I scream at the top of my lungs and with a silent prayer of thanks to Beth I send a left jab to his guts, and a second and a third, and as he loosens his grip in surprise I slam a right cross to his throat, another to his jaw. Hard, harder than any punches I’ve thrown, hardened by fear and rage and how dare you touch me—a cross to the bridge of his nose, a hook to his ribs, I have to land as many as I can before he gathers himself, and he isn’t expecting any of them but in his pain he manages to fling out his own fist and I try to block it but I’m not strong enough and it takes my forearm and head at once. The world spins. I sink to one knee and go for his groin, but he’s expecting it now and he blocks me, grabs my right hand and twists it up until I scream in pain. No one is coming I can’t believe no one is coming I’ve made so much damn noise. I’m alone here, and he’s about to break my arm and I can feel the breathless throbbing rage of refusal and as it fills my body I reach with my left hand for the pocketknife I keep tucked into my boot and I think, Fuck this: I refuse, and so I twist and rise and stab the blade up into his neck.
He gasps in shock. His hands loosen.
Blood is a cascade upon us both.
People arrive, I think. There is movement around us.
“Holy fucking shit—” someone is saying and someone else is demanding the police be called and someone is telling them all to shut the fuck up and arms are holding me upright. The knife drops from my hand. “It’s all right,” someone says against my ear. But the man is still looking at me, looking and looking, and clutching at his neck, trying to stop the bleeding and sinking to his knees, and I think he’s hardly in his body anymore and I think I’m hardly in mine.
“Easy,” the voice says, and it’s Ennis holding me upright.
He walk-drag-carries me somewhere. Back to the hotel? I am dull with shock.
The others are here now, pulling us faster and it’s not the hotel at all but the boat we’re rushing toward, and I think it’s because there are people following us. We run, an adrenaline-fueled blur, feet slapping on boards and low voices giving urgent commands. I blink and I’m on the boat and the guys are working like madmen to get it moving. I blink and the Saghani is smoothly away from the shore and out into the ocean. I blink and I am in a room I don’t know, some part of me thinks it must be Ennis’s cabin, maybe, I don’t care, and from far away he is speaking.
“You’re not alone, love,” he is saying. “Be easy. You’re not alone.”
Does he think that’s true?
“Is he dead? Did I kill him?”
“I don’t know.”
I give in. A dam breaks and weariness floods in. It’s all I can do not to pass out. I blink and I’m in a bed.
“Are we leaving?” I ask.
“We’re already gone,” Ennis says. “Sleep.”
“Did I mess things up for us?”
“No, love,” he says. “You got us free.”
But I’ll never be free. I wonder if this was how my father felt the day he killed a person.
17
SOUTH COAST OF NSW, AUSTRALIA NINETEEN YEARS AGO
Edith is out with the lambs tonight, hunkered down with her rifle to watch for the reflective eyes of hungry foxes. She makes me do this some nights, despite my protests—I’ve told her a thousand times I refuse to kill any animal, even to protect our livelihood, and anyway protecting the lambs is what Finnegan is for, but still she sends me out into the cold on watch duty, the rifle awkward in my unwilling hands. “When it comes time, you’ll do what you have to,” she says in that way of hers, the way that brooks no argument, and I’ve yet to spot one of the predators so I don’t know if she’s right.
In any case, tonight is my chance. I’ve scoped out the locked box of treasures she keeps under her bed, and I’ve taken pains to steal her key and make a copy of it because I just know she’s the type of woman who would notice if it was gone for too long. Copying a key is actually no easy task when you’re stuck on a farm way out of town and you won’t get even your learner’s license until you turn sixteen and that’s an entire year away. I had to pay Skinny Matt to do it for me, and he’s the most stoned kid at our school, so he wasn’t exactly reliable. Next it was a matter of waiting for lambing season, when the first little ones drop messily from their mother’s bodies and then need protecting from all manner of hunter—not only the foxes but eagles, too, and wild dogs sometimes. They’re hungrier and hungrier now that their wild prey grows scarcer. These are the only nights I can be certain Edith won’t catch me: she’d lie in wait out there until her body wasted away and her bones turned to dust, if she had to. Determined and silent.
