My brother and I were adopted when we were three
My brother and I were adopted when we were three. Twenty years later I drove to my adoptive mother's house with lilies for her sixtieth — and heard her laughing in the kitchen about what she'd kept from us.
THE FOURTEENTH OF JUNE, 2019. TEN PAST THREE.
White lilies on the passenger seat, like a peace offering nobody had asked for.
Cillian had laughed at me that morning.
"You're actually going? On her birthday?"
"She adopted us. That has to count for something."
The door was open. I took my shoes off in the hall, the way she has always wanted.
Then I heard her in the kitchen, with her own mother.
"They've never suspected a thing, Mam. Twenty-odd years, and they still believe every word I ever told them."
I stood in that hall holding flowers.
I heard enough.
THE NINTH OF OCTOBER, 2026.
Seven years on, and I am thirty, and the box is still in this house.
That is where this actually starts, whatever I have been telling people.
1999.
We were three when they took us in. Cillian and me, twins, out of a unit at Ardcarn.
They told us our mother left us and never came looking.
Donal did everything he could with what was left of our childhood. Front row at every school thing, louder than anybody. Cars all over that bedroom. Two bikes one Christmas.
"You boys are the most important thing in my life," he used to say.
She was not that.
"You should be grateful you've got a home," if a plate got left out.
"Without us you'd still be in a children's home."
THE FOURTEENTH OF JUNE, 2019. THIRTEEN MINUTES PAST THREE.
She said one more thing to her mother and then the kettle went on and I could not hear any more.
What she said was about letters.
Four of them. Through the agency. Addressed to us.
She had taken every one of them in and given us none.
THE NOVEMBER OF 2006.
We were ten when we lost Donal.
Whatever warmth was in that house went with him.
Cillian had already gone quiet by then — it happened over about two years, between eight and ten, and I used to think it was something at school.
I went the other way. I learned to apologise for everything.
THE TWENTY-SECOND OF JUNE, 2019.
Eight days after that hall.
I rang the Lowry Agency, because that is the name on the paperwork, and a woman called Fiona took me through it.
It is lawful. That is the first thing she said and she said it kindly and she said it twice.
A letter through an agency is passed to the adoptive parents, who decide what to do with it. In 1999, and in 2003, and in 2006, that was entirely their call.
Nobody broke anything. I have had that confirmed twice since.
That is not the part that finished me.
THE AUGUST OF 2014.
I had turned eighteen in the April.
She came out to the car with a box.
"That's your father's. I don't want it in the house."
Not unkindly, even. She had been clearing the back room for about a fortnight and it was one of about nine things that went that week.
She put it in the boot herself and went back in.
THE NINTH OF OCTOBER, 2026, AGAIN.
Twelve years. Four house moves.
It has been in a boot, then a wardrobe at Marrow Street, then under a bed, then on top of a cupboard in the room I am sitting in now.
I have never once opened the lid.
THE FOUR HOUSE MOVES.
Marrow Street in 2016. A flat at Ardcarn in 2018. Thurle Road in 2020. Here, in 2022.
In the October I made myself remember what I actually did with that box each time, because it is not the same as leaving a thing in a loft.
2016 it went in a wardrobe, on the shelf, where I could see it.
2018 it went under the bed, which is the only time it was out of sight, and that lasted about eight months.
2020 I put it on top of a cupboard.
Here, in 2022, I put it on top of a cupboard again — and I turned it.
That is the part I had forgotten. The word is in marker on one side only, and in this flat it faces into the room.
I carried a box up two flights in the April of 2022 and set it down and then stood there and turned it round so that BOYS was looking at me.
Four years of that word at eye level, every evening, in a room I sit in.
Nobody who wants to forget a thing does that.
WHY I DID NOT OPEN IT.
I have had seven years to get this right and I can only do it now because of what is in there.
It is not that I forgot. You do not forget a box you carry up four flights of stairs.
It is that Donal Devlin is the one thing in my childhood that is not complicated.
Everything else in that house has something wrong with it when you turn it over. He does not.
A box with his name on it, handed to me by that woman, with her saying she did not want it in the house — that could contain anything.
There are men who are wonderful to their sons and are something else to their wives. I have met some of them.
While the lid was on, he stayed exactly as he was.
WHAT CILLIAN ASKED ME.
