The Crooked Branch (27 page)

Ginny didn’t believe him, not in the slightest. The only comfort to her now would be her own death, and even that would mean abandoning her children again. So there was no possibility of comfort, never again. Ginny tried to lift breath into her breast, but she only shuddered.

“I suppose we should write to Kevin again,” she whispered. She tried not to imagine Raymond, sitting at a table in some faraway New York City tenement room with his brother, Kevin. Some neighbor or priest reading the letter out to them. She tried not to picture Raymond’s face.

“Let’s give it a few days,” Father Brennan suggested. “With all the upheaval in Ireland now, it’s little wonder we haven’t heard from your Raymond yet. I’d say his letters have gone astray, but you keep faith, and one will find its way to us soon. We can answer him then. We’ll give him the news soon enough.”

They walked home then, Ginny and her girls and the baby.

Ginny spent the whole of that day trying not to think of Ray. Hope was a wicked thing, and she knew she’d be better off without it. Ginny had heard stories of men fleeing to America to save their starving Irish families, only to arrive in New York and forget all about them. Some drank away their grief and their earnings. Others spent them on a new wife and children, a fresh start. Ginny knew her Raymond wasn’t capable of that sort of monstrosity. She knew he was a good and honorable man, that he wasn’t temptable or changeable. He loved his family. But then she remembered the willful amnesia of Springhill House, smack in the middle of the famine and wholly oblivious, and she feared that anything was possible. Perhaps New York
would
be seductive enough to make Raymond forget. Or maybe, even the revulsion of that possibility was just easier for her to imagine than the alternative.

Saturday was the first morning wakening up in the cottage without Michael, and the absence of him felt heavier and more shocking than Ginny could ever have conceived. All those weeks after Ray left, when Michael had stayed silent, hoarded his voice into himself, stolen time from Ginny—she wanted every one of those days back, every minute. She wanted to hold him and heal him and make him whole. She wanted to repair him back to the living boy he had been before that wicked blight had come into their lives, and robbed all the happiness out of his small world.

Seán came to the cottage that afternoon, and he brought a basket of food that Roisin had prepared: some fresh bread with a noggin of butter, cold boiled carrots, and a meat pie in one of Mrs. Spring’s blue Wedgwood china pie plates. There was a jug of buttermilk as well. A feast, compared with what Ginny had been stealing to send to the children all these months. A glimmer of guilt pulsed through Ginny for how cruel she’d been to Roisin at the house, how she’d blamed Roisin for everything. God bless her. It wasn’t her fault; Ginny had made up her own mind, after all. Roisin had only been trying to help.

Also tucked into the basket, and wrapped in a thick and perfumed lavender paper with a gray ribbon, was a gift for baby Raymond—a little book of children’s verse.

“Mrs. Spring knew you were coming?” Ginny asked.

Seán nodded. “She sent me. She still doesn’t know that I’ve been coming here all along, that I was bringing food. Or at least she hasn’t asked.”

“Is she not worried about the famine fever?” Ginny asked.

Seán shook his head. “She doesn’t seem to put it all together.”

“I suppose it was all quite shocking to her. She doesn’t exactly have a rugged constitution,” Ginny said.

“No,” Seán agreed.

Ginny looked at the lovely cream-colored book in her hands. On the cover was a tangle of flowering vines, and a little rabbit wearing a waistcoat. Poppy touched the rabbit. She hopped on the balls of her feet and clapped her hands.

“Will you read it to us, Mammy?” Poppy said, climbing up on Ginny’s knee and backing herself in against her mother.

Ginny flipped through its pages. They had never owned a book before.

“
Mo chuisle
, I can’t read it,” Ginny said. “Maybe we can ask Father Brennan when he comes again. But we can look at the pictures and make up our own rhymes, right?”

“All right.” Poppy tried not to sound disappointed.

“I can read it to you,” Seán said.

Maire was brushing the ashes from the hearth, and she stopped to raise her eyebrows.

“Fancy,” she said, and Seán laughed.

“Hardly,” he answered. “Just lucky.”

“Indeed,” Ginny said, and Seán sat down on the stool beside them, where she handed him the book. Poppy didn’t climb up on his knee, but she did stand, enthralled, by his elbow, while he read, and every now and again, she interrupted.

“Is that one there Hector?” she would ask, pointing to one of the frogs.

“This one, with the blue hat,” Seán would answer. “I think that one with the red bow is Millicent.”