It’s possible I’m being a bit paranoid about the level of protection Edith has over this box. But anyway. It’s interested me ever since I got to this bastard of a farm. My grandmother is a hard kind of woman, see. She doesn’t tell me anything about my parents—she doesn’t talk much to me at all, really, except to bark orders, and if I don’t complete her slave labor to the required degree of perfection she doesn’t let me go to surf rescue training, which is just about the only thing I like doing in this country, and since I just got my bronze medallion I’m now responsible for lifesaving patrols and she doesn’t seem to get the importance of that—but she has this box and I’m convinced there are secrets hiding in it. Instead of turning her bedroom light on, which she might see from the paddock, I creep through the dark and lie flat on my tummy to root around until I can feel the cold of the box’s edge. I drag its heavy weight free—heavier than I’d expected—and dart into my room to open it.
The weight of the box comes from several military medals that belong, I’m surprised to see, to my grandfather, who was apparently in a regiment of Light Horse infantry. I read the inscriptions on them and run my fingers over the metal, trying to put pieces of a puzzle together. Why doesn’t she speak of him, or keep any pictures around the house? What’s so private about her marriage that she has to keep all remnants of it locked away from curious eyes?
I move on from the medals, lifting free a pile of various papers. Some are business documents—the deed to the farm, mortgage statements, and the like—which I put aside without reading. I don’t know what I’m looking for, really, just some sign that I didn’t get sent to the wrong farm, the farm of a woman who has no son and therefore can’t be my grandmother. She doesn’t speak of him, or of my mother. I don’t know where he is or what he does for a living—I don’t even know his name.
A pile of photos slips free and spills all over the carpet. I gasp at the faces staring up at me, a rush of heat filling my cheeks. It’s him, I know it is, because there’s Edith as a younger woman holding a baby, or walking on the beach with a little boy, or chopping vegetables at the kitchen bench with a teenager, or sitting around a campfire with a young man. He has long blond hippie hair in a few, in others it’s been cut very short. His face is handsome and dark-eyed, his mouth wide as though made only to smile.
And there he is with my very pregnant mother. He has his arm around her and she’s laughing at him, and they look so happy, and there is the front paddock behind them, the one I walk through every day to catch the school bus. I don’t realize I’m crying until my parents are wet. On the back in messy handwriting are their names. Dom and Iris, Xmas.
Dom.
I put the precious photo under my pillow and then keep going through the rest of the box. It’s right down the bottom, what I’m looking for, I guess. The explanation, or at least a chunk of it.
Dominic Stewart, twenty-five years old at the age of incarceration.
I stop and stare at the word.
There are other words smattered over the legal documents. My frantic eyes catch and transfer them to my echoing mind, my scattered mind. Long Bay Correctional Complex, Sydney. Life sentence. Standard non-parole period of twenty years. Plea of guilty. Intent to kill. Convicted of murder.
Crack!
I lurch upright. The papers fall from my hands and I scramble to refill the box. That was a gunsh
ot. It doesn’t mean she’ll be back any time soon but I am done with this, with the contents of this box that I should never have opened. I want nothing to do with it, I’ve wasted so much time on it—
“Franny!” Edith shouts and then she has opened my bedroom door and is staring down at the mess I’ve made. We are both silent a few beats, and her eyes are the coldest I’ve ever seen them, the most frightening and the most frightened, I think, and then she says, “I’ve shot Finnegan.”
It takes too long for me to process that. “What?”
“Damn beast was chasing away the fox and I didn’t see him in the dark.”
“What? No.”
I peel past her and run outside into the dark. The lambs and their mothers are in the closest paddock, the one between us and the sea. I sprint to the fence post and then stop, breathing heavily. I can’t see much except a dark shape in the distance.
