The First Day of Spring

by Nancy Tucker

  “Exactly. That’s an accident. Jason broke his leg because I tripped and knocked into him at the top of the stairs. He fell the whole way down. I felt awful, but you just have to forget about it. You never mean to hurt them.”

  We sat without speaking for a while. The dark outside made the French windows into a mirror, so I could see us at the table. Our reflections looked like women, which seemed wrong. In my head we were still two stringy kids, stealing sweets and walking on walls and turning ourselves upside down in handstands.

  “Why did you come?” asked Linda.

  “Don’t really know. I just found out about them taking Molly. Just yesterday. It made me want to come back.”

  It was hard to believe Sasha’s call had been that recent. The time between then and now had expanded in a bubblegum stretch, feeling like weeks, not hours. It occurred to me that I should check how long it had been since the meeting. It occurred to me that I wouldn’t gain anything from knowing.

  “So you didn’t come because of the calling? At all?” she said.

  “What?”

  “I just tried to call you a few times. And then a few weeks ago you picked up. And I thought maybe if you had dialed that number that told you who had been calling, you might have known it was me. And you might have come to see me.” Her voice got quieter as she spoke, until it was only really breath, loosely shaped into words. The effort made it hoarse. Like a can peeling open.

  “That was you? You were calling me?”

  “Just a few times. I wasn’t trying to scare you or anything. You gave me your number the last time you wrote.”

  “Why were you calling? You didn’t before. You never even replied to my letters.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I felt really bad about it. But—you know—I’m still hopeless, Chrissie. I can barely write, even now. I didn’t want you to know I was still like that. It was easier to call.”

  “But why now?”

  “Same as for you, I suppose. Just felt like the right time. I’d just found out I was pregnant. I’ve always thought of you when I’ve been pregnant, ever since I knew you had a little girl. I always wondered how you would have coped. This is the last baby we’re having. I won’t be pregnant again. Just made me want to speak to you.”

  For a second, a window into a different world cracked open, a world where Linda and I had been pregnant together and Molly had grown up in step with her twins. It hurt in a hot, bright way, like looking straight at the sun.

  “I thought it was the papers calling,” I said. “I thought our social worker had told them about me.”

  “Why would she have done that?”

  “Why wouldn’t she?”

  “Because it’s her job to look after you.”

  I thought of things to say back—“No one’s ever looked after me” or “It’s no one’s job to look after me” or “It’s not her job to look after me.” I dragged my nail in circles on the tabletop.

  “I thought you hated me,” I said.

  “Well I don’t,” said Linda.

  “That’s just because you’re really Christian, though,” I said.

  She smiled with half her mouth. “I am a Christian. But I wouldn’t hate you even if I wasn’t.”

  “Did you miss me?” I asked. It came out unbearable—young and needy—and I had to look at the Linda in the window, not the one next to me, while I waited for her to answer.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “I was awful to you.”

  “Nah. You just teased. And you looked out for me, didn’t you?”

  “I was a monster.”

  “You were my friend.”

  I pulled my legs up onto my chair and pushed my face into my knees, so my lips were pressed flat to my teeth. “Best friend,” I said into my jeans.

  It was what I had said in my cell, on the one day of the trial that had made me upset. I hadn’t been upset when Donna’s mammy had stood up and called me “trouble” and “wicked” and “evil.” I hadn’t been upset when Steven’s mammy had stood up and said I deserved to be hung, drawn, and quartered (because I hadn’t really known what that meant). I had been upset when it was Linda’s mammy’s turn.

  “How do you know Christine?” asked the man in the white wig.

  “She was friends with my daughter, Linda,” said Linda’s mammy.

  “Close friends?” said White Wig.

  “I think Chrissie would have said so,” said Linda’s mammy. “Chrissie would have said they were best friends. My Linda, she’s friends with everyone, really. I see lots of little girls at the house—more than I can keep track of, sometimes. Chrissie was just one of them.”

  I felt a sharp pain in my middle and put my hand on it. I could feel my pulse under my palm. I wondered if my heart had dropped down to my belly.

  “But you saw a lot of Christine,” said White Wig. “You’ve told us she spent a good deal of time at your house. More time at your house than at her own.”

  Linda’s mammy looked to the side, to where Mam was sitting alone on a bench. She turned her body toward White Wig. “I don’t think there was a lot for her to go home to,” she said.

  “What do you mean by that?” asked White Wig.

  “Chrissie’s mam. Eleanor. She struggled.”

  “Struggled in what way?”

  “Just struggled. Ever since Chrissie was small. I remember pushing Linda’s pram past the house and hearing a baby crying, and it wasn’t normal crying, not like they’re meant to. Proper howling. Screaming. It happened over and over, and I walked past over and over, because you don’t want to pry, do you? Then one day I thought, this isn’t right, really, it’s not right, and I went to the door and knocked. Took a while but she came in the end—Eleanor—holding Chrissie. I didn’t even get a chance to say anything before she shoved her at me. ‘She just cries, I can’t do it, you take her,’ she said, and she slammed the door.”

  “And what did you do?” asked White Wig.

