She didn’t hear Shay come up behind her, but she could feel him.
If God had struck her blind she would have been able to find him still in a world of millions.
He wrapped his arms around her, fitting them under her breasts so that they rested on her swollen belly. Her breasts had grown large and heavy for the coming babe, and they ached sweetly.
“I’m asking you not to hold me to my promise,” he said.
She said nothing, but she didn’t see how she could deny him. A promise made to her and broken was nothing to the wrong she’d done him, the vow broken, the sin committed . . .
The sins.
She looked down at the arms that held her. He had his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows. His skin was brown, the dark hair bleached golden by the sun. The veins flowed in ridges over the hard muscle and sinew.
She lifted one of his hands, matching it to her own small one, letting his hand swallow hers up. She had always marveled at how his hands could be at once so tender and yet so brutal.
His fighter’s hands.
“Have you forgotten,” she said, “the terrible sin you made with these hands? The troubles they’ve brought upon us?”
“No,” he said, and then nothing more.
“Why not go after it all, then? Why not fight for that diamond belt Donagh spoke of and keep your honor while you’re about it?”
“Because I wouldn’t have a prayer of beating the great John L. Neither does the Yankee fellow, but that’s his lookout.”
They fell into a silence that was neither easy nor hard, only familiar. His lips touched her in a familiar place, in the hollow of her flesh where her jaw bone met her ear.
“Why am I letting you kiss my neck,” she said, and the words came out high and breathless, “when I ought to be giving you a desperate scold?”
His laugh blew hot against her skin. “God save us. And the tongue on you getting rusty from want of exercise.” His arms
tightened around her, pulling her closer against him. “Come here,
mo bhean.
”
She leaned back in to him, getting closer still, nestling her bottom into the cradle of his hips, rubbing against him.
She felt his lips move up gently into her hair.
T
hat night she dreamed she had been sewn alive into her shroud, and the rough cotton filled her mouth and nose, smelling foully of death, tasting of despair.
She thrashed awake, choking, drowning in the wet swamp that lived swollen and thick and heavy inside her chest.
She lay back, gasping for air, sweating and shivering both at once. Slowly, her breathing eased, until all she could hear was the wind panting against the windowpanes.
She pushed herself up on her elbow and looked down on Shay’s face. Moonlight glinted silver off the dried tears on his cheek. He must have been watching her again while she slept, watching over her while he still could. And grieving.
She leaned over and kissed the hollow in his throat, smelling his warmth, tasting the salt of his skin.
She eased out of bed, taking care not to wake him. In one corner of their tiny bedroom she had made a place to pray and say her beads. Donagh had given her a holy card of the Virgin Mary, stamped in gold and etched with a frame of floral wreaths. She’d hung it on the wall, and beneath it she’d set an old rickety tea table that she’d salvaged from the junk heap and covered with a cloth she’d embroidered herself. When she could find them, she put
wildflowers on the table. And burned a blessed candle when she could afford one.
There Bria would kneel and look up into the blessed Mother’s face, into those knowing eyes, forgiving eyes, and the words would be sweet and desperate on her lips.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death . . .
Mary, mother of Jesus, wife to Joseph, would understand the lengths a woman would go to, the sins she would commit, for those she loved.
Bria gathered up her rosary from off the table and knelt. She drew breath to begin the Apostle’s Creed and coughed, hard, her chest bucking with the force of it. A deep, tearing sound, dreadful even to her own ears.
She smothered her mouth with her hands, her chest heaving, the blood pounding hot and fast in her ears, and then finally, after forever, the coughing quieted.
She lumbered to her feet, her pregnancy making her feel clumsy and heavy. She went into the kitchen to look at her girls, where they slept on a pallet spread out on the hooked-rag rug next to the stove. She knelt beside them and folded her hands together as if in prayer, though she said no words, either to God or to herself. She touched her daughters’ faces only with her eyes. To feel their warm, living flesh would hurt too much.
She didn’t know how long she stayed there, but when the need to cough began to burn again in her chest, she left the house so that she wouldn’t wake them. The spring nights were cool, and she brought her old pumpkin-colored coat with her. She put it on, but she didn’t button it; she couldn’t anymore, she was getting that big.
She went around back and down to the shingled beach. She sat among the rocks. One minute it was silent and still; in the next, a rush of wind came up off the water, smelling of salt and seaweed.
She coughed and spit up bloody threads into her handkerchief. She drank more of the patent medicine, her false cure. False miracle.
Pray for us sinners . . .
Nights, when she couldn’t sleep, she prayed and said her rosary. Some nights, like this, she remembered. When you died, did your memories seep away along with your life? She couldn’t bear the thought. It seemed the whole of herself, of the woman who was Bria McKenna, was made of memories, and most of her memories, both cruel and sweet, were of Shay.
She had known him all her life, but she hadn’t understood how she loved him until that summer’s day of the crossroads dance. It wasn’t the first time for her, going to the crossroads of a summer’s Sunday afternoon. There’d been pipes and a fiddle there, much like today all the way over here in America. She and her girlfriends had danced mostly with each other then, though. The priest laid such a penance on them if they so much as smiled at a boy.
It was hard to keep yourself still even when you weren’t dancing. Bria stood at the side of the road, her whole body swaying in tune with the music, when suddenly he was there, Seamus McKenna, planted before her and staring at her with such a fierceness in his eyes that she wanted to run away. Shay McKenna—her brother’s friend more than hers, a boy who’d always seemed as if he didn’t belong anywhere near their world of stone huts and rain-soaked potato fields.
