“I don’t know, no. Not really.” I unzip my boots and kick my feet up onto the coffee table next to my untouched burrito. “I mean, I got it filled. I stopped on the way home and went to the pharmacy, and I have the pills in my diaper bag, but I’m just. I don’t know. I don’t want to take them. Especially while I’m breast-feeding Emma. I mean who knows how that stuff might really affect the baby?”
“Fair enough,” Leo says. “I’m sure the doctor wouldn’t prescribe them if there was any risk to the baby, but one step at a time. At least you have them now, and you can think it over. Maybe you’ll change your mind.”
I reach for my burrito. “Maybe. Any sour cream left?”
He hands me the second little cup, and I pop the lid. We watch Emma like she’s an expensive matinee, and eat the rest of our burritos in silence.
After lunch, Emma naps while Leo showers, so I start on the vegan cookies. I plug in my perky pink KitchenAid mixer, and start measuring out the ingredients. The Earth Balance stuff seems all right, but the fake egg shit totally freaks me out. It’s a powder. That you add water to until it “foams up.” I wonder if Jade will be able to tell if I put real eggs in the vegan cookies. Will she break out in hives or something?
“Fuck it,” I say, but I’m only bluffing. I dump the fake egg powder bullshit into the mixer.
By the time Leo comes down from his shower, the cookies are in the oven, and they don’t smell terrible. Neither does my husband. I’m at the sink, with my hands submerged in the hot, sudsy water. He stands behind me and his skin is damp, and I can smell his aftershave. I feel the clean shave of his cheek against mine.
“I love you, Majella.”
I turn to him, but don’t remove my hands from the water. “I love you, too.”
“Prepare yourself, woman, because I intend to do incredibly sexy things to you when I get home from work tonight.”
I laugh.
“You laugh,” he says, “but that laugh will not save you.”
I take my dripping hands from the water and flick them at his face, but that does not deter him either. He kisses me. Open-mouthed and everything. And the strangest thing happens: I like it. We make out by the sink for two full minutes like some horny teenagers deep in the stacks at the school library. He even goes up my shirt, over the bra. It’s so exciting. And then my boob starts to drip milk.
“Gross,” I say. Leo tries to keep kissing me, but it’s over. “That is so not hot,” I say.
He adjusts his jeans. “I beg to differ.”
“Take it easy there, cowboy,” I say, and I turn back to the dishes, plunge my hands in. The water is lukewarm.
“This is not over,” he says, and he kisses my neck one last time. “I have to go do some damn work now. I must cook for the hungry city! But I will be back. And you will be mine.”
• • •
When he’s gone, Emma is still sleeping, so I retrieve the clandestine shopping bag from the pot drawer and place the Fritos and peanut butter on the counter. I take the condoms up to the bedroom, stash them in my nightstand drawer, and grab the diary. Then I take it, along with the monitor, Fritos, and peanut butter, into the office and sit down at the desk. My diaper bag is there on the floor, beside the desk, and the top of my paper prescription bag is peeking out. I lift the bag out, rip it open. The little orange bottle of pills falls out into my hand, and it’s covered with stickers. May cause drowsiness on green. Do not drive or operate machinery until you know how this drug affects you on yellow. Dizziness may occur on pink.
I open up Google and type in breast-feeding Ativan, but then I don’t even bother to click on any of the results, because I’m not taking these pills. I slap the bottle down on the desk, and I like the sound it makes, the crashing rattle. I google genealogy Virginia Doyle instead. There are something like ten million results, so I start clicking through. Right away I realize I need to find out her birth date before I can go any further. It’s the only way to narrow down the information.
The orange prescription bottle is distracting me, so I open the desk drawer and toss it inside. Rattle crash, in among the pens and the stamps. I don’t know what I expect to find on the Internet that will tell me more about Ginny Doyle than her own diary. But maybe there’s something. Maybe there’s a newspaper article from Ireland about the murder. But no. Because I guess if she got caught, she would have gone to jail, right? She wouldn’t have ended up in New York then, surely, having more unsuspecting babies to infect with her crazy DNA.
