Crooked Branch (9781101615072)

by Cummins, Jeanine

  “What’s your business here?” he said.

  The woman’s eyes reeled on to him, and she licked her lips in effort, but there was no voice in her throat. The man beside her never moved, never even twitched. Ginny wasn’t sure he was breathing. The fat man looked at Ginny.

  “You know these two?” he asked. She shook her head.

  “Nor do I,” said the man in the swallow-tailed coat, “but I can guess their business here as well as you can, Mr. Murdoch.”

  The fat man glared through the bars.

  “And you, Mr. Brady?” Murdoch said to the man in the coat. “What is it you want?”

  “My family and I are going to America,” Brady answered, “and we need to settle our affairs before we go.”

  “So you’re packing it in, eh? Calling it a day?”

  “There’s little choice now.”

  The woman on the ground was becoming agitated while the men talked; she was trying to speak. Ginny watched in horror, the flutter in her stomach growing into leaps and plunges.

  “And you?” The fat Murdoch was looking at Ginny now, but before she could respond, Brady interrupted.

  “Mr. Murdoch, please,” he said, with a quiet insistence. He gestured to the woman on the ground. “They’ve no time to lose. Couldn’t you send down a bite, for pity’s sake?”

  Murdoch’s red neck quivered. “You’d want to mind your insolence before you get to America, sir,” he said. “It doesn’t stand to you.”

  “No, sir,” Brady agreed. “But it stands to them.”

  The woman on the ground looked up at him, and for a moment, her face changed with gratefulness—Ginny could see what she might have looked like before hunger had robbed her voice and her body. Murdoch had his key in the gate now, and he was opening the lock. He swung it open and gestured Mr. Brady inside.

  “Wait for me in the library.”

  Mr. Brady stood his ground.

  “If you’re not coming in, get off my land before I call for the constable,” Murdoch seethed.

  Brady shook his head, and glanced dolefully at the ghosts by his feet. He shook his head, and shoved past Mr. Murdoch. But Murdoch grabbed him by the arm and hissed into his ear as he went past, “Have you any idea the havoc it would cause, if we started handing out food to every beggar who had the nerve to disgrace our gate? It’s well for you to feign righteousness, but I don’t see you forking over the price of your American ticket to feed your fellow paupers out there.”

  Brady freed his arm from Murdoch’s grip with a violent shrug and, turning his back, started up the drive toward the house. Murdoch muttered after him, “Empty-headed fool,” and then he turned to Ginny. “You?” he said.

  She cleared her throat, tried to infuse herself with some of the bravery she’d just witnessed in Mr. Brady. She drew herself closer to the gate.

  “I’m Ginny Doyle, sir, from Knockbooley, and I heard you had an opening for a chambermaid. I’d like to inquire after the position.”

  Murdoch scowled in his eyebrows while he scrutinized her.

  “Where’s your husband, girl?”

  She tried not to show her shock at the boorishness of the question. She cast her eyes downward. “America,” she answered quietly.

  “Children?”

  She didn’t answer, but shook her head only slightly. Murdoch opened the gate again, just wide enough for her to pass through.

  “Around to the back corner, there’s a green door, across from the stables. Ring there and ask for the housekeeper.” He gestured up the drive with his head while he swung the gate shut behind her.

  Ginny didn’t look back at the couple heaped on the ground beyond. Instead, she fixed her eyes uphill, on the huge and daunting house, while Murdoch twisted his keys in the lock behind her. Her heartbeat felt like a small riot in her breast, and her lips moved in a quiet prayer of gratitude. Yes, she was grateful. Even though Raymond was gone, gone, and she was on her own with nothing to feed her vanishing children. Even though it was still nigh on impossible she would get this job that might save them. Even though that heavy gate yawned shut between herself and her hungry babies beyond, and she could feel that clang in her bones like an amputation.

  “Thanks be to God,” was what she said.

