8

Alert Calls

Instinct follows simple stimulus in the bird’s world. As such, what might seem like mother love is nothing more than a deeply ingrained automatic response.

—G. Gordon’s Field Guide to the Birds of the Pacific Northwest

Anne searched the beach around her and the waterline below her for the small figure of her son. She looked at the cart on its side, the small cairn of rocks piled there. Something moved at the far end of the seawall where the boats rose and fell in the growing shore break. She started forward, but it was only a large bird, a solitary heron stalking through the shallow waters near the log boom. It rose now, pterodactyl-like, and flapped slowly across the beach and out of sight in the light patter of rain. The sun had disappeared, and the sky was a canvas of gray.

She ran to the water’s edge and scanned the lake for Aiden’s red-and-blue Snoopy life preserver, also willing herself not to see it. The green water had grown turbulent with whitecaps under the strengthening wind. She hurried back to the cart and looked in the sand for some clue as to which direction he’d gone. The ground was a patchwork of his small footprints, her own, the hooves of deer that came down in the night, and the crows that had landed and left.

He’d been right there in front of her. Right there! Where could he have gone?

She stood rooted next to the cart and heard the report of the gunshots in her mind. She wanted to run or yell Aiden’s name or go get Tim. Or all three at once. But she couldn’t move. She willed herself to speak, to act, and could not. She felt cold all over. Both there and not there. She felt herself falling away, leaving herself, shutting down.

Time bent and folded. She saw her mother then, holding Aiden in her arms the one and only time Anne had taken him home to the island to see her family. Margaret Ryan recounted the story of how Anne had gone to have tea with the mermaids. It was an old story and one Anne had heard dozens of times. There was fear in Margaret’s voice, but to Anne, who hadn’t felt the danger then, it was a pleasant, if strange, memory. She couldn’t have been more than four. She remembered hurrying down to the docks clutching her stuffed kitten. She had something she urgently needed to tell her father, though she never could recall what it was. The other fishermen were accustomed to the sight of Matthew Ryan’s fire-haired wain tripping down the gangway by herself, and they might have called hello, but she didn’t remember that either. She recalled seeing her father’s boat, The Kestrel, not quite having landed, and was chuffed to beat him to the wharf. Eager to reach him, she broke into a run and dropped straight into the water of an empty berth.

The cool, dark sea enveloped her in a tight embrace. There was the shock of falling, but she wasn’t afraid. Sunlight streamed down through empty berths in the wharf. It must have been undulating fronds of kelp she saw there, but in her child mind it was the waving hair of the beautiful mermaids. They sang and held out their hands, and Anne stayed the whole afternoon, and they had a tea party with the kitten. They taught her to sing a lovely old air and she couldn’t wait to tell Gran about it. Those activities had been rudely interrupted by her rescue.

“It was poor Robert Cleary pulled you out,” Margaret said, looking over Aiden’s downy head at her daughter. “Could barely swim himself. Took years off the poor man’s life and you chattering away about the pretty ladies singing under the water.”

“Good Christ, Mam! You’d think I’d drowned then,” Anne said, trying to make light of it. “I can swim now anyhow. No thanks to you.”

Margaret looked at her only daughter with piercing gray eyes and said nothing.

Gran turned her teacup in her hands.

“Níl aon anacair anama ann go dtí go mbeidh leanaí ag duine,” Gran said.

There’s no anguish of the soul until one has children.

Oh, Anne understood that now, didn’t she? The thought brought her back into the present terrible moment, the rain coming down, the empty beach. She willed herself to focus, scanning the area around her for some sign of Aiden. Where had he gone to?

She jumped as a crack echoed down the hillside. Another gunshot? The rain increased and moved in a sheet across the lake. Then Tim had her by the arm and was pulling her into the shelter of the eaves. Surely Aiden was with him. Tim draped a towel around her shoulders and scanned the patio.

“Where’s Aiden?”

Her heart plummeted.

“I don’t know! He was right there! He’s vanished!”

She pointed to the overturned cart and Tim took her shaking hand in his.

“It’s okay, Anne. We’ll find him. He can’t have gone far.”

Tim was good under pressure and rarely got overexcited. He was steady when things got stressful, like when Gran fell ill and Anne couldn’t fly home because she was eight months pregnant. And the day of her review at Cornish when she would or would not be offered a permanent position. When she went into labor when they were at the movies. He was unflappable.

“It’s only a rainstorm, Anne. He’ll probably come running in any minute now.”

“But, Tim, I heard gunshots!” she said.

He shook his head.

“No, the sound carries in strange ways up here. It’s fine.”

“But—I’m bloody sure, I—”

Only now she wasn’t sure of anything at all.

“It was just thunder, Anne.”

