Westerly

Chapter Six

Still wrapped in blankets from the O’Kanes’ boat, Gisela and Elisabeth waited with Hannie and Hugh in the Beattys’ cottage.

They could hear whispering behind the curtain.

At last, Jean and Thomas and the doctor emerged from the room at the back.

“She’s breathing, thank the good Lord,” Jean said. “What on earth happened out there?”

Gisela felt scrutinized, understood the question but couldn’t put the whole story together in English. Elisabeth piped up. “The picnic basket. Waves hit the boat. We . . .” She stood, gestured losing their balance. “Gisela fell, and Fiadh dove in. Fiadh saved Gisela.”

Jean smiled. “Of course she did. A good swimmer, that one. Always with the knack for it. She could go to the Olympic games. Maybe for America.”

“You won’t still go? She can’t travel,” Hannie said.

Jean shrugged.

“A delay,” Thomas said. “Until she’s out of danger.”

Gisela, her stomach full of the roiling Irish sea, moaned and let out a belching cough.

“Let’s have a listen to this one,” the doctor said.

He bent to Gisela, stethoscope in his ears, bell to her chest. He put a finger on his lips to tell her to be quiet.

“Big breath,” he said, “like this.” He demonstrated.

“And out.” Gisela stared intently, following his instructions.

“Again . . . again.” He pulled the scope from his ears and wrapped it around his neck.

“No pneumonia, unless I’ve missed it. If fever spikes, you send for me.

Wee girls were lucky today. What, it was last year the Coughlin boy was pulling in traps and”—the doctor snapped his fingers—“just like that, and we never see hide nor hair of him again.”

Hannie rose. “We’ll leave you now. I must get these girls home and put some broth in them. We’ll be back.”

“We meant for you to have that punt, Hannie,” Thomas said. “You and Hugh. It wasn’t much, but it was a fine one. Of course, I’ll take our girls over a boat any day.” He mussed Gisela’s hair in the way her father had.

“Still. What a pity!” Jean said.

“I’m sorry I let it go,” Elisabeth said.

“Oh, child! I meant to cast no blame! A bunch of wood is all, not worth a single life, not a one, don’t you worry,” Thomas said. “We have what matters.”

Gisela dropped the blanket and threw her arms around the man’s waist, pushed her face against his muddied shirt. For one moment, she was a small child and her Vati was alive and there was no war, no Hitler, no bombs, no Ireland. Only a father’s heart beating in her ear. How she longed for it!

Jean put her arms out and surveyed the room as if some great snake were taking the very soul from her husband. “What’s this about now?”

Bewildered, Thomas tapped Gisela awkwardly. “There, now. It’s fine. We’re fine, you hear? We’re fine. America can wait if it must.”

Before dusk, and already Gisela was on the pallet in the attic, Hannie’s quilt wrapped around her, the other blanket folded on the bench by the door.

Her body still rode the waves when her eyes drifted closed, like it was seawater and not blood that flowed through her veins.

Elisabeth was down the ladder with Hannie.

Birds were singing the last songs of the day when the door banged open.

Gisela sat up when she heard Jean’s voice.

“She’s dead. My child is dead.”

Keening fogged the room as if the space below Gisela filled with white ghosts. She climbed out of bed, perched herself on the top ladder rung to peer down.

“What? No!” Hannie set a stove pot on the table and opened her arms. Jean went to her, allowed herself to be engulfed.

“The doctor told us to watch her. And we did! He said this could happen.” Jean wailed to the rafters.

Gisela pulled her feet into the shadow. “What will I do? What will I do? I can’t leave her here, Hannie.

But I can’t stay. This place has taken every one of my children.

It will take me next, and I’m about for it. ”

“I know. You simply can’t. No, it isn’t fair,” Hannie said, patting Jean’s arm.

“This is it, I tell you. I cannot bury another child. I told Thomas. We’re leaving tomorrow. You’ll see to her burial, won’t you? You’ll do that for me.”

“You’re being . . .”

“Batty? Am I batty for not wanting to put another child in the ground?”

Gisela had asked Hannie about the nickname the O’Kane boys taunted Fiadh with, and Hannie said that following the deaths of twin sons—one from influenza, the other from a mule kick to the head—only weeks apart, Jean had laid up for months, leaving Thomas to care for Fiadh, who was only a toddler.

