Chapter Text
As a child, Jack Kelly had delighted in asking his parents to doodle on their skin. He’d rush from one parent to the other, watching the ink on his mother’s arm disappear and gazing in awe as her even handwriting reappeared on his father’s burly arm instead. He knew that this was something parents could do; parents were soulmates, and soulmates communicated through skin and ink.
He was disappointed at first when he realized that the things he wrote on his own skin never duplicated themselves on either of his parents—wasn’t his mother always saying that he was her heart and soul? But she comforted him by saying that he was so much a part of her that any time he wrote on himself it was as good as writing on her, too.
“Mothers don’t need ink to find their children, darling. You’re my own dear boy, and whenever you need me, I feel it in my bones.”
“But my bones don’t feel when you need me,” he complained. “I know Papa’s your soulmate, but if I’m your soul, why can’t you send messages to me like you do Papa?”
“Your soulmate will be someone outside of our family, Jack,” she explained gently.
“But I don’t want anyone else,” he said, frowning. “I don’t need anyone but you.”
“You’ll feel differently when you’re older,” she said, stroking his cheek.
“I won’t!”
“That’s fine,” she said. “You don’t have to. It’s alright if you do, though, and then—”
“I said I won’t!” His eyes glistened with fierce tears. “I won’t, I won’t! Aren’t you listening?”
“I’m sorry, darling. It’s okay.” She pulled him up into her lap and cradled him close. And he let her, even though he’d decided that now that he was nearly five he was really much too big and grown-up for this sort of thing. But he thought this must be one of those times when his bones ought to be feeling that she needed him, so he snuggled in close. He was doing this as a favor to his mother, he told himself; no reason to admit that he found this embrace comforting, too, that he wanted her arms around him as a shield against growing up and a barrier against a world full of people who weren’t family.
He curled himself up tightly against her chest and hid his face in the folds of her blouse, hot tears running down his cheeks. “Don’t make me go, Mama, don’t make me find a soulmate!”
“Shhhh, macushla,” she said, stroking his head and rocking him from side to side. “I won’t ever do that, Jackie. You never have to leave me. I’ll never make you go.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
*
It was a while before he plucked up the courage to ask about soulmates again. The kids at school talked about it sometimes; the ones who still had two living parents were just as frustrated as Jack was at being able to see their parents write messages and yet unable to do it themselves.
“Why don’t it work, Mama?” Jack asked, scuffing his shoes on the pavement as he accompanied his mother to the butcher’s. “I keeps drawin’ on myself, but it just stays there. ‘M I broken?”
“Why doesn’t it work,” she said, suppressing a smile. “And you’re not broken. It’ll work when you get older.”
“How?”
“Anything you write on your skin will appear on your soulmate, just like it does for Papa and me. It'll happen once you're old enough; you just have to be patient. In the meantime, you keep drawing—I love your beautiful pictures, darling. I’m glad they don’t end up on my skin—I’d never be able to bathe again for fear of washing them away.”
Jack perked up. “Does that mean I don’t have to take a bath this week?”
His mother laughed. “You still need to take your bath, but if you do that without complaining from now until July, how about I promise to get you a sketchbook for your birthday?”
His eyes grew wide. “Really?”
“Really. But only if you don’t complain about bathtime for the next four months,” she cautioned.
“Deal.” He spat in his hand and extended it to his mother.
She laughed again. “I swear, you get more and more like your father every day.” She spat in her hand and completed the handshake. “You’re growing up so fast, darling-- soon you’ll be a man, and you’ll spend all your time writing messages on your skin to some pretty girl.”
Jack grimaced. “No, I won’t. Girls is stinky.”
“Are stinky,” she corrected. “And I’m a girl, you know. Am I stinky, too?”
“You ain’t a girl,” Jack said, tutting at his mother’s ignorance. “You’re a mother. 'S not the same thing at all.”
“I see,” she said. “Well, I used to be a girl, and I can tell you for sure that girls aren’t stinky. In fact, a lot of them are very nice.”
He looked at her skeptically. His mother wouldn’t lie to him, but this information was straining his credulity. “Maybe,” he said. He thought for a minute. “I guess Niamh’s a girl,” he offered, naming his favorite playmate, the little girl from the one-room tenement apartment next door.
“That’s right,” his mother said.
“An’ she don’t smell.”
“No, she doesn’t.”