He read the whole book to her, and when Maire was finished cleaning, she joined them. Maggie sat beside the fire and pretended not to listen. Ginny lifted Raymond from his cradle, and brought him into the sleeping room to feed him. In the privacy and quiet, she allowed herself a lurching of simple tears while Raymond suckled. She dried her face after, but her eyes were still swollen when she came out again. Seán was preparing to go.

“Thank you for bringing the food,” Ginny said, walking him out to the yard. “Hopefully we won’t need your help much longer. The crop seems to be coming good.”

“Thanks be to God,” Seán answered. “There were reports again in Westport this morning that the blight is spreading rapidly. People are beginning to panic.”

The two of them stepped out toward her strong, flowering plants. It was late June. The turnips and early potatoes would both be ready for harvest soon, in the next weeks, and there wasn’t the slightest sign of decay in the fields.

“They look grand so far,” Ginny said.

“Touch wood,” Seán replied. He fixed the bit in his horse’s mouth, but before he climbed up, he turned to her. “There’s something else.”

Inside the cottage, Ginny could hear Poppy singing to her baby brother. She shivered, and folded her arms across her chest.

“Mrs. Spring is leaving,” Seán said.

Ginny’s mind wheeled. “Leaving how?” she said. “Back to London?”

He shook his head. “New York.”

Ginny’s mouth might’ve fallen open, but she didn’t know how to respond at all.

“Apparently, her husband has taken a temporary appointment there, and he sent for her to join him.”

Ginny’s stomach roiled. “New York,” she whispered. “I thought . . . I mean Roisin always thought their marriage was finished, that he would never send for her.”

Seán shrugged. “I suppose even a bastard like Stuart Spring has some well-emaciated sense of duty. I think Murdoch’s been pressuring him to get her out of here, telling him how bad things have got, and that they might get even worse again now that it looks like the blight is returning. Murdoch doesn’t want to mind her anymore, but Spring doesn’t want her back in London either. He probably has another woman there now, and he wants to keep wifey out of the way. So when he got the post in New York, I guess he saw a chance to get her out of Ireland without having to compromise his freedom, his new life in London without her.”

“So you think he’ll just set her up in New York and then abandon her there, too, whenever his business is finished?”

“Of course,” Seán answered. “She’s only an unwanted responsibility to him now, nothing more.”

Ginny thought of Ray, and Seán’s words racketed around in her head:
an unwanted responsibility
. But that couldn’t be Ginny; it couldn’t be her children. No.

“It’s so horrible,” she said, wrenching her thoughts back from her own husband to Alice Spring. “I know she’s a bit touched, but she’s kind, she’s a kindly woman in her way. Not to mention beautiful.”

“I hadn’t noticed.” Seán smiled. He fitted one boot into the stirrup and hoisted himself up to the saddle. The horse stood still beneath him.

“So what will happen to Springhill House?” Ginny said. “How soon is she going?”

“Murdoch is arranging for her passage. He wants to get her gone as quick as he can, in the next couple of weeks. He’ll need to get her down to Cork, I’d say. I’ll probably have to drive her down, myself. All the good ships sail from there. They wouldn’t be great ones sailing out of Westport.”

“Right,” Ginny said, even though his words were rushing through her, and she couldn’t grab on long enough to make sense of them.

“So they’ve already dispatched Katie. Roisin begged for her to be able to stay on, but Mrs. Spring refused. There’s no need for her now.”

Ginny gasped. “But where will Katie go? Aren’t her parents dead? She’s too young to be all on her own.”

Seán shook his head; his face was stern.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Roisin is tight-lipped about it. She’s in an awful state. She’ll barely speak now, these last days. She’ll stay on to cook for Murdoch, and keep the house, even though it will only be the two of them left in it. And then most of the grounds staff will stay. They still need to work the land.”

“And what about you?”

“They won’t need me anymore,” he said. “I’ll go when Mrs. Spring does.” At those words, Ginny caught the terrible whiff of a nightmare memory in the air. The stink of something putrid and rotten.

“Go where?” she asked.

“I don’t know yet,” he said. “I’ve enough saved for my own Atlantic crossing. I might . . . I don’t know. I’ve no land here. No prospects. Know any rich folks looking for drivers?” He laughed, but Ginny couldn’t.

New York. Where Ray was. Now they were all going. The little company she’d come to rely on, the people who, over these last weeks and months, when all of the world had crumbled and decayed, had come to be her unlikely friends. They were going off across the sea now to New York, to Ray.

