The Accident Season

by Fowley-Doyle, Moïra

  The stairs are shaking. We grab hold of the banister rail and cling on to it all the way down, helping each other over the missing step, coughing and spluttering on the thick black smoke. Just as Alice and I reach the last step, the banister rail breaks off and the entire staircase collapses to the floor. We topple over each other into the burning hallway.

  Alice’s leg goes out from under her. The bones in my foot screech together like the hinges of the front door glowing orange through the smoke. Bea and Sam hold Alice up and we stagger through the entrance hall, which has never seemed so long, and the house bows down around us, sending bits of singed ceiling, splinters of wood, embers and ashes and choking black billows of smoke down around us.

  When we scramble through the front door, the fire hits our skin and we scream and the ghost house spits us out into the garden, into the rain, where we roll on the wet grass to put out the flames on our clothes and cool our burning skin. Then we crawl to the giant gates and lie down there, burned and broken, and we watch as the ghost house falls apart.

  18

  The changeling siblings take each other’s hands and hold on tight. They stand facing the iron stepfather who has kept them trapped all these years, and as one creature, they open their mouths and scream.

  From their scream there grows a forest. It pushes through the stone slabs of the floors of the house, it breaks down the walls, it rips at the ceilings like it’s tearing the whole world apart. The woodsprite grows roots that burrow deep into the house’s foundations and she grows like an oak to the rafters. The ghost boy begins to flicker and fade until he is almost invisible. He sneaks unseen behind his stepfather and bolts the door so he can’t escape. The mermaid calls up the sea. She closes her throat, and the gills in her neck open. The water rises up through the floor of the old house; it pools across the carpets, it laps up against the skirting boards and it rises and rises until it fills every room. The fairy girl grows wings. They are huge and beautiful. They are five times as big as she is, and they are strong enough to carry her and her siblings up, up, up to where their woodsprite sister nestles on the roof surrounded by leaves.

  The water fills the house—fills the stairwell when their stepfather tries to climb, fills the bedrooms, which are empty but for the body of a wolf. The siblings watch from their leafy perch as their evil stepfather flounders and flails under the weight of the water. He grabs and gasps and clutches at his throat, but the siblings are more powerful together than he is alone, and when a watery dawn rises outside the spirits’ house and the sea recedes, he lies dead and drowned at the foot of the stairs.

  The spell is broken. The fairy girl extends her wings and carries her three siblings over oceans and mountains, over forests and towns, across the boundaries of the human world to where their mother is waiting. Back home.

  ***

  My mother meets us at the hospital. When she and Gracie get here, we are all salved and stitched and bandaged, and my foot, Alice’s leg, and Sam’s hand are in casts. Bea has borrowed a marker from one of the nurses and is already doodling on the plaster. Our burns are wrapped in cotton and gauze. The pain medication takes the edge off the worst of the blisters so that we just feel singed.

  “Singed.” I say it out loud. Bea writes it on my cast. Singed, singe, sing, sang, song. Our pain is a song. It opens us out and drops pebbles of truth inside us and then it sews us back up again. It is the end of the accident season. Bruises fade, skin stitches together, burns mend. Broken hearts become whole again.

  In the car on the way home, Sam leans his head on my shoulder. We stay close. Bea and Alice hold hands. We are all together in the backseat, hip to hip to hip to hip, overlapping where we’re packed in too tight. We are a little like one person: four heads, eight legs, forty fingers, five broken bones. A million miles of singing skin.

  My mother looks back at us in the rearview mirror. She sees Alice’s and Bea’s joined hands. She sees our burns and cuts and bruises. She touches the cast on her own arm. Gracie keeps her eyes on the road. When we get home, it is she who makes the tea. She digs in under the sink for a minute and comes up with the kettle. My mother sighs and smiles.

  “Tell me what’s been happening here,” she says when we are all sitting down. Her voice is almost normal. Gracie hands her a biscuit. We sit in a circle around the padded table like we’re about to play a game. The typewriter rests on the floor beside me. “Tell me what I’ve missed. What I’m missing. Fill in the blanks for me.”

