by Helen Cullen
Murtagh cut him off.
“Everything’s fine, Dónal. We’d better get home out of this rain.”
Murtagh broke into a run as soon as Dónal’s back was turned, leaving Maeve strolling along behind, dangling the plastic bag he’d thrust at her.
When he reached their cottage, the front door was swinging wide open. A terrible chorus of two infants and one toddler screaming assaulted him at the gate.
Nollaig sat in the hallway, her hair plastered to her scalp with sweat, her chubby arms pink with the effort of the tight little fists she was making. Fat tears hung on her long eyelashes like baubles on a Christmas tree. A dirty diaper hung low in her stars-and-stripes pajama bottoms that Grandma June had sent. Maeve arrived at the doorstep but did not cross the threshold. “God Almighty, Maeve, would you look at the state of the poor creature?” He picked Nollaig up, and she clung to his neck with her hot fingers, wiping her dripping nose in his beard as he ran up the stairs to the twins. “There now, a leánbh, there now,” he whispered, rubbing small circles in her back.
Tomás and Dillon lay side by side in their double crib.
Swaddled each in linen, one trimmed with a green silk ribbon, one with blue, they competed to discover who could scream the loudest.
“Maeve! Maeve! Get up here, I need you.”
There was no answer from his wife, but Aíne O’Shea appeared like a vision at the door in a pristine yellow apron.
“I’m sorry to burst in, Murtagh, but I’ve been listening to those children crying for the past hour and my nerves were gone worrying something had happened. Is Maeve okay? She doesn’t seem herself.”
“Aíne, I’ve never been so glad to see someone in my life. In the cabinet over the stove, there’s formula. Would you make me two bottles, please, if you can?”
“Of course, Murt. God love ’em. I won’t be a minute.”
Murtagh gave Nollaig a rusk from a packet open on the changing table, and she quietened for a moment as she gnawed it. It gave him a chance to pick up his sons and cradle one in each arm. He stood swaying from side to side, singing, for reasons unknown, “Wooden Heart” by Elvis Presley. When Aíne reappeared, he sat in the white wicker rocking chair under the window, and she helped him position the babies so he could give them both a bottle simultaneously. She picked up Nollaig and changed her diaper, wiping down her body with a cool cloth and changing her pajamas. Downstairs, she fed her a mashed-up banana and gave her a bottle of warm milk. In minutes, Nollaig was cooing in her arms, and Aíne tucked her under the soft lemon blankets in the little bed that Murtagh had built to look like a boat.
Before Aíne left, she glanced around the living-room door. Maeve was sitting in her wet coat in front of the empty grate where the fire had gone out. She called her name, but there was no reply, so she slipped away after whispering to Murtagh to fetch her anytime.
For once, Tomás and Dillon fell asleep within moments of each other, a spoon of gripe water in each of their bellies, and Murtagh gently laid them down.
Shaking his arms to relieve the pins and needles that had settled in from holding them, he came downstairs and stood in the doorway, watching his wife.
“Why don’t you spend a night at the hotel, Maeve? Have a bath and get some sleep.”
She turned her head to look at him.
“Are you throwing me out, Murtagh? The bad mother?”
He knew he should go to her, but he could not. The shock of what he had come home to still held him in its force field.
“Of course not. But you need a proper rest. Come home in the morning for breakfast.” He hovered at the door, nudging it back and forth with the toe of his shoe.
“The whole village will be talking,” she said, watching him from the corner of her eye.
“There’s worse things they could be saying. I’ll ring ahead to Michael to let him know you’re coming. Why don’t you pack some things?”
Her glee to be fleeing the house was undeniable and crushing. As she stood in the hallway, holding his small brown leather suitcase, it crossed Murtagh’s mind that maybe she would run for good. As if she could read his thoughts, she stood on her tiptoes and kissed him on the forehead. It was like a crack of light breaking through the fog. “I’ll see you first thing. I promise.” And he was calmer.
