All Our Hidden Gifts

by Caroline O’donoghue

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “Maeve, when I was twelve, a fully-grown man screamed ‘Sweet and sour chicken!’ at me from a car window.”

  “Jesus. I’m so sorry.”

  “Yeah,” she says. “And that was long before the Housekeeper or Aaron came to town.”

  I start chewing on my nails.

  “He might have watered some seeds, organized some people … but all this stuff. The seeds were already planted, Maeve. They already existed.”

  “I guess you think I’m pretty dumb.”

  “I think … when you’re looking for things that are out of place,” she says softly. “You see all the things that already are.”

  I don’t know what to say. I’ve never felt so stupid, or so small. But I look at Fiona, the brilliant friend who made a tourniquet from satin and held my bleeding arm together, and my heart bursts at the millions of tiny things that have happened to her. The infinite tiny interactions she’s had where someone has used her race, her immigrant mother, her scholarship, her beauty, her anything, as a way to hurt her. Things she will never tell me about, but will exist nonetheless.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “What for?”

  “For thinking…” But I lose the words. “For not seeing.”

  “It’s OK,” she says, and despite everything, she starts to laugh. “You’re not the first person to make oppression all about themselves. And Aaron is still making this shit worse. Luckily, we have a secret weapon.”

  “What?”

  “You, you idiot. You’re the other sensitive. Glenda the Good Witch.”

  “I’m not powerful like he is.”

  “Oh, right, it must be that other girl who defeated a deathless witch spirit and rescued her friend. I’ll go find her.”

  I laugh, but my skin feels tight, itchy. Lily might be back, but CoB are still more popular than ever. I start rubbing at the bandages on my arm.

  It’s going to be so interesting. If you live.

  “Are you all right?” Fiona asks, looking at my arm. “This is always the worst bit. Your skin is probably irritated because it’s not getting enough air.”

  I pick at the tape holding the wad of nappy-ish gauze to my arm. The angles are all weird, though. I can’t get my fingernail under it.

  “Here,” Fiona says. “Let me help.”

  She removes the tape and examines the stitches on my arm. “So do you think they’ll let you off homework until next week?” she says, tracing the puckered brown skin.

  “I don’t know,” I answer, sighing at the thought. “I reckon I can get a sympathy vote for…”

  But I don’t finish the sentence. My eyes are on my arm, still being held by Fiona.

  My stitches are beginning to disappear. The surgical thread that I was told would take weeks to dissolve start to crumble away, the broken skin puckering and joining together.

  “Are you doing that?” I whisper. “Because I’m not doing that.”

  “Oh no,” Fiona says, dropping my arm like a hot potato. “Oh no.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  ON SATURDAY, ROE HAS BAND PRACTICE. HE’S OUT OF hospital now, and has reassured his parents that he will keep practice short, and will sit in a chair the entire time. I go to the O’Callaghans’ house carrying a plastic bag full of sweets and art supplies.

  “Hello, Maeve,” Mrs O’Callaghan says at the door, her voice disapproving. “Rory mentioned you might be stopping by.”

  “Yes, hello, Mrs O’Callaghan,” I say politely. Lily always called my mum Nora. I have never not called Lily’s mum Mrs O’Callaghan. “I was wondering if Lily was up for visitors.”

  “I’ll have to ask her,” she says shortly, and leaves me standing on the doorstep while she disappears inside. She doesn’t even let me come in the sliding door and wait on the porch, instead leaving me to linger in the front garden. She leaves me there for so long that I consider leaving. After a while, I’m certain she’s forgotten that I’m here at all.

  Mrs O’Callaghan opens the sliding door. “Only for a minute,” she says. “She’s still not well.”

  I follow her up the stairs, following the progression of Roe and Lily’s childhoods as I go. Tiny Roe with jug ears. Tiny Lily with drowsy, half-closed bug eyes. A few of these photos were taken by my mum at the back of our garden. There is a framed one of me and Lily jumping over a sprinkler. Not very many of either Roe or Lily in recent years. I think parents stop being so interested in taking photos of their children when they stop being children.

