All Our Hidden Gifts

by Caroline O’donoghue

  The skin on my arm kisses the blade. Blood falls on the satin. It’s crimson, and not the deep black blood I know the Housekeeper is going to want. I try to dig the blade in deeper, but start to lose strength in my hand. At least there’s not much pain. That’s something.

  Clouds of blackness start to stain my vision, and I look up to find the Housekeeper, desperate for her approval. But she’s gone, along with the golden light of the spell.

  “Maeve!”

  And Roe is on top of me, trying to wrestle the knife out of my hands. He pins me down, his knees on my thighs. My heads rolls in the dirt, hitting something hard.

  “Roe, stop it. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

  “What is going on?” Fiona starts to scream. “Roe, why are you attacking her?”

  “Give it to me, Maeve. Give me the knife.”

  In the end, I don’t have a choice. He prises my fingers from around the knife’s handle, and immediately turns it on himself.

  “Roe, no!”

  But he just stares at me, and falls, backwards, onto the white satin.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  THE THINGS I REMEMBER.

  Fiona, tying the satin around the wounds. Making, as she called it, a tourniquet. I heard her say the word on the phone to the ambulance. She kept repeating that word through her tears, holding on to it as though it were a magic chant of its own. “I’ve wrapped their wounds,” she kept saying. “They’re bleeding a lot. I made them tourniquets.”

  I remember wondering whether it was painful for her, to be so good at this, when the last thing in the world Fiona wants is to look after people. I remember thinking that her mother would be proud of her.

  The moon. Everywhere and everything was the moon: everything was white; everything was pearls. Cold, minty light shot through Fiona from all angles as she held her phone to her face while I watched her from the ground. Can she not see it? How is she even keeping her eyes open? I was reduced to a squint. The moon was behind her, huge and booming, like the drunkest person at a party.

  The grass. It was wet, and muddy, and I pressed my face into it to protect my eyes from the glare of the moon. It felt good on my face. A balm.

  Fiona, before the ambulance came, her arms around me like she was a child holding on to a too-big teddy won at the fairground. She begged me to stop pressing my face in the dirt. “Look at me, Maeve,” she said, my face in her hands.

  Roe’s shoe. The underside of his trainer. Caked in mud, and lying lifelessly on his foot. I squeeze my eyes shut. I should have known. He knew what I was up to. He knew from the moment he saw the carving knife. Roe. Roe. Roe.

  The river. Soft lapping sounds like a sea tide, getting louder and louder, larger and larger. I laughed to myself and thought about the cogs that had gored my hand open. It was all so obvious, wasn’t it? We said it ourselves: Lily is water.

  Lily is Water.

  And finally: I remember the moon’s light finally starting to dim, and I remember long hair tickling my face. Drops of water fell on my forehead, drops so warm and iron-rich that I first understood them to be my own blood.

  “Oh, Maeve,” Lily said. “What have you done?”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  WHEN I WAKE UP IN THE HOSPITAL, Jo is the only one there. She’s looking at her phone, biting her nails. Her eyes are red-rimmed and raw.

  “You look terrible,” I say.

  “Oh Jesus. Maeve. You’re awake! Oh my God, let me get Mum and Dad – they’re in the canteen. No, wait, how are you feeling? Are you OK? Do you need help sitting up?”

  “I feel … OK,” I say uncertainly. I gaze at my arm. There’s a trail of stitches, nimbly picked out in brown thread. At the top of the trail is a wad of gauze where I had tried to gouge the knife further in. Before Roe took the knife off me, and turned it on himself.

  I close my eyes as tears start to spill down my face.

  “Hey, don’t start crying on me now,” Jo says. “I’m supposed to be the crier.”

  “Why am I in here? How long have I been asleep? What happened?”

  “You hit your head hard, Mae. Bashed your head on a rock when you fell.”

  “When I…”

  “Fiona explained how you were … what? Helping her rehearse? She called the ambulance and came in with you – her mum came to pick her up an hour ago.”

  Thank God for Fiona.

  “What about Roe?”

  “Who?”

