Perfectly Preventable Deaths

35 Self-Heal

Mam’s angry with me. I can tell, because of the pinch of her face and her tight grip, knuckles white against the steering wheel. When she meets my eye in the rear-view mirror, her eyes have that shuttered feel to them. Like I’m only seeing what she’s holding back.

I didn’t tell her. About what Lon did, putting his hands on me to score points on some imaginary scoreboard he uses to control girls like my sister. I think it broke her. It’s hard enough already, I think, looking at Catlin hunched over, shoulders heaving. She’s sobbing. Properly sobbing. Her face and body curled against the door. As far away from me as she can manage. Everything she had been keeping in is spilling out. All of the anger, sadness. This fight between us opened up a wound, and it’s infected. Something cruel has moved in, taken root.

‘Love, are you OK?’ asks Mam.

‘You don’t care,’ Catlin says. ‘I …’ and then she starts again. Tears clear as crystal, fat as ticks, crawling down her face, around her nose and into her mouth. I pass her a tissue, but she tells me to fuck off, and Mam doesn’t say anything.

The drive home seems to take much longer than usual. I feel so far away from both of them. Like we are reverse getting to know each other, slipping out of bonds that held us tight. Is this what love does to people? Brian, Oona, Lon. We fall in love and then we fall apart.

The mountains in the dusk are dark and spiky, pocked with little hollows. Pools and boggy wetlands in the dips. Not for turf, but ones that suck you in and keep you there like a secret for years.

We went to see a bogman once with school. He looked like shoe leather, beaten in the vague shape of a person. Not unlike Brian’s shrunken little head. I think of Catlin’s warmth leaching out into the earth. Her head misshaping, warping through with time. We’re only small. Easier to hide than other people. You’d hardly have to chop us up at all.

I can’t say anything. I mean, I try. I start to …

‘It wasn’t …’

and

‘I wouldn’t …’

and

‘He’s lying.’

She shuts me down. I am the villain here. Mam looks at me too. I see her eyes in the mirror, all clouded with suspicion. Questioning and different to mine. Dad’s eyes were green, like mine and Catlin’s are. At least they were, before he burned to death. Good people suffer. I don’t know if I’m good though. I’d like to think I am. I’d like to be. But how can you be sure?

The car pulls up to the driveway. Catlin hops out, runs in. Mam stops me before I do the same.

‘We need to talk. Wait upstairs in your room.’

Her voice is stern, no room for debate.

I go upstairs. The wood is dark and polished, paintings hang on chains in frames of gold. Other people’s faces, staring, staring. Nobody looks happy on the walls. Or in the walls, I think.

My room is gutted, like a deer that wolves have picked clean, licked clean. All my herbs, my salt, are lined up on the windowsill. A big black bin bag sits at the edge of my bed. My eyes begin to sting. I know the drill. What Mam wants me to do. Erase that last small part of me that needed to explore my own potential.

Take the magic in my hand and clench a fist and crush it into dust.

But how can I?

I just want to feel safe.

My heart is beating faster, faster, faster. I can feel my breath catch in my throat. My eyes sting. I take my hand and make a fist and punch my forehead, hard. I haven’t done that since I was a child. I used to … when the other children hurt my feelings sometimes. But there was always Catlin, and I stopped. I grew.

I feel alone.

Her feet are quickly coming up the stairs.

And I can hear my sister in her room, murmuring and crying to herself.

Mam opens up the door, and comes inside.

‘Madeline, I’ve asked you, and I’ve told you.’

I stare at the wall behind her head, glaring at the stone like it was deciding not to help me. Her tone hurts my heart.

‘You know what we’re going through with your sister. And this nonsense – it’s the last thing that I need right now.’

‘Mam …’ I say, my voice is low, ashamed.

She raises her hand to silence me.

‘Stop. I have tried to be understanding, and to reason with you. But I won’t do it any more. You’ve been leaning on this since we got here. And you can stand on your own two feet, Madeline. You do not need a crutch. All this –’ she gestures around her – ‘it’s just a crutch. And if you go to college, you’ll be living with people, and it will scare them. These strange things you do. And I don’t want that.’

