The Island Child

by Molly Aitken

  ‘Well, hello there, other littlie,’ Enda said and sat up, patting the grass beside him for Joyce to sit. ‘I know it’s a terrible thing, but we don’t know he did it.’

  ‘Have you asked him?’ I said.

  ‘No, and I won’t. He’d think I don’t trust him.’

  ‘But you can’t trust someone who would do something so terrible, Enda.’

  ‘Who are you talking about?’ Joyce said.

  ‘No one at all.’ Enda plucked a daisy and presented it to her. ‘I’m lonely, Oona. I don’t have a family.’ He gave me a look, like he was waiting for me to say poison, like he knew it was there in me.

  ‘You didn’t write to me or call me when you first found out where I lived, did you?’ I said.

  ‘I was ashamed.’

  ‘But, Enda, I knew about you when I was fourteen. I saw you kissing Felim.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  Joyce giggled and Enda blushed.

  We ate sandwiches and fruit salad on tin plates. When we were done, Pat suggested a swim. Enda whooped in answer, tearing off his shorts and t-shirt and racing into the water. Joyce laughed at him. His life and vibrancy was catching. Felim and Pat strode in more slowly, ducking under and shaking off their hair. Joyce unclasped her sandals and paddled. I curled around the sleeping Adair and watched, my mouth full of words I didn’t know how to say. I knew for sure Felim was not good enough for my brother and yet still uncertainty raged through me like blood.

  Joyce splashed wildly, making her way through the short drift of water between them and landing with a hoot of laughter in her father’s arms. Her little dress hung limp on a branch. I couldn’t speak with her here. Everything was so breakable, so fragile. Silence would protect her.

  I took off my shoes, fetched Adair’s cloth, tied him to me and slipped into the trees. Adair cooed but I didn’t coo back. Hard earth and crushed leaves slapped my feet. I sang an old song of Mam’s, but my voice broke on the high notes and the low ones. I tried not to think. I tried not to.

  * * *

  The fire burned on the lake. I watched the reflection dance, my feet bouncing up and down. I was trying not to run. Adair was asleep in my arms, because he couldn’t sleep unless he was held. Enda and Felim sat either side of me, Felim smoking and Enda with his head thrown back marvelling at the stars.

  ‘Just like home,’ he murmured.

  I reached out and squeezed his hand.

  ‘Do you two ever think of having children?’ Pat asked. He was drunk. He’d only had three beers and they had spun him into the giddiness of a teenager.

  ‘Adoption, I mean,’ he said, when no one answered.

  Enda laughed. ‘It’s a bit soon for that. And it’s not legal for people like us to adopt.’

  ‘That’s not right,’ Pat said. ‘I’m sorry. If Oona and I both die, you can have our kids. Take one now, if you like. They’re a lot of trouble.’

  ‘No. They can’t.’

  Pat gaped at me and Enda stared at the fire. A hand flattened against my leg and I darted up and strode away. Adair began to cry. Someone was following close behind me. I spun back to face him, but it was only Pat. I began to cry, and Adair roared at me. Pat stroked my back.

  ‘It’s just the way they are, Oona,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing wrong with them.’

  ‘I know that. It’s not . . . well, it’s not that.’

  ‘What is it then?’

  ‘Leave me alone, Pat. Please. I’m going to check on Joyce.’

  I went back to the cabin but Adair’s cries woke Joyce.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she mumbled.

  ‘Nothing.’

  She sat up. ‘I like Enda.’

  I bounced Adair and waited for her to mention Felim, but she snuggled back under the blankets. I couldn’t sleep so went out again to find Felim. I needed to look at his face and see if she was in it.

  The sky was turning as pale as an oyster. Enda sat on a rock, shoes half submerged by lake water.

  ‘Felim’s left,’ he said.

  The water was cold. Stones cut up into my feet. I took deep breaths.

  ‘Why did he leave?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Enda watched me, and I knew he thought I was to blame. I opened my mouth to say sorry, or say something about Felim, but I never spoke. Our life was so fragile and Felim was gone.

  The Forest Child

  Enda left later that day and I tried to forget. Over the next weeks I stopped picking up the phone in case it was him.

