Crooked Branch (9781101615072)

by Cummins, Jeanine

  “Are you experiencing any of these symptoms?” she asks, gesturing to the page in my hand.

  I’m suddenly completely, unreasonably enraged, like an angry teenager. I don’t want to look at a goddamned checklist. I take a deep breath, and close my eyes for a moment. I have to read it like a grown-up. I open my eyes and look at the paper:

  Do you feel sad or low? Are you more tired than usual? Do little things upset or annoy you? Do you have trouble concentrating or making decisions? Do you feel like you have no one to talk to? Do you feel numb or disconnected from your baby? Do you feel scared that something bad might happen?

  I don’t mean to, but I roll my eyes.

  “Why are you rolling your eyes?” she asks.

  I want to punch Dr. Zimmer in the face, but I refrain, which feels like a noteworthy triumph, even though I’ve never punched anyone in the face in my entire life. I haven’t even considered it. I’m not a face-puncher. If you gave me a thousand dollars to punch someone in the face, I’m not sure I could do it. Unless that person was Dr. Zimmer.

  “Because this isn’t what I’m here for!” I say instead, struggling to keep my voice at an acceptable volume. “Of course I’m more tired than usual. Of course every little thing upsets me. I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since my second trimester.”

  Dr. Zimmer has finally stopped staring at me, and is scribbling furiously on her notepad. I look back at the inane checklist.

  “Do you feel scared that something bad might happen?” I read aloud. “Are you kidding me? Show me a new mother who doesn’t stand over her baby’s crib for hours a day, just willing that kid to keep breathing. Of course I’m scared that something bad will happen. I imagine a thousand different deaths a day for my daughter. I’m obsessed with mortality, that she is growing older, even now.” My voice is rising in pitch. I can hear the hysteria creeping in. “She will grow up and die, my baby will die. We will all die. I’m a hormone freak show, I’m obsessed with death. But this is not why I’m here!”

  I’m clutching the checklist in my hand and shaking it at her. I tear it in two, crumple the halves together into a ball. I love the crashing loudness of the paper destruction, but my tirade has exhausted me, and I’m spent. Now that it’s totally quiet in the breathless room and I’m grasping the ruined paper ball in my fist, I begin to feel embarrassed. I lean back against the couch and shake my head.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. I feel unhinged, completely deranged. I didn’t even know that about myself until I heard it coming out of mouth—about being obsessed with mortality. But it’s true. It’s all I think about since Emma was born—how my life is whizzing by, and soon I’ll be gone. But Dr. Zimmer just waves her hand like it’s a wand, and it will banish whatever badness has come into the room. My teenage self will retreat, and I will be restored to adulthood because she bids it so. She folds her notebook closed and tucks it into her lap, leans toward me.

  “You’re obviously deeply frustrated,” she says.

  Man, she is astute. I bite my lip.

  “Maybe this was a mistake,” I say.

  “Maybe it was,” she concedes. I wonder if she’ll ask me to leave now. “But you’ll never know unless you stay and give it a chance. I won’t condescend to you, or make any assumptions. We can just talk.”

  I stuff the ball of paper down in between the couch cushions. “Okay,” I say.

  She nods. “So let’s just forget about the checklist.”

  “Yes, let’s.”

  The ferns on the window ledge behind her are waving slightly in the draft from the air-conditioning vent overhead, and so is Dr. Zimmer’s hair-halo.

  “It’s just. It’s not postpartum depression,” I say. “There’s more to it than that.”

  “Okay,” she says. “Like what?”

  I take a deep breath. “I just feel totally lost. Like I don’t know who I am anymore. I’ve never felt this way. I’ve always been totally grounded and ambitious. I’ve always had a very strong sense of myself.”

  Dr. Zimmer looks completely unintrigued.

  “And—” I hesitate. There’s so much I don’t want to tell her. I guess those are probably the things it’s most important to confess. “I’ve started to hear things.”

  She perks up. “What kinds of things?”

  “Crunching.”

  “Crunching?”

  “Yeah, crunching,” I say. “Crrrrrk, crrrrrrk, crrrrrrk. At night, when I’m in bed, I hear it. At first I thought it was coming from the attic, but then it just seems to come from all around. Like it’s coming from inside my head.”