But that was cold comfort because Aiden was so afraid of thunder. At home a storm would drive him inside the apartment and into some cozy corner of his own making. Surely, he was inside somewhere. Tim told her to check the house and he’d look around the outbuildings. Anne flew through the rooms of the first floor, calling her boy. She checked the window seat Aiden favored, behind the curtains where he liked to hide with his little book, and the eating nook in the kitchen, the sunroom, then up to the rooms of the second floor. She found nothing but his absence in the silent house.

Tim met her at the sliding door to the patio and shook his head. He grabbed raincoats from the closet and waited for Anne to pull on trousers and boots. Then they hurried off together down the seawall, calling their son’s name. At each of the houses, Tim stopped to circumnavigate the quiet and shuttered buildings, looking for any inviting corner that might entice a frightened five-year-old boy. Anne paced in a parallel line along the shore close to the water, dreading that she would see him there.

The rain came down harder and a cold wind blew off the lake. Anne wiped the water out of her eyes. She told herself this would be over soon, that he was tucked in out of the rain nearby. Any minute he’d come running down the beach and into her arms, his bright curls wet with rain. But he wasn’t there. He wasn’t anywhere. Thunder cracked and rolled overhead. Where could he have gone?

Tim pointed to the house closest to the dock and Anne ran toward the gangway.

“I’m going to check the boat!” she called to him and sprang down the dock. But there was no sign of Aiden in the cozy bunks of the family boat or in the small wooden craft that belonged to the caretaker’s family. She swung around and raced back toward Tim, and her heart stopped at the sight of the red-and-blue Snoopy life preserver half-submerged in the dark shallows of the lake.

In slow motion she plunged into the cold water up to her knees. She reached for him, and only the life preserver came free of the water. She scanned the area between dock and beach and did not see Aiden’s small form. The cold lake hadn’t claimed him, then. She sobbed with relief and stumbled onto the shore. Tim yelled, holding something up. Aiden’s fairy-tale book. He pointed up the hill.

“Maybe he went up to the O’Neills’,” Tim said.

They climbed the steep, slippery trail calling their son’s name.

Anne began to bargain then with a God she wasn’t sure she believed in. She’d be a better mother. She’d be a better person. She’d do everything right this time. Just please, please, please give her the chance. Let him be safe. Let him not be frightened. Let him come back to her. Please.

Nobody tells the truth about having children, Anne knew. People congratulated you and said how lovely and isn’t that just grand? Being a parent is the best thing that ever happened to me, they said. My child is my biggest accomplishment, my greatest pride. They were all bloody awful liars. Nobody ever admitted that being a mother is an epic of failure. There were just so many opportunities to fail: when your baby won’t eat, or sleep, or stop crying, or has a rash, or has a cold, or won’t look at you, or won’t speak to you. Or stares at his hands and won’t respond when you say his name. Or screams inconsolably for some unknown reason. Or worse things. Or when you take your attention off him for one minute and he vanishes into thin air.

So many things had surprised her about becoming a mam. Having the baby wasn’t the half of it. As hard as it had been to carry him and go through labor, that all seemed like a lark after he arrived. The hunger, thirst, and exhaustion were nothing. That first year she was completely overwhelmed with the weight of loving him—his wee hands, the joy on his face each morning, the heft of his tiny sleeping form on her chest—it all undid her. She felt like her heart was a giant exposed wound that would never heal.

“There’s just so much to worry about,” she’d wailed to her mother at the end of that visit home to the island when Aiden was a baby.

Margaret laughed but her eyes were bright with tears.

“Oh, sweetheart. It’s going to be grand. Don’t you worry.”

Anne wiped her streaming eyes.

“So it gets better, then?”

Margaret shook her head.

“No, love. It doesn’t. It only gets worse!”

And they both laughed as they cried, for what else was there to do?

There’s no anguish of the soul until one has children.

So many new emotions came with motherhood. Wonderful and terrible, intense and exhausting. Nobody told you that. Nobody told you the person you’d been before would disappear completely. Who was that carefree girl who stayed up late drinking and carousing and had big plans? Nobody explained that being a mother turned your heart inside out and that the person you were before was a clueless eejit. Nobody mentioned that for every mistake you made there was no learning from it, because you’d just repeat it in a different and possibly worse way. Maybe that’s why you had to have more than one child—so at least you could screw up differently and your offspring could share the burden of having a terrible, awful mother.

“Please let him be safe,” she begged someone, something. “I can do better. I will do better.”

But even as she said the words, she didn’t believe them. She didn’t deserve another chance, did she? Because this wasn’t the first time she’d failed Aiden, her one and only. She’d had dozens of opportunities these last eighteen months. And she failed him over and over again.

Tim strode ahead calling Aiden’s name. Anne stopped to catch her breath and realized she was muttering aloud.

“Please,” she said.

