The Crooked Branch (32 page)

“Hey, now that it’s getting cold out, maybe we can cut back the garden, too, while everything is dead for the winter.”

“You’re ambitious,” Leo says.

“You love it.”

Leo leans up on his knees to stretch his back. “I’m almost ready to trust you with gardening shears, I guess.”

Emma is watching from her bouncy seat in the doorway, like a superintendent. She kicks her feet and bats jerkily at the low-hanging monkey overhead. She is so full of energy now, and movement. Like me, she is stronger every day.

“Hey, how’d your checkup go?” Leo asks, sitting down on the finished section of our new floors, and leaning his sweaty back against the wall. He props up his knees and uncaps his Coke to take a swig.

“Good, the doc said the incision looks good.”

“I thought it was a scar now.”

I shoot him a look while he sips his Coke. “Don’t push it. Oh, hey, you won’t believe what else!”

“What else?”

I can’t believe I forgot to tell him this. “The crunching!” I say.

He doesn’t answer. He has a look on his face like maybe the Coke is flat.

“You know I kept hearing that crunching? You thought it was a squirrel? Dad thought it was a mouse.”

“Yeah, and you thought it was a ghost or something,” Leo says.

“I did not. Well, maybe,” I say. “Anyway, the doctor . . . okay, this is totally disgusting, but fascinating.”

Leo sits up in his sweaty T-shirt.
Disgusting
has him interested. “Go on,” he says.

“So the doctor looked in my ears today, just as part of my checkup, and he asked me if I’d been having any trouble hearing. I told him no, and then he asked if I’d been hearing any funny sounds, like rattling or anything, or if things sounded muffled lately, so I told him about the crunching.”

Leo is trying not to smile.

“What?” I say.

“No, nothing!” He feigns innocence.

“Well, I am not crazy,” I say.

“Mm-hmm.”

“He said that women’s bodies do so much weird shit when we’re pre- and postpartum—”

“He said
weird shit
?”

“I believe that is the scientific medical term, yes,” I say. “Would you quit interrupting?”

“Sorry.”

“He had another patient who heard a high-pitched squeal in one ear during her entire pregnancy. The day she delivered, it stopped.”

“So is there like a scale of crazy, from rattling to squealing?” Leo asks. “Where does crunching fall in line?”

“Man, you are on
fire
today, with your hilarity,” I say. “You should take that on the road.”

“Stop, you’re too kind.”

“So, ready for the gross part?”

“Hit it.”

“He flushed my ears out with a syringe, and there was so much wax in there, we could have built a hotel out of it.”

“Mmm,” Leo says. “Sexy.”

“I know, I’m like a porn star, right?”

Leo looks over at Emma in the doorway. “Hot mommy’s a porn star,” he says.

I wince. “Okay, we’re going to have to knock it off with the sexy baby talk.”

Leo is frowning, too. “Yeah, I sensed that.”

“Glad we’re on the same page.”

•   •   •

That evening, when the floors are finished, it only takes us a few minutes to unroll our thick new area rug, and move the furniture back in. The transformation is extraordinary. It’s like a new house entirely. It’s amazing what a floor can do. I can’t wait to lay Emma down on the plush carpet. I take her out of the bouncy seat while Leo orders dinner, and we hit up some tummy time together. Her chubby little fingers splay along the carpet, and her head bobbles along. I make a spidery-hand, and I walk it over to her face. The spider-hand kisses her nose, and she smiles.

She smiles. Emma
smiles
!

“Leo!” I scream. “Come here! Emma just smiled! She smiled!”

Leo leans in from the office doorway and points to the phone at his ear. He holds up one finger.

“Yeah, the massaman curry,” he is saying.

The spider-hand kisses Emma’s nose again, and she grins with her whole face, her eyes, her tremendous set of gums. She has dimples. My daughter has dimples! Oh my God, she’s so beautiful I could eat her.

After the curries and a bath and a feed, Emma sleeps, and Leo and I stand in the kitchen together for a long, long time. He holds me. His arms are wrapped full around me, my forehead tucked beneath his chin, against his neck. We are listening to channel C. Harrowing, weeping, wailing channel C.

“I don’t understand,” I whisper. “She’s so incredible. She’s such a better mother than me. I mean, she doesn’t seem a hundred percent bonded with her kids, but she totally has the hang of it. And she seems so strong. And smart. About everything.”

