Every gift a curse, p.27
Every Gift a Curse, page 27
Roe looks up from cutting vegetables. “Aren’t we already giving her something? We’re giving her you.”
“No, I’m being taken. I’m going no matter what. What if we summon her and we don’t ask for anything? What if we give it to her instead?”
“Give her what?” Fiona asks.
“Well, I don’t know,” I answer, exasperated. “But it’s the right track, isn’t it? Isn’t it, Nuala? Manon?”
Manon looks genuinely lost for words.
“Well . . .” Nuala.
“Can we do that?” Fiona.
“How would we do that?” Roe.
“I’m not wrong, am I?” I say, excited. “Whenever I’m in the Housekeeper world, people give her offerings, you know? Like treasures, and hares. Dead hares.”
“Hair?” Lily asks.
“No, hares. Like the big rabbit.”
“Ah.” Lily ponders this. “So the idea is that if we give the Housekeeper something, she might go easier on you?”
“Yeah,” I answer, nodding slowly. “I mean, maybe we can restore her to being someone who works on behalf of the weak, to someone I can learn to coexist with. And who might help us in taking down the Children. The first time I . . .”
What word to use here. Met her? Experienced her? Was her?
“The first time,” I start again. “She was helping this young mother get her daughter to safety. There was no pound of flesh or whatever. Except for the hares. She needed an offering, but she didn’t need, like, a human death.”
Aaron’s eye twitches, and I know he’s thinking about that bus trip to San Francisco, the morning he woke up to find Matthew dead in the seat next to him. All so they could escape the facility they were locked up in. The bus trip that led to him meeting the Children, that led to him coming here. To Kilbeg.
“I don’t want to kill the Housekeeper,” I say, trying to gather confidence. “I want to change her. Or, you know. Restore her.”
“Maeve,” Nuala says, her hand on my shoulder. “This is insane.”
“Why is it any more insane than trying to kill her?”
“Because killing something is easier than changing it,” Aaron says. “Take it from someone who professionally tried to change people.”
The more they argue with me, the more convinced I become that I’m correct. On the right track.
“I didn’t say it would be easy,” I say, and look around. Looking for anyone who might think this idea might have the faintest whiff of sanity about it. Everyone avoids my eye. Everyone thinks that I’m still a little deranged from the ritual, that I’ve been taken in by the Housekeeper. Then I find Lily. Lily, rubbing her thumb over the water droplet tattoo—or is it a teardrop?—and biting the inside of her lip. But looking at me. Definitely looking at me.
“Lil,” I say. “You’re the only one who knows her like I do. What do you think?”
She pauses. “I like it,” she replies. “Or at least I like this plan better than the other one.”
There are two of us now. Two out of eight.
René drums his knuckles on the table. “It is a deranged plan,” he says. “But I have seen deranged plans work.”
Three out of eight.
Manon looks at her father. A hard, scrutinizing look. “If you think it has possibility,” she says, “then I think it does, too.”
Four. Half the vote.
Fiona looks between me and Manon hesitantly.
“Fi,” I tell her softly, “if I have to live with this forever, I’m OK with it. I think it’s what I’m supposed to do. Find a way to bring her back in a way that . . . that makes sense, and that is fair. I don’t think it’s college for me. I don’t think there’s some big job like acting that I want to do. I think it’s helping people. I think it’s this.”
I’m talking to Fiona, but I realize that I’m talking to everyone. And most of all, I’m talking to myself.
“What do you mean, Maeve?” Roe asks, and I remember the thousands of conversations we’ve had. In Bridey’s, in my bed, in the back of their car. Talks about how I was going to get through school, how I was going to get into college, what I would do in college, what I would do after. Roe, always so eager to help. Roe, convinced that everyone has a calling, that everyone is smart in their own way.
“After we broke up,” I say hesitantly, “I went out. I went to a club. There was this girl, and some guy was trying to rape her. It was horrible, but I was trying to save her, get her away from him, and I had this realization that even if Dorey and the Children vanished tomorrow, there would still be horrible people in the world, preying on the vulnerable. And I know that’s a pretty broad category, and the world is just like that sometimes, but . . . I don’t know. I think I could . . .”
