by Lisa Carey
“Some say she wasn’t a saint at all,” Fiona pipes up. “Only a fairy queen disguising herself as a Christian when it suited her.”
“That’s enough of that talk,” Rose scolds.
“Others say there wasn’t any magic to her,” Emer adds. “It’s just a story of women who wanted to get away.”
Brigid looks at her for so long that Emer feels heat rush from her face all the way down to her lap.
“I know the feeling,” Brigid says.
Brigid’s next delivery, happily lugged up the road by Malachy, who is so taken with her he is ridiculed by the other men, is art supplies. A wooden case of pastels with more colors than Emer has ever seen laid out like precious, edible things. Bottles of colored ink and long, delicate brushes so fine they look like they might prick like a pin. Rectangles of charcoal that leave smudged fingerprints on everything Brigid touches, as if she has dipped her hands in the ashes from the fire.
“Are you an artist?” Niall asks, excited, when he sees the tools spread out on the table. The sheets of paper are thick and soft and jagged at the edges, and there are sketchbooks that he flips through delightedly, each and every page identically blank and waiting.
“I like to draw,” Brigid says. “Though I’m not very good at it.”
But of course, she is good at it. She draws the dog first, smudges of charcoal, shadows and lines that seem random, until a recognizable figure emerges. She draws the pig, capturing in a few strokes the expression of the thing, though before she drew it Emer didn’t realize it had an expression.
Other days her drawings are not realistic at all. She draws odd mutations, Niall’s head on the pig’s body, her own fiery curls on the dog’s. She renders them quickly and adjusts them to make Niall laugh. Sometimes they do it together, she will sketch a face and Niall will finish it off, putting wings and a stinger on himself or trousers on the dog.
“You don’t have to let him scribble and ruin things,” Emer says, but Brigid laughs this off.
“We’re only having fun,” she says. Emer thinks, if she could draw like that, if she could use her hands to translate lines and smudges into life, she wouldn’t want anyone to touch it.
Whenever she draws Niall she gives his eyes fiery concentric swirls that look like they are moving, turning in circles on a white page.
One day, Emer is fussing about Brigid’s kitchen while Brigid is trying to draw.
“Oh, Emer, sit,” she sighs. “Pose for me.”
“I wouldn’t know how,” Emer protests. Her heart is hammering so hard she’s afraid it is audible.
“There’s not much to it other than holding still,” Brigid says. “And you’re driving me batty moving around so much.”
So Emer sighs and shrugs, hiding the thrill that courses through her at the thought of Brigid’s hands drawing her. She imagines Brigid taking the charcoal and smudging it across her skin, like smothering a fire, dousing the hot anticipation that crawls all over her. Desire so strong it has lipped over into pain.
It’s backward, having someone look at her so intently. So purposefully. Instead of what usually happens, eyes glancing at her and running away. Niall comes in and out with the dog and pig, checks Brigid’s sketchbooks and nods, serious as a man.
She does not see any of Brigid’s drawings until the end. What she had imagined, during the hours that Brigid’s eyes studied her, was ugliness; bad posture, awkward limbs, a puckered pocket of skin where there was once an eye. She thought the drawings would be as disappointing as looking at herself in the mirror. When she finally sees them, she is suspicious at how pretty she looks. In the charcoal sketches, her torso is long and graceful, her neck and clavicle look like they belong to some other woman. Her face is absent of the clenching she sees in the mirror, not smiling but looking at least as if it eventually might. Her dark hair covers her patch so it looks like merely a shadow, her good eye is lovely, the lashes longer than she knew.
The ink drawings are stranger. In them her figure is recognizable, but instead of shadows and cross-hatching she is composed of furious swirls, swirls of what look like fire, then water, then air, some of them bumping into one another in the junctures of her body and creating a storm. In her middle, curled like an infant but taking up more space, is a version of Niall. He is half-boy, half-pig, a frightening deformed creature except for his face, which is beautiful. In the storm that swirls about her body his eyes are the only fixed and steady spot, the only place in the drawing where you can comfortably look. He stretches from her groin to her neck. There are whorls of dark water in her neck and her hands. But in her middle, where Niall is, the blue lightens to silver, like the color of sun on the sea.