  “Rory. Rory O’Callaghan.”

  “He’s … not doing as well as you, but it seems like he’ll eventually be OK. He had some blood transfusions. His parents don’t know what to make of everything.”

  “To make of what?”

  “Oh, God, I forgot. You don’t know. Lily. She’s showed up. She staggered home last night when her parents were already at the hospital and collapsed on her front steps. The neighbours had to ring them while they were here.”

  I blink, long and slow. I can’t believe this. Roe and I are alive, and Lily is … back? How can that be?

  “So where was Lily?” I ask, dazed. “Where was she, this whole time?”

  “I don’t know. They haven’t shared that with the likes of us yet. But her skin was almost blue. Hypothermia. Wherever she was must have been freezing.”

  “So she’s in the hospital?”

  “Yep,” Jo says. And then, after a pause. “This hospital.”

  “Me, Roe and Lily are all in the same hospital,” I say disbelievingly. “Alive.”

  “Alive,” she confirms.

  And I don’t get another word from her, because Mum and Dad crash through the door, and I am covered in love.

  They stay for hours, way past when they’re supposed to. Mum treats me like I’m made of glass. I don’t say a lot, and pretend to be much more tired than I am. I wait for clues, to try and make out what Fiona told them. She must be a better actress than even I realized, because the story sounds bizarre, yet Mum and Dad don’t seem to have any doubts about its validity. We were rehearsing Othello with her, apparently: it was all Fiona’s idea. The knife was there for Desdemona’s death scene. Jo, who did Shakespeare as part of her Masters, says nothing. I wonder if she remembers that Desdemona was smothered, and that it was Juliet who stabbed herself.

  “I suppose this solves the mystery, then,” she finally says.

  “Of what?”

  “Of who your boyfriend is.”

  “I don’t know if we’re calling it that.”

  But a light switches on in me, bright as the North Star. Roe lived. I lived. Lily lived. We can do anything now.

  My family leave slowly, reluctantly, with promises that Pat is coming down from Dublin and that Cillian is trying to get the time off work. I nod and yawn dramatically. I’m dying for them to leave. I need to call Fiona. I need to see Roe. And Lily. How is she? How did she make it home?

  The nurse comes in to check on me, and I ask her politely what room my boyfriend is in.

  “Your boyfriend?”

  “I’m sorry,” I laugh, putting on a big performance of girlishness. “I mean Rory O’Callaghan. We came in together. The knife accident?”

  Accident.

  “He’s on the ward,” she replies. “Ward E, bed 3.”

  “Thank you.”

  I wait until everyone’s asleep and sneak out, slipping on the dressing gown that Mum brought from home. I wander the dense, endless wards, my gut quaking at the thought of seeing him.

  When I find his ward, it’s after midnight. There are several other men on it, and it feels strange to associate him with them. Already, he feels like a different category. When I find him, I let out a small yelp of excitement. There he is. Still, if you can believe it, with his mascara on.

  He’s dozing, his Adam’s apple bobbing softly as he snores. Roe snores.

  I drag a chair over and sit next to him. His hand is lying across his pyjama-clad chest, and I place mine on top of it. He opens his eyes slowly, carefully, like you might cautiously unfold
a broken umbrella.

  “Hello,” I whisper.

  “Hi,” he replies. His face is white, all that ruddy colour drained out of it. I can see the blue of his veins shimmering under his skin. “That was really stupid, that thing you did.”

  “I know,” I hush back. “It worked, didn’t it?”

  “In a way,” he reasons, his voice croaky. “I suppose it did.”

  “Are you OK?”

  “Not really.”

  “How bad is it? One to ten?”

  “If one was that punch-up at the Cypress, then this is … eleven hundred and four.”

  “Oh, Roe. Roe, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault. Except, no wait, it totally is.”

  “It is my fault!” I say, trying not to yell. “All of it! Top to bottom, the whole thing!”

  “Sssssh. People are trying to sleep around here.”

  “Lily is back.”

  “I know. She kind of stole my thunder,” he says, grinning.