The next morning, Maeve slipped back into the house as dawn was breaking. She left her shoes in the hallway and crept up the stairs in her stockings. Murtagh sat in her rocking chair, a son in each arm, snoring softly, baby formula dried onto his forehead. Nollaig was standing up in their crib, holding on to the bars, wide awake but totally silent. As if she was watching over her daddy while he slept. Maeve walked closer to pick her up, but the strength was missing from her arms. Nollaig lay back down and turned to face the wall while Maeve gripped the side of the crib. She knew how she should feel, but could not. When the crow came to sit on her shoulder, she became an orphan, an unmarried woman, childless, friendless, an island lost at sea; the soles of her feet barely touching the earth. She was untethered, ready to take flight, the threads connecting her to the life she loved fraying.
Four days later her mother arrived on a flight from JFK. Maeve was silent for the duration of the drive from the airport but felt safer to have her close.
To not be the mother.
There would be no more walking out in the rain or dirty diapers unchanged, she was told.
As if she’d ever wanted, or chosen, those things.
But she was thankful.
Thankful to be held and thankful to hold.
As Grandma June pushed the twins through the village in their double pram, Maeve sat in the garden, pressing Nollaig’s skin against her own.
Impressing a mother’s love upon her daughter in the early-morning light.
The touch of love as an act of hope.
Inis Óg: January 1990
Dear Diary,
I slipped out of bed last night while Murtagh was sleeping.
I waited for that wheezy noise he makes through his left nostril that heralds his deep sleep; the signal that it’s safe for me to escape.
Like a biological school bell.
The neon-green numbers on his alarm clock blinked eleven minutes past one as I stood over him, his eyes restless under the lids. I wished I could crawl inside his ear and watch the film projected in his mind...but what if I appeared as a monster? Something tentacled and evil from the sea, or winged and manic from the sky?
What if, in the deepest mind of his, there is a knowledge of me that wants him to hate me? What if they try to tell him in his dreams?
Murtagh is so loyal, he would never leave me. He would endure the challenge of living with me and my moods and my difficulties until the end of time if I let him. He only wants to see what’s good in me, but sometimes I think it might be easier if we named problems, instead of just enduring them.
Shouldn’t I be protecting him, and the children, from anything that makes them suffer? Shouldn’t I save them from myself if they cannot rescue themselves?
These thoughts run relay races in my mind as I dab antiseptic on grazed knees, make their favorites for dinner, fill their baths and test the temperature with my elbow. I try to hide behind my love but worry the toxicity will leak from my pores. I went to see Dr. Lynch on the mainland, but all he could suggest was trying the pills again, and keeping busy. I could tell he didn’t take me seriously, but I’d rather vanish whole than become the walking ghost those tablets turned me into. I know they work for others, but whenever I let one of those little tablets crawl down my throat I feel it expanding through my veins like rivers of ice, freezing every inch of me so that I become a statue. As the effect wears off, I thaw a little, but the next pill compounds the frost, so I am in a constant state of chilling numbness, tentative hope, then numbness again. So, it’s back to my own methods—the walking cure, the writing cure, the sleeping throu
gh it cure, the drowning in music cure.
But this spell feels very prolonged.
The weeks are counted in new silver hairs on Murtagh’s head.
I fear that Sive stole my last anchor when she left my body, so impatient and cross.
When I escaped last night, I was surprised by how mild it was. It didn’t feel right to be strolling along with my coat flapping open behind me, no scarf around my throat. I climbed to the lighthouse and leaned my back against the damp white paint, the heels of my Doc Martens pressed firm against the dandelions growing at its foot.
I thought I heard a cuckoo call in the distance—had one lost fellow forgotten to flee for the winter?
I remembered Murtagh laughing at me the first time we heard one here and I confessed that I hadn’t thought they really existed but were a made-up bird from fairy tales. They don’t have any cuckoos in Brooklyn, as far as I know. I must remember to ask Papa. I echoed the call, but it sounded artificial in my ears, amplified in the silence, and the bird didn’t fall for it.
I walked to the edge of the cliffs, precariously navigating the rough rocks that guard the perimeter in the darkness. It was as if, although I wanted to annihilate myself, I still couldn’t bear the thoughts of tripping, of scraping my hands and knees on the gravel.
