Other Words for Smoke

by Sarah Maria Griffin

  He had sent sparse text updates to Mae, who was becoming increasingly pissed off at him. He’d taken one call from his father, ignored six from his mother. He’d stayed with his pal Jordan for two nights and was crashing with Sam for two. He’d go home in the morning, he promised himself. Just steel the nerves first. The upside of being gone a long time was, well, being gone a long time. The downside was that when he got home, the fallout was worse. And now Mae was annoyed at him too. He tried not to think about what it might be like for her in the house without him, though she’d been hanging around with that girl from the Gaeltacht a lot since last year. Maybe she’d found somewhere safe to go, too.

  He’d felt bad for not taking her more places with him, but he reckoned it was easier to crash at people’s houses if he was just one, not two. Mae was strong. She could fend for herself, more or less. She’d have to, he thought, scooping the last grains from the bowl. Seemed when he was trying to protect her it only made his parents worse. Angrier. Less in control. If there was only one of them there, she might get off easier.

  The boys cracked open the cans and switched on Netflix, waiting for the pizza and then a small cohort of mates to come over with more cans, louder conversation. The screen glowed in the dark of the living room.

  “Look, Rossa,” said Sam, sparking a joint. “My mam says you can stay for as long as you need if things are shit at home. Just wanted to let you know.”

  Rossa let silence fall between them, suddenly not hungry, the beer more sour in his throat. His heart thudded. The only thing worse than having to deal with his parents’ fights was the creeping realization that he couldn’t keep it totally secret. Cracks would open up. People would know. Their school was small. Maybe his couch surfing was giving him away. His exit route too obvious. He found a last thread of dignity, somewhere in his person, and pulled it taut. “Ah no, man, it’s grand, thanks for offering, though. I’ll head back over there tomorrow.”

  Sam did look at him for a second then, and Rossa saw genuine pity flash across his wide brown eyes.

  “Whatever you say, man.”

  And he handed Rossa the joint, a tiny red light in the dark.

  Forty Something Summers Previously

  The stone eyes of the Mary couldn’t see the warp and twist of the air in the glade. It happened in the middle of the afternoon, in the sun drench of the early summertime, long after the worst had happened. Just at the beginning of the continuing lives of those who had lost their friend. The most powerful tragedy is the first time one is forgotten, even for a minute.

  There was a weak point: the kind of injury upon reality that unearned pain and unspeakable punishment had left on this mountainside. The world split, a hairline crack in reality that shone like iridescence and madness.

  The two of them slid out, like tears or drops of blood or spirits—or monsters—or calamities. They were starved, and this place was a fertile plain of agony and ecstasy. There was so much grief around this mountainside. They would follow it to its source.

  One came in the body of a cat. The other in the body of an owl.

  Behind them, a cut in the world. An entryway. An exit.

  Forty Something Summers Previously & a Number of Hours Later

  A slowness had taken Rita when the sisters had come for Deb, not long after she had confessed her pregnancy that day in the glade. Not long after Audrey had asked her mother for help. And after Deborah was found in December, Rita’s limbs had felt like they weighed more than a human’s should, her tongue lifeless in her mouth. Audrey had cut off all her night-black locks of hair, some act of shame, some apology that would never be heard.

  And yet here, nine months later, on the cusp of August, the two girls were hand in hand in Rita’s bedroom, expressing something in themselves to the lilting, thin tunes on the record player. It wasn’t the first time their bodies had known to go to each other for comfort, but this was the first time they had danced. It didn’t come naturally to either, but they had risen off the floor where they had been lying, hushed as usual, and come together to the rhythm.

