by Lisa Carey
Sometimes, after the mother had been taken away to the infirmary to recover, Matthew was packing up, and the nuns were stripping the bloody linens, Brigid would hold the newly bathed and swaddled baby. They were so warm, as warm as the inside of the womb they’d come from. She whispered endearments to them in Irish. My heart, my light, my pulse. She kissed their impossibly soft feet.
She never saw the mothers again. Soon after the babies were out of them, the nuns had them dressed and packed, rags stuffed into their bras to soak up the weeping from their breasts. A car would arrive to take them away—a guilty-looking boyfriend, a stern social worker or pale, stony-faced parents. They went back to their homes, their high schools, their jobs. Brigid imagined them afterward, going about their lives, pretending nothing had happened as grief doubled them over like a surge of labor, as their bodies keened from every orifice, blood, milk and tears pouring out of them with no consolation in sight. Nothing could stanch such grief; it would be there, inside both the mothers and the babies, the rest of their lives.
The nuns said the babies were better off. They were being given to parents who could love them. But Brigid had her hands inside these girls, inside their wombs. It was not for lack of love that babies were being stolen.
Sometimes while she waited through a labor, Brigid looked at diagrams in Matthew’s medical textbook. Wrinkled wombs, flowery fallopian tubes, smooth, serious-looking ovaries. She read that eggs lived inside these sacs. It wasn’t a man who made the babies, like she’d thought, but a man and a woman together, the tiny sperm unlocking something in the woman’s egg, so it could grow and change and swell until it could no longer be hidden from the outside. Brigid imagined, on those nights when she thought back to the diagrams and Matthew’s eager, boyish voice, that her eggs had been there all along. On the island with her parents, in the lighthouse where she failed to pull her father’s life back, in the orphanage where Jeanne’s hands could make her forget herself, all that time, she had been incubating this possibility. This hope.
The need for a man was a technicality. Her baby was already waiting inside her.
Brigid waited for the right time, knowing that to rush it was to risk everything. Matthew thought she was only a girl. They developed a rhythm where he no longer had to call for the time for Brigid to step forward, she already knew. They grew to work seamlessly with one another, one encouraging the girl to push through pain, the other alleviating it. Matthew usually stepped aside when Brigid touched them, or averted his eyes. Despite everything he’d seen, he treated these girls’ bodies with a modest deference that made a few of them, not to mention a handful of the nuns, want to love him. But they never got a chance to see him and after what amounted to days of pain and relief and blood and defecation and vomit, they usually forgot by the end of it all that they had thought him attractive. They were never to see him again, any more than they were allowed to see the babies he pulled out of them. Only Brigid saw him repeatedly, was greeted by his shy, eager smile, which he gave when the nuns weren’t watching and which always jolted her a bit, in a similar but sweeter way to the throb inside her whenever she and Jeanne saw the chance to be alone.
Once he forgot to give Brigid space, during a labor that was going along fine and started to tilt at the last minute. While Brigid was laying her hands to ease a contraction she felt a jolt of something going horribly wrong. She panicked, stepped back and he saw it, walking up behind her quickly, putting his stethoscope to the girl’s belly, that was shifting, large mounds of flesh pushing their way across and diving down again. Like whales coming up out of the sea.
“It’s the cord,” he said quickly. He put his arms on Brigid’s, the first time he’d ever touched her, too intent on a solution to be shy or modest about it. He held her arms from behind, told her to quickly, quickly, his breath hot and urgent in her ear, slip her fingers beneath the cord and loosen it from the baby’s neck. As she eased the tight band, her hands inside gave the mother another moment of pleasurable relief, and Matthew, still holding her forearms, felt it. She felt the jolt of longing ricochet back to him, so shocking him that he let go and backed away, but not before she felt something grow between his hips and her back, the possibility she had been waiting for. After the birth was over, he packed up quickly, not allowing Brigid time to sing and softly rock the newborn. She barely got it cleaned up and swaddled before, avoiding her eyes, he took it roughly and left with curt instructions to the nuns.
