Crooked Branch (9781101615072) Read online

  “We’ll have to go, Raymond.” Her voice was like the rattle of those lifeless stalks in the stiff night breeze.

  “We can’t afford passage for six,” he said.

  “No,” she admitted.

  “So one of us will have to go. Get work and send money back,” he said.

  There was just enough light from the cottage to outline the shape of his face. She reached out to feel the stubble on his chin and cheek, sticky beneath her fingertips. He leaned in to kiss her, and she locked him into her arms, his face buried in her neck. They stayed like that for a long time.

  “I’ll go,” he said, and he pulled away, straightened himself up. He glanced back to the cottage, and Maire was standing tall in the open doorway, watching them. She was backlit by the warmth of the lamplight. He nodded, tucked his lips inside his mouth. “We’re lucky, Kevin is gone this two years. Maybe he can help me find work in New York—he’s already set up. Lots of folks have no brother, no family over there, nobody to go to.”

  “Most folks couldn’t even manage the price of a ticket,” Ginny said.

  But Raymond and Ginny could. They could pay the rent, buy a single steerage ticket, and then still have food enough—maybe—to keep the children until Ray found work beyond and started sending money back. Ginny clamped her arms together in front of her, but it was no use—there was an emptiness already, howling up from inside her. She couldn’t remember how to live without Raymond. Twelve years they’d been married—thirteen, nearly. She could feel his absence already, like some sacred part of herself had been stripped savagely away. He leaned into her, bumped shoulders and foreheads with her, as if to remind her that he was still here. She could hear him smile, the way his lips framed his beautiful teeth.

  “It’s going to be all right, Ginny,” he said, really trying. “We’ll get through it.” He squeezed her shoulders.

  She sniffed, and slapped her two cheeks lightly with her hands, willing color into them. Willing faith. How many young Irish lads had gone out before Ray and crossed that ugly ocean to America? How many of them had ever come back? She wanted to fling herself into his arms and sob. She wanted to plead with him not to go. She wanted to scream and cry, and batter his chest with her fists. But there’s never any use in despair when you’re a mother; it’s a fruitless endeavor entirely. Instead, she breathed. She looked back at the cottage again, but Maire had disappeared inside.

  “We will, we’ll get through it,” she said, with such a surprising degree of strength in her voice that she nearly believed it herself. She ventured on. “The passage takes ten weeks or thereabouts.” She counted out the time in her head, as if Ray leaving Ireland, leaving her and their babbies, were just some tricky sort of mathematics.

  He beat her to it. “Say February,” he said. “March at the latest, I should be able to get some money back over by then. And the turnips and that should keep you ticking over until then.”

  She nodded.

  “We could slaughter the cow instead of selling her,” he said. “It’s meant to be a cold winter, so you might be able to keep the meat.”

  “A cold winter,” Ginny repeated.

  They were talking about weather.

  “Listen to me,” Raymond said. “I don’t care what it takes. I don’t care how many people have trod this path before us. That ocean goes two ways. Do you hear me? I will be back.”

  She closed her eyes and shook her head. “Raymond . . .”

  “I will be back for you,” he said again. “No American wake for this ould paddy. No sir, I will be back.”

  “You can’t . . .” But he interrupted her again.

  “If I have to swim it,” he said, and then he took her chin in his hand, like she was a child. “Wifey.”

  Her eyes found his in the dark.

  “I will not be parted from you,” he said.

  And in that singular moment, there was no question in her mind or her faith. She believed him. Yes.

  “I believe you.”

  And then there was the slightest welling of grateful tears hidden in the corners of his eyes, and she could feel them, even if it was too dark to see them.

  “Raymond Doyle, if you cry right now, I swear I will follow you to America just to divorce you. I hear a girl can divorce her fella no problem, over beyond.”

  His laughter in those last days was miraculous, a kind of nourishment in itself.