  Mrs O’Callaghan creaks open Lily’s bedroom door. “Go on,” she says. “I’ll come back in ten minutes.”

  Lily’s room isn’t much more than a single bed and a dressing table. I haven’t been in here in almost two years, but not a lot has changed, except that the drawings on the wall are more advanced. Lily is sitting up in bed, her long blonde hair over her shoulders, drawing pad in her hand. Her eyes flicker up when I come in, but she doesn’t put the pad down.

  “Hi,” I say. “How are you feeling?”

  “Hello,” she says, but she doesn’t answer the question.

  “I brought you some Heroes,” I say, rattling the plastic bag in my hand.

  “Thank you,” she replies, shortly.

  “How are you feeling?” I repeat, because she hasn’t answered.

  She puts down her pad and takes a long sip of water from the glass next to her. “Why are you here, Maeve Chambers?”

  I’m startled. Why is Lily referring to me by my full name?

  “I’m here because I wanted to see how you are. And I wanted to say I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry.”

  “Yes.”

  “For what?”

  “For treating you the way I did. For ditching you. For doing that stupid tarot reading that started this … this whole mess.”

  I say this last part tentatively. I’m still not sure how much Lily even knows about what has happened to her. Was she just knocked unconscious for the past month, like in a coma? Or does she know everything?

  She gazes at me for a moment, bored as a boy king. “You don’t have to be sorry.”

  “Oh.”

  “No, wait,” she says, cocking her head. “If you’re sorry for anything, say sorry for bringing me back.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. Say sorry for ending it all. Say sorry for turning me back into this … this creature in bed.”

  Her eyes are glassy now and beginning to brim with tears. She swipes at them aggressively, determined I don’t see her cry.

  “Do you know what I was thinking, on that stupid day you did your dumb tarot reading? I was thinking…”

  A single, crystal tear falls down her cheek and onto her sketchbook.

  “I was thinking, God, what I wouldn’t do to be anywhere or anything else. To be away from that school. Away from you. Away from the whole disgusting business of being a human.”

  Something clicks in my head. “I wished for you to go away. And you wished to be taken away.”

  Was that what activated The Housekeeper? Two twin desires, and an enchanted deck of cards to join them?

  She swipes at her face again, as more tears fall. She looks like she is trying to punch herself in the eye.

  “And I was, Maeve. It worked. I was away.”

  I gaze at the new drawings stuck to the wall with masking tape. I see an overturned trolley, floating downstream. I see tadpoles hatching. I see the purple gleam of a rainbow trout.

  “You were the river,” I say simply.

  “I was,” she says, miserably. “I was.”

  She resumes sketching, mostly as a way of distracting herself from tears.

  “I could be so huge. I could be the biggest thing. Miles and miles for ever, on and on. Or so small. Just a little stream over a few rocks…”

  She pauses, and her eyes swivel towards me.

  “I saw you,” she says, fiercely. “I saw you, once.”

  I am now rep
laying all the times I kissed her brother by the riverside. “… Oh?”

  “You had your hands in me.”

  I wince. “The cogs. The keys.”

  “I cut you,” she says, slowly. “Your blood was in the water.”

  The hair prickles at the back of my neck. She’s scaring me now. The Housekeeper has clearly left some long shadow within Lily, some imprint. Maybe even possessed her. This isn’t Lily. This isn’t the girl who would lick books and then scream laughing.

  “It healed,” I respond, and remember Fiona’s hand on my stitches yesterday. The skin is sealed now, a red scar that should take weeks to appear. If Lily and Fiona are so changed after the ritual, then what happened to me, and to Roe? Is there something lurking in us, too?

  “You can go now,” she says.

  “Are you tired?”

  “No, I just want you to go.”

  “Right. OK,” I look awkwardly at my plastic bag of corner-shop offerings. “Do you want me to leave these?”

  She looks at me blankly. “I don’t fucking care.”

  I race down the stairs, pushing past Lily’s mum so she doesn’t see that I’m crying.

