The Crooked Branch (25 page)

Maire stepped slowly across the room, and looked down at the baby. She went down on her knee beside Poppy and touched his nose.

“Isn’t he lovely?” Poppy said. “He likes me best.” And then loudly, “I’m your big sister.”

Maire laughed softly through her tears.

NEW YORK, NOW

I
order burritos on Myrtle Avenue, and while I’m waiting for them, I flip through my online recipe box, looking for some vegan cookies I can make for Jade. I asked her to come over when Leo leaves for work around three. It’s a really warm day, for October, so maybe we can sit outside in the backyard and drink lemonade and eat vegan cookies while the babies hang out on a blanket together. Maybe it will be relaxing and enjoyable, like my ridiculous prenatal fantasy of what motherhood was going to be like.

The vegan snickerdoodles look good. Not really. I mean, how good can a cookie look without eggs or butter? But I want to be optimistic. I’m willing to try. I pay for the burritos and then stop at the market on the way home to purchase something called “Earth Balance,” which I’m supposed to use instead of butter, and then some fake-egg stuff. If I’m nonjudgmental, maybe they will be delicious. I also buy Fritos, which—
guess what!
—are arguably vegan, even though I would never serve Fritos to a guest, vegan or otherwise. I can hardly fathom eating them myself. But they’re in my basket, and I grab peanut butter, too (also potentially vegan). And then butt paste for Emma. And condoms, because eventually I’m going to have to do it with Leo again, and if I get pregnant again right now, I will probably die. This is, without question, the strangest combination of items I have ever purchased at one time.

I dump everything onto the counter beside the cash register, and await the rampant judgmentalism of the cashier, but it turns out she’s far too bored to judge me. I lug everything home, the heavy plastic bags cutting their marks into my fingers. Leo’s waiting and he’s hungry.

“Oh hey,” he says, “burritos.” But he says it like,
Oh hey, head lice
.

“Yeah, it was just quick. It was on the way.”

I try not to sound defensive, but I’m wearing maternity pants again, and one of those awful Empire-waist tops that the woman at Motherhood Maternity convinced me were flattering. That kind of outfit would make any woman combative.

Leo takes the burritos in to the coffee table in the living room. Emma is cooing beside him on the floor, and something else: she is staring at her hands. She is studying them as they flutter and swoop through the air above her.

“Hey, look at that,” I say.

Leo is busy, unhappily unwrapping the burritos. “What’s that?”

“Emma,” I say, “she’s watching her hands.”

“Hey!” Leo abandons the burritos and goes down on his knees beside her. “What do you see?”

While he’s distracted, I stuff the bag with the condoms, Fritos, and peanut butter down deep in the pot drawer. Then I cover it with a loose lid, just in case.

“What else’d you get?” he asks.

“Just, you know,” I say. “The butt paste and stuff.”

“Cool.”

“Yeah.”

“And how’d it go with Dr. Zimmer?”

His voice is careful, but the question is loaded. He wants to ask about the pills, if she gave me a prescription. I sigh, and take two glasses down from the cabinet. Ice cubes. Seltzer. I watch the glasses fizz up, and then I join my small family in our living room.

“You seem like you’re feeling better,” he tries again.

I shrug. “I just had a bad morning. It was nice to go in and talk to her, though. It was good.”

“Well, good, then,” he says, and puts an arm around me, leans in to kiss the side of my head.

I wait a moment to make sure he’s not going to ask, and he’s not. He’s leaning toward his burrito again. He folds back the foil and takes a bite.

“Do we have any sour cream?” he asks.

“I got a prescription,” I say, and then point to the burrito bag. “Check the bag, they usually throw some in.”

He pauses in his chewing, leans his hand into the bag on the floor, and returns with two small plastic cups of sour cream with little lids on them. One more dip into the bag produces a plastic knife.

“Okay,” he finally says.

“She said that everything I’m going through is totally normal, but that the drugs could still help, just temporarily. Just to balance out my chemistry a little bit until things get back on track.”

Leo has popped the lid on one of the sour creams, and is smearing it on his burrito. He nods. “So basically what you’re saying is that I was so spot-on, I’m practically a mental health professional.”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“That will be three hundred dollars, please,” he says, taking a huge bite of the burrito. Emma is kicking her little heels into the yoga mat beneath her. She’s doing calisthenics. “But seriously, that’s great,” he says with his mouth full. “How do you feel about it? Are you okay with it?”

