The Stolen Child

by Lisa Carey

  He stops when he sees that Brigid is shaking so hard her pretty white teeth are rattling in her head.

  “I’ll take you across,” he says. “Are you sure you don’t want to stop at the guards in town?”

  “Positive.”

  “I’ll have some of the lads up to carry your things.”

  “There’s no need,” Brigid says, her voice quavering. She sounds more like an islander than ever. “I’m leaving it to the birds.”

  She considers bringing the cradle. Whether it was hand-carved by a saint or an ancestor doesn’t matter; it was where her mother and grandmother were laid, where Brigid herself would have slept if her mother had been let to stay.

  The man who held on to them both in that lighthouse was not her father after all. He was just a man her mother asked to save her, whom she couldn’t leave. Brigid can see why now. Nuala confused violence with love. She thought she only had magic enough for one life-changing swim across the sea. And she didn’t want to run anymore.

  She leaves the cradle behind, in plain sight in the bedroom for whoever dares to steal it. She won’t need it. This baby will sleep in her arms.

  Rose comes once more, to the house, leaving Emer asleep and the body of Niall, bathed by island women, in the newly turned ground.

  “How is she?” Brigid asks. Rose can’t even say it, holds a hand to her mouth to keep from spitting out a wail.

  “I’m so sorry,” Brigid says. They are silent for a while, while Rose makes tea. Nothing is so unbearable that they won’t stop to make tea.

  “When I think of what they did to you,” Rose says when the tea is poured, “it makes me sick it does.”

  “They were afraid.”

  “Did you heal yourself? The way your mother could?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You couldn’t heal Niall.”

  Some part of Brigid feels like she is not even there. She is standing on the edge of the cliffs, screaming all her terror and remorse into the wind. She has been there too many times before.

  “No.”

  “Does it make you a witch, then?”

  “It’s only what I am. Same as Emer. Doesn’t amount to much in the end.”

  “Where will you have the baby?”

  “I don’t know. Somewhere safe.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “I’m wondering myself.”

  “We won’t stay here, anyways. Emer was right about that. Sure it won’t be much comfort to her now.”

  “You’ll miss it.”

  “Every day of my life, I suspect. Not as much . . .” but she doesn’t finish, though they both say the words in their minds.

  Not as much as you’d miss a child.

  Rose pours the tea into the two stained mugs Brigid has always thought of as hers and Emer’s.

  “She’s nothing without him,” Rose says.

  “She’ll have to be. You’ll keep an eye on her.”

  “I will. I will, of course.”

  They leave in the early morning, the sun still crawling its way above the mountains on the mainland. Brigid stops at the graveyard, finds the disturbed spot, lets the wet of it seep into her knees, staining them the color of bog.

  The doctor has summoned Muruch men to come collect them, the women with whom she learned to row will not be there to see her off.

  “I’m bringing the dog with me,” Brigid says to the doctor at the quay.

  “Have you taken leave of your senses, woman?”

  “I can’t leave her behind.”

  “You can’t take a dog like that off the island. It’ll be chasing cars and get itself killed.”

  “I won’t go without her.”

  “Jesus, you Yanks. The notion. You’re after being persecuted and all you care about is that bleeding animal. It’s yourself and that baby you should be thinking of now.”

  “I can think of more than one thing at a time.”

  He cocks his head, lets air gust through his teeth.

  “Fair enough,” he sighs. “Put a rope on the thing at least.”

  At the quay the dog hesitates, pulling away from her.

  “Rua?” she says. The dog sits obediently and looks up. She puts the rope over her neck and pulls on it, but she doesn’t budge. It’s as if the rope or the future has frozen her in place. Brigid yanks harder and says “come,” trying to sound firm. Rua looks penitent, but still won’t budge. Something opens up in Brigid, something she imagines could swallow her whole.

  “Rua,” she says softly, trying not to cry. She feels as close to feral, incessant tears as a girl. A girl who hasn’t learned to deter them yet. She crouches down, and whispers, begs, to something more than just the dog.