  “What was I supposed to do? She was a scrap. Half Linda’s size, and Linda wasn’t big. I took her home and gave her a bottle. Three bottles, actually—I kept her a couple of hours, and she was starving. And then I went back and Eleanor opened the door and took her from me like it was a completely normal thing. Like it was completely normal to have given your baby to a stranger for the afternoon.”

  “And you didn’t think to tell anyone about this? The social services? The police?”

  “Of course I thought about it. Didn’t think about much else, for a while. But what would I have said? ‘I know a baby that cries a lot.’ It would have sounded daft. And sometimes I saw Eleanor at church with the pram, and sometimes the da was there, and I thought, ‘Well. They’re coping. They’re fine.’ I couldn’t do it to her. It would have felt like snitching. I couldn’t do it to another mam.”

  “The relationship between Christine and her mother. From an outside perspective, what was it like as she got older?”

  Linda’s mammy turned herself further round, so she had her back to Mam. “Eleanor did what she could to be rid of Chrissie,” she said. “Like I said, I don’t know what it was—hadn’t wanted a kid, couldn’t cope with a kid, couldn’t cope with that kid. Whatever. But you looked at what was going on with them two, and it was hard to believe she cared about Chrissie at all.”

  The words burbled up from my chest like sick. “Shut up,” I said. It was loud enough to make people look at me. “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”

  Linda’s mammy didn’t look. She stayed facing the judge.

  “I always said I’d do my best for Chrissie,” she said. “I said it to my husband—‘We’ve got to do our best for this little girl, she’s not got much.’ It’s what we believe in, what God teaches us. I did do my best for a while. When she was little. I had her round, fed her, gave her some of Linda’s clothes. But then she got older. Sh
e got tougher. I stopped doing things for her, because I thought if I kept on doing things for her she’d keep on hanging around. I didn’t want her playing with Linda all the time. I didn’t want people thinking of them as a pair.”

  She coughed a wet-sounding cough and wiped something off her cheek. “She did terrible things. She did. But she’s just a kid. She needed people like me to come through for her and I didn’t. I failed her. We all did. She’s just a little girl.”

  She looked at me over her shoulder. It was like she couldn’t make her eyes stick. They drooped down to the floor underneath my glass box, and across to the bench where Steven’s mammy was sitting.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  I put my hands over my face. I didn’t speak. I shouted.

  “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.”

  I shouted and panted and stamped my feet on the floor of the box, one and then the other, like I was running or marching. The guards took hold of me under the arms and dragged me down the stairs, into a cell. They held me until I got too tired to kick and scream anymore. Then they left.

  “We are best friends,” I whispered when I was by myself. “Me and Linda are best friends. And I didn’t need you. And Mam does care about me.”

  Now, sitting at the table, Linda didn’t say anything for long enough that my cheeks boiled and my throat burned, and then she said, “Yeah. Best friends,” so quietly I only just heard it. But I did hear it. I swallowed it whole.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “You should get some sleep,” she said. “You must be so tired.”

  “Yeah. Probably,” I said. I didn’t want to stop talking. Over the years I had spent hours imagining the things I would say to her when we were reunited, and I hadn’t voiced even a fraction. It was the way it had been with Mam: these weren’t the grand unburdenings I had rehearsed, but surreal run-ins with people very different from the characters who lived in my head. I thought perhaps that was how it would always feel, even if I talked to them for a month, because I couldn’t be unburdened from something that was mine to carry.

  “Are you going to go home tomorrow?” she asked.

  “Maybe. I don’t know,” I said.

  “Will they be looking for you?”

  “Yeah. Molly has this court order. It means I have to do what they say. I can’t just take her away if I want to. They treat it like kidnap.”

  “Okay.” If she was shocked, she managed to keep it out of her voice.

  “I don’t know if we’ll go back tomorrow, though,” I said. “I was thinking maybe I should wait until they actually track us down. It might be days and days.”

  “I think it might be better just to face it,” she said. “I think they’ll feel better about it if you go back and admit you made a mistake.”

  “Maybe it would just be better if they took her.”

  “Why?”

  “Just seems right, doesn’t it? For me to lose her. It’s what I did to other people, so it’s what should happen to me.”

  “Like—what—a tooth for a tooth?”

  “Kind of.”

  “It doesn’t work that way though, does it? They gave you a punishment for what you did. You went to prison for a long time. You can’t go on being punished and punished forever.”

  “I didn’t go to prison. I went to a Home.”

  “But it wasn’t an actual home. It’s not like it’s somewhere you would have chosen to be. You weren’t free.”

  I ground my molars together until grit coated my tongue. It was hard to describe the freedoms I had missed when I was at Haverleigh—the scratchy spin of rolling down grass hills, the smell of birthday cake candles—and harder to admit that the losses had been so much smaller than the gains. Underneath the layers of guilt and complication, three things were true: that Haverleigh had given me what I needed; that there had been a price for my being there, and that I hadn’t been the one to pay it. It was where I would have chosen to be, and if I went back in time I would choose it again, over and over, and if it still existed it was where Molly and I would be at that moment, begging the keepers to take us in.

