The Crooked Branch (17 page)

I notice a lot of the other moms bobbing their heads enthusiastically, and I whisper to a nearby mom, “What’s a SAHM?”

“Stay-at-home mom,” she whispers back.

There is almost nothing I hate more than people who talk in acronyms. I make a mental note not to get too friendly with Rebecca, despite the rings under her eyes.

“It’s
so much better
for the children,” Tanya is saying, “to stay at home with them full-time.”

I can see panic in the eyes of a few of the other moms, the guilty, job-having moms. They immediately begin to fuss over their babies. One little man is beginning to whimper loudly in his seat. His mom reaches into her diaper bag, and retrieves a bottle with water in it. She dumps the premeasured powdered formula into the bottle, and begins to shake it up. Her eyes are glued to her crying baby, and she doesn’t notice that everyone else has stopped talking to stare at her. She’s unstrapping her hungry little boy; she’s lifting him onto her shoulder.

Tanya points to the bottle. “You’re
formula feeding
?” she says.

The mom looks at her bravely, stares straight into her eyes. She’s not scared of Tanya. The baby boy in her arms is content now, sucking happily on his formula bottle.

“What’s it to you?” the brave mom asks. She’s like a firefighter, an astronaut, and a midwife all rolled into one—that’s how fearless she is. I watch in awe. Tanya purses her lips, and exchanges knowing glances with some of her underlings.

“Just curious,” Tanya says. “You know, with all the research about how much better it is to breast-feed, I just find it peculiar when mothers choose to feed their babies chemicals instead of the real thing.”

The courageous mom straightens herself up tall. Well, as tall as she can—she’s only about five feet two, with cascading black curls, and gorgeous skin, and Latina hips. I think she’s going to lay into Tanya. I think I’m about to watch a bona fide smack-down. Who knew there was so much potential violence in suburban parenthood? But what the brave mom does is
so much better
. She drops her voice to a near whisper. She takes a step forward, to make sure Tanya doesn’t miss a word.

“Some women can’t breast-feed,” she says.

Tanya tries to interrupt. “Anyone can breast-feed, if you try hard—”

But the brave mama plows ahead. “Some women are on experimental drugs for cancer, you nosy, judgmental bitch. And it’s none of your business what anyone chooses to feed, or not feed, their kid.”

We are watching like it’s a tennis match, me and all the other moms. We turn back to Tanya, to await her stunned, apologetic retreat, but it doesn’t come. It does not come! Instead, she snorts.

“Well, there’s no need to get all bent out of shape about it,” she says. “I was only asking.” And then she waves her hands in front of her, as if to erase the whole ugly incident from our minds.
“
Anyway
,”
she says.

But the brave mom isn’t done.

“Fuck this,” she says, slinging her diaper bag into her empty stroller. “What a joke.”

Tanya is sweeping her arms around in elaborate, circular gestures, trying to distract us, trying to win us back. But now more than a few of the moms are packing up. I stuff the
Food & Wine
magazine
back into my diaper bag, and double-check Emma’s straps. I turn the stroller, and point it toward the gate. The brave mom is already halfway across the playground, her baby boy still in her arms, still eating from his bottle. She turns and yells back at the group.

“You know, the whole point of this shit is that new moms need to support each other. We need
support
. That’s why we came here today.”

There’s nothing else for Tanya to say, so she just laughs in response. This is the single most awkward, horrible exchange I have ever witnessed between adult humans, and that includes my devout consumption of many seasons of
The Bachelor
. I chase after the brave mom. I want to be her friend, or maybe even her wife. I love her. I meet her at the gate, and she’s struggling with the baby in one arm, trying to push the stroller with the other. I open the gate, and hold it for her.

“Thanks,” she says, pushing her stroller through.

I smile. “You were so great back there,” I say. “That Tanya is a total bully, it’s like being back in school. You were so right to stand up to her.”

The brave cancer-mom is shaking her head. She makes a disgusted noise; she’s all out of words.

