Chapter 7: A Virgin’s Prayer

Because I had tossed and turned all night, I pull the curtains closed to shut out the daylight and, almost as soon as I lay my head to the pillow, I drift into a fitful sleep, where I dream of my lovely late wife Ella, who was taken from me so cruelly and far too soon in our all too brief marriage.

I am reminded that I first saw my wife-to-be, Ella Bernadette Walsh, in a Cork pub quite close to the student dorms. It was back in 2004 when I was a 23-year-old post-graduate student from the US and she was a freshman on a degree course in Cork. Ella was 19 and very smart and was training to be a chartered accountant; she was beautiful but shy, wore glasses and hid behind a wall of bright red hair. She was conscious of her puppy fat that she couldn’t quite shift and she didn’t go out much but that night she had been persuaded by her new student friends from her freshman dorm to go to a pub near the campus.

The bar was crowded and boisterous with young drinkers at the start of the first semester. It wasn’t my favourite pub but I was a month into my stay here, far from home, lonely, wondering if coming here was as good an idea as I first thought and I was looking for company, not necessarily female company. OK, I probably was looking for opportunities to get laid. Being a post grad I was three or four years older than most of the bar’s drinkers. Back home in the US they all would have been too young to drink, yet here many were already seasoned teenage drinkers.

It was Ella’s hair that I saw first as I was ordering a solitary pint from the barkeep and looked around as I waited for it to be poured. Ella’s hair was very red, it was voluminous too, both curly and frizzy and long down her back. It shook and shimmered as she spoke animatedly to her new friends, eight girls altogether sitting around two tables pushed together.

All were laughing at what Ella was saying. I say she was shy, but she was bright and brilliantly observant with a sharp wit, which had been loosened by a few drinks.

I stayed at the bar, sipping my relatively warm pint of black stuff and watching her, fascinated. She tossed her head around and, although her main focus was on the table, she looked around the room too. Male student visitors to the table were constant, they were being bought round after round of shots, particularly ones set alight and I was actually on edge, worried about her hair catching fire. Maybe she noticed my concern and the close attention I paid her and she kept looking over in my direction.

She must’ve said something to her friends because all eight girls looked around at me at the same time.

Damn! Now I was the shy nerdy guy who felt embarrassed by the unwanted spotlight. But I realised that I had naturally struck a pose without realising; I had my back leaning on the bar, being tall I had relaxed with my elbows resting on the bar counter behind me and one heel nestling on a brass foot rest, so my leg was cocked at a comfortable but provocative angle.

I was new to Dublin, it was early October and cold and wet compared to California, I was used to wearing shorts and cotton tees back at home at this time in the fall, but here in Ireland I was going through a corduroy jeans period, they were thick and warm.

Although I was on a post-grad scholarship, which paid my university tuition fees, while Mom and Dad paid the rent on my tiny apartment and the cost of budget air fares, money was still tight and several pairs of corduroy jeans really bright and clearly unpopular colors were bought in a sale out of desperation on my part to be able to keep warm and dry. That evening even my shirt was a thick weave cotton and over that I wore a smart leather jacket that my favourite aunt had presented me with for my 21st, and my comfortable mid-calf boots, so I thought I looked a little garish color-wise but not too out of place in a bar filled with young kids, so I was confident that I looked an OK dude.

So, when these eight pretty chicks checked me out, I maintained my pose at the bar as relaxed as I could, gripping my half-drunk pint in one hand, and I gave them my usual crooked smile and a ‘John Wayne’ two-fingered salute with the other hand.

Ella later admitted that she thought I looked hot and all the girls on her table agreed with her. I only had eyes for the girl with the red hair, her huge eyeglasses, emerald green eyes and cute unblemished face. If I believed in love at first sight, and now I really do, that was the moment that Ella stole my heart.

I was too shy to approach the table. I saw other guys kept buying them drinks and the redhead girl, I didn’t know her as Ella at the time, got steadily more and more drunk.

