by Lisa Carey
They both became something else. It was as alarming and as hopeful as if she had watched them transform into slick-skinned animals and flop into the sea.
Later, when her father was up in the tower, Brigid looked at what he had painted. He painted the bruises onto thick, ragged-edged paper he seemed to keep just for that purpose. There were heavy black folders full of renderings of wounds as they changed and healed and faded. He could capture the exact red of her blood, then the darkening to black as it crusted and healed. He painted scars with the detail of beautiful features. Just as he had a recording of every ship that passed, every barometer reading, the nightly position of the moon, every wounded prism, he had a painting of every injury he had ever given her. It was some sort of penance, the way he recorded it. Soon after he was finished apologizing, her bruises disappeared, as if his remorse was all they had been hanging around for.
Brigid was ten by the time they found out about her hands. She was helping her father in the oil house, watching as he emptied hot oil into a drum, and a spill glugged over and grabbed him. Her father swore, clawing at his trousers, trying to rip the fabric away.
Brigid went to him, her hands reaching for the dark spot on his thigh. He tried, not gently, to avoid her and when this didn’t work, to bat her away. “Nuala,” he barked, her mother’s name, then “you,” as if he couldn’t recall her name at all. Backing away from her he tripped on a toolbox and in the instant of backward sprawl he was helpless and before he could stop her it was over.
She put her hands on his thigh, spread them wide to try to cover the oil. For an instant, the pain he must have felt when it spilled racked her, but that was merely an entry, a trip over his pain into what happened next. There was a pulling sensation, heat rose up her arms and through her shoulders and into her head and then crashed down into the trunk of her body, like a wave on a rock. The oil on his thigh evaporated, the hole it ate through his trousers was still there, but the skin underneath was now tender and pink and hairless, like a sunburned child’s. Either her father didn’t feel the relief of pain yet, or it was merely his instinct, because he hit her. He knocked her off her feet just at the moment where the pleasure of removing the fire was at its peak. He thumped a hard hand to her chest and sent her reeling backward, where she banged the back of her head on the rough cement wall. For a while, until the opportunity occurred to do such a thing again, Brigid believed that the sickness that followed this—vomiting until nothing was left but her body heaved anyway, three days of a fever so high her parents fought openly about whether to radio the coast guard—was because her father had hit her, and not because she had healed him.
It had only ever been something she had done to herself, playing with matches in her cove by the woods, burning her fingers then drawing the burn away, the same way she played with adding twigs and shells to the fairy houses she built, an experiment of magic and nature. She pulled the burn away and it felt good and that was all she knew. She’d kept it a secret because of the feeling it brought. The loosening, building, mind-evaporating hum was something she didn’t want either one of them to know about. It didn’t make her ill, but if she did it too often, it did exhaust her. Her father’s burn was the first real wound she had ever tried to heal.
While she was still recovering, she waited for an apology, some indication that he was grateful or full of remorse. But he never came in; it was her mother who tended to her when she was ill.
Her father came to find her in the woods when she was better. Since the time when she first saw him hit her mother, his eyes were always pointing somewhere else when he was talking to her, or unfocused, as if he was purposefully blinding himself to what was in front of him.
“Does your mother know?” Brigid shook her head. She liked to answer her father in gestures, because it forced him to flick his eyes in her direction.
“I think it best you don’t tell her,” he said.
“Why?” Brigid said.
“You know why,” he said. Brigid shrugged again, forcing her father into eye contact. “She might think you’re touched. She might want to do something with it. With you. Understand?”
“Yes,” Brigid said. He was lying. Her mother knew more about these things than anyone. She told her stories of just this sort of magic. But though she felt a pull of guilt, Brigid liked having a secret with her father. Like the secret language with her mother, or the secret of the penance paintings.
Secrets meant you were loved.
For months after she first healed him, her father avoided drinking from the ship bottle. He didn’t want to cause an injury, Brigid thought, that his daughter might be obliged to heal. But then the violence seemed to build in him, as if there was a ceiling on the loving ways he could touch her mother, and when he reached that, he needed to do something else. He drank, he hit, he apologized.
One night she heard her name called out like a curse by her father. As soon as Brigid came out, her father fell to his knees and started to cry.
“Help her,” he said. “I went too far. Something is broken.” Brigid laid her hands on her mother for the first time, but it didn’t work.
The attempt came rushing back at her, like a deliberate slap in the face. Understanding, then revulsion followed. Her mother opened her eyes, challenging her to tell, but Brigid never did. She pretended to heal her mother’s broken bone, but she didn’t do a thing. Her mother healed herself. Nuala had the same secret inside her hands that Brigid did. Most of the time, Brigid realized, she chose not to use it. If she healed herself, her husband would have nothing to apologize for.
Brigid saw it now. Despite years of being battered, her nose broken, cheekbones and ribs cracked, wounds splayed open like mouths across her face, her mother didn’t have a mark on her. She was as flawless and lovely as the young girl Silas had first painted, first captured into this violent spiral that neither of them seemed able to leave. She had healed all her scars, even as she stayed and asked for the wounds.