“You’re an activist,” Aaron says. No sarcasm, no edge. Just plainly.
“Yeah,” I say. “I think? I don’t know. But this is part of it. Me being the Housekeeper, and figuring out how to use her, that’s important. For me. For everyone. For helping.”
Fiona smiles at me, a sad smile, like she’s watching our roads diverge and is frightened they might never meet again. “You found your thing,” she says, and she gets it, because she has a thing, too.
Roe nods. “You found your thing.”
I laugh a little, because I want to cry. “I found my thing.”
Six. Six out of eight.
Aaron and Nuala are leaning by the kitchen sink, both so fair-haired and disapproving that they look like mother and son. I suppose there’s more they have in common, too: both of them have lost people to the Housekeeper.
Aaron knows what I’m thinking; or rather, he knows that I know what he’s thinking.
“Look,” he says, “I saw Matthew, remember? She murdered him and he did nothing wrong. I don’t know if you can rehabilitate something that . . . might not have started out evil but has definitely become that way.”
“I don’t see why not,” Roe says. “We did it for you.”
“Ha, ha.”
“I’m serious, man. You tried to ruin my life. What if you had succeeded, you know? What if I didn’t have the girls with me that night? What if I quit the band? What if I quit myself? Went back to being Rory O’Callaghan because people like you proved that the alternative was too unbearable?”
“I’m sorry, Roe,” Aaron says. “Really. That period of my life . . . I don’t think I’ll ever be done atoning for it. But I am sorry. You have to know that. Don’t you?”
Roe nods. “I do know that. I’m not going to get brunch with you, but I do know that. But maybe you’ve got to pay that faith forward. Forgive someone else. Forgive something else.”
Aaron crosses his arms. He addresses his next statement to the floor. “Fine. OK. Goddammit. All right.”
I look at Roe and realize the depth of the strong, yelping, dog-faithful love that I have. The love that goes on and on, always growing, never quite going away.
And then I realize I don’t mean just Roe. I mean both of them.
Both of them understand something about me that no one else does. The silly lightness I can feel with Roe, the goodness and faith that pours out whenever we’re alone. The pirouetting giddiness of just being around them. Cava in the bathtub. Conversations in the car. Being good, being bad, being funny, being myself. Roe who sees the world in me. Who thinks I can do anything.
Then there’s Aaron, complicated and infuriating, and someone I want to push off a building from time to time. Someone who understands what it’s like to live with a curse. I choose to keep him in my life, confide in him, work with him. Do I love him? Yes, I think. But do I love him like I love Lily, Fiona, Nuala? Manon, whom I barely know, really, but would still go to the ends of the earth for? Or do I love him like something else?
I feel all of this, the gray circle of the Housekeeper flickering between my eyes like a lost contact lens. I feel it all, and do nothing. Let it flow and pass. Feelings are not my priority right now. She is.
“So, Maeve,” Nuala says, filling the kettle again. “What do you propose we give the Housekeeper?”
Eight. We have all eight, and I know we can do this. I know it can work. I raise both hands up, like a primary-school teacher asking the class a question.
“What do you give a housekeeper, kids?”
Silence.
“You give her the house.”
“THE HOUSE,” AARON SAYS. “YOUR HOUSE? The school? Is that what you mean?”
“Yes. That’s exactly what I mean.”
We’ve planned rituals before. And what they have always been, really, are requests. Please bring our friend back. Please stop them from draining the Well. Please get out of my body. Please die.
What this is, instead, is: Here. Here you go. This is for you.
It immediately feels like a more powerful concept. In primary school, when we learned about prayer, our teacher told us that every day God receives millions of prayers asking for things, but only a few saying thank you. I remember finding that very sad, and at the same time, absolutely inevitable. If you hoard all that power to yourself, then what else do you expect other than requests for help?