“I’m Majella,” I say, following her through the gate.

“Hi,” she mumbles, and sticks out her hand, but she forgets to tell me her name back. “Nice to meet you.”

“Hey, you want to go grab a coffee or something?” I ask her.

She stops walking and puts the brake on her stroller. It’s hard to hold and feed her baby with one hand. She looks at me and takes a deep breath.

“Thanks,” she says. “But no, I’m just . . . I think I just want to go home, after all this. I need to get home.”

“Sure,” I say, even though my heart is sunk. “Okay.”

“Yeah, thanks anyway, though. I gotta go.”

She walks away, pushing the stroller with one hand, and holding her son’s bottle pinned between her cheek and her shoulder. Emma is still asleep, and another mom is trying to get out through the gate behind us now. I’m in her way, but she hasn’t even asked me to move. She’s just waiting. I scuttle out of the way. “Sorry, excuse me,” I say.

She nods, and pushes her huge stroller out onto the sidewalk without saying a word. She has short, spiky blond hair, and her arms are lined with tinkling bracelets. A tattoo snakes out from beneath one sleeve of her fitted T-shirt, and reaches toward her elbow. I slam the gate behind her, and it makes a loud, satisfying clang. She starts to push her stroller down the street, and I follow her until we reach the first intersection. We pause at the crosswalk and wait for the light. She looks up at me, and her eyes look completely hollowed out, the whites of them laced with swollen red veins like she’s been crying for decades. Her cheeks are puffy, and her stroller is oversized and awkward. She looks like a baby herself, almost too young to have a child. I didn’t notice her at the playground.

“Were you at that horrible mommy meetup group?” I ask her. “I didn’t see you in the playground.”

She takes a deep breath. “Worst. Mommy group. Ever.”

I laugh, “Yeah, it was seriously awful, right? What is wrong with people?”

“I went one other time, and it was just as bad,” she says. “I don’t know what possessed me to go back.” She runs her hands through her spiky blond hair, tugs it away from her scalp. “I guess I just needed to get outta the house.”

The light changes, and we push our strollers out into the crosswalk.

“I should’ve known not to come, from that huge fight on the message board,” she says.

“Message board?”

“You don’t read it?” she asks.

I shake my head.

“Ugh. One woman suggested that because it’s grown into such a large group, maybe we should subdivide into smaller groups. You know, based on the ages of our children.”

“And that caused a fight?”

“You wouldn’t believe it. They ripped her to shreds, telling her she wasn’t the organizer of the group, and she had no right to go mixing everything up, and if she didn’t like things the way they were, she should start her own group. It’s like Tanya has them all brainwashed. And then the one woman who did come to her defense said,
Oh, you know, I think we actually should subdivide by the kids’ ages, because my son is almost two now, and I don’t even bother talking to the new moms, because I have nothing in common with them.
”

“Good God,” I say.

“I know,” she says. “Like the only thing these women could possibly have in common is the age of their children? Give me a fucking break. What about movies, books, travel, sports?
Interests?
What about who you were before these little sprogs were born? Jesus, it’s like these women, they have no identity of their own, beyond what the little shits have reduced them to. They’re just a bunch of fucking
mommies
.”

I know I should be shocked by her calling all those defenseless babies “little shits” out loud, but I’m not. It’s like she’s inside my head. I’m almost afraid that I’m hallucinating her. I touch her arm, and she doesn’t disappear, but she does seem slightly startled. She pulls away. My cell phone makes its swoopy text-noise, and I remember that I never got back to Leo. I pull it out of my pocket:
Still there? How’s it going?

“Hang on,” I say to the other mom, and then I stop walking for a moment to type back:
It was awful. Bitchy mommies. Heading home
.
I can forecast Leo’s disappointment. I wonder if he’ll think it’s my fault, that I didn’t give it a chance. I’ll have to explain it to him, how terrible it was. He’ll understand, right? I stick the cell phone in my cup holder, and sip my now ice-cold coffee. Gross. It’s gone bitter in the cup.