“What is that supposed to be,” she scoffs.
“What do you think?” Brigid says.
“Queer enough,” Emer says, and Brigid laughs. Emer feels suddenly cold, like she’s been wrapped in something that was ripped away.
“It’s like you’re drawing inside me,” she says quietly.
“Yes,” Brigid says, and Emer wonders if she understands. She doesn’t mean that Brigid is interpreting her. What she means is that Brigid’s pens, her ink, her coal-smudged fingers, seem to be reaching down inside Emer herself, reaching for something as deep and as secret as what she has spied on, what she had stopped wishing to find. And that something inside her is rising up, begging to meet Brigid’s hands.
On a calm day, they take a picnic to the cliffs, spread a blanket on the grass between the clochán. Emer and Brigid eat scones and drink tea while Niall and the dog and the pig chase after birds. Emer hasn’t spent this much time outside since she was a girl and has lighter streaks in her dull hair and a color to her face that her sister has told her is handsome. It’s not just the color, her expression is a bit softer. Not so chiseled. Once, as she walked by Malachy in the fields, he said, “If I didn’t know better I’d say Emer was smiling.” This of course made her scowl, but she couldn’t bring herself to hate him for it. Because Brigid winked at her.
They are like this since she started posing. Easier. Brigid smiles when she sees her coming up the road, instead of sighing and reaching for the kettle. Occasionally Emer cracks a joke and makes Brigid laugh and those moments are so satisfying, Emer wants to grab at the air between them and swallow it, so that she can feel this friendly, this loose, this enjoyed, all the time.
It is as though the drawing has softened Emer, as though a new version has been inked on top of the old. Right onto her skin. She has even posed nude for her—Emer, who can’t undress in front of her own sister without turning away. She lay naked on Brigid’s bed and felt drunk with the cheek of it. Looking at the drawings afterward, she is mortified at the jolt of longing she feels from the curve of her own breasts.
Even Emer’s mother notices the change in her, and says, if she catches Emer smiling to herself, “Aren’t you making a holy show.”
Lying in the grass, listening to the wind rise and fall and the birds’ wings flapping against it, Brigid’s pen scratching at paper, and Niall laughing at the animals, Emer almost falls asleep. Then something yanks her, as if she is falling and instead of hitting the ground she is caught by a rope, and suspended, jarred and bouncing in midair. Anxiety surges at her neck and she leaps up, looks for Niall, barks at him not to get too close to the edge.
“He’s all right,” Brigid says. Not dismissive, she is reassuring. “I’m watching him.”
Emer flushes, embarrassed and awkward again. She can’t think of a graceful way to sit back down, so she stands, letting the wind whip her hair loose from its place behind her ears. She can see that Brigid has been drawing her again, drawing a peaceful, pretty woman stretched out in a bed of grass.
“What is it you’re so worried about?” Brigid says.
Emer considers not really answering, as Brigid brushes her off when she asks too much about her life before or why she is here.
“Boys are prone to scrapes,” Emer tries.
“He’s pretty car
eful,” Brigid says. “You’re not worried in the moment, though. You’re worried all the time.” She flips back in her sketchbook to a quick ink drawing of Emer’s face, eye closed. Though at first glance she just looks to be sleeping, Brigid has done something with her eye, with her mouth, that give off flashes of pure anguish, which then fade away, as if the picture itself is moving in and out of a bad dream. Emer looks at this drawing for a long time.
“When he was born he wasn’t able to eat,” she says quickly, afraid she will lose her nerve. “A woman helped me teach him and she wasn’t, well she wasn’t real. Wasn’t human.” She glances quickly at Brigid, but she doesn’t look like Rose does when she tries to talk of this, ready to placate her. She just looks like she’s listening, really listening, with no contradictions lining up behind her eyes.
