THIS MORNING, LILY AND her sisters had prepared giddily for Cara’s visit, laughing, reassuring one another. Aoife licked her thumb and wiped some mascara from beneath Eileen’s eye; Sinéad made her some lemon balm tea.
But after Cara left, there was a disappointing quiet. The fervour had passed. For a few minutes, Aoife sat at the table. Then she said, ‘Right, well I’m off.’
Sinéad finished her tea, and helped Eileen to clear up. She left the brownies wrapped in parchment on the butcher’s block.
She’d love that. She’d love if Eileen ate the brownies and got as fat and diseased as she is.
Eileen wraps them tightly, squeezing them to mush in their soggy paper, and pushes them down into the bin.
*
She phones the gardener and tells him he needs to come urgently to weed the rockery, but he says, ‘No, I’m sorry, Miss Kearney.’
‘Oh, call me Lily, please Hugh…’
‘I’m sorry, Lily, I’m not available until next week.’
‘This is urgent,’ she says. ‘I’ll pay you double. There are weeds choking my rock plants…’
But he is stubborn. She phones the electrician – she’s going to have the living-room lights changed to dimmers – but he’s not picking up. She rings him again, and again, and then she leaves a voicemail telling him to phone her back as soon as possible or she will have to find another electrician.
It’s getting dark already. She pulls the curtains closed around the big bay window of her bedroom. She switches on all the salt lamps and turns up the daylight bulb very slightly, making a little twilight here in her room.
She sits at her vanity table and combs out her hair. She begins to count silently – she has to do a hundred strokes every evening or the spell might break.
This room is her sanctuary. The walls are bare, but in every corner there is a paper model of her house, the symbols for money and love placed in their appropriate rooms. All you have to do is wait. You make the models, you plant the messages, you ask the universe, and then you wait. Under the glass protecting the boxwood of her vanity table, she has put a hundred-euro note, a lock of hair, a laurel leaf. She kisses her fingertips, touches the glass.
In this lovely glow she can look closely at her face – she is very pretty. You can tell she is somebody’s little sister, her daddy’s favourite, the envy of her peers. Aoife licked her thumb earlier, and tidied her mascara, and everything was right again. Aoife remembered that Lily is her little sister. Pretty little, cheeky little, feisty little Lily.
Her hair – her hair is still toffee gold. She sighs and a kind of joy lights in her. It is good to take a moment sometimes, to appreciate the miracle of herself.
But it’s made her uneasy, the way Aoife upped and left so abruptly like that. They forget – they all forget who Lily is.
Daddy shaved Aoife’s underarms, more than once. Lily saw. It was no secret. Aoife would ask him to shave her underarms, and he did it using his shaving brush and razor. That was strange, wasn’t it? That was not something Aoife would like to be reminded of. There was nothing more to it, but does Aoife forget what Lily knows? They shared a home for decades; they came from the same body. Does she think she can erase that, getting up like that, nodding farewell like a stranger, her lips tight with all their secrets?
Lily is a little shaken after seeing her daughter. Cara is so old. In the sunroom she took a worn bobbin from her wrist, held it in her wine-stained teeth while she scraped all that unruly hair into a ponytail, and Lily noticed a few crazed greys zigzagging out from her temples. Her own daughter is grey before she is. Everything is out of time. Mammy is alive and Daddy is dead.
Her daughter is a wreck of a woman, bitter. Why have you got those photos – the cheek!
Who do those girls think they are?
She is their mother, for God’s sake. She knows them better than anyone could. She knows them from before language, before who said this or who did that or what really happened or any of it.
Ridiculous, to think they can cut themselves off from her; keep that little boy from her. Her own grandson.
Eileen won’t be denied.
The truth is dirtier, murkier than anyone can understand. Sometimes a lie is the only way to bring it into the light.
*
She has lost count, so she starts at the beginning again. Counting aloud this time: ‘One, two, three…’
*
You get the child you are able for – she heard someone say that in a supermarket once. Two older mothers talking. One of the children had Down’s Syndrome, and the other was running into the trolley repeating, bash bang, bash bang, bash bang.
There was always something off about the children she had. And she wasn’t able for them; that’s the truth of it. She tried, but she wasn’t up to either of them. She was too innocent, too giving.
She did her best to cure Cara. There was always something dark and dead in her, something that sucked the good out.
The night after Cara’s birth, Lily couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t get warm. The crumpled creature folded into her like a clam, pulling any heat it could from Lily’s body. It was of a place beyond, a place utterly alien – how could it have come from inside her? Short, very black hair swirled on its forehead, merging with its eyebrows, fuzzing down its arms and over its back like soot. It seemed so foreign; it seemed full of dangerous knowledge.
