The Crooked Branch (28 page)

“Mind if I grab another cup?” she says.

“Of course not, help yourself.”

Jade and the babies stay all afternoon, and we talk about everything. She tells me more about deadbeat Paul, who now works as a production assistant for some shit reality show in L.A.

“That just means he fetches coffee and tampons for the trampy women who come on the show to find love while he waits to get discovered,” she explains. “Pathetic.”

“Discovered for what? He wants to be an actor?”

“Yeah,” she says. “That’s why we came to New York, really. Or that’s half the reason.”

“What’s the other half?”

Jade shrugs, and I can sense her reluctance, but it’s much fainter than it was before, and she brushes it aside. “I wanted to be a writer,” she admits.

A writer! So I was right when I detected a well-concealed interest in my career yesterday. I am careful not to betray too much excitement.

“Oh?” I say coyly. “What kind of writing are you interested in?”

She shakes her head. “It’s stupid.”

“It’s not stupid at all, what are you talking about? Why should it be stupid? Plenty of people are writers.”

“Yeah, but I want to be a novelist,” she says shyly. Her cheeks pinken, and she suddenly looks years younger. “I’m a huge sci-fi and fantasy buff.”

“That’s terrific,” I say. “So have you done a lot of writing?”

“I have a finished trilogy, and I’m working on book one of the next series,” she says. “But I don’t know. When I first came to New York, I was temping at publishing houses, but they pay so little. And then I started temping at this law firm, and they offered me full-time, and since I was expecting, I felt like I had to take the job. But I still really want to write, and the best thing about the law firm is that I can sit at my receptionist desk and write all day. As long as I answer the phones and greet everyone who comes in, they don’t care what I do. Actually, one of the partners said he loves me writing because I look so busy when the clients come in.”

“So it sounds like a perfect arrangement.”

“Yeah, I guess it is,” she says. “It just seems like such a pipe dream now. Like maybe it’s time to grow up and start living in the real world.”

“Well, if being a receptionist at a law firm isn’t the
real world,
I don’t know what is,” I say.

Jade smiles again. We spend the next hour passing the babies around, and discussing the relative merits of Tolkien versus Lewis. I tell her I can forward her trilogy to an agent I know, and she seems carefully excited. Before I know it, the sun has passed behind my house, and the late-afternoon light is leaking quickly from the back garden.

“Hey, you guys want to stay for dinner?” I ask. “My husband is working until late. Maybe we could order something in?”

“Yeah, why not?” she says. “Cool.”

•   •   •

It is dark by the time we have finished our falafel pitas. The babies are all fed and drowsy, and I feel like I have known Jade all my life. I wish we could put on some footie pajamas and make popcorn, stay up late watching trashy television and talking about boys, but she has to go home and put her babies to bed. I leave Emma’s bouncy seat beside the front door, and I follow Jade next door, so I can hold one of the babies while she unlocks their door.

“This was really fun,” she says.

“Yeah, I can’t believe you were living right next door to me this whole time,” I say. I kiss Madeline on top of the head, and give Jade an almost-not-awkward hug before they disappear inside.

It is the best second date I’ve ever had. On my second date with Leo, he took me to a car show at the Javits Center, where a lot of bimbos stood around in tight red dresses, rubbing their booties along shiny, revolving cars. It was so awful I almost turned down date number three, which turned out to be a day at Coney Island, and then a romantic dinner, followed by the world’s greatest make-out session under an awning during a summer downpour. I don’t expect that kind of chemistry the next time I see Jade, but I’m so excited about our budding friendship that I can’t rule anything out.

I skip back up the front steps to my house and wake Emma, who needs a bath before bed.

“We can’t let Daddy see that I dripped tzatziki on your head,” I tell her.