Her father had always spent his nights in the lighthouse, drinking large thermoses full of coffee, so he could continue the conversation of light between the tower and passing ships. Brigid still slept in the bed with her mother, where she had once listened to fairy stories of women stronger than any of the evils that threatened them. Her mother had less and less to tell her these days.
“Why do you let him?” Brigid said once, and her mother stiffened. “You’re stronger than he is. Why do you let him hurt you? Why do we stay here?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
Brigid said nothing, but her silence demanded more.
“I was a girl when he found me. I was in trouble. He saved me.”
“What trouble?”
“It doesn’t matter. He’s a part of me. Like you are. You don’t choose who you love.”
Something resonated in Brigid then, she wanted to scream and rage and insist that this was rubbish. That she wouldn’t fall for it. She would choose whom she loved, or she would not love at all.
“But he hurts you.”
“Not in a way I can’t bear.”
“We could leave. We could swim away, like the stories.”
“Just because I’m strong enough to leave, doesn’t mean I want to.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It could be worse. It could be a lot worse.”
But Brigid doubted that.
“There are other ways to be hurt,” her mother tried. “He only uses his hands.” Her mother paused. “He can’t hurt me. Don’t you see? Any more than he can hurt you.”
“But he has,” Brigid said. “He does.” Her mother stiffened, held her tighter, pretended she didn’t hear.
She fell asleep before Brigid could ask the question she most wanted the answer to. She whispered it anyway.
“Are we real?”
She didn’t know what was true anymore. The story they were trapped in or the ones her mother no longer told.
When she was ten, Brigid wanted a
changeling baby. In her mother’s stories, babies were stolen from their cradles, a fairy left in their place. Other babies were given to women who couldn’t grow one themselves. Fairy children, lent to the world, had a foreign loveliness and fire in their eyes. On her mother’s island in Ireland, there were places known as entrances to the fairy world, green roads, the ancient stump of a tree, a cave in a stone cliff by the sea. Places where children could hear music and laughter and a pull to something that would swallow them away. Where something else could be born.
Brigid set up sites on the island where fairies might hear her request. A circle of stones in the woods where she built fires and burned and healed herself while waiting. A cave down by the shoreline that was swallowed at high tide, but dark, wet, and promising at low. An old oak tree whose trunk she could not fit her arms around, which she surrounded with a colony of fairy houses made from bark and pine needles and shells and moss.
There was the chance, she knew, that she would be stolen instead. The instant she passed through bark or damp mossy ground or stayed in a cave until the sea swallowed her, she planned to gorge herself, eat and eat from whatever she was offered, drink goblets of fairy wine until it ran down her chin, eat beyond the point where she felt she might be sick, to make sure that there was not the slightest chance she could ever be returned.
Either way, stolen child or fairy gift, Brigid would no longer be alone.
Her mother’s hands shook her for a long time before Brigid relented and opened her eyes. The first thing she saw was the blood. Her mother had smeared it on the sheet and the doors and the walls. There was so much blood Brigid assumed it was coming from her, but she pulled her out of bed and outside, barefoot over ice and rock, murmuring “Hurry, hurry,” even though they already were.
Inside, the studio was a mess. The fight was an epic one. Smashed glass, ripped canvas, they had broken and torn and shattered it all. More blood than Brigid had ever seen. Streams of it, puddles, smears, soakings, blood like spilled and wasted paint. Blood leading in an ungraceful sweep to her father, still and curled up in the corner, where he’d pulled himself then stopped. Brigid didn’t want to go near him, she wanted to turn around and go back to bed. But her mother was still holding on.
“I hit back,” she said, pulling Brigid along. “I hit him too hard.” Brigid’s bare feet warmed on the bloody floor. “I can’t fix it.”
The fire iron was still where she’d dropped it. His head was a mess, the blood as dark as his hair but glistening, weighing down his curls as if he’d just emerged from a deep and oily sea. It pooled beneath him black and so thick she could tell it was already cold.
“Right there,” her mother said, pointing to an indentation in his skull, a broken pit behind his ear. There was something in there, in that pit, something besides bone and blood, something neither one of them was ever meant to see. An entrance, Brigid thought, an underworld.
It was not something Brigid could put her hands on. Her mother forced her, pulled her down to her knees in the blood and pressed her daughter’s hands to the pit and begged her to close it. Nothing happened. There was no heat, no rush of pleasure, there was nothing inside him that she could get a grip on. He was gone.
“He’s not in there,” Brigid mumbled.
“No. Nonononono.” Her mother paced the round room in her bare feet, leaving bloody footprints in a spiral, swearing and crying and mumbling to herself. When Brigid tried to talk to her, she looked as if she didn’t know who she was, or what language she was speaking. She looked like something other than a mother, like the changeling that had replaced her who could not figure out how to leave.
Part of Brigid was relieved when nothing happened. When she put her hands to her father’s head and found it empty. The relief opened a throat constricted with guilt. Though she would have saved him, though the reality of her father dead—the father who had once held her hand and shown her how to polish light—made her want to fall into darkness herself, not saving him meant that they were free. It meant that someone would come in a boat and take her away and it would be better than being with the fairies because she could escape and still live in the world. She thought her father dying would break open the trap that was the three of them.