It was three weeks before he returned again. Three weeks where Brigid continued to make love with Jeanne but could no longer lose herself in it. A memory infected her pleasure. She would watch Jeanne’s mouth twist and smile, and have to look away, remembering the moment Matthew had glanced at her with a longing that resembled fear.
When a nun finally woke her in the night and brought her to the infirmary, her stomach was knotted at the thought of how he might greet her. Or not greet her. He didn’t look up when she came in, he was taking the girl’s blood pressure, but as she washed her hands and arms and put on the nurse’s gown he always had her wear, she could feel him watching her, and when it was time to go over and touch the girl who was yelping, as if alarmed by her own pain, she stood next to him. He turned to look in her eyes and it was a shock how he didn’t try to hide it at all, but let her see everything, the desire and the shame. Shame, his eyes hinted, that wasn’t going to stop him.
It was all they could do to get through that birth, mercifully straightforward and short, only two hours of rapid, biting labor that Brigid barely needed to help. The baby was expelled out with such force, in one great wave of painful joy, Brigid almost dropped him. After the baby and mother were cleaned up, the nun brought the baby downstairs to the new parents who couldn’t bear to wait the few more hours it would take Matthew to deliver their child to them. Matthew said something low to the remaining nun and rather than lead her back to the dorm, the nun retired, leaving Matthew with the keys. If Mother Superior had been there it never would have been allowed, but most of the other nuns deferred to the doctor as if he were as infallible as the priest. So they shuffled off and Brigid wondered later if they knew and envied her the soft click of the lock on the door.
He was driven by something that was not gentle, but he was still Matthew, shy and too kind to abuse her, so she had to put her lips to his first, ease him down into a chair, lift her gown and lead his trembling hands. He kissed her cautiously and whispered the words she had waited to hear as a girl.
“I’m sorry.”
It lasted longer than it ever had with Jeanne, longer than a nighttime of labor, longer than her father had mouthed apologies into her mother’s bruised and battered skin. It lasted longer than her life so far and still it wasn’t over.
She knew what Matthew was feeling. She had felt it inside of Jeanne.
Eventually he let out a regretful moan, shuddered, holding her with a desperate grip, then grew still. What they’d created continued to move through her, new waves breaking just as the last one retreated.
He kissed her for a long time, filling her mouth with gratitude, kissed her with such serious and gentle intent, she felt it reaching below the ocean inside her, deep down to meet the place where something, she was sure, something akin to love had just been made.
She lost the first pregnancy quickly, only a few weeks in. Just as she could feel a pop inside her body when her egg was released and began its way down, she felt the moment where the jumble of cells that was her baby let go, loosened its grip, almost playfully, like a child swinging and dropping from a tree limb. It happened when she had her hands on another baby, the one trying to stay inside Kathleen McKenna, and she was giving it the gentlest of tugs to encourage it out. Just at the moment where the baby gave in and Kathleen groaned in relief as Brigid’s hands dissolved her pain, Brigid felt her own child slip, fall away, and the corresponding seize of her womb, as if it were trying to grab on to it, a sob of protest that came too late. By the time she got back to her dorm, she had sta
rted bleeding, and spent two days examining but finding nothing recognizable in the brown clots she rinsed from her monthly rags.
The next pregnancy was harder to arrange, since Matthew, after the first time, remembered to take precautions. At first he pulled away just at the crucial moment, and it was all she could do not to cry in disappointment. Then there was the time that she managed to hold him down, he was a small man and she was tall and big-boned for fourteen, and when he realized her intention he started to sit up, but came inside her anyway, and was furious afterward. She told him that it didn’t matter, that she’d not yet begun to bleed, but he wasn’t convinced and the next time brought rubber sheaths that left her smelling medicinal between her legs. A darning needle prick to each of the sheaths in his stash was enough to guarantee that her body started swelling up again. This one lasted longer, a lot longer, and it was months between laboring girls, months where she only saw Matthew twice, when he came by to help with another girl’s miscarriage, and that time the nuns didn’t leave them alone, so he couldn’t see how taut her stomach had become, tight and stretched like a drum.
