The Stolen Child

by Lisa Carey

  “I might call in and see if she needs anything,” Rose will say and Brigid will convince her, without even saying it aloud, not to.

  She knows that the longer Rose leaves her, the further away Emer will slip. Brigid’s want of this life, this island, is enough to make her cruel. Though she once promised to help Emer, and had wanted to heal her, now she sees that Emer is not something to heal but something to stay away from. Emer could ruin it all. She destroyed her own family, she’ll stop at nothing to get what she wants. If it suited Emer, she would reach in and yank Brigid’s hope right alongside the bloody limbs of her half-formed child. Brigid will do whatever is necessary—she will turn her sister and her son against her if she has to—to avoid losing this one last best chance she has ever been given at life.

  “Leave her be,” she says to Rose, over and over again, and Rose listens, because, Brigid knows, there is a part of her so tired of missing her husband and a lifetime of being Emer’s better twin that it would like to have someone else carry away the burden of her sister.

  “When shall we tell the others?” Brigid asks Rose. It has become difficult to hide her growing middle, even behind the yellow waterproof she wears most of the time now. She is nervous about the reaction. Though they have accepted and welcomed her, she has seen before how quickly even women can turn when you dare to betray their ideas of decency.

  “I’d be inclined to tell the lot of them at once,” Rose says. “Keep the lips from flapping, if you know how I mean.”

  So they do. On a wet day when the women are gathered at Rose’s, their hands roughened with new calluses, from rope and oars rather than knives and churns. Kathleen, Nellie, Margaret, their mothers and mothers-in-law, the grandmothers and teenagers left at home to tend the smaller children.

  “We’re expecting a wee Australian in May,” Rose says cheerily, while refilling the teapot. “I told Brigid we’d all pitch in, of course. I don’t want her lifting that boat any longer.”

  There is a heavy silence that goes on long enough to set dread thronging inside Brigid. The women look at one another, at her, at Rose, and seem to come to a collective decision.

  It’s not as if we weren’t in the same position ourselves once. Quite a few of us, if you remember.

  Don’t mind the talk. She’s one of us now and we take care of our own.

  That’s a blessing, so it is. Babbies born after forty are touched with luck.

  Won’t it be a stunner, that one? With your complexion, and that Australian was an eyeful.

  Sure, aren’t we an island of women and children now.

  They reassure her, congratulate her, ask her what she’ll name a girl, a boy. Later, when Brigid is washing up, she overhears the older ones whispering in Irish.

  Same thing happened to her mother, don’t you know.

  That was another time.

  How do we know it was the Australian? Kathleen always wondered if Malachy fancied her.

  Whisht. It won’t help any of us, that talk.

  What about the stories? What her family had in them?

  They’re only stories, sure. She has no more black magic in her than I do.

  We wouldn’t be here still without her help.

  I’m not certain that’s for the best.

  Rose is. Rose is sure of her and that’s enough for me.

  She’s too fond of Emer for my liking.

  Yes, well, she wasn’t told any different. She’s copped on now, I suspect.

  Brigid can’t decide if they believe in magic or not. On the one hand they are superstitious, never walking past places where fairies might cause mischief, crossing themselves multiple times a day. On the other they seem pragmatic and dismiss notions of fairies when it suits them. Rose will talk of Emer as if she is cursed and then act as if she is just regrettably sour. They seem to respect some parallel world at the same time as they brush the very idea of it away.

  Brigid keeps a few things to herself. Only Emer and Niall know about the healing. The diffusing of grief she does so subtly no one suspects her hands are behind it. If someone cuts themselves or bleeds through blisters she doesn’t mend it. As far as they’re concerned her hands are just like their own, work roughened and compassionate. She suspects Rose knows, has guessed, but she is too loyal to say so.

  She doesn’t tell any of them she understands their Irish. Not even Emer knows that. All these years later, it still seems wise to Brigid to have a secret language. You never know, says her mother’s voice, still as close to her ear as if she lies on the same pillow, when you might need it.