  Chapter Three

  NEW YORK, NOW

  I press a button, and my daughter’s image pops up on the tiny monitor screen in grainy black and white. She’s lying on her back, with her two fists up over her head like she’s celebrating some clandestine victory. At three weeks old, I feel like Emma could already have a life that’s so separate from mine, so covert and mysterious, that she could in fact be celebrating a secret triumph—something she’ll never tell me about. I know more about her, and less about her, than anyone else I’ve ever known. I feel like my own heart and brain and all my vital organs are jammed inside those two tiny fists of hers. I turn the volume way up, until I can hear her breathing.

  I walk out the front door, careful not to let the screen bang behind me. I sit on the top step, where the brick is warm despite the sloping shade of the afternoon. I try several different angles before I find a spot where the monitor can sit without static. Sometimes I enjoy the interference—I can pick up two different families when I change to channel B or C.

  The B family is amazingly jolly, and they speak to their child with the enthusiasm of Elmo, despite the guttural tones of a language I can’t place. Something Balkan, maybe. The image on channel B is just a close-up shot of the crib, and occasionally the dark-haired, smiling little baby who seems rarely to sleep there. There is a lot of clapping and squealing and all-purpose merriment on channel B, and I often try to guess which nearby house they live in. I feel like they should have rainbows and unicorns on their mailbox, but I don’t see a single neighbor who could even fake the kind of delight I hear on channel B.

  Channel C is much more sordid, like a story on Dateline. There are four cribs on channel C, and I haven’t been able to discern, yet, if there are really four babies (are they selling them on the black market?), or if it’s just twins and a mirror. I rarely hear any voices at all on channel C—only crying, footsteps, sighing, toilets flushing, a loud television in the background. Those two or four babies spend an awful lot of time in their cribs. It’s grainy and dark. You can’t see much.

  But channel A is where the real action is: my sleeping girl and her glorious fists. I check the volume and then stretch my legs carefully in front of me. I’m determined to spend every possible moment outside before the weather turns. The leaves are changing colors already and as the days grow shorter, the heat begins to falter as well. Soon we’ll be trapped inside for months. Just me and my baby girl. Channel A.

  I dial three different friends, and nobody picks up. They have jobs, lives. Finally I try my mother’s number.

  “Majella,” she sings. “How’s our grandbaby?”

  “She’s good,” I say.

  “Great!”

  For a half a second, I wonder if she’ll ask how I’m doing, too. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t wonder; she never asks that, probably because it would require her to stop talking long enough to listen to my response. But I sorta thought me giving birth to her first grandchild might result in the occasional glimmer of curiosity about my well-being.

  “Oh, I’ve been so busy, I’m just exhausted!” she says, and then she plows headlong into a detailed description of her week. And when I say detailed, I’m talking she includes how many times she pooped on Tuesday. And how many times she tried, but failed. Seriously.

  I start to lean back on my elbows, but my abdomen is still too tender to stretch, so I just examine my legs in the sun while she talks. She’s on to the weather now. Apparently they had some strong winds last night, and
their dog, Cocoa, got so nervous she peed on the new carpet in the den. Thank God they went with the green, it really hides the dirt! I stop listening after that, and just wait for her to be finished. I take the phone away from my ear every few minutes to check on the time. Yes, I’m timing her. At about twelve and a half minutes, she takes a breath.

  “All right, well, I don’t want to keep you,” she says.

  And my mouth falls open—not from shock exactly. This isn’t shocking—it’s the same conversation we’ve been having for years. But Goddammit.

  I almost explode on her. Really, I almost say: I don’t care if your fucking bank teller is taking his granddaughter to the Buccaneers game this weekend. What about ME? I just had a baby over here! But I am deeply cowardly, and the words stay buried somewhere in my solar plexus. After all, it’s hard enough in therapy, being honest with the woman I’m paying to be the receptacle of my deepest fears; how am I supposed to be honest with the woman who’s the harbinger of them? My mouth closes slowly, like a drawbridge inching up from the moat. In the background, I can hear my father mumbling at her.

