Child of My Heart

by Alice McDermott

  Mrs. Richardson placed her broad hand on my shoulder. “When will your parents be home?” she asked me, and I said, “Soon.” She called across the lawn to her husband. “They’ll be home any minute. Tell them we’ve gone to the emergency room in Southampton. We’ll meet them there.” And then, to her dogs, “You be good boys, now.”

  The cop got out and opened the back door for us. Holding Daisy in my arms, I slid into the back seat, and then Mrs. Richardson slid in right beside me. The cop took a red light out of his glove compartment, wires trailing from it, and put it on the dashboard.

  “Well, isn’t this fortunate?” Mrs. Richardson said pleasantly. “To have a policeman right next door.”

  There was a small black radio under the dashboard as well, and as he drove, he pulled a microphone from it and, in an efficient and nasal voice that did not seem his own, reported that he was taking a child to the Southampton emergency room, dog bite, ankle, and then turned over his shoulder to ask us if she’d been bitten anywhere else. Daisy and I both said, “No.”

  Then, with his voice lowered, he said, “A stray” and “taken care of.” He gave the Morans’ address. “Under a tarp and some pine boards,” he said. “West side of the house, toward the back.”

  Mrs. Richardson was unwrapping the bloodied towel from Daisy’s foot. “We want to keep some pressure on this,” she said, as she wrapped it again, more tightly, her solid gray bangs moving over her steely eyes. And then she said, in the same determined voice, “Such a pretty shoe, Daisy, you’ll have to tell me where you found them.”

  Crying, her head under my chin, Daisy whispered, “It hurts, it hurts.” I stroked her arm. “I know,” I said. “I know.” Then I remembered the aspirins I had taken from Flora’s room. I slipped my fingers under her head, into the pocket of my shirt, and slid out as many as I could, finding the turquoise jewel as I did. I held the aspirins out to her in the palm of my hand, and she took them one by one.

  We were in the hospital only twenty minutes or so when my parents arrived. Daisy’s parents were there by ten. By then the conversations had begun, whispered conversations between the doctors and the parents, mine and Daisy’s, conversations to which I was not privy.

  She spent the night there, Aunt Peg and Uncle Jack sleeping on chairs beside her. My parents and I went home and gathered her things, all the new and unused outfits, the hairbrush and toothbrush, the new sneakers still bound together with their plastic string. I added a few of my old clothes to her suitcase—the red-and-blue-checked sundress, the white Sunday dress with the green sash, the red Gypsy skirt, on a whim, certain somehow that it would not meet with Uncle Jack’s approval. There was only a bit of blood on the inside of her pink shoe and I scrubbed at it with cold water until it was gone. Then I glued the jewel back into place and brought the shoe to her in her hospital room the next morning. Uncle Jack shouted, “Hey, Cinderella,” but then turned to Aunt Peg, frowning, to say, “Maybe she shouldn’t have been wearing these,” a last attempt to find something he might add to his lengthy list of prohibitions, to find an ordinary and avoidable cause that would yield an attainable antidote for whatever it was that troubled poor Daisy.

  They left for Queens Village that afternoon, and for another hospital, in the city, by the following morning. Driving back to our own house, my parents told me, hesitantly, vaguely, but speaking together and for each other, as was their way, that the doctors were afraid there was some trouble with Daisy’s blood. Had I noticed her bruises, they asked, and I said I had. Perhaps, they said, I should have mentioned them to someone. I said I figured it was just the result of being raised with so many siblings. “Like the Moran kids,” my parents said together, and I was absolved.

  I took care of the Scotties and Red Rover for the rest of the week. And on Saturday night I babysat for the Swanson kids. Mr. Clarke had returned Moe and Larry to them that morning. They were, apparently, ready to take on the experience of owning pets again. The two cats curled around my legs when I came to the house, oblivious to all, and when I asked Debbie how she’d managed to change her mother’s mind, she gave me a sly look and said she had just asked nicely if the cats could come back. But Donny laughed. He was straddling the back of the wicker couch where we sat. “Yeah, right,” he said. “She told the doctor she goes to that she’d kill herself if the cats didn’t come back.”