  The weight came out of Rita’s arms, and she closed her eyes. She wondered: would she spend the rest of her life listening this hard to the grief in her body, trying to find a way to make her flesh her own again? Would she ever forget the headlines, some nameless girl dead in childbirth beneath the statue of the Virgin Mary? Hearing radio presenters discuss how exactly this nameless girl, Girl X, they called her, got out of the laundry, instead of why she was put in there in the first place. Like a criminal. She was nameless, X, there at the end of the alphabet. Would Rita ever stop wondering if it was she herself who was the criminal? Or Audrey, for speaking? All these terrible queries ran through her as she moved with Audrey, but something, as always, in the soft electricity of the other girl’s touch almost, almost alleviated the pain of them. At least they had each other. At least they had this.

  When the tap came to the window, Rita recoiled and Audrey strode forward, flinging up the blind to look into the night, challenging whoever had the nerve to disturb their tiny moment of reprieve.

  Upon discovering the bright yellow eyes of a cat on the windowsill, and the even yellower eyes of the owl, she cast a look over her shoulder at Rita and opened the glass pane. She took the owl in her hands as though it was a tame thing, let the cat pad in after. The two creatures tentatively explored the room, sniffing the air, investigating, staring at the girls with their pupils too clever and all wrong.

  Audrey said how sweet the little bird was, hopping around the blankets on the bed, arranging himself. How he looked like a James. A Sweet James. The cat had knocked his head off Rita’s shins, rolled a deep and happy purr to her, and she said that he was a little dear. Bobby, she said. Bobby Dear.

  you’ll have to keep us now that you’ve given us names, said the owl.

  We’re terribly hungry, you see, said the cat.

  Rossa and Mae, Three Summers Later

  “Rossa, I am going to sit on my hands until this conversation is over because I cannot believe what you’re telling me and I might throw something. You are going to get me in so much trouble.”

  Rossa stood over Mae as she sat on the floor of her room in the spindly little townhouse they were raised in. Their home. Down below, their parents were arguing again: only for once, Rossa knew exactly what they were arguing over. He had made a comment. A stupid comment. One stupid comment about Mae that had flipped an ordinary evening into one of those evenings. Well, it was one of those evenings for him. For Mae it was even worse.

  “I didn’t think it was a big deal? I thought they knew. I mean, it’s kind of obvious—” This was the cowardly way. Minimize it, make it smaller, that way her anger couldn’t get too big. Trick her into thinking it’s not a big deal, or at least try.

  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

  “Well, you know. You cut off all your hair? You don’t like, wear a lot of makeup or anything. You and Orla were together all the time . . .”

  “Sorry, Rossa, but I literally cannot believe that we were born in the same year let alone came from the same fucking cells. That is so ignorant.”

  “Well, I thought they knew, all right?” Hands in his pockets. He knew he was wrong. He knew they didn’t know, and he told them anyway. Mae had been so moody since she and Orla broke up, and he just wanted to find a way to talk to Dad about it. That meant telling him, and Rossa’d reckoned if he just mentioned it, like no fuss, it wouldn’t be a problem. He didn’t see the issue with Mae liking girls. But Dad had summoned their mother and accused her of knowing already.

  She hadn’t.

  The information dropped like a bomb. Mae had come into the house for dinner after what Rossa had assumed was a long, morose walk and had been confronted by both of their parents, arms folded.

  “It was very dishonest of you to have kept your relationship secret from us.”

  “If this is some kind of rebellion, you need to get over it and get over yourself.” />
  “If we’d have known you were this way, we would never have let you spend all that time with that girl.”

  Mae hadn’t even responded. Just walked up the stairs and shut the door of her room. Rossa had let himself in and now wished he hadn’t.

  “You knew full well that I hadn’t told them yet. I was going to tell them eventually. Just not now, when things are so—”

  Down below them, something crashed, their mother’s voice roared something unintelligible. If this house was the kind of house that could shudder, it would have.

  “I just didn’t think it was a big deal. . . .”

  “It doesn’t matter if it’s a big deal or not. It’s not a big deal to you, or to our mates. But no matter what size it is, it’s my deal. It’s up to me to tell people.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing, Rossa. This wasn’t yours.”

  “But—”

  “Nope. Get the fuck out of my room. Don’t talk to me.”

