by Lisa Carey
“It’ll be done soon,” their mother said, and the last word was swallowed with a sharp inhalation of breath. It was the same musical gasp all the islanders used, to indicate agreement or horror or finality, much like the way her mother’s heart skipped, a pause you could get lost within.
Emer could see the cliff edge from her perch on top of them both, how it looked just like any swath of thick grass, how deceiving it was, you could put your foot forward sure there would be something beneath it and fall straight into rock and water and wind. The birds would sweep away from you, no help whatsoever, they would barely look as you fell right through. That was where they were headed, over that edge, and Rose, crying, raging, pinned to the ground, knew it now.
“I won’t, Mammy!” she screamed from underneath her mother’s soft weight. “I won’t allow it! I won’t! Emer!” Her mother tried to muffle her voice with pressing hands; when that didn’t work, she put her mouth on Rose’s in a crushing kiss, like she could swallow the noise. It had no effect. “I won’t go, Mammy, I won’t.” It sounded like her throat was ripping on each won’t, like such determination would permanently scar her voice.
“It will be done soon,” their mother said again, but the assertion was missing. Emer could tell that her mother thought it sounded wrong now, this phrase, when it had sounded almost reasonable a moment ago. “Please,” she said instead, and Emer heard it through her chest like wind. “Please, Rose.”
That’s when Rose spat in her face. Their mother rolled off her in shock, and Emer, jostled and dizzy, expected her mother to strike. She had seen it before, the rough red hand rushing at her sister’s lovely cheek.
Rose was holding a knife. She’d taken it from the pocket of her mother’s apron, the small, wood-handled paring knife that all the island women kept near, given to them as girls, their age revealed in the wear of the blade. Their mother’s blade was not as worn as her face; she was only twenty-three years old.
“You’ll leave us, so,” Rose said, breathing heavily from the effort of screaming. “You’ll leave my sister.”
That was when their mother began to cry, pressing her face to the wet ground, keening with the same raw wail as the day she buried an empty coffin. Rose watched her with a look of superior disgust.
Emer was whispering, so softly it sounded like no more than her breath. Whispering encouragement, but not for her sister.
She turned her head, her damp hair catching in the fibers of her mother’s back, and saw the clochán, a beehive of stone with one small opening. The ruins of Saint Brigid’s abbey were all over their island, and the children liked to play in them. Emer had never seen this one, completely intact, perched on the edge of the cliff like an offering.
Emer saw a hand. A hand coming out, not from the clochán but the air. It pried its way from nothingness and hovered there, wriggling its joints as if shaking off sleep. Then it pinched its fingers and pulled the scene of wind and grass and gray sky aside, like a veil. A curtain that looked exactly like the world. The hand was attached to a woman, who ducked and stepped through the opening she had rent in the sky. She was dressed all in white, robes of fabric whipping in the wind like untethered sails. Her hair was as orange as flames leaping above her head. She reminded Emer of the stained glass window in their little church, which portrayed the rising soul of Saint Brigid. The woman looked right at Emer and smiled, and Emer knew she was not a saint. Her teeth were too sharp. A saint wouldn’t smile like that, Emer thought, when it was quite clear she knew exactly what Emer was thinking. A saint would have come to help Rose, not stood there grinning wickedly in destructive collusion with Emer. In her other hand she was clutching some sort of fabric or pouch, blue as a jewel, and she held it toward Emer like a gift.
She didn’t point the woman out to Rose or to her mother. She didn’t want to be told, as she was quite sure she would be, that only the clochán was actually there.
She closed her eyes, counted to three and turned back again. The woman was gone. All that was left was the beehive hut and the wind and the knowledge that everything she saw could be as thin as that veil.
They sat by the cliff’s edge, sliced by rain and wind, Rose holding tight to her mother’s trembling hand, kinder now, now that she had won, the knife hidden in the pocket of her small dress, ready to help. Emer was still strapped to her back, her burning eyes closed, her whispering, which was fierce and fast only moments ago, gone, as if her little voice was the only part of them that managed to throw itself over that edge. She didn’t know if anyone, other than that woman, heard her during the last moments. For while her sister screamed and saved them, Emer had been murmuring encouragement into the warmth of her mother’s neck, “Go on,” she had whispered. “Go on, go on.”
