The Mermaids Singing (18 page)

Grace stole Jack Keane's boat in a desperate panic, though she didn't know how to navigate it, and the fog was too thick to even see the mainland. All she could think of was escaping her mother. That expressionless face ruling her life. She was terrified that if she stayed on this island, that would be her own face someday: callused and wrinkled by sea winds, impenetrable.

She accidentally locked the rudder in turn position and the boat went out of control, spinning her in circles. She was stuck, fated to go back again to where she'd started. Pregnant. Desperately in love. Trapped.

Stupid, was what Seamus called her, when he'd grabbed on to the circling boat from his curragh.

“How could you be so stupid, Grace?” he said. “You could have
been lost at sea, drowned. Surely death can't be more desirable than marrying me.”

He brought her to the empty hotel lounge to dry out by the fire. He wrapped her in a wool blanket and held her in his lap, stroking her damp hair. Grace cried, silently, though she clung to his body as if it were the hot water bottle she took to bed at night.

“I don't want to have a baby,” she said. “I'm only eighteen. I don't know
how
to have a baby.” Seamus rocked her, shushing.

“It's my fault,” he said. “I should have been more careful. It will be all right. You'll be a brilliant mother, you'll see.” Grace moaned at this, crying harder.

“If you know it's a mistake, why won't you let me get rid of it?” she said.

Seamus stiffened. “I can't let you kill our baby,” he said. Then he softened, and kissed her temples gently. “Ah, Grace,” he whispered, “why do you not want to marry me? I love you to distraction. Sure, I'll be good to you, always.”

Grace shook her head vehemently, scattering salty drops from her cheeks.

“Don't you love me?” Seamus said. She buried her face in his shoulder.

She did love him, or she thought so, if this mixture of longing and terror was love. She couldn't get enough of him, and she was sure he knew it. Despite her feeling that she wasn't in charge, she had gone back to his house almost every night after that first one, needing to feel him inside her. She sobbed with every orgasm, called out his name until he had to cover her mouth so the neighbors wouldn't hear. She only had to look at him and her insides liquefied and ran away like tears of wax. During sex with Michael—though she'd enjoyed it—she had always kept thinking, planning, taking notes and storing them for later on. With Seamus she ceased to think. It felt like swimming: as with her body and the water, her body and his were all that mattered. But also, she thought sometimes, being with Seamus was like drowning.

She was afraid of him. Of the way he looked at her in bed sometimes, mean, serious, as if he were plotting against her. He had never hurt her, he was gentle in every way, but still she felt like she'd been captured. Seamus had once told her that his father believed that mermaids kept the souls of drowned sailors in cages beneath the sea. He joked that his father was there now, being let out only thrice daily for his meals among the colony of sea-people. Grace felt like one of those souls, in a sensuous, loving cage, but a cage nonetheless; she would never get off this island if she married Seamus. He loved Inis Murúch. He wouldn't even move to Dublin despite the fact that he was writing for
The Irish Times
. Grace would end up an island wife like her mother or Mary Louise, sitting around pots of tea, talking about their husbands as though they were unruly little boys.

“This isn't my home,” Grace said to Seamus, not answering his question. He sighed.

“It can be, Grace,” he said. “If you want it to be.”

“No,” she said, but quietly now.

“Just give me some time, Grace. We'll have the baby and I'll make you happy, you'll see.”

She married him because the fear of losing him was as strong as the fear of giving herself up. Because she'd never felt this way about anyone and was afraid she never would again. Because he had swallowed a part of her which she could not get back: her liquid center which she could not leave without.

She married him because she hoarded a secret hope that someday things would reverse, and she would be able to take him away with her.

 

Grace threw up in the bathroom while her wedding guests were set-dancing, the hotel function room rank with the smell of body odor and stout. She knelt with her forehead against the cold tiled wall, willing her stomach to settle down. She hadn't been sick as often this time. Mary Louise was also pregnant and fiercely ill the first half of every day. Grace had heard the island women saying that
so much sickness meant she was carrying a boy. Michael's baby, which had slopped out of Grace in the bathroom, must have been a boy, she thought. And this one, Seamus's, would be a girl.