Four times, that I can place.
2015, about a year after. He asked what was in it and I said papers.
2018, at my flat, when he saw it on top of a cupboard. He said: "Is that Dad's?" I said it was.
The twenty-third of June, 2019 — the day after I rang the agency — he said: "You've still got that box, haven't you."
He said that. Out of nothing, on a telephone call about his mother-in-law's hip.
Then in the January of 2024 he came over and stood in front of that cupboard for about a minute and said: "Eoin. Open the box."
I said I would.
THE 2003 LETTER, AND WHAT CILLIAN WAS DOING THAT YEAR.
He went quiet between eight and ten. That is in the first part of this and I have always put it down to something at school.
The 2003 letter is dated the fourth of August and he turned seven that April.
It is not that he knew. He cannot have known; nobody in that house said a word in front of us.
What I have had to sit with since the October is something he told me on the eleventh.
He remembers a row.
Not what it was about — he was seven — but he remembers being on the stairs and Donal's voice, which he had never heard like that, and Ivy saying something about that woman.
He has had that in his head since 2003 and has never mentioned it to anybody, including me, including a therapist he saw for a year in 2017.
He said: "I thought I'd made it up."
Twenty-three years of a man half-remembering a row on a staircase about a woman nobody would name.
THE FOURTEENTH OF JUNE, 2019. ABOUT TWENTY PAST THREE.
I put the lilies on the hall table.
Then I put my shoes back on and went out and shut that door, and she never knew I had been in the house.
She rang me that evening to say thank you for the flowers, because her mother had assumed they were from me and told her so.
I said it was nothing.
I have never had a conversation with Ivy Devlin about any of it. Seven years.
She is sixty-seven now. We speak about four times a year, at Christmas and on birthdays, and it is perfectly civil.
THE TWENTY-SECOND OF JUNE, 2019, THE REST OF THAT CALL.
Fiona at the agency told me something I did not ask for.
The letters are not held by them. They do not keep copies; they pass them on and that is the end of their involvement.
She said: "They'll be wherever your adoptive parents put them, if they're anywhere at all."
I said thank you and I rang off.
I did not take that sentence anywhere. For seven years.
A woman whose job it is told me, on the twenty-second of June, 2019, exactly where to look.
THE SEVEN YEARS, AND WHAT I DID IN THEM.
Not nothing. That is what it looks like and it is not what happened.
In the August of 2019 I paid a man eighty pounds to find Shona Keane.
He found her in under a week. He sent me an address and a telephone number and a note saying she had been at that address a long time.
I have the email. It is dated the third of September, 2019.
I did not do anything with it.
Not that month, not that year, not in the five after it.
I have told Cillian, for seven years, that I did not know where she was.
That is the sentence I have used. We don't know where she is. We, as though it were a condition the pair of us were in.
I have had her address in an email since the September of 2019 and her own handwriting on four envelopes on top of a cupboard since 2014.
My brother has been asking me about his mother for seven years and I have had everything, the entire time.
WHAT I TOLD PEOPLE INSTEAD.
Cillian. My girlfriend at the time. Two friends. Later, my wife.
The version is the hall, the lilies, the kitchen, they've never suspected a thing. It is four minutes long and nobody has ever been anything but horrified on my behalf.
What is in it: a woman who took four letters and kept them.
What is not in it: that those letters existed somewhere, that a woman at an agency told me so, and that I have had a box of that family's papers on top of a cupboard the entire time.
My wife has been in this flat four years and has never once asked what is in it, because I told her, early on, that it was my father's things and that I would get to it.
THE JANUARY OF 2024, PROPERLY.
***Eoin. Open the box.*** I have given that as four words my brother said in front of a cupboard.**
He was in this flat two hours that night and it was not a passing remark.
He had come over for it. He said so afterwards, in the October.
His wife had been at him about it. Nan was two and there had been a thing at the doctor's about family history, which is the sort of thing that starts people off.
He sat in that chair and he got as far as asking me three times.
The third time he said: "Do you want me to do it? I'll do it now."
I said no, that it was mine to do, and that I would do it at the weekend.
That is the sentence that cost everybody two years and nine months.
Not a refusal. A man taking a job off his brother and then not doing it.
He did not raise it again until the ninth of October, 2026, and when he did he had a four-year-old asking him questions.
