Crooked Branch (9781101615072)

by Cummins, Jeanine

  “Moo,” I say to Leo.

  He draws back and looks at me. “What?”

  “That was a cow joke,” I explain. “I feel like a cow.”

  “God, Majella, you’re beautiful, would you stop?”

  “Moo,” I say again, softly.

  • • •

  After he leaves for work, I take the monitor, and flip it back to channel C. That baby is still crying, and now there is even more crying—at least two screamy little voices, maybe more. Man, if I was that mother, I would lose it. It sounds like someone is murdering Smurfs over there. I turn the volume all the way down again, and watch the red volume light flicker and dance along the bottom of the screen. After a moment, the light in the channel C room changes, like someone has opened a door, or turned on a lamp. I quickly turn the volume back up. The babies stop screaming, and strain their necks to see who has come in. One of them flips from his back to his front, and I can see now, from that movement, that it’s definitely just two babies, and that their cribs are pressed up against a large mirror.

  The flipped-over baby is on his hands and knees now, rocking, trying to crawl, but he’s not quite there yet. He wills his arms and legs, but they’re stuck to the mattress beneath him. I stare, mesmerized. I wonder how old they are, how long until Emma does that. Maybe it will change everything, when she begins to flip over. When she begins to do anything.

  Now I see a pair of feet, just the feet, coming into the picture, and the babies are rapt, silent, hopeful, watching the feet approach. I hold my breath. I’m afraid to even blink, in case I miss something. And now there’s a hand, a shoulder, a bottle, dropped into the crib. The hands-and-knees baby flails at the nearby bottle. The other baby begins to wail again. The arm reaches into the crib, nestles the bottle into the baby’s mouth. The baby’s hands come up by instinct. He holds his own bottle. And the human shape moves over to the second crib; the arms reach in and flip that baby over onto his back. He smiles up at the camera. He grabs the bottle that’s pressed into his hands, and he drinks. Greedily. Noisily.

  The arms and the hands disappear. The feet retreat from view. And now the babies are quiet, eating, and I can hear something else, beyond. I turn the volume all the way up. It’s a woman, I hear. She is sobbing.

  I grab the phone and dial Tampa. “Mom, thank goodness I got you,” I say when she picks up.

  “Hey, Jelly!” she sings. “Listen, I don’t have long, I’m about to run out to water aerobics. What’s up?”

  I chew the inside of my lip. I mean, what is up, exactly? Now that I’ve got her, I’m not sure what to tell her.

  “Yeah, hey, Mom—you knew most of the neighbors around here, right?”

  “Sure,” she says. “I mean, everybody who’s been in the neighborhood for a while, but that six-family apartment building always had people coming and going. I could never keep track of the tenants. There was this one guy who lived there, and he used to stand in front of his kitchen window and shave his legs at the sink stark naked.” I press my lips together, shake my head. “And all the women would talk about it at book club, and they’d pretend to be shocked and appalled, but nobody would call the cops. I think they enjoyed the sneak-peek. . . .”

  “Mom!”

  “Yes?”

  “Did you know anyone around here who was expecting twins, before you and Dad moved out? Like the babies are . . . I don’t know, maybe four or five months old now, so she probably would have been pregnant when you lived here, right before you moved.”

  “No, honey, nobody I can think of,” she says, even though she doesn’t seem to have given it much thought at all.

  She doesn’t ask why I’m asking, so I just tell her. “Because there’s a woman I’m picking up on our baby monitor who has twins, and I think she might be in trouble.”

  “What do you mean you’re picking her up on your baby monitor?”

  “Like, when I switch to one of the other channels, I can see her,” I say, “with the twins.”

  “See her? I thought baby monitors were just like little walkie-talkies?”

  “Ours has a picture, too.”

  “Oh,” she says, “like a little television screen, so you can see Emma when she’s in her crib?”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “Wow, that’s so neat, I didn’t even know they—”

  “Mom, focus, please!”

