The Wives of Tromisle
My mother stands on the dock, her hands cradled in front of her as if in prayer. She wears a gray smock, the same as all the other women, her white hair pulled back into a severe bun. I wonder if she’s done it to iron out the wrinkles and creases in her forehead; if she has, then she has failed.
Once the ferryboat is tied off and the warped gangplank has been thrown ashore, I follow her through the streets to her cottage.
She nods to a tall, bearded man who sits mending nets on the quayside, but otherwise she ignores the frothing sea of bodies around her, each welcoming their own loved ones to Tromisle.
The only time she turns her head is to stare at two children, so alike they might be twins, watching us from a window.
I think I see a smile twitch at her mouth.
The cottage is bare and unwelcoming, the kind of sparse cell she has preferred since the Easter before my eighth birthday, the day she miscarried. Only a spray of purple and white flowers in a jug on the kitchen table hint that she may have decorated for my arrival.
“So,” she says, her hands thrust under cold water gushing from the faucet, “you’re here at last. How was the sailing? Sea not too rough for you?”
I shake my head. “I can see why you don’t come to the mainland, but I survived it. My legs still feel a little wobbly, though.”
“That will pass.” Her hands reach for the kettle, filling it with water. “You got my message, then?”
I had. When your mother hasn’t spoken to you since you divorced your husband five years ago, a letter in her handwriting makes you sit up and pay attention.
It was unnecessarily formal in that way she prefers, skirting the point and burying its meaning beneath a mountain of polite niceties, but I’d gathered she had something to tell me—something that needed to be said in person. Naturally, I feared the worst.
“You have news. Is it your health? You could have told me that over the phone, you didn’t have to?—”
“No,” she interrupts, speaking across me as if I’ve already said my piece. “Not that. You’re not getting rid of me yet. The sea air has worked wonders, just as they said it would. I feel better than I have in years.”
Now that I look properly, I can see she’s right; she looks well. She’ll soon be turning seventy, but apart from the wrinkles and white hair, she might pass for someone in their fifties. I can’t see her body beneath the shapeless smock, but her arms look lean and strong.
“What is it then? Have you met someone?”
She smiles.
“I’m pregnant. You’re going to have a sister.”
* * *
The light from the window is sharp and clear as I unpack my few belongings.
I refold the T-shirts and a spare skirt into a small chest beside the bed, arranging my book and reading glasses on top.
I didn’t pack much because I hadn’t intended to be here long, a couple of days at most. Now my supplies look woefully thin.
I assume there is somewhere in town that sells the bare essentials; I can borrow from Mother if I have to.
I’m stowing my wheelie case beneath the bed when she raps on the door. I turn to tell her to come in, but she’s already standing in the doorway.
“I haven’t said thank you,” she begins, and I can see what it costs her to offer an apology, even one so well disguised, “but I do appreciate you coming. This should be a time for family. I may need your help in the days to come. The midwife, Mrs. Penrose, says it’s best to have someone by your side. Someone you can trust.”
“Are you sure?” I say the words before I’ve had time to think them through. “There must be some mistake, mustn’t there? At your age it’s not impossible, I know, but the chances…I’m assuming there’s a father?”
She smiles. “Of course there’s a father. You’ll meet him, all in good time. Here.”
My mother walks to the bed and lowers herself slowly, carefully.
Once she’s lying down, I can see what the folds of the smock have hidden: the fertile dome of her belly.
Lifting the dress, she exposes the skin, tight as a drum over the swelling.
She takes my hand in hers, places it on the warmth of her flesh.
“Keep it there for a moment. She’s active this morning. You’ll feel her.”
And I do. A flutter at first, like Mother is the old lady who swallowed a bird, then a kick, hard and bony, a heel or an elbow testing the walls of its prison.
“See? She’s a lively one, same as you were. I’m going to call her Alison.”
It was the name they had chosen for my younger sister, the sibling who never was.
The miscarriage came late, almost twenty-two weeks, and we’d already started making room for her arrival.
That was thirty years ago, and my memories are foggy, but I remember the name painted on the door of the room we were meant to share.
I don’t know how long the name stayed there, but it must have been months.
We lived with the ghost of my sister for even longer.
* * *
The town is quiet as I make my way down to the quayside.
The crowds are gone. The ferry comes just once a week, and then only if they have paying fares.
In between times, Tromisle slumbers. One of the children from before sits on the harbor wall, his arm bandaged up in a sling.
He stares at me from beneath a heavy brow as I walk past, and I do my best to smile back.
It isn’t hard to find the store; there’s little else here.
It feels like a converted living room, divided by rickety shelving that sits half empty and covered with dust. I manage to root out some essentials, a couple of plain gray T-shirts, toiletries with labels so faded they can barely be read.
The old lady in the corner totals them up on a sheet of paper, licking the lead of her pencil as she does her sums. I hand over a note after she tells me my credit cards won’t work.
“You’re Agnes’s girl, aren’t you?” she says as she bags my purchases. “Come to help with the birthing? You must be as excited as we are. A child is always a miracle.”
“I am,” I say. “And yes. About the miracle, I mean.”
I don’t need her to tell me what being a mother means.
I still think of Michael every day. We had no indication of the heart defect before it happened; he ran and laughed and played like any other five-year-old, right up until the moment that he didn’t.
Andy still calls me sometimes, wanting to talk it through, but I can’t.
I can’t recall the last time I talked with anyone about it. The divorce suits me just fine.
The old woman taps her fingers on the counter to recapture my attention.
“It’s a blessing for us all. Your mother’s child. A daughter, I hear?”
“That’s right. Do you have children?”
She smiles, her eyes lighting up. “I do, dear. I had a daughter who died—house fire, 2001. Now I have a daughter who’s living here with me. She helps me in the shop, sometimes.”
