On Your Doorstep: Perfect for those who loved Close to Home. Laura Elliot
leave. He spoke with certainty. This child would carry his name.
I asked him if he loved me. We’d had so little time to know each other.
‘Yes,’ he said, and I believe he spoke sincerely. ‘I love you, Susanne. That’s all we need to begin our lives together.’
A week later the pain began. Miriam drove me to the hospital.
‘First babies, it’s common enough,’ she said, and cried with me, held me gently, as if she was afraid I’d shatter at her touch. She faded quietly into the background when David returned from the oilfields to comfort me.
‘We will still be married,’ he said, ‘and we will have many children.’
We married that summer in Maoltrán. I’d achieved what I desired yet I was haunted by ghosts; the ache was unbearable. Miriam moved into my house and I moved to Rockrose. ‘Less clutter, more space,’ she insisted. ‘Two women together in the family home, not a good idea.’
The Burren billowed into the distance, a grey patchwork quilt stitched in green. I imagined the earth seething beneath the limestone ridges and dolmen tombs; and on the surface, the gentle orchids and gentians, the woodruff, harebells, eyebrights and rockrose spurting from the cracks. This grimly beautiful landscape would absorb my grief. We would have more babies. They would grow up wild and free and happy.
I was in the business of persuasion but fate mocked my hopes one by one. And then they began to whisper to me, my lost children: no more…no more…no more.
They don’t whisper any more. Not since you came to me. The only sound that breaks the night silence are your fretful cries, as if you are trying to break through the walls with your voice.
Today, sitting at my kitchen table that had once been hers, Miriam asked how I was feeling. Her expression was guarded, as if she was picking her way through thistles. She wanted to know if I’d seen Dr Williamson.
I shook my head and told her everything was under control. I’d seen a doctor when I was in Dublin visiting my father. He prescribed antidepressants to get me through the next few months.
She frowned, as if I’d suggested lacing my tea with arsenic. ‘They will only mask your symptoms,’ she said, a hint of ice in her tone. ‘We’re not exactly a backwater here,’ she added. ‘Dr Williamson is highly qualified and a trained counsellor to boot.’
‘I’m suffering from exhaustion,’ I replied. ‘I’ve a child who doesn’t sleep at night.’
She bit her bottom lip and looked away. ‘I’m not for a moment suggesting you need counselling,’ she said. ‘But I suspect you’re suffering from a touch of postnatal depression.’
You, as if hearing her words, awakened and cried. Miriam waved me back into my chair and went upstairs to pick you up. Moments passed. I heard her footsteps crossing the landing. The creak of old wood tells its own story. I walked silently up the stairs, skipped the fifth step, which always squeaks, and paused at the top. She was holding you in her arms. Her chin rested on your head and her hand patted your back, pat-pat-pat. You gurgled against her, content in her embrace as she stared into David’s bedroom.
A sweater lay over a chair, a book and his Walkman were on the dressing table. I had not touched his room since he left last week and it was obvious we no longer shared a bed. That’s the worst of knowing the geography of a house. It’s possible to figure out what should be other people’s private business. I turned before she noticed me and waited for her in the kitchen.
‘What you and David need is a break,’ she said when she returned. ‘I can take a few days off work and move into Rockrose to look after my little cabbage.’
I took you from her and sat you on my knee. You began to cry, to wriggle in my arms, your legs kicking against me.
‘Colicky,’ said Miriam. ‘David was exactly the same for the first few months.’
She loves making comparisons and is delighted that your eyes turned out to be brown. ‘Bog pools,’ she calls them. ‘Exactly like her father.’
‘Later, in the summer,’ I promised her. ‘Maybe then we’ll go away.’
She refused to be fobbed off, believing, no doubt, that our friendship allowed her an inappropriate level of interference. ‘Living down the lane, so far removed from others, it’s isolating you from normal life,’ she said. ‘Too much solitude is for men with beards who like to perch on rocks.’
She waited for me to share her laughter and looked at her hands when I remained silent.
I saw her to the front door. She kissed your cheeks.
‘I’m sorry you’re not coming back to the studio,’ she said. ‘But you now have everything you need to make this a happy home. Look after my son. He lost one child. Let him enjoy his daughter. It’s a shame he has to spend so much time away from home.’
‘It’s his own choice,’ I replied.
‘Is it?’ Her question was rhetorical. She had already decided on the answer.
I locked the door behind her. I allowed the silence to settle. You stirred, restless, your eyes searching, always searching. Miriam was right to call them pools. I want them to pool with love for me but more often they pool with tears and you awaken in the night with a shriek that jerks me upright in the bed. I rock you…rock you…walking the floor until you exhaust yourself back to sleep.
Carla
The letters had started to arrive shortly after Isobel’s disappearance. Mostly they were messages of support, offering prayers and hope. Medals, mass bouquets and holy pictures fell from the envelopes. Good luck tokens also came, small packages with crystals and dried bunches of four-leaf clover, amulets and phials of sand or strange-coloured liquids. The latter ones were usually accompanied by long, rambling descriptions of guiding spirits and psychic predictions. But other letters – Carla was unable to tell if the senders were unbalanced or unbelievably cruel – claimed she was being punished by God for her past wanton behaviour. These letters were mostly linked to the lingerie advertising campaign that the press had unearthed. Photographs had been cut from newspapers. Much folded and with suspicious stains, they were enclosed with the anonymous letters. She saw herself in lingerie and transparent tops, boldly posing. How thoughtlessly she had worn such clothes, proud of her body, enjoying the caress of the camera, blissfully unaware that such images would haunt her future.
Whore of Babylon…Scarlet Bitch…Shameless Hussy…God Has Seen Fit To Punish Thy Wickedness.
Since the Garda search had been scaled down, the number of letters had decreased. Carla flung the morning’s post on the table and made a cafetière of coffee. She read every letter she received, searched them for clues, hoping that somewhere in the crazed ramblings she would find the key to Isobel’s disappearance. So far, nothing had been deduced from the well-meaning messages of sympathy – or from the dark sponges that soaked up her misery and squeezed it out again in vile capitals.
A psychic called Miranda May had sent a prediction in this morning’s mail. For once, the letter claiming psychic intuition was short and to the point.
Dear Carla,
I have received strong psychic signals from your daughter. Look for her in a place of stone. She is safe and well-nourished. Do not be downhearted. Keep the candle of hope burning. Your patience will be rewarded.
Miranda May.
Carla grimaced and folded it back into the envelope. The next letter belonged to the ugly category. Even before she opened it she knew, could almost smell the stale air of venom and religious wrath that possessed the senders. She stared at the scrawling handwriting. You deserved God’s