After she’s tucked in, I change into pajamas, and then flop down in front of the television. I flick through the channels, trying to guess which awful show Paul works on, which desperate women he caters to for a living. I wonder if he’s even met his beautiful babies. I wonder how much production assistants make, and how often he sends Jade money. Emma cries out briefly, arcing a bright red spike on the monitor, but she’s only talking in her sleep. I am asleep on the couch when Leo comes in around two o’clock.

“Hey, Jelly,” he says, sitting down on the coffee table and leaning over to kiss me. “What are you doing up?”

I sit up. Yawn. “I wasn’t really up,” I say. “I guess I fell asleep down here. How was work?”

He is walking into the kitchen and taking off his jacket.

“Good,” he says. “Busy night. How about you?”

“Great!” I say. “I have terrific news!” He fixes the jacket on a hanger and then comes back to the doorway. “My scar is just a scar now,” I announce. “It’s not an incision anymore.”

He laughs, and then disappears to hang the jacket in the closet. “How do you know?”

“I just do,” I said. “I ran upstairs today and everything. I’m almost back to normal. Except for being enormous, I mean.”

“You’re not enormous,” he says, coming back to sit beside me on the couch. “You’re beautiful.”

I decide not to contradict him, but it’s only for the sake of peace. I lean my head against his shoulder, and hand him the remote. He flips to ESPN.

“Hey, did that girl come over today?”

“Yeah, Jade,” I say. “Her name’s Jade.”

“How’d that go?”

“It was amazing,” I say, and then I try to temper my reaction, and I’m not sure why. Maybe I’m afraid Leo will caution me, somehow. That he’ll ruin my euphoria. So I go with a noncommittal, “She seems like a really nice girl. I think we have more in common than I originally thought.”

“That’s good,” he says.

“Yeah.”

We watch a couple of men make conflicting predictions about tomorrow’s football games and then, during the commercial break, Leo asks me, “Did you think any more about the pills?”

I pick at some nonexistent fluff on the afghan I have draped across my knees. “Yeah,” I say. “I’m not going to take them, at least not yet. Not now.” And then I lean away from him reflexively. I prepare for a battle.

“Good,” he says. Which totally throws me off kilter.

“Good?”

“Yeah, maybe you don’t need them,” he says. “I mean, I think it’s great you have them, and there is nothing wrong with taking them if they help. But just . . . I was thinking about it all day. I was thinking about
you
all day, how amazing you are.”

“Well, it’s true that I’m amazing,” I laugh.

“You are. And maybe if I was just a little more supportive when you need me to be . . .”

“Like when I freak out crying and stuff?”

“Exactly, you freakazoid,” Leo says, but then his face turns serious, and he says, “I don’t know. Just maybe all you need is for me to listen more, without making my own judgments about what you’re going through.”

“Leo, you’re so wise,” I say suspiciously. “It’s almost like you’ve been watching Dr. Phil or something.”

“Dr. Phil wishes he were as wise as me,” he says. “Dr. Phil can kneel at the temple of my superior marital wisdom.”

“Leo, Dr. Phil is an idiot.”

“True. But there’s something else I keep thinking about. That conversation I had with my brother last week, when I told him that life hasn’t changed that much, since we had the baby?”

“Yeah,” I sigh. I’ve really been trying to forget about that.

“I get how unfair that is,” he says. “It’s sort of ridiculous. When I stop and think about it, I can see how much everything has changed for you. I have to remember that. Just because my life is still the same: I get up, I go to work, I come home and play with Emma . . . I don’t know—it’s hard for me to appreciate how much everything has changed for you.”

I look hard at him. Does he truly comprehend this? I don’t want to be fooled. He taps on the side of his head.

“I have a lot of time to think now, with my long commute,” he explains. “I know it’s not just moving to Queens and the hormones and the sleep deprivation. It’s everything—it’s your whole routine, your work, your friends, your whole life has been upended.”

God bless him. Maybe he does get it.

“Sometimes it feels like my life isn’t even my own anymore,” I whisper, “because every moment of the day revolves around Emma now.”

