by Lisa Carey
Even Emer and Clodagh can’t stain the bliss that soaks the cottage the first few days. They try, with their gasps and their scathing comments, but they are outside it, harpies who cannot penetrate Brigid and Rose’s enraptured cocoon.
Brigid and Rose coo at the little feet and earlobes and fingers, and run a soft flannel soaked in warm water into the fat creases of one and the hollows of another, they lie down with them, skin to skin, naked babies wrapped inside their blouses, letting the warmth they produced when they were inside seep back in from above. When Rose notices her swollen belly, Brigid admits she is expecting too, and holds her breath. But Rose is delighted.
“Was it the Australian, then?” she says. Brigid merely smiles. “I don’t know that we can find him.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Brigid says.
“No,” Rose sighs. “I suppose not. We’re only women now.”
When everyone else is asleep, in the timeless deep night, they lie next to one another in the bed, a baby on each of them, and look at the thing reflected in the other’s eyes. The slow recognition of what they are holding on to, these tiny bodies that are entirely infused with trust. This is why Brigid could not stay away from birth all those years, even when it sliced her with regret. She covets this time. When they are first born, before things get more complicated, you can press your skin to theirs and absorb that faith, as though you, as well, are being held by something that will never let you go.
The doctor, when the weather finally allows him through, six days after Rose’s labor, is furious at the lot of them. He stomps with angry purpose from the quay up to Rose’s house. It is the same doctor, Rose tells Brigid, who was there when Emer lost her eye. This, Brigid feels, is enough of a warning.
The doctor hands his coat and hat to Emer without looking at her.
He asks Rose how she is feeling while he polishes his spectacles.
“If I was any better I’d be unbearable.” Rose beams at him. His frown remains.
“Where is this Yank everyone’s on about?” he demands. Brigid steps forward, and with her hair loose and her men’s trousers, in an old flannel three-buttoned tunic that once belonged to Austin, she can see how she looks to him, bold, with an arrogance not familiar on the island, or in Ireland, an arrogance that is particularly American. She will milk this now, however they dislike it.
“What sort of medical training have you?” he says. Brigid tells him that she trained as a nurse midwife in the States, adds that she has attended hundreds of births.
The doctor makes a dismissive noise at this information. “Were there any complications?”
Brigid tells him of the long labor and Wee Emer getting stuck up behind the other, cord round her neck, needing mouth to mouth and chest massage to breathe.
“How long before the baby began breathing?” he asks.
“Less than a minute, I’d say,” Brigid answers.
“Did you do the Apgar?”
“Yes. A two after birth, a nine five minutes later.”
“Hunh,” the doctor mutters, as if he doesn’t believe her.
He examines Rose, then the babies, one at a time, unwrapping them and prodding until they are both screeching at his cold, rough fingers.
“There’s not much to this one,” the doctor says. “Is she nursing?”
Rose can express milk into a jug from one breast while feeding a baby on the other. Not a bother on her, the island women say.
“She is,” Rose and Brigid say together, and he glances up suspiciously. He finishes examining baby Emer and walks away, leaving her frail, angry, yellow-tinged body flailing uncovered on the table. Brigid re-covers her quickly, swaddling her tight in the wool the doctor has cast aside.
He packs up his bag, letting out occasional disapproving gusts of breath, like an angry horse. Every time he does it, Emer jumps.
“Your babies,” he says to Rose, “not to mention yourself, might have died. There’s talk this Yank has persuaded you people to stay here. You, madam”—he waves at Brigid dismissively—“are taking lives you have no claim to out of God’s hands.”
He wrestles with his coat, and makes one last biting remark.
“She’ll likely end up touched, that one,” he mutters, gesturing to Emer in the cradle. Then in the same breath, he remarks how sorry he is to hear about the passing of their husbands. He looks at Emer oddly on his way out, as if he is trying to place her.
Brigid shuts the door hard behind him, as though she means to catch his generous backside on the way out. After the last comment, she expects morose faces, maybe tears, but she looks at Rose and all at once they are laughing. They can barely speak, holding their sides and breathless with it, but Rose manages to get out a few imitations of the doctor’s high-pitched, nagging voice—You, madam—which just sends them off again. They wail with laughter and look at each other, mouths open in silent hilarity, gazes focused on the other’s wet and dancing eyes.
Emer is furious, Brigid can tell, but it can’t touch them, she is as helpless as the men who, were there any left, would be made to stand outside while the women got on with things.
Chapter 19
Feet Water
December 1959
There is almost nothing that makes Emer lonelier than the sight of other women laughing. It’s like a fracture, somewhere inside her, watching Brigid and Rose laugh together. She thinks they look like sisters. Or wives. Or some other conglomeration—similar to the fantasies Emer had when she was with Brigid—a different kind of family where every adult member is female. Like the ancient society of women who loved each other before them.
She had this once, this affinity with Brigid. It was the first time she understood what it was like to be Rose, or Austin, with their lascivious looks and whispers. But the woman who adored her (she did, didn’t she?) now won’t look her in the eye. If she comes upon Emer unexpectedly she will flinch, step back, like every other islander. Emer once took grim satisfaction in people’s fear of her, but she doesn’t want to be dreaded anymore.
