Julian
“Ah, good,” Eileen says from the table. He likes Eileen; he’s known her ever since they arrived in Ireland, two years ago.
She’s their nearest neighbor and the person he’s left with if his grandmother has errands to run.
They mostly sit in silence, neither feeling the need to fill the space with chatter.
His job is to assemble loops of beads; a decorative weight that dangles from the end of each bobbin to keep the tension of Eileen’s lace just right.
When Maia and his grandmother arrive from counseling to collect him, it always feels as though it breaks the stillness that’s settled over the room when it’s just him and Eileen, and like he’s putting down the lid on a part of himself as he closes the bead box.
But he’s also relieved. Even when he’s absorbed in his task, he’s aware of their absence.
Images of them flicker through his mind: his grandmother’s small car on the long, winding road that cuts between fields.
Gray sky, blue car, green grass, yellow lichen, dark rock.
His grandmother and Maia inside, the faint smell of petrol, and the leather of his grandma’s driving gloves.
“Why do you wear gloves to drive?” he’d asked her once.
“In the olden days—even older than my days,” she’d said, smiling in the rearview mirror, “steering wheels were made of metal or wood. You needed to protect your hands from the cold. Or splinters.”
He remembers his father’s hands on the steering wheel, big and firm, a smattering of hair on the backs of them. He blinks the image away.
“Why did Mummy never learn to drive?” he’d asked recently. He saw his grandmother’s shoulders rise and fall in the front seat in that way they always do whenever he asks a question that has an uncomfortable answer to do with his mum.
“Well, she was in London from fourteen, so she missed out on that time when I might have taught her. And later, I don’t think he wanted her to.” And then she’d corrected herself. “No, that’s not right. He didn’t let her.”
She’d blinked at him in the mirror then, both eyes pressed shut for just a moment, in the same way her cat, Thistle, does.
“It’s a cat’s way of saying I love you. She only does it to people she really likes,” she’d explained when they’d first arrived.
His grandmother says she loves him out loud all the time, but he likes her silent cat blinks even more.
He didn’t let her. They never call his dad by his name.
They call him he or him. Julian notices that people talk about God in the same way.
Not Grandma Sílbhe—she doesn’t believe in him anymore—but at school, when they go across the road to morning church, Julian hears the priest say the Hes and the Hims. There is Father this and Father that, and it feels like a muddle of fathers that Julian can’t quite unpick.
He hasn’t done the Sacrament of Penance yet, but they talk about it in the playground and the other boys are almost giddy with what will be their first confession.
“I’m gonna say a stolen pencil!” says Reggie. “You should tell about the money you take from your mammy’s purse for ice creams,” goads another. Their eyes are wide. They all agree the sins have to be not so bad they could get in trouble, but bad enough to justify confessing.
“Did Mummy talk to anyone when she picked you up today?” he remembers his father asking back then, when he was in his first year at school, and they still lived in England.
“No one? You wouldn’t lie for her, would you?
” his voice like a fingernail prying open the ends of a staple.
“Has she been using the phone again? I’ll know if you don’t tell the truth, Julian. ”
Now, the idea of telling the priest his sins makes his breath feel like it’s being sucked from his body.
Grandma Sílbhe says they won’t be doing any of that.
That he just needs to keep his head down and try to fit in at school.
But still, the words he hears in lessons swirl around in Julian’s mind, dark and ominous like the low sky that settles over the fields around the house before a storm.
O, my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended You.
I detest all my sins because of Your punishment…
I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell…
Julian doesn’t want the pains of hell. But even more, he doesn’t want to be the one inflicting the hurt.
When they play hide-and-seek, Julian can only stay hidden for a moment or two once Maia’s come into the room.
Somehow, watching as she peers behind the sofa or the door makes her seem too vulnerable.
And even though he knows that’s the game, it is unbearable.
He doesn’t want to feel her surprise; to see her jump and be momentarily afraid.
So he tries to pitch his voice just right—not too loud, not too quiet—“Maia, I’m over here. ”
He watches Maia when she sits working at the kitchen table, hair trailing over her schoolbooks, a face that says she’s gone into herself. It makes him feel wavery inside when she’s distracted; there-but-not-there. Maia, he says, under his breath when the feeling of being alone gets too much, Maia.
And she’ll exhale, her fringe rising in a gentle sigh. “I’m concentrating, Jules.” And even though a moment later she might reach across the pages, give his hand a squeeze, she doesn’t look up, her pen still poised over a diagram, labeling the parts of a plant cell or a human heart.
He’s overheard Grandma Sílbhe talking to Eileen. Saying that he—Julian—will be all right; that he can barely remember the night his mother died. It’s Maia she really worries about. And he realizes the wavery feeling isn’t something other people can see.
Some nights, once Julian has finally fallen asleep, Maia gets up and joins her grandmother in the living room, where they talk in hushed voices and her grandmother pours her some wine—just an inch at the bottom of a glass, to be companionable.
One evening, Maia builds up her courage and says, “I know Mum didn’t like me doing it, and I know you probably won’t either, but could I carry on with ballet? Could we find a class here?”
“Why ever would you want to do that?” Sílbhe asks. “I thought you only went because he insisted?”
“I did, but—”
“Sorry, you can say it. I know you’ll have your reasons.”
“Mum never wanted me to dance because of the stress it can put on your body. And I guess because she could see I never loved it the way she did. But I miss it now. It’s like a—a connection with her.
” She stops. There are other things she could say, but already her grandmother is nodding, suggesting they find a class and drive down into town one night a week.
“But no leaving before you’re eighteen,” her grandmother cautions.
As soon as she’s said the words, her face drops, and for a moment, it looks like it may crumple entirely.
But then she touches a finger to her eyes.
“Will you listen to me, clucking over you with all my regrets. As if someone can’t go to a dance lesson without leaving the country.
” She takes Maia’s hand across the side table and squeezes it in apology, although she doesn’t look at her.
Nor when she adds, “But she was too young; I can see that now. She needed more care. She needed parents. I don’t know what we were thinking, letting her go out into the world like that.
” Maia understands the subtext of what she’s saying and pictures her mum in the chair where she sits now.
Before she and Jules were born, their existence not even imagined.
After a while, Maia breaks the silence. “You know I’d never even want to leave this town, let alone Ireland.” And as she speaks, she feels the truth of her words.
At ballet class, the other girls watch her, only warming when they’ve sized up her jetés and the angle of her brisé.
A smile, a shared complaint as they extract sore feet from slippers.
She sees her mother all around her. In the other girls with their necks long, in her teacher’s habit of standing stock still, heels joined in first position when she wants their attention.
Her mother gravitated toward this pose at the kitchen sink washing up, or waiting for Maia at the school gates.
Maia always thought she’d renounced ballet completely, but now she sees it was there all along.
“Your mother is very jealous,” he used to say, the hardness of his gaze demanding Maia look up, as though, with eyes locked, he might overwrite her thoughts with his own.
“She can’t bear to see you get what she could never have.
But it’s not your fault her body gave up; you shouldn’t have to pay the price for that. ”
She hadn’t enjoyed dancing back then, in England.
She danced because he wrote the checks and insisted Cora take her each week.
Maia knew she could never reach the level her mother had.
She didn’t have that drive, that natural pull to it.
It was a duty, something to please her father.
But now, in Ireland, it has changed shape, morphed into something else.
And she yearns for it. To inhabit the same intangible space her mother once did.
She feels her in her own calves and quads held taut, in the balls of her feet pressed against the floor.