by Molly Aitken
My legs shook. Her hands were on my shoulders, pressing me down into the chair.
‘Inside the whale was the whole ocean,’ she said. ‘The boy made friends with the seals and the salmon and the clams. He was happy and played with them all day. At night, he slept on the smooth tongue of the whale and he had only good dreams there. He didn’t weep for his lost family. He’d forgotten them. But all that time his father was rowing his canoe on the waves above, searching for his lost boy. The father’s mittens froze to his oars but he kept rowing. Ice got in his eyes and he couldn’t see but he kept searching. In the dark of blindness, he lost his belief that he would ever find his son. He’s still rowing the ocean, searching.’
My chair clattered behind me.
‘I don’t want your stories.’
‘It’s hard’ – she grabbed my face and stared at me – ‘but you’ve got to let him go. If you don’t, you’ll disappear. You’ll never find him and you’ll be blind to what you still have.’
‘I don’t care.’
‘But you do. I know you do. Cry. Tear your clothes, if you have to. After, you stop. Keep living. Don’t let your missing him consume you. That’s the easy way. Joyce needs you and so does Pat. If you’re not careful, you’ll lose them.’
The slap rang out across the kitchen. Rose clutched her face. She should have slapped me back, roared at me, shaken me.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘I know you are. I just wish you’d listen.’
She drove fast and said nothing to me the whole way to her friend’s party.
* * *
The party was at an abandoned house outside the town. Someone had lit a fire in the backyard. I found myself a bottle of gin in the cupboard and filled my flask.
Sparks from the fire hissed in the grass and flecked my bare arms and knees. A boy watched me with black marks like fingerprints under his eyes and a white face that stood out in the darkness.
Rose sang a beautiful, trembling melody and I followed her inside and leant in and kissed her lip. It was still. For some sweet moments, I forgot.
She shoved me away. ‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘I thought . . . I’m sorry.’
‘Do you only think about yourself?’
The pale boy laughed and led me outside again, dragging deeply on a rancid-smelling cigarette.
‘You want some?’ he said, passing it to me.
I inhaled and the smoke seared inside me. I spluttered it out, my eyes streaming.
‘Have some more,’ he said. ‘It takes a while to get used to it.’
‘What does it do?’ I asked.
‘Numbs you.’
I took a long pull on it again, and it uncoiled inside me, fanning out.
‘Make another,’ I told him.
‘Mom!’
For a blissful moment I thought it was my Adair, but I looked up and saw the face of Aislinn.
‘Are you mad?’ she said.
I stumbled up, grasping her dress, using her as a post like Mam had used me when I was too little to be given so much responsibility. I started to cry and one lone hand gently touched my arm.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t want you.’
‘Mom.’
‘Get away.’
The sound of someone sobbing.
‘Go,’ I yelled.
Whoever was playing guitar stopped and all conversation fell away. The image of her wavered, and for a moment I put out my arms to catch her but she was already backing away from me.
I blocked out all thoughts and I sank into the night.
The boy kissed me, cold against a naked mattress in an empty bedroom. Outside I could still hear the party shouts, someone singing. I stayed awake to soak it in, but hope is a new-hatched bird rejected by its mother, sure to die.
I buried my face in the boy’s neck and breathed in his smell of smoke and old sweat, and he woke and we had sex again like strands of smoke coiling together, only to be obliterated by the cold autumn air.
Curls pressed to the boy’s forehead like a picture of a cherub I once saw on a postcard in the city. Asleep he was like a child, with the gentle breathing of innocent dreams. I unpeeled his body from me, stood at the window and waited.
Pat’s car sprayed pebbles on the lawn. He kept his gaze ahead when I got in, and before I shut the door he jerked the car forward. I embraced it, his hatred. I wanted him to hit me but he just drove and drove, eating up ground. I didn’t need to ask who told him where to find me. It could only have been Joyce.
The sun rose high in front of us and then began to fall behind. I didn’t look back. I looked for the first time in years at the older man, clefts on either side of his grinding mouth and hair cut with silver.
I couldn’t speak but with the last dregs of my willpower I wished for him to stop driving this long dark road, turn on the light and remake me with his gaze.
The sky had turned black.
My eyes were dry.
The car halted, engine silenced, and all that was left was his breathing. Neither of us moved. Frozen both in hatred for me. I slid the handle down, the door popped open and I stepped out, into the night, into the dark. And he drove away, the small beams of light vanishing.
* * *
I walked the roads with only the voice in my head for company.
Night stretched like a black ocean. Dust rose into my mouth and cold entered my bones. There was no moon, but I kept walking, feeling my way step by step.
The lights of a car shone out. Small at first, far off and growing, growing, into a sound. I stepped off the tarmac and the bushes scraped my legs but the car roared past, headlights waving along the fir trees. It wasn’t Pat.
I walked until dawn spilled white across the black outlines of the trees.
My mind brought me back to Éag, to Felim in the dark up near the cliff in the fairy hut. He pushed me down and pushed his way inside me, pushed Joyce inside me. The choice was stolen from me.
Everything swooped in, then burst out, fluttering away, and I wept.