  “If you want to be with us, you need to get in the boat.” There is a pause where she thinks Rua will deny her and she won’t have an idea what to do next. She does not know if she will ever be let back here to retrieve her. Then the dog sighs, stands up and walks to the lip of the quay, where she allows herself, with as much dignity as she can muster, to be lifted and placed kindly into the belly of the currach.

  She holds on to the dog the whole trip. With her scarf pulled over her head in a protective veil and her face pressed into warm fur, she barely sees the green rock of the island moving away. Of her leaving, she will remember only the hiss of the oars, the list and promise of the boat as it moves over the sea.

  Chapter 28

  Vigil

  February, March 1960

  While she is sleeping, her son is still alive. She struggles to stay down beneath it, under the ground that is her slumber, where she can still smell him. He fills her nostrils first, then she can feel his body warm and wiggly and so tall he has to fold himself to fit in her lap. She holds tight, inhales, and he murmurs to her in Irish. A chuisle mo chroí. You are the pulse of my heart. His voice comes out all wrong, it is the graveled voice of an old man. It shocks her awake, he is ripped away, and all she can smell is the bread Rose brought going stale under a towel, the damp that lives on everything, the turf smoke backing up from the quiet chimney. All the odors of her life, choking her.

  For the first few days she believed he would come back in. That a shadow of him, a Niall-shaped light, would come in to look at her while she was sitting up with his body and she would be able to snatch him back. That her greatest fear, her son stolen, has finally occurred, and she only needs to believe in his being returned to her. That he will get away, just as she told him how, just as she did, and come home.

  But after they bury him, she knows that she shouldn’t have worried about him being stolen. That wasn’t anywhere near the worst thing, not at all. She was so afraid of him being stolen by fairies it had never occurred to her that his life, like anyone else’s, could simply end. That, like all those children before him, he would die.

  When she hears about Brigid leaving, she is livid, raging until she falls upon her bed and cries like a disappointed girl. At all the things she should have said, so that none of it would have happened. She spends most of her time now spinning it all in her head, changing what she did so the direction shifts and she saves her son. The night with Austin, the cursing stone, lying down with Brigid on her bed. Bringing the women into Brigid’s home to burn her. Take away all of them, any of them, and fate could be reshuffled so he is not doomed.

  Now of course she wants Austin’s baby back. Wants it as fiercely as she wants her son to be alive. She didn’t realize until now that the baby that Austin put in her was part of Niall as well.

  She thinks often now of the way her mother sat by the fire after her son died, as if there was no life in her, as if she were already dead but her body still insisted on beating her heart and filling her lungs. Emer feels like this now. Buried inside herself but with skin so warm and flushed and healthy it insults her to be inside of it. She drugs herself to sleep only to have her child returned and taken away all over again.

  Emer’s neck doesn’t plague her anymore. There is no pressure there, no
threat; her breath comes in and out so easily it is offensive. There is nothing left for her to be afraid of.

  She sleeps through the springtime. She is in Rose’s house now, on the hearth bed. Rose puts her there on purpose, so Emer is forced to be aware of life going on around her as she lies like an invalid in the corner. Tea is set beside her, a bun, a bowl of spuds with new butter. Sometimes she sits up to eat, often she does not.

  The weather barely lifts. The plans for evacuation seem to be divided between a voice for leaving at the beginning of the summer and those who want to stay to the end. They decide to abandon the sowing they’ve started and get it over with. None of them wants to be lulled into optimism by another glorious summer. In years to come, they will talk as if this island was a paradise, but the truth was, to live there required faith, courage and sheer stupid luck. As well as the knowledge that all of them might fail you.

  The bees, Fiona and Eve report before Rose can shush them, Brigid’s bees are awake again. They are busy making babies and comb and honey, but there is no one left who dares to approach them and pilfer a cup of sweetness from their home.

  On the handful of days that give them a reprieve, Rose forces Emer to sit on a stool in the sun, her back propped against the stone wall of the house. The sunlight is insulting and she soon crawls back inside, where it remains damp and cool and dark no matter what.

