by Lisa Carey
After Emer leaves to collect Niall from school, Brigid goes back into her bedroom, too heavy to remain upright. She has been pregnant so many times before that she adjusts to the signs of it before she remembers that it shouldn’t be possible. The queasiness that creeps in, so subtle it is a while before you realize it has been there all day. The disconnect in her throat when she breaks open an egg, the subtle turning of the smells of her home from a comfort to an assault. The band of tightness that stretches above her pubic bone, as if a stone has lodged just under the soft mound of her belly. She reaches her fingers below her waistband to see if she can ease the feeling, but it’s permanent, it’s not going to budge. She feels like this, as if her body has already expanded to make room for something that barely has substance yet, for days before she allows herself to hope for what it means. Aside from generous waist pinches and Austin’s sloppy lunge, no man has even touched her since she arrived.
The well has done what her mother promised. It has given her not merely a womb, but the baby as well. She hopes that what is growing inside her is not a fantasy, or a dangerous pact with the darkness that lurks in Emer. She will call it a blessing from the saint, though she has no evidence to distinguish the gift of a saint from the bargain of something that lives beneath the world.
She lies in bed next to Rua and pulls her soft ear through her fingers, making her sigh and stretch and put her thin face on Brigid’s belly.
“Shall we have a baby, Rua?”
The dog thumps her tail, willing to agree to anything, as long as she’s allowed to lie beside Brigid, her adoration is simple and boundless, unmatched by the damaged humans who surround them.
The corncrake shrieks mercilessly in the field behind her house, repeating his endless warning, frantic that no one will translate the message.
Be careful, Brigid imagines him screaming. Everything they give you, they can also take away.
But by now Brigid has her own warning system. The child growing inside her already tells her when it has had enough.
Chapter 15
Cursing Stone
October 1959
Emer is adrift. Inside her is a great swell, it has rent her down the middle and now the two halves are moving apart like a body dragged by the current from an overturned boat. Her neck feels pressed for most of each day, her diaphragm is rigid, she has to stop and lean over and pull with all her might to get air deep into her lungs. Most of the time this fails, her breathing refuses to delve below the shallow, and she fears the space will shrink a little more each time, until she stops breathing altogether.
In the days after Rose returned, Emer was wound tight as a spring, jumping at everything Patch and Niall said as if she’d forgotten they were in the room. She spent those days inside, though the weather was fine, because the thought of meeting Rose or Austin in the field, of watching them approach her, was too much to bear. The knock she was expecting on the door never came.
Things do not improve even after it is clear that Austin has not told. Emer tells Brigid because she thinks if she lets it out her breathing will ease a bit. Brigid doesn’t seem shocked, or even that interested, beyond an interrogation of blame and a simple “I’m sorry.” She lays a hand on Emer’s neck just long enough for her to breathe for a hour, but when she leaves the weight comes straight back in, like the sea air greeting her as she steps out the door.
Her desire for Brigid does not wane, if anything, it grows, but now it’s a desperate, angry desire. Brigid avoids her, then denies it. If Emer comes up behind her, in the field, in the house, Brigid deflects her hands. She makes excuses, Niall will see, or Austin, whom she claims already suspects.
“Let’s lay low for a while,” Brigid says. “We don’t want anyone to find out.”
“I don’t care if they know.”
“Believe me, Emer, you do.”
“Is it because of Austin? Because I let him touch me? Is that why you don’t want me anymore?”
“Of course not.”
“Then what is it?”
“I’m just being careful. It’s not about you.”
Even before this, every time Brigid reached for her was a relief. The last time they made love before the night with Austin, Emer had been asking about Brigid’s husband, jealousy making her tactless, and, as if to prove her loyalty, Brigid seduced her rather than answer.
“Come here,” she’d whispered, and Emer leaped out of her seat and into Brigid’s hands driven by a lust tinged with fear.
They did not bother with the bedroom, but dropped right to the floor; the fire beside them burned as hot as the sparks they ignited in each other. At one point, Brigid called out her name, with a yearning that filled Emer to the brim. Emer imagined holding tight and rolling over, rolling them both into the fire with the same abandon as she once fell into a cavern of bees. The fire, rather than burning them, would just make it all last longer. They would never reach the point where they redid their clothes and Emer started to doubt it all, reading too much into Brigid’s lack of eye contact. The point when they were two people again instead of the one glowing brand of lust that bound them. She wanted to reduce them both to ash, in the moment when they cried out with the glorious pain of it, at exactly the same time.
This is her fear: that Brigid has discovered that Emer disgusts her after all, that what Emer has learned to depend on—Brigid’s hands—will be taken from her, with the same cruel disregard as a fairy withdrawing its promise.
In October, all the old things come back to frighten her. She fears for Niall and keeps him home from school for a week after the teacher mentions that he often spends lessons gazing out the window and mouthing one half of a conversation no one else can hear.
“What were you doing?” she asks him.
“Listening to the music,” he says, so casually that she feels a surge of vomit in her throat. “I think Austin was playing his whistle in the field,” Niall says. But the men have been at sea all week, pulling the lobster pots.