It is as though someone took Brigid aside and reminded her which sister was the better one, and now she has chosen Rose. All Emer can do is stand apart and watch them laugh. It wouldn’t be any worse, she believes, to see their tongues reaching into each other’s mouths.
The children go back to school now that the autumn work has subsided, and Emer, avoiding Rose and Brigid, is often alone. One afternoon when she goes to collect Niall at school, she sees that all the children have been let out to play. The air is full of the sort of shrieking that accompanies unsupervised children in a school playground. It takes Emer a while to distinguish Niall’s scream from the others. It is not playful, but a panicked wail that sounds so like the cries he let out when he was an infant and couldn’t eat, she feels her breasts grow heavy with memory. She quickens her pace on the bright green path and tries to distinguish him in the crowd. Niall is off on his own, ten yards from the rest of them, he is howling and throwing stones. The other children are laughing, or shouting back, and Fiona is trying to speak to him softly, but it doesn’t seem to matter what any of them are doing, not to Niall who cries and rages at the whole lot, nor to Emer, who can see nothing but her child with his face twisted in pain. When she gets to him he looks at her without recognition, no blue left in his eyes, and raises his fist as if he means to pound her in the face.
“Niall!” she hisses, stopping his hand and squeezing a warning into it. “Niall?” Then his eyes focus and he knows it is her and his face falls into childish tears and she gathers him up. There is a half-assed explanation of a childish game gone wrong, and a lecture from the teacher about how little he minds her, and a claim from Eve that he’d gone off in a fit for no reason, but through it all, all Emer can think of is the look in his eyes when he’d almost hit her, how he’d not even known who she was, how he’d been gone, gone somewhere far away.
She has always worried about music, fairy forts, the lull of dripping honey. She sees now how he can be stol
en from her, in the bright of day, even while she holds him in her arms. This is what she should have been afraid of all along.
It is subtle, the ways he is taken. For moments, the boy she has always known will vanish. She’ll be speaking to him and look up and see that his eyes have gone together in a squint, and he is not listening to her but to something no one else can hear. “Niall,” she’ll bark, and it won’t reach him, she’ll have to practically scream it and grab his shoulder before his eyes will go straight again and then he’ll look startled, hurt at her tone, not at all concerned by his own absence.
“I was speaking to you.”
Then he’ll get annoyed, as if she is bothering him about trifles.
“Would you never leave me my life?” he says once, his voice as deep and dangerous as a changeling who speaks from the cradle with the wizened voice of an old man.
It happens again in the currach on the way home from Mass. Kathleen, Maeve, Brigid and Margaret are rowing. The wind is strong enough that no one else could have heard it, she can only hear words spoken against the soft space of her ear. She is holding him and he turns his face up to say it, and the voice that comes out of him is not his own, or the fairy’s, it is Austin’s.
“It should have been you who was drowned.” She stiffens and wonders if he can feel how her heart seems to stumble over itself, to stop beating in shock and then rush to catch up. When they get home he holds her hand up the path, smiling and chatting as if nothing has happened, and spends the evening drawing little animals for her and wrapping them in paper and twine like gifts.
“A chuisle mo chroí,” he mimics, just before going to sleep. You are the pulse of my heart. She lies watching him for hours, her neck crushing inward, watching his still, blank face as the light fades with the shrinking candle, looking for some evidence of the thing that is lurking inside him.
She tries to tell Rose that he is being taken, slowly but surely stolen from her. But Rose dismisses it.
“He’s only a lad, Emer. He’s after losing his father. The same thing is happening to the girls.”
“It’s not the same,” Emer says. There is something between her and Niall that Rose doesn’t have with her girls.
“Did you think he’d be that way always, so?” Rose scoffs. “Your pet? They grow away, Emer. They’re meant to.”
“That’s not it,” Emer says.
“He’s your only one, so this is the first time you’re seeing it, but that’s all it is.”
“They tried to take me,” Emer insists. “They’re after him now.”
“Those are only stories. You were stung by bees.”
“I was touched.”
“You weren’t, so. It’s just who you are. Nothing more.”
She says it as if Emer’s evil power, the way she can leave people drowning in their own minds, can be chalked up to moodiness or a disagreeable disposition. Rose has seen the same things as Emer, but she seems to believe that her will to dismiss them is stronger than the fairies themselves.
It’s not easy to get Brigid on her own. If she manages to come up behind her in the field or back garden, Brigid will start, put her hands to her belly and say, “Jesus, Emer. Don’t sneak up on me like that.”
She used to love it when Emer embraced her from behind, she used to lean back and guide Emer’s hands to where she needed them.
“Will you help . . .” she gets out once, but then Fiona interrupts and Emer can’t say any more.
Brigid looks relieved, Fiona smug. Before Emer knows it, they are walking back to the house together, she is alone.
