Joan
Joan
THREE DAYS INTO 2003, JOAN HAD A MISCARRIAGE. Ellen left the girls with her father, who’d been spending the Christmas holidays with them, and drove to Cork. Seamus answered the door, looking worn out.
‘She won’t let me do anything,’ he told Ellen. ‘I can’t get her to rest. She keeps saying she wants to stay busy.’
Ellen gave him a hug. He looked like he needed one. ‘Where are the children?’
‘My sister in Limerick has taken them for a couple of days. Joan’s in the kitchen.’
She was peeling potatoes in her dressing gown, eyes glittering and red-rimmed. ‘There was no need for you to come,’ she said, making it sound like an accusation. ‘I’m fine. We’re fine.’
‘I wanted to come. I want to help. Give me a job, because I’m not going away’ – and at that Joan dropped the potato peeler with a clatter and slumped into a chair and laid her head on her hands and wept hard, angry tears. Ellen sat next to her and drew slow circles on her sister’s back and remembered her mother’s spine, and how the jutting bones had cracked her heart.
When the tears were spent Ellen coaxed her upstairs and ran a bath. She added oil from a bottle she found on a shelf, and Joan sat in the scented water and cried some more while Ellen returned to the kitchen and got a dinner together. When her sister didn’t reappear, Ellen brought a tray upstairs to find her asleep in bed, so she brought it down again and covered the plate with tinfoil.
‘It might be a sign,’ Seamus said, cutting into his chicken. ‘She’s getting older.’
‘Forty isn’t too old, not when she’s already had four healthy babies. See how you both feel when she’s a bit stronger.’
Ellen stayed the night in Trisha and Daphne’s room, finding a stray red sock between the sheets, and under a pillow the copy of Matilda she’d sent Daphne for Christmas. In the morning she poached eggs for Seamus and Joan before driving back to Galway.
In May, Joan announced she was pregnant again. ‘Due in November,’ she said. Ellen crossed her fingers when she heard. Thankfully all went well, and on the last day in November, two weeks late, and following two days of labour, Philip joined the family.
‘Never again,’ Joan said.