“I’m Majella, by the way.”

“Yeah, I’m Jade.”

We don’t shake hands. She sniffs, and I notice the tiny silver ring in her nose. I want to ask how old she is, but I know that’s rude, so I ask how old her baby is instead.

“They’re five and a half months,” she says. “Almost six.”

“They?”

She pulls back the hood on her enormous stroller, so I can see inside: two babies.
Two! Twins!
I think of channel C, and my heart races. I’ve been talking to this woman for three city blocks, and I didn’t notice that she has two friggin’ babies in there. Way to go, Sherlock.

“Boys or girls?”

“One of each,” she says.

“That’s great, you got one of each!” I say, and I realize the stupidity of it even as the words escape my mouth.

“Yeah,” she says, “great.”

I stare at the babies, and try to determine whether they could be the ones from the monitor. They do have dark hair, but it’s so hard to tell, without the grainy green night-vision light that makes the monitor-babies’ eyes glow like little goblins’.

“It must be tough, having two,” I say.

Jade shrugs. “Having any is tough, right?”

“Yeah.”

I can sense her drawing into herself, the plates of her armor shifting and clicking down. I don’t know what’s happened, what has changed, but her little outburst is finished, and she is done talking unless I can draw her back out.

“Are you from here?”

“Nah, Miami,” she says.

“Been here long?”

“A year,” she says. “What about you? You sound like a New Yawkah.”

“Yeah, I grew up here,” I say. “But I was living in Manhattan for fifteen years. My husband and I just moved back to Queens to have the baby.”

Jade nods, but doesn’t ask any more. I feel a little desperate; we’ve been walking for almost six blocks now, and we’re nearing my turnoff. I wonder if she’ll turn off, too, if she’s that sobbing mom from the monitor. But she can’t be; she seems so strong, so hard—even her body is fit and solid. She must be a size two, and her arms are toned and tan. She has that kind of effortlessly lean body I had once, before my pregnancy blurred me into a new, permanently swollen shape (like parentheses). I wonder how she got hers back after twins. She’s so young. She can hardly be twenty years old.

“Hey, you wanna go somewhere for a coffee?” I ask, afraid of her answer because that brave cancer-mom already rebuffed me, and I don’t know if I can take two rejections in one day. “I’m all gussied up with nowhere to go,” I joke, and then I look down self-consciously, because I realize that to any sane human being, I wouldn’t look
gussied up
in the slightest. Since when does a clean shirt and maternity jeans constitute
gussied up
? And who the hell says
gussied up
anyway? “I just, I’m not ready to go home yet,” I say, “so I’m probably going to head down to Salamander’s for a coffee and a scone if you want to join me. I’m going anyway.”

We come to another red light, and Jade seems to be weighing me against whatever her other options might be. If she has other options—any other options—I will lose. Why would she choose me over an actual friend, or
The Ellen DeGeneres Show
, or scrubbing her toilets? I bite my lip, and try not to care while I await her verdict.

“Yeah, okay,” she says, unenthusiastically.

My heart soars.

IRELAND, MARCH 1847

G
inny blew out the candle in her little room, and lay down on the mattress in the dark, the whiff of squelched smoke still trailing through the air above her. Roisin had given her a heap of blankets, but it was still cold and dark in the attic room, with no cheerful turf fire for warmth. It wasn’t hard to stay awake, never mind how exhausted Ginny was.

After a time, the house seemed quiet. She could hear only the sound of the determined wind hauling itself savagely across the roof above her. She crept from her mattress, and stooped by the door, listening. She grabbed one of the blankets and folded it around her shoulders. Then she carefully turned the doorknob. In the blackened corridor, she carried her brogues in one hand and groped her way along the wainscoting with the other. She crept backwards down the steep attic stairwell, wincing with the creaking of each floorboard underfoot. She didn’t know which chamber was Murdoch’s, and she didn’t fancy bumping into him in the middle of the night. When she reached the first floor, she went into the dining room and sat down in one of the soft chairs to lace up her brogues. She went out through the French doors, and left them unlatched behind her.