  “What’s that, Stu?” she says away from the phone. “Well, I don’t know. Is she still keeping you up nights? Pop wants to know.”

  “Well yeah, Mom, she’s three weeks old,” I say irritably.

  “You slept through the night right away,” she says. “You always did, and when I would tell people, they didn’t believe me! But you did. You were a great sleeper.”

  I yawn loudly enough for her to hear me.

  “Anyway, it doesn’t last forever,” she says. “The sleep deprivation.”

  “Yeah, it’s fine.” Her pep talks tend to make me suicidal. “In fact we’re just getting ready to head out to the market. I only called because I wanted to ask you something.” I hadn’t intended to ask her anything, but I need a diversion.

  “Sure, what’s up?” she says.

  “I found this diary in the attic.”

  “What were you doing up there?”

  “Nothing, just having a look around, and—”

  “Majella, you should be taking it easy. You have your hands full enough with the new baby and your recovery, without climbing those steep stairs all the way up to the attic.”

  “Mom, PLEASE, stop lecturing me,” I say, in the horrible, ungrateful bitch tone that I reserve only for her, a tone that’s inevitable, but steeped in immediate regret. “I didn’t call to ask your advice about sleep deprivation or whether or not I should be hanging around in my frigging attic!”

  In my defense, I know I’m being nasty. Is self-awareness a passable defense for bitchiness? I’m aware.

  “Oh,” she says, and I can actually hear the deflation in her voice, like an untied balloon. It seeps down the phone line and into my shoulders.

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” I say, shaking my head, my eyes welling. “Really, I don’t mean to be so cranky.”

  “I know, it’s okay.”

  “I’m just so tired,” I say, rubbing the heel of my hand into my eye. “And I only wanted to ask you about this diary.”

  “Go on,” she says.

  “Who was Ginny Doyle? I think it belonged to her. Was she like a great-great-grandmother or something?”

  “I’m not sure. There was a Virginia Doyle somewhere in there.” I can hear her drumming her fingers on something. “You know we actually considered that name for you—Virginia? There were a lot of Virginias, on my side and your dad’s, too. But then we both just loved Majella. Did I ever tell you how we came up with Majella?”

  “Yes, Mom.” Seventeen thousand times.

  “We were on our honeymoon in Montreal, and the local church we attended on the Sunday was called after St. Gerard Majella, and I just thought the name was so unusual and so pretty, I always remembered it.”

  “I know, Mom.” I try to strangle that awful bitch-tone out of my voice, I really do. But why does she always bother asking me if I know the story, if she’s just going to repeat it anyway? Why? WHY?

  “I’m glad you didn’t name me Virginia,” I say then, because I want to say something nice to her. “But what about Ginny Doyle?”

  “Yeah, I’m not sure. I’ll have to check my genealogy log.”

  “Great, yeah, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Sure thing, honey. You know I just love all that stuff. It’s so interesting, all those family stories just waiting to be discovered.”

  My mom has been an amateur genealogist ever since my sixth-grade family tree project, and in recent years, she’s gotten serious about it. She’s traced certain branches of our family back to like the eighth century or something. She has this ravenous curiosity about dead people’s lives. But I’m less interesting, and her other line is beeping in. She’s about to drop me like a fad diet.

  “Hey, is Pop still there, can I say hi?” I preempt.

  “No, he just left—they’re having a casino day down at the clubhouse.”

  My parents are taking full advantage of the programs on offer at their Floridian retirement village. They tackle the weekly events schedule like a military campaign, and she reports back with precision.

  “Oh, and I have to run, too,” she says, possibly tapping her watch in the Florida sunshine. “I don’t want to be late for my luncheon! It’s candied ham on Tuesdays!”

  “Okay, Mom,” I say, wondering if she knows that I can hear when the other line beeps in. I know she’s ditching me so she can talk to somebody else instead, but I guess I can’t blame her. I would ditch her, too, if there was candied ham on the line.