We watch Max and Madeline writhing in their cribs. They both clamor for Jade, who stays just offscreen. Her sobs are wrenching. They would knock the breath clean out of you, just from the sound of them. Leo is shaking his head.

“Yeah, this is not . . .” He doesn’t know what to say. “Not good.”

“Nothing like what I’m going through, right? Even in my worst moments?” I ask, just to make sure. Because it seems extreme to me, but familiar at the same time. I really can’t tell.

“No,” Leo agrees. “Nothing like your crying. She . . . she sounds like she needs help, Majella.”

I pull away from him. I lift the monitor from the counter and hold it in my hands.

“I’m going over there.”

“What, now?” he says.

“Yeah, I think I should.”

“Are you going to tell her we’ve been eavesdropping over the monitor?”

I shrug. I think. “Maybe.”

Leo nods. “Okay. Take your time. I’ll be here when you get back.”

•   •   •

I turn off the monitor and take it with me, because maybe it will be easier just to show it to her, instead of trying to explain. Maybe she can think of my eavesdropping as accidental, or at least incidental.

I stand at the front door of the six-family and study the various bells. There’s no way to know which is hers, so I take a guess. The first one warrants no response. The second one results in a grumpy Polish lady leaning out her second-story window to shake her fist at me. I lean back and wave up at her.

“Sorry, wrong bell!” I say.

I ring bell number three. A little kid answers.

“Hello, who’s there?”

“Hello, I’m sorry, I might have the wrong bell. I’m looking for Jade?”

“This isn’t Jade, it’s Franklin.”

“Franklin, hey! I know you! It’s Majella. I saw you in the window a few weeks ago—I live next door. Remember, you heard me say a bad word?”

“You said the
F word
!” he whispers.

“That’s right, Franklin, that’s me! The F-word lady!”

Franklin giggles.

“Franklin, do you know which apartment Jade lives in?” I ask. “With the twin babies?”

“Oh yeah, she lives on the first floor, in the back.”

I frown. “Do you know which bell is hers?”

“Nope.”

Damn.

“Franklin, do you think you could let me in?” I ask, knowing that I shouldn’t. Knowing that I am asking this kid to break every rule he should follow in life, in order to stay alive and unmolested in New York City.

“Sure,” he says, and he buzzes me in.

I ascend the three steps to the lobby, and walk through the echoey corridor all the way to the back. There are two doors, and one has a painted pumpkin on it that says
Franny’s Fun Factory
, so I knock on the other one. Nothing happens. For a long time. I knock again, and then start to envision calling the fire department to break the door down with an ax. Or at least turning the monitor back on, so I can see what is happening in there. Why won’t she answer the door? I’m about to knock a third time when I hear footsteps inside, and then the
shick
ing sound as she pulls back the cover from the peephole.

I hear her hesitate, but I know she’s in there. I know how alone she is. And maybe I have at least an inkling of what she’s going through: the way those hormones can bear down on you like a chemical wall of tears. The way you can feel the torrent coming, but you can’t outrun it. The way you have to sit powerless and wait for that wall to pound down over you. The way you pray for it to end. The way some days, you want to scream at your baby
What the hell do you want from me?
just to make her stop crying. There’s a reason they make you watch those anti-baby-shaking videos before you leave the hospital. Because if you didn’t know how dangerous it was,
everyone
would do it at least once. This new-mama shit is no joke. No one should have to do this alone.

“Hey, Jade, open up,” I say to the peephole.

There is only silence.

“Jade.”

Another beat.

And then finally: the flick of the chain lock, the clack of the dead bolt, the twist of the knob. The door swings open.

“Hey.”

She lets me in.

•   •   •

I am standing in the arrivals hall at LaGuardia, and it’s hot. It smells like soup. There’s another woman waiting, and her toddler has sprinted gleefully past the sign that says
STAY BEHIND THIS LINE
while the mother watches helplessly, bound by the rules of society in a way her kid is not. The mother has a Baggie of gummy bears out now, and she’s shaking them softly at her moppy-haired daughter, trying to entice the child back across the line. Security is approaching, and the mother becomes frantic.

“Olivia, come back here this instant!” the mother hisses, her cheeks paling.

“Ma’am, you have to keep your child behind the line,” the security officer says, his thumbs tucked idiotically into his belt.

“Yes, I know,” the mother says, stabbing him to death with her eyes. “Olivia, get over here!”

