warned her, but seriously, a door sounds like a metaphor for embracing change,” I suggested to her. “Any plans I should know of?”
“’At my age?’ she asked.”
“You’re still alive,” I told her. “You’re breathing, you’re healthy, and you’ve plenty of living to do. Your choice! And you know what?”
“Well, not knowing your mother, I don’t.”
“’How about we drink to that?’ she suggested. She’s not one to knock back the offer of a bubbly or two, so I cracked open a bottle of Champagne with her, just for a bit of Dutch courage. We chatted for a while about the dream, and then I so easily slipped it in.
“To be honest I was beside myself, and sure, she was stunned for a while, but not nearly as badly as I thought she might be. She told me that all along she’d had a feeling that there was something the church didn’t want us to know. She’d always questioned their closed-shop response to her questions. But NEVER did she suspect that Alistair was about to leave the church, or that he had fallen in love.
“‘He could have had any girl he wanted,’ she sighed. ;But you know he was never really aware of his charisma. Dad and I can take a bow for that. We deliberately kept you all grounded.’
“But here’s the clincher. When I told her your name, her eyes almost popped out of her head. She was stunned…sat quietly for a few minutes and I held my breath. I didn’t dare say a word, and then she simply asked, ‘So when do I get to meet this lassie?’”
“She sounds like a pretty strong woman,” Ailsa answered, and quietly to herself, she whispered, ‘a strong woman who might write the first page of the rest of my life.’