  December storms strand them for two more weeks. School is canceled, boats tied down to cement blocks on the grass, women can’t even walk the road without hanging on to fence posts and digging the toes of their shoes into boggy ground. It’s all Brigid can do to milk the cows, everything else is left to the rain. She wears Desmond’s wellies, the toes stuffed with extra socks, and lines them up next to Austin’s at Rose’s front door. She stays most nights with Rose, teaches drawing techniques to her girls, learns to knit herself a postulant’s tube scarf. They watch the stores of flour and sugar and tea sift away, portion by portion, no hope of replenishment in sight. It begins to look as if there will be no Christmas packages, something Rose’s girls fear every year, with good reason. Half the time, they explain, Father Christmas does not come. He arrives in January, with a note of apology tied up with the oranges and apples and chocolates that come over on the boat.

  Brigid goes ten straight days without a glimpse of Emer, though Niall comes over daily for a visit. On an afternoon where the wind and rain clear to a frosty fog, she tells Rose she will go back to Desmond’s house and get the rest of her flour and tea. She walks the road, a brighter green in fog than it is in sunlight, unable to see more than two feet in front of her. Emer is not far behind.

  Emer knocks on the door, announcing herself with the desperate pound of her fist. Brigid doesn’t open it; she leans on the other side of the door, barely breathing, willing her to go away. Emer once walked in without invitation, but she has reversed to a formality with Brigid, an odd one considering the intimacies that occurred once she let her in. Brigid can imagine Emer on the other side of the wood, as the plans that propelled her up the path grow cold and her face heats up with humiliation. She hopes Emer can’t hear her jagged breath, or the inner voice that, despite her resolve, still calls her name out with something like ardor—Emer, Emer—even as it begs her away. Emer lingers for a long time, longer than she should, hoping that Brigid will change her mind, then turns and stumbles her way back down the hill.

  Chapter 20

  Christmas Tree

  When Festy manages to get across from the mainland and bring provisions for Christmas, Niall comes to tell Emer the men from Muruch are pulling into the quay. They have brought a pine tree for Brigid. She asked Festy to get her one to decorate for Christmas. When Emer goes down to the quay Brigid and Rose are together, smiling and laughing with the men, and the girls are all taking turns putting their faces in the branches and inhaling the smell of pine. The blasted dog is moving circles around them, jumping and filthying skirts with her paws. No one minds her anymore.

  “Brigid got us a Christmas tree, Emer,” Rose says. “Just like in a storybook. We’ll have it inside the house with candles and sweets hidden in the branches. Why don’t you and Niall come for tea and help us decorate it?”

  “It’ll burn the house down,” Emer says bitterly.

  Niall is running around on the quay rocks and she needs to bark at him to get some sense, and that’s when Rose gasps her disapproval. Rose never has to tell the girls to mind their own bodies. They just do it.

  “Ach, Emer,” Rose says. “Try not to ruin Christmas for the lot of us, would you now.” Fiona and Eve snicker, like women already, squinting at Emer with cruel glee. Brigid is busy directing women on how to hold the trunk of the tree without damaging the needles. Niall becomes interested in carrying it, but doesn’t listen to instructions so
just manages to poke himself in the eye. He is comforted by Eve and doesn’t even look for his mother. And so they all fuss and carry on and walk away from Emer, so enraged by it all that she can’t move, her face screwed up and ugly against the wind and sea spray, left on the abandoned quay. Not even the dog, normally compelled to keep the herd together, checks behind them.

  On Christmas Eve at Rose’s house, where everything they do emphasizes the absence of husbands and fathers, where Niall is the only male in a throng of optimistic but weary-eyed women, Emer has too much to drink and accosts Brigid in the bedroom.

  The girls have their father’s instruments out and are screeching out simple tunes on the fiddle and the concertina while the toddlers wallop the bodhran. Rose has been cheerful and kind to her all night, to make up for the scene at the quay, but Emer can tell she is thinking of Austin. It doesn’t help that Brigid notices it too, and keeps touching her, touching her with those hands, which Emer knows from experience ease the worst of it, the worst of you, like shifting something inside just enough to let you breathe all the way. Emer keeps refilling her wine—another surprise Brigid had brought over on the boat—so she can swallow the rude thoughts she’d like to spew at the both of them. When Brigid goes to get some presents from the back bedroom, Emer follows. The musical cacophony is enough to cover their voices, and Rose, nursing two babies at once, will not be standing up anytime soon.

