The Stolen Child

by Lisa Carey

  In the shed behind her house, which Malachy has restocked with grain for the hens, the milking pails and stool, and various tools she will need to start a garden, she finds a collection of skulls. They are lined up in descending order of size—sheep, dog, rabbit, vole—on a shelf within the thick-layered stone wall. Behind the skulls, a pile of sun-bleached bones. She wonders if this was a child’s collection Desmond couldn’t part with or if that grown, lonely man wandered the island looking for death the way she looks for a miracle.

  In the damp corner of the shed is a dirty tarp she pulls at, thinking it will be a temporary covering until the men can patch her roof. Underneath it she finds a diligently wrapped parcel, another waterproof tarp, then oilcloth, then softer, cleaner flannel, each layer closer to the object that waits underneath.

  A cradle. Hand carved from driftwood soft and weathered by salt and wind, a pattern of limpet shells affixed around the edges and across the curved head. The bottom is carved like the hull of a boat, and it is darker there, water stained, as if it has spent time at sea. Brigid’s mother once told her that this was how she got her to sleep as a baby, by laying her in the rowboat and tying it to the dock with a rope long enough to let it sway in the dark water. It was the way, she had said, that all babies in her family had been lulled, with the music of the sea as their lullaby.

  Brigid brings the cradle inside and puts it next to her bed, and when she wakes in the night she reaches down to run her fingertips over the mountain range of limpet shells, like crenellations on the fortress of a royal child. She rocks it a little before she turns over, puts her arm around the warm dog and falls back to sleep.

  It was wrapped so meticulously, hidden in that shed, as though someone had stored it with the intention that Brigid find it instead of the thieving neighbors. As if her uncle had known that it was the one thing in the house she might actually need.

  Chapter 5

  The Lightkeeper’s Wife

  1927–1933

  There was a time, before it all went cross-eyed, that Brigid’s mother was a soft pillow of flesh and a lilting voice that climbed into bed with her, pulled the covers over their heads and told fairy stories. She told them in Irish. It was a secret language, hardly anyone spoke it anymore, her mother said, not even in Ireland. Her stories were about heartless creatures who stole babies and lonely women for their own amusement. For Brigid, the more terrifying the story, the better. She liked a story that made her forget to breathe in the middle of it.

  One of her favorites was about a mother who was stolen.

  A woman was passing a fairy ring and stopped to listen to the music. She was pulled under the ground and an identical version of her, a changeling, was left in her place. Only her children could tell it wasn’t her, and no one believed them.

  The new mother played cruel tricks on the children, starved them of their dinners, pinched them black-and-blue, laughed like a braying donkey when they cried that they missed her. The father preferred the fairy wife to the old one, whom he had often struck when he’d been drinking. This new wife spoiled him, giggled and flirted, kissed him shamelessly in the middle of the field, not caring who might see. It wasn’t long before the mother was smugly round with a new baby.

  But when a baby girl was born, the mother died. They lived on a remote island, far from any doctor or priest, and complications arose. The fairy may have just decided to abandon them, having had her fill of human life, but refused to return their real mother at the end.

  The children did not grieve her; as far as they were concerned, their mother had been dead for over a year. But the father raged over the loss. He got viciously drunk and tried to drown the baby in the well. No matter how long he held it under, the baby just seemed to wait, her eyes wide open and shining up from the dark water, holding on to breath for as long as was needed, refusing to die.

  The father ended up drowning himself, falling off the cliff and being battered against the rocks, though no one was sure if he took his own life out of grief and guilt or sloppy stupidity. The children were sent to the orphanage on the mainland. Only the oldest boy stayed; he was twelve and able to tend the farm. He wouldn’t allow them to take the baby. He fed her milk from the cow and wore her tied to his chest with an old woolen shawl of his mother’s.

  She grew into a girl, half-fairy, half-human, who had the power to heal in her hands. She eased the pain of childbirth, lifted the fevers of children expected to die. Some of the islanders knew that she was the child of a changeling, others believed her power came from the holy well her father tried to drown her in. It was the same well the nuns had once used, saving the cauls of children born with the sac intact, filling them with holy water, to heal the barren wombs of women. No one cared much where it came from, pagan or Christian, as long as it was helping them.

  When the girl was fourteen, there was a baby she could not save. She put her hands on it, but it had already died before it came into the world. The islanders who had called her a saint when she could help, called her a devil when she couldn’t. They planned to punish her in the old ways, to burn her and see if she could heal herself. She was gone before they could try.

  Her brother never revealed how she got away, no boats had come or gone on the island, she disappeared during a day when the sea raged them into seclusion. Some said she had thrown herself over the cliff, others that she had gone back under the ground to where she had come from. She was never seen, or heard from, on the island again.

  “Where do you think she went?” Brigid would ask her mother breathlessly, whenever she finished this story.

  “I think she swam,” her mother would whisper in their little cave under the covers. “I think she swam until she couldn’t swim anymore and found herself all the way across the sea.”

  So many of her mother’s fairy stories ended badly. Brigid liked the ones where they got away.