  Sometimes, after she hangs up, I stay on the line and listen to the dial tone, and then the please-hang-up lady. Just to depress myself, really, to face the harsh buzz of my mother’s absence and feel sorry for myself. But today I don’t need extra self-pity—I’m full up. So I turn off the phone and stay on the front steps wishing I had a friend who lived nearby, wishing I still smoked, to give my poor nails a reprieve from my biting. I try not to cry, but the tears are jammed up tight in the back of my throat. I blink.

  When neighbors walk past with their dogs or their children, I give them my hopeful smile, which, in New York, is code for I’m demented, you should probably cross the street in case I try to speak to you. Why can’t someone just smile back? I wish we’d never bought this house from my parents. We should’ve stayed in Manhattan. I’m not cut out for this outer-borough life, for motherhood.

  “I wish I never had a baby.”

  • • •

  It’s not true, that wish. I don’t know why I said that thing out loud—it’s just another symptom that I’m coming undone. I mean, it’s at least ninety-three percent completely untrue. I love Emma. More than anything. I love her in a way that is so acute that it makes me physically aware of my heart beating inside me, the vessels carrying blood out to my fingers and toes, the milk swelling in my breasts. I love her so much that her breath can bring tears to my eyes. So here is my real confession: all that love? That vast and powerful, terrifying love? I don’t know if it’s enough. I don’t know if I love her the way I’m supposed to. Because I miss my old life. A lot. My apartment, my job, my firm and reasonably sized breasts. I miss romance and coffee and television. I really miss television.

  I catch up on The Price Is Right while Emma sleeps, because I’ve made the decision that there won’t be any television while she’s awake, which feels like enough of a sacrifice to make me a good mother all by itself. Taking television away from an already lonely, isolated person is like robbing a tired swimmer of her life preserver. I am a martyr. I watch Drew Carey wistfully, heroically. He’s good, but I long for the spaying and neutering of the Bob Barker days.

  After nap time and feeding, I strap Emma into her car seat, and the car seat into the stroller. I check all the straps twice, because I have an irrational fear that the stroller will get struck by a car, and Emma will
come flying out of it like a Hail Mary pass to the end zone. In fact, that is only one of many awful fantasies I have every day, every hour, like a freaky horror show in my mind: Emma’s stroller rolling into traffic while I bend at an intersection to tie my shoe; me passing out from exhaustion while I bathe her, Emma’s little head slipping under the water, bubbles coming up; Emma pulling her blanket up over her face in the bouncy seat while I shower, unaware of her suffocating just beyond the curtain. Sometimes I even imagine that I can see a hand on the monitor, someone standing over her crib. The terror that seizes me is so paralyzing that I have to stop what I’m doing and go to her, to reassure myself that she breathes, she lives.

  I check her straps again, tuck her blanket under her chin, and set off walking the streets of Queens, the graveyard borough. This is where I grew up, where I was determined to return and raise my daughter. Queens is the most solidly middle-class and residential of the five boroughs. Well, okay, of the four boroughs at least, because no one really counts Staten Island, except the people who live there. And sometimes, not even them. Queens is a place where people are civic-minded, and entirely without pretense, where the neighborhoods are proud and distinct. It’s the I-don’t-give-a-shit borough. It’s not trying to be cool. It’s not trying to be anything. It has terrific ethnic food, large, crowded parks, and decent, affordable square footage. People here have grass—not enough to own a lawn mower or anything, but still, authentic green grass that they grow in neat little squares behind their rows of brick two-family homes. My childhood here was happy and wholesome, and that’s what I want for my kid.

  Emma and I round the corner and pass a neighbor we don’t know, who’s busy sticking bat decals in her windows for Halloween. She already has a veritable gang of scarecrows stuck to her front door, and it’s not even October yet. She was probably friends with my mom before the big move. She pauses in her window and waves out at us. That confirms it: crazy. I wave back and hurry on.