  I stopped touching Pat and he took a promotion in the city. It was too far to drive every day so he stayed with his mother during the week and in September Joyce went with him for the better school, which meant I only had to see their faces at the weekends. I phoned Pat and he told me Enda had rung Mrs Lightly’s and spoken to Joyce, inviting her to go and stay with him.

  ‘No,’ I yelled down the phone.

  ‘What?’ Pat said.

  ‘Find a way to get her out of it. Tell her she has to stay for school or something. Please, Pat.’

  There was a long silence at the other end, and then, ‘Okay.’

  He hung up.

  * * *

  It was a time for just Adair and me. He was growing, crawling, finding the beginnings of his freedom. I brought him into the woods and showed him my favourite trees. The oak with the thickest trunk. The tallest pine. The birch with the family of beetles living in the bark. And of course the on-fire red maple.

  His little face turned up to the roof of leaves, and sun and shadows played on his skin like flames. He lifted his long baby fingers to grab the light. I kissed his warm cheek and we kept walking.

  I tried to focus on him but I was becoming distracted. The past and the island dragged me back. When I walked in the woods, I was walking on Éag, and when I held Adair I couldn’t help thinking of Joyce but I would push the thoughts away again, distract myself with having Rose and her friends over in the evenings and scrubbing the house down every day.

  Deep winter came again and Adair got a cough. I drove him to the doctor in town, who told me I was being ‘over-anxious’ and prescribed a syrup, and soon my boy was chirpy and giggly again, although the rasp in his voice didn’t completely disappear. I kept him by the hearth and knitted him hats and jumpers, but often when I picked him up his fingers were icy.

  It became a rattle in his chest and his coughs became harsher again. I went and got more syrup, and it worked. Next, he got really hot. I pressed cold cloths to his head and chest but he was still burning. I rang for the doctor and he wasn’t there. I rang again and he told me to come in, but the snow was thick and I couldn’t put the chains on the tyres. I phoned him again and he said he would stop over on his way home. I phoned Pat and he said he would be with us soon. I dragged off my jumper and t-shirt, letting myself get cold, and pressed Adair’s roasting little body to my cool chest. He shook with every cough and I wanted more than anything for me to be the one who was sick. I tried not to cry. I sang to him.

  When his eyes were glazed open and his skin was so cold I couldn’t bear to hold him any more, I shut his eyelids and placed him back in the crib for the last time. When I looked up, searching for the angel of death in the doorway, there was only Joyce.

  Pat was gone when Adair arrived and Pat was gone when he left.

  Pneumonia. The word was said over and over. I didn’t understand what anyone meant. I couldn’t understand.

  * * *

  Pieces of my past kept appearing in the snowy garden. I hated to look out at it, and kept the curtains shut, but Pat would open them. Shawls of snow were draped on the bushes and branches.

  It was Enda who first took Joyce away for a holiday.

  ‘Felim?’ I said into the phone.

  ‘He’s gone now.’

  It was enough. I let him take my other child, because I was not fit to be with her.

  The first time I scalded my tongue with whiskey I was eight. Most little ones had tried it younger but M
am watched me like my lips remaining dry was her ticket into heaven. Dad had fallen asleep and I lifted his fist, clenched around his cup, to my open mouth and poured the lot of it in. It burned like the devil and I wanted more. It sang in my bones and I didn’t know I was singing too until Mam began to spank me with the spoon.

  The bottle in the garden was laid out in the snow like a gift from the forest fairies. I finished it, of course I did, and sat on the kitchen floor nursing the feel of it in my belly. But it wasn’t enough to wipe away the pain and emptiness.

  When the green bloomed on the trees in the spring, it was wrong. Nature couldn’t keep moving when he was gone. To stop it, I didn’t move. Most days Rose came and talked to me for hours. She’d kiss my cheeks and hug me before she left but the prickles of fire she’d once sparked in me had turned to dust.

  Pat drank coffee and worked and cooked dinners and got thin.

  When Joyce came back from her time in New York she was always standing in a doorway, watching, eyes so big and blue like water.

