The Crooked Branch (20 page)

“Nah, I’m good,” she says, so I make myself turn back to my door, but it’s a physical effort, like peeling your eyes away from a car crash or a particularly discomforting episode of
The Bachelor
.

“I hope she’s gonna be okay,” I say to Emma, once we’re inside with the door shut safely behind us. She just blinks at me. She doesn’t reach or wriggle or squeal. Just blink, blink.

I take the monitor to the couch with us, and immediately flip it to channel C. I can’t hear anything. I set it on the coffee table while I feed Emma. Afterward, I roll my yoga mat out on the unfinished floor, and put one of Emma’s baby blankets on top of it. I feel like she spends her whole life in contraptions. She’s always strapped into the car seat or the bouncy seat, or else she’s propped up in the Boppy on the couch beside me. She’s six weeks old now, and I want her to stretch out into the world. The pediatrician wants her doing tummy time. I lie down on the floor beside her.

“Hey, you’re six weeks old today!” I tell her. She blinks at me. I sing “Happy Birthday,” and flap my hand above us like a pterodactyl. Or at least that’s what I’m going for. She watches the pterodactyl-fingers, and makes a sound I’ve never heard before. It’s like a coo. I roll to my side.

“Did you just coo?”

She blinks at me, and I make the pterodactyl-hands again.

“Coo,” Emma gurgles.

Oh my God this is so exciting.

“You did! You cooed!” I squeal, and I sit up quickly, and I wince, but the pain in my abdomen isn’t as sharp as I expect. “Wait until we tell Daddy!”

After ten minutes of tummy time, including three more coos, Emma is spent. She falls asleep in her bouncy seat, and I am so encouraged by the wild, unaccustomed success of my day that I decide to tackle some work. I haven’t even checked e-mail in weeks. I take off my shoes and pad into the office to flick on the computer, but as soon as I sit down, I notice that the red monitor light is flickering from where I left it on the coffee table. I go back to the monitor and turn the volume up. Max and Madeline are both back in one of the cribs together, and there are some toys in there with them. They are sitting up, facing each other, and I can see a drum, a rattle, and a stuffed panda bear in there, too. Madeline grabs the rattle and begins waving it around, precariously close to Max’s nose.

“Maybe I shouldn’t watch,” I say.

Now that I’ve met Jade, it seems like my voyeurism may have slipped from natural curiosity into weird spying. My hand goes up to the power switch, and I am
just about
to turn it off—I swear I am—when I hear the unmistakable sound of muffled sobs. The babies hear it, too, and they both turn toward the noise. Max lunges for the side of the crib, laces his one arm through the bars. He reaches for his mother. His chubby little hand strokes the air.

I don’t do any work. I don’t even open my e-mail. I just sit there at the desk, staring helplessly at the monitor until the phone rings. It’s Leo.

“So how horrible was it?” he asks.

“On a scale of one to ten?”

“Yeah,” he says, “one being like that time we had to go to the Hamptons for your cousin’s wedding, and ten being an adulterous case of genital herpes.”

“I’d go with a solid seven.”

He whistles.

“Yeah, it was bad.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing really
happened
, just the women were awful to each other.”

“Ugh,” Leo says.

“For real. They were all so judgy and mean. And there were like warring factions. The breast-feeding moms versus the bottle moms, and then the working moms versus the SAHMs.”

“The SAHMs?” he says.

“Don’t ask.” I’m rubbing my temples. “Oh! But guess what, I almost forgot to tell you! Emma cooed.”

“She what?”

“She cooed.”

“Like a pigeon?”

“No, Leo, like a baby. Like
coo.
” I try to do the gurgle as cute as Emma did it, but I sound like an insane person. “Forget it, you’ll hear it tomorrow. It’s this new thing she’s doing. It’s cute. And guess what else.”

“What?”

“I met the mom from channel C.”

“No way,” he says.

“Yep.”

“Did you go find her? Did you like ring her doorbell or something?”

“What am I, a stalker?”

“No, I’m just asking, because I know you were concerned. . . .”

“No, I didn’t ring her doorbell,” I say disgustedly, but secretly I’m glad I didn’t think of it sooner, or I might have. “How would I even know which doorbell?”

“I don’t know.”

“She was at the mommy group.”

“Oh, was she one of the awful mommies?”