“I don’t know, no. Not really.” I unzip my boots and kick my feet up onto the coffee table next to my untouched burrito. “I mean, I got it filled. I stopped on the way home and went to the pharmacy, and I have the pills in my diaper bag, but I’m just. I don’t know. I don’t want to take them. Especially while I’m breast-feeding Emma. I mean who knows how that stuff might really affect the baby?”

“Fair enough,” Leo says. “I’m sure the doctor wouldn’t prescribe them if there was any risk to the baby, but one step at a time. At least you have them now, and you can think it over. Maybe you’ll change your mind.”

I reach for my burrito. “Maybe. Any sour cream left?”

He hands me the second little cup, and I pop the lid. We watch Emma like she’s an expensive matinee, and eat the rest of our burritos in silence.

After lunch, Emma naps while Leo showers, so I start on the vegan cookies. I plug in my perky pink KitchenAid mixer, and start measuring out the ingredients. The Earth Balance stuff seems all right, but the fake egg shit totally freaks me out. It’s a
powder
.
That you add water to until it “foams up.” I wonder if Jade will be able to tell if I put real eggs in the vegan cookies. Will she break out in hives or something?

“Fuck it,” I say, but I’m only bluffing. I dump the fake egg powder bullshit into the mixer.

By the time Leo comes down from his shower, the cookies are in the oven, and they don’t smell terrible. Neither does my husband. I’m at the sink, with my hands submerged in the hot, sudsy water. He stands behind me and his skin is damp, and I can smell his aftershave. I feel the clean shave of his cheek against mine.

“I love you, Majella.”

I turn to him, but don’t remove my hands from the water. “I love you, too.”

“Prepare yourself, woman, because I intend to do incredibly sexy things to you when I get home from work tonight.”

I laugh.

“You laugh,” he says, “but that laugh will not save you.”

I take my dripping hands from the water and flick them at his face, but that does not deter him either. He kisses me. Open-mouthed and everything. And the strangest thing happens: I
like
it. We make out by the sink for two full minutes like some horny teenagers deep in the stacks at the school library. He even goes up my shirt, over the bra. It’s so exciting. And then my boob starts to drip milk.

“Gross,” I say. Leo tries to keep kissing me, but it’s over. “That is so not hot,” I say.

He adjusts his jeans. “I beg to differ.”

“Take it easy there, cowboy,” I say, and I turn back to the dishes, plunge my hands in. The water is lukewarm.

“This is not over,” he says, and he kisses my neck one last time. “I have to go do some damn work now. I must cook for the hungry city! But I will be back. And you will be mine.”

•   •   •

When he’s gone, Emma is still sleeping, so I retrieve the clandestine shopping bag from the pot drawer and place the Fritos and peanut butter on the counter. I take the condoms up to the bedroom, stash them in my nightstand drawer, and grab the diary. Then I take it, along with the monitor, Fritos, and peanut butter, into the office and sit down at the desk. My diaper bag is there on the floor, beside the desk, and the top of my paper prescription bag is peeking out. I lift the bag out, rip it open. The little orange bottle of pills falls out into my hand, and it’s covered with stickers.
May cause drowsiness
on green.
Do not drive or operate machinery until you know how this drug affects you
on yellow.
Dizziness may occur
on pink.

I open up Google and type in
breast-feeding Ativan
, but then I don’t even bother to click on any of the results, because I’m not taking these pills. I slap the bottle down on the desk, and I like the sound it makes, the crashing rattle. I google
genealogy Virginia Doyle
instead. There are something like ten million results, so I start clicking through. Right away I realize I need to find out her birth date before I can go any further. It’s the only way to narrow down the information.

The orange prescription bottle is distracting me, so I open the desk drawer and toss it inside.
Rattle crash
, in among the pens and the stamps. I don’t know what I expect to find on the Internet that will tell me more about Ginny Doyle than her own diary. But maybe there’s something. Maybe there’s a newspaper article from Ireland about the murder. But no. Because I guess if she got caught, she would have gone to jail, right? She wouldn’t have ended up in New York then, surely, having more unsuspecting babies to infect with her crazy DNA.

I shudder. Maybe I’m being unfair. Maybe she wasn’t as awful as she seems, in the diary. If there is some other, softer, more forgivable explanation for what she did . . . I don’t know, then maybe redemption is possible.

