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There is nobody waiting for Kayleigh at the doors of Dublin airport when she arrives home from America.
The taxi journey is quiet, her breath fogging the windows. She dusts the tips of her fingertips to the glass there and swirls a syrupy-slow love heart through a trickle of condensation.
The front door of her childhood home is familiar, when she stops in front of it. Tucked at the end of a terraced laneway and battered from years of cold weather.
As children, in the summer, it was always left open, breezing lazily on its hinges. There was never any point in closing it. It would only be slammed open a moment later, shoved into the wall once more, bruising the wallpaper. Tiny, sticky hands swinging off the handle and a shrill shriek of, “Mammy? John won’t share!”
Out front, the low step in the doorway is just wide enough for three small children to sit, snug together. Elbows knocking, knees bouncing, ice cream in rivulets dripping down their pudgy hands as their wafer cones melted faster than they could lick.
Kayleigh slides her bag off her shoulder and sets it down on the ground, balancing it half on the instep of her boot to buffer it against the rain-damp concrete. She carried this bag so carefully, all the way from America, the now-crumpled handles threaded tight through her fingers. Cradled it lovingly in her lap for the entire plane journey, dipping inside over and over just to make sure the gifts were all still safe.
A pair of suede gloves for her older sister. A snow globe for her little brother. A hand-stitched leather journal for her mother, paired with a matching pink fountain pen. She has always liked to fill pages upon pages of notebooks with her recipes. Kayleigh spotted this journal in a small boutique in West Virginia and knew instantly that it would sit so beautifully on her mother’s cluttered, bric-a-brac shelf. And lastly, a novel that she's heard the book shops in Ireland are quietly refusing to sell.
When she presses open the front door, her palm easily finds the hand-shaped curve worn deep into the wood. A breaddcrumb of light spills out into the laneway as she steps into the home. The hallway, just inside, is decorated top-to-toe for Christmas. Glittery tinsel spirals sticky-taped to the ceiling and the staircase spindles adorned with crepe-paper sleigh bells.
She has not even set her bag down when, at the end of the hallway, the kitchen door belts wide open. Her little sister comes tumbling through it, backwards, tossing a joke over her shoulder into the commottion behind her in the kitchen. She spins on her heels, hops a step towards the stairs, and then rocks to a stop.
Illuminated by the golden light of a lamp, her sister in her lopsided, woollen socks is so irresistibly homely in shape.
She gasps, “Kayleigh?”
A rotten weed of homesickness dug itself into the earth of Kayleigh’s soul on the day she first left home. Now, as a smile unravels across her face, as her sister blink-blink-blinks at her in surprise, she feels those roots loosening, slipping easily out of her chest and through her ribs like silky, silky ribbon.
“It’s me,” she says, and she’s grinning now. She feels it tingle in the tips of her ears. “It’s me!”
She catches her sister’s jump-hug with a tripping step backwards, wrapping her arms tight around just as they thump with a thud against the door.
“Jesus christ, Kayleigh!” Her sister squeaks, squeezing her round the neck. Then, pulling back a little, her hand comes to rest shaky on Kayleigh’s chest, fingernails scritching at the soft, grey wool of her fancy, fancy coat.
“Is it really you?” and her eyes flicker, up and down, up and down, to double check the truth of it, to reassure herself of the reality of the warmth in her arms. “I thought you weren’t flying in til tomorrow morning!”
Kayleigh’s fingers curl-up tighter in the back of her sister’s fuzzy jumper. With a smile, she dusts a kiss to her smooth cheek, right where she knows a little dimple lives. She traced that tiny mark countless times with her the tips of her fingers, back when she was nothing more than a schoolgirl herself and her sister but a bouncing baby cradled on her knee.
“It’s really me,” she promises, with a laugh. Bumping their noses together, nuzzling closer, she whispers, “Do you think Ma and Da will be okay with me coming earlier? Is there a bed to spare?”
Her sister’s smile is brighter than the sparkly decorations dangling above their heads. She grabs for Kayleigh’s palm, wraps it up snugly in the cradle of her two own, and laces their fingers together.
“I think we could probably persuade them,” she hums.
She brings their joined hands up to her face and tucks her cheek snugly against Kayleigh’s knuckles.
Pressing her as close as possible, whispering, “Yeah, I’d say we can.”