“How do we do a thing like this?” Manon asks, and she looks to me for an answer. “Give her a piece of property?”
“I guess we show up there, light her a few candles, and just say, ‘Take it. It’s yours.’”
“How is it hers, though? If she is you and you are her?”
“I think . . .” I close my eyes, feeling the gray circle fall back and forth like a pendulum. “I think if she has the space to make things her own, to make it good, and beautiful, and . . .”
I shake my head, start again.
“Basically, when I go there, I’m going to sit with her. And say, ‘What do you want, Housekeeper?’”
“And why would she want that?” René asks. “Presuming that she wants things?”
“I think the reason the Corridor appeared is that it was from the original house that she was transformed in. It means something to her, that house. It’s the mouth of the Well. It’s everything.”
“And so, what, you’re going to take decorating tips from her?” asks Roe.
“I’m going to let her come out. Let her run wild, if she wants to.”
“A shrine,” Nuala suggests. “Sort of?”
“A temple, if she wants it. A refuge, if she wants that. I think she wants to protect people. I think if I let her do that, she might be happy.”
“And then she might not eat you from the inside out?” Lily asks.
“Yeah, possibly?”
“Worth a go.”
We brainstorm, tossing out other ideas. Fiona briefly suggests an exorcism. Then I get a text from my mum, and I realize it’s almost midnight.
Where are you
With the gang. Omw home x
A pause. Text bubbles, appearing and disappearing. And then:
You can’t keep doing this
“I better go, guys.”
When I get home, both my parents are waiting for me at the kitchen table. The dog scampers in, tired, and slumps immediately into his bed by the door.
“It’s one a.m., Maeve,” Mum says, clearly annoyed. “Do you even care that we are worried sick about you all the time? Does that even register with you, when you go gallivanting around until all hours of the night?”
Oh, god. What to say, what to say, what to say.
“I’m at Nuala’s most of the time, Mum. She’s a grown-up. It’s not like we’re unchaperoned.”
“Well, why can’t you and your friends come here, then?” she asks, sounding like a hostage negotiator.
“Well, Manon is her daughter, and Aaron sort of lives there, and it’s right near town, and . . .”
My mother suddenly slams her fist on the kitchen table, rattling the oranges in the fruit bowl.
“Maeve,” she says sharply. “Kids are dying.”
“What?” I know this, but I’m surprised that she knows it, too.
My father wordlessly hands me today’s newspaper, and instantly I think it’s going to be another “Kilbeg witches” thing. I try not to groan as I take it from him, thinking: Oh, god, did someone see the ritual at the river tonight? Did they think René and the others were trying to drown me, or something?
Then I see the headline on the front page.
TEENAGERS’ REMAINS FOUND
IN GRAIN SILO
The bodies of two missing teenagers, Sophia Mulready (19) and Lorna McKeon (18), were discovered by a Ballywick farmer this morning. John O’Donovan (61) was examining his silos after detecting a blockage in the spout and found the remains of the young women.
“It was devastating, horrifying,” O’Donovan says. “I’ve lived here my whole life, so I know all the young people to see. There’s no question in my mind that they were dumped here, by someone very sick.”
While Gardaí cannot confirm this, Mulready and McKeon were both from Kilbeg city and had recently become estranged from their families. Estrangement has quickly become a familiar story in Kilbeg, as more and more young people have been suddenly leaving home, with many dropping out of third-level education. The police have not confirmed whether these estrangements are linked to the deaths of Mulready and McKeon, but a spokesperson has said that “parents and families should be extra vigilant about retaining strong communication with their children,” and also added that “teenage girls, in particular, need to be extra safe.”
FULL STORY CONT. ON PAGE 2
A grain silo. They are dumping corpses and leaving them to rot. That’s the sum total of the holiness, the clarity, the splendor that the Children are really offering. They will use your suffering to pump the Well for magic. They will push your body to its very limit. And if you die—when you die—they will dump you a few miles from the Lodge, hoping your body decomposes before a sixty-one-year-old farmer finds you.
Lorna. Lorna Lorna Lorna.