I shudder. Maybe I’m being unfair. Maybe she wasn’t as awful as she seems, in the diary. If there is some other, softer, more forgivable explanation for what she did . . . I don’t know, then maybe redemption is possible.
The phone rings and it startles me. I glance at the caller ID. It’s Mom, so I weigh my options carefully. I don’t know how long I have before Emma wakes up, before my cookies are ready. Mom tends to be a little long-winded when she’s the one who initiates the call. It’s better if I call her and catch her off guard. Do I really want to hear about her neighbor’s nephew’s backpacking trip around Argentina? I pick it up.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Majella!” She always sounds surprised to hear my voice, even when she calls me. It makes me wonder if she dialed me by mistake, if she was one button off on her speed dial. “How are you, how’s everything?” she says, but before I can answer, she says, “You wouldn’t believe the weather we’re having down here—it’s gorgeous! You wouldn’t even know it’s October. What’s it like up there? Vera said it was warm.”
“Oh, you were talking to Mrs. Wimmer?”
“Yeah, well, she had an operation on her knee last week, and I just called to see how her recovery was going, and I guess she’s not doing too well. She’s in a lot of pain, and the doctor said she has a contusion. . . .”
I tune her out, go back to clicking through the millions of Virginia Doyles, but I can’t really concentrate on my research while Mom is talking. I open the drawer and look at the pill bottle. Talking to my mom on the phone makes me really consider taking the Ativan. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, to stop feeling. Maybe it won’t poison Emma’s food supply. I slam the drawer, and make the decision to interrupt.
“Hey, Mom, I don’t have much time, I’m having a friend over.”
“Friend? Who’s that, honey?”
“Just this new girl I met around the neighborhood. This girl Jade.”
“Oh, that’s nice,” she says. She doesn’t ask where we met, or how. She doesn’t ask if she has children. She doesn’t ask anything.
“Yeah. So she’s coming over in like a half an hour, and I probably need to get cleaned up and stuff.”
For a crazy half a second, I consider telling Mom that Jade is the woman from channel C, that she has twin babies, that she might have serious postpartum depression, that I am struggling, too, that I am seeing a therapist, that I have a bottle of Ativan in my desk drawer. And then I imagine her sitting in the clubhouse with her friends around a table of chef salads and gossip and carefully coiffed heads. She’s telling them everything. And then she tells the butcher, the postal carrier, the stock clerk at the grocery store. My daughter’s on Ativan and she’s breast-feeding. Can you believe that? I shake my head. But maybe there is something else I can tell her instead, something real. Something that might pique her interest enough that she’ll listen.
“Hey Mom, I meant to tell you, though, you know that diary I told you about, Ginny Doyle’s diary?”
“Yeah, oh—I have some information on her, I’ve been doing some digging.”
“Great,” I say, “but listen to this, Mom: she killed someone.”
“She what?”
“Yeah, I know. It’s true.”
“Well, wherever did you hear that?”
“It’s right in her diary.” My mother is outstandingly silent. “She wrote about it. She k
illed this woman right before she left Ireland to come here, and she did it in front of her daughter. I guess it really haunted her because she seems totally obsessed with it, in the diary. It seems like she feels terrible about it, but it was awful, and super violent.”
“Well.” One word, from my mother—an unprecedented one-word response. I think she might even be speechless. This is the best thing that has ever happened to me.
“I know, it’s amazing, right?”
“It’s awful,” she finally musters. “Majella, she was my grandmother’s grandmother.”
Shit, that’s even worse than I expected. “Your mom’s mom or your dad’s?” I ask, as if this can save me.
“Mom’s.”
Double shit. A direct maternal line.
“Her daughter Maire was my great-grandmother,” she says.
“Maire, yeah,” I say, “that’s the name in the diary, her daughter’s name. She witnessed the murder.”
“Oh.” My mother sounds flustered, deflated. I don’t think I actually like this new, wordless mom. “Maybe it was a misunderstanding?” she tries. “Maybe you misunderstood what you read?”