  We look at each other. For a while we don’t say anything. We could tell it like a story. We could take each secret out of the box and read it aloud around the table, sentence after sentence, a spoken exquisite corpse. We could make this a fairy tale.

  But we don’t. Instead, we tell my mother the truth. About the ghost house, about the party, about Nick. At some point my mother starts to cry, but silently, so as not to interrupt.

  The only part that is still like a story is when we tell her about Elsie. And only I know how that story ends. Secrets and guardian spirits. My mother always told me I’d catch my death out there. Bea and Alice and Sam bend their heads, but it is my mother who looks like she’s seen a ghost.

  “I have something to tell you too,” she tells us. “But first I have a question.”

  I get nervous. There is only one secret I can think of that we haven’t told her. I look over at Sam. His hair falls in his eyes.

  My mother turns to Alice. She asks, “Did you set the fire?”

  Alice’s face is pale and pink in patches, her bangs and eyebrows burned away. Her eyes are bloodshot, her cheeks tear-stained. She stares straight at my mother and shakes her head. She looks at us all in turn. “No,” she says. “No.” Bea lets out a breath. I realize she’s probably been wondering since we saw the fire. The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind. Sam is staring at Alice as if he can see through her skull.

  “I fell asleep,” Alice says. “I went to the ghost house and I lit some candles and drank some whiskey and I fell asleep. When I woke up, the fire was all around me.” Bea’s hand is on Alice’s knee—I can tell by the way she’s leaning in her seat. Alice tucks her singed hair away from her face and takes a little breath. “But I didn’t run out when I could have.” My mother hides her mouth in her hands. Alice looks at Bea, at me and at Sam. “I’m glad you came to get me,” she says.

  “And you’ll never try—you’ll never do something like that again?” My mother’s voice is like an old lady’s. Alice shakes her head harder this time. She promises. She puts her hands on my mother’s hands and promises again. Gracie puts more biscuits on the table.

  “What did you want to tell us?” I ask my mother when our mouths are full of crumbs. The tea is milky sweet and comforting. It spreads warmth all down my chest to my tummy. My mother frowns and fluffs up her purple hair. It hangs around her face in tangles. She reaches out and touches the typewriter on the floor beside us.

  “I don’t know how to—” she says; then she breathes deep and starts over. She says, “It started with the first accident.”

  We all sit forward in our seats. The accident season is something that’s acknowledged, sometimes spoken of, but never explained.

  “It started with the first accident,” my mother says again. “Three years before Alice was born.”

  Gracie’s eyes are all concern. I realize that this is a story she’s heard before. I don’t know if I feel angry or relieved.

  “When I was very young,” my mother tells us, “I had a daughter. Before you, Alice. Her father was someone I met at a party once, but I never saw him again.”

  We all say, “What?” We don’t even look at each other, we’re all that shocked.

  My mother suddenly looks so sad. “She died before any of you were born. She wasn’t two years old. We were crossing the river—she ran ahead, the bridge collapsed. She fell in the water.” My mother’s voice sounds like it’s completely
detached from her body. It sounds like she’s telling a story, like it isn’t something real. “The current took her. I tried to follow, but it was too late. We found her downstream—there’s this old house that the river flows under. We found her washed up on the grounds, but she hadn’t drowned. She didn’t wake up either. She died of pneumonia a month later. I didn’t—” My mother stops. “It was the worst time. There’s no other way I can say it. And then I met your father, and it was like life suddenly started again. Like a new beginning.”

  “Did he know?” Alice whispers.

  My mother looks down at her hands. “After a few years I told him. But for you . . . I was never able to find the words. It’s part of the reason I gave you girls my last name instead of your father’s. I wanted to keep you connected to her, even if I couldn’t tell you.”

  “What was her name?” I ask.

  My mother smiles sadly. “Now, don’t read too much into this,” she says, “but it’s sort of why I’m telling you this now.”