Ginny would miss Seán. But she should never have grown so fond of a man who was not her husband. She should never have grown so dependent on him. When she tried to breathe, it felt like water was seeping into her lungs. They walked to the top ridge, Seán on the saddle, and Ginny strolling alongside the horse, until they reached the highest point of Ginny’s land together. She turned back toward the cottage then, and looked out across the dips and folds of the winnowing fields, her little home tucked snugly among them.

“Please God, let the crop come good,” she said. “Let
one thing
come good in our life. We need this.”

And they really did. If the potato failed again, there would be no salvation this time. On the ridge looking down over Raymond’s cairn, Seán froze on his horse, cocked his head sideways as if he were listening to something in the distance. A high breeze whipped through his black hair, and he patted his horse’s neck beneath him. Then he lifted his head again and took a deep breath in through his nose.

“Do you smell that, Ginny?”

NEW YORK, NOW

“S
o how do you take your coffee?”

“Just black,” Jade says, “unless you have soy milk?”

“Black it is, then,” I say. “I did make vegan cookies, though. Snickerdoodles.”

Jade is sitting cross-legged on the floor beside the yoga mat, but it’s too small, and the twins keep rolling onto the unfinished subfloor. Emma is watching from the bouncy seat.

“Maybe we should move out back. It’s beautiful out,” I say, bringing a plate of the vegan cookies in to the coffee table. “And sorry about the floor. I’m not used to mobile babies, and we just haven’t been in a rush to do the flooring yet, because Emma doesn’t really get around much.”

“Yeah, I guess not,” Jade says, deadpan.

She is unimpressed by my sparkling wit.

“I’ll just make some lemonade first, and we can go outside,” I say.

“Cool.”

I squeeze the lemons in silence. Emma is vibrating in her little bouncy seat, and Jade just sits there rolling her babies back onto the mat whenever they get near the edge. She doesn’t talk to them or tickle their feet or kiss their armpits the way I do to Emma whenever she’s defenseless on the yoga mat with me. She just watches them silently, rolls them away from the edge.

I have never squeezed lemons so fast in my life. I add sugar, water, ice, and some crushed mint leaves. I carry the pitcher, some glasses, and the plate of awful snickerdoodles out to the back porch, and then return to grab Emma’s whole bouncy seat.

“Ready?”

“Sure,” Jade says, getting to her feet.

She lifts Madeline and her mug of black coffee, but leaves Max on the floor. I frown at him.

“Hmm, guess we can’t carry everything,” I say, thinking that perhaps it’s the mug of coffee she should leave behind.

“He’ll be fine, he can’t get very far,” she assures me. “I’ll come right back for him.”

I guess there are certain risks you learn to take when you have twins.

“Okay,” I say, and I lead her to the back door and down the five steps.

As soon as we’re outside, I recognize the fatal flaw in my plan: there is no grass here, nowhere soft to set the babies down. Not yet, anyway. Leo and I have plans to cut back the jungle beyond the porch, but like with most things on our renovation list, we haven’t gotten to it yet. Jade looks around desperately, and I cringe.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “Gosh, we just haven’t gotten to this stage yet, with Emma, where we need a baby-proof environment. I guess I hadn’t thought . . .”

I set Emma’s vibrating seat down next to my own chair at the wrought-iron table.

“It’s fine, you can’t expect the whole world to conform to your babies’ needs,” Jade says, with the grace and wisdom of Yoda. “I wouldn’t have thought of it either, before they were this age. I’m only starting to baby-proof my own place. But they sit up all the time now. Until they fall over. They really need somewhere soft to land, because the falling part is inevitable.”

“Well, here, let me take her, anyway,” I say, because all I can think about is Max, still inside on his own. We’ve been out here for almost a full minute. That kid could be down the front steps and halfway to Myrtle Avenue by now. Jade hands me her baby, disappears inside, and returns after a minute with Max.

“I could run next door and get my Pack ’n Play,” she says.

She is not leaving me alone with these three babies again. No way, nohow.

“Oh, we have one! You can use ours. It’s still in the box. We registered for it, but haven’t used it yet.”

“Cool,” she says, and then I realize that I’m going to have to go inside and upstairs to get it out of the hall closet. I’m going to have to leave Emma here alone with her. I take a sip of my lemonade to stall. Jade sits down at the table and balances Max on one knee. I settle Madeline on the other knee, and then I kneel down over Emma.

“Mommy will be right back!” I tell her. “Don’t go anywhere!” I have the idea to pinch her while I’m down there, to make her cry, so that I can track her little voice the whole time I’m inside. And then I realize that this is probably another symptom of my crazy, so I leave it. Jade is hardly going to kidnap her, anyway. Why would she want
another
baby? And how far could she get in thirty seconds with all three of them?