“‘Poor Batty Jean!’ they said, like her name was in a drinking song! Then one day, she rose up, got dressed. ‘We’ll speak no more of it,’ she said and never did, though I suppose the name still has a certain ring to it. ”

“Jean,” Hannie said. “Where’s Thomas?”

“He’s with her. Your Hugh has gone for the priest.”

Elisabeth looked up, tapped her finger on her lips to tell Gisela not to speak. She backed slowly to the open door and ran out without Hannie or Jean noticing.

Jean marched around the room. “Curse God. Curse him! Theresa O’Kane and those beautiful boys of hers. You and your sons, and now these German girls are yours too! God gives and gives to everyone and takes and takes from me. God leaves me with nothing!”

“Let’s not do that,” Hannie said, as if God was in the room taking notes. “You have Thomas. You have me and Hugh. The wee girls need us, especially now. Stay. You must.”

“I wish one of those girls had died instead of mine,” Jean said.

“You don’t mean that.”

“I do. I really do. If God wanted a child so bad, take one that no one else wants. Take one who doesn’t have a mother who loves her. Don’t take mine. It is not too late! Switch them out! I dare you, God. Switch them out!” She raised her fist as if she were throwing lightning to heaven.

Those words that nourished Gisela came together now, what the women were saying about her and her sister. They were castaways. Orphans. Below her, the room turned into the sea. Jean was right. It should have been her. She was to blame. Clumsy fool.

“Friend,” Hannie said. “Listen to me. Listen. Stay. Take one of these shamrock girls into your house. They both need a mother.” Her voice dropped but, from the shadows, Gisela could still hear every word. “Take Elisabeth. She’s easier. She goes along.”

“I’ll never have peace here. Let me leave!” Jean wailed. “Fiadh. Fiadh!”

Suddenly, the prospect of Fiadh in America didn’t seem so bad to Gisela.

What had been the fuss? In America, Fiadh would be alive.

In America, Fiadh could write letters, maybe someday return.

Or maybe someday Gisela and Elisabeth would have gone to visit.

Forget the ship. They could have flown in an airplane and visited this New England that Jean and Thomas waxed on about.

Gisela closed her eyes and pictured Fiadh alive, living a different life after all.

“You are in America,” she said out loud.

She repeated it. An incantation. “Fiadh is in America.” She opened her eyes.

Hannie was staring up at her, a peculiar look on her face. “What did you say?” Hannie hissed, her voice calm but alarmed, a sound meant to let the sleeping rest. “Get back in bed. Cover up. And where is Elisabeth? Where is your sister?”

Jean folded over in her chair, a puppet collapsed, strings limp. A withering look from Hannie again. “See what you’ve done?”

The twilling light of early evening drizzled in through dirty windows.

From the darkening loft, Gisela kept her ears perked.

She could not see Hannie or Jean anymore, could not know from their expressions whether what Hannie said next was sinister or generous, but she could hear them clearly in the small house.

It was not simply an idea. It was a proposal.

“Or take Elisabeth to America. These girls have no one to miss them. They’ll be separated eventually. No one would have them both. You asked God to switch them. I say we do it ourselves.”

Gisela gasped, retreated from the opening. The voices lowered to a whisper. Gisela put her ear to the floorboards. Jean’s voice pitched and dropped on words like betrayal and grief and chance and love. “It’s too late,” Jean said clearly. “We’re leaving tomorrow, and that’s that.”

“I’ll take you home,” Hannie said. “We’ll talk to Thomas. He’ll see it my way.”

Gisela crawled into bed. Where was Elisabeth?

Had she been taken already? And where would that leave her?

Without Fiadh, without Elisabeth, she would have nothing.

She slipped into shallow sleep and soon was out to sea in the punt, rowing and rowing, going nowhere, a motorboat full of Nazi boys and cousin Herbert in hot pursuit.

War planes buzzed overhead, dropped bodies in bloodstained yellow dresses into the green sea around her.

She woke with a start when Elisabeth slid onto the pallet next to her.

It was a nightmare. They were still in Ireland.

For now. She rolled over onto her back, stared with Elisabeth into the dark beams.