  “Couldn’t there be some logical explanation?” she asks.

  “Like a tumor?”

  Dr. Zimmer frowns. “I was thinking more along the lines of a squirrel in the attic.”

  “We’ve checked and checked,” I say. “There’s nothing up there. And my husband doesn’t hear it, even when I wake him up. And it’s so real. It’s loud.”

  “Okay.” Dr. Zimmer nods. “Any voices?”

  “No.” I shudder. I’d never even thought of that. “No, thank God.”

  “Okay, what else?” she asks.

  Isn’t that enough?

  “I don’t know, I just find myself doing things and saying things that are insane. I can’t seem to control myself. Like what just happened here, that outburst? That checklist made me so damned angry. I’m not usually like that. Or I didn’t used to be.”

  She waits for me to continue. She knows there’s something more coming—it feels like I’m in a confessional and I’m about to go for it. It’s that awful swelling moment of terrified shame before you admit your lusty buffoonery to the shocked and kindly priest.

  “Last week I told someone that the baby died,” I whisper.

  It’s the same whisper I use when Emma’s sleeping and I don’t want to wake her, a hope of not being heard. I can’t meet her eye now. I’m too ashamed to look up, but I imagine I hear something like empathy in her one-syllable response.

  “Oh.”

  • • •

  At home, the baby monitor is propped against the window frame, and I’m padding around the attic in my fluffiest (quietest) socks, careful not to wake Emma, who’s napping in the nursery below. The window is thick with grime, but that’s no match for the hard, gushing light of a September afternoon. I’m sending up rockets of dust through the sunbeams, and trying hard to avoid sneezing. Three weeks after I gave birth, my incision is still prone to frequent spasms of icy pain. Right after we bought this house, I started cleaning out the attic, but then I got too pregnant to move, and I abandoned it half-finished. I still have dreams of making it lovely, maybe a playroom for Emma, or a quiet reading nook. But in the meantime, it’s a mess, filled with semiorganized piles of junk. In one pile, clothes. In another, old newspapers, journals, and scrapbooks. In a third, rusty things: a birdcage, an old-fashioned bellows, a manual typewriter with a missing L. I feel like this is the pile for me.

  If there is a squirrel living here in this attic, tormenting me with his elusive crunching noises, making me think I’m going crazy, I will find him. I will make him pay. I look around at the stacks of stuff. It’s like a squirrel’s paradise. He could be anywhere. There is a heap of old handbags nearby, and I nudge it uncertainly with my toe. Nothing scurries out from beneath it. There is no sound of crunching. The steamer trunk stands alone near the window and the diagonal light cuts across it, slicing it into shadows. Could there be a nest inside? Of course not. There’s no squirrel door. But I cover my nose from the pending dust cloud, and open the sticky lid anyway. Inside, the stale scent of mothballs, some long brocade skirts, and two woolen coats. I lift the items out one at a time to throw them on the clothing pile. A small clothbound book must have been stitched into the lining of one of the coats, because there’s a gap there, just at the hem, where the threads are worn brittle and loose
, and the diary just slides out from between the folds of fabric. It comes to a rest on the floorboards, in a small puff of dust beside my filthy, fluffy socks.

  In this moment, I am pierced with foreboding: goose bumps, a cold breath across my neck. There is a damp, quiet presence in the hushed and sun-clogged room. I can feel a distant suffering, before I even bend down slowly to retrieve the battered book, before I open it to its first fragile, yellowed page, before I see or understand the significance of the name emblazoned in mad, familiar handwriting fourteen times across the inside cover: Ginny Doyle. Ginny Doyle. Ginny Doyle.

  • • •

  There are all different kinds of crazy, but mostly I think it’s ancestral. Sometimes you can even trace it back along the dead branches of your family tree; you can find evidence in family anecdotes or documents. A sepia-stained photograph. A diary. You might think you’ve escaped its reach—you might think you’re okay. Because it can lie dormant like a tumor, until some gentle, private trauma pushes it loose inside you.