  Debbie turned on him with all the vehemence of a woman betrayed. “Did not,” she said.

  “You know you did.”

  I held up my hands. It was another lovely summer twilight and we were on the wide front porch, just below the widow’s watch, waiting for the fireflies to begin to appear once more. “I don’t even want to know,” I said. “Don’t even tell me.”

  I didn’t go back to Flora’s. When we ran into the cook outside church on Sunday, my mother was the one to explain what had happened to Daisy and why I had been missing. The good lady clucked her tongue and shook her head and said the poor little thing never did look right to her, so pale. She said it was perfectly fine that I hadn’t been by—absolution all around— she was quite enjoying the little girl, Frenchy had returned just yesterday morning, and her own mother was due back next weekend. “No doubt,” she said to me, “she’ll be giving you a call, to get back into the routine.”

  But she never did. That evening I had a call from Mrs. Carew, my first employer. Her sister was visiting from Princeton with two young children and she wondered if I’d be free for the week. Then the Swansons moved in for the rest of the summer, and I was busy with them. Then the Kaufman twins and Jill arrived. She had now become “my fiancée” and wore a huge ruby ring about the size and shape of the English muffin I had folded over Daisy’s finger, back on that morning in June. She slept in the guest bedroom, I was happy to see, and was modest around the pool. She winked at me once, after she had rebuffed Dr. Kaufman for placing his hand on her thigh. “Three words to live by,” she told me, shaking her bangles, counting them off on her manicured fingers, “after—the— wedding.”

  I spoke to Daisy every Sunday, just a word or two when she was sick, longer conversations when she was feeling better. She always asked about the dogs and the cats, and I told her stories about all of them, Rags included. I told her the Moran kids were always asking for her. And that poor Petey sent his love— which was always met by a purposeful silence that brought more vividly to my mind her freckled blush and her goofy grin than any words she might have spoken. In March she left us— as all the family took to saying, harking back to some ancient, ancestral turn of phrase none of us, separately, could have claimed as our own, although Bernadette and I, alone in our beds, might over the years have thought to say, She left me. Uncle Tommy was visiting us when the long-expected phone call finally came, and he was the first to point out (determined to be happy) that she had left us in the season of the Resurrection, the beginning of spring.

  Late in August of the summer Daisy came, just after my parents had left for work, I carried a plum and my book to the front porch, and when I had finished them both, I went down the steps and around to the back of the house, my feet bare in the wet grass, the sun warm enough on my shoulders and my hair to portend the hot, humid day that was to come, despite the pleasant ease of the morning air. I peeked behind the hedge that ran beneath our bedroom windows but could find no evidence that Petey had been there, although I’d thought I’d heard him during the night. I went up the back steps and, just as I pulled open the screen door, saw the blurred gray bundle that I knew immediately, even before I bent down to examine it, was a living thing. Three baby rabbits, newborn, blind, wrapped in what appeared to be their own sticky cocoon. I went into the house, through the kitchen and the living room and into my bedroom, where I dumped the ribbons out of my ribbon box—just a shoebox covered with fabric—and carried it outside. I went around the perimeter of our lawn, pulling at the long grass, filling the box. I knew without asking that this was Petey’s gift, indistinguishable as it was from a burden. Petey, who always
used to ask, challenging and pleading at the same time, “Do you like me? Do you like my family?” Who had wept with his fists tight. Who would be plagued all his life by anger and affection, by gifts gone awry, by the irreconcilable difference between what he got and what he longed for— by the inevitable, insufferable loss buried like a dark jewel at the heart of every act of love.

  I tore at the grass around our yard, handful after quick handful, and as if the sound of it had drawn them, when I looked up, the Moran kids were slowly moving through our gate. Judy with baby June in her arms, Janey with a box of sweet cereal clutched to her chest, Tony and Petey bumping arms and hips as if battling to share the same space.

  Without a word, I carried the box to the steps and bent down, and with the Moran kids gathered around me, I gently lifted the hopeless little things, still breathing, into the nest of torn grass.