When one of the booze-buyers tried to pull her out of her chair to separate her from the others in the girl herd and take her outside, I stepped in. All the girls were wasted by then and Ella couldn’t even tell me where she lived, so I took her back to my apartment; it wasn’t far but I had to carry her for the last half of the walk.

She projectile vomited in my tiny bathroom. I sat on the floor with her, keeping her lovely hair out of the toilet bowl until her stomach seemed empty. I propped her up in bed with pillows behind her to stop her rolling off onto her back and I slept on the lumpy sofa that was at least two-feet too short for my sleeping comfort.

Ella was deeply embarrassed on Saturday morning when she woke late and alone in my bed and realised she didn’t even know my name! We quickly made introductions and she was grateful that I had not molested her. I explained that a belligerent youth was trying to drag her off and none of her female friends were in a position to do anything about it. She was shocked, but admitted she hardly knew the other girls, all having only moved into the dorms in the previous few days.

I plied her with lots of drinking water and aspirin and walked her safely home to the female dorms and managed to get a date with her for the next Friday night. One date turned into a string of dates and we soon became inseparable even though we both kept up to date with our respective courses of study.

I married 21-year-old Ella Bernadette Walsh in 2006, in Cork. I fell for her because for me it was love at first sight, a feeling only reinforced by every waking moment I spent with her and getting to know the wonderful person that she was.

I think she only gradually fell in love with me because around me she felt safe, was more confident, funny and her bubbly personality was allowed to be released; she regarded me as her white knight and often called me ‘Sir Richard’.

As a newly-married couple we rented a flat in Cork for a while then, after qualification, her parents Bernie and Bill offered to match the money I had saved as a deposit on a house. We wanted to buy a house in a small town within a hour’s commute by train from Cork, but El fell in love with one half of this pair of cottages on the edge of Thurles, which was 1hr 17 to 1hr 24 minutes away by train and we were 4.1km from the town station. She commuted by train to Cork every weekday, while I used our only car to call on offices where I serviced computers and systems mostly in the towns in the south of Ireland.

We were delighted to find this old cottage and at such a low price that we were able to raise enough finance to modernise it into a family house. Then, Ella fell pregnant and broke my heart when she died giving birth.

If it wasn’t for our kind neighbour Katie Wisniewski’s offer to babysit at all hours of the day and night, I would never have pulled through and brought up my daughter Caoimhe.

Now I find out that our kind neighbour, who was so helpful while I dealt with the tragedy of losing a wife and the responsibility of a baby to look after, had known all along that my lovely wife was going to die and she did nothing about it.

I feel I have lain in bed and grieved enough for today and, looking at my cell phone I find I have been here tossing and turning for two and a half hours.

I can’t blame Caoimhe for mentioning the foretelling of my wife, her mother’s death so candidly, after all, she never knew her mother. She has lived all her life with just a father and monthly visits to or from her Irish grandparents in Killorglin, Co Kerry, and roughly annual visits to or from my parents in California in the halcyon days before Covid. She has fond memories of her “Aunt Katie” next door, while I am now filled with a loathing rage for her deception.

Why hadn’t Katie warned us that she had read Ella’s future, that she would die in less than two years after we moved to this house? Could Katie have done something about it? Advised us not to have children; we could’ve adopted. Anything to save my sweet Ella. Could she have prepared me for this tragedy?

Still, nothing I can do about it now. And I cannot blame Etain, she wasn’t here ten or even twelve years ago when we first moved here, she’s only the messenger, and she says that can’t read my future either, nor Caoimhe’s. I’ve got questions and I need answers. Besides, I missed breakfast and it’s getting on for lunchtime.

I am met with a girly “Whoop!” and a cry of “Daddy!”, followed by a guided missile of pretty solid daughter who hits me in the doorway between the foot of the stairs and the kitchen diner.

Caoimhe is a continually prodding reminder of Ella, being almost a clone of my dead wife. I am not always reminded of my late wife but now, when I having been thinking about her for most of my dreams and, being awake these past recent hours, seeing the top of her head as she buries her face in my chest, I feel awash with emotion, not pain or sorrow, nor regret, no, I am filled with love without regret.