In the house, Niall is clumsy and distracted. He spills milk all over the new bread, leaves the bottom half of the door open so the pig comes snuffling in. Emer keeps barking at him, and though she apologizes she does it again immediately, which makes him look at her with wide eyes and become even more forgetful. Finally, hating the havoc they wreak on one another, she sends him back to school. She regrets it almost immediately. Without him there is nothing in her small, damp, ugly house but herself and what she has done.
When it is her turn to care for her mother, the woman seems livelier than usual and peppers Emer with cryptic comments about Emer’s appearance, or Brigid, whom she still disapproves of, or Niall’s seeming a little slow, until Emer imagines strangling her with the kitchen cloth or plunging the thinning blade of her knife into the woman’s limp mouth.
Seeing Austin is like being accosted. He won’t look at her directly, but still she feels his eyes following behind her, watching to see if she will dare tell. Rose is behaving strangely and Emer is paranoid, every short response or look of weary burden makes her sure Austin has finally confessed it all, and blamed her for it, telling her sister that she is a heartless whore. She worries that Rose won’t even bother to ask her side. What if Austin declared Emer a liar and told Rose never to speak to her again, and Rose actually listened to him?
Emer’s headaches return with a vengeance, and she spends entire days blind beneath a wet cloth in her bedroom, insisting that Niall stay in the house but also remain silent, which is so impossible for him to do she ends up scolding him, and just that rise in her voice causes her to vomit until she is sure the inside of her head is as empty as her stomach.
“Would you ever untwist yourself?” Patch says one evening, when every mention of Rose or the girls or his brother causes her to knock over a jug or drop her fork with a clang on her plate. Her mother looks at her with a knowing grimace. Niall looks away, preferring to focus on what no one else can see. And Emer realizes how impossible that will be, to ever uncoil
the fairy threat from the human mistake, to ever untwist what has been done to her from what she has done herself.
Brigid is ill. The freckles on her nose leach away, leaving only their outlines, the skin beneath has a tinge of green. She doesn’t want to touch Emer, or kiss her, or even talk to her, she wants to lie down in bed with the curtains pulled and eat only dry toast and read poetry and cuddle with the foul-smelling dog. She waves away Emer’s offers of help, of company, and grows weary at her insistence.
“I just need to be left alone,” she says. She can’t see that Emer can barely breathe. She won’t even look at her. “Just for a day or two, Emer, would you find something else to do?”
But Emer cannot stop coming over. When Niall is at school she has nowhere else to go. She sits in the outer room, keeps the kettle boiling in case Brigid wants tea, and listens to her being sick quietly, without explanation, into a waiting bowl.
Emer sees it one day, when Brigid moves in front of the fire and the light shines through her oversized blouse. The soft pouch of her belly is tight now, stretched and ready as a drum.
Emer goes cold with dread.
“Is that a child in there?” she says. Brigid turns away but not before Emer sees her smile.
“It is,” she says.
“Did the well heal you, so?”
“I believe it did.”
“But who was it put it in you?” She thinks of Austin making Brigid laugh, Malachy bringing back her stolen cow across the sodden fields. The priest, who’d come to her for tea once.
“I haven’t been with a man, Emer. Perhaps it was an immaculate conception. Only not so immaculate.”
“That’s not funny. Who was it, really?”
“The saint,” Brigid says. “Or a fairy. It doesn’t matter.”
“Jesus wept,” Emer says, and the hair on her neck rises. There are so many things wrong with this she can’t even begin.
“What will you tell the women?” she asks.
“Why do I have to tell them anything?”
“You must be joking.”
“Fine. I’ll tell them it was that Australian I flirted with on Muruch. He’s the perfect alibi. Gone already.”
“You flirted with an Australian? Was it him, so?”
“No. It was nobody.”
“They won’t like it, you not being married.”
“This is what I want, Emer. There is no one to say I can’t have it.”
I wouldn’t be so sure of that, Emer thinks, but she doesn’t say it out loud.
“Are you not afraid?”
“Of whom?” Brigid looks defensive.
“Of what that baby might be.”
“I’ve seen enough darkness to know it’s not inside me, Emer. This baby is a gift.”
“They don’t give things for free, the fairies. I know.”
“Saints do. Anyway, I’m not afraid.”
There is a silence where Emer digests this. She rewinds to the well, she can’t remember anything other than the glorious relief of Brigid’s body, the way they used the water to satisfy their yearning. What had they put inside her?
“Is that why you won’t touch me anymore?”
“Emer . . .”
“You got what you wanted and good riddance to me?”
“I care about you and Niall both.”
“Is that how you get everything you want?”
“Emer,” she almost whispers. “That’s enough.”
But Emer can’t stop now. She wants it to hurt.
“What happened to the other baby?” she says.
“What baby?” Brigid stiffens.
“Your belly had a baby in it before. Who’d you use to get that one?” Brigid reaches down with the fingers of one hand and presses there, just above the pubic bone, remembering. Her wide shoulders square up. She directs toward Emer such a look of fury, Emer’s legs go weak just at the eye contact.
“Be careful, Emer,” she says. Then she turns around and goes back to the fire.