  A Note on the Author

  Alice McDermott is the author of A Bigamist’s Daughter,

  That Night, At Weddings and Wakes and Charming Billy,

  winner of the National Book Award in 1998.

  She lives with her family outside Washington DC.

  Praise for Child of My Heart

  ‘Enough to turn your heart into a red velvet pin cushion … There’s no one like McDermott … her touch is light as a feather, her perceptions purely accurate’ Elle

  Oh, but what a way with words. From Theresa’s wryly knowing narration to McDermott’s sharply etched characterisations, Child of My Heart dazzles’ USA Today

  ‘Her turf resembles that of Scott Fitzgerald more than it does any other Irish-American writer … compelling … Take it with you to the beach, and make sure the kids get sand between their toes’ Irish Times

  ‘McDermott sees everything and misses nothing … She is a miniaturist, a master of the oblique and the crystallised, indelible moment’ Houston Chronicle

  ‘A wondrous new novel … McDermott is one of our finest novelists at work today’ Los Angeles Times

  ‘McDermott’s prose slips down like liquid, often carrying alcohol’s lingering sting’ Daily Mail

  ‘Shimmers … McDermott’s fiction is larger than it seems, this novel lingers in the mind with the tenacity of stone steps, sculpted and shaped by time and weight, evoking all the various erosions of love’ Boston Globe

  ‘McDermott spins a magical tale full of lyrical language and delightful imagery’ Irish Independent

  ‘Child of My Heart is a remarkably poised and provocative work … uplifting, enchanting … it’s a great escapism because the story is so authentic: you’ll return refreshed and ready to look your tired adult’s world with new eyes’ Observer

  ‘We have echoes and stirrings of Hardy, Shakespeare, Dickens, James, Beatrix Potter, Christina Rossetti… Theresa is a vessel containing a multitude of heroines, a transcendence of ethereal beauties who loved and live in the minds of their readers and inventors’ Chicago Tribune

  By the Same Author

  A Bigamist’s Daughter

  That Night

  At Weddings and Wakes

  Charming Billy

  At Weddings and Wakes Alice McDermott £6.99 0 7475 6394 2

  ‘A beautifully observed chronicle of New York family lives … few writers have exploited the half-silence to such exquisite effect’ Observer

  Twice a week, Lucy Dailey leaves suburbia with her three children in tow, returning to the Brooklyn home where she grew up, and where her stepmother and unmarried sisters still live. Aunt Veronica, with her wounded face and dreams of beauty, drowns her sorrows in drink. Aunt Agnes, an acerbic student of elegance, sips only from the finest crystal as she sees Aunt May, the ex-nun, blossom with a late and unexpected love. And all the while, the children watch, absorbing the legacy of their haunted family.

  ‘A haunting and masterly work of literary art’ Wall Street Journal

  To order from Bookpost PoBox29 Douglas Isle of Man IM99 1 BQ www.bookpost.co.uk

  email: bookshop@enterprise.net fax: 01624 837033 tel 01624 836000

  www.bloomsbury.com/alicemcdermott

  Charming Billy Alice McDermott £6.99 0 7475 45391

  Winner of the National Book Award 1998

  ‘Eloquent … heartbreaking … McDermott is brilliant’ Hew York Times Review of Books

  On Long Island one summer years ago, Billy fell in love with a beautiful Irish girl. Billy wanted to marry Eva, but she went back to Ireland. Then Billy‘s cousin Dennis had to break the terrible news: Eva had died of pneumonia. Billy never got over it. Anybody who knew him would tell you so. Billy began courting Maeve not long after, but for the rest of their lives, he, she and Dennis shared a hidden, twisted grief.

  ‘As powerful as watching a film. We are there with the characters, we know and understand them intimately’ Independent on Sunday

  To order from Bookpost PoBox29 Douglas Isle of Man IM99 1 BQ www.bookpost.co.uk

  email: bookshop@enterprise.net fax: 01624 837033 tel 01624 836000

  www.bloomsbury.com/alicemcdermott

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  First published in Great Britain 2003

  This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Copyright © by Alice McDermott 2002

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 9781408806678 (e-book)

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