‘I don’t. I mean, I keep it …’

‘Under the bed, I know. And in your wardrobe, and on your windowsill and in your sock drawer and in the toilet cistern …’

She’s thorough. I’ll give her that. I feel anger rising up within me. I want to say the things I do are real. I want to tell her. I am afraid to tell her. I stay silent, biting my fingernails. The little parts of me I can pare down.

‘This stuff is dangerous, love,’ she says. ‘If you give in to these urges, your life will get smaller and smaller, until these things –’ she gestures to the boxes and the jars, the little piles – ‘are all you are. And you are more than that. I love you. I want you to be OK. OK?’

‘OK,’ I lie. I start gathering all my little pieces, bit by bit. Piling them into the black sack Mam holds open like the mouth of a dark cave. Things I’ve left in different places too. The little salt packets I tried to hide in her room, the ones from under Catlin’s mattress.

Tears start rolling down my face. The shame for what I’d learned to be less ashamed of returns and washes over me, engulfs my face and neck in red. I’m trying very hard to hold it back.

‘I know it hurts, love,’ Mam tells me. ‘But some things that we think we need are damaging. Look at Catlin and Lon.’

I let a bunch of dried sage, tied with twine, fall into the bag. The room is warm, it smells of bin bag, sweet, disgusting plastic. I feel like if I touched it, my fingers would emerge all soaked in tar.

This is not like that. The things I do are nothing like Lon Delacroix. I close my eyes. I think of Catlin’s face. His bony fingers crawling on my skin like spiders’ legs. The triumph in his smile. His stupid flaring nostrils. Like a bull. I just need to get this done. To get Mam off my back. And when she’s finished doing whatever this is, asserting her control, making her point, I can decide where I will go from here.

It takes forever. When everything is packaged up, I look at her and sigh. I think of the candles and religious paraphernalia that Catlin gathers in her room. She has an actual altar, for crying out loud. Weird things are fine when they’re pretty. It’s when it’s messy, or ugly that people get creeped out and try to stop you.

I mop the floor, dust the shelves, change the sheets. Every trace of me, of who I am, has left the room, I think.

I look at Mam. ‘Are you happy now?’ I ask her.

‘No, Madeline,’ she says, ‘I’m really not.’ She looks like she wants to say more things, but I don’t want to hear them, so I ask her if I can go. And she says that I can. I go to the garden and press my hands to the damp earth in the dark and try to breathe my way back into safety. There’s something pulsing, in the pit of me, inside my blood and breath. It’s at my core, and maybe it is my core. And my mother hates it. I always thought, deep down, that if I were to tell her I liked girls, that she would be supportive, that it would be OK. But – after this?

I go back inside and softly knock on the door between our bedrooms, hoping that Catlin maybe heard the thing with Mam, that she maybe feels some sympathy, some something. When I hear her in there, I reach my voice under the gap between the door and the floor. Lying on my stomach like a soldier, I try to reshape feelings with my words.

‘What you saw … it isn’t what you saw,’ I say to Catlin. ‘He tried to explain. To make me like him better. He put his hands on me. But not like that.’

‘Shut up.’

I do. This sort of magic – normal human stuff – is far beyond me. I shut my mouth and look out at the mountains where they found them.

Amanda Shale, blonde hair attached to bone. Skull cracked almost in two, and three ribs missing.

Nora Ginn. Her father’s little girl. They smashed her face to pieces like a plate.

Bridget Hora, just a few scraps left, the rest was missing.

Helen Groarke, who kept a little flesh.

I’m not a bad person. It’s just I let things happen. I thought that I could stop it, but I can’t.

I hear Catlin’s voice, rising and softly falling in her room. I crack the door to look. She is asleep. And she is saying:

‘Lon.

I love you.

Lon. Laurent?’

Back in my room, I lie awake. My hands still smell of dust. I think about the soft green things that grow. The hot small lives that teem under the earth and only wake when we are fast asleep. About the herbs. The garden that we used to have in Cork. Of lavender for patience. Mint for calm. The textures and the smells. Catlin’s hand in mine, walking in the door of big school.

‘You will be fine,’ she said. ‘I’ve got you. Always.’

It isn’t true now. Something big has changed.

Soft earth. Cold wind. Wet rain.

Mountains cut the edges of the sky.

My eyes tilt shut. I flatten into sleep.