  “How come … how come we both got to…?”

  “Live?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve been thinking about this. Are you cold?”

  “Yes.”

  He moves his body over and flips back the hospital blankets. I scooch in next to him and lay my head across his chest. I think one of the men in the bed opposite is staring at us, but I don’t care. We’ve cheated death. I don’t give a crap what anyone thinks.

  “Have you ever heard the story of Abraham?”

  “Wow, are you Jewish and Protestant now?”

  “Shut up,” he says, picking up a length of my hair. “Abraham was a Bible guy, and he had a son called Isaac.”

  “Bible guy?”

  “And God told Abraham to sacrifice his son. To kill him, basically.”

  “Scant,” I say in disgust.

  “I know. But when Abraham was about to do it, to kill his son, God sent a ram to sacrifice instead. He said, It’s grand, you don’t have to kill your son.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the fact that Abraham was willing to do it was enough. The pure intention to sacrifice was enough. I think … that’s what happened with us. I think it was enough that we were willing to … to…”

  “To die?” I say.

  “Yes,” he answers quietly. “Do you want to know something funny?”

  “Go on.”

  He puts his hand into the shirt pocket of his pyjamas and pulls out a flat black stone.

  “When I drove the knife in, it hit against something.”

  I marvel at the jet necklace I had given him, just minutes before we left my house. “It’s jet,” I whisper. “It’s a protection charm my dad gave me.”

  “When it hit against it … it was like the blade didn’t like it. I could hear the knife talking to me, if that makes sense. It was like, Ew, gross, let’s get out of here.”

  “The knife said all that?”

  “The knife said all that.”

  Silence. The low beep of a machine at the other side of the room sounds.

  “Do you think,” I ask softly. “Do you think that maybe … I sacrificed myself for Lily, and you sacrificed yourself for me, but I had already sacrificed my protection for you, and so…”

  “This is advanced sacrifice mathematics.”

  “Do you think we cancelled it all out, though?”

  “It’s as good a theory as any. Whatever happened, no one’s ever going to believe us.”

  “No,” I say, nestling into him closer. “So it’s good we have each other.”

  “And that you’re a powerful sensitive.”

  “Harriet was a powerful sensitive,” I say, my voice hushed. “But I guess she didn’t have the friends to protect her.”

  We are silent for a long while then. He traces my stitches with his fingertips, winces at the big patch of gauze, and finally settles on burying his face in the crook of my neck.

  “I don’t want to die,” I say, finally. “I never did. I like life.”

  “Me too,” he says.

  “Seems a bit obvious, doesn’t it?”

  “Not always,” he says, a half-smile on his face. “You should go before a nurse finds you in here.”

  “OK,” I say, getting out of bed.

  “Hey, not so fast.”

  So I stay for a few more minutes, and I kiss him, and he shows me the bandages on his stomach. He lifts the corner of the white bandage tenderly, and I suck my teeth. Thick black blood has dried around a deep wound just above his naval. If he had gone just one centimetre to the left, the doctor said, he would have had to wear a bag for the rest of his life.

  “To which I said –” he coughs – “Gucci or Prada?”

  “No! You didn’t!”

  “I swear, I did.”

  “With your mum in the room?”

  He nods, clutching his stomach and trying not to split his stitches laughing. “Honestly, Maeve, there’s nothing like a brush with death to make you realize that your parents’ opinion of you doesn’t matter.”

  “Hear, hear,” I smile. “Have you talked to Lily yet?”

  “No. My parents will barely tell me a thing. Just that she’s basically OK. They seem totally dazed. I don’t think they’ve had this much excitement their entire lives.”

  “I can’t believe she’s back, Roe. It worked. We did it.”

  “I know. Me neither. I guess we’re pretty amazing.”

  “Glad we’re agreed.”

  I kiss him goodbye and turn to leave.

  “Maeve?”

  “Yes?”

  “Nevermind.”

  “What?”

  “It’s dumb.”

  “Come on.”

  “No, it’s the wrong moment. I hate myself already.”

  “Roe.”