“I think she means to come back for him. They’ll try to steal him, the way they took me, but they didn’t want me. They try all the time, they tease, pull him partway. If I get him off this rock, if I get everyone off, before he’s seven, I think maybe they’ll leave us alone.”
“Why seven?”
“Seven years is how long they give you. Before they take them back.”
“You think he’s a changeling.”
“He’s mine. But a part of him belongs elsewhere. It does not live in this world. They want the rest.”
“That’s why you want the evacuation,” Brigid says. “Because you think Niall will be taken?”
“You can see it, I know you can.”
Brigid is quiet. She is thinking.
“Why do you have to get everyone off?”
Emer shrugs. “I can’t see any other way.”
“You could leave. If you wanted to.”
“Please,” Emer says. “I’m not you.”
Brigid seems like she’s going to argue with her, but then stops. She knows Emer is right. Brigid is a woman with no ties, with money of her own, with the American notion that running away is always possible. The box of who she is wasn’t already lidded and sealed long ago.
“I don’t think they’ll take him, Emer,” she says. Emer notes, even as she opens her mouth to argue, that Brigid doesn’t bother to say they don’t exist.
“You don’t know. You haven’t been here long. Some say they drove Saint Brigid away. That they took some of her girls, and she, the most powerful saint in Ireland, couldn’t do a thing about it. When you cross them, there is no mercy. You’d be better off if you took them seriously yourself.”
“It doesn’t help anything. All this fear.”
“What would you know about it?” Emer can’t hold it back, the crying, and her voice is bending around it. “You don’t know how I am afraid. It’s not like fear for yourself. Not at all. You’ve no children, so you can’t know.”
“I’m no stranger to the kind of fear that strangles you, Emer.”
Emer can’t stand that, she turns away, tries to stifle a sob as it rises, as loud and inevitable as the wind.
Emer is facing the cliff, the drop her mother wanted her to take, the drop into sea air and wind that she wanted too, until she had Niall, when she no longer wanted it, though often she feared she would end up like her mother and throw them both off. She misses it, that blasphemous desire, that promise she kept to herself that she could take everything away, that she could destroy something completely, instead of a little bit at a time with the misery that comes from her hands. She doesn’t have that anymore, that out. Now that she has Niall she is no longer alone with herself in the darkness. His light is insistent and it never wanes. He is like Rose on that wet hill, screaming at her daily not to go. She has no hold on the earth without him.
Brigid comes up behind her. She has never touched Emer before, but she moves in until her front is pressed against Emer’s back, her strong arms have slipped underneath Emer’s crossed ones, and she is hugging her. Emer leans back into her, feeling like the wind might knock them both over, wanting it to, wanting to fall and have this woman, every strange and promising inch of her, press Emer into the ground.
Emer is breathing too fast, and Brigid holds her tight and tries to calm it down.
“You’re his mother, Emer,” she whispers, her breath a welcome relief at Emer’s tight neck. “You’re a horrible crank to everyone else,” she laughs, “but you’re everything to him. He’s not going anywhere.”
Though Emer fears she might be pushed away she can’t stop herself. She turns around, rotates within the cave of Brigid’s arms, so she is facing her, so their hips are pressed together, their breasts, their arms wrapped so tightly you can no longer tell who is holding on to whom. They are exactly the same height. Brigid’s mouth is right there and though in one minute Emer will think she imagined it, there is a pause, a lingering of Brigid’s eyes on her lips that makes Emer’s mind flare with the image of kissing her, open, wet, endless kissing of the kind she has never tried, until it falls back into the realm of impossibly wrong.
Brigid gives her one last, fortifying squeeze, turning this into something else, like the patting hand of someone who is already walking away. She steps back and the wind rushes in between them again. Niall comes running into view, laughing and being chased by the animals, just in time to miss it all. Emer sees Brigid looking at him, she tries to smile casually, hiding her real expression underneath. The way she looks at all children. Smiling as if she’d rather be crying because they are not her own.