  They won’t leave her alone. Either Rose is there, or the other women, or worse, her own mother like a carcass of disappointment wrapped in a woolen shawl. She can’t even look at her, her mother, with her cruel, satisfied face, as if she is glad that this new generation has finally lost something. Emer would like to blame her for it all, but she barely has the energy to keep upright in her chair. She begs for sleep, deep and blackened sleep, and barely swims to the surface to open her eyes, see that nothing has changed, and close them again. She doesn’t dream of him now. Only when she is first awake, the split second before she opens her eyes, like when you’re sleeping in a strange bed but have forgotten and are expecting the particular view from yours, does her heart leap, first in hope, then plunge down again, so hard she thinks it will stop altogether. But it doesn’t, so she must roll over to a cooler spot on her pillow and listen to the same wind and rain she’s heard all her life, flinging at the windows like a child in a tantrum, and dig her way back down into the underworld beneath her consciousness.

  After they have all gone to bed, when the house is dark and silent, she rises and sits by the glowing fire. She doesn’t bother to try the door, padlocked from the inside by Rose who sleeps with the key. She sits for hours, her head aching and swimming with the effort of being upright, watching the fire as it slowly burns into the earth, trying with all its might to stay lit. She sits and pokes the fire and waits. She hasn’t given up on him, but he never comes.

  She fools the girls in the end. Fiona and Eve, dumbed by grief themselves, are told to run after their mammy if they see Emer get up. She waits until Fiona goes out to milk the cows. Her mother is napping with the babies. Teresa and Bernie are minding the toddlers by the shore. She moves silently, getting her clothes on, not bothering with shoes, and puts a finger to her lips to signal Eve that she shouldn’t say a thing.

  “I’m to tell Mam when you wake up.”

  “I’m only going to get your mother. Which way is she?”

  Eve, as gullible as Rose before her, looks relieved and says her mother has gone to move the sheep to the back field. Fiona would be more vigilant.

  “I’ll meet her on the road,” Emer says. “Wait here, child, and wet the tea.”

  Emer walks the other way, unsteady on legs that haven’t held her up in a fortnight. The wind has gone; the island is preternaturally calm, as if the whole place is listening. The fog is close; she can’t see the next house on the road, let alone the mainland. Emer slips into the fog easily, following the green road at her feet, and no one comes after her.

  She walks toward Brigid’s house, meeting no one, not even a dog. She wonders where they all are, then remembers it is Sunday, and in sea this calm they’ll have gone over to Mass before the fog. The fog will keep them now. For all she knows it is only herself and Rose and the girls on the island, the rest of them meeting with the priest and the government official about the evacuation. She overheard something, stretches of conversation floated into her as she lay, heavy as a stone in her bed. Plans that once would have left her jubilant with success. She won’t be going with them.

  At Brigid’s house the door opens without resistance and she slips inside. It still smells of her, and of the dog. Emer heard she took the dog with her, tying a rope to its neck and dragging it into a boat. The priest had spoken of it, of how the doctor was annoyed but Brigid had insisted. She loved that stupid creature as if it were her own child and not a dog at all.

  Brigid has left the house as if she had merely gone for a walk. There are dirty dishes in the basin. A pair of knickers on the floor of the bedroom. The fire has burned without disturbance into ghost ash still holding the form of turf sods. She left the same way others left before her. Some tidied like they were merely going on holiday, others dropped it all where they stood and ran. If they were able to return, their lives would still be there for them. If not, what was the use of any of it? On the mainland, things could be procured easily, there were shops and post offices and trains and buses and butchers, and no need for the things you desperately hoarded on a remote island. There’d be nothing you couldn’t replace if you wanted it dearly enough.

  There is nothing here that Emer needs. A book of Yeats’s poetry lies by her bedside, scraps of paper marking multiple pages. Emer flicks through bright clothing, sticks her finger into the face cream that Brigid once smoothed onto Emer’s lips, which were chapped and happy from a long, brutal session of kissing.