  Chapter Seven

  NEW YORK, NOW

  Dr. Zimmer and I are having a bit of a stare-down. Sometimes she does this to me when I first come in—she just sits there and looks at me from beneath that great, voluminous swell of gray hair. If I stubbornly refuse to break the ice, will we just sit here and mock each other with our eyes for the entire hour? I pull a strand of hair out from behind my ear, and sniff it. So clean. So dry.

  “How are you feeling today?” she finally asks.

  Her jacket and hair are the same color as the building across the street, out the window behind her. If I blur my eyes she almost disappears.

  “How’s the baby?” she tries again.

  I nod. “Emma’s good.”

  “Getting easier?”

  “Sure,” I lie.

  “Perhaps this week we should talk about your mother,” she says.

  I snap my eyes back into focus. She’s wearing glasses, and I can feel her eyes behind them, studying me for a reaction to this suggestion.

  “Why my mom?”

  “Oftentimes, when a new mother finds the transition into parenthood uncommonly difficult, we can trace at least some of that struggle back to the relationship with her own mother.”

  “Yeah, I guess that doesn’t seem like rocket science,” I conclude. I expect Dr. Zimmer to leave it there, to wait for a moment while I ponder my mama, while I flip through memories, and zero in on a good place to get started. But she surprises me instead.

  “She seems like a decent woman, from what you’ve shared with me so far.”

  “Yeah, she is. Of course.”

  “So then where do you think all the hostility comes from?” she says.

  I feel the air squeezed out of my lungs like water from a sponge. I try to suck it back in. Is this what a panic attack feels like?

  “What hostility?” I splutter. “What are you talking about?” I glare at Dr. Zimmer, who is raising a hand in protest.

  “Perhaps hostility is too strong a word?” she says. “I didn’t mean to upset you. It just seems to me that there is some clear animosity there.”

  I can feel my jaw clenching and unclenching. How is it that she can reduce me to this—this insolent, enraged teenager feeling—with just a peppering of words? This is what hostility looks like.

  “Why do I keep coming here?” I accidentally say out loud.

  Dr. Zimmer takes a short breath and purses her lips.

  “Because you want to feel better?” she asks. “And even though sometimes I say things that anger you, deep down, you know we’re on the right track. And the reason you respond so strongly is because I’m touching a nerve?”

  I pick up the gold pillow and stuff it into my lap like any self-respecting fourteen-year-old would do. I study my fingernails, select one to chew.

  “Listen, Majella, mother and daughter relationships are some of the most complicated on earth,” she says then. “It’s perfectly natural for you to feel a degree of tension there. Every woman I know thinks her mother is annoying in some way or another. Surely you can admit that much, at least?”

  “What, that she’s annoying?”

  “Yes.”

  I shrug. “Of course she is,” I say. “She’s incredibly annoying. That doesn’t mean I hate her.”

  “Okay, how?” she asks. I pull on a hangnail with my teeth. “If you had to pick one thing about her that annoys you the most, what would it be?”

  The hangnail rips loose, and the little pocket of my nail bed fills up with blood. I grab a tissue from the cry-box that Dr. Zimmer keeps beside the couch, and blo
t the tiny wound. Then I look Dr. Zimmer in the face.

  “I guess the worst thing is probably the way she talks to me.”

  “How does she talk to you?”

  “The same way she talks to everyone,” I say. “I mean absolutely everyone. The ladies at church, the bank teller, the grocery store clerk, the guy who pumps her gas. They know as much about her as I do. Last week she told me that her neighbor’s dog has cataracts. She talked about it for like ten minutes. I don’t even know this neighbor, let alone the dog. It’s a Pomeranian, by the way, named Luke. He’s almost fourteen.”

  “I see.”

  “It’s like she’s an open book, but all the pages are blank.”

  “I imagine that’s quite frustrating.”

  “Of course it is,” I say. “Because I know it’s not real. I know she has depth, somehow. She has interests. She’s a smart lady. But it’s like she can’t access her feelings unless they’re immediate.”

  “Or at least she won’t access them,” Dr. Zimmer says. “Or share them with you.”

  “Right.”

  She shifts her position in the chair. “That’s difficult, because we can’t change your mother. It’s not your job to change her. We can only change you, how you cope and respond.”