“I’m sorry,” Emer says. She doesn’t want this, this fury she is so familiar with, she doesn’t want to feel for Brigid the same hatred she feels for everyone else.
“I miss you,” Emer murmurs. “When can I have you back?” Brigid pretends she doesn’t hear. Emer thinks she sees something in her profile, a pained look, a cringe of regret. But what is the pain? Is it from being with Emer, or being without her?
“I’m tired,” Brigid says, raking the coals to prepare to bury them with ash for the night. “I’ll see you tomorrow, all right?”
She won’t even kiss her good-bye, but turns her head so Emer’s mouth bumps her cheek. Emer walks home through the autumn darkness, her heart banging with a new dread she cannot name.
“We saw Austin on the road,” Niall announces one day, entering the house with his father.
“What?” Emer barks. “Why, what’s wrong?” Patch just looks at her, annoyed.
“Don’t have a cow,” he says. “We’re off to town when the tide is high. He asked that you stay with Rose for the night, in case she needs anything.”
Because Rose, Emer thinks, is the one we are all worried about.
“I will, of course,” she says.
After he leaves for the quay, Emer packs up a little fish and the morning’s bread in her basket, Niall’s nightshirt and her own on top, and pulls her cowl over her shoulders. They walk slowly up the road to Rose’s house, a ruin renovated by Austin and Patch, whitewashed stone with two bedrooms and a loft in the generous roof. Austin had wanted to put on a new slate roof, but Rose had insisted they keep the thatch. Austin humored her, though it meant more work for him.
“I like the way the birds nest in it, and the softness of the rain,” Rose said at the time.
“Sure it’s easy enough to refuse modern conveniences when you’re lucky enough to have them offered to you,” was Emer’s two cents.
Rose is heavily pregnant now, and not as radiant as she usually is. Her face is swollen and carries a sheen of effort. She catches her breath a lot, twitching with the discomfort of being kicked from within. When these latest babies are born, Emer will have to be over here all the time, feeding Austin and the girls, doing the laundry, milking Rose’s cows while she nurses the infants in the damp prison of her room. Other women will help, they always do, but for reasons no one can fathom, Rose, after childbirth, relies on Emer the most. How can Emer do it now, when every glance at her sister makes her think of Austin’s hand laid like a gentle threat on her neck? How can she look her in the eye when she knows that she asked for it, that she stole him from her sister like a heartless fairy?
At Rose’s pine table, Emer cracks an egg into a bowl and sees a deformed, bloody embryo clinging to the yolk. She heaves, so quick and hard there isn’t even the time to know it is coming, or aim, so she is sick directly into the bowl beneath her hands, ruining the egg. She clings to the table with terror, and when she dares to look up, Rose is staring at her, a gleam of amusement in her eye.
“Well,” she clucks. “Something you’ve been wanting to tell me?”
Emer thinks she will faint. Rose cops on and comes around the table, takes her arm and leads her to a chair.
“Oh no, no no no no no,” Emer chants, thinking she does so in her head, but Rose shushes her.
“It’s all right, pet,” she says, and she sends one of the girls to the well to fetch a fresh glass of water. Niall stands like a statue halfway across the room, the same hot fear she feels in her throat throbbing in his eyes.
“Every baby is a blessing,” Rose whispers. “You’ll see.”
“Oh,” Brigid says when Emer tells her. “Well, then.” She is unable to hide her surprise, or, Emer thinks, her annoyance.
“I need your help,” Emer says. Brigid goes pale.
“No,” she says.
“You only have to pull it out of me,” Emer says. She is pacing the floor, Brigid is sitting by the hearth. “You pull things out all the time.”
“It’s
not a bruise, Emer.”
“It’s more a bruise than anything else.”
“I don’t do that,” Brigid says. Emer blinks, as if she is out of focus as well as not making sense. “What I mean to say is, I can’t,” she continues. “I’m sorry.”
Brigid is quiet for a while. Emer can’t understand why she looks so worried. Not sympathetic worry, but nagging fear.
“It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to have it,” Brigid says gently. “No one will know it’s not Patch’s. It would give Niall someone. The way you have Rose.”
“I never wanted Rose.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“I do, sure.”
“It could be someone for you too, Emer, when Niall is gone.”
“Gone? Gone where?!” She has left Niall with Patch at the house but he’s no better than useless at the vigilance.
“To school.”
Emer plops onto the chair across from Brigid and drops her forehead in her hands.
“You don’t understand.”
“I do understand. I understand what Austin did. I can’t undo it. But you’re not alone.”
“Have you no notion of what this child might be? I can’t risk it. I can’t. It could be the fairies, found a way to finally get inside me. To take Niall.”
“It’s not a fairy, Emer, it’s a baby.” Emer shakes her head.
“Sometimes it’s possible to turn things,” Brigid says. “Sometimes you decide what you will allow to be taken from you.”
“That’s how it works for you,” Emer says. “Not for the likes of me.”
Brigid nods and sits back again. Emer thinks suddenly that she doesn’t want Brigid to give up. She wants her to take her hands, keep arguing, keep saying those three words she has never believed before: You’re not alone. She wants to rewind to the part where Brigid was still hoping to reach her. She wants her to say: You have me.