Ginny drew the blanket more snugly around her, and studied the darkened upper-floor windows of Springhill House as she walked, but the sound of her footfall on the gravel path didn’t rouse any curiosity to the windowpanes. Seán Lyons was waiting for her in the shadowy stables, and she was glad to get in out of the wind. There was a lamp going in one of the bottom stalls, and she could hear men’s voices, slurry speech.

“You’re looking to get in on a card game, is it?” Seán said, as she approached.

“Hardly.”

“So it’s romance, then.” He grinned. “But, Mrs. Doyle, I needn’t remind you that you’re a married woman. Though it may grieve my heart to slight you, I am not the breed of wicked man who would deign to take advantage of a woman in your position.” He clutched at his breast again. “Oh, sing, treacherous heart!”

“Shhhh.” She pulled him into the quieter light of one of the stalls. “Seán Lyons, when did you get to be such a trier?” she admonished him.

“When my heart was broken at the tender age of thirteen.” He smiled.

The mare who shared their stall leaned down to nudge Seán for a sugar cube. He flicked one out from his pocket, and she licked it up quick.

“Come on, we’ll walk out,” Seán said then, and he led Ginny back into the cold, dark night.

The sky above was a mess of stars, and the moon was nearly full. The wind fairly howled through the fields, whipping Ginny’s ropy black hair around her head, but those stars were as fixed and still as God Himself. Seán was watching them, too.

“Ah, here!” he said, pointing up. “This one’s making a run for it,” as one of the stars arced frantically across the sky. Seán whistled low. “Think he’ll make it?”

“For dead certain he will,” Ginny said.

They walked to the back of the stables, and started down a stone path that was canopied by a thick arcade of trees. Their boughs stretched and swayed above, protecting the walkers from the worst of the wind, and blotting out the starlight. There was a stone bench cut into the trunk of a big oak tree, where Ginny and Seán sat down.

“There’s nobody here?” she asked.

Seán hummed in response.

“You’re sure?” she said. “Nobody would overhear?”

He sat forward. “Jesus, Ginny, you’re awful nervous.”

“I am.”

“What is it, woman?”

“I need your help, Seán.”

“Anything.”

“Don’t say that until you hear what it is,” she said. “It could cost you your life, your job, everything. What I have to ask you.”

He leaned forward on the bench and planted his elbows on his knees. She could see only the outline of him, in the dark.

“Go on,” he said.

“Raymond is gone this six months, nearly,” she said, shivering, and pulling the blanket tighter around her shoulders. “We were meant to hear from him by February, with money.”

Seán took a breath out of the wind, and sharpened it in his lungs. “It’s nearly April now, Ginny,” he said.

“I know.”

“So he’s what, six, eight weeks overdue?”

“Something like that.”

“Is there anyone you can write to, to ask after him?”

“Yes.” She nodded. “His brother, Kevin, is there, and I sent him off a letter last week, to find out, before I came here. But I couldn’t wait any longer. We have a family, we have four children. I had to leave them, to come here for the job.”

“Who has them, then, who’s looking after them?” he asked. “Are they with his parents?”

Ginny shook her head, and an awful lump of a thing came into her throat so that she found she couldn’t answer him.

“Where are they?” he asked again.

“Raymond’s parents are dead, too,” she said. “There was no one.”

Seán sat up, and she could see his blue eyes moving over her face in the darkness.

“They’re at home, still,” Ginny whispered. “I had to leave them.”

Seán gulped. “On their own?” he said.

She nodded.

“Jesus, Ginny.”

“I’d no choice, Seán. They were starving, we were all going to starve. Dammit!” She stood up, and the blanket fell from her shoulders so that she could pace the width of the path. She was grateful for the wind now, because it dried the tears quickly on her face and neck.

