* * *
Cutlery scrapes against plates and echoes off the high ceiling. It’s practically a cathedral in here.
We are staying the weekend at Niall’s parents’ place, so I can meet them. Niall wanted to do a half-hour coffee; it was me who suggested the whole weekend when I heard his dad’s longing on the phone. Arthur Lynch is a quiet, cheerful fellow who misses his son a lot. Penny Lynch is a different story. I should have opted for the coffee.
“What do you do for work, Franny?” she asks me, even though Niall’s already told her. I’m just grateful someone is speaking.
“I’m a cleaner at NUI.”
“And what drew you to that vocation?” Penny asks. She’s wearing a cashmere sweater and ruby earrings. The fireplace in the corner is the size of Dublin, and the wine we’re drinking has been in the cellar as long as Niall’s been alive.
“It’s not a vocation,” I say with a smile. I don’t know if she meant it as a joke but it’s pretty funny to me. “It’s just a job I could get with no skills or qualifications. It’s easy enough to come and go, and you can do it anywhere in the world.” I pause with the fork halfway to my mouth. “Actually to be honest, I don’t mind it. It’s meditative.”
“Happy days,” Arthur says. His cheeks are very red from the wine and he seems chuffed to have us here. His accent is more Belfast than Galway.
“And what do your parents do?”
Niall exhales loudly as though he’s about to lose his shit. He must have briefed them before we arrived, and his mother isn’t following the script.
“I don’t know,” I tell her. “I haven’t seen either of them in a long time.”
“Then they’re unaware of your marriage to Niall?”
“They are.”
“What a shame. You’ve done so well for yourself, I’m sure they would be proud.”
I meet her hazel eyes, the same exact color as her son’s. I’m not playing whatever game this is. “I’m sure they would be,” I agree. “Your son’s very special.”
“How’s the new gardener going, Dad?” Niall asks loudly.
“Very well indeed—”
“How did you two meet?” Penny asks me.
I put my wineglass down. “I sat in on his class.”
“Only person in the history of my teaching career to leave in the middle of a lecture,” Niall says.
“I bruised his ego.”
“What a meet cute,” Arthur says.
Penny’s gaze is precise; everything about her is careful and poised. She says, very deliberately, “I suppose working on the university campus might allow one access to a successful young professor’s schedule.”
“Jesus, Mother—” Niall starts to say but I squeeze his knee under the table.
“Sadly the faculty isn’t so transparent with their lecturers,” I tell her. “No matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t find any information about the professors’ net worths or their marriage statuses. Made it really hard to know which classes to sit in on.”
It takes a moment, and then Niall dissolves into laughter. Even Arthur has a chortle, while Penny keeps her eyes trained on me and offers a magnanimous smile.
“I just like birds, Penny,” I tell her. “I promise.”
“Of course,” she murmurs, signaling for one of her staff to take our plates.
* * *
“I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy,” Niall says, still grinning with glee. I roll my eyes and hide a smile of my own. I don’t want to condone making fun of his mother—he’s lucky to have one who still wants to be around him, and now that the moment’s passed I regret the jab.
“She was just being protective,” I say.
“She was being an enormous bitch, and what’s worse—she didn’t even have the wit to be subtle about it.”
We’re in the guest wing because Niall didn’t want me sleeping in his childhood bedroom. That bedroom was a haven for him but it was also his prison; Penny used to punish him for the smallest things by locking him in there to think about his behavior, and as this occurred daily it offers him a cold childhood to remember. Venturing into that bedroom is stepping back into his inadequacies, his loneliness, the feeling of being responsible for his mother’s happiness and also an utter failure at it.
“Here you are, darlin’.” He’s run me a bath, so I cross to the en suite, undressing as I go and letting clothes fall where they may, as you do when you’re on holiday. I sink into the hot water and Niall sits on the edge of the tub, peering around at his parents’ ornate bathroom tiles and gilding as though the sight of it all bewilders him.
“I’m glad I married a girl who can hold her own,” he says.
“Did you marry me to annoy your mother?”
“No.”
“Not even partially? Because I wouldn’t mind if it were partially.”
“No, darlin’. I stopped trying to get reactions out of my mother a long time ago.”
“You’re still so angry with her.”
I’m surprised at how quickly his response comes. “Because she’s not good at love,” he says.
* * *
I wake from a dream of trapped moths, throwing themselves repeatedly into a pane of glass as they try to reach the light of the moon. Niall’s gone from the bed so he doesn’t see what I see: that my feet are covered in dirt, and have smeared it all over the sheets. I pause. Oh no. I must have gone roaming in my sleep.
At breakfast something is wrong. Penny is striding around the house giving terse instructions to her staff, while Arthur buries his face in a newspaper, hoping for invisibility. Niall pours me a cup of coffee and steers me to a window seat overlooking the gardens.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“Penny’s greenhouse cages got left open last night. Her birds escaped.”
“Oh shit…” I try to make out her cutting words in the next room, and hear something about reimbursement and pays being docked. I gulp my coffee and tell Niall I’ll be back in a moment.
Sunlight turns the surface of the pond molten. Long grass brushes my calves as I walk to the greenhouse. It’s quiet and cool inside; I can already see the huge cages at the end are no longer alive with color and movement and sound, but empty like a skeleton. I inspect the lock on the door and my heart sinks—there is no key or combination, simply a deadbolt that can be easily opened from the outside. I wonder if they hesitated before their escape, wary of what lay beyond the cage, or if they surged free, a vibrant bursting of joy.
“I had over twenty species,” says a voice and I turn to see Penny. She looks out of place in this earthy cave.
“Niall showed them to me once. They were wonderful.” And trapped. Even if I hadn’t seen the dirt on my feet, or the type of lock, I would know what happened. There was an ache in my chest from the first moment I saw them in here, hidden from true sky. More than anything I wanted to set them free. But only my other half, the savage half, would actually do such a thing.
“Penny, I…” I clear my throat. “I’m so sorry, I think it might have been me.”