A grey fox stood in the middle of the highway; its silver back shone and black eyes flicked over me and on, beyond me, back into the wild.
* * *
Much later, Pat picked me up. He told me he’d rung Enda and I could go to the house, pick up my things and take the bus to New York.
His hand rested on the gear stick. I reached out and he retracted it.
I cleared my throat. My mouth was parched.
‘How is Joyce?’ I asked.
‘Talk to her. She deserves the truth.’
He pulled up at the house.
‘She was here when I left,’ he said.
I dragged myself out of the car and went inside. I poured a glass of water in the kitchen. My hands shook. They were covered in dust. I scrubbed them with the nail brush. In the bathroom, I splashed my face. I packed my bag with everything. I wasn’t going to New York. I didn’t deserve the kindness Enda would give me.
Outside Joyce’s room I paused, and heard her muffled sobs, but I didn’t go to her. I was too afraid.
The mother climbed out of the river with empty arms. Her son was gone, lost in the memories of the dead.
The daughter watched her girl mother and knew that although her body was no longer in the river, her mind still waded through its mists.
The daughter watched and waited for the joy and youth of her girl mother to return. She watched as her girl mother’s hair turned silver and tears dropped, pooling around the wooden throne she would no longer leave. She watched her beloved father deliver fruit and leave it as an offering at her mother’s feet, where it withered, uneaten.
The Men
Pat stands in the shallows, the waves crashing in to meet him. He ducks and the white vanishes him. I’m breathless, watching from the low cliff, but his head appears again and he whoops and trudges out of the sea to his pile of clothes.
Éag hangs on the horizon, a shadow, not far away.
I wave to him a
nd he dresses quickly, jogs up the beach and climbs up the cliff.
‘Good swim?’
‘I’ve not washed in a few days.’
I sniff myself and I’m sour as vinegar, but there’s no time for me to dip in the ocean.
‘The men should be ready to row us now,’ I say.
It takes only a few moments to pack up our bags and leave Aislinn’s cottage. Jonjoe is waiting on the pier.
‘Is this how you get the tourists to Éag?’ I ask.
He grins, dragging his hand through his faded thatch of hair. ‘Not many people want to go to Éag, Oona.’
Soon we are out in the open water, and the shoal of Jonjoe’s sons row us hard. The sky is pink and thick with cloud but the sea is only lightly ruffled.
I turn my face towards Éag and clutch Pat’s hand.
They drop us on the only shore. Ahead the island rises, so much smaller than the last time I was here. Jonjoe shouts that he’ll send some lads back in the afternoon to fetch us. If the weather’s bad, they won’t come.
‘Oona?’ Pat says as they row away. ‘I recognise that guy. He was the one giving you drink the night we were here, wasn’t he? Did he hurt you?’
‘No. It wasn’t him.’ The pain in my throat is worse. I swallow it back. I will tell him. ‘It was Felim.’
I wish I had told Enda the truth.
Enda
The stillness of the lake calmed me.
I stayed out there for three months, walking and thinking about Adair. In my dreams he played in the garden, a little boy as high as my hip, throwing a ball. I caught it and ran to give it to him. I got close and the sunlight caught in my boy’s hair and turned it gold. I pulled away, horror in my mouth as the child Felim reached up to me and laughed at my fear.
I searched the island for Adair. Every field, every cottage, every beach. Over the roar of the waves came a cry, and I ran towards it, into the cave. Dead babies crawled and wriggled over each other, screams from their hollow mouths. Tiny skeletal hands clawed at my clothes. I woke tangled in the branches of a holly tree.
Sometimes I considered ending it all, but Pat would come out and talk to me about himself and Joyce. We’d sit together saying little as the long evenings stretched out before us, and some nights he stayed over, his age-softened body curved against mine, holding me in place while I slept. He had, at least partly, forgiven me for what I did. Every time I heard the car I hoped Joyce would be sat beside him, and every time he pulled onto the dirt track I saw she wasn’t. She hadn’t forgiven me at all.
I became good at surviving with just the camp stove. I drank endless tea, and to entertain myself went to the library in town. I sewed and knitted and Rose collected and sold the clothes I made to her colleagues, friends and patients. She joked that I had finally become the hermit witch, only she told me she would be much better suited to it as she at least could heal people. I couldn’t even heal myself but she had let herself forget how I had treated her. She is good like that.
Joyce went to university and Pat asked me to come home. I waited a week, but the weather was turning again, the winds were back, the lake calling me. I drove back myself.
Pat was sat on the porch and waved with a cigarette in his hand when he saw me walking up the path.
‘What’re you doing outside?’ I said. ‘You’ll freeze to death out here.’
‘I’ll survive it. There are worse things than a little cold.’
‘When did you start smoking?’
‘Oh, about three months ago.’
My back and arms were stiff from the drive. He blew grey shavings of smoke into the night. The black trees pressed in closer to the house, reaching out their bony fingers. I took a cigarette from the packet and sat beside him on the bench.
* * *
For the fall break, Joyce came home. I made sure I was out at Rose’s when Pat drove her back to the house.
‘Joyce is upstairs,’ he said as soon as I came into the hall. It was late evening and the place smelled like a roast dinner.