  Chapter Two

  IRELAND, SEPTEMBER 1846

  Ginny was on her hands and knees at the edge of the potato pit, staring in. Moisture seeped up from the soil and stained damp circles onto the knees of her petticoat. Her fingernails were caked with black earth, and a stink of rot saturated the air. She covered her nose with one hand to keep from retching. In the chilly dampness, her breath came out from behind her hand in puffy white blooms.

  “Mammy, I thought we weren’t supposed to open the pit again until spring, only as we needed them.” Her daughter Maire was beside her, talking in her granny voice. “Sure, we only pulled these up last week, and we still have loads in the shed. Shouldn’t we leave them covered?”

  Ginny looked across the pit to where Raymond was digging on the other side. She tried to catch his eye, but he wouldn’t look at her; he was staring into the opened ground.

  “Maire, you’re eleven going on seventy-three,” he said to their worried daughter without looking up.

  “But isn’t that right, Daddy?” she said. “The air isn’t supposed to get at them.”

  “Yeah, that’s right,” he said. “Usually, Maire.”

  “But not this time?” Now it was Michael talking, jumping at the chance to prove his big sister wrong.

  “No, not this time, son.”

  “Why not?” Maire asked.

  Raymond finally looked up at Ginny with his deep brown, half-moon eyes. The first time she’d met him, she’d been caught by those eyes, by the beautiful curl of them, the way he looked like he was always dreaming. But now she could see only naked fear in his face. She hoped Maire wouldn’t notice.

  “What’s wrong, Daddy?” their daughter said.

  Ginny shook her head at him. He was a good man, funny and handsome, but he never was much good at pretending, even for the sake of the children. Ginny smiled at her daughter.

  “Never you worry,” she said to Maire. “Your father and I will sort it out.”

  “Sort what out?” she said.

  “Never mind,” Ginny said, standing up, brushing the dark clumps of earth from her hands. “Take Michael and your sisters inside for a few minutes. Let Mammy and Daddy have a chat.”

  Maire twisted on her feet but didn’t go. Her long, fair hair was stringing across her face in the late-morning wind, and her mouth was screwed up with worry. Her face was bright and clear, with only a dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose.

  “Go on, love,” Raymond said softly.

  Maire’s shoulders drooped, but she grabbed Michael by the hand, and then she turned and trudged toward the door, calling for her sisters to follow. Maggie went running, but Poppy was still squealing in the hazy fields, flinging her arms out to her sides while she spun in circles.

  “Come on, Poppy!” Maire called again. “Inside!”

  Poppy stopped spinning, but toppled over, laughing. Then she stood, and ran dizzily after the others, her moppy golden curls bouncing against the back of her neck. Ginny winced, watching her baby run, thinking she might zigzag into the doorjamb, but Poppy corrected her course and disappeared inside with the others.

  “How bad on that side?” Raymond asked without looking up.

  Ginny shivered and looked down at the hole by her feet, where she’d dug into the fresh pit to check the potatoes from the early harvest. They’d dug them up a few weeks premature, at the first sign of blight in the fields, hoping to save them. Even as they’d pulled them out from under their wasted stalks, a good portion of them had already turned to slime, black and spongy in their beds with an awful gag of an odor to them. But they’d managed to save and store more than half, and they’d been living the weeks since on hope.

  This morning when they opened the pit, they found a horrid, stinking, squelchy mess. Those salvaged earlies were decaying altogether.

  “Any savers?” Raymond asked.

  Ginny shook her head, kicked some dirt back over the hole. “Maybe three out of ten if we’re lucky,” she said. “What about over there? Anything?” Raymond scratched the back of his neck, and then folded his arms in front of him.

  “Maybe a few, Ginny,” he said. He walked the rim of the pit, and put his arm around her shoulders.

  She tried to breathe deeply, to refute the tears that were coming. She looked toward the cottage door and felt the fear clawing up the inside of her throat like a monster. Raymond put both arms around his wife, and she collapsed her forehead against his shoulder.

  “We’ll manage,” he said.

  “Gale day is coming, Ray,” she said. “Rent will be due.”

  He nodded his head.

  “Thanks be to God, the oat harvest looks to be in strong condition, at least,” he said.