“Hmm.” Jack was going to have to think about this one. In the meantime, he reached out to hold his mother’s hand. He had to make sure she made it safely to the butcher’s, after all. He was her little man, and it was his job to protect her.
*
The last conversation about soulmates that Jack ever had with his mother took place when he was six. She was already sick then, although Jack wasn’t aware of how badly. Everyone had a cough in the winter; nothing worth getting worked up over, not when there were bills to pay and mouths to feed and work to be done. This cough would turn out to be different, of course, but the only one who could possibly have realized that so early was Eileen Kelly herself, and if she knew, she wasn’t telling.
Jack looked up from his copybook and watched his mother at her piecework. He knew better than to interrupt her focus; the work paid poorly and by the piece, so she needed to finish as many as possible if they were to eat that night. But this was important. “Mama, how old were you when you met Papa?”
“Eighteen,” she said, snapping off some finished threads with her teeth.
“So that’s when the words start showin’ up?”
“No,” she said, reaching for the next swatch of fabric. “It started at fifteen for me. It’s different for everyone, though.”
Jack sat for a moment, trying to do the math in his head. He soon gave up and decided to count on his fingers.
“So it took you three years to find Papa?”
“Mhmm,” she said, sticking some extra pins in her mouth.
“That’s a long time,” he said, swinging his feet back and forth under the table. “I don’t wanna wait that long. Soon’s I’m fifteen, I’m gonna write, ‘Hello soulmate. This is Jack Kelly. I live with Mama and Papa in the apartment next to Niamh O’Malley. Come visit.’”
To his surprise, his mother shook her head violently back and forth and reached a hand across the table to clamp it over his wrist. “You mustn’t ever do that, darling. Promise me?”
“Why not?”
“Because it’ll hurt you, Jack. If you try to give your soulmate any information that would let them find you before you meet naturally-- your name, where you are, where you go to school, what kind of work you do-- anything specific, darling, anything at all, the message won’t send. And instead of sending, it will hurt you. Badly.”
Jack pursed his lips and kicked a chubby leg against the table. “How badly?”
“You remember Mr. Scott from down the street?”
Jack shuddered. Mr. Scott was one of the many drunks who lived in the neighborhood, and last summer he’d stumbled out in front of a large dray horse pulling a fully loaded ice cart behind it. The sound of the man’s screams had haunted Jack for weeks. Mr. Scott was a beggar now; his mangled legs made him unfit for work. Jack brought Mr. Scott apples sometimes, hurriedly thrusting them into the man’s outstretched hands before running away, but usually he took an alternate route to school these days. He simply couldn’t bear the sight of the man sitting there on the sidewalk, broken beyond repair.
His mother lifted and held his chin so that he had to look her in the eyes. “It'll make you scream like that, Jack. So promise me you won’t ever try it.”
Jack wriggled, trying to escape her grasp. This had gotten much more serious than he wanted. His mother was always so gentle; it scared him when she went all firm like this.
“Jack.” She gripped harder.
“I promise,” he whined, using his petulance to cover up his fear.
She scanned his face a moment longer, then nodded and released him. “Good. You’ll find your soulmate when you’re meant to, sweetie. There’s no need to rush it.” She placed her piecework down and motioned to him to come over, wrapping him in a tight hug. She laid her head atop his and rubbed his back. “You’ll find someone someday, macushla. Don’t you worry. And if it takes a while, then it’s not because there’s anything wrong with you—it’s just because whoever you’re waiting for is going to need an awful lot of time to grow into someone wonderful enough to deserve you.”
Jack nodded into her shoulder, savoring the smell of fresh soap and sage and home that always clung to his mother. “I promise,” he said again.
She kissed the top of his head and then pushed him away suddenly so that she could cough into her hand. Jack frowned at the noise, a dry, racking shudder that didn’t fit with his image of her at all. She looked up to see his eyes narrowed, his concern writ plain. “I’m fine, love.” She smiled and patted him on the back, pushing him gently back to the bench on the other side of the table. “Now scoot and finish up that homework. You’re a smart boy, Jack, and I want you putting those smarts to good use.”
“Yes, Mama,” he said, climbing back onto the bench and reopening his copybook. He sighed. He’d much rather be drawing than practicing spelling words, but the last time he’d handed in a page of pictures instead of a page of properly punctuated sentences, he’d gotten a paddling in front of the class. He wasn’t eager to repeat that experience, so spelling it was. “Paper. P… a…”