‘I won’t wake her.’
He said nothing. Just stared at me. He knew. He knew I was afraid of her.
The door banged above.
I couldn’t stop looking at her. Those eyes blazing down.
‘I thought I might make cocoa,’ I said.
She climbed slowly down the stairs.
‘All right,’ she said.
Her hair was tied in a rough ponytail that hardly controlled its wildness. We all sat, awkwardly sipping our hot chocolates. Pat was the first to talk, and he talked about Adair. Joyce and I listened all night. Sometimes I caught her looking at me and I couldn’t tell what she was thinking.
* * *
We went on for five days, talking little but hiking with snacks.
Somehow she was eighteen and I’d missed it. She was taller than me, and frowned a lot and chewed her nails and watched.
Pat continued to talk to the both of us, and bridged sentences between us as we couldn’t find a way to do it for ourselves. But we were moving closer with each hike. I felt it in the way we both laughed when Pat slipped and landed on his backside, scattering potato chips in a wild arc. She studied in the kitchen while Pat and I made dinner. I felt her opening, and I was too.
* * *
On Joyce’s last morning there was a knock at the door. We were all in the kitchen, eating fresh scones. Joyce ran to get it. There was a hushed voice in the hall. I stood up as she came back.
‘Enda’s here.’ There was a strange ring to her voice, as if she wasn’t really sure if what she said was true.
The heaviness that had been lifting from my bones settled back again. The last time I’d seen him was two years before. I’d gone down to New York alone and we visited the enormous public library, eaten slippery spaghetti in a restaurant with plastic tablecloths and strolled through Brooklyn arm in arm to see the Irish in their new native habitat. He was quieter than the Enda I knew before but I never questioned him, because the fear had got in me that we were strangers, as remote from each other as Éag and Inis.
I found a man in the sitting room.
‘Hello, littlie,’ Enda said. ‘It’s good to see you.’ His lilting, island tone was the only part of him left. He was grey as a beach rock, rain-pitted and worn thin. ‘Don’t be giving me that look,’ he said.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ I sat on the floor next to him and took the shrunken fingers in my hand.
‘I’m a bit ill is all.’
‘I’ll have to feed you up.’
‘I’d like that, littlie. I really would.’
He leant back and shut his eyes. I gave him another cushion, even though he was surrounded by them, and spent the morning with him talking about the island and our parents and Kieran. At lunch he instructed me to make the best meal of our lives. Joyce sat with him while I hurried around the kitchen, trying to make food that would be easy to eat. Joyce was laughing, and then fell quiet. I hurried back to them with soft rolls and soup slopping on the floor.
Pat watched me from the hallway. I tried not to catch his eye but he beckoned me over.
‘You have to convince him to go to a hospital,’ he whispered.
‘He just needs to rest.’
‘I think it’s AIDS, Oona.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘That’s a lie.’
Pat’s eyes were wide. The tide had pulled away the rocks I perched on, clinging to the hope of Enda healing, but now there was only water to hold me. Pat’s hand steadied my elbow.
‘You two gossiping about me?’ Enda’s eyes were shut. ‘I won’t go to the hospital, but they told me I wouldn’t bother you for long.’
Pat was hanging onto my shoulder. Somewhere behind us I heard Joyce start to cry.
‘Oona,’ Enda said. ‘I want to see the lake again.’
‘We’ll go when you’re better.’
‘No. It has to be soon.’
‘Tomorrow,’ I said to Pat and he nodded.
Joyce and I sat wi
th Enda in the front room, playing cards while he slept. She was more distracted than me, because I easily won. In the morning Enda was too exhausted to leave bed so we played cards on his quilt and I sang the songs he asked for, the ones I learned at Mam’s knee, and Joyce hummed along, somehow familiar with them just from hearing me sing these lullabies to Adair.
* * *
The lake was as smooth as a tideworn pebble. Stars pierced the blanket above.
Enda leant on Pat, his cane limp at his side, and I set up the fold-out chairs so we could look at the water. Joyce sat on the ground between Enda and me, clutching his knee.
After a while Enda said, ‘I’d like to just be here with my sister.’ Joyce sobbed and he stroked her head. It was too painful to watch them so I walked along the shore and listened to the slap of the lake.
When I got back Pat and Joyce were gone. They had left us with blankets, a flask of coffee, a fire and ham sandwiches. It was cold out and I wrapped all the blankets around him, cocooning his fragile body. His face was all that was visible, grinning, too many teeth.
‘I’m sorry it’s not the ocean,’ I said.
He smiled. ‘It’ll do.’
In the thick of night air the water was the only sound shushing gently against the muddy shore. If we forgot, it was almost like home.
‘I’m sorry too, Oona,’ Enda said.
‘What do you have to be sorry for?’
‘That night on Éag. I was afraid to talk to you about it. I never told you I loved you and that I was there for you.’
‘That’s just how we were. We never talked about what mattered.’
‘Now I don’t see why. I wish I’d told you about myself too.’
‘But I could have told you I knew about you. I could have told you many things.’
‘You can tell me now.’
I thought about telling him but I would ruin this night and many more. I would ruin all his memories of Felim.