The morning of Christmas Eve comes with the nippy promise of soon-to-fall snowflakes.
In the childhood bedroom she shared with her two sisters, Kayleigh is flopped starfish-splayed on the bed.
She’s been getting a lot of headaches, lately. Knots of tension that thump between her temples, press heavily between her eyebrows.
“Hormonal changes,” the nice American doctor had told her. “It’s normal. Nothing to worry about. Take this medicine and make sure you rest. Drink up a lot of water.
The pillow is soft as butter beneath her head. She rolls onto her side, pressing her nose into the downy give of it, feeling the shivery shift of the feathers stuffed inside. The scent of the washing powder, still, is so comforting. Stirring threads of memories from deep, deep, deep in her bones.
Early school mornings when she huddled down in her bed and burrowed the blankets tight around her shoulders. The tick-tick-tick of the gas heater as it sputtered to life in the corner and began to wheeze trickles of warmth into the room. The click of the bathroom light as her siblings bumbled sleepily through their morning routines and bickered over toothpaste.
Kayleigh has had so many homes, now. Japan. America. England. But Ireland, always -- here, always -- feels like home for her soul.
There’s a rap on the wall outside the bedroom and before she even lifts her head, before she can get an elbow beneath her to raise up, her mother is peeking her curious face around the door. Silken scarf wrapped round her head, cheeks tickled rose-petal pink in the apples from the winter wind outside.
“Are you feeling any better?” she whispers. She crosses the room to take a seat on the edge of the bed, and rests one gentle hand on the curve of Kayleigh’s calf.
Softly. She’s always so soft, with Kayleigh. With them. She always has been.
“It could be the weather, you know, Kay. The snow coming,” she says. She strokes Kayleigh’s leg before moving to pluck one of the metal pins free from her head scarf. When she pulls it out, her hair tumbles down in a woosh over her shoulders, waterfall-silky. “They say the change in the weather can put pressure on your head.”
Kayleigh reaches lazily up to twirl a lock of her mother’s hair round her fingertip. It slips baby’s breath-soft over her knuckles.
“It’s probably just from the plane, Ma,” she says, tugging it. “it’ll pass. Don’t worry.”
Her mother smiles.
“Or maybe,” she says, and she wiggles her eyebrows now, dipping down to lean closer, like she’s passing a secret, “you’ve just gotten too used to America. Maybe it’s a shock to the system to be back here, back to all this doom and gloom.”
Kayleigh feels warmth drizzle like honey through her. When she was little, she was so utterlly convinced that it was her mother’s own hand that hung the stars in the sky at night and coaxed the sun from its sleep in the morning.
In a way, she still believes that.
Her mother’s hand makes a staticky brush sound in friction against the nylon of Kayleigh’s tights. She squeezes gently again, before standing back up.
“Close your eyes,” she suddenly, and she claps her hands once before spinning a finger towards Kayleigh. “I have a little surprise for you.”
Kayleigh does so. She even goes so far as to lay one hand across her face, shrouding her vision entirely, and she hopes she memorises the feel of her own smile against her sleeve. She hopes she can tuck the memory of it into her pocket to hold on cold, lonely days. With the other hand, she gets a hold of the blankets beneath her and pulls herself to a wobbly sit, scooting til her legs are dangling off the edge of the mattress.
Only the very tips of her toes skim the floor. The soles of her feet do not reach, at all. She’s not tall, she never has been. But she wonders if her baby will be, because David is tall.
She wonders what her baby will look like.
She hopes he inherits her mother’s green, green eyes.
Footsteps pad at the worn carpet as her mother scurries back across the room.
“Okay!” she chirps, bird-song bright. And the excitement in her voice is like a layer of crackle candy, ready to burst, ready to pop. Sugar glass on her tongue. “Open!”
She is holding the most beautiful princess-style coat that Kayleigh has ever had the privilege of setting her eyes on.
A deep, luscious green. Velvety fabric with soft collars and fluffy-fluffy cuffs in a whipped-cream white. A breathy gasp tumbles from Kayleigh’s lips as her entire body stiffens with shock, just a moment, before she slips off the bed and her half-asleep legs stumble her forward.
There is no way her mother could have afforded this easily. There is no way, there is no way, there is no-
She reaches out to run the tip of her finger over the polished green buttons. They trickle like a glistening river down the front, all the way to the neatly hemmed skirt.