Tim, hearing her, turned back to look. Up on the hillside beyond him a spot of color appeared on the trail. A flash of red against the slick brown earth. The spot grew into a shape and the shape became a body, a person moving toward them. Then he was there, her dearest one, her maddening child, her perfect boy. He descended the trail, his dear, wee frame tripping down the hillside like he was coming back from tea with the Queen. He brushed past his father and walked to Anne. She sat down hard against the bank and reached for him, hoping he would let her hold him. Her tears mixed with the rain streaming down her face. Aiden sat in her lap and held up a glossy black feather. He tucked his head under her chin and leaned into the curve of her body. She closed her eyes and rocked him lightly and heard him humming a little tune. She forced herself to hold him gently, her arms loose around his small, precious little body.

“Oh, Aiden, love. You’ll be the death of me,” she said quietly.

Tim gave a short laugh.

“That makes two of us. Think I just got my first gray hair,” he said.

Aiden reached up and took the book from his father and tucked the feather inside it.

Back at the house Anne took a hot shower while Tim ran a bath for Aiden. They ate an early dinner of grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup. Anne did the dishes and Tim built a fire in the large stone fireplace. He popped a film into the VCR, an old Disney movie called Dumbo, which Anne hadn’t seen before. Aiden wanted to sit with his face pressed close to the screen, but they coaxed him back to the couch, where he perched between them briefly. Then he moved to stand slightly apart, rocking to the music and flicking the feather in his fingers.

Then the lullaby, the imprisoned mother elephant caressing her baby through the bars.

“Good Christ, Tim!” Anne yelled and threw a pillow across the room.

“Sorry! I forgot about this part,” he said and fast-forwarded the movie past the terrible scene of the mother elephant being separated from her baby.

“Trying to cheer me up, are you? What’s next? Sophie’s Choice?!”

They were laughing together, their shared dark humor. It helped to end the day like that, to put some space between now and that time that he was lost to them. Short as it had been, it would forever stretch long and terrible in her memory.

Tim pulled her close and she leaned into his shoulder. He took her hand and idly twisted her wedding ring. It had been five years that spring—their marriage a bigger surprise than her pregnancy.

For though they’d agreed about the baby, they hadn’t discussed marriage. Their legal union was inspired by a hiccup with Anne’s work visa. US Immigration insisted she renew it midsemester, which would mean returning to Ireland. Being so close to the end of the year, it wouldn’t make sense to return if she left then. She’d have the baby at home and she and Tim might have gradually lost touch. But he proposed on a beautiful April evening. And in the romantic urgency of the moment, she’d accepted. They’d gone to the courthouse the next day and celebrated with dinner at Place Pigalle at Pike’s Place Market. Anne had murdered a braised lamb shank and a crème brûlée and stole sips of Tim’s wine. It had been great fun.

Tim’s family had not shared their giddy joy. At his parents’ house the following Sunday, Anne felt like she’d been called to the head matron’s office for a uniform violation or smoking in the girls’ toilet. Christi Magnusen made it quite clear she was not thrilled to have accidently acquired a daughter-in-law.

To her credit, Christi had tried. Robbed of the opportunity to throw a grand wedding for her eldest, she’d held a baby shower for Anne at the Four Seasons Hotel tearoom. It was a nice gesture, only Anne didn’t want a baby shower. Her family couldn’t afford to travel from Ireland, and the do was a lopsided affair of Christi’s friends, Tim’s sister, and a couple of Anne’s friends from Cornish. It was an uncomfortable afternoon and just the start.

The Magnusens were big on tradition—Sunday dinner, holiday celebrations, birthdays, and the like. Anne soon realized she wasn’t being welcomed; she was expected. And when pushed, she balked. Like when she skipped a boating day party. She was trying to wean Aiden and didn’t want to chitchat with a bunch of yachties while breast milk leaked into her bra pads.

“For the love of Mike!” Anne yelled, replaying Christi’s phone message for Tim. Christi had called to ask if everything was okay and said everyone missed her at the party. “You’d think I murdered the patron saint of boating!”

Tim laughed then, but Anne often felt her mother-in-law’s eyes on her. It seemed Christi was waiting for her to make some colossal mistake. Something awful and unforgivable—like losing track of your child by a lake. Your child who could not swim. Your child who could not call for help.

Tim never asked her how she’d lost sight of Aiden. And she didn’t tell him about the feeling on the beach either, that cold paralysis, and how similar it had been in May at the graduation ceremony. Because she hadn’t told him then either. That night she’d simply said she was ill. She didn’t know how to explain it, or maybe she just didn’t think he’d understand. It wasn’t his fault. She did love him—though there were so many gaps between them that seemed to be widening more all the time.

If only she could write. She might be able to capture her feelings and examine them like butterfly specimens pinned to paper. Drafting the lyrics could help her articulate what was happening to her—to her mind, her heart, and her marriage. Her music had always sorted her, helped her understand her life. But her music had deserted her now.

She looked at Tim watching the movie about the young elephant finding his way. He was right there, wasn’t he? But with everything she couldn’t tell him he might as well be a thousand miles away.