I don’t reply.
“Do you know where she is, Franny?”
My throat thickens as I shake my head.
“You haven’t spoken to her since you were a kid?”
“I’ve been trying to find her.”
He absorbs this silently. Then, “What of your da?”
“I don’t have a da.”
“What happened to him?”
“No idea.”
I wonder if I will ever tell Niall the truth of my dad, or if I will keep it buried in the dark, rotting place within.
“Then why’d she send you to live with him?”
“She sent me to the only place there was left, to his mother in New South Wales.”
“Australia? Shit.” He scratches the early growth of his beard. “Accent seems obvious now. Hybrid thing that it is. How long did you live with your grandmam?”
“Why are you asking so many questions?”
“Because I want to know the answers.”
“You didn’t before.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Then why didn’t you ask? Why now?”
He doesn’t answer.
“Why didn’t either of us ask a single question?” I press. “We were so stupid.”
“Regretting it already?” he asks. The wedding, if it can be called that.
And for one long moment I think the answer will be yes, it seems obviously yes, only when I open my mouth it’s to say the other word, and I’m astonished to feel it as truth.
We both catch sight of an egret carried by an eddy. “Too windy for you, my love,” Niall murmurs to it. The bird is flung about and stolen from view.
“I was with her a few years,” I say. “Edith. But I came and went a lot, and in the end I didn’t spend much time with her before she died.”
“What was she like?”
I try to find the right word, my mind reluctant to go back there, to that farm and all its hard edges, all its loneliness. “Unforgiving,” I say.
Niall strokes my hair off my face and kisses my temple.
“Mam wasn’t like that,” I murmur. “She was warm and sweet, and lost. I loved her so much. She had the wandering thing but she was terrified of it, too. She begged me not to leave her. She was fine being on her own until I came along and then the thought of being without me made her want to die. That’s what she said. But there was a boy I liked. I wanted to go to the beach with him and I didn’t fucking tell her, I just went. Why did I do that? I stayed away two whole days—or it might have even been three. So by the time I got back it was too late and she was gone. Like she warned me she’d be.”
“She just left?”
I shake my head. He isn’t listening. “I left.” I look at him and brace myself for a truth, the worst one of all. “I always leave.”
He is quiet a long while, and then he asks, “But do you come back?”
I rest my head on his shoulder; I rest myself in his hands. It seems a safe place to be kept, even to belong. But where does he get to belong? What crueler fate is there than to belong in the arms of a woman who dies each night?
* * *
For years I thought of that evening in Doolin warmly, the evening I first knew I was his. It was only when he seemed bewildered by this recollection that something long since cast aside returned.
“I thought you hated dead things,” Niall said.
And I remembered how we walked along the rocks until we found the seabird settled among them, its neck broken and wings twisted at violent angles. It had gone simply from my mind, that image, like a light winking out.
15
LIMERICK PRISON, IRELAND FOUR YEARS AGO
I have waited for a rare moment alone to drag the crudely sharpened end of my toothbrush through my wrist. It hurts more than I’d thought. I drag it again, trying to deepen the wound. I know I’ve done it right when the blood is born dark as night. It’s slippery and I lose my grip on the toothbrush, only to find it again and go for my other wrist, wanting it over—
She smells of sweet, cheap sugar as she kneels and gathers my arm strongly in her grip. The makeshift weapon is flung from my reach and she is calling for help and I am sobbing for her to let me go, please just let me go—
* * *
Her name is Beth. My cellmate. We don’t speak to each other, not after those first days when I tried to end it. I don’t think she will ever speak to me again, and that is fine. She and I don’t cry at night, not like the women in other cells. We don’t shout like they do, nasty lewd comments for the benefit of the guards or to rile each other up. I think they shout and cry to give voice to the fury and the fear of being so reduced. No, Beth ignores me and I lie shivering in horror, the horror of walls and of what I’ve done. I am unmade.
After only a month or so I was moved from the relatively comfortable single bedrooms of the women’s prison, with its bedspreads and kitchens and sweet-smelling bodywash, to Limerick Prison, which is a different world and far more fitting. Here the cells are small and gray and concrete. Beth and I share a metal toilet and the window is opaque.
There are women here who’ve been violent because of drugs or alcohol. Women with addiction problems. Women who steal or commit vandalism. Abusive mothers. Homeless women. There are men, too. It is a mixed prison, after all, and not much keeping us apart. One door, to be specific. To be terrifying.
There are all kinds here. But I am the only woman who has killed two people.
* * *
I’ve been here nearly four months when it first happens. It takes them that long to realize that the murderess is harmless, catatonic, even. I don’t speak, I hardly eat, don’t manage to move much, except to clean and walk when they let me outside. But even without a voice I manage to offend Lally Shaye—it’s something in my eyes—and she beats me black and blue. It happens again a month later, and then in another three weeks. It’s becoming a habit of hers. I’m an easy target.
After the third attack I’m sent back from the infirmary with broken ribs and a broken jaw and all the blood vessels in one eye burst. I feel like hell. But Beth looks at me and stands up. It is the longest she’s regarded me since that bad day near the start.
“Get up,” she says in her Belfast accent.
I don’t, because I can’t.
She takes my wrist and wrenches me to my feet; it hurts less to surrender to it.
“You don’t stop this now, it’ll never stop.”
I shake my head, listless. I don’t care about being beaten.
Then Beth says, “Don’t die in here. Not in a cage. Get free and die, if you have to.”
It stills me. An idea forming.
“Lift your hands.” She lifts hers, making fists like a boxer. It seems absurd. I’m not this, I can’t fight. She yanks my arms up for me, positioning them. Ribs hurt. Lungs wheeze. Spine sags.
She punches me. I gasp in pain, cupping my cheek.
And Beth sees it. The flash of anger in my eyes. A remnant of willpower, not completely dead after all. She stokes it, calling it back to life, and all right, then, why not, I set my mind to a plan: die free.