Liam never asked her to get rid of it or any of that. And even if his visits became no more frequent, he was tender to her all through the pregnancy. Some evenings they didn’t even have intercourse – just held each other, or played chess – and she felt sure that she had him; that once the baby came, she’d have him. It was only a matter of time, she thought, before he left his wife. She believed that.
He was there for the birth. He watched her in pain and at the time she was glad of that. There was nothing now, no currency of suffering that his wife could hold over her.
But then – she saw it as it happened, there in that moment, when the baby left her body, as his gaze moved from her face to the child – she saw his love shift from her. She felt it. The heat, the light, the love pulled off her face and shining onto that tiny thing. She remembers how cold she felt, suddenly, without his eyes on her, how she began to tremble, and when they handed the baby to him, how he rocked it, bending his head, never looking back at her. She lay trembling, the big cord still snaking out of her, and it was only when the afterbirth began that anyone even noticed her.
He kissed her as they took her to the ward. He put the baby in its glass box. ‘I love you. I love you both,’ he said, looking only at the box as they wheeled her off to the ward. And then he was gone. He didn’t come back to the hospital and it would be months before she saw him again. He would say the baby had spooked him, and by then she would understand what he meant.
And those three days in the hospital, she learned about Cara – the long, sharp nails she had, the furred back. Sometimes, when she slept on Lily’s chest, she seemed like a little accomplice; a witch’s familiar. But the baby had a terrible power. She could melt Lily’s faculties, she could draw her into liquid and flesh with her sucking and mewling, the flexing of her tiny fingers. Time collapsed in her. Lily could look for a moment at the wrinkled feet, and the whole day might have passed. She thought she would have to re-understand time and space now. She thought her world had changed.
She half expected Liam to be waiting when she got home, so when they discharged her, she put on her lipstick and her nice wool coat and hailed a taxi.
But she couldn’t bear the emptiness in this house, the way the baby’s cries rang against the walls. Cara was never satisfied. She used to pummel Lily’s chest with her fists. She used to vomit up all the milk she had taken, and then feed again. Lily was frightened to be alone with the baby, because it was as though her very lifeblood was being taken from her when it suckled – her head spun, her hands were weak. She could see herself drained to a papery shell, there in the bed, limp with exhaustion, too frail to cry out for help, while the hairy little thing sucked and sucked.
She phoned her parents. Daddy came in the car for her.
It was in her mother’s house that she saw, with horror, the real weirdness of Baby Cara. She was a disappointingly ugly little goblin of a thing, even Lily could see that. But just as she had drawn Liam’s love away, she snaffled all of Lily’s mammy for herself. Such a beautiful child, that’s what Mammy kept saying, such an easy baby.
*
But Eileen loved her. She must have. Because she took her back with her six weeks later, when she went home. And she spent a long time pumping her milk into a little bottle – so long that her wrist ached – before she left her for the first time.
She gave the bottle to Sinéad. She was to look after Cara while Lily had her hair done – Liam would be back soon, she knew it. She must have loved it, because she was edgy that time in the hairdressers. She talked only about the baby. Milk stains blossomed on her T-shirt. The hairdresser was embarrassed. She gave her a stack of blue paper towels which she folded into her bra. They chafed her nipples and dissolved, sodden with milk. But when her hair was set, Lily walked the wrong way, away from the car park and through the streets.
She found a restaurant she had not been in before. She ordered a pot of tea and sat there for hours. She read a chapter in a book about Cuba and decided that she would go there. She thought she might do some shopping now, or see something at the cinema. She thought she might never go back.
Mammy was at her house when she returned. Baby Cara was sucking at a sugared rag, her little chest heaving in the aftermath of tears. ‘I didn’t know what to do,’ said her sister, ‘she just kept crying, so I phoned Mammy…’
‘I could hit you,’ Mammy said, her lips pale with rage as she stirred two sugars into Lily’s cup of tea. ‘I could hit you. I never thought I would feel like I could hit you, Lily. Have you no shame? You are a mother now. Your child is all that matters. Have you no shame?’
Cara cut her teeth early, and bit her until she bled. She was only a few months old when she started to beat Eileen while she fed. She had a small wooden rattle. She hit Eileen’s breast bone harder and harder until she was bruised.
And why did Lily think the next child would be different? It was Liam called her Freya – ‘flower’ – because she came out so pretty. He didn’t run away like he did when Cara was born. But Freya took more than love from Lily. After the birth, Lily’s hair came out. It fell away in her hand. And she couldn’t shake the weight. She was fat for years after, and her hair wasn’t right for months. Freya tried to sap the youth from Lily. She tried to take her beauty. They were hard, those years. And then when Liam died, there seemed no point to the children at all.