“The priest came for Fiadh,” Elisabeth said. “I saw her through the window. Fiadh is dead. It is so sad. So awful! They’ll send us back to the nuns for sure.”

“Why would they send us away?”

“Fiadh is dead because of us. They won’t want us anymore.”

So, they would be sent back. And then what?

They’d gotten lucky the nuns had let them stay together.

Maybe their luck had run out. Gisela was done leaving everything up to chance.

She remembered Herbert, his dirty fingers, his sickening words.

She remembered Mutti’s bloodstained dress.

They had nothing left in Germany, and now Ireland was ruined too.

“I’m so tired,” Elisabeth said, burrowing into Gisela. “What a terrible day. But let’s not fret. You must think of Mutti waiting for us. You must keep that hope alive.”

Elisabeth and her silly fantasy about Mutti! How it galled. She was not coming back. Their life was forfeit. The sea boiled in her throat. Gisela turned away.

“What? Are you angry?” Elisabeth asked. “I’m sorry I wasn’t the one to jump in and save you. Is that it?”

It was Elisabeth who always insisted they stay together, even though it meant that they got stuck with Herbert or had to stay longer with the nuns.

Gisela turned to face her sister. Though they were close enough to taste each other’s breath, Gisela imagined a lifting away, the yank of a paratrooper when the chute opens. “We can’t swim.”

She remembered a bridge over the Rhine, walking with their father, holding his hand.

She had spied a mewling kitten clinging to a drifting branch in the current.

Gisela begged him to save it. “Das K?tzchen, Vati!” He said if he were to jump in, he and the cat would both drown.

We are in that swollen river now, sister.

We must grab hold of what we can. “We can’t swim,” Gisela repeated.

“You couldn’t save me. If you’d fallen overboard, I couldn’t have saved you either.

We’d both be dead.” She felt her knees digging into the seahorse’s ribs, felt Fiadh’s sea-silked hair tangle through her fingers.

She touched her own head. It felt the same.

“I should have tried,” Elisabeth said, her voice thick with sleep.

“No,” Gisela said. “Listen to me. You did the right thing. You saved yourself.”

“Yes, well, we are alive. But poor Fiadh . . . Wir müssen mutig sein. Be brave,” Elisabeth murmured as she drifted off.

Gisela snuck down the ladder, her ragged stuffed rabbit under her arm.

On the tamped grass path to the Beattys’ cottage, she watched her brown shoes move beneath her, carrying her as if she were not in control.

Her heart pounded. She went to the side of the cottage where a low light flickered.

She could see the bed through the window.

Fiadh’s body lay on top of the covers. There was a blueness to her, part sea, part sky, and a greenness too.

Hardly a girl at all anymore. Gisela wondered if vines might come up from the floor, entwine her friend until she turned into loamy dirt, into Ireland itself.

She bowed her head, tapped her forehead with her fingers.

Be brave. She moved to the door and opened it.

Jean sat stone-faced at the table, Thomas standing over her, both in traveling clothes.

Their eyes were sunken. Hugh and Hannie sat on a bench, hands in their laps.

The priest—bent and paunchy, his slapped red cheeks flamed with boil scars—stood next to Thomas.

Gisela did not skip a beat. She went to Jean, bent to her knees, the gritty floor pocking her flesh.

She placed her cheek on Jean’s lap, sanded her skin against the rough of her dress.

She was not fine like that woman in cornflower blue, but she smelt like Mutti, like fire and worry. She felt Jean’s hand on her head.

Though Hannie’s voice sounded an alarm—“Child! Child!”—Gisela focused only on Jean and on Thomas next to her.

The shoes that carried her, the knees that held her up, her war-torn heart.

She would make her own luck now. She would save herself and perhaps Elisabeth at the same time.

She croaked in a mix of German and English all that was in her head, spewing every thought and excuse and reason that it should be her they take, not Elisabeth, who was too bossy and too mouthy, who would never tolerate being separated, would never behave.

She, Gisela, would do whatever they asked.

She would never tell a soul. “Nicht zurück nach Deutschland. Bitte.”

Thomas placed gentle hands on Gisela’s shoulders. “What is she on about?”

“Take me to America,” Gisela said, in plain English. “I will be Fiadh in America.”