The phone rings and it startles me. I glance at the caller ID. It’s Mom, so I weigh my options carefully. I don’t know how long I have before Emma wakes up, before my cookies are ready. Mom tends to be a little long-winded when she’s the one who initiates the call. It’s better if I call her and catch her off guard. Do I really want to hear about her neighbor’s nephew’s backpacking trip around Argentina? I pick it up.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Majella!” She always sounds surprised to hear my voice, even when she calls me. It makes me wonder if she dialed me by mistake, if she was one button off on her speed dial. “How are you, how’s everything?” she says, but before I can answer, she says, “You wouldn’t believe the weather we’re having down here—it’s gorgeous! You wouldn’t even know it’s October. What’s it like up there? Vera said it was warm.”

“Oh, you were talking to Mrs. Wimmer?”

“Yeah, well, she had an operation on her knee last week, and I just called to see how her recovery was going, and I guess she’s not doing too well. She’s in a lot of pain, and the doctor said she has a contusion. . . .”

I tune her out, go back to clicking through the millions of Virginia Doyles, but I can’t really concentrate on my research while Mom is talking. I open the drawer and look at the pill bottle. Talking to my mom on the phone makes me really consider taking the Ativan. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, to stop feeling. Maybe it won’t poison Emma’s food supply. I slam the drawer, and make the decision to interrupt.

“Hey, Mom, I don’t have much time, I’m having a friend over.”

“Friend? Who’s that, honey?”

“Just this new girl I met around the neighborhood. This girl Jade.”

“Oh, that’s nice,” she says. She doesn’t ask where we met, or how. She doesn’t ask if she has children. She doesn’t ask anything.

“Yeah. So she’s coming over in like a half an hour, and I probably need to get cleaned up and stuff.”

For a crazy half a second, I consider telling Mom that Jade is the woman from channel C, that she has twin babies, that she might have serious postpartum depression, that I am struggling, too, that I am seeing a therapist, that I have a bottle of Ativan in my desk drawer. And then I imagine her sitting in the clubhouse with her friends around a table of chef salads and gossip and carefully coiffed heads. She’s telling them everything. And then she tells the butcher, the postal carrier, the stock clerk at the grocery store.
My daughter’s on Ativan and she’s breast-feeding. Can you believe that?
I shake my head. But maybe there is something else I can tell her instead, something real. Something that might pique her interest enough that she’ll listen.

“Hey Mom, I meant to tell you, though, you know that diary I told you about, Ginny Doyle’s diary?”

“Yeah, oh—I have some information on her, I’ve been doing some digging.”

“Great,” I say, “but listen to this, Mom: she killed someone.”

“She
what?
”

“Yeah, I know. It’s true.”

“Well, wherever did you hear that?”

“It’s right in her diary.” My mother is outstandingly silent. “She wrote about it. She killed this woman right before she left Ireland to come here, and she did it in front of her daughter. I guess it really haunted her because she seems totally obsessed with it, in the diary. It seems like she feels terrible about it, but it was awful, and super violent.”

“Well.” One word, from my mother—an unprecedented one-word response. I think she might even be speechless. This is the best thing that has ever happened to me.

“I know, it’s amazing, right?”

“It’s awful,” she finally musters. “Majella, she was my grandmother’s grandmother.”

Shit, that’s even worse than I expected. “Your mom’s mom or your dad’s?” I ask, as if this can save me.

“Mom’s.”

Double shit. A direct maternal line.

“Her daughter Maire was my great-grandmother,” she says.

“Maire, yeah,” I say, “that’s the name in the diary, her daughter’s name. She witnessed the murder.”

“Oh.” My mother sounds flustered, deflated. I don’t think I actually like this new, wordless mom. “Maybe it was a misunderstanding?” she tries. “Maybe you misunderstood what you read?”

“I don’t think so, Mom, it was pretty clear.” But she seems so disappointed and sad that I don’t want to push it. “But who knows, right? I mean it was like a hundred-and-sixty-something years ago.”

“Do you have the diary there?” she asks. “Would you read it to me?”

I’m reluctant, because reading it once was awful enough. But I do it, because my mother is asking to
listen
to me, and it is the first time in my life I can remember that happening. I read: the crunching, the blackthorn tree, the hurley bat, the baby falling, the daughter’s windy voice, the pale blue china, the dead woman’s hair. My voice shakes and my mother is silent, listening. When I’m finished, I can hear the electric hum of Emma’s monitor on the desk. That’s how quiet my mother is. I can smell the vegan snickerdoodles, browning in the oven.