“Thought you might like to be with him when I put him out,” Edith says.
“He’s still alive?”
“Not for long. Bullet went straight through his neck.”
“Can’t we call the vet? Or we could take him there now! Let’s get him in the truck, quickly!”
“There’s nothing to be done, Franny. Come with me or not, up to you.”
“He’s mine, though!” I plead. I’m the one who leads him round and feeds him apples and clips his hoofs and scratches inside his ears even though it makes my hands all black. I’m the one who loves him.
“That’s why I’ve called for you,” she says, and she is so calm and so cold and she doesn’t care about what she’s done, she doesn’t give a shit that she’s just murdered our beautiful old donkey who does nothing but bravely try to protect the little ones in the night.
“You’re a bitch,” I say clearly, and it shocks us both, for I’ve never uttered a bad word to anyone in my life, let alone my terrifying grandmother. “You’re a fucking bitch,” I go on, fueled by rage and grief and impotence. “You did this on purpose. Just like you never told me about Dominic.”
Edith goes through the metal gate, leaving it open for me. She has the rifle in her hand. “Do you want to be with him or not?” she asks as she walks across the grass and down toward the still-breathing body.
But I can’t, I can’t go near him, I’m too frightened of what he will be when he’s gone, what he will look like, what will be left.
“Shut the gate, then,” Edith says.
And I do, and she shoots Finnegan in the head, and it’s so loud, so horrible, that I turn and go to the truck, taking the key from the dash and turning on the engine. I am getting the hell out of here. I’ve driven this truck for the last few years; Edith made me learn, and it doesn’t matter that I don’t have a license or any money or belongings, it doesn’t matter that the photo is still beneath my pillow: I hope it stays there forever, fading and curling and turning to dust before anyone ever sees it again.
A strong hand snakes through the window and snatches the key from the ignition, killing the engine. “Hey!” I snarl. But Edith is already walking back to the house.
I run after her and try to get the key from her hand, panicked and urgent and doesn’t she understand that I have to get out of here, I don’t belong here, I’m suffocating here.
“You want to leave, that’s just fine,” she says, “but you don’t get to take my truck.”
I let out a gasp of frustration, tears flooding my throat. “Please.”
“Things don’t always take the shape you want them to, kid, and we gotta learn to endure that with a bit of grace.”
It humiliates me. I hate her.
She goes inside and I sit on the front porch, sobbing. For my Finnegan, my only friend, and for wishing my mother was here. Edith doesn’t care about me. I think the day I got sent here ruined her life. At least I know now why she hates me so much: I’m a reminder of her rotten son.
Hours have passed by the time I head back in. I’ve waited until I’m sure she’s asleep, unable to face her again tonight. But as I’m moving toward my room I hear a soft sound coming from the back door, and I can’t help it, I am compelled to creep to the window and see her there, sitting on the back step in an orb of lamplight, alone and holding the tag from Finnegan’s ear, weeping softly.
I sag against the wall, resting my head.
“Sorry, Grandma,” I whisper, but she can’t hear me through the glass.
* * *
Breakfast is a silent affair, but that isn’t unusual. Edith didn’t reclaim her box of secrets last night, so I locked it and placed it back under her bed, regret heavy upon me. I didn’t touch the photo under my pillow—I couldn’t bring myself to give it back to her even though I can’t imagine ever wanting to look at it again. I’m tired now with a night of tossing and turning behind me. It takes me the entire bowl of porridge to drum up the courage to ask. “Did he really kill someone?”
Edith nods, not looking up from the newspaper.
“Who?”
“Ray Young.”
“Who’s Ray Young?”
“Just a boy who grew up nearby.”
“Do you know why he did it?”
“He never said.”
I stare at her, stunned by the cavalier way she shrugs.
“How did he and my mother meet?”
“No idea. In Ireland, somewhere.”
“You never asked him?”