“How old are they?” Seán asked. His elbows were planted on his knees, and he cracked his knuckles while they talked.

“Maire is the oldest,” she said. “She’s nearly twelve, but she’s very grown. Very responsible. I know she can manage.” But Ginny’s voice had a creeping edge of hysteria, and she knew it wasn’t Seán she was trying to convince. He stood up, and found Ginny’s hand in the darkness.

“Sure twelve is ancient,” he said. “Calm down, Ginny. You did the right thing.”

But her throat felt all choked and petrified, thinking of them out there in the cottage on their own.

“But the little ones,” she said. “Poppy isn’t yet three. God, what have I done?”

“Only what you had to do,” he answered. He was tugging on her arm, steering her back to the bench. He groped around for her blanket in the darkness, and heaped it back onto her when she sat. He handed over his handkerchief, too, and she honked her nose into it. Then they were both quiet, listening to the wind rifling through the branches above.

“I’m having another one,” she said, after a while. “Soon, I think. A couple of months more, maybe.”

“I wondered if you might be,” he said. “You look well.”

Ginny tipped her head back and rested it against the tree behind her. “It’s too small, this child.” She felt for the swell beneath the blanket. “But he’s kicking in there, still. I can feel him moving around.”

“Ginny, I don’t mean to frighten you,” Seán said then, “but you know what they’re saying about them American ships.”

She leaned over and bundled the blanket all around her like a suit of armor.

“They’re calling them
coffin
ships,
Ginny, because so many on board are dying before they even get to New York. Conditions are dire, and the fever is rampant on them ships.”

Ginny shook her head, shook his words out of her ears. She’d heard that before, all right. She’d heard it from the gossips in Westport town, and in the churchyard on a Sunday.

“But Raymond is young and fit,” she said. “He can do anything.”

Seán nodded quietly beside her. “I’m only telling you, you did the right thing, coming here, for your children—finding work. I don’t want to upset you. I’m only telling you to be prepared for whatever happens.”

Ginny drew the blanket up over her head and face, then, to save Seán the discomfort of watching her sob. She rocked herself, and wept and heaved. The baby in her belly seemed encouraged by all the bustle, or maybe it was the good meal she had eaten. She could feel the child rolling and stretching inside. Then Seán’s arm was steady on her shoulder. He didn’t try to stop her crying. He let her go.

When she was calm enough to speak again, she told him, “She won’t let me go. Mrs. Spring knows I’m expecting, but she has no idea about the other children, and there’s no way she’d let me off to see them, even if she did.”

“She’s terrified of the fever.” He nodded. “She’s nearly deranged over the fear of it. But sure she’s half-deranged anyway, at the best of times.”

“She does seem a bit odd.” Ginny sniffed, blowing her nose into his handkerchief again.

“Oh, she’s mad as a March hare,” he said.

“She’d want to be, to take me on in this state.”

Seán hummed again, stood up, and clasped his hands behind him in the dark. “I’ll do it,” he said.

“You’ll do what?” Ginny looked up at him. “I haven’t even asked you yet.”

“I’ll look in on your children, make sure they’re all right, keep an eye out,” he said. “I’m out on the roads at least every other day, I’m the only one from Springhill who’s allowed free travel. She keeps everyone else under lock and key. But I can run messages for you.”

Ginny breathed carefully, her heart flying like that arcing star. “They need food,” she said.

“Of course.”

It was dangerous, what she was asking him to do. If Murdoch or Mrs. Spring got wind of it, he’d lose his job no question—they might even see him transported. But even worse, carrying food in these times was downright unsafe. Since the famine had deepened, there had already been drivers killed by starving natives in Mullingar and Strokestown, just for a chance at the provisions they might be carrying.

“You’re sure?” Ginny said. “It’s an awful risk, Seán, and nobody would fault you—”

“I would fault me,” he interrupted, and then he sat down again, by her side. “How could I live with myself if I didn’t do this? Of course I’ll do it.”