“Ma,” she whispers. She’s torn in her gaze, flickering between her mother’s delighted grin and the sheer beauty of the gift, the luxury of the velvet. “How on earth-? When? Where?”
Her mother preens. She’s flushed in the cheeks, sparkly in the eyes, almost shy when she tilts her head bashfully towards her shoulder and quietly says, “I had it put aside in the shop, a few months ago. I’ve been paying it off bit by bit.”
Kayleigh is gaping. Her jaw is dropped.
“It’s for you, Kay.”
She shakes her head. “For me?”
An enthusiastic nod. Her mother peeks over the rich-wool shoulder of the coat, fingers curling a little nervously into the fabric. Fluttery, fidgeting, flighty, as if worried about her daughter’s reply. As if she’s been waiting a long, long time to unveil the gift.
“Try it on,” she urges. She might as well start hopping on her toes, now, the excitement is so crackly in the air between them. “Go on. Go on!”
Kayleigh gently takes the coat and steps in front of the standing mirror in the corner. She meets her mother’s lovely, familiar eyes in the reflection. A single footstep behind and one to the side. One arm crossed over her chest to cup her opposite elbow, to hold her chest together amidst the anticipation, maybe, and the other at her face, covering her mouth, covering the excited curl of her grinning lips there.
Kayleigh really hopes her baby will have those eyes.
But her chest twists with the weight of her lie, too. Everything she is keeping from her mother. It presses down aching on her ribs, shrinking her lungs too flat. She exhales on a stuttering sigh of air.
Her fingers tremble as she slips her arms into the sleeves of the coat and reaches for the the top button. Carefully, cautiously, she draws the two sides together and slips the first one into place.
Second button.
Third button.
Fourth.
Fifth.
The sixth.
The sixth button-
The sixth button-
The sixth button-
It will not tie. It’s not tying.
It’s not tying.
Kayleigh sucks her stomach in strong as she can, as if she can fold her shame in smaller, tuck it away deeper. Her knuckles whiten with how hard she drags the sides of the coat across her middle, fingernails stinging as they snag in the fuzzy threads. The satin-sewn seams of the sides groan, pulled as tight as they can be, but the button snicks loose again from its hole.
Over and over.
Over and over.
One button, two button. Three, four, five.
One, two, three, four, five.
One, two, three, four-
The sixth will not tie.
The sixth will not tie.
“Let me,” her mother hums, and Kayleigh squeezes her eyes shut. “It’s awkward to do them up while looking in the mirror! It’s like it’s backwards.”
She steps in closer, so close that her knees warm the back of Kayleigh’s own thighs. There’s hardly a breath of space between them. They may as well melt into one, this way. Her arms loop tiptoe-slow around Kayleigh’s waist, and her fingers, deft, practiced, catch easy on the buttons.
Kayleigh watches her, in the mirror, and the past and present blur together, like watercolour.
She sees herself, suddenly, at five, being wiggled into a pinafore for her first day of big school and pouting pitifully at the awful itchiness of the cardigan as her mother smoothes it all neatly into place.
At twelve, on the morning of her confirmation ceremony, with her mother combing her hair out and sliding pretty clips into the bunches of brown paper-tied curls.
At twenty-one, embracing her mother tearfully at the airport gates and promising she would return one day. Promising, promising, promising. Stumbling away from her parents with tears knotted dry and aching in her throat and the scent of her mother’s powdery perfume in her hair, the colour of her lipstick in a kiss on her cheek. Her mother buttoned her coat for her that morning, too.
She watches, now, as her mother’s fingers falter. As she bites her bottom lip in between her teeth and tugs on the fabric, eyebrows furrowing when the button refuses to catch, again and again.
In the mirror, Kayleigh’s breath withers in her lungs as she watches darkness creepy-crawl a shadow across her mother’s face. Her frown deepens. Silence falls, for a moment, until slowly, so slowly, she presses herself even closer to Kayleigh’s back so that she can peer down over Kayleigh’s shoulder.
Can she feel the beat of Kayleigh’s heart splintering her spine?
“Ma,” Kayleigh whispers. Tears blister in the corner of her eyes, but she chokes them back, shakes around the gulp of it. “Ma.”