“None of my business.”
“Did they seem … in love? When he brought her back here?”
Edith looks up from the paper, gazing at me over her reading glasses. “What does that have to do with anything?”
I don’t know.
“It had nothing to do with him killing that man, that’s for damn certain. Or with him getting sentenced the very same day you came screaming out of Iris on that couch over there. I pulled you out and stopped her bleeding. She was crying with loneliness and whatever love there was between them, it didn’t stop her taking you away.”
She folds up her paper and takes her bowl to the sink.
“I’ll need your help digging a hole for Finnegan,” Edith says, and I nod.
“Yes, Grandma.”
As she pulls on her boots I ask, “How did he do it?”
“Strangled him to death,” my grandmother replies.
18
DUBLIN, IRELAND TWELVE YEARS AGO
The raindrops are fat and cold on my face. I don’t have a raincoat or umbrella, so I make my peace with getting wet. Dublin is a dreary place when the sky is gray and yet there’s something moody about it, mysterious, something you could get caught up and lost in. I am headed for the library, which is down near the quay.
Most mornings I wake to a kiss as he leaves for work. This morning it was so early there was barely any dawn light peeking through the shutters and in the dark his lips could have been a dream. I didn’t have a shift today so I was determined to try to make Niall’s apartment feel more like home, with some color, plants, art, anything. But within those walls I felt my feet begin to tap and my fingers begin to fidget and as I ignored those things there came a tightening around my throat.
I remembered then that I have wanted to visit the Dublin Library for some time and so I hopped on a train from Galway and here I am, hurrying to beat the downpour and breathing with ease. I duck inside the large building, over the mosaic floor and beneath the high ceiling, into the dome-like reading room I remember enjoying when I first returned to Ireland. I’m not sure what I’m looking for, maybe something on genealogy, but first I stand a moment and enjoy the space. Then I immerse myself in the pages.
Sometime later I feel a vibration in my bag.
I miss the call, and as I catch sight of my phone screen my heart lurches and I am flooded with the realization of having done the wrong thing, though I’m not quick enough to quite identify what that is. Eight missed calls from Niall. Three text messages asking me where I am. Dark has fallen outside; the entire day has passed while I lost myself in reading. Shit.
I call him immediately.
He answers with, “Are you all right?”
I try to keep my voice light. “I’m fine, sorry I missed your calls, I’m in Dublin.”
There is a long pause. “Why?”
“I wanted to come to the library.”
“Just … randomly?”
“I guess so.”
“And you didn’t think to mention it.”
“I…” The horrible truth is that it didn’t even occur to me. I haven’t done this before, not since we married, haven’t let my feet lead me where they will. I don’t say that this is nothing, that I’m only a couple of hours away, that I could have gone much farther and that I can go where I want because some instinct tells me that would be callous.
“I came home to see you at lunch and you weren’t here, and I’ve come home now to bring you dinner and you still weren’t here. I thought maybe you’d … I just didn’t know where you were.”
Abruptly I’m having trouble breathing again. “I’m sorry. I should have said. I didn’t think.”
Another pause. There is hurt within it. “Do you plan on coming home any time soon?”
“Aye. I hadn’t thought that far ahead, but maybe a night or two?”
“Right. Grand. See you then.” He hangs up.
I stare at my phone. Then I walk back out into the rain, which is really falling now, and I walk all the way to the train station and I buy a ticket for the next train back to Galway.
* * *
The biology faculty is abuzz with life, which is strange for a Tuesday night. Or any night. All the lights are on and there must be at least thirty people in the department kitchen. I edge my way inside, keeping my back to the wall and looking for Niall. He wasn’t at home, which meant he’d be at work, only I didn’t realize I’d be arriving in the middle of a staff party. I have come straight from the train, my shoes squelchy, hair damp.
I spot him in the center of a group of men and women, and edge closer, wanting to know what he’s saying that has them so enthralled. There is a dark cloud over him that I can see from here.
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