THE NINTH OF OCTOBER, 2026. ABOUT NINE IN THE EVENING.
Cillian rang.
He has a daughter now. She is four and she is called Nan after nobody in particular.
He said she had asked him, that week, where his own mammy was.
Then he said: "I want to know, Eoin. I'm done not knowing."
He has said versions of that before and it has always gone past me.
This time he said one more thing.
He said: "You've had it twelve years. If you won't open it, give it to me and I will."
I said I would do it that night.
THE TWENTY MINUTES BEFORE I OPENED IT.
I rang off from Cillian at about half nine and the box was down off that cupboard by about twenty to ten.
Then I sat with it on the floor in front of me for twenty minutes.
My wife came in at one point and saw what it was and went out again without saying anything, which was the right thing and which I did not deserve.
What I did in those twenty minutes is work out what I was going to say to my brother if it was bad.
I had three versions ready before I had touched the tape.
I had one for if there was something about Donal. I had one for if it was nothing at all.
I did not have one for what was actually in there, because in twelve years it had never once occurred to me that the letters might be in it.
That is the thing that stopped me when I lifted that envelope out.
Not grief. The simple arithmetic of it — four letters, a woman at an agency saying they'll be wherever your adoptive parents put them, and a box with my adoptive father's name on it.
It took me eleven seconds to put that together on a floor in 2026, and seven years not to.
ABOUT TEN O'CLOCK.
It is a wine box with the top cut down. The tape on it is the brown stuff and it has gone brittle.
Donal Devlin's handwriting on the side, in marker, one word: BOYS.
That is on the outside of it. Facing out, for twelve years, in four houses.
On top there is a layer of ordinary things — his watch, a lanyard from the works, a folded Ardcarn team photograph from 1998.
Underneath that there is a brown envelope with nothing written on it.
Four letters.
WHAT THE LETTERS ARE.
From Shona Keane, who is our mother.
The twelfth of November, 1999. The ninth of March, 2001. The fourth of August, 2003. The twenty-ninth of September, 2006.
Seven years, four letters, all of them opened and all of them refolded.
They are not what I had built in my head. There is no case in them. She does not ask for anything and she does not run anybody down.
They are four short letters from a woman telling two boys what she has been doing, in case they ever want to know.
The first one has her address on it. So do the other three, and it is the same one each time.
WHAT DONAL DID.
He took them.
Not from the post. They came to that house addressed to Mr and Mrs Devlin and she opened them, which is why they are opened.
Then at some point, four separate times across seven years, that man went into wherever she had put them and took them out and put them in a box in the back room with his own things on top.
He never gave them to us. We were three, five, seven, ten.
He also never let her get rid of them, which I think is the whole of what he was doing.
THE TWENTY-NINTH OF SEPTEMBER, 2006.
The fourth letter is dated six weeks before he died.
He was ill by then. He had been since about the June and we were ten and nobody told us much.
So the last thing that man did about any of this, he did while he was ill, in the autumn, with about six weeks left.
He went and got that letter and put it in the box with the other three.
WHAT IS ACTUALLY IN THE FOUR LETTERS.
Most of it is theirs and I am not putting it here.
The shape of them is this.
1999: she is twenty-four and she is at Lissard and she has somewhere to live and a job in a kitchen. It is one page and most of it is about the job.
2001: she has been ill and she is better. There is a line about Christmas.
2003: the longest. Two pages. There is a paragraph in it about why she could not keep us, and it is not an excuse, and I had to put it down twice.
2006: half a page.
The last line of the last one is the one Cillian and I have not been able to leave alone.
She wrote: I'll stop now. If anybody wants me I'm where I've always been.
***I'll stop now.***
She did not write a fifth. She has told us since that she sat down to, in 2008, and then thought she had said everything four times and that they would come if they came.
She was thirty-one when she wrote that line and she has been at the same address ever since.
THE PIECE OF CARD.
Underneath the envelope there is a bit of card off the back of a writing pad.
Seven words in marker, same hand as the lid.
***For the boys when they're eighteen. D.***
He wrote that in 2006, for two children of ten, about a date he was never going to see.
Then he put the lid on and left it in the back room of a house he was leaving.
WHAT THAT MEANS ABOUT 2014.
She did not know.
