The Stolen Child

by Lisa Carey

  It wasn’t until she healed Niall that Emer started looking at her that way. Something was switched on then, and though she clearly has no experience with women, her want is there, raw and demanding regardless. It makes her clumsier, self-conscious, and awkward, but also more attractive. The flush, the bright eye, the way she looks at Brigid’s hands, her breasts, her mouth. She is like no one Brigid has ever met, and yet, in Emer’s desire, she sees all of them. Matthew, too feminine to be attractive to most women, who never quite recovered from the guilt of the crimes he committed, and made love to her with a combination of deference and violence that took her breath away. Jeanne, that scarred, hardened girl, awkward and rough on the outside, gorgeous underneath the carapace. All the women since, the women Matthew ignored and forgave because of what he thought he’d done to her, women who felt burdened, lost or unattractive, who did not believe it when men told them they were beautiful. Most of them had never imagined that this was what they wanted, another woman running her hands over every flaw of their body, until they were cured of the idea of their ugliness that had burdened them for so long. Brigid made lonely women lovely, with the same hands she used to mend their open wounds.

  At first, she keeps Emer at a distance, pretends she doesn’t even know what the girl wants. This seems to make her even more desperate. Her loneliness is so acute Brigid can practically hear it, like a keen that runs just under that sarcastic, vicious monologue delivered in an enchanting brogue.

  Then there is the picnic on the cliff where Emer opens up and tells Brigid what she is afraid of. Brigid comes so close to kissing her, to soothing Emer the one way she knows will work, by validating her desire, that the effort not to leaves her dizzy and slightly nauseated.

  It occurs to her that she could seduce Emer into revealing the well. But she doesn’t want any more casualties from love affairs. She just wants a baby.

  She is grateful for Emer’s awkward inexperience. Were she bold enough to make the first move, Brigid would be doomed.

  After the picnic, they go back to Brigid’s cottage and Emer shows her the picture of the council house she keeps in her apron pocket, folded and unfolded so many times it has faded to nothing at the creases. It’s an architect’s drawing of a modern Irish bungalow, ugly and squat, made of concrete and slate and pavement instead of grass in the yard.

  “These houses aren’t any better, Emer,” Brigid says, though even as she says it she knows they are not speaking of the same things. The houses will have heat, electricity and running water. They are luxurious if you don’t notice they have no soul.

  “If you want to leave so badly, why don’t you do it? You don’t need the whole island to go with you. Why doesn’t Patch get a posting on the mainland?”

  And Emer tells her why, quietly, simply, like a child telling a dirty secret for the first time, of her husband’s last posting, where he drank so much he let the light die out and caused an accident on the rocks. He was fired, lost his pension and would never leave the island for work again.

  Brigid says nothing for a while. She wants to give a speech rallying Emer, telling her she is not at the mercy of her husband, but she knows better. Just because Brigid had a husband who wasn’t a trap doesn’t mean she hasn’t known plenty of women who have been tied up and suffocated within a man’s mistakes.

  “I understand,” she says finally. “I do. But I don’t see it happening. They can’t make people leave the only home they’ve ever known. Not even for central heating.”

  What happened to this girl, Brigid wonders, to make her so vicious? Because that’s what she is, a tightly wound ball of ferocity, lashing out at anyone who approaches her with those nasty fingers. At some point she decided that if she was going to be unhappy, she would pull everyone else down with her.

  “It will happen eventually,” Brigid says. “You’ll find another way, if it’s what you really want.”

  Emer looks quickly at Brigid, and Brigid can feel that eye linger on her mouth, and on her hands tightening around the mug of tea. Brigid has seen this many times before, watched as a girl’s body opens the possibility in her mind. Where the unfathomable turns into a necessity.

  Emer can’t even imagine saying out loud what it is that she wants now.

  Sketching Emer starts as a way to avoid repeating all of this. She sees Emer’s raw need and thinks she can heal her another way, without complicating it all by touching her. But then she gets caught up. She translates Emer’s body into smudges of charcoal and suddenly, despite her promise to remain alone, sexless, an uncomplicated vessel whose only relationship is with a dog, she can’t stop thinking about it. She feels doomed. Their course is as inevitable as the sea rising up in a storm. What she wants to do with Emer will feel like healing, like teaching, but she knows that it is more like theft. She won’t be able to help but steal every sensation she thrusts upon Emer. She will steal her from her husband and her son and her plans for a better life, and Emer doesn’t even know it yet. She will think she is being saved.

  Even remembering all the guilt and complication and lying and fear, she can’t help but savor the familiar beginnings. It feels so good to have someone want her again that she forgets, for long ascending moments, that this has never, not once in her life, ended any other way than badly.

  After Matthew stole her from St. Brigid’s, they drove north through the night to Canada, where they pretended they were married until she was old enough that they could be. Though charges were never filed, Matthew couldn’t go home; his reputation was gone, his family disgraced. The first few months were dark and miserable ones for the both of them. Matthew often ended lovemaking with tearful apologies. He begged for her forgiveness.