  “Read into what?” says Sam.

  My mother puts her hands palms up on the table, like she’s offering us everything. “Her name was Elsie,” she says.

  “Elsie.” I can’t tell if my heart’s stopped beating or it’s beating triple-time. “What river? This river?” I point at the front door; I point out of the house and down the road and through the field to where the river runs away, along the picnic-table-strewn banks, along the muddy walks, to where it hides underneath a house for a while before resurfacing on the other side of the garden. “You found her in the grounds of a house—you mean the ghost house? Where we had the party? Where I saw Elsie?” I can hardly breathe. “Did you tell her to wrap up warm? Did you tell her she’d catch her death out there?”

  My mother’s smile is still sad, but there’s a knowing look in her eyes. “All mothers say that to their children.”

  “You said it to Elsie.”

  “Just like I’m sure your friend Elsie’s mother said it to her.”

  I look to Bea, Sam, and Alice for support. “I don’t think they’re different people, Mom. I don’t think so.”

  My mother leans over the table and touches my cheek. “Oh, honey,” she says. “I understand why you’d like to think that, but it’s just a coincidence.” I shake my mother’s hand away. “She’s just a girl with the same name.”

  I take out my phone and open up my photos. I put the phone flat on the table and everyone crowds around.

  “Look,” I say. “Look.” But when I swipe through the photos, I don’t always see what I’m looking for.

  I look for Elsie in all my pictures. She’s there, yes, in a few of them. Not in all. In the class photographs, the locker room snapshots, the pictures taken at lunchtime or on school tours. Never a full Elsie, though. Just a flash of mousy hair here, a sensible brown shoe there, the hint of an ugly cardigan in the background.

  “But she was there.” I flick backward and forward, faster and faster. “She was in all of them.”

  My mother puts a calming hand on my arm. “I think the Malloys across town have a daughter your age,” she says. Gracie makes a little Oh yeah noise. “I’m pretty sure her name is Elsie. It makes sense that she would go to your school.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  Gracie hasn’t heard me. “Sharon Malloy,” she says. “She’s my hairdresser.”

  “But—”

  “They’ve just moved to Cork,” Gracie says. “Or so I heard.” My mother nods. I shake my head.

  “No.” I hate that Sam and Alice look unsure. “You said she fell in the river but she didn’t die until a month later. When was it? What was the date?”

  My mother shakes her head. “I don’t . . . It was the very beginning of the accident season. I don’t know. The first week of October. But she died on the thirty-first.” She says that like it’s a date she’ll never forget.

  “But that’s it—that’s the accident season.” I open my palms in supplication. “It’s the same every year.”

  “Cara—”

  “No! No. She was by the river. She set the traps. She was in the ghost house. She’s been looking out for us, you know that.” My voice rises. I don’t mean it to. “She’s why the accident season happens. She said that—she goes searching, one month of every year. That’s why the accidents happen.” I hit my hand on the table. “That’s why the accidents happen.” My fist thumps dully on the padded wood.

  Alice grabs my arms before I can hit the table again. “Cara,” she says. “So many of those weren’t accidents.”

  I turn around in a circle. I look at the wrapped and padded house. A wildness builds inside me. I run at the walls. I rip the padding off the hinges. I tear the cloth away from the door handles. I grab the wool and bubble wrap by the fistful, I wrench it away. I uncover the table, the sharp corners of the kitchen counters. My nails split and my burned skin pulls and my broken foot in its cast feels heavy, but I keep going. I tear the padded rags apart. I rip up the afghan rugs. I don’t know when it is that the others join me, but I am in the living room baring the corners of the walls with Alice, I am pulling up the rugs in the hall with Sam, Gracie and my mother are plugging in the toaster and reconnecting the gas burners.