As soon as I pass the kitchen door, out of Jade’s line of vision, I break into a dead run. I ignore the dull pain of my C-section scar as I take the steps two at a time. I throw open the door to the hall closet with a bang, and I haul the Pack ’n Play out onto the floor. I pry at one end of the box with my fingers, but it doesn’t budge. Shit. Why is baby-product packaging so stubbornly resistant to being opened? This could take entire
minutes
. I bend down, and drag the whole box into Emma’s room, where I can see out the back window into the garden. Jade is holding both babies on her lap with one arm, and sipping her hot coffee with the other. Emma is looking straight up at the window. Can she see me? I wave.

After several moments of intense cursing and sweating, I finally loosen the thick staples from the cardboard flap on one end, and the box gives way. I upend it, and the Pack ’n Play slides out onto the floor. It’s fairly lightweight and tidily bundled. I lift it by the handle, and lug it quickly back downstairs. Jade hands me only one of her babies, and sets up the Pack ’n Play in approximately ten seconds. I couldn’t even get the bloody thing out of the box. She is the most accomplished human being I have ever met, and that includes my cousin who was in a boy band that was huge in Poland in the nineties.

“Wow,” I say.

“Yeah, it’s easy once you get the hang of it. These things are great. You’ll use it so much when Emma’s bigger.”

I don’t believe her. It’s like a tiny jail. She plops Max inside, and he rolls happily onto his back, and begins chewing one foot. Then Madeline goes in beside him, and starts chewing his other foot.

“Gosh, they’re so good,” I say. “They never cry.”

Jade snorts.

“I mean just compared to Emma. She seems to cry an awful lot. Sometimes she just goes on these crying spells, and they can last for hours, when
nothing
comforts her. It drives me insane.”

Emma sighs theatrically in her bouncy seat.

“Yeah, well, who doesn’t cry for hours sometimes, right?” Jade says. She leans back in her chair, and twists at a couple of the blond spikes that stick up from her scalp.

“It’s hard, isn’t it?” I say. “Becoming a mother? I mean, it’s amazing, too, but it’s so exhausting. Even with my husband, with one baby, it’s exhausting. I can’t imagine how you do it on your own with two of them.”

Actually, I know exactly how she does it. She leaves them in their cribs for hours, and the three of them cry all day long. That’s how. I look over at her babies, happy in their padded cell, and then I look at Emma, whose face has fallen, whose lip is threatening. She is squirming, her face turning that telltale magenta. Soon, she will let loose with her most impressive, most harrowing cry. The hunger cry.

“I gotta grab the Boppy,” I say, and I run inside and grab the nursing pillow off the couch.

I manage to get Emma out of the seat and attached to the boob before the cry rears its ugly head, which makes me feel almost as skillful as Jade, with her Pack ’n Play magic tricks. She is staring vacantly at her babies. I have absolutely no idea what to say to her.

“You know, you’re so impressive,” I decide. “I hope I can make it look as easy as you, when Emma’s that age.”

This time she does not snort. She does not respond at all.

“I’ll get the hang of it, right?” I say, and I brush the side of Emma’s face, her ear, with my fingertip.

This conversation is really not leaping out of the starting gate the way I had hoped. I can’t ask about the father; he’s not in the picture. There’s no family here. She hates her job. And then asking a new mom about her own interests seems almost cruel, a reminder of her lost life. I’m out of options. Jade sniffs, and when I look up at her, I realize with horror that she has tears in her eyes. She has turned her face as sideways as she can, to try and hide them, but it’s unmistakable. She stands up from her chair in haste and turns her back to me. She leans over the Pack ’n Play, and pretends to play with the twins for a minute, but she’s unable to recover herself. She crumbles.

“Hey,” I say.

Yep, that’s what I go with. The perennially helpful
hey
. Jade sounds a loud sniffle with an undercurrent of grunt, and then she sets about wiping her face. She knows she’s been caught. “I’m sorry,” she says, and when she turns back, her face is wet and red. Her cheeks are splotchy.

I shake my head. “No, no. Not at all, there’s nothing to be sorry for.”

She sits down on the edge of her chair, reaches into her bag, and retrieves a tissue.

“Hey, I cry like that about ten times a day,” I say. “Like, for no reason at all.”