  “Maeve,” she calls. “Maeve, are you all right?”

  I walk as fast as I can down the street, my head down, my nose buried in my scarf. Lily is a monster. A monster that doesn’t give a crap I almost died trying to save her, and who would rather live as a body of water than as a human girl.

  As I get to the end of the street, I see Roe getting off the bus, his guitar on his back.

  “Hey!” he calls, a big smile on his face. “Thank God. You can help me bring this back to my house. I’m not even supposed to be carrying stuff with my injuries.”

  I look at him, my eyes wet. His eyes are coated in mascara and black liner. Clearly, make-up is not just a showtime thing any more.

  “I can’t, Roe. I can’t go back there. Don’t make me.”

  “What? What happened?”

  “Lily’s different, Roe.”

  He sighs. “I know. But I guess that’s to be expected. We can… We can’t really know what she went through. It’s hard to empathize.”

  “What if the Housekeeper is using her, Roe? I looked into her eyes and … and that’s not Lily. That’s the Housekeeper talking.”

  “What do you mean? You defeated the Housekeeper, Maeve. She’s gone.”

  “Is she, though? Lily’s not even a person any more. She’s just this … this shell.”

  “Why? Why are you saying that?”

  I break off, remembering the fierce, unforgiving look in Lily’s huge eyes.

  “The way she … talked to me.”

  “Oh God. Maeve.”

  “You weren’t there, Roe. You don’t know.”

  “Sit down, Maeve.”

  I look around. There’s nowhere to sit, except for his neighbours’ low garden wall, so I perch there. Roe puts his guitar on the pavement, kneels down and gives me a long, slow kiss on the mouth.

  “Jesus,” I say, when he pulls away. “What was that for?”

  “That was so you don’t get mad at me for what I’m about to say next.”

  He takes a deep breath, and sits down on the wall next to me. “Lily doesn’t have to forgive you.”

  “What?”

  “I understand what you did. I understand everything. So does Fiona. But Lily doesn’t have to. Lily can hate you as much as Lily wants.”

  “But…” I say, grappling at this like a rope that’s burning the flesh on my hands. “What I did for her? I became a witch for her. I stuck a knife into my arm.”

  “She didn’t see any of it.” He shrugs. “That means nothing to her.”

  “But she knows! I told her! You told her! Didn’t you?”

  “I told her everything. We’re actually –” he pauses, considering this – “we’re actually closer now than we’ve ever been.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” I say, petulantly.

  “With all due respect, she’s not your sister. Only me and Lily know what’s between me and Lily. And both of us…” He trails off.

  “What?”

  “Both of us know what it is to feel like the body you have isn’t always the body you want. I promise not to write any bad songs about it, but Lily’s always going to be part of my life now. We’re not going to make the same mistake again, shut each other out and just assume the other one is trundling along fine. So that means…”

  “What? What does that mean?”

  “It means that you two, and Fiona, are going to have to accept that.”

  And as he says it, a strand of light spreads, wormlike, through my mind. One that, like the night I looked at Fiona and saw the moon shooting through her, is touched with a kind of silver glow. Immediately, I am able to recognize that this is a light coming from Roe, and that it is one I can grab and hold on to, like a rope ladder dangling from a helicopter. Before I even have a chance to speak, I realize that the light is a thought, and the thought is his.

  I hope she loves me enough to try.

  “Maeve? Did you hear what I said? I think it’s important for Lily to have a group she can immerse in, y’know? A group like ours.”

  “So you want Lily to hang out with us, but you also think it’s fine for her to hate me.”

  “I’m just saying that you need to give it time. Can you give it time? Time for her to heal, for you guys to work it out, whatever? Then we can be … I don’t know. A foursome.”

  “Right,” I grumble. “Earth, Air, Fire, Water.”

  “Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, yes.”

  “Right.”

  I lean my head on his shoulder and wonder just how easy life would be if I weren’t in love with Roe O’Callaghan.

  But, oh God, how boring.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  SPRING

  FIONA AND I ARE WALKING TO THE RIVER, AND SHE’S complaining again.