That is the thing I have had to sit with since the ninth of October, and I have checked it as hard as I know how.
The tape on that box is from 2006 and it had not been off. There is one line of it and the brittle edge was unbroken until I did it.
She cleared a back room in the August of 2014 and put a box in my boot with her husband's name on it and said she did not want it in the house.
She was not giving me anything. She was getting rid of a dead man's things.
She handed me four letters she had spent fifteen years keeping from us, by accident, in a car park, four months after I turned eighteen.
Exactly when he asked her to, without either of them knowing it.
THE NINTH OF OCTOBER, 2026. ABOUT HALF ELEVEN.
I rang Cillian back and read him all four.
It took about twenty minutes and I had to stop twice.
At the end of it he did not say anything for a while and then he said: "Where was it, all this time?"
I said it had been in the box.
He said: "I know. Where was the box?"
On top of a cupboard. In the room I am in. For four years at this address, and eight before that.
He has been at this flat about thirty times in four years.
IVY, AND THE PART I HAVE NEVER BEEN ABLE TO FIT ANYWHERE.
In the November I went to see her. Seven years after the hall and five weeks after the box.
I did not go to have it out. I went because I wanted to know one thing, which is whether she had known what was in that box when she put it in my boot.
She had not. She said so straight away and I believed her, because of the tape and because she has never once lied to me about anything small.
Then she said something I was not ready for.
She said: "He wanted you to have them. I knew that much."
I asked her why she had not given them to us herself, then, at eighteen.
She looked at me for a long time and then she said: "Because I'd have had to say what I did."
That is the first true thing that woman has said to me in thirty years, and she said it in her own kitchen at sixty-seven, without being pushed.
Then she offered me a cup of tea and I said no, and that is where we are.
THE SHONA PART.
She is fifty-one and she is still at that address.
That took one afternoon. There was nothing to it; there has never been anything to it since the twelfth of November, 1999.
Cillian wrote first because I could not, and she wrote back in nine days, and there has been a lot since and it is theirs and mine and not for here.
She did not know we had never had them. She had assumed, for twenty years, that four letters had been read and not answered.
Twenty years of a woman believing her sons had decided against her.
WHAT CILLIAN SAID ON THE ELEVENTH OF OCTOBER.
Two days after. He came over.
He was not angry, which I would have preferred.
He went through the letters properly, at the table, and then he put them down and said: "Right."
Then he said: "Why didn't you just do it?"
I gave him the thing about Donal — about not wanting to find out something that spoiled him.
He let me finish it and then he said: "That's about Dad. I'm asking about her."
Meaning Shona.
I did not have anything for that. I have had three weeks and I still do not.
The nearest I can get is this.
For twenty-six years I have been the one who knows what we are. The one who manages it, who decides how much we say, who goes to the birthday with flowers.
The day she comes into it, I am not that any more. I am one of two sons.
THE LILIES.
They were on the hall table when I went out of that door and she rang me that evening to thank me.
In the November, in that kitchen, I noticed something on the dresser and asked her about it.
There is a photograph of Donal there, and next to it a small glass vase, and the vase was the one off the hall table.
She has kept it there since 2019.
She said, when I asked: "That's the one your flowers were in."
Seven years.
A woman who took four letters off two children kept a vase on a dresser because her son brought her lilies on her sixtieth.
She has no idea what I heard that afternoon. She thinks that day was a kindness.
She has had seven years of thinking her eldest came with flowers when he did not have to, and the whole of it has been sitting on a dresser next to her husband, next to a photograph of the man who went into her drawer four times and took those letters out.
THE LAST THING.
I have been angry with Ivy Devlin for seven years and she has earned every bit of it.
She took four letters and told two children their mother had never looked for them, and then stood in a kitchen at sixty and laughed about it to her own mother.
None of that moves.
Here is what will not leave me alone.
That woman had those letters for seven years and did not burn them.
She could have, at any point between 1999 and 2006, and nobody on this earth would ever have known. Instead she put them in a drawer, and her husband took them out, and she let him.
Donal had them for a few weeks and wrote seven words on a piece of card.
I have had them for twelve years, with BOYS written on the side in marker, facing out, at eye level, in four houses.
May you like
My brother asked me to open it four times.
The one of the three of us who kept those letters longest, after being told exactly where they were by a woman at an agency, is me.