On one of the darkest nights of the year, when the sun is gone by the middle of the afternoon, the husband Emer murdered comes home. She is steeping the tea in the pot when the door bangs open with the wind and he is there, massive and dark and wet, taking off his coat and cap and hanging them on the hook, dropping a load of turf into the hearth box. He stumbles around, sniffling from the cold that runs his nose, making noises somewhere between animal and man. Emer is petrified. Frozen in her chair, waiting for the moment where he sees her and remembers what she has done and forces her to her knees with the blame of it. She thinks of what his body must be like after two months beneath the water, white and swollen and eaten away, and knows she will have to touch it, because surely the punishment for killing him will be to resume having sex with him, and this thought starts her screaming. She screams and she screams and it is not until she sees that the hands holding her wrists are small and soft and belong to her son that she stops screaming. It is Niall’s face in front of her.
“When did you come in?” she says.
“I’m here all along,” he says. “I brought in the turf. Didn’t you watch me walk in the door?” Emer shakes her head.
“Have you taken leave of your senses?” Niall says. He is so young still, how could she think he’d gotten bigger, he looks as small as when she still carried him in her arms. He goes to wash his feet in the bowl that waits by the fire for this purpose. His feet are the same shape as they were the day he was born, squat, ugly toes with nails soft enough to bend. When he was a newborn, they were as clean and smooth as the rest of him. Now the nails are caked with earth, the cracked soles stained brown by the bog. No matter how he scrubs they will never be that clean again.
He takes the basin and brings it to the door, flinging out the dirty water, in the island tradition: It’s bad luck to keep the feet water in the house overnight. There was an island girl, the story goes, who forgot to do this and the fairies carried her off the same night. She was gone with them for seven years before she was let home. She was returned the same age as when she’d left, still a girl, still in her nightgown, but she had no toes. She had danced them off.
“Come here,” Emer says to Niall, and he obliges. She holds on to him, too tight, he squirms and tries to get away.
“I’m only just in from the cows,” Niall says. “Not off to America.” She doesn’t laugh as he means her to, but clutches him tighter and pretends to believe it, even as she knows, inhaling—she has known for a while now—that the smell of him is all wrong.
“When is your baby due?” Rose asks.
“In May,” Brigid says.
“I hope you’ll stay on,” Rose says. “You’ve come to mean so much to Emer.” Brigid looks away.
“Oh, it’s not easy to tell, but I see it. She never had a friend before you,” Rose says. “Folk steer clear of Emer, because of what is in her hands. She’s able to rid herself of it, I believe. I’m not sure why she doesn’t want to.”
Because she’s like my mother, Brigid wants to say. And yours. Sometimes people get pounded so much by life they choose to burn back at the pain rather than douse it.
“Aren’t you afraid of her?” Brigid asks instead.
“Oh, Emer isn’t able to harm me,” Rose says. “And even if she were, she wouldn’t. Any more than she’d hurt Niall, or you, for that matter.”
Brigid can’t bring herself to say it. Can’t look into that lovely face and tell it: Don’t be so sure.
“I must say,” Rose adds, “I’m glad you’re here all the time. You’ve eased the whole business for all of us, so you have.”
Clodagh, who has been pretending to doze in her rocker, rises to this opportunity.
“Are you not going to ask her who the father is?” she says.
“It hardly matters,” Rose winks at Brigid. “I don’t see him here.”
Brigid isn’t attracted to Rose, though she can feel Emer’s jealousy, as palpable as winter damp in the room. She pities Emer, greedy and vicious and alone, but even if it were not dangerous, she tells herself she is no longer interested in romantic love, or sex. Her baby grows so quickly she feels fuller, more complete, every hour of the day. She has left so many babies behind, the ones she birthed as well as the ones she lost. She does not have to leave this time, after the babies are born. She will stay on and help Rose feed and bathe and dress them, she will be the midwife to the next woman who needs
her, she will birth her own baby into this island of women and girls. She will stay here because there is a space she can fill perfectly and without suspicion, because on this island women dance with each other, walk the roads holding on to each other’s waists, curl up together on the same beds to sleep, and it never occurs to them to be ashamed. This island was settled by women who lived together, they had ceremonies where they were essentially married, where they bound their souls, and their bodies, for life. Brigid doesn’t need a ceremony, and her body is occupied. She would like to be the woman who convinces them to stay.
When she pulled that crushed, wizened, barely human form out of the forgotten crevice in Rose’s body, and had to lay it by the fire and breathe life, not magic, inside, she decided she was done with something. Done with the manipulation of women’s most tender parts, and the way she used them to fill something that had never been there. The way her father once pretended to apologize to and caress her mother, the way it appeared to be generous and guilty and really all he was doing was consuming her alive. Feeding her pleasure so he could suck it back into himself. Brigid is tired of pleasuring women, and of teaching them how to wring pleasure out of her. She wants that part to be over, had wanted it over when she moved here, but forgot for an instant, tripped a little, when presented with Emer’s raw and awkward need.
She is surprised at how cruel she begins to sound when Rose mentions Emer. Dismissive, unforgiving, done. As if rejecting Emer has earned her a film of Emer’s disposition, a trail of unease like something left on a stone by a snail.