Cale said, “Did you see—did you—see—”
There was a letter on the windowsill. A letter addressed to me. It was weighted down by the girl’s brass candleholder.
My own candle’s flame flickered. But I wasn’t carrying a candle, was I? Wasn’t I just holding a phone?
“This is . . .” Ida was pale, eyes bright and wide. “This is some mass hallucination or something. This is some mass hysteria. This isn’t real. This can’t be real. We’re all just imagining together.”
Cale had her eyes closed. She was muttering, “I can’t see you, I can’t see you, I can’t see you,” over and over again. Finn’s hands were clenched and he was shaking.
I stood in the middle of the room and spoke in a clear, loud voice that even my own ears didn’t recognize. “We see you. We hear you. We feel you. What do you want?”
Follow, came the whisper. Follow us.
“Why are you doing this?”
There are tears in the landscape. Pinpricks in the map. Pain stays on in places like this.
“What do you want us to do?”
You won’t see us in the photographs. The history books. But the landscape remembers.
By then I was crying. Huge tears blinding. “What do you want me to do?”
The only thing you can do.
Tears ran like rivers down my cheeks, dripping onto the dry floor, salting the earth. “I can’t find my sister. I can’t break the curse. I can’t do anything. I can’t help you. I’m just a bad fucking apple. Just like her.”
So were we. Don’t let us be. Tell the story.
The tears were choking me, stealing my voice. “What story?”
Break the curse, Deena.
“Shit.” My voice broke first.
I sank down to the dusty floor and wept.
Dear Deena,
None of this is easy. This isn’t a simple story to tell. True stories often aren’t, especially those that have been hidden for so long. This is where you come from. The history of this country is tied to the roots of our family tree. I need you to know this. She needs you to know this. They all do.
This is what a curse does: It takes a truth and twists it. It punishes those who don’t conform. It sets the parameters of conformity so narrow that few can actually stick to them. Ask Rachel, she knows. We’re more alike than she wants to admit. We are all bad apples, Deena, plucked before we were ripe and ready, right off the family tree.
Here, read this, you’ll see.
20.
When a home is not a home
Drumcliff and Donegal, 1936
It took almost six months for anyone to notice that Julia was pregnant. She had only had her monthly blood once or twice before and her mother assured her it was normal for it to come and go during the first year. It was also normal, she said, for Julia’s breasts to be tender, her joints stiff and sore.
“Growing pains,” her mother said fondly, brushing her daughter’s long red hair. She never imagined that Julia could be pregnant. Not even Julia imagined that.
She wasn’t sick the first few months, just tired. (Growing pains, her mother said again.) She didn’t start to show until Christmas, and even then it was easy for her to tell herself she was simply changing, becoming a woman. (Growing pains, her mother kept saying, and certainly her words were true, but it wasn’t only herself that Julia was growing.) The swell of her belly was well hidden under her skirts, and only her sister ever saw her undressed in the room they shared.
It was Lizzie who exposed her, although she could never have imagined what would happen when she did.
* * *
—
It was a shock and a shame on the family. That’s what Julia’s parents both said. It was a curse and a burden. It was all her own doing. It was a great sin.
It was a smacked face. It was a dress torn away from a swelling belly. It was hair pulled to drag her over to the fire, press her hand against the burning stove until she told whom she had been with, whom she’d sullied herself for, whom she’d let turn her into a fallen woman, someone beyond repair.
Lizzie listened outside the kitchen door and her tears were salt and shock and sudden guilt. She was the one who’d told her mother, who’d spied Julia’s round abdomen when she got changed for bed and hadn’t known what to do, had done what any child does with a problem she can’t solve: She’d found an adult to help. Except these adults weren’t helping.
The following morning, Julia nursed her burnt hand and cried while her parents went to speak to the priest. They returned with a solution.
“A home,” Patrick called it. “For mothers and babies. A place for you to rest. To repent. To make things right.”
But nothing would ever be right again.
Patrick remembered the herbs his mother had used. The hot baths she’d prescribed, the teas and ointments. But he also remembered how she’d died, burned to death in her bed. It was difficult not to attribute it to an act of God. It was difficult not to see Julia’s current condition as a form of penance.
Julia never said who the father was. Said she couldn’t remember. Said she must have drank poitín at the St. John’s Eve dance, which made her mother smack her all the more, but didn’t answer the question. Not even when Catherine had pressed her daughter’s hand to the hot stove.
“Cast her out,” Catherine hissed that night, hair askew and face wild. “Let her find her own way in this life, the little slut.”
But Patrick calmed her, stroked her blond hair until it lay flat again, told her that everything was not yet lost for Julia, that Father Hannigan was right, that since this was Julia’s first offense she could be spirited away to the home before anybody else noticed, could come back to the farm right after and none of the rest of the parish need know.
“She made a mistake,” said Patrick.
“A mistake is a kiss,” Catherine insisted. “A mistake is an indecent word at a dance. A mistake is drinking a few too many glasses of Guinness. This was not a mistake. This was a sin.”
Within a day, Julia’s bags were packed, excuses concocted about staying with family up in Donegal, helping out an elderly relative, what a kind, good, selfless girl, a credit to her parents.
* * *
—
Early the following morning, John O’Connor drove his pregnant granddaughter up to Donegal. He whistled as he drove. Julia would not know it, but, when John O’Connor returned home, let himself into the bull’s field to feed him, the creature would charge him, putting him in the hospital for three weeks with a broken collarbone. For the rest of the year, the bull would have to be chained and sedated so he wouldn’t attack or escape.