  Enda visited again and talked and talked to me like Rose did. Once he asked me if I’d like to go home. I laughed at him for that one. Would you? I slurred. He spoke to Pat, and after that it was hard to get a bottle; there was never any drink money lying about and I had to go back to making clothes. I gave them to Rose to sell, but when she did she kept the money, saying I’d need it for a rainy day.

  I was singing an old lament when I looked up and saw Joyce, pale as a petal.

  ‘I miss him too, you know,’ she whispered.

  ‘Wait, Joyce.’

  But she was already running to her little room.

  Pat came back later and took me upstairs. I couldn’t sleep because the bed was far too soft. It was like lying in a sinking currach. The memories kept appearing. Whiskey numbed them but the morning always came. When I opened the curtains they’d all be lined up in the grass, and I remembered, so I shut them. My herbs and vegetables and flowers were all dead.

  The girl mother loved her children more than the breath that kept her with them. She let them explore their world, knowing freedom helps a child to grow and become strong. The twins began to stray further and further, tottering through the fields after butterflies when their girl mother was distracted with her thoughts, staring into the distance, her sewing abandoned on her lap.

  One day, the little boy was playing by the river when he heard voices calling to him. The daughter searched the banks for her brother but couldn’t find him. She ran to her girl mother, shedding a stream of tears behind her. He is lost. He is lost. He is lost. She chanted over and over but her girl mother blocked her ears. When the girl mother reached the riverbank, there was no sign of her tiny son. The poisonous waters had taken his body and, without a word to her daughter, the girl mother leapt in after him, sinking into the mists of dead memories.

  The Father

  I wake to the rushing sound of the sea in my ears and I am a child again, ready to be scolded by my mam and pushed down onto my knees. I open my eyes and a grey light is seeping through the open door where Pat is standing. He is so beautiful.

  ‘Is the storm finished?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes. Listen, Oona.’

  I sit up. ‘We have to go.’

  ‘The sun hasn’t risen yet.’

  All the blankets are piled around me. He must have put them on me. I can’t remember falling asleep. We were talking about our children and now my arms feel empty.

  ‘I hope she found somewhere. Somewhere safe.’ I wipe the grains of sleep from my eyes.

  My jumper is unravelling in my fingers. His hand is cold against my wrist, pulling me against him. I cling to his shoulders, hold him like I never did when Adair died.

  ‘Joyce will be fine,’ he says.

  ‘If we don’t find her – if something’s happened . . .’

  He pulls away from me. ‘No. In spite of everything you’ve done and everything you kept hidden from me, I need you. I always did.’

  ‘You’re a fool to have married me.’

  ‘I knew what I was doing.’ He laughs and kisses me lightly on the mouth. ‘I’m just going out to get some air.’

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  ‘No. I just need a few minutes.’

  ‘All right.’

  From the door I watch him stroll along the cliffs and head towards the horizon. When he is just a smudge I run to the pier and sit waiting for Jonjoe. The sky whitens fast. It’s close to sunrise. When he appears, he waves and says his boys are on the way and ready to row me over.

  I run along the sharp, rocky path towards the beach. I can’t see Pat. I wish I dreamed all of this so I could do it all again, make it better. But there’s no way to unpick time, like stitches on a dress, because it would happen again. I will always be me and the men in my life will never be different.

  ‘Pat,’ I yell.

  He’s just there, naked except for his briefs, on the beach below me, the beach where Aislinn and her whale died. He strides through the waves like he was born from them, and like he’s returning. I scramble down the broken cliff and race along the rocks, slipping, sliding, slicing my knee open.

  ‘Pat!’

  The Empty House

  I was a terrible mother. Joyce stayed out of the house, away from me. The years shaved away, nailed in by visits from Enda and us to him. In the Big Apple, we looked like a family again. He took Joyce to the museums and Pat and I would lunch with Pat’s old schoolfriends and check out our competitors in the furniture and clothes businesses. Sometimes Joyce and I went to the library and she would pore over illustrated books about ancient Rome or the Aztecs and I read Westerns. Those were the times that warmed me, just the two of us sat in the comfortable, musty air in a place where you are told to be silent, so it doesn’t seem strange.