She was breaking Jeanne’s heart, she knew this, and tried to ease it a bit, by continuing to touch her, keeping their encounters so dangerous and brief that it was natural that she didn’t get a turn. It wasn’t long before Jeanne demanded to know why she cringed if she tried to touch back.
“I’m bleeding,” she said. Since they all had their periods at the same time, Jeanne knew she was lying.
Brigid’s body ached to be touched but she was afraid for the baby, that Jeanne’s rough hands might make it let go.
And then, before she could move away, Jeanne, sliding her hands down, felt the swell of Brigid’s lower belly and lifted her dress to look at it.
“I guess you got what you wanted,” she said, and walked away. She stopped trying after that, stopped coming to her in the night or cornering her in the bathroom or leaving notes about meeting by the boiler. One day, when Brigid ran to the bathroom to throw up, she found Jeanne there with another girl, a new girl who looked as frightened as she was thrilled by Jeanne’s hands venturing under her smock. She tried to push Jeanne away, pointing at Brigid, but Jeanne just closed the stall door and kept at it, and even while Brigid vomited next to them, she could hear the impatient breath she recognized from when Jeanne reached inside her for the first time.
By the time Matthew came again to deliver another baby, Brigid was no longer vomiting and she had traded her dress for a wider version in the laundry room. Matthew tried not to look directly at her when she walked into the delivery room, not wanting the nuns to see the relief and desire flushing their faces. They moved side by side throughout the night, easing the girl’s contractions, wiping away blood and feces and vomit, mostly waiting in the heavily warped time that occupied a birthing room. When the girl’s pelvis was distorted with the final drop, Matthew, listening with the stethoscope, gestured to Brigid to hurry and release the cord strangling the little neck. Brigid reached in but it was harder than usual to find; the baby’s head was so large she couldn’t get her hands past it to reach its neck. She had to rip the girl a bit, masking the pain, and pull the cord over like a shirt too small for a child’s head. Just as she felt it free up, and the baby’s head and bruised neck emerged, she felt a fissure inside her, not a letting go this time but a vicious, deliberate cleave. She doubled over with a sudden surge of pain and Matthew stepped forward to catch the pulpy rush of baby and blood and mucus and cord. In the business of spanking for a cry, cutting the cord, and toweling to find healthy pink skin, no one noticed that Brigid had lowered herself to the floor and crawled away, as if it were all about gravity, and the lower she was to the ground the less likely she was to lose what was inside her. She was a virgin to the type of pain attacking her, and yet it was perfectly familiar the way it rose and peaked and released only to come again harder the next time. It was only when Matthew needed her to stop the hemorrhaging from a placenta that would not detach that he noticed her. There was a lot of confusion as he left his patient and tried to get Brigid to rise, and he saw that she too, on the back of her orphan’s nightgown, was bleeding. Somehow, Matthew, whispering in his sweet, confident voice, got Brigid to stand up and walk over to his patient, release her placenta and stanch the gushing blood, searing the vessels with the fire of her hands. By the time the girl on the table was all right, Brigid was passed out from her own blood loss, and wouldn’t know until later the panic that ensued and the secrets Matthew revealed with his reactions. He sobbed when the half-formed child was expelled from her. It never took a breath. Brigid remembered only the moment when she stopped her own hemorrhaging. She could smell the odor, like new wood being burned, that accompanied the application of her fiery hands. She healed herself, but could not save what grew inside her.
By the time Brigid woke up, in one of the rooms they gave to girls to recover from the birth, Matthew was gone. The Mother Superior was the one who told her. Given what had fallen out of an innocent girl with no access to men, from now on no doctor would be needed at St. Brigid’s Home for Wayward Girls. Tears poured silently down Brigid’s face.
“He’s lucky,” Mother Superior said. “I could have reported him to the police, had his license revoked. But he agreed to never return here if I let him disappear.” Brigid held herself still, not wanting the Mother to see that her words were like blows.