Her mother says nothing. Her hands on the buttons twist, curl, snapping out one last attempt of pulling the coat sides tight together over Kayleigh’s middle. Then, all at once, they rip the coat fully open, like a band-aid. Kayleigh tries to grip the hem of her jumper underneath, to hold onto it, to pin it down, to keep her shameful secret hidden, but her fingers are clumsy, desperate, her eyes are burning, she can’t see, she-
“Ma, wait, wait, please-”
Her mother’s nails sting round her wrists as she snatches at Kayleigh and smacks them aside.
The bump of Kayleigh’s belly is unmistakable once the jumper is yanked out of the way.
There is no hiding it, now.
Her mother recoils as if burned, as if scalded. Stumbling backwards backwards backwards until the bed hits the back of her legs and collapses her swaying body down with a thud. Kayleigh spins around so fast that she has to grab the side of the mirror to hold her balance up, almost tripping in haste to follow.
“Ma,” she whispers, and her voice is shorn thin and weak. It cracks, brittle ice, at the edges. Her veins freeze at the sight of the blood draining from her mother’s face, at the sight of all of the light draining from her eyes.
“Just wait, please, let me explain,” she begs. The coat crumples to the floor around her feet, slips through her tremvling fingers, but she snatches it back up and clamps it to her chest, arms wrapping shaking around. Something to grip, something to anchor, something of now while she's staring wide-open at a future that may be suddenly bereft of it all. “Let me expl-”
“How far?”
The sharpness of her voice hits Kayleigh like a clatter across the face.
But she’s in reach of her mother, still, where she stands, now. Where her toes are curling-up in the carpet and pressing, pressing, pressing. The walls are tilting in the edges of her vision, the red poppy print of the curtains sliding, and she needs the floor beneath her. She needs the pressure pushing back up. She needs to stay here on earth and not dragged by the ankles into hell.
She’s nothing but one single stretch of an arm away from her mother. A simple lift of her hands, even just one. Kayleigh isn’t even asking for two. Just one, even. Just one. Nothing but a breath, nothing but a handful of inches, she’s that close.
She’s so close, she’s so close, and god please she hopes her mother wants to cross the distance.
She hopes her mother comes to her.
She wants her mother to come to her.
She wants her mother to come to her.
“Let me expla-”
Her mother does not move.
“How far?” she repeats. So quiet in sound, but the disappointment there stuns Kayleigh still. “How far along are you?”
Kayleigh’s eyes fall to look at her little bump. It’s not very big. Not yet. But she presses her palms to the curve of it, fingers splaying out bit-by-bit wide. They tremble, right above the spot that the baby likes to kick little wild legs at every night.
“Five months,” she whispers, and it’s a broken breath of a noise, “I…I didn’t mean to, Ma.”
Her mother’s eyes are wider than what Kayleigh thought possible. Tucked inside the lashes, the irises blown far, far away by starving pupils.
Kayleigh forces down a swallow. Her legs tremble her a step closer.
“Ma,” she whispers. “It’s... It’s- I think it’s a boy. I think it’s a little boy.”
Her mother says nothing.
Kayleigh feels the grief beginning to wring the air from her lungs, gutting her empty of any warmth. Her mother’s cold stare needles into her.
“I’ve dreamed about him a couple times.” Another step, slow. In the corner, the radiator clunks. It’s so rusty, these days. An echo of the tinny creak in Kayleigh’s ribs. “He looks just like Da, in the dreams. Same hair. But he has your eyes.”
Another inch closer.
She does not, she does not, she does not, see her mother’s body flinch her backwards, viciously, as if the proximity is painful. She does not see the way her mother’s rattling hands thump into her lap and flip over to claw into the fabric of her skirt. Awful, twisting fingernails that bleach all colour from her knuckles.
The shame is a visceral beast, in Kayleigh. It blisters in her bones. It has been waiting, all this time, ever since she first realised that she was pregnant. But it mostly raised its head in the dead of the night, when she was all alone. And it was somewhat soothed by the mental image of a sweet, little baby with green eyes. But now. Now.
Now. She looks into her mother’s eyes as the flat, blunt teeth of a monster begin to gnaw a chasm through her chest.
Is she bleeding out onto the carpet?
“Maybe that- maybe that dream stuff is all made up,” she whispers. Her tongue sticks to the roof of her mouth, like glue. “Who knows? Maybe it’s just. Just all stupid talk.