When her nausea had passed, Grace sat on the closed toilet seat, not ready to face her wedding party yet. She heard a group of girls come into the bathroom, smelled the spray of perfume and the face powder. Mary Louise was with them; they were all giggling and teasing one another. Grace lifted her feet and held her knees so they wouldn't see her under the door.

“Ah, we saw you dancing with Francie Raftery, Margaret,” Mary Louise said. “It's love, I suspect.”

“Not a fucking chance,” Margaret shrieked. “He'd his hands groping through the back buttons of my dress. Mind my back, girls, have I got paw prints on the silk?” The group of them whooped. “It's good craic, anyways, the party,” Margaret said. “Not half as good as your wedding, Mary Louise. This one's spoiled by that bitch of a bride.”

“Mind what you say about my sister,” Mary Louise said quietly. She tried to change the subject back to Francie, but Margaret, who sounded drunk, wouldn't let her.

“What are you, a saint?” Margaret bellowed. “I wouldn't call that tart my sister for anything. Stealing Seamus O'Flaherty from all us deserving girls on the island. Everyone knows she trapped him. And now she'll be having her baby just after you have yours, Mary Louise. She has to keep all the attention for herself, that one.”

“Ah, shut up, would you?” Mary Louise said, louder now. “Don't blame my sister just because Seamus never looked twice at you, Margaret.” Grace heard Mary Louise's heels stomping out of the bathroom.

“Don't mind her, Margaret,” a girl said. “She's not herself.”

“I feel sorry for her is all,” Margaret said. Someone peed in the stall next to Grace, and they all left her alone again.

Grace wasn't surprised at them. She was aware that the whole island knew she was pregnant. Clíona had told her she should be
grateful that Father Cullen had accelerated the counseling so they could marry quick. The counseling had consisted of pamphlets on God and Holy Matrimony. “If you have relations with your husband on a Saturday night,” it said, “you will not be able to receive the sacrament on the Sunday.”

(At Mass that week, Seamus had leaned over and whispered to Grace, “Mind the couples who don't go up for communion.” She'd ignored him. Everything about this religion of hers seemed ridiculous. Blind people reciting prayers that were never answered. She wished there were some other way to marry Seamus, but the priest was their only option.)

Grace didn't care what people said about her, but she was surprised at Mary Louise's defending her. Surprised and furious. She should have kicked open the stall door and punched that Margaret in the lip. She didn't need Mary Louise sticking up for her, nor Seamus, nor Clíona. She didn't need any of them, and someday she'd make them all realize it.

When she returned to the party, Seamus was waiting anxiously for her. He took her hand, grazed his hot lips against her cheek, and said she looked pale.

“Do you feel all right, Mrs. O'Flaherty?” he smiled. She took her hand away.

At the church, when Father Cullen had told him to kiss the bride, Seamus had looked at her with such intensity, she'd forgotten she was angry at him, forgotten she was trapped. For an instant, he was everything she wanted and she was grateful as his warm kiss enveloped her. Then she opened her eyes and saw Clíona's grim relief, and wanted to rip the lace and satin off her ribs and run screaming from the church.

 

For their honeymoon, Seamus took Grace to Florence, where they stayed in a hotel overlooking the river, and spent their days in the museums, or drinking too much cappuccino. They made love every evening until Seamus was exhausted, then Grace watched him
sleeping and listened to the hum of the dark city from the window. Grace liked Florence; it was dry and warm all day and night, and she soaked the sun in greedily. The Italian men were gorgeous, and paid her as much attention as Seamus allowed.

One afternoon while Seamus was napping, she slipped out and wandered the
mercato
, smiling at the men who tried to sell her “beautiful things for a lovely woman.” She purchased a silk scarf the color of seaweed from a man wheeling a cart, who said the fabric matched her eyes. She went to a small museum which held four of Michelangelo's sculptures, staring for a long while at the Madonna and Child. The Virgin Mary's carved face had a mixture of euphoria, terror, and grief as she looked at the baby, an oversized thing with a grown man's self-absorbed face. Is that how I will feel? Grace thought, massaging her abdomen. Will I love my child and hate it at the same time? She didn't want to feel for her daughter the conflicting emotions she had for Seamus. She was also determined not to be like Clíona, making her daughter miserable while clucking that she did it out of love. She would name her daughter Gráinne, so she'd be strong. No one, not even Grace herself, would be able to smother her.