  Bea laughs her witchy laugh and finds twine somewhere—hidden in a once-locked drawer with the carving knives—and she strings it up around the house. She winds it around all the exposed nails, she drapes it over picture frames. Then she takes the sharpest pins from my mother’s sewing box and drives them through the papery skins of all our secrets. When our house is sharp and hard and dangerous again, the secrets are right there at head height, impossible to hide from, impossible to ignore.

  We all stand in the hall and breathe hard. We read our secrets aloud. We count our bruises. We eat some toast. We drink more tea. When we laugh, the sound echoes. The house feels exposed and a little too real.

  Soon, it is morning. The sun rises watery and weak outside the kitchen window. The trees at the bottom of the garden shimmy in the rain. We haven’t slept. Outside, the bins overflow with rags and wrappings. My mother and Gracie go into the sitting room to get some rest and tell us all to go to bed.

  We go upstairs and pull the mattresses off all our beds and into Alice’s room again. It takes a long time because of our broken bones. Bea sits behind Alice at Alice’s vanity table and cuts her burned hair. It falls onto the carpet like autumn leaves.

  Sam and I lie together by the wall and watch them. I take Sam’s plaster-casted hand in both of mine. There are words and swirls and secrets written on it. It is hard to the touch. I kiss the tips of his fingers without really realizing it, and Alice’s and Bea’s reflections look out at us and they know.

  “Well,” says Alice finally. “I thought so.”

  “The cards never lie,” says Bea. Sam blushes. So that’s what he asked.

  Bea is smiling like she’s been waiting for this all along, but Alice looks at us strangely. I decide not to pretend anymore. I say to her, “So you don’t think it’s weird?”

  “I think it’s very weird,” says Alice. Sam bites his lip. “But I don’t think it’s wrong.”

  “Good,” Sam says. “Because it’s not.” His head is high like he’s practiced saying this in front of the mirror. “We’re not related or anything—we just . . . we just live in the same house.”

  “And have the same family, and grew up together,” Alice says, but she’s smiling. Then she shrugs. “It’ll take some getting used to. And I have no idea what Mom’ll think—”

  “Don’t tell her.” Sam’s voice is huge in the room.

  Alice is taken aback. “I wasn’t going to, Sammy,” she says softly. “But she’ll figure it out.”

  I look at my hands on Sam’s hand, I look into his riverbed eyes. I get up carefully and limp downstairs. I sit at the typewriter. I hid the secret earlier when Bea was hanging the
m all up, but now I write it out again. I type it carefully so the ink doesn’t run.

  I am in love with Sam.

  I tear out the sheet of paper and pin it to the twine in the hall, just at eye level, in front of the kitchen so that everyone can see it.

  ***

  Later, we go down to the river. We leave all our layers in the echoey house and we limp-walk-hobble down to the water like changeling things, like we’re not quite used to this human skin.

  I lead Sam and Bea and Alice along the bank toward the broken bridge and we stand facing the rushing river and we hold hands in a line and we scream and scream to the other side. Birds fly out of the trees. Fish hide in their hollows. Dogs bark. The river rises up to swallow us, but it takes all our secrets instead. The ones that were stuck to the roofs of our mouths. The ones that made it hard to speak. The trees on the opposite bank shake with them.

  I think about the clearing that the trees are hiding. I think about the trap, about the dream catchers and the flypapers on the trees. I think about all the little Elsies. She needs us to help her find her way home.

  When I tell the others what I’m thinking, Bea says, “You can’t cross the water with that cast.” My shoulders droop. Then Bea kisses my cheek and grins. “Wait here just one second.” She splashes into the river and across to the other side. The water sucks at her bare legs. When she returns, she’s holding her dress out like an apron. Inside are all the dolls.

  “I told you.” I pick up the pieces of the porcelain Elsie. “I told you it was her.”

  ***

  A few days later, my mother shows us her grave. Baby Elsie, we call her when my mother is around, but in our hearts we know she is as old as we are. After that, we go there sometimes. We bring flowers and smoke cigarettes, we drink whiskey from hip flasks. Every time we leave, we put a tiny doll beside the headstone.