The Stolen Child

by Lisa Carey

  “You moron,” she said. “You need a boy for that.”

  It was a while before she learned that Jeanne didn’t have all the facts either. But even when she knew it was from a boy, she still wanted it, wanted a baby growing inside her with the same longing that drove her to press her hands into wounds, or her mouth to Jeanne’s chapped lips. The longing to be rescued. It seemed, in the short time she’d known about it, exactly what she was meant to do. She was dejected when Jeanne first told her. There was no part of her that desired to do with a boy the things she did with Jeanne. Other than the priest, Brigid hadn’t seen a man since the doctor who dropped her off. There was another doctor, one who slipped in to deliver the babies, but they never saw him. Apparently she would need a boy, at some point, to get what she wanted. She hoped to find the kind that quickly disappeared, like the ones who had abandoned the girls at St. Brigid’s, while their babies were still growing.

  Jeanne thought she was crazy. No one except rich, married women with nothing better to do actually wanted to have a baby. It ruined you. It stretched your body and then ripped its way out, they’d all heard the screams. Sometimes the girls even died while it tried to get out. Even if they lived, no one was allowed to keep it. The babies were carted away and the girl was left leaking blood and milk and ruined for any sort of normal life where you could live happily ever after. Jeanne had heard of girls who had survived the birth, left St. Brigid’s and had gone on to kill themselves after all.

  Yes, there were those who did it on purpose to snag a particular boy. But often that backfired, like with Jeanne’s cousin Myra who was awaiting her due date upstairs, and then you lost the boy, the baby and your life. It just wasn’t something a normal girl would want to do. She was so vehement, Brigid stopped talking about it, but the fantasy continued in her mind. Her belly grown hard, full of blood and flesh that was not hers, but was more a part of her than anyone could have been. More a part of her than her parents, who had been too caught up in their dance of brutality and forgiveness to love her, more than this rough, desperate girl who seemed to want to be violated to match what was happening in her mind. More than any of them, a baby would be the closest Brigid could come to love. She imagined it like stealing, more of an abduction than a creation, but once you’d gotten the baby, there was no chance of another world taking it back. Not if you held on tight enough.

  That she was a child herself, planning on having a child, never occurred to her. She hadn’t felt like a child in a long time. She wasn’t even sure she had ever been one.

  Jeanne was taken from her bed the night her cousin Myra went into labor. Something was wrong. They wouldn’t have come for her, thought Brigid, awake and listening from her cot, if everything were going to plan. Jeanne hadn’t even seen her cousin since the first day she’d arrived, when the Mother Superior had allowed them a brief reunion visit in her office. Jeanne told Brigid that Myra had talked the entire time about her boyfriend, who was going to come and get her as soon as he saved up enough money.

  “She’s an idiot,” Jeanne summarized.

  A few hours later, Brigid was woken again by Jeanne’s familiar hands, and she could tell before she opened her eyes that someone was with her. The hands were tentative, tapping at her as if they’d never touched before. Brigid opened her eyes. Mother Superior was there. She instructed Brigid to put on a dressing gown and they went out to the corridor.

  “I’m not sure why I’m allowing this,” Mother Superior said. “But Jeanne seems to think you have an ability to help. Do you, Brigid?”

  Brigid glared at Jeanne. She had promised not to tell anyone. She didn’t want to do it anymore, now that she’d found other ways to share her body.

  “Yes, Mother,” she said, wishing, not for the first time, that she was just a normal child with no idea what to do except cry for help when encountering someone else’s pain.

  Even when her father died, there hadn’t been this much blood. It was everywhere, smeared across the floor by the panicked soles of the nuns, burying the doctor up to his elbows, christening foreheads like dried-up dabs of muddied ash. It came out of Myra like something being washed in from the sea, clotting into enormous sacs. Brigid imagined if you broke one apart, you’d find a baby hiding inside. But the baby was still in Myra. Stuck.