“I don’t think so, Mom, it was pretty clear.” But she seems so disappointed and sad that I don’t want to push it. “But who knows, right? I mean it was like a hundred-and-sixty-something years ago.”
“Do you have the diary there?” she asks. “Would you read it to me?”
I’m reluctant, because reading it once was awful enough. But I do it, because my mother is asking to listen to me, and it is the first time in my life I can remember that happening. I read: the crunching, the blackthorn tree, the hurley bat, the baby falling, the daughter’s windy voice, the pale blue china, the dead woman’s hair. My voice shakes and my mother is silent, listening. When I’m finished, I can hear the electric hum of Emma’s monitor on the desk. That’s how quiet my mother is. I can smell the vegan snickerdoodles, browning in the oven.
“God, that’s appalling,” she finally says.
“Yeah.”
“But, you know, maybe it’s just, maybe there’s more to it than what you can read on the page.”
“I mean it seems like there must be,” I agree.
“Why would she do such a thing? How could anyone do such a wicked, violent thing?”
“And in front of her kids,” I say. “I feel like that’s almost the worst part. I mean, it sounds like the woman was holding the baby when Ginny Doyle struck her.”
“Horrible,” Mom says. “Read that part again, about the baby.”
I flip back to the previous page, to where the entry began, and I read, “‘The baby nearly falls with her, but I catch him, I catch him, by one dangling arm. Her eyes and her mouth stay open, and Maire’s eyes, too, wide open at my back. Her voice is windy. She calls me mammy.’”
Mom makes a disgusted sound. “Just imagine, that girl was my great-grandmother. She watched her mother commit murder. The poor girl.”
“I know,” I say, and I feel sort of sick to my stomach. That burrito is sitting in there like a rock.
“Still, I guess every family tree has at least one crooked branch, right?” Mom says, determined to return to her usual, dogged flippancy.
“I guess so,” I concede. “But you said you found some other stuff about the mother, right? About Ginny Doyle?”
“Yes, there’s quite a bit about her, and her children,” she says.
“Do you know what year she was born?”
“Let me pull up my records,” she says, and I hear her desk chair scrunch beneath her as she sits. “I already have the file open. I was just looking at it this morning.”
I open the desk drawer and reach past the Ativan to pull out our scratch pad and a pencil.
“Eighteen seventeen, she was born, in the parish of Doon, in the County of Mayo. She was an only child,” Mom says, “which was very unusual in those days. And she died in New York City in 1904.”
“So that made her what, about eighty-seven?” I ask.
“Something like that,” Mom says. “A ripe old age for a murderess.”
“And what about her daughter Maire, your great-grandmother? Did you ever meet her?”
“No, she died before I was born.”
There is some new and unfamiliar quality to my mother’s voice. It might be thoughtfulness. Or self-reflection—that would certainly be new. Maybe she’s wondering about the genetic line of disappointment. Perhaps she feels it, too, that we have all let each other down. That she hasn’t been the mother I’ve wanted her to be. Maybe she understands my terror, in this moment, that I will disappoint my baby, that I am disappointing her even now. Maybe she’s thinking about descending from Ginny Doyle, what it means to be the direct lineage of a vicious murderess. The oven timer begins to beep. The vegan snickerdoodles are ready, but I ignore it. I want to share this quiet moment with my mom. If she were here, I might hug her. But her other line beeps in.
“I’d better run,” she says.
“Yeah, cool, Jade’s on her way, anyway,” I say, but she has already hung up.
• • •
I take the vegan cookies from the oven, and scrape them onto a cooling rack. Scrape is the right word, because they have the texture of thick tar on a hot day: pliable, but just barely. I sniff them suspiciously. Then I break one in half and wait for it to cool. I blow on it. And taste. It is not the most disgusting thing I have ever put in my mouth. It tastes like cinnamon and sugar, and beneath that, I don’t know. The fake, powdered egg. Yuck. I throw the rest of it in the garbage, but save the others. Maybe Jade will be used to that nondescript chewy-chalkiness. Yes, it manages to be chewy and chalky both. I shake my head and return to the office. I’m still full from the burrito anyway.