“Can you help us?” Emer whispers. Brigid looks angry for an instant and Emer takes a step backward, thinking she has gone too far. But then the anger fades to weariness and Brigid smiles, looking at her but not really meeting her eye. There is something in this gesture that makes Emer go cold and still inside. The avoidance, coupled with the look of burden, it is the thing she puts in everyone, but she isn’t trying now. She wants to find a way to reach Brigid. She is tired of pushing people away and still being surprised when they recoil.
But then Brigid nods. “Perhaps we can help each other,” she says.
Her smile is a miracle. A genuine smile, directed at Emer.
Emer is too grateful, and too worried that she’ll take it back, to disagree. The dog comes running up then, jumping on Brigid, and Niall flies into Emer for a hug. The pig squeals and bonks against their legs. And even as Emer squeezes Niall as tightly as she can, a part of her wishes that he’d stayed away for five more minutes, so that Brigid would not have been required to let go.
Chapter 10
Kidnapped
1936
After that first birth, Brigid was no longer just a girl to them. They were Irish nuns, their order named for a saint who colluded with fairies, and they knew magic when confronted with it. On the outside Brigid remained the same: a thirteen-year-old girl pulled without much kindness through long days of chores. To the nuns, whose lives were not much brighter, she became the promise of something. Proof that what they did was real. They came to her now, when she was sitting in class or sweeping a hallway, and wanted her to put her hand on their arms. Though she had never tried to heal any wound that wasn’t physical, none of them believed her. They came away from Brigid’s hand imagining a salve had been applied to their soul.
Matthew, the young doctor, who felt no need to argue with useful magic, requested that Brigid be fetched for every birth, even those that promised to be routine. He didn’t believe in drugging the mothers because the drugs, even though they stifled the screams, made the process more difficult. He needed them to push, not pass out. He had seen too many babies’ heads crushed by forceps, and had radical views of the natural process of childbirth. The nuns, being from rural Ireland, didn’t mind these views, which was why he’d ended up with the job in the first place. He had observed Myra when Brigid turned the baby and he wanted every girl he delivered to be given the same balm. Some pain in childbirth was necessary, so a routine developed between them that moved quietly through the delivery room over the long tedious hours that bled into each other at night. If Brigid comfort
ed too much, the natural contractions would slow down, or stop. The girl giving birth either lay on the cot, seizing up with each surge of pain, or walked around, squatting and grunting and making younger nuns blush. The rhythms of it, the build and release, and often the moaning, reminded her so much of what she pulled from Jeanne that Brigid sometimes grew embarrassed, rearranging her posture in the chair where she was supposed to wait until she was needed. When the pains grew closer together and they had no chance to recover in between, Brigid would be called over to touch their writhing bellies. Matthew wouldn’t let her ease it too much. They needed the tight bands of fire to push out the baby. Without it, the body, he explained to her, would not know what to do.
These breaks also eased Brigid’s own illness, gave her a handle on it, so that, during routine labors, she could push through a vague feeling of fighting the flu. Other labors, she barely managed to hold it in until she returned to her dorm, where she collapsed with chills and vomiting, or a headache that temporarily blinded her.
She did most of her healing in the last moments, when the baby’s head was warping the mother’s groin beyond recognition, when the space between her hips and the open folds of her vulva looked deformed, studded with poking bones.
Often, at the moment the baby’s head finally broke out, Brigid would feel not triumph but something deep and cold and more like failure. As if she’d assisted in some sort of death. There was grief once the baby was out. Even the girls who held their babies and cried and kissed them didn’t get to do so for long. The babies pushed their way out only to be ripped away. Brigid often went back to her cot and, spurred on by fever or cramping, cried silently, thinking of the worst of the pain, the pain she could not ease, that came the moment that girl and baby, meant to be together, were pulled apart.
Brigid liked to imagine the hospital where Matthew worked, where the process of giving birth was actually a positive one, where there were smiles and presents and congratulations rather than silence and pinched faces and the sneaking around of doctors who brought no relief in their heavy bags. Where babies were the long-awaited reward instead of the last part of the punishment.