  Brigid was led up to that space, the space between Myra’s legs that was the center of so much panic, even the doctor, tired and out of ideas and fed some lie about Brigid’s mother being a midwife, was stepping aside to let her in. Myra was in too much pain, screaming, thrashing, struggling to close her legs which were held open by two blood-spattered and terrified-looking nuns, to even know that Brigid was there. Someone poured something clear and stinging over Brigid’s arms.

  Somehow she knew what to do. She put her hands on Myra, first one and then the other, as easily as if she were sliding them into wet clay. Myra stopped screaming. She whimpered, like someone whose pain has backed off, but the memory of it is still spilling over. The blood stopped gushing out, though this was hard to tell because of all that was already there. The baby had ripped places that Brigid sealed even as she reached for it. She felt the small hard joints, an ankle, a knee, the heel bone of a miniature foot. The leg pulled away from her, curling in on itself like something afraid. The baby was hiding, no intention of coming out, holding on, willing to let her mother bleed to death before leaving the only place that was safe. Brigid held on to it, letting her healing hands soothe a baby that was not injured, only afraid. She slowly turned it around so she could cradle the head, fists clenched to its chin, and gently, with no pain for Myra and a silent promise to the reluctant baby, she pulled it, long and slimy and covered in a white, waxy crust that beaded away blood, out into the harsh white room. Instead of handing the baby to the doctor or one of the nuns, Brigid stepped forward, laying it on the bloody sheets draped on Myra’s still massive belly. The baby curled back up again, like a rubber band snapped back into shape, and stopped crying, as if that was where it belonged. Before they pulled her away, while she sealed the last rip in Myra that her own hands had helped make, Brigid saw the look on Myra’s face. The pain had been gone for a while, as had the fear of dying. As soon as Brigid had first touched her Myra knew she wouldn’t die. But the way she looked at that baby, as if it were just as horrifying as the wobbly clots of blood that came before it, made Brigid want to snatch it back, hide it in her nightgown, run away. Apologize for exposing it to this in the first place. Myra closed her eyes and turned her head and let the nuns, once the doctor pulled Brigid away and cut the cord, remove the baby from its place on top of her, as if its weight meant nothing at all.

  The doctor was not like she’d imagined him. Brigid had never seen him up close, only the form of his shoulders and hat as he was rushed in and out to deliver and remove these little lives. She had assumed he was like the priest, old and craggy-faced and revolting, without a hint of kindness, but his face was young, open and feminine, with the large, barely blinking, eyes of a deer. His lashes were long and wet and it was clear that he had not yet in his life needed to shave. He came and stood next to her while she washed her hands in the enormous sink, watching the blood fade to pink, form a whirlpool around the drain and swirl away. He held a hand up and she thought he was going to touch her shoulder, but when she cringed, he put it down on the edge of the sink.

  “It’s easier when they don’t want to hold them,” he said.

  Brigid said nothing. She was looking at his hands, delicate, smooth, with long fingers and only the slightest thickness at the knuckle. They could have belonged to a woman, or a child.

  “Can you take out your own eye as well?” he asked. “Then put it back, like your namesake?” She looked quickly at him, before she could stop herself. Then back at the sink, but she could feel a smile stretching.

  “Of course not.” She was blushing.

  “I’m not one to question miracles,” the doctor said. “So I won’t ask how you did that.” His voice was light a
nd high, a voice she imagined, had she ever met any, might come from a boy.

  “But I’m going to insist that you do it again.”

  She didn’t have to answer him, because she started gagging and a nun led her quickly to a bathroom. She was allowed to sleep the morning away in the empty dorm, where Jeanne visited quickly before running off to mop the floors.

  “He took the baby with him,” Jeanne said.

  “I know,” Brigid said.

  The doctor was wrong, Brigid thought. It wasn’t that the girls didn’t want to hold them. When something is stolen from you, it is sometimes easier to act like you never wanted it in the first place.