“No, she was actually really nice, I mean she seems nice. We went for a coffee afterward.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah.”

“And how was that?” he asks.

“It was good. I mean, it was kind of awkward. I don’t know how much we have in common. Not a whole lot, I think, but we might have the same sense of humor, and a similar potty mouth. Anyway, it was just nice to go out during the afternoon, and sit and talk with another adult for a little while, even if it was sort of weird.”

“Good, honey!” Leo says. “See, something good did come of the awful mommy group!”

“Well, we’ll see.” I don’t want him jumping to conclusions. “And anyway, she’s still, I don’t know. I mean, I’m still worried about her.”

“Why?”

“After we got back, she was still crying on the monitor.”

“Majella, you’re still listening in on her?” Leo sounds appalled.

“What? No. I mean, just for a minute, it was on the wrong channel, I just overheard. I wasn’t spying or anything.”

Leo sighs. “All right, well, now that you’ve met her, maybe you can talk to her. See if she needs some help or something.”

“Maybe,” I say, but I’m already trying to imagine how that conversation would go.
Hey, listen, Jade, I’ve been eavesdropping on you and notice you seem to weep a lot.
Her response:
Nah, I’m cool, you crazy bitch.

“All right, I gotta run,” Leo says. “I’ll be pretty late tonight. We have a full house.”

“Okay!” I say readily, because I want to show him how well I am adapting to my new life.

Emma and I have a good night. The cooing helps. After she goes to sleep, I pour myself a glass of wine, find Ginny Doyle’s diary, and run myself a bubble bath. I lean against the bathroom sink while the water foams up and the air steams warmly around me. I want to read the diary in the tub, but the pages are so fragile, I’m afraid. What if I drop it in the water? A charge runs through me, just holding that weathered book. It’s like the woman embossed her grief onto its very pages, and now it’s stained there, animate beneath my fingertips. I can
feel
her anguish. I crack the book and reread the first few entries. When the tub is full, I lay the diary down carefully on top of a towel on the closed lid of the toilet. I twist off the squeaky taps and immediately hear the crunching.

Shit. I crack the door to the bathroom and peek out. “What the hell is that crunching?”

My heart feels rickety, my breath shallow.
And why does it scare me so much?
The monitor. Where is the monitor? When Emma is asleep in her room, I always have it nearby on a table, or clipped to my enormous waistband. Shit. I’ve forgotten it downstairs. I tighten the belt of my bathrobe, and scamper down the hall in the direction of the crunching, but now it seems like it’s coming from behind me. I spin around in the dark hallway and try to listen.
Crunch.
I flip on the light switch, run to Emma’s room, and push open the door, so the light from the hallway brightens the carpet inside. Emma is breathing steady, a soft little rhythm, a reassurance. My own breath deepens, and I strain to listen past the sound of small lungs filling and emptying. The crunching has stopped. I step into the room and stand over her crib to watch her features in repose. She’s so beautiful like this, her cheeks all full and soft, her tiny hands thrown up over her head, and the light through the crib slats falling in stripes across her peaceful face. I touch her velvety forehead, and her lips make a seeking motion in her sleep. I tiptoe out and pull the door mostly closed behind me.

I retrieve the monitor from downstairs, and bring it back to the bathroom with me, but I’m too uneasy to sink into a hot bath now. The crunching has me unsettled. I step into the tub just long enough to soap and splash myself clean. Then I pull the stopper, towel myself dry, dress in my baggiest pajamas, and take the monitor and diary down the hallway with me, into my bedroom. The monitor is turned up loud, and I set it on my nightstand. Our bed is one of those high platform ones, so I use a cushioned footstool to climb up, and then I lean back onto my pillows and open the book. A shiver runs down my spine.

7 April 1848

The children are grand, they’re so much more resilient than I am, as if they don’t even remember the hunger, the grief. They don’t speak of who’s missing. I feel like a ghost of myself, but my babbies are bright little nuggets of resolve. Whatever sorrow has haunted them no longer weighs them down in this new place—they seem to have swallowed it, digested it. It becomes a part of them, and they move on in lightness. I wish I could know their secret, and thieve just a morsel of that lightness for myself.

Easter was gorgeous. The way the sun shines here is so different from Ireland. It’s closer, somehow, and heavier. The light really stays on your skin. The children glow with it. New York is a good place for them, after everything.