Olivia lunges for the gummy bears and when she’s close enough, her mother snatches her by the arm. I wonder what family member they’re waiting for, what happy reunion Olivia is determined to ruin by getting her mother arrested. She gobbles the gummy bears joyfully, and the mother holds her hand so hard that her knuckles turn shiny and yellow. Olivia doesn’t notice. She is dressed like a strawberry, because today is Halloween.

Emma is in her stroller, and she’s wearing a frog costume that is so cute it would make your eyes bleed. She is kicking her legs, making the giant frog feet bounce. Olivia’s mother smiles at me, but not because of the frog feet. That smile is an apology. Olivia is doing the twist in her strawberry costume, still holding her mama by one hand while she chews her gummy bears with her mouth open.

“It doesn’t matter,” I say.

I lift my phone from the stroller’s cup holder and check the time. Eight weeks ago right now, Leo and I were in a taxi, racing along Sixty-eighth Street, pulling up in front of Weill Cornell Medical Center. The taxi driver was freaking out. He kept screaming, “Don’t you have that baby in my car! Not in my car!” I could have reassured him—there was no way she was going to fall out on the floor of the cab. I wouldn’t have that baby for another twenty-eight hours. They would have to hack me open to get her out.

I pull back the hood on her stroller, and she looks up at me. Her frog feet bounce. She flashes her fleeting, elusive, miraculous smile. That kid has my heart in a hammock.

And now people begin to appear from behind the line, behind a partition—tanned and wrinkled people, pulling their rolling luggage behind them. Olivia the strawberry tries to make a run for it again, but her mother yanks on her arm and holds fast. I hold, too.

I hold my breath.

My mother is here. She is here. She went to the airport in Tampa, and faced her worst fear. She boarded an actual airborne vessel. To get to us. My baby and me. And now she is here, she is walking toward us in the arrivals hall at LaGuardia. She sees Emma, and her face is so happy that she doesn’t even smile. She has tears in her eyes. But she doesn’t go to the stroller first, to bend down and greet her only grandchild for the first time. Instead she comes to me. She drops the handle of her suitcase and she leans across the rope and she puts her arms around me. I fall in against her, against the sound of her voice in my ear.

“Baby,” she says.

Jeanine Cummins
is the bestselling author of the groundbreaking true crime memoir
A Rip in Heaven
and the novel
The Outside Boy
. She worked in the publishing industry for ten years before becoming a full-time writer. She was born in Spain, and has lived in California, Maryland, Belfast, and New York, where she remains now with her Irish husband and growing family.

CONNECT ONLINE

www.jeaninecummins.com

facebook.com/jeaninecummins

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The

Crooked Branch

JEANINE CUMMINS

1. At the beginning of the book, Majella’s relationship with her mother is a source of frustration, rather than a comfort. Why is Majella angry with her mother? Is her anger justifiable, or is her attitude toward her mom unfair? Is theirs is a typical, modern mother-daughter relationship? Why or why not? What could Majella do to improve their relationship?

2. Majella’s labor is long and difficult, and results in her giving birth to Emma by C-section. Do these factors affect how she adjusts to motherhood? Is her transition into motherhood a particularly bumpy one, or is it fairly normal? Would you describe her as having postpartum depression?

3. Majella eavesdrops on her neighbors using her baby monitor. Is this an unethical behavior, either immediately or eventually? If so, when does it cross the line?

4. Food plays an important role in Majella’s life, and that role changes dramatically during her postpartum experience. What causes the shift—is it her new lifestyle, boredom, depression? Or is she just hungrier than normal because she’s breast-feeding? Are these kinds of significant personal transformations an inevitable part of becoming a mother? Will Majella ever get her food groove back, or is her palate permanently altered?

5. When Leo and Majella found out they were expecting Emma, they left their apartment in Manhattan, and moved in search of a more suburban lifestyle in Queens. Were they right to make that move? How would Majella’s experiences as a new mother have been better or worse if they had stayed in Manhattan, or if they had selected a more neutral setting than the house where Majella grew up?

6. Leo loves Majella, and he tries to be empathetic, but there are moments when he just doesn’t understand what his wife is going through. Is he a supportive husband? How could he be better, more helpful? Is Majella right to get angry when he uses the word “babysitting” to describe staying home with their daughter, or does she overreact?

7. Eventually, Dr. Zimmer suggests a prescription to help ease Majella’s anxiety. Should she take those pills? Why or why not?