  Chapter 9

  Ink

  August 1959

  Emer can’t stop thinking about Brigid’s hands. The long fingers, slender except for prominent knuckles that move like stones beneath her skin. When she pulled that poison out of Niall, Emer could feel a loosening in her own neck. Normally a late sleeper, now she is up before dawn counting the hours until it will be proper to stop by, just to be near them again.

  Emer catches Brigid by surprise, out back trying to move her stubborn cow. Seeing Emer without warning, combined with the frustration at the cow, makes her face go dark, it looks fed up for a moment before she can rearrange it into a welcome. Emer is used to this face. Her mother gets it, Patch, Austin, and even, though she tries to hide it, Rose. Emer is not greeted with joy by anyone but Niall. She makes people start, cringe, slink away. If they are unlucky enough to brush against her, she makes them wonder why they bother getting up in the morning at all. Even the people who are supposed to love her dread being alone with her. She is already worried about the day that Niall first looks at her this way. The Yank doing it hurts even more than she thought it would. With Brigid, Emer wishes she could be someone other than herself.

  She helps Brigid with the cow, and Brigid asks her in for tea, the obligation that Emer relies upon. Now that she is friends with Rose and other island women she will have even less energy, Emer is sure, to put up with her alone. But she is already bound by the custom of offering tea.

  This is new to Emer, trying to make a friend. She’s not very good at it.

  “Why aren’t you married?” she says, cringing at how it comes out, like an accusation. She stirs milk into her tea and tries, if not to smile, to at least straighten her face into something neutral.

  “I was,” Brigid says quietly, not looking up.

  “Did you run away from him?” Emer says. “Is that why you came here?”

  “No, Emer,” she says. “He died.”

  “Car crash?” Emer says. She has heard this is how loads of people die in America.

  Brigid sighs, pressing two fingertips against her temple. “Cancer,” she says.

  Niall is trying to dance with the dog and the pig, encouraging them to stand on their back legs. Brigid allows his pig inside now because it is as well behaved as any of them, though it can’t really manage to stand on two legs.

  “Poor Brigid,” Niall says. The dog and pig sit neatly, looking up at him for their next instruction. It is so much easier for her child to speak to people than it is for her. How little time he spends, no time at all really, thinking about what he is going to say. It is the sort of ease that she hates in other people, like her sister, or Austin, or Brigid herself.

  “Could you not heal him?” Niall says. “With your hands, like?”

  “Nope,” Brigid says, a catch in her voice that she coughs her way through.

  “Why not?” Niall says.

  “Hush, Niall,” Emer scolds him, even as she feels grateful for his nerve.

  “Some things are too dangerous,” Brigid says quietly, “to get my hands around.”

  Emer allows herself a quick glance at Brigid’s hands, tightened to whiteness around their mug. And it happens again, the pull, so strong it is like being accosted, a longing that has flared up in her, ever since she saw what Brigid can do. A vicious need, so sinful and foreign and unthinkable that it makes her dizzy. She is not even sure that what she wants is something that women do. She imagines, over and over again, like the fantasies of Austin that once looped in her mind, Brigid laying those hands on her.

  Rose has Brigid over fairly often now for tea, and though Emer is always invited along, she hates these afternoons; she suffers physically every time Brigid smiles at her sister. The islanders are all taken with Brigid now, they like her big American laugh and her quirky hobbies and her expressions of respect and gratitude. She is constantly complimenting them, praising them, as if what they do mindlessly every day is actually admirable. Emer thinks she lays it on too thick, and is amazed at how they all fall for it. Still, no one will tell her where the well is. No matter how fond they get, she will never be one of them.

  Their mother is the only one Brigid hasn’t charmed yet. Clodagh doesn’t speak to her, just sits out of the circle in her rocker, crocheting with one hand and looking up every so often to glare her disapproval. Brigid smiles at her, and pours her tea.

  Rose’s girls, of course, adore Brigid. Clare and Cecelia sit on her lap and try to feed her their porridge and she makes them laugh by pretending to gobble up the offered spoon. Fiona and Eve mimic her accent, borrow her busily patterned scarves, bite their lips until they think their mouths are as red as Brigid’s. Rose’s girls have always steered clear of Emer, and everyone on the island knows better than to hand her a baby. This has always suited Emer just fine, but watching Rose’s girls fight to sit next to Brigid makes her want to pinch every one of them off their chairs.