For a long time, Emer would think this day was the beginning, that it defined her, that she alone had inherited her mother’s pervasive, bitter despair. That Rose would be the fighter and Emer would give up, let the worst of it, the strongest things, pull her over, and it would be like this time and time again, so surely they would grow to depend on it and design their lives to fit inside. Emer would see things her sister never could, but they wouldn’t save her. They would only mortar her more immutably in herself.
Even after she had Niall, which banished forever the option of merciful cliffs, she would refuse to forget how she let herself be pulled toward a death of wind and rock and sea, not from giving up so much as to see what would happen if she let go.
After Mass on Sunday, Rose sends Austin to the mainland and he comes back with Emer’s husband. After nearly a week of drinking in town, sleeping it off in fields when the pubs were closed, Patch needs Austin to help him walk up to the house. Emer stands outside her doorway, ready to collect him, and sees the fiery-haired shadow of Brigid above on the green road, dog at her heels, looking down on Emer’s embarrassment. Emer almost raises her hand in greeting, but clenches it in her apron pocket instead and turns her eyes to her fetching brother-in-law and his foul-smelling failure of a brother.
Patch avoids her gaze, but she can see he is sober enough, just too knackered to walk on his own. Austin brings him into the house, sits him down on the hearth bed and ruffles the dark head of Niall on his way out. He doesn’t look at Emer either.
“Hello, Da,” Niall says, out of obligation, but his eyes go to his mother, gauging her mood. She manages a smile for him, and a wink, and gestures that he take the pig, sleeping by the fire, outside before Patch gets his bearings enough to notice it.
She heats water and draws him a bath. Patch undresses behind the curtain and drops his clothes to the stone floor. She scoops them up, turning her head and trying not to gag at the smell. She takes them outside and scrubs at them angrily in the washbasin, watching Niall run around giddily with the pig. Once the foul chunks and smears and a tinge of cosmetics have been washed away, she hangs it all on the clothesline. She wants to stay outside long enough that she doesn’t risk seeing him in the bath. She does the milking, since evening is coming on, though the sun is still high in the sky. Mass today had been full of questions about the Yank, and since Emer was the only woman who had spent any time with her, she had gotten a lot of attention. Away from her island, Emer is a bit easier to talk to, as long as they stay away from her hands. She is always sorry to row back home.
When she finally goes in again, Patch has finished, and put on his spare trousers and flannel shirt, combed his long hair, the leached color of dried turf, and shaved the week’s worth of dirty whiskers from his neck and face. He sits at the table, avoiding her eyes, holding on to a mug of tea tightly to disguise the tremor of his hands. He looks young enough, still. Emer has a flash back to a less ruined version of his face and their first awkward, dogged kiss. She hasn’t kissed him, or anyone, unless you count the small willing mouth of her son, in five years.
“Will you have a bite?” Emer says roughly and Patch nods, so she slices some cold chicken and heats it up with the leftover spuds, adding a dollop of butter and pinch
of sea salt. When she puts the fire-warmed bowl in front of him, he leans away to avoid an accidental brush with her hands.
“Go raibh maith agat,” he says, Thank you, his voice rusty from little use. As she turns away, he adds, so softly she almost doesn’t hear him, “Logh dom.” Forgive me.
“You’re all right,” Emer says, with a smidgen less vehemence than her normal tone.
Emer is not fond of her husband. He is a daily reminder that she plays second fiddle to Rose, married to the better brother. She resents his failure to follow through on the few promises he has made. But this is not, she knows, entirely his fault. He has never fully recovered from the time when he was still willing to put his hands on her and be touched by her in return. The few times her husband entered her was enough to turn him off the whole business, even though she tried, for a while, to touch him in other ways.