  She never should have left him alone. Not for an instant. Not to seduce his uncle, not to drown his father, not to come to this house and plunge herself into the body of another woman. She shouldn’t have left him to milk the cows. All those moments she stole away from him were now stolen from her. In one of them, in any one of those thieving moments, she might have been let to keep him.

  She lies down on Brigid’s soft bed. She wants to sleep again. Sleep and sleep until her body forgets how to wake up. Except the problem is it keeps remembering. And will every day for the rest of her life. Which seems so unbearably long and yet empty, like an enormous sea with no land to row toward. The bed doesn’t work, every time she wakes up it seems bigger, all this emptiness, than it did before. So she makes her legs stand up, weak and heavy as if the whole of her is a vessel filled with stone, and leaves by the back door and climbs through grass and bracken, so steep that every few moments she must grab on to a rock the color of jutting bone and pull herself forward.

  She almost makes it to the top before Rose ruins it all. Huffing her way up the cliffs from the other side, calling Emer’s name like a curse. Emer briefly hopes the fog will disguise her, but then Rose is there, her hand is on Emer’s wrist, as tight and strong and full of hope as it was when she was a girl. As if she hasn’t in all that time learned any better, doesn’t know that faith will get her nowhere.

  “Will you never leave me be, Rose,” Emer says.

  “You’re soaked to the bone with the mist. You need the fire, so you do. And a cup of tea.”

  “I’ll drown in any more tea,” Emer barks. “Let go of my arm.”

  They struggle a bit, but Rose has always been stronger, and is immune to the hands that fill everyone else with hopelessness. Emer sinks exhausted to the wet ground. All she can hear is her angry breathing, and Rose’s breath, which is determined and smooth.

  “I won’t let go of you,” Rose says. “Not in your lifetime.”

  “You’ve no right.”

  “You’re my sister.”

  “I AM NOTHING!” Emer screams, which startles Rose, but not enough to make her let go. “He was the only good in me and now he’s gone.”
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  “We’ll leave the island, Emer. We’ll start over. You’ll have another child.”

  “I don’t want one. And you don’t want to leave.”

  “I don’t mind, so long as we’re together.”

  “I killed Austin.”

  “Ah, stop it, Emer.”

  “And Patch.”

  “That’s enough. You didn’t either.”

  “I did, Rose. I went to the cursing stone to get rid of Austin’s baby.”

  Rose blinks, fine mist on her lashes. As if she can blink away anything that she does not want to see.

  “Then it was Austin’s fault,” Rose says. “You didn’t mean to. You didn’t mean any of it.”

  “I did. I meant every bit. There’s a terrible thing in me, Rose. A dark thing. Any love that was in me died with him.”

  “That’s fear, Emer, nothing else. You’ve been scared witless for ages. Even as a girl, you were afraid of everything. Afraid of love.”

  The strength of Rose’s grip weakens, enough for Emer to stand and wrench free, pushing toward the wind, the diving birds, the merciless rock and sea. Rose dives after her, holding on to her leg like a stubborn toddler.

  “Take me over so. Orphan my children.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Rose, let go!”

  Rose gives a great yank and Emer falls, scraping her cheek on a stone, her face soaked by the wet grass and the onslaught of tears. Rose slides up to her and lays her whole self, heavy with milk and a lifetime of vigilant cheer, on top of Emer, like a wet woolen blanket, like the earth, like Austin, or Brigid, or Patch but with more desire, more loyalty, more regret, than all three of them put together.

  Rose whispers, as angry as she gets which is still, underneath, kinder than it should be. “You’ll break my heart so you will.”

  And Emer knows this is true, even as she is enraged by it. That somehow it won’t be Austin drowning or Brigid leaving or her children going to America or her nephew dying right in front of her, but her sister, who she’s held on to all this time, her sister going over that cliff will be the thing that breaks Rose. That she loves wretched Emer more than the lot of them. A miracle. Blasphemous, but a miracle nonetheless.