I waited too long. I didn’t act quickly enough. And now she’s dead. A girl I went to school with since I was twelve, and never really spoke to, and now will never know at all.
I put the paper down, hot spit foaming at my jaw. The article, clearly, has more of an effect on me than my parents were hoping. They wanted to scare me into behaving, not give me a mental breakdown. They have no idea where I figure in this, how my life has bumped off of Sophia Mulready’s. The learner’s permit. The bonfire.
“Oh, god. Maeve. Sit down,” Dad says, guiding me into a chair. “I remember Lorna. Or, I remember her father. The other old dad at the gates.”
My father’s eyes are shining with tears, the same vomiting urge in him. A grain silo. Flesh becoming food for animals.
“I remember her,” he says. “Lovely big eyes, like dinner plates. Pretty.”
His voice catches on pretty. It’s the little-girlness to the word, I think. Don’t you look pretty in your party dress. The idea that she will never ascend to other kinds of beauty, other kinds of personhood. Not elegance, not grandeur, not maturity. The paper falls out of his hands and onto the floor, and my mother puts her forehead on the table.
I pick up the paper. Turn to the full story on page two. Details on how secretive Lorna had become, how cagey, how different. Sophia and her sudden preoccupation with sin.
They all come to me. All find me, somehow, without realizing. I’m the Housekeeper and I was supposed to protect them. So I get these clues, these meetings, these little bits of them. Missing squares on computer screens. Learner’s permits. Mixtapes from before I was born. Debris washing up at my feet because I wasn’t strong enough to save them.
But I will be strong. I will be.
“I didn’t know Lorna very well at all,” I say at last. “But I wish I did.”
“I don’t want you going out anymore,” Mum says, and she has to make her voice harsh to keep back the tears. “Not after dark.”
Oh, god. Not this.
“Mum, be realistic. It’s January, and it gets dark at four p.m.”
It is absolutely the wrong thing to say. She explodes.
“When are you going to realize that this is serious, Maeve? It’s not a game. I’m sorry that you can’t stand to be with us for more than five seconds, but this is about safety. You are not. Going. Out.”
“This is the plan, is it?” I say, scanning the double-page spread of the story. “No one’s asking why these girls died? The solution is keep your girls inside? What the fuck is that? Why is no one protecting us? Why is no one hunting them?”
The gray circle, that Housekeeper lens, starts to settle on my iris, her perspective twinning with mine. Yes. Why? Why? Why?
Mum’s mouth twitches. “I want you to carry a rape alarm.”
It is a suggestion so dazzling, so ridiculous, that I actually laugh. “A rape alarm? Mum? A rape alarm?”
“Why are you laughing?”
“Maeve,” Dad says, like a storm warning. “Don’t.”
But I can’t stop because the Housekeeper is laughing, too.
Hahahaha, imagine, imagine, a rape alarm, imagine, imagine, imagine if the only thing between rape and its victims was a sound to let people know it was happening.
“I will wear a rape alarm, Mum,” I say at last, wishing I hadn’t laughed. “I’ll wear two, if it will make you happy.”
Then she slaps me across the face. She slaps me so hard that my head turns in the other direction and I can read the clock on the oven.
She seizes the paper again. “This!” she says, her voice rising to a screech. “This was Lily O’Callaghan ten months ago. Do you remember that?”
I hold my face, hot and red. I have never been slapped by a parent before.
“I thought she was dead, Maeve. So did your father. And your siblings. Everyone. This child we watched grow up. Who came in and out of our house—who we took on holidays with us—no one thought she was coming back, Maeve. Not really. Not after the first week. You put your head in the sand about it, you nattered on about magic and tarot cards, and I thought, oh, god, she’s regressing. She can’t deal with the fact that her best friend has been killed, or worse than killed, and so she’s going back to childhood. Fairies at the bottom of the garden. I was jealous of you. Meanwhile, I was spending every night thinking of Lily rotting. This child that I thought of as family. Your father and I didn’t sleep for weeks.”