“I know,” he says.

“But I don’t even really mind that so much. It’s more than that. It’s like my sense of identity has just dropped out from under me. Like I’m not even a writer anymore. My palate is shot.” For a harrowing moment, I consider telling him about the Fritos, but I press past it. “I used to be such an overachiever, but motherhood has kind of obliterated that. I’m not super good at this. I’m not even sort of good at it. And then, my body and brain are both out of control. It’s like I don’t know who I am anymore. I feel like I’ve kind of disappeared.”

I can see Leo struggling with all of this. I can see him battling his own irritation. He wants positive thinking only.

“I know you don’t like to hear me talk like this,” I say, “that it bothers you when you think I’m being hard on myself. But instead of arguing with me, or trying to convince me I’m great, and everything is fine, maybe I just need you to listen. And empathize.”

Leo nods. “And maybe it will help when you get back to work, too. Instead of me reminding you how awesome you are all the time, maybe you need to remind yourself. You feel ready to start writing again?”

I shake my head. “Not without child care. It’s impossible. I don’t have the headspace.”

Before Emma was born, we had these crazy ideas that our professional lives were flexible enough that we could work around her, that we might not need child care. We had delusions of me fitting in my research and writing around Leo’s work schedule and Emma’s sleeping. We failed to account for an actual live, human baby. There is nothing part-time about her.

“Yeah, we’re going to need at least part-time child care, huh?” Leo says.

I feel like it’s Christmas—no, better than Christmas. Between falling in love with Jade, and now Leo’s dawning enlightenment, this could be the best day of my entire life.

“If we want me to make any money, we are.”

Then we make out on the couch until Leo wriggles out of his checkered chef pants. I guess I did tell him that my incision was a scar now. He probably thought that was code for something. He’s tugging at my pajama bottoms, but I’m nervous. If he thinks I’m doing this without birth control, he is insane. He’s kissing my neck, and I have to admit, it feels good, even though his hair smells like meat frying, with a nuanced hint of vegetable steam. I dig my fingers into his shoulder blades, and remember the new package of condoms in my nightstand drawer.

“Let’s go upstairs.”

IRELAND, JULY 1847

T
he blight came slow into the fields. At first they could only smell it, and Ginny knew that calamitous odor like a sinner knows the devil. But the crop looked so verdant and promising under the midsummer sky that she postponed her despair. She put it on the long finger.

They dug up the earlies, and they were sound, if small. They harvested the turnips as well then, and ate like kings during the first weeks of July, without a whisper of charity from anyone. Seán visited regularly, though Ginny tried to convince him there was no need of that now that she was home with her children. And though she wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone, she was glad he ignored her protestations. Dread was seeping in through the back of her mind, its presence growing, like the familiar stench that impressed itself more firmly into her consciousness with each passing day.

It was the eighteenth of July when they noticed the first visible stripe of brown creeping serpentlike through one corner of the potato field. Maire saw the black spots on the leaves first, and she screamed out for her mother. Ginny remembered the date precisely because they were down on their knees in the field studying the stinking, cancerous sores when Father Brennan appeared over the ridge at the top of the field. Ginny hadn’t been expecting him, and when she rose to greet him, she noted that he had a white envelope in his hand. Her heart skittered, and she felt a shivering weakness in her hips and knees. She grabbed Maire’s hand and helped her daughter to her feet.

“Go on in, and get your sisters a drop of water,” Ginny said. “See is Raymond up from his kip. I’ll be along to give him a feed shortly.”

She met Father Brennan halfway across the yard. Her voice was high and tight in her throat. “Did you open it yet, Father?”

He shook his head. “Sure, it’s not mine to open,” he said, and he handed her the letter. “It’s postmarked New York.”

She lifted it to her nose, and sniffed it, to see could she catch a hint of Raymond on it, any remainder of him. Or failing that, perhaps a whiff of exotic New York or the Atlantic salt between. She handed it back to Father Brennan.