  Brigid’s father was a lighthouse keeper. The lighthouse was on an island, ten miles off the coast of Maine, two acres of layered gray rock, one side shorn down so steep it looked like it had been broken by something in anger. Stalwart pine trees grew between the cracks to form a miniature forest. On one corner perched the tower, painted white and splattered with yellow lichen, and set behind it, a white brick building with a red roof, two rooms meant for one lonely man. Instead it sheltered Brigid’s small, painful family, three people shaped by isolation, shadowed between the dark sea and a constant, revolving warning of light.

  Brigid and her mother were not supposed to be there. Such a lighthouse would normally be run on shifts, by men who returned to their families on the mainland for weeks at a time. But it was such an unpopular posting that when her father offered to take it on full time, so he could devote every spare minute to his painting, a hermit artist on an island out at sea, the state was eager to give it away. He was fed and supplied by boat, paid a salary he didn’t spend, and left alone. Brigid was told never to show herself to the fishermen who passed by and greeted her father with three pulls of their bell.

  “Am I a secret?” she asked him.

  “A treasure.” He winked.

  Her father called her his deck hand, showed her how to polish the individual prisms of the Fresnel lens, layered together in a beehive of glass the size of a child, the light they were there to keep. A history of the lens was kept in a leather-bound book, each prism was numbered, every chip or discoloration recorded. There were multiple notebooks involved in his job, for logging boats, radio transmissions, tides and weather. Brigid loved to climb up the perilous wrought-iron spiral of stairs, her father’s enormous shoulders just behind her to break her fall. From the top of the tower you could see for miles, and the reflection of sea and sky and the angles of honeyed light trapped in the amber glass lens made Brigid feel, when they were up there, like they had climbed into another world. He painted her like this, a girl looking over the sea, her hair the same color as amber sunlight cupped in the deepest crevice of the lens.

  By the time she w
as seven, she could tie any knot her father asked for, trim the wick with precision, knew the colors of his oil paints better than any art student he’d had. She could bait and set back a string of lobster traps, though he hauled them for her, since she was small enough to be crushed if they fell in the boat. She knew that a lobster was big enough to keep without the brass gauge, and could spot an egger before they opened the parlor.

  “Always throw the mothers back,” her father said. He taught her to punch their tails with the sharp end of the gauge, so the next lobsterman would recognize the breeders. “The ocean needs them more than we do.”

  These were her parents, Silas and Nuala: peculiar, intense, zealous. Their love was not consistent, it was as mercurial and varied as the color of the sea. It depended on the angle, which portion of the glass you looked through, whether they were tender or severe. They took turns with her, because when the two of them were in the same room, she, and everything else, tended to fade away.

  It was like they set the room on fire. They were both struck by the same fever that flushed their cheeks and glazed their eyes. They touched whenever they could, her father often grabbed her mother in the middle of some chore, to kiss her neck, press her against the counter with a teasing growl. He would stand in the doorway to tell her he had fish for dinner, and she wouldn’t appear to listen, instead she would reach out and put a hand on his forearm, as if she’d never seen it before. He would look at her hand, and lose his words. They closed themselves in the bedroom in the middle of the day, or her mother padded barefoot out to the lighthouse at night, and Brigid grew up with the sounds that accompanied these sessions; they were as familiar as the moaning of the wind and the sea.

  They loved each other too much, Brigid thought, when she was old enough to analyze it. They couldn’t see through the fog of it. It possessed them. “A chuisle,” their mother often whispered to him, and she would hold his hand so his rough palm cupped her jaw and the soft spot at her neck. You are my pulse. They were in each other’s veins.

  She began to hear something other than love at night, voices rising in pitch and intensity, like a harmless wind escalating to a concerning one. A thump that didn’t belong, a clatter, a shocked silence, a sound that could have been a cry. She stood by the door, feet bare, nightgown billowing from the draft that came in underneath. The lines of light around the door edges encircled her, framing her inside a dark rectangle, her hand on the cold brass doorknob, gripping but not turning it. In the bedroom, within that illuminated rectangle, she was still safe, and what was happening outside it might not have been real. She would stand until her hand on the knob had fallen asleep, the fingers full of stabbing glass pins, then she would let go and get back into bed and will herself to sleep beneath the dark weight of the covers.

  There would be detritus to further confuse her in the morning: a green bottle with a silver ship on the label, her father’s evening drink, so potent it made Brigid’s eyes water if she got too close to the open glass, half-full the night before, would be empty and lying sideways on the counter. Shards of shattered glass hastily gathered in the dustpan but not emptied into the wastebasket. Once, what appeared to be a small, jagged bone lying on the porcelain drain, which on closer inspection she decided was a tooth. Her mother too ill to get out of bed, something wrong with her that couldn’t be named.

  Blood, sometimes. On a dishtowel, a handkerchief. A dark painting of it on the seat of the outhouse. She asked her father only once, when her mother didn’t emerge for three days and he brought her tea and took away armloads of darkened sheets to be scrubbed in boiled seawater. Some rags he didn’t bother soaking but fed directly into the cast-iron stove.

  “What’s wrong with Mam?”