  “I just wish I had a gift for something I could use, y’know? Like, being able to memorize huge monologues, or dance choreography, or something. Not this.”

  Fiona has not quite accepted her newfound status as a healer. It is possible that she never will. It’s not that she doesn’t care about people. In fact, she’s probably one of the most compassionate people I’ve ever known. But Fiona is butting her head up against something that, as close as we are, Roe and I can never understand. We’re not working against a stereotype that says you should always be the girl with the tourniquets.

  “All I want is what you have,” she said to me once. “The right to be selfish.”

  “Yes, Fi, but then you wouldn’t have saved our lives.”

  “What good is that doing my career, though?”

  “I’m coming to your bloody play, aren’t I, Miss Thing?”

  “I suppose,” she says, adjusting the canvas bag filled with sandwiches on her shoulder. The Othello run went well, even if it was just three performances. Now she’s playing the younger sister in some play about the Blitz.

  “Hey, Maeve.” She suddenly grins. “I’m thinking of a number.”

  “This again.”

  “Go on. We said you need to practise.”

  I close my eyes for a moment, and feel for Fiona’s tail of light. “You’re not thinking of a number,” I say, finally. “You’re thinking about whether you’re going to keep being cast in the kid sister roles, and whether anyone will take you seriously.”

  “Well, damn.”

  The telepathy thing hasn’t gone away. It feels mad to even call it that, especially as it’s not at all how you see it in films. There, it’s always this rush of a million different voices, hitting the person like a wall of sound. With me, it’s never voices. It’s lights. Strands of coloured lights that I grab on to and follow until I’m a tourist in someone else’s brain. It takes time. It takes concentration. And it’s absolutely knackering.

  In the days after the ritual, Fiona and I went to Divination, mostly to reassure Fionnuala that we were OK.
It wasn’t an easy conversation to have, with her spinning between wild rage at having disobeyed her and extreme relief that what happened to Heaven hadn’t happened to me. She made us a cup of camomile tea, and slowly, we told her about our gifts. About the healing, the lights, the scar tissue that could disappear under Fi’s fingertips.

  “The ritual changed you. You’ve seen beyond the veil,” Fionnuala sighed, a tinge of jealousy in her voice. “And now you’re for ever changed.”

  Roe and Lily are already on the grass when we get to the Beg, sitting on a blanket, deep in conversation. We waited for a long time to see whether they had gained anything in the ritual. Eventually, we gave up. Fiona and I had big conversations about the fact that we were the only ones who gained gifts afterwards, and that maybe for the O’Callaghans, surviving was a gift great enough. But then it happened.

  Small things, first. A cheap padlock sprung open when Roe put his hand on it. We thought it was a fluke. Then one day I was locked out of my house, and called him round to keep me company while I waited for Dad to get home. We decided to try the lock trick again. The front door stayed put; but the back door, with its old lock and rusty brown handle, flew right open.

  He said, “Oh my God.”

  I said, “Welcome to the club.”

  The vague talent he had for fixing things has flowered into a kind of strange understanding of inanimate objects, one that makes perfect sense to him, but he struggles to explain. He gave me a watch battery on the bus and told me to hide it anywhere in my house. Two days later, he walked through the front door, took one long blink, and said, “Behind the bookcase in Pat’s room.”

  “Hey, you guys,” I say, bending down to kiss Roe. “What are you chatting about?”

  “It’s private,” Lily says. Firmly. Not crossly. A month ago it would have been snappily. Now, we are on “firmly”.

  “OK.” I nod. “Me and Fiona have hot chicken rolls and cans.”

  “Angels,” Roe says.

  “We try,” Fiona agrees. “Who wants a Game of Thrones tarot reading?”

  “Ooh, me,” Lily says, huddling in close to her.

  I try not to take it too personally.

  On the whole, Lily’s mental recovery seems to be taking much longer than her physical one. The world was exhausting to her for a long time after the ritual. I think she might have given up on living entirely, if her gift hadn’t appeared.