As I drew closer to the edge, I tested the ground in front of me with my right toe before I stepped forward, until eventually I felt just the air beneath my foot.
And then I paused.
One more tiny step and it would have seemed that a terrible accident had happened.
With no note left behind, surely there could be no doubt about how I met my fate.
I closed my eyes and pictured the faces of each of my children, the face of Murtagh.
I knew they wanted to call me home, but that they should not, for their own sake.
Hovering with one foot held out in front of me, my arms outstretched, I paused, as if hoping something would happen without my needing to propel myself forward.
I couldn’t shake the Christmas number-one song from my ears, Bono’s pleading on the Band Aid song, repeating over and over again. Where were all the musical loves of my life when I needed them most?
I wondered if Murtagh would remember to return the new raincoats we’d ordered from Germany and decided were too fluorescent.
I pictured the shelves of the refrigerator, tried to conjure up how much food there was at home before more shopping would be needed.
And finally, I thought of the little watercolor painting that Murtagh had received from Jeremy, a black-winged butterfly just four inches wide. I’d pressed it between the pages of Maeve Brennan’s In and Out of Never-Never Land to keep it safe until I found a frame, and now it struck me that Murtagh would never know where to find it. It seemed an unnecessary cruelty to do that to him.
So, I stepped back.
In truth, it gave me permission to come home because I was afraid to follow through.
I am a coward.
Too scared of what happens next to mothers who abandon their children—even if it’s for their own good.
Worried about surviving but being horribly injured and having to account for myself.
Terrified that I would change my mind at the crucial moment.
Or that I wouldn’t.
So, I climbed back down the craggy lighthouse path, passing the pier as the first fishermen were preparing their boats. If anyone was surprised to see me out so early, it wasn’t reflected in their hat-tips and nods. I stopped at the shop for milk we didn’t need and bought hot fresh scones from Síle. She wrapped them in a tea towel to keep them warm for me; it has a picture of St. Brigid on it, tending to a lamb with her prayer embroidered underneath.
Brigid is eyeing me cautiously now while I write at the kitchen table and wait for sounds of stirring upstairs.
She would have had the courage, I’m sure.
I spread my fingers over the towel and whispered her words out loud.
“‘You brought light to the darkness,
You brought hope to the downcast.
Strengthen what is weak within us.’”
If only it were that easy, to have faith, but I don’t believe anyone is listening. I wish I did.
So now I will carry on, and try not to imagine how different it might have been.
Instead, I will get that watercolor framed.
And send back the raincoats.
LATER THAT MORNING, with Nollaig happily settled at school, the rest of the Moone family strolled down to the beach; the boys on either side of their mother, slapping their Wellington boots along the pebbly lane, while Murtagh carried Sive in a sling. When they reached the end of the shore, they paused to sit awhile on a flat boulder the tide had polished smooth. Murtagh focused a camera on Maeve, her skirt gathered in her hands, laughing as her two sons splashed her, as they teetered at the water’s edge. In the foreground of the shot, he could see Sive crawling toward them in her striped romper.
Murtagh laid the camera on the sand and watched Maeve stand her ground as the beating heart of their family. He loved to see her like this, how a stranger might bear witness to her. Her concentration was always pure, her commitment total. As she held the boys’ hands, he knew there was nowhere else she would rather be, that for those moments the universe was exactly as it should be. Any dark stretch of Maeve at her worst was worth these moments of Maeve at her best. He squeezed fistfuls of sand in his hands and tried to stop it slipping through his fingers. Dug deeper into the damp grains. The muscles in his arms tightened, and he anchored himself to the ground with his heels. He tried again and again, but the natural order would not be controlled. Eventually he let go, and the sand scattered in the breeze.