  “Touch wood,” Ginny answered.

  “It’s the heartiest crop of oats I ever did see,” Ray said.

  “Isn’t it strange, to have the oats that thick and the blight won’t touch them,” Ginny added, “when the potatoes are all in ruin?”

  On a good year, they wouldn’t save but a small stock of oats for their family—they sold nearly all of them, and the pig, to pay the rent. They lived all the time on potatoes, with the odd turnip or cabbage from the kitchen garden, a few eggs from the hens. They were better off than most of their neighbors because they had the old cow for milk. But she wouldn’t last, not now. “That’s all our food for the next six months,” Ginny whispered, looking out over their scalped field. “Gone.” She snapped her fingers. There were tears in her eyes, she couldn’t help it.

  Ray squinted off into the foggy damp. “We haven’t sold them oats yet, Ginny. We have the pig, still, and a decent crop of turnips and cabbage besides.”

  “And we owe most of that to Packet,” she said. “You know what’ll happen if we don’t pay.”

  Every year on the gale days, there was always a family or two who couldn’t manage the rent for whatever reason, whatever hardship had befallen them. Packet took no pity on those people. His agents and the constables would be dispatched to drag whole families out of their homes. Those men would tumble the cabins down into the road before the very eyes of their inhabitants, never mind the wailing of the women, or the wild panic of the screeching babbies. A rope would be fixed to the roof beam, and the whole house just tumbled down in front of them, until all that was left was a mess of stone and thatch, a big, choking hot cloud of dust. The neighbors would be warned against taking the family in, and the poor wretches would be destitute then. They would take out to the roads in misery. Ginny shook her head.

  “Whatever happens, we’ve got to pay.”

  Ray nodded. “You’re right. If we’re going to be hungry, we may at least be hungry with a roof over our heads.”

  The stink from the pratie pit was so sharp they could taste it, bitter in the backs of their throats.

  “We’ll get a good price for the oats,”
Ray reasoned. “We can keep a decent stash back from that.”

  “We can sell the cow,” Ginny said. “We’ll manage without milk for the winter.”

  “We’ll get by,” Ray said.

  They tried to believe each other.

  • • •

  The children loved going into Westport town. They never minded what reason, or the long walk. Poppy, Maggie, and Michael skipped on ahead, flailing their loose, warm baby limbs around them. But Maire kept solemn watch beside her parents. Ray held Ginny’s hand and tried to quell her fear, so Maire wouldn’t sniff it out. You couldn’t hide anything from their eldest daughter—if you wanted her to believe something, you had to believe it yourself.

  Ginny squeezed Ray’s hand, and started talking for a distraction. “Michael’s getting a bit big for the petticoat.”

  The boys usually wore them only until they were eight or nine years of age. Michael was on the small side for his age, but even so, his lean legs were beginning to stretch out beneath the skirts. He looked more like his father every day, the only one of the children who’d inherited Ray’s half-moon eyes.

  “I reckon that’s right,” Ray said, watching their son on the road ahead.

  “He’s nearly ten now. Time for some knee breeches and a coat and vest, like a proper little man.”

  “He needs a hat, too, Mammy,” Maire said.

  “He does,” Ginny agreed. “But sure, he’ll be grand in that getup for now anyway. Won’t do him the bit of harm.”

  The roads were eerily quiet, only for the sound of their gathered footsteps falling against the packed dirt of the road, and the high voices of the children in the distance. It was a mild, clammy day, and the rain wasn’t falling, but it was hanging in the air so you had to walk through it nonetheless. The ends of Ginny’s hair were damp when she tucked them in under her bonnet. She looked out from under its brim at the fields on the sides of the road, usually a heavy, bloated green at this time of year, just ready for harvest. Now they were a cankerous, weeping brown, and the stink of blight was so strong you could nearly see it hovering over the land. The farms they passed felt abandoned of their food and people, the fields empty of living things. On a stile in the distance, a lone figure sat up, curled over himself, with his head in his hands. Ginny called the children back to her, and they turned and skipped toward their parents, till they all approached the sitting figure together. It wasn’t until they were upon him that they recognized him.