And even that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was after. Like the other girls had said. The worst was when it was over.
Her baby’s head crowned close to two in the morning. Julia was so exhausted she could barely bring herself to push. The doctor held her baby’s head in his gloved hands. Suddenly, in a wet, sucking squelch, Julia’s baby was born.
She heard the baby crying, heard the doctor tell the nurses that he was a boy. She could hear her own voice croak that she wanted to see him. She knew what she wanted to name him. William. But they wrapped him up and took him away.
Julia slept, and the following day she went back to work—with blood spilling into her skirt, milk leaking into her apron from her breasts, her belly still round, still contracting, the skin mottled like a sponge, just like the other mothers who stood beside her.
Four times a day, and twice at night, they filed into the nursery to feed their newborn babies at their breasts. Precious stolen moments to coo and cuddle, to smell the spicy milk scent of the crown of their heads, to stroke their tiny fingers. Four times a day, and twice at night, they were sent back to the laundry, to their rooms, to their penance.
One year. That was how long they were forced to stay in the home after their babies were born, to pay for their birth and their care by working six days of every week for the nuns. Seeing their children for one hour a day only, after their early infancy. Just enough time for a cuddle, a song, a story. Just enough time for the tiny child to recognize his mother. Just enough time for her heart to break again, and again, and again.
William was all Julia thought about. When she made her bed in the morning. When she ate her porridge at breakfast. When she worked through the noise and steam. She dreamed of the day they would be together, without whitewashed walls and rows and rows of identical cribs, without nuns watching their every move.
She dreamed of him all night, lying alone in a crib on the other side of this enormous building, separated by stairs and doors and nuns.
* * *
—
On the day of William’s first birthday, Julia’s father came to fetch her. He folded her into his arms and said, “It’s over now, it’s over. You’re coming home.”
Julia ran to the nursery to get her baby. The nuns stopped her at the door. They shook their heads.
“We’ll take care of him, Julia,” they said. “Go home now, and be with your family. Go home and take your second chance for a proper life.”
Inside the nursery, the babies were crying. The toddlers stared at her with round, open eyes. They understood nothing. Julia understood nothing.
The nuns took her hands, took her elbows, took her under her arms when she started crying, started screaming, started trying to run back to the nursery, pleading, “I’ll stay, I’ll stay, I’ll work here forever, just let me keep my baby.”
They kept walking; they held her up; they wouldn’t let her fall; her—fallen woman already. They led her to her father, who bundled her into her old coat, pinning her arms to her sides. She had screamed all there was in her to scream.
As her father pushed her gently into the car, one of the nuns said, “You’ll see, Julia. You’re one of the lucky ones. From a good family. You can still have a good life, find a husband. Nobody in your parish needs to know.”
The other nun patted Julia’s shoulder and said, “Now you can put all this behind you.”
Julia still believed somehow, in the depths of her heart, that her family would send for her baby when he had finished his nap. That she would raise her beautiful baby to love the animals on her family farm, to become a bustling and loud darling little boy. To see him off to school in the morning. To mend his clothes and kiss his knees when he skinned them. To tell him stories and sing him songs and let him fall asleep in her arms.
Her father would allow her to fetch him. She’d tell him—she’d explain the all-encompassing love she felt. She’d explain that none of this was her son’s fault. That he shouldn’t have to suffer for his mother’s sins.
The nuns shut the car door and Julia finally managed to speak, croaked the words out of the open window: one last plea.
“I didn’t even say goodbye.”
Her father started the engine. The nuns waved as the car pulled away. Before they left, Julia heard one say, “You see, it’s a kindness. It’s a good thing we didn’t let you get too attached.”
23.
The fallen and the forgotten
Donegal, 2012
The morning was something unexpected, as if not a single one of us thought we’d wake up to see the dawn. And yet eventually, as it did every morning, then like now, pale white light shone through the high empty windows, painted the stone walls a lighter gray. After a virtually sleepless night, our faces had taken on the same hue.
Outside our salt circle, darkness retreated, slightly, to the corners of the room, pooled in the shadows of the old bedframes. Or perhaps we had grown accustomed to the gloom. We turned away from the stairs that led up to where we’d seen the girl the night before, and instead walked deeper into the building. The doorway at the far end of the hall had once been bricked up, but had since been broken open, stones stacked neatly to either side. Beyond it, time was strange—simultaneously paused and speeded up, stark and startling.
This room was even larger than the one we had slept in. Long tables filled the space, covered in dirt and creaky Singer sewing machines under faded dustcovers. Measuring tapes, rusted scissors, and needles littered the floor. Over each door, a large crucifix and a framed photograph of an old pope.
Weak sunlight filtered through windows set high in the walls, illuminating the long fluorescent lights that swung on rusted chains from the ceiling. Pipes ran underneath the windows, over the exposed walls, disappeared into other rooms like worms inside a dead animal. Only our footprints disturbed the dust.
As we walked, the sound of our steps echoed off the ironing boards and steam presses, the pumps and hydraulics of the boiler, the giant vats for bleaching, the industrial-sized washing machines twice as tall as the tallest of us (Finn, whose face was the same stone gray as the walls underneath the ancient peeling paint).
Through a far door was an office, its walls covered in cardboard boxes on metal shelving, interspersed with ceramic statues of Mary (the Virgin, naturally, not the Magdalene). Inside the boxes were folders, files, stacks of metal hangers, the same detergent and fabric softener that Rachel used at home.
In a corner stood a large fridge-freezer, empty now, door yawning open. On the countertop beside it, an electric kettle, a radio—a cluster of reminders that this place was open not so long ago.
“This looks . . .” Ida spoke suddenly, broke the silence. “This looks newer. I mean, more modern than I thought it would.”