“Thank you,” she whispered, and she had nothing more to give him, only that.

“Yeah, to hell with it,” he said, slapping his thighs. “Where’s the fun in living a safe, easy life anyway?” He stood up abruptly from the bench. “We should get you inside, Ginny. Jesus, with the baby coming and all, and you out here in the freezing cold.”

“I’m all right,” she said, but she stood up, too, and it was true that her teeth were chattering. They started back up the path toward Springhill House, and Ginny could see the light dancing out merrily from the stables. Before she crept back up the lawns toward the French doors, she thanked him again.

“Do you think you might go tomorrow?” she asked. “I wouldn’t press, only they’re so hungry. I’m awful worried over them.”

He shook his head. “Tomorrow, no,” he said. “There’s no messages tomorrow.”

Her heart plummeted, but she couldn’t push him any further. She’d already asked for so much.

“Ginny,” he said, and then he waited until she looked up at him. His blue eyes flashed in the windy moonlight. “I’m going tonight.”

•   •   •

She slept. Ginny slept deep and hard and guiltless and dreamless, and when she awakened, the room was lit gray, with a dusty shaft of sunlight leaking through the gap beneath her door. Someone was knocking. She sat up and smoothed down her hair, wrapped the blanket around her, and went to the door. Roisin was in the corridor, already dressed and smiling.

“It’s laundry day,” she said, “no time to lose!”

Ginny nodded. “Right, I’ll just get dressed.”

“Quickly, dear.” She clapped her hands, and disappeared down the corridor toward the stairs.

In the kitchen, the women ate eggs and cheese and toast with butter, and Ginny attacked the food with vigor. She was too hungry to feel guilt.

“The laundry is heavy work,” Roisin said, mopping up the yolk on her plate with some bread. “But we’ll be able for it if we’re well fed, hah?”

Katie ate silently, without looking up from her plate.

“You’re looking better already, dear,” Roisin said, studying Ginny’s face across the table. “Fuller in the face, and a better color in you, your eyes a bit clearer. After only one day! Imagine after a week here, that baby will be fat in your belly. You won’t be able to move, with the grows of him!”

“Please, God,” Ginny said. “That’d be a fine problem to have.”

It was true that she felt stronger already, able for the work ahead. They bent to it without complaint. They stripped the beds in Mrs. Spring’s room, and Murdoch’s as well, and brought all the table and chamber linens down to the basement. Two enormous wash boilers were already bubbling in the laundry room, and the air inside was steamed, damp and warm.

“Thank God there’s only the two of them here to look after, Murdoch and Mrs. Spring,” Roisin said, as they loaded the sleeping linens into the first copper boiler. “We’d never manage the washing for a full house. We’d need more help.”

“But why is that?” Ginny asked. “It seems awful unusual, the way Mrs. Spring is here on her own in such a fine house, with the agent managing the estate. Where is her husband? You’d think she’d prefer to be in London.”

“Oh, she would,” Roisin said, plunging the linens deep with a wooden paddle. “She’d be off to London in a flash if she could. She keeps a brave face on it most of the time, but in truth, she hates it here. She’s miserable.”

Roisin stopped in her work and stood straight for a moment to look at Ginny. “I say too much,” she corrected herself.

“Not at all,” Ginny answered, taking the paddle from the older woman, and pitching the linens herself. “I’d never breathe a word of it, you needn’t worry about me. I’m only interested. It seems so curious, a man leaving his wife here on her own in these times.” And as soon as she said it, she thought of Raymond, and blushed. “I’m sure they have their reasons.”

“Oh, he has his reasons, all right,” Roisin tutted, as she started loading the table linens into the second boiler. “It’s easier for him to carry on with his other women if his eccentric wife is tucked well out of the way, at the end of nowhere in the west of Ireland.”

Roisin paused and went to the door, opened it to look out. All was quiet beyond. She closed it, and returned to their work.

“Mrs. Spring never comes down the stairs,” she said. “Still, it would be just my luck.”