  She had only planned to talk to her, to tell her about Niall and her visions, but she is so drunk and Brigid’s body so familiar that she barely thinks as she reaches her hands to her waist. She wants to press into her, to feel again the only good thing she has felt in years coursing through her body. Even if it’s only once more, and is taken away again at the end.

  But Brigid deflects her hands, slaps them away like they are meant to hurt. She moves quickly, as far away as she can get in the tiny dark room. Her breathing is quick, her stomach under the pretty blouse is swollen, growing larger by the day.

  “Don’t, Emer,” she hisses, sounding shocked, as if it hadn’t happened countless times. As if it’s wrong, Emer’s mistake, instead of something she taught her to do.

  “Just this once,” Emer says. She hears the pathetic begging in her voice.

  “It’s not going to happen. I’m sorry, Emer. That’s done now.”

  It’s like being kicked in the stomach, the truth, even when you suspect it. Like her skin being ripped away.

  “I’m sorry,” Brigid adds, but she has to force it. The way she is looking at Emer is not sorry. There is no pity there. Only avoidance mixed with an undercurrent of disgust.

  Emer’s real voice escapes with a barking hiss, she almost spits it.

  “Sure you wouldn’t mind if it was Rose?” Emer says quickly. “I’m not much of a prize next to Rose.”

  “Jesus, Emer,” Brigid says, “I’m not having sex with your sister.”

  “Only because she won’t,” Emer says. She sees how this hurts, a quick sting like catching skin with a sharp nail.

  “Must you be like this?” Brigid says, and she turns away, so quickly and easily giving Emer her back that the swivel of it forces Emer’s breath away.

  “You said you’d help me,” Emer says.

  “Has there ever been anything in your mind but what you want?” Brigid says.

  “And what do you mean by that?” Emer says.

  Brigid lets out a little gasp of disapproval, like an old island woman. Her voice has a lilt to it now. It follows the same rhythm as every voice that has dismissed Emer her whole life.

  “You’ll not spare anyone, will you?” Brigid says. “Not a soul is safe that stands in your way.”

  “That’s grand, coming from you,” Emer says.

  When Brigid tries to walk by her, Emer lashes out, like some animal inside her has been released. She clamps onto the woman’s wrist, the same wrist she held prisoner against the mattress while she teased with the mouth she’s just recently learned how to use. She holds it now, prepared to press all the ugliness she has inside it.

  “You won’t do that to me, Emer,” Brigid says. “You can’t.” But she looks terrified.

  Emer can’t do it. Something holds her back. She is not sure that it is Brigid anymore.

  “It’s not me you should be afraid of, so,” Emer says. “They’ll swallow you whole, the lot of them. Rose too. When they find out what you are. They’ll spit out your bones. They’re hateful.”

  “No, Emer. That’s you. I thought I could take it out of you. But it’s too deep.”

  You could have, Emer wants to say. You did. But she sees that Brigid is gone. Whatever was there between them is now as cold and unwanted as the relations she has had with men before. She had thought there was something different, with a woman. But it turns out to be the same humiliating, violating, dismissive thing in the end.

  Emer doesn’t know the answer, any more than the rest of them do, Rose or Patch or her mother or even, now, her own son, to why she can’t be loved. This is a rejection she expected, but somehow that makes it even worse. To have such low expectations and then to watch, time and time again, as they are realized.

  She tries to take Niall with her. Something burst inside that bedroom and now her good eye has a blind spot, a smudge at the edge of her vision where there is nothing, as if the fabric of the world is beginning to peel away. All she wants is to go home and be with her son. In the middle of the tree trimming, the gaiety, the music, the first time she’s seen him truly laugh since his father drowned, she tries to drag him away. Even as she sees how unfair it is, she can’t stop herself. She can’t stand to watch him so enchanted by the same people intent on making her miserable.

  “We’ll go now, Niall.” His face falls, sure as if she’s hit him with the words.