  “Yeah.” And then it’s quiet, and something pops into my head, so I just say it out loud, because that’s how therapy works, right? “Last week I was watching some baby show on television, after Emma went to bed and Leo was still at work.”

  “Mm-hmm.” Dr. Zimmer nods encouragingly.

  “And the woman just had this baby, and she was holding him, in the hospital delivery room, and she was all sweaty and swollen, and happy. So happy. And her mom was there with her, and she looked at the mother, and she said, Mom, I never knew you loved me this much.”

  As soon as these words are out in the room, I very predictably and insipidly begin to cry. Dr. Zimmer watches silently for a few minutes, while I snuffle myself back together. I pat at my bleeding fingernail some more, to distract myself.

  “And what do you think about that?” Dr. Zimmer finally asks. “What’s making you so upset?”

  I blow my breath out heavily, from my puffed-out cheeks, and drop my head back on the couch to look up at the ceiling. I picture Emma. Fuzzy, squeaky Emma. My voice comes out in a whisper. “When I hold my baby, I guess the thought I have is: I don’t think my mother loves me this much.”

  “Oh boy,” Dr. Zimmer says, and it’s the most human thing I’ve ever heard her say. She closes her notebook and leans slightly forward in her chair. “What if she’s just not able to show it?”

  “I’m worried that she’s not even able to feel it.”

  “What about the other women in your family, other mothers? What about your grandmother? Was she like this, too? Sort of glossed over?”

  “No,” I say. “I mean, my dad’s mother was a crazy bitch, but my mom’s mom was amazing, tremendously warm and sweet.” And then I remember the diary. “But there were others.”

  “Like who?”

  “Well, there was some great-great-grandmother or something. . . . I don’t really know how she was related to me, but I recently found her diary in my attic, and I started to read it.”

  “And?”

  “She seems more than a little crazy, actually. Even her handwriting. She had some kids, but she only refers to them obliquely, and she’s just totally obsessed with herself, like she’s just living inside her own head.”

  “Well, sometimes a diary can just seem like that,” Dr. Zimmer says. “It’s a bit like therapy. Navel-gazing. Maybe she wasn’t as crazy as she seems, if the diary was just her outlet.”

  “She heard crunching, too,” I say, as if that proves everything. But Dr. Zimmer ignores this, so I carry on. “Apparently something horrible happened when she was leaving Ireland or something, and she came here hoping for a fresh start, but she just seems completely haunted and tragic and fucked-up.”

  “When does the diary date from?”

  “From 1848.”

  “Oh, so she came during the famine times.” Dr. Zimmer’s eyebrows are up a little, over the tops of her glasses. “Seems like that would be enough to traumatize anyone.”

  “Yeah, I never even thought of that,” I say. “The famine.”

  “I bet it’s fascinating, that diary.”

  “Yeah, I’ve only managed to read a few pages, because every time I sit down with it, Emma wakes up, or something interrupts. But it’s really something. I wonder what happened to her.”

  “Do you believe in genetic memory?” Dr. Zimmer asks.

  “What, like I could remember something that didn’t happen to me, just because it happened to some ancestor of mine?”

  “Well, that’s a rather literal interpretation, but yes,” she says. “I was thinking more along the lines of you, looking for an ancestral excuse to be a bad mother.”

  My nail has stopped bleeding, so now I look for another one to assault. “I hardly need an excuse,” I mutter.

  • • •

  Leo is standing at the kitchen counter when I come in, fiddling with the baby monitor. Behind him, I can see through the glass doors of the refrigerator that he’s been shopping. How does he always manage to get so much done when I’m gone, even with Emma here? He makes it look so damned effortless. I throw my bag down on the counter.

  “Hi, honey.” I sling my arm around him, but he shushes me.

  “Listen,” he whispers, pointing at the baby monitor.

  I lean my elbows down on the counter beside his, to look at the tiny screen, but it’s not Emma there. It’s channel C: the four cribs, their wooden slats glowing green in the night-vision light of the dim room. The baby nearest the monitor weeps and wails, like he’s acting in a Greek tragedy. He gnashes his gums together, and I reach across Leo to the far side of the monitor to turn the volume all the way down. I can’t stand the crying.