“I think you know enough now,” she went on, “to be our midwife. There is no reason we need anyone from the outside. When you are old enough you can take your vows.”
“I’m not staying here,” Brigid said quietly. Mother Superior grimaced.
“You’re already ruined for anything else.”
A month later, Jeanne and Molly found Brigid in a bathroom stall slashing at her wrists, trying to cut quicker than the slices could heal themselves. They led her back to the dorm and laid her on the bed. Both of them, first Jeanne whose body she knew by heart, then Molly, the new girl, softer, pudgy, with a smell as promising as rising bread dough, climbed in beside her, sandwiching her body between theirs, absorbing her convulsions and sobs with the same silent thoughtless mercy that she used to seal open wounds. When Jeanne tried to kiss her, Brigid pressed her lips still, realizing too late that what she was grieving for was not only the child that had come out of her, but the man who had put it inside.
She went back to her life of cleaning and studying and sealing up pain, with less hope than she’d ever functioned with before. Brigid was thin enough to appear breakable, and her only desire seemed to be to find ways to go back to her bed and sleep, sleep that never refreshed her but that she clung to like a life rope, not wanting to come fully to the surface of anything.
It was Jeanne who gave Matthew back to her. Through a complicated series of communications involving arriving and departing pregnant girls, she arranged it all. She and Molly woke Brigid in the night, which took some time because she slept as if she were holding on to her dreams for dear life. Jeanne hadn’t included Brigid in the plan, in case it didn’t work, so when Molly told Brigid they had a surprise, Brigid began to cry, lying back down as if the promise had drained her.
They sat her up, Jeanne bracing from one side while Molly wrestled socks and shoes on her like she was a toddler. They draped her arms over their shoulders, and pulled her across the silent dorm into the dark hallway. Brigid’s feet began to move, and the more they moved the more she wanted them to, and the next thing she knew they were running, holding hands, Molly and Jeanne laughing softly, delirious with possibility. It didn’t matter if the nuns heard, Brigid thought, in that moment, they were three girls flying down polished halls, they were untouchable.
They ran down the stairs and ducked into a classroom, the same one Jeanne and Brigid used to escape from because of the disguised broken lock on one window. The panels of glass Molly pushed went outward, like a doorway. It was so dark, Brigid couldn’t even make out a shadow of what she was dropping into. Jean helped her on
to the sill, took the last second to sear a quick, angry kiss to her lips. Brigid was so numb from months of grief, and confused by the darkness and the plan, that she remembered later that she should have kissed back, thanked her, said good-bye. They held her arms and dangled her over a dark abyss, the window frame pressing pain into her wrists. Then they let go and she dropped, only a few feet but it felt like it might go on and on, into waiting arms. She knew it was Matthew by the way he caught her, confident and shy at the same time, and the smell of him, antiseptic hands and sweet breath, and though she was perfectly capable of walking now, she held on to his neck and let him carry her, whispering apologies into her hair, letting him tell her that she would never again, after her cruel parents and cold nuns and girls just as broken as she was, never in her lifetime would she have to be alone.
They drove quickly through the night, Matthew’s car packed with what he had salvaged of his life. Over the next few days, as she realized what he had given up by stealing her, his practice, his license, his family, she would have instants where she lost breath and thought and word. She would feel, simultaneously, like pain blooming into pleasure, pure relief that he had taken her right alongside the terrible thought that he could just as easily have let her go.
Chapter 11
The Well
August 1959
Brigid doesn’t try to seduce Emer. She tries to stop it. But even as she tells herself that it will end just like all the others—with gossip and shame and another quick move, a packing up of her life to escape the rage of men she steals women from—she sees herself doing it. Sees how she is pulling Emer in, stroking her, tempting her, long before she even lays a hand on her. She thought this might be a problem the moment they first clasped hands on that quay. She always knows, she can recognize the women who will desire her, tell them apart from the ones it would never even occur to.