“Will we go inside?” he said.

Ginny glanced toward the open cottage door. Maggie was standing there, but when she caught her mother looking, she scampered back inside.

“Better not, Father,” Ginny said. “Until I know what it says.”

“Fair enough. Will I open it?”

Together they stepped around the larger of Maggie’s cairns, so that they were hidden from view of the cottage. Ginny breathed as steady as she could, and clasped her hands together. She nodded, and all the joints in her body went loose and shuddery.

“Go on, Father.” She trembled, and he pulled a delicate piece of lined blue paper from the envelope. Some American dollar bills were tucked inside, and they fluttered to the ground, but Ginny let them go. She would pick them up after. She held her hands up below her chin, clutched and twisted her fingers together. She could hardly breathe. Father Brennan cleared his throat and began to read.

7 April 1847

Dear Ginny,

I hope this letter finds you well, and in good spirits, for I fear that the news I have will come as a shock.

Father Brennan stopped reading long enough to glance up at her, and she could already feel that her face was drained, that life was slipping out of her. Her children were just inside the cottage. The blight was beginning to eat their field. She could smell it, the rot. Father Brennan carried on.

I’m sorry I didn’t write sooner, to respond to your letters, but I was waiting in hopes that I might have better news. I’ve been trying to track Raymond’s ship, to get some news of his passage, but I could find nothing until a young man came to me at work last week on the docks, and he asked me was I Raymond Doyle’s brother from Knockbooley in Mayo. He said he was on the ship with Raymond coming over, and that conditions on board were dire, that fever broke out when they weren’t two weeks under way. Scores of people died on the passage, Ginny, and this young fella, he said Raymond was very brave, that he hung on mightily. He spoke of his family the whole time, he said, and of his beautiful wife back home in Mayo. This young fella knew all of your names, even the baby one, who ye call Poppy, even though I only ever knew her to be called Pauline.

He held onto ye until the very last, and I hope that is some small comfort to you in your coming time of grief, Ginny. My brother, your devoted husband Raymond, died three weeks before they made landfall in New York. He was buried at sea. Meagan and I will send what we can, to help ye, until you’re back on your feet. I know it won’t be easy for ye, the way times are, and you on your own with the children. We’re enclosing a few dollars here. Please God we’ll all be together again some day. It would be a beautiful thing to see your face, and to kiss my little nephew and nieces. Meanwhile, kiss them for us, and you’ll be an auntie soon enough yourself. Meagan is expecting our first wee one this summer.

May God provide you peace in your time of sorrow, Ginny. God bless,

Always your faithful brother,

Kevin Doyle

Father Brennan folded the blue paper solemnly, and slipped it back into its envelope. He leaned down to collect up the fluttering dollar bills that had scattered by their feet. He looked up at Ginny and pressed the money into her hand. She took it. She folded it into her pocket. She caught her breath.

She didn’t know what he expected of her at that moment. She didn’t know what she expected of herself. And to be sure, there were tears, hot and fast, slipping down the fallow field of her face. But she surprised herself and Father Brennan both, nonetheless.

“Read it again, Father, please,” she said softly.

It’s hard to describe the shape a grief can take, when there is nothing but sorrow left in the world. It’s difficult to imagine that devastation can be liberating. Perhaps Ginny had known, deep down, for some time, that Ray was dead. She thought that was right, that she had felt his emigrant absence more deeply than an ocean’s crossing. Perhaps her soul had perceived the passing of his. In any case, the hope of him had been like an imbecile yoke, and she hadn’t understood the guilty weight of it until it was lifted from her.