She takes a deep, shuddering breath, and flumps back in her chair. She honks her nose into the tissue and rolls her blue eyes up to dry them. “I do it about ten times an
hour
,” she whispers, and then she tries to laugh, but it comes out flat. “The only time I don’t cry is when I’m at work. God, I can’t even wear mascara anymore, because my face is all in stripes every ten minutes. It’s so embarrassing.”

“It’s not,” I say, “not at all.” Even though we both know it totally is.

“Maybe we should go,” she says, standing up. “We can try it again another day, when I’m feeling better. I’m just so tired. They haven’t been sleeping well the last week. I think they’re teething.” And then she really disintegrates into tears. She plomps back down in her seat, and it rocks beneath her as she cries. Max and Madeline have stopped chewing on his feet, and have both turned toward the sound of their mother’s weeping. Their little faces are opened right up to her.

“No, please,” I say, lifting Emma off my boob and up to my shoulder to burp her. “Please stay.”

Jade blows her nose again, waves her hand in the air.

“I’m sorry,” she says again.

I shake my head. “Please, stop apologizing,” I say. “Here, wait here. I want to show you something. I’ll be right back.”

I walk with Emma up the back steps and in through the kitchen and living room. I fling the French doors to the office wide open and descend the two steps. I open the desk drawer and pull out the bottle of Ativan with my name on it. I take it outside and set it down on the table next to Jade. She seems to have recovered herself for the moment. Her eyes are red, but her breath is steady. She picks up the bottle. “What’s this?”

“Crazy pills,” I say. “I’ve been having a hard time, too. I’ve been crying a lot. Like a lot. Just trying to adjust to being a new mom, you know? It’s sort of not what I expected. So I’ve been seeing a therapist, and you know. She sent me to a psychiatrist, who gave me these pills to help.”

“And do they?” Jade is studying the bottle. “Help?”

I shrug, and Emma burps loudly in my ear. I lean back in my chair and unsnap the bra on the other side. She latches on.

“I don’t know yet,” I say. “I haven’t decided if I’m going to take them or not.”

Jade breaks the seal on the bottle and opens it without asking me. She tips the bottle up, shakes one little white pill out into her hand, and then pops it in her mouth. She swallows it back with coffee while I watch. Perhaps I should feel affronted by this, or at least surprised. But I’m not.

“I’ll let you know,” she says.

“Cool,” I tell her.

It’s quiet then, for a few minutes, but the silence is less awkward than before. She runs her hands through her hair. She rubs her face. And then she tells me this story:

“I started going to church on Sundays, right down here at Saint Pancras. I wasn’t raised anything. My mom was Catholic, but she never brought me. I don’t even think I was baptized. So I just started going after Paul left because Sundays were so long and empty. Mass took up an hour, and people there were nice to us, when they’d see me on my own with the two babies. And then like a month ago, I was there, and they were asking for prayers for this young couple whose five-month-old baby died. He had some awful disease, and he died, and the mother was just inconsolable. That baby was the same age as my twins. And all I could think about was finding that couple, and giving them one of my babies. Or maybe both of them, if they wanted them both.”

Jade looks at me to gauge my reaction to the story, and I’m careful to keep my face plain and open.

“I don’t mean that I thought about it in some theoretical, kind of abstract way,” she says. “I mean I actually
considered
it. I thought about which one to give them, if I gave them just one, and I settled on Max, just because Madeline is easier.” She glances over at the twins. “Cover your ears, Max,” she says, and then she blows her nose again. “I don’t even know what stopped me. I don’t know. I could still do it. It would be so easy, to only have to worry about me again.”

I don’t say anything, don’t press her. I just wait for her to talk it out.

“Do you think I’m a terrible person?” she finally asks.

“Not in the least,” I answer honestly. “I told someone my baby died.”

She laughs, and somehow that laugh does not offend me. It sounds like salvation. I laugh, too.

“You what?”

“Yep, told a guy she died,” I repeat. It sounds so absurd now, with the taste of mint lemonade on my lips. “I didn’t mean to. I was telling him about a dream I had, and he misunderstood, but I didn’t correct him.”

Jade pushes the orange pill bottle across the table at me. “I think you’re going to need these,” she says. And then we both laugh, and I love her more than I have ever loved another human.

When Emma is finished eating, I consider putting her in the Pack ’n Play with the twins, but they are both so big and strong, and it looks a little crowded in there. So I tuck her into my elbow instead, and she stays awake and looks at us. Jade sits back in her chair, and folds her legs beneath her. She finishes her coffee, and smiles at me. It is the first really genuine smile I have seen from her. She is beautiful.