  “What did you do in America?” six-year-old Bernie asks her. “Were you a film actress?”

  “Certainly not.” Brigid winks at Fiona.

  “Are you somebody’s mammy?” Teresa adds, and Brigid’s smile stiffens.

  “No. I was a midwife. My husband was a doctor. He took care of babies.”

  “Like Saint Brigid?” Fiona says.

  “I thought she was the patron saint of midwives, not one herself. Nuns don’t usually have babies.”

  “Do you not know the stories?” Rose asks her. Rose has an annoying loyalty to the saint, and prays to her with the same ignorant fervor, Emer thinks, as a woman fifty years her senior. She raises her girls on tales of Brigid’s miracles: hanging her cloak on nothing but a sunbeam, blessing cows to give endless amounts of milk, offering her well to two lepers to bathe in, and, when the first cured won’t help the next, cursing him ill again. Even the toddlers know how to pray over the fire at night, smooring it in her name.

  “Saint Brigid leans over every cradle,” Rose likes to say, whenever someone has a baby. Emer hates this expression. She believes that something else, something prayer has no power over, hovered over Niall’s.

  “Emer told me about the convent,” Brigid says. She looks at Emer then, so intensely Emer has to look away. “She said nothing about babies.”

  “Well, first it was only the nuns, for the isolation, and the peace, to finish the scriptures, that sort of thing. She brought her postulants here and built those clocháns and lived on not much more than sea air.”

  Rose pours tea into Brigid’s just-emptied mug and continues.

  “They had a reputation, mind, for healing, even now Brigid is the patron saint of childbirth. Some say that girls came here, when they were in trouble, and had their babies. And Brigid let them stay.”

  “There’s nowhere in Ireland you could do that now,” Emer explains.

  “True enough,” Rose says. “A girl gets pregnant nowadays, they send her to the laundries and sell her baby to rich Americans.”

  “Little pitchers,” Emer warns. The girls are listening, rapt. Rose dismisses her.

  “Not that we’d do that here, not in donkey’s years,” she says. Their mother lets out a snort of laughter. Brigid looks over, but Rose and Emer ignore her.

  “There’s nothing shameful in being a mother, sure,” Rose declares. “It’s what God wants for us.”

  Emer looks
quickly between her sister and Brigid, a vise grip on her neck.

  “It’s not God who makes those little whores open their . . .” their mother starts, and Rose interrupts her, loudly suggesting the children run outside to play. Brigid actually leans over, puts a hand out and pats the woman’s arm. Their mother is shocked silent by this. Eve, pouting, ushers all the little ones out the door but Fiona stays.

  “Some say it’s how she found her soul friend,” Rose says. “Darladuach was one of those girls; she and Brigid raised her baby together. Darla was so devoted to Brigid that when Brigid was on her deathbed, she lay down and asked to die along with her. They say she died a year later, on the same day, the first of February, of grief.”

  Emer had forgotten this part of the story. She remembers now how she felt the first time she learned it at Sunday school. The picture in their book was of a dark homely woman standing like a child at Brigid’s side. It had reminded her of how she felt standing next to Rose.

  “Why did they leave?” Brigid says.

  “I expect they hadn’t the strength to carry on after that. Some stayed, they say, and had sons who grew to be men and married the daughters and that is where the island families come from. The fire that Brigid kept, the eternal fire that the nuns guarded so it would never go out, is the same fire we have in our hearths today.”

  “And her well?” Brigid says. “Didn’t she leave a healing well behind?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?” their mother taunts.

  Rose is blushing, realizing she has gone too far. “Och, that was all a long time ago now.”

  Emer is holding her breath. She thought perhaps Rose would tell her where the well is. But, true to island tradition, she is keeping it to herself.