  “Stop saying you’re sorry,” Brigid would say, crying that he still refused to believe her, the only person she had ever fully believed in herself. “You’ve done nothing wrong. You didn’t kidnap me. I came with you.”

  They had to move often. In the beginning they kept moving whenever anyone grew suspicious of her age, they were often asked if Matthew was Brigid’s father. Later they moved when the rumors grew thick about the things Brigid did with the women who came to them for help.

  They continued to deliver babies. Sometimes for married women who wanted to deliver at home, but more and more, as the war came, for women who were left alone, discovering they were pregnant after their boyfriends had already been shipped to Europe. Women and girls just as scared and abandoned as the ones they had known at St. Brigid’s. The difference was, with Matthew and Brigid, they were not expected to hand their babies over at the end.

  In every town they moved to, they filled their extra bedrooms with pregnant girls, new mothers and babies. Brigid had never forgotten the pain of those girls severed from their children, so she and Matthew gave unwed mothers time to bond with their babies, nurse them and decide for themselves. If they chose to keep the baby, Matthew and Brigid helped them find jobs and homes and daycare; if they chose to give them up, which some still did, they helped arrange adoptions with couples who agreed to keep in contact, and send the mothers photographs and letters about their children. For twenty years they moved around, first in Canada, later in New England when the memories of their crimes had faded, and ushered women and babies through the first few fragile months of their lives together.

  In every place they lived, Brigid got pregnant and miscarried. Sometimes it would happen in such rapid succession—pregnant, miscarriage, pregnant again—that she felt continuously with child, but never allowed to give birth, never reaching the part where she felt the flutter of life inside her, before it was pulled away too soon to survive. It seemed that healing the girls brought it on, but by the time she tried to keep her hands to herself, something inside her was already broken. More than once Matthew found her curled up amid the blood-soaked bedclothes, her hands pressed so tight between her thighs that she could barely feel them when he pried them away.

  “Why can I help them and not myself?” she asked Matthew. �
�They don’t even want their babies.” But she knew that wasn’t true. They didn’t want to be pregnant, but they did want their babies. Wanting them and keeping them were often two very different things.

  “Maybe it’s me,” said Matthew, who felt each miscarriage almost as deeply as she did. “Maybe this is the punishment for what I did to you.”

  Matthew was not a religious man, neither of them bothered with that. But he had been raised Catholic, and he couldn’t quite escape the idea that he had sinned by falling in love with a broken girl with magic in her hands.

  “Don’t be daft,” Brigid said harshly, sounding like her mother or one of those nuns, women with no patience for whining self-pity. “It’s not your fault.”

  But she wondered if it might be.

  She went to a specialist who told her that, by the looks of things, her womb and cervix were never meant to hold children. They were incompetent.

  “How can I fix that?” Brigid said. The doctor looked at Matthew, then back to Brigid.

  “We can’t fix it,” he said. “It’s not an injury. It’s just the way you were made.” He told them to stop trying, that eventually it could kill her.

  “Doctors don’t know everything,” she said to Matthew, but he made her get a cervical cap and refused to make love without it.

  “We have each other,” he said. She didn’t tell him it would never be enough.

  Brigid wanted to remain faithful to Matthew, tried to resist the temptation of the girls who lived in their home. But sometimes, after a miscarriage, this resolve would bleed away, and she would fill the empty space left by another baby with the swollen bodies of these women, many of whom had no idea what their hands and mouths were capable of until Brigid came to their rooms, closed the door and taught them in the darkness. She only chose women who looked at her a certain way, whose eyes lingered on her mouth, who exuded sexual tension even when they couldn’t recognize it. These women hadn’t had anyone to teach them about such pleasure. It was another form of healing, Brigid told herself, overwriting the memories of unsatisfying, sometimes violent encounters with men. But the truth was, she was the one who needed healing.

  Every once in a while a girl would confess to her priest or her parents, or her crippled boyfriend back from the war, what had occurred with Brigid in the fevered months of her confinement. That’s when they would move, find a new place where no one knew them, and start all over again. Matthew forgave her every time.

  Matthew suggested that they adopt one of the babies the women decided to leave behind, but Brigid refused. He didn’t understand. He had not reached deeply into their wombs and felt the familiar rip in their souls as they birthed a child they could not keep. It tore the same places as having them born too soon sliced in her. Brigid found loving mothers for the babies they gave up, but she would never be one of them. She couldn’t pretend. She couldn’t be part of the cleaving and then raise the child as her own. She would remember, every time she held it, that it was not.

  When Brigid was thirty-five and Matthew fifty, he fell ill. Brigid could sense it in him way before the doctors found it. He had headaches that blinded him for hours at a time, and when she tried to heal them, she felt a dark space, like a wet, nasty hole that she could not see the bottom of and didn’t want to put her hand into.

  It was a tumor in his brain. Though the prognosis was dire, the oncologist was continually amazed by his patient’s refusal to die. The mass was inoperable and grew rapidly, except it kept shrinking, despite Matthew’s refusal of treatment. It never went away, but got small and then grew again, like a child playing with a balloon.