  In court, one of the white wigs had said that the things I had done had lost me my childhood, and that that was punishment enough. He was right and wrong. I had lost something that spring—something light and precious—but without it I could still run around and climb trees and do handstands with my best friend. You couldn’t do that if you were dead. Now I was older, and I lived with such a heavy millstone around my neck I sometimes felt my spine would buckle beneath it, but from time to time I became so absorbed in Molly that I forgot who I was, and I shrugged off the weight to rest on the ground. You couldn’t do that if your kid was dead.

  A high cry jolted me back—“Mum, Mum, Mum”—but Linda didn’t get up.

  “You can go,” I said.

  “It’s Molly, isn’t it?” she said.

  “Mum, Mum, Mum.”

  “But that’s not my name,” I thought as I stood. I went down the hallway and into the lounge. Molly was sitting up straight on the couch, her fists balled against her eyes.

  “It’s fine,” I said. “You’re fine.”

  She gulped and choked. I knelt down next to her. I put one hand on her back. “It’s fine, Molly,” I said. “You just had a bad dream. You’re fine.”

  “I—woke—up—and—you—weren’t—here—” she said. “I— thought—you—left—me—here—by—my—self—”

  There was space on the seat where her head had been. I squeezed into it and pulled her onto my lap. I was surprised it felt so much like muscle memory; it wasn’t something my muscles had done enough to remember. Her arms went around my shoulders, and I was surprised again, surprised that our bodies fit together when they had barely had to fit together since she had been inside me. She pressed her face to my neck, making it slick with spit and snot. The wetness made me feel that we were two pools of seawater merging, edgeless and saline. Her tongue touched my skin when she panted. There was a tug at my scalp and I saw a chunk of my hair wrapped around her hand. Haverleigh came back to me in a wave so heavy I felt it as a blow to my gut.

  When the keepers had stopped me stealing food to eat at night I had eaten more at meals. Three times a day, I ate until I was sick. They started putting my food on a plate before I came to the dining room, giving it to me at a desk in the corner while the other kids ate at the trestle table. At night I screamed even louder.

  “What’s the matter, Chrissie?” asked my favorite keeper, coming into my room.

  “I’m hungry,” I screamed.

  “No, you’re not, lovey,” she said. “You had a good tea. You’re full up.”

  “I am hungry. I am,” I screamed. She sat down on the floor beside my bed. Most keepers didn’t come that close to me, because I was so bad. I stopped screaming. I just whispered.

  “I am hungry, I am hungry, I am.”

  “You need to get to sleep,” she said. “Go on. Lie down.”

  I put my head on the pillow. She was close enough that I could take a chunk of her hair and grip it in my fist.

  “I am hungry, I am hungry, I am.” I whispered it until my eyes were heavy, and just before they closed I whispered, “Call me lovey again.”

  “What, lovey?” she said. And then I was asleep, and when I woke in the morning she was gone. I still had a strand of yellow-brown hair tangled around my fingers, kinked and dead.

  I pressed Molly’s body closer to mine. She whimpered, and I felt her fist open and close around folds of my jumper. She liked it here. She liked Linda. But she needed me.

  “I didn’t leave you, lovey,” I said into her shoulder. “I didn’t leave you.”

  Chrissie

  After I got back from hospital I stayed away from the house as much as I could. I knew if I did anything to make Mam cross she could tell the police about St
even, or she could give me more tablet-Smarties, and I wasn’t in the mood for either of those things. Sometimes she was cross if I stayed away for too long, because she said it was like I didn’t love her. She was more usually cross if I was in the house, because when I was in the house I did annoying things like ask for food. I had decided she had probably given me the tablet-Smarties to try to turn me from a bad kid into a good one, and if she saw me she would realize I was still bad, and she might try something else to get me good. So it was safest to stay away.

  “Your mammy will be wondering where you are, Chrissie,” Linda’s mammy always said when I was still at her house at teatime. She meant, “I am wondering why you are still here, Chrissie,” but I pretended not to know that.

  “No she won’t,” I always said. “She never wonders where I am.” Linda’s mammy liking me because of being in hospital hadn’t lasted very long.

  There were still policemen around the streets, and they still knocked on doors to talk to kids, and the mammies still twittered about it over their garden walls. Linda’s mammy didn’t do much twittering. She never really joined in with the other mammies. Probably because she was too old. You could get a heart attack from twittering when you were that old.

  On Sunday I stayed after church to help Linda and her mammy put the knee cushions back on the pews, and Robert’s mammy helped too. She kept sighing and tutting and saying, “I don’t know, oh, I don’t know.” Linda’s mammy didn’t say anything, so Robert’s mammy sighed and tutted and said, “I don’t know, oh, I don’t know,” louder and louder until eventually she put her hands on her hips and said, “I shouldn’t tell you, really. I really shouldn’t.”

  “No need to tell me anything,” said Linda’s mammy.

  “I really shouldn’t say. Not with the kiddies around,” said Robert’s mammy.

  “No. I’m sure you shouldn’t,” said Linda’s mammy, and went to the cupboard for the broom. Robert’s mammy went too.

  “You’ve heard what they’re saying, haven’t you?” she said.