I need to clean myself up, change my milk-stained top, and put on some lip gloss, maybe some blush. I go back to the office for the monitor, and that’s when I remember the sneaky snacks I bought. There they are, waiting for me. Quiet. Obedient. I know they will be exactly what I expect them to be.
I twist the lid off the peanut butter and peel up its inner seal. Oh, the smell of a fresh-cracked jar of peanut butter! My heart soars. Then I grip the Fritos bag right at the top, and pull it open. The metallic bag squeaks beneath my fingers, and I breathe deeply, oh the fried and salted glory! I reach in and grab the first chip, dunk it deep into the waiting peanut butter. I rupture the smooth, inviting skin of that Jif without remorse. I am committing food pornography.
My inner foodie is aghast, ashamed, alarmed. I am a fraud. The last article I turned in to Gourmet before my maternity leave was about how best to achieve balance using fig in your holiday meals. Fig! People used to remark to me that it was curious and impressive, the way many food writers tend to be rather slim. “It’s all about the palate,” I would respond obnoxiously. “You just train yourself to enjoy the healthy foods, and eventually that’s what you crave.”
Fritos and peanut butter. Oh holy God in heaven. I close my eyes, and I crunch, and I chew, and I moan. I eradicate the memory of that vegan snickerdoodle, entirely, from my taste buds. My life has always been Fritos and peanut butter, Fritos and peanut butter. It is so, so good. I dip another one, and chew. And then another. Then I eat two at once; I make a sandwich out of them with that smear of depraved peanut butter in the middle.
I stand at my desk and do this. I don’t even sit down. I eat and I eat until the waistband on my maternity jeans begins to feel somewhat compromised, until all the Fritos are gone. When the bag is empty, I tip it up, and deliver its unholy crumbs onto my waiting tongue. My fingers are covered in salty Frito grease, and I lick every one of them, until all that remains is the thoroughly assaulted jar of Jif. It is ridged and striped with the hostile craters of my attack. I collapse into my desk chair, and it rolls a few inches beneath my weight.
“Oh my God, that was so good,” I say out
loud. I tip my head back and close my eyes.
I don’t wake up until the doorbell rings. Shit! Jade is here. I meant to get up, to wash, to do something with my hair. I spring up from the rolling desk chair, and I’m itchy from where some of the Frito crumbs have fallen down my cleavage and lodged themselves disgustingly inside my nursing bra. I unsnap the top hooks quickly, and brush at my boobs beneath to liberate the crumbs. I smooth my hands over my hair as I run for the front door.
Jade is outside with a baby on each hip. She is swinging like a human seesaw. Both babies are gummy, smiling.
“Hi!” I say manically. I wonder if I have peanut butter on me anywhere, so I brush one hand across my mouth and chin.
“Hi,” Jade says. She has her low-maintenance canvas diaper bag hanging from one shoulder.
“Can I help you?” I reach for one of the babies, the closer one. Madeline, I think.
“Sure,” she says, and she shrugs the baby off easily. There is no hesitation, no tormented deliberation. The baby reaches her chubby hands toward me, and I heft her into my arms. She is so heavy, so substantial, compared to Emma.
“Come in.” I back away from the door, and Jade comes into my house. I close the door behind her. “The baby’s asleep, but she’ll be up any minute,” I say. She is following me down the long front hallway, past the stairway, and toward the kitchen. “I fell asleep, too,” I say, mostly because I want her to know why I’m so disheveled. “I meant to get cleaned up, change my top. Next thing I knew, the doorbell was ringing!” I laugh, but Jade seems concerned.
“Are we early?”
I glance at the clock on the stove. “No, no. We said threeish. It’s almost three fifteen.” The poor girl has only been in my house for thirty seconds, and I’ve already made her feel uncomfortable. This is hopeless. “No, it wasn’t you at all,” I try again. “I’m just so tired. This newborn thing, you know? We’re still up with Emma two or three times a night.” I yawn. “Tell me it gets easier.”
Crooked Branch (9781101615072) Page 26