  “I just think it’s interesting, honey, we didn’t have all these doodads when you were little.”

  “Anyway, Mom, this lady must live close by, for me to be able to pick up her signal, but I can’t figure out which house she’s in, and I’m worried about her.”

  “Worried how?”

  “Like, she seems pretty overwhelmed.”

  “Well, that’s probably normal for new mommies, honey. Especially with twins. Can you even imagine?”

  “No, Mom, I don’t think this is normal,” I say. “Like just now, I heard the babies crying and she came into the room, and gave them their bottles, but she wouldn’t even pick them up. The babies are feeding themselves, and then I could hear her crying.”

  It sounds incredibly not-ominous when I say it out loud. I begin to wonder if the creepy, greenish night-vision light on the monitor is making things appear more menacing than they actually are.

  “Hmm,” Mom says.

  “What do you think? Should I call 911 or something? No, that would be totally crazy overreacting, right?”

  “I don’t know, maybe not,” she says. “I just saw a story on Dateline last week about a mother of infant twins, who got so freaked out, she took a hammer to them, and then threw herself off her seventh-story balcony.”

  “That’s great, Mom.”

  “But she landed in her complex swimming pool, and she survived, but she’s paralyzed from the waist down. It probably would’ve been better if—”

  “Mom, this isn’t some homicidal woman on Dateline.”

  “Tragic,” she says.

  “Mom, this is a real person, a neighbor. What if she’s really in distress?”

  “Yeah, I donno, honey. Maybe ask Vera Wimmer, in the green house. She knows everybody, the way she’s always stuck in that front window of hers, watching all the goings-on.”

  I walk to my front door, and open it. I step out into the sunshine, and lean on my wrought-iron front-porch railing. I look across the street at the green house beside Brian’s. Vera waves out at me. I wave back, and when a bus passes between us, I scuttle back inside.

  “Yeah, okay, Mom,” I say. “Maybe I’ll talk to Vera.”

  “Oh, honey, I’m late!” she says. “I’ll call you later.”

  • • •

  Leo comes home early because it’s Tuesday, and the restaurant is quiet, but I don’t hear him come in because Emma is screaming. She has been crying since twelve minutes past five o’clock, and it is now seven thirty-eight. When I see Leo’s face appear, I am so happy I could weep. So I do. I weep. And he sweeps heroically into the room, and scoops that baby out of my arms, and he’s talking to me, but I couldn’t tell you what he’s saying, not for all the money in the world. And I look down at myself, now that Emma is safe in her father’s arms, and I notice how I’m shaking, and my shapeless green shirt is all wet, and I don’t even know what that liquid is. Snot, tears, saliva, milk. I don’t even know who that liquid came from. I go through the kitchen, and open the door into our little mudroom, and I go through that mudroom, with its strange, sloped ceiling and low-hanging light fixture, and I open the back door of our house. I don’t flip on the back-porch light, because I don’t want to attract mosquitoes. I step outside, and I try to close the door firmly behind me, but I end up slamming it instead.

  I sit on the top step, and plant my elbows onto my knees. Everything is shaking. How long have I been shaking? It is twilight in my back garden, and the painted white brick of the apartm
ent building next door is glowing a soft purple. Leo and I haven’t managed to clear out this garden yet. It’s overgrown and wild beyond the square patch of concrete where our little table and chairs sit, our deluxe barbecue. That machine was one of the only things that excited Leo about moving to Queens. A real, honest-to-God, macho, sleek, oversized, suburban barbecue. I stare at it now, blurry because I’m still crying. My head is pounding. How could I have been so wrong about all of this? About how it was going to be, living here, raising a family?

  A lone cricket creaks pathetically somewhere in that tangle of mad foliage. I tell it to shut the fuck up. Then, a giggle. I look up at one of the windows in that white-painted brick, and a little face is shining down at me.

  “I heard you say a bad word!” He’s a kid, maybe five or six, in one of the second-floor apartments.