Father Brennan was standing beside her in the yard, and he was calling out her name, but his voice, it sounded like gravel. And she turned to look out over her fields. Their homeplace. She stared out into the wind, and as she watched, all the colors separated, one from the other, and she could suddenly see the world as it was truly made up, as of tiny, whirring grains of sand. And she thought, how easy it would be, to walk into that decaying corner of the potato field, and simply scoop out all the brown bits. To leave only green behind. How easy it might’ve been, to scrape the wicked fever out of young Michael’s body, and leave him whole and well. How easy it would be even now, to walk farther into that as-yet-untouched portion of the field, to stand beneath the slow summer gloaming, to lift her hands to the sky, and dissolve. To go to her husband. Her two sons. To go to where they were gone.

“Ginny.” Father Brennan’s hand was on her sleeve, and as she looked down, it snapped into focus, his knuckles as solid as the roots of the blackthorn tree.

Ginny blinked her eyes very slowly. The wind in the fields whipped the grief clean out of her. The stench of the blight was growing. She felt her chest caved in, in a way that she felt certain was permanent.

“Are you all right, Ginny?” Father was asking her.

She laughed.

•   •   •

Ginny lost track of how many days passed between that and the day Alice Spring came to call. She knew that the blight had gathered speed and resolve. Their field was rotting where it stood. The earlies in the pits were beginning to collapse and stink, too. Maire and Ginny were doing what they could to dry them and save them, but their efforts were proving largely useless. It was exactly the same as last year, only Ray was dead and gone. Michael was dead and gone. There was no cow to sell, no hog or hens. Their resources were exhausted, entirely.

It was midmorning, and Poppy was singing to baby Raymond. Her baby lullabies sounded so awful eerie now, her unblemished voice all full of sweetness amid the rot. Maire was stood in the doorway looking out when Ginny thought she heard carriage wheels approaching. Maggie pushed past her sister and went out to stand in the yard. She ran up to the ridge to see who was coming. She would chase them down and ask them for money. She was bold like that, Maggie was. She hadn’t learned to give up yet. The carriage wheels slowed as they approached the gate, and Ginny and Maire caught up with Maggie atop the ridge.

After a moment, behind the rock wall that lined the road, they could see the extravagant purple feather of a hat cavorting merrily along. The feather paused as the head that bore it approached the gate, and Alice Spring’s face came into view. Seán stepped before her and opened the latch on the gate. Ginny turned to Maire.

“Go in and see to the baby. Make sure he’s shined up for his visitor.”

The gate swung in, and Seán stood aside to hold it open for Mrs. Spring, who gathered up her skirts in both hands and traipsed into the little lane like she was the Queen herself. The brilliant purple of her gown was visible beneath an elegant velvet traveling cloak that she wore buttoned up, despite the clammy warmth of the day. Her golden hair was plaited and wrapped into a tightly calculated chaos. She loosened the folds of her skirt, and the purple fabric swirled around her legs. Maggie’s little face fell open with wonder as she watched. Alice Spring’s smile was dazzling, even at this distance, her teeth white like the pearls strung tightly round her straight, tidy neck.

“Here, Maggie,” Ginny said, holding out her hand to her daughter. Maggie turned to her, and shied herself in behind her mother’s petticoat while Alice Spring stepped up the sloping lane toward the ridge. Behind her, Seán swung the gate closed, and disappeared into the road behind the wall. Alice Spring began climbing the slope, and as she approached the top of the ridge, she held her gloved hands out to Ginny. Her eyes were blue like a cornflower, lit bright by the outdoor light, the fresh and clear summer sky. It was so strange for Ginny to see Mrs. Spring now, after everything that had happened, all the stunning grief she had endured since her departure from Springhill House. This woman was like an apparition from another life. Ginny nearly felt she couldn’t place her.

“Ginny!” Mrs. Spring called, gripping Ginny’s hands, while Maggie hid behind her mother. Mrs. Spring kissed Ginny outlandishly on both cheeks, like they were old friends or sisters. “You’re looking well,” she said. “What a beautiful home you have. Such a quaint little cottage. And the land here.” She turned to look out over the fields. The purple taffeta swished dramatically around her. “What a gorgeous view!” She was breathless.