I smile and nod my farewell, gathering the paper bag in my arms. It’s only as I leave that it occurs to me that she spoke of the two daughters as if they were one and the same.
* * *
It’s my sixth day on the island when Mother goes into labor.
At first, I’m pleased that my stay won’t be extended, but there’s so much to do that my relief is soon buried under hot towels and breathing exercises.
Mrs. Penrose, the midwife, appears as if by magic—I can only assume someone heard the wailing and called for her—and quickly takes control.
I expected a jolly, round woman, but she is as hard and lean as Mother, and I do not see her smile.
“Will the father be here?” I ask as they kneel together on the floor, Mother’s breathing exercises punctuated by swallowed cries. “Shouldn’t someone let him know?”
“He’ll be here,” Mrs. Penrose replies, keeping her eyes on the task at hand. “He’s always here.”
I’m making the fifth round of herbal teas in the kitchen when the baby comes.
Mother screams louder than before, a keening sob that rises and rises in pitch until it can’t possibly go any higher; then there’s silence, followed by a tiny cry.
When I enter the room, Mrs. Penrose already has the baby—Alison, my sister—wrapped in a coarse blanket.
The cord still attaches her to my mother, and the midwife holds out a stained pair of scissors to me, handles first.
“You should do the deed, given that you’re family. Cut between the clamps, dear. Nice and hard, this is no time to be shy.”
“But shouldn’t the father—” I begin.
“It’s your job,” says a voice like grinding stones behind me.
The bearded man from the dock stands in the doorway, his thick hands pressed against the frame as if he’s holding it up.
I look at him properly now: the beard hides most of his features but his nose is wide and broken in several places, his eyes black as tar. He smells of the sea, salty and rotten.
“Are you the father?” I ask without thinking.
“Of course he is,” Mrs. Penrose replies, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. “Right, are you going to cut the cord, or do we have to leave her like this?”
The scissors are cold in my hand, the umbilical cord thicker than I expected.
I feel I’m doing it wrong, mashing the handles down in the hope that something will bite, but then it gives and the two ends fall free with a gush of blood.
Mrs. Penrose takes them back from me and wipes the blades on her dress.
“Now, let’s see about that tea, shall we dear?”
* * *
Mother lets me hold the baby later that night. She wriggles in her blanket like a landed fish, surprisingly light but imbued with a hidden strength. Without realizing it, I’d hoped that her eyes would be blue like mine, but they’re a muddy gray, neither one color nor another.
“Hello, Alison.” I try her name on for size, a name that we’ve lived with for so long it barely feels real. “Nice to meet you.”
A pudgy hand pushes out from between the folds of the blanket and grips my finger, squeezing it like she wants to bring it to her mouth.
When I finally convince her to let go, I loosen the blanket to tuck her arm back inside, safe and warm where it can’t do any damage.
Her other arm isn’t an arm at all. In its place are three thick tentacles, wet and green, sprouting from her elbow like bladderwrack.
One of them wraps around my hand, and I let it stay like that until she is asleep.
* * *
Mother doesn’t know the bearded man’s name.
She doesn’t know if he once had one and it has been forgotten, or if he was never named in the way that you and I were.
He would nod and speak to her occasionally when she first came to Tromisle, only to say good day or comment on the weather, nothing more.
She assumed the other menfolk were out at sea, or lost in the many shipping disasters she’d heard about in the news.
It seemed odd, but then so much is odd out here, this far from the city.
It was simply accepted as the way things were.
One night he came to her. Three knocks on the door then he let himself in, bringing the briny stench of the sea with him. He made her promises, held her hand as she told him about her lost daughter, the miscarriage, the shadow it had cast across her life. When she was done, he took her to bed.
As Alison grows, she starts to look like the boy I saw on the quay, like all the children I have seen on the island.
It makes sense that they are all his. He is the only man here, after all.
Being with Alison works wonders for my soul.
We don’t have to hide her tentacles; they all have them, the children of the island.
She can be free and unashamed, playing with her sisters and cousins.
I cannot say if she is the sister I might have had, or someone new, a surrogate sent to heal my mother’s pain. I’m not sure it matters.
Sometimes, in the flash of a smile, an unguarded laugh, I see a glimmer of my Michael.
I do my best with the bedroom, brightening the corners with flowers, painting the bed frame.
Mother doesn’t seem to mind. Her thoughts are elsewhere.
She returns to motherhood faster than either of us expected, bouncing the baby on her bony knee.
It’s as if she’s been on hold for the last thirty years and now, finally, her life has begun again.
At night I lie awake in the darkness, waiting for three knocks on my door.
I think I hear him outside sometimes, but it must be the seagulls on the slates, or the sea washing up hard against the quay.
I cannot imagine being with him; cannot stomach that ocean stench of rotting fish he carries.
I would never give myself to him, I say.
I won’t let him lay those thick, calloused hands anywhere on my body.
But then I see Michael’s face, my darling boy, and I know I might do anything if only I could get him back.
* * *
The day I leave, Mother walks me down to the dock.
My bag is light. I’m only taking the things I brought with me, the rest the island can keep.
Alison bounces at her hip, her golden hair catching the sunlight, tentacles writhing in imitation of a wave.
We say goodbye on the jetty, and once I’m on the ferry I make my way to the front.
I don’t look back at the island as we pull away.
As we leave the harbor, deep in the belly of the ship something clanks three times. I feel every muscle in my body clench.
He had come to me two nights before, his knuckles knocking like barnacles against the wood, tapping out his promise.
Through the door I could smell the sea on him, salty and brutal.
And as I buried my head beneath the covers, I saw Michael again as he was on that final day, playing on the lawn: carefree and full of life, safe in the knowledge that his mother would protect him. That neither of us need ever be alone.