  “We can pick up other channels on this thing,” Leo whispers gleefully. “We can watch our neighbors.”

  “Yeah, but why are we whispering?” I whisper.

  “Because if we can hear them, they can hear us, too, right?”

  Strange that I hadn’t thought of that.

  “Sure, but only when we’re upstairs, in Emma’s room, right?” I say out loud.

  Leo stands up straight and sets the monitor back on the counter. “Yeah, yeah.” He clears his throat. “And there’s this other family, on channel B, my God. . . .”

  “Oh, the Elmos?”

  Leo laughs. “They do sound like Elmo. Hungarian Elmo!”

  I giggle, too. “I always wonder where they live,” I say.

  “You already knew about this?”

  “Of course, I found it out like the first day,” I say, and I feel a tiny thrill of pride because I’m beginning to recognize these slivers in Emma’s world where I’m the expert, where I know more than him. I need this. “The first day, I was flipping around the channels, and I heard them singing the alphabet. Like they were at a Phish concert. Who the hell is that happy?”

  “I’m exhausted just listening to it,” Leo agrees. “One day that kid is going to wake up and say, Yo, Ma! Dad! Shut the hell up, you’re driving me insane with the baby talk!”

  I laugh, and Leo kisses me again. For a split second, it feels like the old us, from before we were parents. He looks sexy, and I’m suddenly self-conscious in my floppy clothes. I’m in second-trimester maternity pants, and a baggy T-shirt. I keep waiting for my waistline to spring back like the women in the pages of Us Weekly, but it’s been almost six weeks since Emma was born, and there is no evidence that any part of my body will ever spring again. My C-section belly is still distended, my breasts droopy and drippy. I turn from Leo and open the fridge, take out a Diet Coke, and pop the top. He flips the monitor back to channel A, and turns it u
p. We listen to Emma breathe.

  “I got a few groceries together while you were out,” he says. “And some diapers. We needed everything.”

  “Yeah, I hadn’t had a chance to stock up,” I say, and now I feel self-conscious about that, too. “I guess Emma had a good morning?”

  “Yeah, she was great. She’s snoozing now.” Leo pretends to look at his watch, but he’s not wearing one. “You know, I have over a half an hour until I have to leave for work.” He snakes his arms around me. “Baby’s sleeping, Mama and Daddy are alone.” He begins kissing my neck. He smells so good. I feel so gross, so leaky and globular. I’m wearing jeans with a five-inch elastic waistband, for God’s sake. How could he possibly want to have sex with me? That is what he’s suggesting, isn’t it? It’s been so long, I can hardly remember how one initiates these things.

  “The doctor said six weeks,” I say, pulling away from him, wrapping myself around the Diet Coke instead.

  “It’ll be six weeks on Friday,” he says, running a finger along my neckline.

  I gulp at the Coke in a panic. I’m still so sore, so fragile. Sometimes, when I sit on the toilet, I’m afraid important body parts are going to fall out with a splash. Clean, blow-dried hair can only do so much for you. Leo takes the Coke can out of my hand and sets it back on the counter, and I’m suddenly terrified, that he’s going to take me by the hand, and lead me up the stairs, and that there will be smooth jazz playing while he undresses me. Smooth jazz! And stretch marks! And a nursing bra! The horror!

  But instead, he just kisses my hand. He rubs my knuckles with his thumb. “Hey, no rush,” he says. “Whenever you’re ready.”

  And he wraps his arms around me, and I press my head against his chest, and I feel tremendously guilty, because I fear that I will never be ready again. He’s so loving and patient, and I’m so relieved; I don’t want to kill the kindness of this moment by explaining it to him, that my body is permanently altered now. These boobs have finished phase one of their biological job: in perky innocence, they attracted a mate. Now they have obviously matured to their second biological use: to suckle. To feed our child, as from an udder. Yes, I am bovine, entirely.