Every person on the island, except Rose and Niall, stays away from Emer’s hands. Even strangers can sense something in her, beyond the scowl and the plainness, that makes them shy away. As if standing too close to Emer is like choosing to grasp the hand of a fairy and be pulled into the dark, boggy, merciless ground.
Emer never forgot that hand. As a girl, she looked for it in all the places on the island where children were forbidden—the fields where corncrakes nested, the green road that rose past Old Desmond’s house, a cluster of ancient piled rocks by the cliffside. In any of these places, they could be stolen, snatched away, a husk of a child left in their place. They would live in an eternal world of gluttony, lust and dancing, and they would never see their families again.
Emer went to all the forbidden spots, looking for that woman, the curtain to another world. She wanted to fall into her clutches, be stolen away. Lose herself. Like the stories of women and children who fell under the world and refused to return, leaving a fairy changeling in their place.
The cave that hid Saint Brigid’s holy well also harbored a shelf carved into the walls of the cliff that held one heavy rock—an clocha breacha, the cursing stone—left by the fairies and linked to tales of murder and revenge. Emer went there, but refrained from actually touching the stone. She didn’t want to accidentally kill herself in the process of being saved.
It was two years before the hand came back for her, in the bog. It was turf-cutting time and the whole island was at work, children and women outnumbering the men, who had either drowned or left the island in search of employment. At seven, Emer and Rose ran the household. Their mother had crawled into her grief and would not budge. If she could not die, she refused to live either. She left the house only for Mass.
Emer was slicing the earth into floppy dark logs and laying them in rows to dry. When the smallest hand imaginable came poking out of the bog wall—a hand the size of a newborn’s but with long delicate nails iridescent as oyster shells—and handed her a knife, Emer didn’t scream a warning as a sensible child would have, but took the knife eagerly, a little disappointed when it made the hand sink away.
She used the knife, with an engraved silver handle much finer than any she’d ever seen, to slice away the turf, and the amount she cut was much more than what she was able to do before. Only Rose noticed her sister’s sudden fervor for the chore and the expectant flush on her normally pallid cheeks.
Later, when the hand came back and Emer set down her knife to hold and caress and tickle it, Rose snuck up behind her, picked up the blade and lopped the fairy hand off with one swipe. There was a squeal of angry horror that only Emer could hear, and the stump of wrist, clean as a sliced turnip, no blood or flesh or anything so messily human, pulled back and closed itself off in the earth. The little hand rolled to rest at Emer’s bog-stained feet and shriveled upon itself, curling and shrinking and turning whitish green, until it resembled nothing but a loose clump of lichen. When Emer tried to lift it, it crumbled in her fingers and left a fine green-gray dust on her apron.
“What did you do that for, Rose?” she cried and stood up to face her sister, stomping her feet like a toddler in a tantrum. Later, in the loft bed they shared at home, Rose would apologize, spooning herself into Emer’s rigid back, and whisper how she would never, ever let her be stolen away. But in the moment, in the sun-warmed bog, a fairy blade glinting in her hand, Rose said, “Don’t be a fool,” and walked away.
She didn’t even want to know what the knife could do. She marched straight up the cliffs and tossed it over, scattering a flock of birds from where they’d been hovering within the wind of the sharp cliff’s sides. Emer was sure that Rose, who had no idea what it was like to desire something else, to be something else, even if it was deformed and threatening, had ruined any chance of her being invited under the ground again.
The bees tried next, when she was nine. In a high back field that belonged to their uncle Aidan stood a tree stump left from another time, when the island was covered in enormous oak trees, before they were cut down, burned and ultimately swallowed into the bog. The stump was so wide around that two children couldn’t circle it, five feet tall, a forest of moss and purple thistle on top, and deep inside the hollow base lived a writhing colony of honeybees. Their auntie Orla used turf to smoke them into a trance, and gave tiny jars of honey as Christmas presents. The honey was a luxury, and never offered to children unless they were ill, when a dollop was set on their tongue to cure a swollen throat or cough. Children on the island longed for sickness so they could be given a taste of that honey.
