Migrations(43)

“What are you wanting, dear? If this is about the land after all then we’ve things to discuss.”

I frown, confused. “No, sir. I’m just here to ask after my mother. I was told by Margaret Bowen in Kilfenora that you might know her.”

He laughs then, the sound turning quickly to a wheezing cough. “Ah, now I see. Margaret’s losing her senses, can’t remember a thing about who belongs where.”

He goes into the kitchen and Niall and I listen to him shuffling around.

“Can I help you, John?” Niall asks, but John only grunts and returns with a floral tray, on top of which he’s placed a plate of digestive biscuits and two glasses of water.

“Thank you,” I say, taking a glass and noticing the smears of dirt on it. John must be close to blind.

“I’ll give it to you straight, lass, ’cause it seems you know very little.”

“I’d appreciate that.”

“Iris is my daughter.”

My fidgeting hands fall still. Everything of me falls still.

“I haven’t seen her now in many years but that’s her there.” He points to the photo on the mantel.

I rise on weak legs and reach for it. Shock steals the breath from me. Up close, the little girl looks just like me. I had no idea—I’ve never seen a photo of my mother at this age. I return to my seat, cradling the photo in my lap, leaving fingertips pressed to her face, to her dark mane and the little red dress she wears.

“That was taken down at the shore,” John says, and it’s the shore we can see now, all the way down at the base of this sprawling hillside.

I clear my throat. “But then if … If you’re my grandfather why wasn’t I sent here to be with you?”

“Now why would that have happened?”

“Well … when Mam left.”

“She left?”

I nod blankly. “When I was ten.”

John’s shoulders sag. His face gentles a moment, loses some of its creases, and I’m able to see a flash of true grief in his small, liquid eyes.

“Ah, now. That’s a burden of mine, and it’s part of a dark time.”

“Could you tell me? Please? I don’t know anything about my family.”

Niall takes my hand and squeezes it. It startles me; I had forgotten he was here.

John folds his old, gnarled fingers in his lap. They are shaking a little with age. “Maire, my wife there, she was a wanderer. Her feet ne’er touched the ground. But she swam in that ocean each day, and had all the lads admiring her, and I couldn’t be easy with it. She’d go missing, you see, for days at a time, and I told myself it didn’t matter, she was still mine, the strange, lovely lass, the one everyone wanted for himself. But when wee Iris was born I took it into my head that she’d come of some other man.”

I study the photo again. It’s true, the little girl looks nothing like the man.

“Maire swore black and blue she was mine, and that was all right for a while. But it ate at me, and one day I couldn’t stand it anymore, and I told Maire to take the girl back to where she belonged, wherever it may be, to whoever it may be. I’d had done with them both.

“So Maire divorced me and changed her name back to Stone. She gave Iris her name, too. And they wanted nothing to do with me and that was the way it stayed for twenty-odd years until I had a letter from Iris telling me Maire had passed.”

He looks away from me now, to the window. “You hadn’t been born yet, lass,” he tells me softly, and then he falls silent a long while.

I’m glad of it, of the break. And I’m so glad of Niall’s grip, the warmth of it, when there has never before been a hand to hold mine.

“You say she left, child?” John asks me eventually.

I nod again.

“I was hoping that curse wouldn’t pass from mother to daughter.”

“I think it did.” And on again, to granddaughter.

“It makes sense Iris didn’t want you left with me,” John eventually says. “I was no father to her. Only … I wake some nights and there’s no surer thing in me except that I was all wrong, that she was mine after all.”

I can’t keep the tears from slipping down my cheeks. One of them drops onto the photo, distorting my grandmother’s face, drowning her. I wipe it off so she can breathe again.

“Where did you go?” John asks.

But I don’t want to tell him. I don’t want this man knowing anything about me, this man who throws away his family as though they aren’t precious.

“To my father,” I lie.

“And he was a good man? She found a good man to love her?”

“He’s a good man and he waits for her.” This is absolute nonsense but the sheer falseness of it coats me like armor.

The sky is beginning to darken. Night will soon fall.

“How is she?” John asks abruptly, and I hear the pain in him and the longing, and I feel the same in myself, the pain and the longing, and a small ugly part of me hates him for it, for not being able to help me find her, for knowing less than I do, and another part of me loves him for it, and it is all too much and too swift and so I get to my feet.

“She’s well,” I say, and then for no reason I can name, simply because it feels warm to say so, I add, “She speaks highly of you. I mean, of her memories of her father…”