On the way back to the hotel, Grace met Seamus, who was walking briskly across the bridge.

“Where have you been?” he said angrily. She crossed her arms, backing away from him.

“Why is that your business?” she said. Seamus paused, then laughed, hugging her.

“I'm sorry,” he whispered. She saw the man who had sold her the scarf, watching them. She didn't return Seamus's embrace.

“I thought you'd left me,” Seamus said, holding her tighter. “I don't want to be like this, Grace. Tell me you won't leave me.” It was because he sounded so vulnerable, and because the man with the scarves winked at her, that Grace put her arms around Seamus and smiled into his chest.

“Don't be silly,” she said. “I love you.”

 

Mary Louise gave birth to a boy, Liam, on October 29, with the island midwife and Clíona looking on. Grace, whom Mary Louise had asked to be there, sat outside the bedroom, squeezing Seamus's hand every time Mary Louise screamed.

“I want you to take me to the Galway hospital,” Grace whispered to Seamus. Her baby was due at Christmas. “Where they can give me drugs.” Seamus smiled.

“What happened to natural childbirth?” he said.

“Fuck that,” Grace said. They could hear Mary Louise cursing Owen from the bedroom, and Owen murmuring for her to breathe.

When it was over, and the house filled up with visitors, Mary Louise wanted Grace to be the first one to hold Liam. Since Grace had gotten married, Mary Louise had been smothering her with sisterly affection. Grace had put up with it only because she'd been bored; there was nothing for a pregnant woman to do on the little island. But she told herself, whenever she pretended to listen to Mary Louise's chatter, that she would never end up like her stepsister. Trapped in a life that had been mapped out by the previous generations on the island. Where men were catered to like babies who couldn't fend for themselves, and women were expected to do everything and ask for nothing.

Grace took the bundled baby and scowled at it.

“You
would
have a boy,” she said. Mary Louise laughed.

“Whatever you do, forget about the breathing business,” Mary Louise said. “I just about murdered Owen at the end, puffing in my face the way he was, thinking he was being useful. He should have stayed pacing in the sitting room where he belongs.”

They could hear Owen talking to Seamus in the other room.

“It's not so bad,” Owen said. “Just keep her breathing and try not to hyperventilate.”

Mary Louise rolled her eyes. “Hurry up and have your wee one, Grace,” she said. “If it's a girl, she can marry my Liam.”

Grace handed the baby back quickly. There was no chance her
daughter would marry an island boy—all the island men went from their mothers' laps to their wives', expecting to be spoiled. Except Seamus, who'd grown up without a mother and learned to take care of himself.

“Ah, no, he's hungry,” Mary Louise said, looking terrified as the baby began to cry.

“How can you tell?” Grace said.

“Look at his mouth, he's opening and closing it like a hooked fish,” Mary Louise said. “Quick, Grace, run and get your woman so she can show me what to do. And send the men to the pub. They'll just get under our feet here.”

 

Grace's labor pains began on the morning of Christmas Eve. At first, they felt so much like the cramps that had come with her miscarriage, she woke Seamus up, crying.

“I think the baby's dying,” she said. “Stop it, Seamus, the baby's falling out.”

He called Mary Louise and Clíona, who calmed Grace down and convinced her that everything was normal. Seamus had Eamon bring them to the mainland on the ferry, even though it was snowing and the sea was rough. In the gas-stink of the cabin, Grace clung to Seamus's body, as though she were drowning. With each pain she wanted to dive overboard, where the cold sea would numb her middle. She would push Seamus away for an instant, then grab him again.

“I'm here,” Seamus whispered, his hot breath swimming in her ear. “You're all right, Grace. I'm here.”

At the Galway hospital, something went wrong. Grace did what the nurses told her, endured Seamus's silly breathing and coaching at her side. But the baby would not come. When the doctor came in he told her that the baby was backwards; they'd have to do a cesarean.