Only Rose and Emer knew what it was like to gorge themselves on it. Not even their auntie Orla had ever swallowed more than a judicious teaspoonful. Emer let it dribble from her thickly covered fingers into her sister’s waiting mouth.
Emer could lull the bees more effectively than the sweetest turf smoke. Rose would stay back, lying in the spongy grass, while Emer approached the log, the bees growing quieter the closer she got, the hum subsiding as they dropped off to sleep. She would dip a jug into the opening—dark with crowded, furry bodies—picking off the small corpses that had sacrificed themselves to the sticky sides. The honey was amber brown and flecked with bits of comb, lost bee legs and ancient chips of bark that stuck like chips in their teeth. It tasted like the scent of wildflowers and was thick enough to chew. They scooped it into each other’s mouths, giggled and sighed and lay down, because they could barely stand up with such sweetness coursing through them. It was dishonest and gluttonous and a little bit lustful, all things they’d been raised to avoid and confess as sin, and, to Emer’s surprise, Rose didn’t call on Saint Brigid for help to resist it. Emer loved what the honey did to her sister, normally so sharply tuned to what was safe and what was right. Rose didn’t hear the threat, as tangible as the magic blade of that knife, buzzing underneath.
Emer felt the difference one day as she leaned in, as if the bees were only feigning sleep, as if every fuzzy body were just closing its eyes and waiting for the cry of Now! before they came awake and snatched her.
What Rose saw was this: her sister reaching in and being pulled, yanked with a force that seemed merciless, a gulping swallow that left no regret about what it might leave behind. She leaned into a space only large enough to fit her head and shoulders and disappeared as if she were stepping off a cliff. The bees rose in a swarm of angry victory, and Rose ran screaming and crying over the fields for help.
All Emer saw was the little hand. The one her sister had sliced, grown back, slightly smaller, like the severed arm of a starfish. A little hand coming out of the honey, ready to pull her away. She remembered nothing after that moment of decision, where she chose the cruel promise of that hand, and as she did so, felt the bees wake up, or rise from pretend slumber, and cheer callously as she was yanked under the world.
She wasn’t gone for seven days, or seven years, like the stories told. She wasn’t even gone for an hour. By the time Rose’s hysterical crying was deciphered and the women ran up the fields, aprons whipping up at them, their hair wild with maternal ferocity, Emer had been spat back up again. She
lay on the rough grass, her throat puffed up to the width of her face, her eyelids ballooned shut, her mouth a smear of bruises. Bees fell out of her nose and mouth and she coughed and retched and tried to answer the worried questions of the women who lifted her. They carried her back home, bees shedding behind like husks of dead skin. She was wrapped in flannel soaked with holy water, and the men rowed the doctor over from the mainland when it was clear that her breathing, the way it kept catching, then stopping, then starting again, was not quite right.
The doctor calmed her wheeze and removed hundreds of stingers, properly, so no more poison was poured into her. He wasn’t there when the infection began in her left eye, and by the time he returned and discovered it, despite a visit to Saint Brigid’s healing well, it was already too late. She was taken to the hospital on the mainland, where a surgeon removed her ruined eyeball.
When Emer came home from the hospital, the place where her left eye had been sewn tightly shut, she tried to see if she’d been changed in some other way. But all that remained from being pulled under the world was a thick, buzzing band of anxiety that gripped her neck, a swarming that would follow her into adult life. It was as if, instead of stealing her, the beings under the ground had taken a good long look, flipped her over, then decided, as the human world had, that she wasn’t much to fuss about, and sent her back. She was not a changeling after all, but simply Emer, dipped into a pool of bees and found not sweet enough to keep. Expelled, rejected by the very world she so longed to abduct her. She would never be invited again. All that would stay of her trip below was the brown circle of leather held over the memory of her eye, and the power to make others feel as ugly as she did. The good people had left some fire in her hands, but it did nothing to warm her.