Yet there he stood, so close to her it wouldn’t have taken anything at all for her to lay her head on his chest and wrap her arms around his waist—a thought that frightened and intrigued and thrilled her.
He seemed to grow taller with every breath he took, all broad shoulders and long, ropy muscles even then. And too pretty for a boy, surely, with his full mouth and the hair on him the shiny dark color of wet slate.
He flustered her, too, the way he was staring, and she tried to hide it behind a tart tongue. “What are you doing here, Seamus McKenna?” she said, as she put her hands on her hips and gave him
a look-over. “Haven’t you prayers that need saying and holy books that need reading? Saintly deeds that need performing?”
His mouth softened, almost smiling. “Sure and I do, but maybe I wanted to indulge myself in a bit of wasteful wickedness by dancing with you.”
“Hunh. As if I would.” She turned and tried to flounce off, swiveling her hips the way she’d seen the older girls do.
He laid his hand on her arm with just enough force to stop her and no more, and he said, “I’ll be having both a dance and a kiss from you,
mo chridh
, before this day is through.”
She’d nearly given him everything he’d asked for, and more, right there at the crossroads—such was the way his words had gone like an arrow straight from his mouth and into her heart. For one of the first things you noticed about Shay McKenna, after you were struck by the grand size of him, was his voice. Even when his words were brash and cocky things, telling a girl what he would have from her, he sounded like an archangel singing.
He hadn’t taken a kiss that day, but he’d had his dance. He’d simply come up to her and taken her hand and led her into the set that was forming, and she could have pulled away from him, walked away from him at any time, but she hadn’t. She had sensed he could be pushed only so far, that with him she would only get so many dances, and so many chances.
She remembered that he spoke not another word and neither did she. But she looked at him, at the way the strong sinews in his throat stood out like ropes when he turned his head, and how his lower lip seemed to soften and grow fuller when he was on the verge of a smile. At the way his eyes squinted at the corners, as if he were used to looking beyond, to a place others couldn’t see.
And she thought: I want him.
No, that wasn’t quite the way it was. She hadn’t
known
she wanted him. She had only felt the wanting, as a tightness in her chest, a breathlessness. A panic that was like a scream in her mind that if
she couldn’t be with him now, this very minute, and for every minute for forever after, she would die.
Shay’s da had never been a steady worker, for he’d taken to the drink early in life. He spent his hours in the pubs, his favorite being the Three Hens, where he exercised his elbow by lifting glasses of whiskey and ale and his tongue by plotting rebellion. Shay and his mother were left to work the family’s few scraggly potato ridges and the landlord’s barley. When he could, Shay would take the curragh out to fish for cod along the rocky coast.
Bria was at the beach late the next afternoon, when he brought the curragh back to shore. It was a rare, grand day—the sky a clear, duck’s-egg blue and a warm, steady wind to fill the sail.
She waded out into the surf to catch the mooring line he threw to her. She helped him tie the boat to the buoy and roll up the lug, and only when that was done did he look at her.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
She looked up at him, narrowing her eyes against the glare of sun on water. Nearly shivering at the rare beauty of him—his face, his body, his voice. He stood with his bare feet splayed wide on the deck, the sea breeze lifting his hair. The curragh’s leather hull creaked in the tidewash. Overhead, a gull cawed, as if jeering at her.
“Waiting for you,” she said.
She helped spread his seine nets out on the sand to dry and lay his catch on the flakes to cure in the sun. Once, she found herself standing so close to him that the wind sent a hank of her hair slapping across his mouth. He smelled faintly of the cod, but mostly of the sea. Sometimes she could remember every word they had said to each other that day and all the days to follow. Other times she could only remember how she had felt. That the air around them was about to catch fire from a glance, a touch, a sigh.
“Why do you want to be a priest?” she’d asked him.
He turned to look at her, and there was something so fiercely brave about him, standing in his bare feet and rags among a net full of fish, but with ink stains on his fingers and calluses on his knees
that would do a scullery maid proud from so many hours of praying on a stone church floor.
“I want to
do
something with my life,” he said. “To do . . .” He shrugged, flushing a little. “To do good.”
She remembered that a lot, those words he’d said that day, in his angel’s voice, with that mouth she had wanted so desperately to kiss.
To do good.
“I think you’ll be a fine priest,” she said. She made herself smile, and stopped herself from running her finger along his lower lip . . . there, where it was the fullest. “A grand one.”
She helped him with his fish and nets for many afternoons before he finally kissed her. And then it was only a soft brush of his lips against her cheekbone, as if he were whispering a secret. She remembered looking up afterward, into a sky milky with high clouds, and feeling watched.
Sometimes, before they parted, they would walk the beach together, climbing the rocks, exploring. One evening, when the setting sun was painting fiery splashes across the sky and the sea crinkled silver, they found a cave.
There, within the soft, hollow darkness, his kisses grew deeper, longer, bolder. One day his mouth left hers and moved lower, and he was kissing and licking her throat. Another day he pulled open her shawl and unlaced the neck of her dress, and brushed his lips across the hollow between her collarbones. And then somehow more laces were undone, and his lips and tongue were on the slopes of her breasts and then between them. She remembered hearing the sea pound on the rocks below them, and her fingers tangling in his sun-warmed hair, holding on to him, holding on.
“Bria,” he said in his beautiful angel’s voice, just her name and nothing more. It was one of the many discoveries she made that summer—how a boy, a man, revealed most what he was feeling in the way he said your name.