Dreams of escape obsessed her now that Roisin had been taken from her and placed in the orphanage, waiting to be given up. It was foolish of her to think that anything she would say or do could change what would happen to her child. The Church, believing her an unfit mother, had separated them, deciding that it was better her child remain motherless and be raised by strangers.
She planned it while she worked each day, washing the soiled clothing mechanically, ignoring her water-soaked hands and her bleach-burnt skin. She needed her family to collect her, to take her out of the convent. Swallowing her pride, she had written three letters home to her mother and
brothers, telling them of her situation. She waited week after week and still there was no reply. Frustrated and angry, she cursed them. Perhaps the sly nuns had not posted her letters. She wrote again, one more final begging letter to her mother, another to her Aunt Patsy, this time asking Jim Murray to post them for her.
“Keep calm, lass!” he cautioned her. “Your family will come. They’ll not leave you here.”
Of late she found herself seeking out Jim’s company more and more. She admired his air of common sense and calmness. He never reproached her about Roisin or enquired about Conor. She felt safe with him. The others slagged her about him, but she doubted Jim had any romantic inclinations towards her other than plain old-fashioned kindness. He talked a lot about his children and worried about them. “My mother’s too old to cope with them. I’m going to have to find someone to take proper care of them while I’m at work.”
She waited and waited for news, until finally Sister Margaretta informed her that a member of her family was coming to Dublin at the end of the week and would escort her home. She hadn’t been able to sleep a wink since. Funny, but she had imagined that she would have been jumping for joy at being finally liberated from the Magdalen laundry, but instead she felt nervous, afraid to leave the convent and the women who surrounded her.
“For God’s sake, Esther, you’ve been waiting for weeks to hear from them. Don’t even think of changing your mind!” Maura screamed at her. “You don’t want to end up
like the rest of us, Esther. I’d have given anything for my husband or sister, or anyone, to take me out of here. By Christ, I’d be long gone from here if I could!”
“I won’t know what to do outside, Maura …” She hesitated. “I’m different now. I can’t pretend to be the same, that nothing has happened.”
“When you leave here and go back outside, nobody will know about the baby,” interrupted Sheila, “unless you tell them. It’s your secret!”
“But I’ll know! I just can’t walk out of here and pretend that I never had Roisin. Here at least I’m close to her, near the orphanage. I might even get the chance to see her.”
“You stop that kind of talk, Esther, d’ye hear?” said Maura furiously. “Are you going to tell me that you’d let your little girl be brought up in an orphanage by the bloody nuns? Are you mad?”
“A nice family could take her and raise her, Esther,” whispered Saranne.
“But I’m her mother! I’m her family!”
“That’s not enough!” insisted Maura. “Do you want your daughter to end up here when she’s sixteen, working in the laundry like poor Saranne and Helen? Is that what you want for Roisin?”
“No!” she sobbed, hiding her face in her hands, not sure anymore of what she wanted to do. The Maggies sat around on the beds, staring at her accusingly. “No! No! I want Roisin to have a proper home and a family, but I just don’t want her to forget about me.”
“My Stephen’s got a nice family now,” murmured Bernice, shoving up beside her and clasping her arm around
her. “A mammy and a daddy to love him and care for him, that’s what Mother Benedict told me. He don’t need me no more! So I’m trying to get my sister Betty to come and take me out of this dump. I could live with her and her husband till I get fixed up in a new job—that’s if they’ll have me …”
Esther, listening to their talk, had eventually gone to Sister Gabriel and told of her change of mind. She would give Roisin up. It was better for her child to be placed with a family than raised in the order’s orphanage.
Mother Benedict and a social worker called Joan Connolly had met her and arranged for her to sign all the necessary forms in order that Roisin could be fostered or adopted. She had to agree to never seeing her child again, though Mrs. Connolly, a pleasant-looking woman with a fawn-coloured perm, had promised her that the expensive white baby suit and the knitted bainin blanket she had made would both be sent with her baby.
Numb, Esther realized that she was not doing this because of her mother or Conor, or local gossips, but solely for herself and Roisin. Following her decision Esther now knew that she wanted to leave the laundry, but was still unsure about returning home to Carraig Beag. How in God’s name could she possibly go back to living with her mother after all that had happened, the two of them working in the close confines of the cottage, both bitter and angry, pretending nothing had happened, grieving for children lost to them? Wash and cook and clean for brothers who had refused to stand by her when she needed them most! ’Twould drive her crazy! Then there was Conor … Every step she took along the narrow paths and roadways,
she might run into him. She could murder him for what he’d done to her. Imagine having to sit in the church of a Sunday and the parish watching her as he sat in the aisle across from her with his bride. She already felt fragile, cracked. Returning home, she knew, would break her.