  Rossa didn’t even try to bring her around. He shrugged his shoulders and left in silence. Down the stairs in twos, coat snatched off the hook, pockets checked for keys—and he was out. Didn’t stop to check in on the parents. Just left them to it. Mae’d have it worked out with them in an hour or two.

  He turned the redbrick corners of the tiny housing estate they lived in, a left, a left, and a right, until he made his way up toward the small sloped park that marked the beginning of the concrete labyrinth. None of the lads were around, odd. It was sunset and the tide was up on the river, he’d sit and have a look at the swans. One of the lads would come by with a football at some point, maybe a few cans. A distraction.

  Rossa kept walking, hands balled in his pockets as he walked, didn’t look at the birds again, just tongued the hollow in his toothline, thought about sending Mae a text apologizing, guilt at his back like a chill wind in the balmy August air. He felt like all the old ladies knew he’d just done something unfair and unkind to his sister. Like over their teacups and fans they whispered, “Some people just don’t know how to keep their mouths shut,” “I’d be snapping if I was her,” “Sure it’d be a wonder if she ever forgives him.” He couldn’t take this one back, so was there any point in trying?

  Up the concrete steps, down the center of the green and to the walkway by the river, he leant then over the high wall erected to stop the basin of the estate getting flooded by heavy winter rains. Today it was fat and full, a silver-pink dragon of a river that led right down to the Liffey. Swans flecked the surface, mute and vicious and gorgeous. More violent birds, Rossa thought to himself. Don’t go near them, they’ll break your arm, his ma had always warned. Maybe she wasn’t just talking about the swans, maybe that childhood advice was about gorgeous things that only want to break you in half. The hollow where his tooth had been panged again.

  He thought about how easy it was simply to exit the house. To disappear into the world. How nobody tried to stop him going, even though he was sure his parents saw him get his coat. He took comfort in that, there by the skinny urban river as the bad day bruised to night. Things might go wrong, but he could always walk away. He could always just leave.

  Bevan, Three Summers Later

  “What did you just call me?” she whispered, low, hot tears prickling in the corner of her eyes, her fingernails digging into her palms.

  “Crazy,” Gus sneered. “No wonder you have no friends. Making up stupid stories. Do you think that makes you more interesting? An owl in the wall. Christ.”

  Crazy, a bullet.

  Five Things Audrey Tells Sweet James, Every Sunday for Three Years, Until One Day He Does Not Show Up

  I am afraid she has forgotten me

  I am afraid I will never forget her

  I am afraid if they find me they will put me away

  I am afraid I will never love again

  I am afraid, I am afraid, I am afraid

  The Second Summer

  Chapter

  One

  The year the twins turned seventeen gave way to a vicious, roaring family collapse. Mae started to find gray hairs springing from her temples like tiny shining weeds. One in her eyebrow, one in her armpit, too. She’d taken to plucking them with tweezers. As the car approached Iona Crescent for the first time in three summers, the tweezers were nestled in the front pocket of her backpack with some pens, a lipstick, her little Nintendo, just in case. She laid her head against the window of the car door as her mother silently sped her and Rossa through the leafy suburbs.

  The twins had only been informed three days before that they would be spending the rest of the summer with Rita, in order to stay clear of proceedings. The disassembly of their family home was proving traumatic for everyone concerned. Rita’s impartial cool had offered their father great solace—he told them she’d keep an eye over them while he and their mother worked the last things out.

  Neither twin said anything of missing teeth or broken hearts or talking cats or radiators that went all strange when you looked at them for too long. They were glad to be out of home. They’d take the wrongness of Iona Crescent over the escalating anxiety building in their little terrace house. How strange was this mutual, silent agreement that maybe something was badly wrong in Rita’s house, that they’d seen something awful there that they couldn’t quite name, but somehow they felt more able to manage that wrong than their parents.