8. How are Jade and Majella similar? In what ways are they different? Does either of these women represent a typical new-mother experience, or are they both somewhere beyond the conventional ideas of what it’s like to become a mother for the first time? Are those traditional concepts of new motherhood still changing, or have they become static?

9. When Majella reads her ancestor’s diary, she begins to worry that she may have inherited some bad mothering genetics. Is she right to worry about this, or is it meaningless? Are parenting skills hereditary, or can women learn how to be patient, calm, and nurturing with their children, even if that sort of temperament doesn’t come naturally? Is Majella looking for an excuse for her shortcomings?

10. At the beginning of the book, when the blight first sweeps Ireland, Ginny and Ray make the decision that one of them must go to America for work. Is this the right decision? Similarly, when Ginny and her children reach the brink of starvation, she leaves them home alone to seek out the position at Springhill House. Is she right to do this? Does she have any choice? Why or why not?

11. In her determination to save her children, Ginny relies heavily on help from her eleven-year-old daughter, Maire. Is it fair for Ginny to place so much responsibility on Maire? Is there some part of Ginny that just wants to escape from the harrowing circumstances at home, or are her motives for leaving her children entirely pure? Does her leaving constitute abandonment?

12. It is Ginny’s pregnancy that first endears her to Alice Spring, and the arrival of Ginny’s infant son that consequently ensures Ginny’s security at Springhill House. Ginny knows this; is she right or wrong to take advantage of Alice Spring’s attachment to her baby? Is Alice Spring’s fondness for Ginny’s baby sweet or creepy, or a little of both? Could Ginny have discouraged the intensity of Alice Spring’s devotion to her child and still maintained her position at the house? Does Ginny’s behavior make her culpable, in some ways, for Alice Spring’s ultimate unraveling?

13. The friendship that evolves between Ginny and Seán is a source of strength and comfort to her. He is integral in saving her children. Does their friendship ever feel improper or disloyal, given Ginny’s marital status? When they first meet at Springhill House, are Seán’s flirtations harmless, or does he really have romantic motives toward Ginny? Does Ginny respond to his flirtation appropriately?

14. The staff and residents at Springhill House live largely beyond the reach of the famine, and while some experience occasional glimmers of guilt, they mostly carry on as if everything is normal. Is this kind of “willful amnesia” immoral? What, if anything, could they do to help influence the events around them? What could any of the staff at Springhill do to save some of the starving population beyond the gate? What about Murdoch? Or Alice Spring? What is their moral imperative, and how does it differ from that of the people who work for them?

15. Alice Spring is decidedly eccentric, but is she crazy? Are her peculiarities the product of her situation in life (her childless abandonment by her husband, her sheltered detachment from the real world), or are those peculiarities just symptoms of her preexisting insanity?

16. When Seán comes to Ginny with news of her son Michael’s illness, she decides to wait until nightfall before going to him. Is she right or wrong to make that decision, given what she knows at the time? Would it have made any difference if she had gone home sooner, the moment she learned that her son was sick? What might the outcome have been if she had behaved differently?

17. Near the end of the book, Ginny and Alice Spring have a violent confrontation that ends horribly. Did Ginny
murder
Alice Spring, or was it self-defense? A terrible accident? Some combination of these? Does Ginny’s behavior in the aftermath of the struggle make her more or less culpable? Was she right to take all of the money and traveling papers, and to flee Ireland with her children? Or would it have been more honest for her to report Alice Spring’s death to the authorities? As we learn from the recording in the library, Raymond thinks of his mother’s actions as heroic. Are they?

18. When Majella learns the truth about her ancestor, she feels absolved and rejuvenated. How are Majella and Ginny alike? In what ways are they different? What about Majella’s mother? Are there family characteristics that all these women share, despite the generations that have passed between their stories? How much of motherhood is passed down, either through observation and experience, or genetics? To what degree is it possible for a woman to overcome poor examples of parenting and create her own path as a mother?

19. The book closes with Majella’s mother finally coming to visit her new grandchild. Does this signal a significant change in their relationship? Will this baby girl of a new generation allow Majella and her mother to bond in a way they haven’t before? Is Majella still angry with her mother? How have her feelings changed and why?

20. What do you think of the title,
The Crooked Branch
? Is Majella’s mother right when she declares that “every family tree has at least one crooked branch”? Who, if anyone, is the crooked branch in this family? What does it mean to be the crooked branch?