  “Will you … are you my girlfriend?”

  I decide to make him wait. Just for laughs.

  “Or, y’know, ‘girlfriend’ is a weird term. It’s very binary. We don’t have to gender it. Is ‘partner’ too weird? ‘Lover’? Oh, God. Pretend I didn’t say that. Please wait while I stab myself again?”

  I laugh. “We are not making jokes about stabbing, Roe, as a rule.”

  A pause.

  “And that’s a rule, I insist on, as your girlfriend.”

  He smiles. “I accept.”

  I’m discharged from hospital a couple of days later. Mum comes to collect me and brings Pat with her.

  “I glued that Walkman of yours back together,” he says, giving me a hug. “Is this what teens are doing now? A few years ago, it was vinyl and now it’s cassette tapes?”

  “No,” I say, remembering Heaven. “Honestly I think I’m outgrowing it myself.”

  I never get to visit Lily’s room, even though I try to get Mum to take me. She won’t even let me say goodbye to Roe. “You’ll see him when he gets out in a few days,” she says. “This is family time.”

  “You don’t want him getting excited either. Not in his condition.”

  “Pat!” Mum says, disgusted.

  “Mum, we were all thinking it,” he protests.

  It feels like it takes a long time for life to get back to normal. Cillian arrives and it’s strange to watch him lump around the house with his work laptop, knowing what I do now. The brother born in the summer of Harriet. The difficult pregnancy. The year the cat ran away. He’s definitely the moodiest of the five of us, and the only other one who has dark hair, like me. Part of me wonders if it touched him in some way, whether the Housekeeper is part of his DNA now. The way, I suppose, it is mine.

  Mum doesn’t let me go back to school until Friday. That way, she says, I only have one day before the weekend, and it won’t be too much of a “shock to the system”. I hug Fiona when I see her. It’s awkward. Her texts have been formal the last few days, and I can’t say I blame her. We meet in the art room at lunch.

  “Hey,” she says, holding me at a distance. “How are you feeling?”

  “Uh. OK. Not
too bad, really. The stitches are kind of itchy and gross, though.”

  “Sure. Great.”

  “Fiona. I’m sorry.”

  “You could have told me, Maeve.”

  “You know I couldn’t have. And anyway, I wasn’t even sure what I was going to do.”

  “You could have died, man! In fact, you were planning on it.”

  “I wasn’t planning on it,” I say. And because I can think of nothing else, I just repeat myself. “I was just … willing to do whatever it took.”

  She says nothing, just stretches a piece of Blu-Tack between her fingers.

  “It just seemed like the only way to bring her back. And to end all this … all this horrible stuff. My sister and her girlfriend were getting attacked, Roe’s gigs were ending in punch-ups, Aaron’s weird influence … it was all water flowing from the same direction. I had to be … the cork in the bottle, I suppose.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  “It does, in a messed-up kind of way.”

  “No, I mean, it’s an interesting theory, but it hasn’t stopped anything, has it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The CoB are having a rally this weekend in Dublin.”

  “What?”

  “Well. They’re not calling it a rally. It’s a ‘city-wide festival celebrating Ireland’s Catholic heritage’, but it has all these creepy alt-right speakers doing events at it.”

  The blood drains from my face.

  “Oh God. I should have waited to tell you, shouldn’t I?”

  “So … nothing has changed? Aaron is still…”

  “I wouldn’t say nothing. Lily is back.”

  “But…” I rub at my eyelids. No. No, this wasn’t how things were supposed to go. “That wasn’t the deal.”

  “What deal? Did you make a deal?”

  “No…” I say, trailing off.

  “Maeve … did you think that…” Fiona bites on her bottom lip, pausing to find the right words. “Did you think that you could end hate crime by killing yourself?”

  “You know it wasn’t as simple as that,” I say fiercely. “But Aaron’s the other sensitive. The one who’s manipulating everyone. CoB’s popularity was because of him. The city was cursed, Fiona.”

  “I agree that maybe the city was cursed,” she reasons. “But … did you really think Aaron could make people hateful if they weren’t already?”