  “Yeah, sorry,” I say.

  “I liked it!”

  This kid is the best thing that’s happened to me all day. Maybe Emma will be like this one day. Bright and smiley and not-screaming.

  “I’m supposed to be asleeping,” the kid tells me. “My name is Franklin.”

  I nod. “I’m Majella.”

  He stares down at me for a while longer, and we don’t talk, but I feel like he’s the best friend I’ve ever had. “G’night,” he says after a few more minutes.

  “Good night,” I tell him, and I hear him yawn as he drops away from the screen.

  I don’t want to go back inside in case Emma is still crying. But the mosquitoes are starting to swarm, so I stand up and take some deep breaths before heading back in.

  It’s quiet, except for the sound of Leo’s voice. I make my way to the office, and Leo looks up at me.

  “Hang on,” he says to someone on the computer, and then to me, “She’s asleep.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” I think but do not say. To Leo, I say, “Wow.”

  “Yeah, I’m just talking to Jeff on Skype.”

  “Hi, Majella!” I hear the voice of Leo’s brother coming from our computer speakers.

  “Hi, Jeff,” I say, without stepping in front of the camera, because I am such a disgusting mess I cannot possibly appear on Skype without a shower, a whiskey, and hundreds of dollars’ worth of spa treatments.

  “I’ll be out in a minute, I brought you a bottle of wine in the fridge,” Leo says.

  For this, I will give him sex.

  “Thank you,” I say, and I slip out of the room and back toward the kitchen.

  I can still hear them chatting as I work the corkscrew into the bottle top.

  “So it’s totally amazing, being parents, right?” Jeff says. He and his wife have been thinking about starting a family, too. They live in Colorado.

  “Yeah, it’s awesome,” Leo says.

  “But has it just completely turned your whole world upside down or what?” Jeff asks.

  “Nah, not really,” Leo says.

  Not really? I put the bottle down so I won’t drop it. I step closer to the door to eavesdrop.

  “You know, life is pretty much the same. Now we just have a baby!” Leo is saying.

  Pretty much the same? What is he, insane? Or maybe he’s just lying because he wants parenthood to seem fantastic so that Jeff and his wife will hurry up and do it, too. Maybe he wants to trick them. But I hear him saying that the biggest change of all, really, is living in Queens, and I just don’t feel like you could make this shit up. I step back to my wine bottle, and attack the cork with renewed vigor. It pops, and I take a large gulp straight from the bottle before finding myself a glass.

  I install myself on the couch with the remote control and the baby monitor, and I begin flipping through the channels on both. Channel B is the usual exuberant bullshit. And someone is whimpering quietly on channel C when Leo closes up the office and joins me on the couch.

  “You’re home early,” I say.

  “Just in the nick of time,” he says.

  “Yeah, you’re telling me.”

  “How long was she crying?” he asks.

  “Before you came in? I don’t know. Two and a half, three hours?”

  In fact, I know exactly how long it was because I watch the clock when she cries. It was two hours and twenty-six minutes, but I always round up when Leo asks because I need him to understand the enormity of it. I could, in fact, tell him that she had been crying for seventeen thousand hours, and that would feel closer to the emotional truth of the situation.

  “Oh, that’s awful,” he says. “I guess she wore herself out. She conked out after about five minutes when I came in.”

  I grip my wine so hard that the pads of my fingers turn yellow beneath the glass. He takes it from me and tries a sip, hands it back. Then he walks into the kitchen to find himself a glass.

  “Hey, Leo, let me ask you something.”

  “Yeah?”

  There’s nothing so beautiful as the sound of a wine bottle glugging into a glass, to soothe a frazzled, exhausted mind. I close my eyes and listen to him pour. He plomps down beside me on the couch.

  “Did you mean what you said to your brother? About life being pretty much the same, except now we just have a baby?”

  Leo takes a sip of his wine and thinks it over. “Yeah, I guess I did.”

  “Oh.”