* * *
That afternoon, while Maeve was working in Makes of Moone, old newspapers were spread across the kitchen table at home so the children could paint without worrying about making a mess. Empty egg boxes held the paints; the brothers shared one carton, but Nollaig had her own—she couldn’t cope when the boys forgot to rinse their paintbrushes in the jam jars of water before changing colors. She concentrated on carefully painting a house, like she always did, with blobs denoting the family who lived there. Mossy held the paintbrush in his fist and hit the paper more than he painted, and Dillon, well, he loved to smear the paint all over the newspapers with his hands. Murtagh sat on the kitchen counter above them, calmly reading aloud the arts section of the Irish Times over the din.
He looked up when he heard Maeve’s arrival in the hallway. For him, the sound of love was always Maeve’s key turning in the lock; she brought home home with her every time. His forever shy smile was waiting when she slipped through the kitchen door and closed it quickly behind her.
“My darlings!” she shouted. “There is someone special I’d like you to meet.”
Nollaig ran over and held up her painting in front of her face. “Look, Mama, I did you.”
Maeve crouched down. “Well, you clearly inherited your father’s artistic abilities, dear, because that is marvelous. Definitely fridge-worthy.”
Murtagh started wiping Mossy’s hands with a kitchen towel and gathering up the newspapers while Dillon stretched his arms out to Maeve and pawed green paint onto her blouse. She kissed him on the forehead and lifted him down from his chair.
“Who’s here?” Murtagh asked her. “Were we expecting someone?”
Maeve wrinkled her nose at him. “Not exactly someone.”
He froze, his arms full of crumpled newspapers. “Please tell me you didn’t—”
“I did,” she sang, and flung the hall door open.
A tiny black Labrador puppy padded in, yelping in a high pitch, and skidded on the kitchen tiles. Mossy immediately started crying while Dillon tried to run toward him and slipped on his bottom. Nollaig gushed, “Oh, Mama, Mama, is he ours?” as she tried t
o pick up his wriggling body.
Maeve knelt on the floor and pulled the puppy into her lap while Murtagh comforted Mossy. “We have to be gentle with him,” she said. “He’s only little, and we don’t want to scare him. You have to stroke his fur carefully, like this.”
She picked up Nollaig’s hand and guided her to smooth his hair in the right direction, and the puppy licked her fingers.
“Maeve, where did you get him? I can’t believe you didn’t tell me about this,” Murtagh said, while Mossy peeked out from behind him, still sniffling. Dillon crawled over and immediately tried to grab his tail, but Maeve was quicker and caught his hand in her own and frowned at him.
She smiled gingerly at Murtagh. “I know,” she said, “I’m sorry, but DÓnal intercepted me at the ferry. One of the tourists abandoned him on the beach. Can you believe it? I couldn’t say no.”
Murtagh sighed, picking up the dog and looking into his eyes. “That DÓnal knows a soft touch when he sees one, doesn’t he? I suppose we’re stuck with him now!”
Maeve clapped her hands and gave Nollaig a squeeze. “So, what are we going to name him? Any ideas, Noll? Maybe you can name him after someone special?”
Nollaig chewed on her lip for a minute and then shouted out, “Let’s name him Granny Teresa.”
Laughter exploded from Maeve and Murtagh, and Nollaig’s face fell.
“What?” she shouted. “I love Granny Teresa!”
Maeve pulled herself together and said, “I know you do, darling, but I’m not sure she’d like having a dog named after her. What about your favorite redheaded friend on the telly?”
“Oh no,” Murtagh groaned. “Not that screeching puppet!”
“BOSCO!” Nollaig shouted, and the twins chimed in, “BOSCO! BOSCO!”
In years to come, Dillon and Mossy would swear they could remember the day Bosco came to live with them, even though it was unlikely their developing memories could have captured it. Maeve never forgot it, though, for he seemed to bring with him the start of a golden era in their family. It was the period when Murtagh received an unexpected commission from Japan for a new series of miniature teapots; that her mother visited for three whole weeks; when Nollaig learned to ride a bike and Maeve finally started surfing. Bosco was a talisman for familial harmony, equally loved by all of the Moones, and almost as perceptive about Maeve’s moods as Murtagh was. Often, she would doze in the afternoon, and he would lie, wide awake, beside her on the sofa.