  Nothing had ever made Brigid as ill as reaching her hands toward that tumor. Each time she shrunk it, she ended up in her bed for days with high fevers, body aches, vomiting, dehydration. She lost too much weight, her hair fell out leaving whorls like birds’ nests in her brush. Matthew tended to her; she had no energy left to heal herself. He would lie next to her on the bed and wipe her face with cool cloths, put straws to her lips, murmur his love and apologies as she thrashed and moaned and forgot whole days. When ill, she was trapped in her childhood again, on that island, with people she could not trust not to murder each other.

  The last time she was ever pregnant (darning needles work on rubber cervical caps too), she made it halfway through, the longest her body had ever managed to hold on. Matthew was in the hospital, declining rapidly since he would not let her heal him. If there were even a chance that it might harm the baby, he wouldn’t risk it. She could have done it anyway, when he was sleeping, but she waited, crouched around her own middle and terrified. Terrified of losing the first baby that had grown big enough for her to feel moving, and of letting go the only person who had ever loved her without limits. She told herself she could hold on long enough that she could have both of them.

  He died the night the nurses convinced her to go home and get a decent night’s rest in her own bed. When the phone rang at four a.m., she knew before lifting the receiver. Four a.m. was a time they saw together a lot. Babies tended to come then, in that timeless space between night and morning, in those moments where even the weariest body got a rush of adrenaline to spur them on. It was also a common time for people to die because they needed that extra surge of energy to finally let go.

  After she hung up the phone, she felt something sever inside her, and a pain worse than anything she had ever felt drove her to her knees. It took only minutes. She delivered a miniature boy on the floor of her bedroom, saw him breathe once, an inhalation that lifted his entire torso, as if he could hold on to it, and defy nature. Then he died. She woke in her own hospital bed, after one of the pregnant girls discovered her unconscious and hemorrhaging, the elfin child in a vise grip in her arms. A doctor she’d never met before, who was younger than she was and so awkward she almost felt sorry for him, told her she’d had an emergency hysterectomy. She would never be pregnant again.

  The next year of her life was as unbearable as any that had come before it. She wanted to die but felt already dead. She kept remembering herself as a child, and all the hope she’d had that when she grew up she would be happy. Her life’s work had given her glimpses of this, but without Matthew her heart was no longer in it. It didn’t seem any better, somehow, being a woman. The world still stole from her the same as when she was a helpless girl.

  She sealed herself up just enough to go through the motions. She had occasional affairs with women, but never with men. She painted, she walked the promenade and looked at the sea, sometimes while holding the hand of a frightened girl in early labor. She resigned herself, even as her heart still raged, that it would never be her.

  Then she got the letter from Desmond’s solicitor about the island and the house. Her mother’s stories started coming back to her, of holy wells that gave babies to barren women, and fairies that lent their dark gifts in exchange for the chance to live in the world. Her mother had died years before, in a fire in St. Dymphna’s Asylum. She was no longer there to warn Brigid of the cost of such magic, or to remind her of how badly all her stories ended.

  The weather stops changing; for the entire month of August there is rarely a cloud in the endless blue sky. The sun is much stronger than Brigid expected—no trees means no shade—and it remains in the position of high noon for hours. Rua wearies more quickly, seeks out the shore more than the fields, flops her belly down in the frigid ocean for relief. Brigid takes off her shoes and walks in the same water, watching Niall and his cousins splashing between the seaweed-covered rocks. The weather has made all the islanders giddy, it is not just the children who are bright red with sunburn, their eyes manic from the overdose of sunshine. No one wants to be inside. The women bring their teacups and their dinner plates outside and lay out picnics on the meticulous stone walls. They bring their chairs out and knit and peel potatoes and darn clothing, moving their spots around the house with the circle of the sun.

  After three weeks of unrelenting heat, the well closest to Brigid’s
house dries up, and the one further up the hill ceases to flow soon after that. Malachy brings her water in large ceramic jugs on the back of the poor, overheated donkey. He says the weather is good for the hay, which they are cutting all over the island to store for the cattle in the winter. Malachy and Austin cut her field down for her, and when they have gone, the hay collected in clochán-shaped piles in the field, she finds a bird’s nest, whorled out of hay into the ground, eggshells cracked and abandoned. Niall tells her it’s the corncrake’s.

  “They might have left a spot around the nest,” he says, shaking his head. “Now she will have moved on.” Brigid worries until she hears the male again that night. She knows it is the same corncrake. She can now distinguish the corncrakes in their separate fields. Their voices are as varied as people’s.

  “Has the island ever had a drought before?” she asks Emer the next day. Niall is running circles around the dog and pig, mocking them with a sheep’s thighbone he found in a field. He runs too close to Emer, almost knocking into her.

  “Would you mind yourself,” Emer snaps. Emer gets irritable with Niall now, she is so caught up in her longing for Brigid. Niall drops his arm, dejected, and Rua yanks the bone from his hand. Emer pulls Niall in for a quick hug of apology.

  “Every so often we get a summer like this,” Emer says. “The last one was when I was a girl.”

  “Will the island run out of fresh water?” Brigid asks.

  “Saint Brigid’s well never runs dry,” Niall announces. “It isn’t meant to. It’s holy.”