  “She’ll be all right,” he said, but he wouldn’t look at her.

  Something had fallen out of her, Brigid thought. Something she had wanted to keep inside. Like the tooth, only worse. She didn’t know what it was. She didn’t want to know.

  Once she heard her mother screaming, accusing him, weeping about a baby. There had never been a baby. She imagined this was how babies were made: by drinking fire and bleeding and lying in your bedroom until a new, dark being was formed out of it all. But a baby never came.

  She helped her mother after she emerged from these bedroom sessions, though she much preferred her father’s chores. Her mother showed her how to make dense boulders of brown bread. No matter how many times Brigid did it she could never remember the steps involved and could not make bread herself, she forgot key ingredients, the baking soda, the salt, or let the whole thing burn black in the stove. She knew her father’s paint hues and the chips on the lens prisms by heart, but couldn’t cook a simple meal. “Your memory is choosy enough,” her mother said. She wasn’t angry, she merely sighed and gave her something less complicated to do.

  Sometimes she thought her mother’s face looked a bit lopsided, one cheek puffed out as if she was storing food in it. Or she moved too stiffly, carefully, as though trying not to spill something hidden in the walls of her back. Once, Brigid walked into the bedroom just as her mother lifted her blouse above her head, and saw a livid green and purple thing on her back that looked more like something alive than a bruise. Later that night, when she was asleep, Brigid pulled the sheet back to look at it again. Her mother’s slight, spaghetti-strapped nightgown was thin enough to see through, but even in the bright moonlit room she couldn’t find the mark. It was gone.

  She was nine the first time she saw him hit her. The yelling was loud that night, insistent, as if they’d forgotten their usual attempt to hide it. Later, when she thought about what finally made her open the door, she decided it was hearing her own name, her mother called it out, like a warning. She opened it in time to see her mother’s flailing arms and wild hair, see her hurl a glass and watch it shatter by her father’s head on the stone wall of the chimney. See the look of angry terror behind her father’s dark beard, the huge, gulping steps he took toward her, his hand, the enormous stone of his fist, driving at her face, so decisive and blunt that Brigid thought for a moment he was trying to knock something out of her, whatever invisible thing that had possessed them both. But it wasn’t that. It was merely this, her tender, powerful father hauling his arm back and punching her mother, on purpose, in the mouth. The crack it made, the sound of the bones in his hand meeting the flesh of her face, was a shameful sound, something private, that she should not have been allowed to hear.

  “Fuck,” he yelled, livid, guilty, frightened, like the time he dislodged three prisms from the lens and they shattered and he had to radio to ask for their expensive replacements. Furious at his own careless stupidity. As if he meant to caress her and misjudged the pressure of his hand. Then he saw Brigid, standing in the dark doorway. His shoulders dropped even lower, he could not meet her eyes. “Shit, shit, shit,” he moaned, punching the wall this time, hard enough that Brigid heard something else crack. He left the house, tears carving thick pathways down into his beard.

  Brigid padded over to her mother, who had slid down to sit against the wall, unable to move, her eyes closed, leaking tears. She squatted down and reached a hand out to the pulsing hot mess that was the lower half of her mother’s face. She wanted to fix it. But her mother opened her eyes and shook her head. She let go of her own mouth to stay Brigid’s hand. Her front teeth were dark and pressed in at an angle that was not right. Her lip was split so deeply it looked like a fish sliced down the middle and splayed in two.

  “Don’t,” her mother slurred. “Leave it.”

  She would learn later why her mother left the bruises. She wanted to leave all the comforting to the one who was to blame.

  “What’s happened to Da?” Brigid whispered. He looked possessed, as if some dark beast had dragged him under the sharp rock and left behind a monster who used fists like he intended to break her mother in two.

  “It’s only the drink,” she lisped through the blood and split flesh and fear. “It’s all right.”
r />   “Oh,” Brigid said. She was dumbfounded.

  It made no sense. The silver ship drink that made her father glassy-eyed, heavy-lidded and sloppy also turned his fists into punishing stone?

  Though Brigid had been angry at the idea that they were hiding something, once she found out what it was, she regretted ever being curious. It was no longer possible for her to go back to being the girl in the nightgown who listened to noises, but had not yet made the mistake of opening the door.

  It didn’t happen every day. Or even every week. Months could go by where all that passed between her parents was the familiar foggy-eyed desire. Had it been constant it would have been easier to hate her father. As it was she both loved him and feared him, as though she had two fathers. Two fathers on shifts like lighthouse workers, appearing to relieve each other just at the moment the other reached a breaking point.

  Her father apologized with paintings. In the lighthouse room that was his studio, there were stacks of her naked mother, lying down, looking out of the canvas with a dark, feverish happiness. After he hit her, he painted her wounds.

  Brigid watched through a round, dirty glass window as her father used his brushes to heal what he had done. Eventually he put down his brushes and came over to her, he would cry and she would kiss his tears away, and that was when their bodies would come together, together in a way that Brigid through the thick dirty window couldn’t fully understand, but she imagined it was something that grew between them and all they could do was hold on tightly, like they were being pulled by a current, until it let them go.