  But now he is looking at me thoughtfully, like it’s just dawned on him this moment. “I guess it’s not like that for you, huh?”

  “No,” I say.

  “It’s hard,” he says.

  “Yeah.” And then we both sip at our wine for a few minutes, while the baby whimpers softly on channel C. “I guess I’m just not the mother I expected to be,” I confess. “I thought I would be so super-nurturing and easygoing. I love kids. But with Emma, it’s like. I don’t know, I can’t even think. When she cries, I just. I’m a fucking mess. I thought I’d be so good at this.”

  Leo has taken my hand. “You’re exactly the mother I want you to be,” he says. That should be such a comfort to me, but the words fall into my chest with a hollowness. I can’t feel them. “There isn’t another woman in the world I would want to be Emma’s mother. It’s just a learning curve, Majella, that’s all. It’s the toughest job there is. But you’ll knock it outta the park. You just need some time to adjust.”

  I sniff and blink. I’m determined not to cry again. I’m so bored of tears. “Thanks,” I say.

  The baby on channel C starts to cry a little more loudly, so I tell Leo about what I witnessed this afternoon, the feet and the hands, the bottles, the sobbing. I don’t feel like I’m fully able to articulate my alarm. I’m also acutely aware of my own recent sobbing. How can I explain my fear about channel C without inspiring a similar worry about all my sobbing? Can I really tell Leo that it’s different for me? That I would never leave Emma in her crib, alone with a bottle? That I would always pick her up, if she was crying, that my instincts are sound?

  “Well, are you actually worried about this?” Leo asks, when I’m done talking. “Because it sounds like maybe the channel C mom just had a rough day. Or you don’t know, maybe she just had a terrible phone call and got some bad news or something.”

  “Maybe,” I say. “But I don’t know, there was just something about the way she was crying.”

  Maybe it was recognition. Familiarity. I shudder.

  “I want to find out where she lives,” I say.

  “Yeah, I’ll keep an eye out for her, too, around the neighborhood. How many twins can there be, living on our block?”

  “Yeah,” I say.

  I hold the monitor up over my head, as the channel C baby starts to cry louder. I stand up from the couch and walk into the office with it, watching the picture on the screen. It goes staticky.

  “Switch it back to Emma,” Leo says.

  “I will,” I say. “In a minute.”

 
And then I have this great idea, and I pass back through the living room, and plant my wineglass down on the coffee table, and I walk out through the kitchen, down the long hallway, and out the front door. On the stoop, channel C buzzes and flickers. I walk down our front steps in my socks, and make a left. I walk two houses down, holding the monitor up over my head all the time. The signal fades and falters. I swivel around and walk back, past our house, toward the six-family apartment building. As I approach the building, the signal on the monitor crystallizes. The buzzing stops. One baby is babbling softly, and the other is back to the low whimper. There is no sign of a parent in the room. I look up at Leo, who is standing on our front porch, watching me with what might be a look of concern on his face. His hands are in his pockets. I point up at the apartment building.

  “They live here,” I say.

  Chapter Eight

  IRELAND, MARCH 1847

  Ginny couldn’t see Springhill House from the gate, but she followed the drive uphill, where it wound through a stand of shade trees and skirted a neat little pond. There, the landscape flattened, and Ginny could see that her path would lead her through a line of hedges, to where she could discern the shapes of a gabled roof beyond. She paused—not to gather her thoughts, which could only lead to terror and distress, but rather, just for a moment’s rest before she would step through those hedges, and face whatever awaited her. There was a breeze stiff enough to ruffle the brim of her bonnet, and she breathed it in.

  “The same air Maire is breathing right now,” she said to herself. “Only six miles down the road.”

  She shivered slightly as she stepped past the hedges, as if she were passing through a portal, an elemental shift. And indeed, on the other side, it was as if all the world brightened with promise. There was no suffering here, and Ginny felt the shame of betrayal already. Her children were still out there. Beyond the gate.