  We stayed in cheap but cheerful hotels, shopped for secondhand books. Enda was waiting tables, as all his acting work had dried up, but he said he didn’t care and from what I could see his life looked good. He shared a small apartment with two girls who adored Joyce, taking her to the cinema and record store, but were wary and distant with me. We drove across the border again and again, and Joyce was suddenly a teenager and wore makeup and smoked. Her indifference and grasping at maturity saddened Pat. I tried to encourage him: ‘She’ll be back to us soon. It’s just her age.’

  ‘It’s me she’s mad at, not you.’

  At home, I saw her less and less. I tried to care but often forgot. I searched the house for the shadows of Adair, the memories, and slept in the kitchen on the rocking chair. Sometimes I woke in strange places: at the top of the stairs, my toes caressing the abyss; in the garden, the frost on my feet jolting me awake; standing over Joyce’s bed sure she was missing, only to open my eyes and find her curled up asleep.

  * * *

  I woke in my kitchen chair and sighed with relief. I leaned back again, but there were scuffles above, a laugh.

  I ran upstairs, paused outside Joyce’s room and pressed my ear to the door. A muffled cry and I pushed the door open. Limbs and clothes were tangled on the bed. I stood a breath too long on the threshold and hurried downstairs. There was the tramp of feet and the front door opening, closing. I waited. Heavier footsteps. I waited.

  Joyce stood in the middle of the kitchen, arms crossed, blue eyes sparking.

  ‘What did you think you were doing?’ It was like she was talking to a fool child.

  ‘Joyce, I . . . did you want that boy in your room?’

  ‘Want him? Of course I wanted him. I invited him.’

  ‘But were you careful?’

  ‘Don’t try to get involved in my life now. You’re too late. Why don’t you fix your own?’

  ‘I’m sorry for walking in,’ I said. ‘But don’t speak to me like that.’

  ‘Have you spoken to Dad lately? You just eat his food and let him clean up after you but you never even talk to him.’

  ‘Joyce, I—’

  ‘You don’t care about him and y
ou definitely never cared about me. Just stay out of my life.’

  She spun out the door. I should have gone after her. I should have sat with her every night and talked to her, but I was sure I’d left it too late.

  I stopped going to New York. Joyce went alone, and when I asked how Enda was she just shrugged and said, the same as always. I didn’t know what always meant.

  * * *

  Priests wash every mother’s sinful blood from their babies, but children are still punished for their mothers’ crimes.

  There was a small hole at the bottom of my baby’s window. I noticed it after he was gone. I imagined the ice wind cutting through it and getting beneath his blankets. I saw the snow slicing in on the wind and settling on his cold cheeks.

  No sea-fairy stole away my baby. If they had, I could make a deal. I could get him back. Cold and blue-veined, a water creature, but still mine. No, he was really gone, like the dead we sent to Éag.

  I hurt everywhere and yet I didn’t feel like I was attached to my body at all. I felt like I was lying dead in the snow beside him, except I had to get up and pretend it wasn’t my fault, that I didn’t kill him.

  Fire in the Dark

  ‘I’m going to tell you a story,’ Rose said. ‘And you need to listen to me.’

  I escaped often to Rose’s home. It was small, on the outskirts of town, full of rugs and cushions and wooden furniture she’d convinced Pat to give her. There were always people coming and going. It reminded me of the cottages on Inis, always full gossip and laughter too.

  I’d dropped in to tell Rose I wasn’t coming to the party her friends were holding later.

  ‘You’re coming,’ she said. ‘You need to talk to people who aren’t me. I need it.’

  It was late afternoon and I was sat at her table, nursing a coffee. The house was unusually empty, the only sound the crackle and chatter of the radio. Rose crossed to the windowsill and switched it off.

  ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘A boy grew up always hearing the voice of the sea calling him. One day, he followed the music of the waves. He rowed his canoe across the water and he got colder and colder inside his fur coat. It got so cold the sea began to freeze, but the boy cracked the ice and kept on rowing. He kept rowing, until he rowed into the mouth of a whale.’