  “The tree’s not finished,” he whines.

  “You can’t go, Emer,” Rose dismisses her, not even bothering to glance in her direction. “Your supper’s not eaten.”

  “We won’t be staying for supper,” Emer says. This is such a ridiculous statement, it’s not as if there is anyplace to go, any real reason to leave except that Emer can’t stand to be there.

  “Don’t be cross,” Rose says. “Give the children a hand with the tree.”

  “I’m not one of the children,” Emer spits. “And I’ve no intention of fussing over that bloomin’ tree.” She can feel the room changing, she is changing it, like the calm that comes before a storm on the sea, a stillness that is more about dread than peace, followed by onslaught. Her nieces’ fidgeting gaiety has gone still at her language; they refuse to look at her. Niall is looking at her too hard.

  Clodagh looks almost delighted. “You’d easier get a smile off a stone,” she says.

  “I’ll make tea,” Rose says, looking quickly from Emer to Brigid and back again, hoping for some explanation. Brigid’s face is pale, clenched, revealing nothing. Emer feels like her own face is about to collapse, that if she says too much it will let loose and slide right off her, features broken and ugly and lost in tears. She wants to hold on to it, press her own cruel hands to her face and attempt to keep it on. If she cries she will let loose something terrible. She feels a sudden, sharp slice of pain behind her eye, and then a throbbing, like an echo.

  “Niall, get your coat. Now.” Niall looks at her for one more disbelieving instant and then he transforms into a small, angry man.

  “No,” he says. “You leave me be.”

  Emer grabs his arm and drags him to the door and tries to force him, thrashing and screaming, into his jacket.

  “Let me alone!” he screams. “Don’t touch me!” She hasn’t had to put his arms in clothing since he was small and she is surprised at how strongly he can resist her, and this angers her more, that his body is big enough to dismiss her. She is furious, but his wailing insults stab her ears so she alternates between wrestling him and pushing him roughly away.

  “You’re horrid,” he howls, and his hurt fuels her. She feels it coming before
she does it, her hands on him changing into the ones that are not his mother’s. She presses all her embarrassment, rejection and fury into the small arm of her boy.

  “I hate you!” he screams. His face breaks, the anger crumples in on itself and the wail he lets out is pure, though it grates on her nerves as if it is put on. She cannot tell if her hands have hurt him, or if he is merely mourning the fact that she actually tried.

  She tries not to look at anyone in the room, all of them frozen and staring, but cannot help a glance at Brigid. Because now she’s regretting herself and wants to take it back, and Brigid is the only one who has ever let her do this, or at least the only one who hasn’t had to, the only one, besides Rose, who waits long enough for Emer to say something good. She wants to lie down on the bed and have Brigid bind up whatever it is that is breaking up inside her mind and sliding away. But all Brigid gives her is one pitiless shake of her head.

  Her vision swims in and out, one second she can see them, blurred as if under the water, the next there is nothing.

  “Emer,” Rose begins, but Brigid stops her from being saved.

  “Let her go, if that’s what she wants,” Brigid says, and Rose’s eyes widen at the boldness of it.

  “Oh, how the mighty have fallen,” their mother sings.

  And though Emer could be convinced now, one kind word from Rose and the storm will subside, and she’ll accept tea and make herself small and, if not agreeable, at least not insufferable, Rose stops, eyes glistening at the thrill of it, then shrugs and turns around.

  “Let the boy stay, so,” she says. “No need to drag him down with you.”

  Niall, quiet now, looking slightly ashamed, wiggles out of her grip and goes to stand between Fiona and Eve, who each put an arm around him and glare at her with the same pretty, disappointed eyes as Rose. This is such a shock, he has never not gone with her, has always chosen her, when pressed, over everyone else, for a moment she does not know what to do next. She considers picking him up and carrying him home. But she can barely see, and the stabs in her head are converging into an intolerable wave. She thinks she might be ill, seasick from her own pain. She can barely stand straight with the strain of it; she won’t be able to carry him now. This is what she has been dreading all along, this moment where her son recognizes what everyone else has always known. When he is repulsed by her. How can she blame him? How can she force him? She does not even want to go with herself.