  Mae and her pompadour of curls, her tiny nose stud and skinny jeans, was three years from the gawky adventurer she’d been last time she was down this end of the world. Beside her, Rossa wore corduroys and a long, narrow cardigan—his own curls wound into a neat bun at the back of his head. Mae had shown him how to make sure it looked effortlessly hip.

  “I’m not having some scruffy hippie for a brother. At least try to make it look cool, would you?”

  “The beard balances it out,” he’d replied gruffly.

  His patchy attempt at growing facial hair was mostly ginger, a profound mismatch to the mousy dishwater brown of his mop, but he was dedicated to his cause.

  The car was quiet and moving too fast. No radio. Mae knew not to ask to put it on. Mam would take off her head for even suggesting it. There’d been an argument: Dad had wanted to see Rita and their mam hadn’t wanted to share the car with him, so Dad had stormed off to the pub at midday and their mother had stood blankly in the kitchen, car keys on the floor, for half an hour while the twins sat on the stairwell, like children, silent, shoulder to shoulder.

  Without fanfare or comment, they turned through Dorasbeg village. Three years and it was just the same, cradled by mountains, in the shadow of a gray stone church. Mae reached her hand across the back seat for Rossa as their mother took a sharp turn away from the Crazy Prices and down into Iona, rattling toward the crescent. Her brother’s hand eventually met hers and squeezed, silent recognition.

  The woman driving the car was so far from what Mae thought she knew of her mother that sometimes Mae felt scared. Not least when Mam was behind the wheel. The breakup had made Mam brittle: touch her at the wrong second and she could cut you right open. Long gone was the buoyant optimist, the lady with all the answers who couldn’t ever seem to stop singing. Gone, and the woman in her place was razor fury, who couldn’t wait to see the back of them. Mae wondered if that loving woman had only shown up a time or two, in her memory. That the singing may have only been once or twice, the optimism an illusion disguising the knife drawer.

  The car screeched to a halt outside Rita’s house. Rossa jolted forward, his seat belt pulled taut. He clenched Mae’s hand a little too hard; her knuckles cracked. They locked eyes, both pairs watery blue, identical, both feeling the very same thing in that quiet second. They were older now, though they didn’t always feel old. But they were grown enough surely to handle whatever dark, rotten thing remained in Rita’s house—if any of it remained at all. This moment of eye contact said more about what had happened in the house than either of them had said aloud in years.

  They�
�d nearly talked about it that morning, when they’d been packing, listening to the screaming match on the ground floor of the house. Mae knew Rossa wanted to talk about it. She could sense it. The questions in her throat were in his, too.

  Out of the car and into the still suburban air. Rita at the doorway. Two suitcases, two backpacks, left on the footpath. A perfunctory, brief hug each from the ghost of their mother. She didn’t linger. When Mae let her go, she nearly burst into tears. It was less of a hug than a handshake.

  “Be good,” Mam said to them both. “No drama.”

  She paused a second. “I’ll see you in three weeks. Well, either me or your dad will see you in three weeks—once we, well . . . once we know.” She was less talking to either of the twins than she was to herself. She waved up at Rita, formal, almost a salute, one hand on the car door. She looked at her children again and said, “Be good,” once more, and then got back into the car and pulled away. Just like that.

  Rossa turned to Mae. “Well, things can’t get any worse from here, can they?”

  Mae inhaled deeply. “Here’s hoping.”

  They pulled their cases over the pavement and up Rita’s driveway. Their great-aunt stood there in the porch door, arms outstretched, Bobby by her side.

  “I barely know ye,” she laughed.

  Mae and Rossa embraced her at once. Now this, this was a hug. She smelled like sage and stove. After a moment, Mae felt a nudge at her ankles. Buttercup eyes looked up at her as she descended to her knees and kissed Bobby’s small pink nose.

  “You lonesome?” she asked.

  “Never for a moment,” he whispered in reply. Above them, Rita fussed over Rossa’s hair and he let her. The twins were comforted by the unbridled warmth there on the doorstep. Maybe they would be safe this summer.