15 April 1848

I think I might be expecting, and I’m happy. I’m trying. I know it’s a joy and a blessing, the idea of bringing a new child into this reinvented family. But I miss our old life at home. I’m as happy as I can be here, but not as happy as I once was. And maybe that’s as it should be. I have to pay somehow, for what I’ve done. And still I feel that our new life is a betrayal, in a way, of everything we’ve lost. What right have we to carry on, to start over? My children, yes—they are blameless. But me . . .

23 April 1848

Perhaps there is no baby after all. It could just be I’m exhausted and anxious. I still don’t sleep well here, with all the lights and the noises. The neighbors are so close you can hear them coughing, spitting, arguing, lovemaking. It’s unsettling, all this aggressive intimacy. But it’s the crunching that troubles me most, in the nighttimes. Every night, it wakens me. If I could find its source, I might have peace. I have a terrible fear that it’s coming from inside me, from my mind.

25 April 1848

Dear God, I killed her. I killed her. It is late now, and the children are asleep here, and I was awakened by that horrid crunching, and it was so vivid, the sound of it, that it brought me right back there. . . .

The cottage. That last day in the yard, under the blackthorn tree. I can see myself, almost as if from above. Like I’m that magpie in the tree looking down. And there’s the other me down in the yard, the ferocious me. The baby is there. Maire is watching. Oh the horrors my poor daughter has seen in her short life.

I’m holding the hurley bat in both hands, and I’m swinging it down over my head. How does my face look in this instant? Is it pained, twisted, demented? Demonic, with the power coursing through me? I am about to take a woman’s life—a woman who was only kind to me until this last day, these last moments.

She is dead now.

Would that I could wish myself back to that moment, and stop it there. To drop that hurley bat to my feet, to hear its soft clatter in the dust. But instead there’s an almighty crack like thunder as I bring it down on her skull, and she drops, heavy like a bag of clean, dry praties. The baby nearly falls with her, but I catch him, I catch him, by one dangling arm. Her eyes and her mouth stay open, and Maire’s eyes, too, wide open at my back. Her voice is windy. She calls me mammy.

There are shards of the blue Wedgwood china on the ground, and they crunch beneath my feet, like the sound of bones snapping. Maire’s cheeks have gone a sickly white. There are pieces of the pale blue china strewn through the dead woman’s hair.

Why I remember this crunching, above all else, is a maniac question. Perhaps it’s easier than the rest, than Maire’s intrepid voice, and the baby crying after. It stays in my ears like a disease, that crunch. It robs my sleep.

God forgive me, God forgive me. I can still see her dead and ghastly face.

I close the book with a snap and throw it down on the bed, but the damage is done. I will never sleep now. I pick up the monitor from the nightstand, and a feeling of dread creeps over me. I’m almost afraid to look, afraid I will see a hand pass across Emma’s face, a shadowy figure lurking by the rail of her crib. I hop down from the bed, and hurry through the hall to check her again in person, without the void of technology between us. I hold my hand beneath her nose until I can feel the moist guarantee of her breath against my knuckles.

I retreat to the kitchen, where I top up my wine and then pace to the front window. It’s almost eleven o’clock. Emma will be up for a feed in a little while, Leo home not too long after that. I don’t sip the wine; I gulp it. I shouldn’t really have more than one, but surely an extra half glass won’t hurt? I bring it to the office, where I set it on the desk while I google
Ginny Doyle
, and get a bunch of LinkedIn and Facebook profiles. I don’t bother clicking through them. They don’t have what I’m looking for. Facebook can’t tell me how I’m related to some lunatic murderess from the eighteen hundreds. And maybe I don’t want to know. Maybe it’s best not to trace that line back too carefully, not to seek hard evidence of my shitty maternal genetics. I would like to believe that I can, one day, be a good mother. Or at least a not-terrible mother. What kind of a woman kills someone in front of her own daughter? With something called a “hurley bat”? And what the fuck even
is
a hurley bat? I google
hurley bat
, and then shudder at the flat, heavy thickness of the wood, the violent images that flood my mind. Who could do this? Who could crack open someone’s skull with a cudgel? Some great-great-grandmother of mine, I guess. Fan-fucking-tastic.