“Thank you,” Ginny said flatly.

“It’s all rot,” Maggie said, poking her head out now, and stepping boldly away from her mother to look at Mrs. Spring.

“Maggie, whisht.”

“Well, it is, Mammy, can she not see that? It stinks.”

“Maggie, go inside and check on your brother.”

Maggie rolled her eyes, and then stamped her feet beneath her, but in a moment she scuttled down the hill and in through the door. Alice Spring turned back to face Ginny.

“I suppose you heard the big news!” she said.

“Seán mentioned . . . you’re going to New York?”

Her smile broadened. She had a shallow dimple in her right cheek that Ginny had never noticed before. The exhilaration suited her. She looked younger than before, like a girl in the first blush of love.

“Isn’t it exciting?” she said, stepping closer to Ginny, and taking one of her hands again. Her gloves were impossibly soft.

“I’m delighted for you,” Ginny managed to stammer.

“New York City!” she said.

Ginny swallowed.

“Isn’t that where your husband is?” Mrs. Spring said abruptly then. She stepped in so close that Ginny could smell her, stronger than the acrid tang of the blight in her fields. A powdery honeysuckle with lavender. The sweetness was cloying, like Poppy’s lullabies. “I thought perhaps I could look him up for you, if you have an address? Perhaps he simply hasn’t had the means to contact you. I know you’ve been anxious for word from him.”

She was staring intently at Ginny’s face, but Ginny couldn’t meet her gaze. Instead, she looked past her visitor, at the shapes of Maggie’s cairn behind her.

“I was,” Ginny said.

“Were?” Mrs. Spring prompted.

“I was. Anxious.”

“Oh!” She clapped her gloved hands. “So you received word, then? You’ve had a letter?”

Ginny nodded.

“Oh.” Her expression faltered. “Oh dear.” She placed one scarlet glove rather delicately across her breast.

Ginny cleared her throat. “A few days ago, I had a letter from his brother, Kevin, in New York.”

Mrs. Spring trained her piercing blue eyes on Ginny.

“He didn’t make the passage,” Ginny said quietly.

“I don’t understand. What does that mean,
he didn’t make the passage
?”

Ginny cleared her throat and tried to answer, but found her voice to be quite faulty in her throat.

“He died.” She hadn’t intended to whisper it.

The red glove was in front of Mrs. Spring’s mouth now, and the corners of her eyes turned down. She was very pink in the cheeks, and with the purple of her dress, the pearls, the rich velvet cloak—she was a riot of color there beside the bleakness of the cairn.

“But how . . .”

“There was fever on the ship. Many died on the passage. He wasn’t the only one. Many died.”

“Oh.” Mrs. Spring’s voice was clear and loose. “I’m so sorry.” But her compassion felt artificial. Ginny stared at the bobbing feather on her visitor’s hat.

“Here, come inside anyway,” Ginny said, turning from her. “We haven’t much to offer you, but Raymond will be happy to see you.”

Ginny heard the heavy taffeta rustle as Mrs. Spring stepped down the slope behind her, and into the cottage. Maire had stoked the fire, and Maggie and Poppy were sitting with their backs to it, where they could see Mrs. Spring when she entered. Poppy’s eyes grew wide as she took in all the finery. Ginny tried to imagine what this lady must look like to her daughter, an exotic bird or opulent cake. And then, as quickly, she wondered how her life, this cottage, must appear to Mrs. Spring. She looked around her modest home, one of the nicest tenant homes in the whole of the parish. But it was smaller than the kitchen at Springhill House, smaller than Mrs. Spring’s bedchamber even. Still, it was clean and warm, Ginny’s children bright and beautiful despite everything. Maire was sitting on the stool with Raymond on her knee and the little book of verse opened in front of him. She was pointing out the various pictures to him, but Raymond only squirmed and kicked his feet.