But her mother decided to stay.
“They’ll take you away,” her mother explained. “I’ll go to jail. Is that what you want?”
“I’ll tell them,” Brigid tried. “I’ll tell them it was his fault.”
“Look at us,” her mother said. “There’s not a mark on either one of us. No one will believe you.”
Brigid stopped arguing. She was only a child. None of this had ever been her decision.
It wasn’t hard for her mother to pretend. They left his body in a cave that was walled off by enormous boulders pushed in by the sea. The boat still delivered supplies and thought nothing of leaving the wooden boxes on the dock. They had never liked Silas, who was gruff and impatient with small talk, so they dropped things in a hurry to avoid him. Brigid knew how to run the lighthouse, how to log the boats and punch in the Morse code at the appropriate times. How to pull the enormous bell three times in greeting to a passing boat, each ring a bigger lie. Her mother burned stacks of sketches in the stove, annihilated images of her broken, bruised body, swallowing them with flame. She refused to listen when Brigid said they could be used as evidence. She alternated between periods of energetic destruction and collapse, taking to her bed and not leaving it for days, weeks at a time. She had hallucinations, open-eyed dreams where she grabbed Brigid’s arms and tried to warn her of something.
“They’ll burn me,” she said. “They’re waiting with the fire irons. They’ll burn me and kill the baby.”
“There is no baby,” Brigid would insist, and then feel guilty that such pragmatism sent her mother into a fresh episode of tears.
Brigid ran the lighthouse by herself then, signaling the boats, manned by those who knew nothing about what was happening underneath the light. At some point it occurred to her with a rush that they could be here for years before anyone came. They could be here forever, two women who could barely meet eyes or speak, having murdered the only thing that bound them to the human world.
One summer morning, Brigid was swimming in the cove when she saw a sailboat. She was halfway to it before she even realized what she was trying to do. She swam so hard she forgot to pace herself, and the sailboat moved quickly out of her sight. She swallowed water, couldn’t keep her head above the waves long enough to cough it out, swallowed more. She panicked, struggling. She felt something large and warm brush against her legs. Suddenly, she was not afraid. It was so easy to stop struggling. To believe that falling beneath the sea would save her. This is where the fairies have been all along, she thought, as she felt a small arm circle her neck, and heard a whisper that seemed to come up from the water. Brigid, the watery voice said in the secret language, mo chuisle. My pulse.
She woke on the shore, coughing and vomiting seawater in a violent gush. She lay for a long time, her bruised and scraped body heavily alive in the sand. When she felt strong enough, she walked back to the water. She lowered herself into a tide pool and watched the blood, sand and all the hopes she’d had for being stolen lift off and swirl away.
Later that night, in the bed they shared, Brigid’s mother said simply, in Irish, “Don’t ever try that nonsense again.” When Brigid didn’t answer, her mother put an arm around her waist, pulled her in tight.
“Don’t give up on me,” she said into Brigid’s neck, moving her hair aside. “I don’t know how to start over again. But we’ll figure something out.”
Her mother had been the one to rescue her. Not to save her, but to chain her there. Trapped in a story worse than any fairy tale she’d ever been told.
Brigid stopped wishing for a changeling. Once she imagined that her mother was the brave fairy girl who swam herself across the sea, now Brigid thought the story was about her. She knew exactly what it felt like to be that fai
ry girl, an accident born from the blasphemous joining of worlds. She couldn’t escape this life any more than she could hurt herself.
It wasn’t just happening to her or around her, all this darkness. It was part of her.
She couldn’t bring a baby into all of this. She imagined it slipping away, like newborn seals that had to be nudged back up the rocks by their enormous, aggravated mothers.
It would have nothing to hold on to.
When Brigid was eleven, the state decided to renegotiate with her father, and though her mother forged his signature on letters requesting an extension, it was denied. Three young coast guard sailors, eager to prove themselves, arrived on the island expecting to talk down a madman, but found instead two wild-eyed, emaciated women and the bones of the lighthouse keeper rattling around in a cave of sharp gray rock. Nothing magical saved them. The world that Brigid thought had forgotten them merely stumbled in.
In town, the police pulled a confession out of her mother as easily as a needle drawing blood. She was sent to St. Dymphna’s Asylum, from where, it was well known, no woman ever left. They weren’t sure what to do with Brigid, who wouldn’t say a word. She was as tall as a grown woman, with wild, fire-colored hair and a look on her face that made the adults required to help her extremely uncomfortable. In the end, Brigid was sent north to an institution that bore her name, St. Brigid’s, run by a group of Irish nuns who had a reputation for reforming the most damaged and bold of wayward girls.
Her mother had told them her father had abused them both. That was why she had killed him, because he was hurting their child. Brigid didn’t learn this until later. Somewhere in the shuffle of policemen and social workers and doctors, Brigid and her mother never said good-bye. Brigid was left to wonder alone, until she grew tired of wondering anymore, which one of them—the mother who had stolen from her, or the mother who had saved her—was the one she should remember. The fairy or the saint.