Her mother does not speak. Her gaze scrapes from Kayleigh’s face down to her belly. So sharp that Kayleigh feels it like a scrawl on its bitter pathway back up.
She’s fully clothed, but she has never felt more naked in her life.
All at once, she feels both ninety years-old on the morning of her death, and also a tiny little girl caught doing something so very, very wrong. The juxtapposition is dizzying.
“I need you,” Kayleigh breathes. Another step. Just one. Just one. “I’m going to need you. More than ever, Ma.”
The shame has riddled her ribcage through with holes, already. She is suffocating under it. Swelling, swelling, swelling inside of her, a balloon about to burst, and the irony of it, the irony of it, is that there is nobody else to blame.
Because this is all of her own doing, isn’t it? This is all her own doing.
She did this to herself.
Kayleigh may be choking, but the only thing round her neck is her own two hands.
Her mother straightens to a stand from the bed, stiff in the spine. Her arms, though. They quake all the way down to her wrists, where the chipped metal of her watch is clinking in a shudder against her bracelet.
She is silent, as she leaves. The soft click of the door is deafening.
Kayleigh tries to move, but her feet are stuck to the carpet. Her mother has soaked every fibre with a terrible, tarry grief.
Her mother announces the news at the dinner table over Christmas Eve lunch.
Like cracking a whip, she says, out of nowhere, “Kayleigh is pregnant. Five months gone. There’s nothing to be done.”
Just like that.
The carved handle of Kayleigh’s soup spoon slips through her sweaty fingers. Sliding from her shaky grasp and dropping into the cold gloop of the vegetable soup.
Her father sits opposite her, at the table, and his eyes snap from his own dinnerplate up to her pale-white face. He pins her icy still, right there, like a corpse in her chair.
The space between them is sparse, but it feels like it shrinks even further, now.
Without thinking, one of Kayleigh’s hands slides slowly from the tabletop and crawls into her lap. She tucks it beneath the white skirt of her baking apron, laying her palm flat over the baby. Her thumb strokes gently back and forth, barely a breath of a movement.
“Ma is telling the truth,” she whispers, after a few moments of taffy-thick silence. “It’s- I’m... I’m having a baby, Da. It’s true.”
Her mother is wordless again, now. Scowling out the frosted kitchen window, arms folded tight across her chest. Her elbows barely smother the shake of her fingers.
“You cannot be serious,” her father eventually says. He’s looking between both of them, now, and there’s a blood-stained redness bubbling up his neck and throat to infect his face.
A pause.
“Do you think this is a funny joke or something, Kayleigh?”
Kayleigh swallows. She presses back firmly into her chair.
“Da,” she says. “I-”
His enormous hands smack down on the surface of the table so hard that every shred of cutlery atop it rattles. A metal box of thin, tiny bones, and the quake of the wood reverberates up Kayleigh’s arms. She feels it in her jaw.
“A baby? A baby?” He snaps, he spits. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Kayleigh? A baby?”
A placemat tumbles off the side of the table when he thumps it next. Kayleigh pins it beneath the toe of her shoe, pressing hard hard hard.
“Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure?”
“Ye-”
He slams his elbows onto the table. Dropping his head into his palms, his nails gnarling roughly into his hair, shoving back over his temples.
“Because we all know you get these grandiose fuckin’ notions, Kayleigh, and surely all that time in the states has gone to your fuckin’ head, you-”
“Da. Stop.” She squeezes her eyes tight shut. “I’m sure. I am sure. I got it confirmed.”
The silence is worse, this time. His violence, at the very least, has always been predictable.
Her eyes snap open.
“Where?” he demands. And though his voice has fallen quieter, the fury in it is stripped-back stark. There’s a barely-bridled beast behind his teeth, she knows. “Where did you get it confirmed, Kayleigh?”
A sickening coldness pools beneath Kayleigh’s skin. It creeps spider-legs of grief down the length of her arms until her fingers are numb. She flinches her hand away from her bump in fear of giving the baby frostbite, somehow.
“A doctor here?” he roars. “I swear to god, Kayleigh, if the neighbours found ou-”
“Not here,” Kayleigh croaks. “Not here, Da. A doctor back in America.”
Her mother hangs her head.
Midnight mass on Christmas Eve drags Kayleigh and all six of her siblings to the local chapel, where they huddle together on one of varnished, oak pews.
Kayleigh keeps her eyes on the worn leather of the kneeler by her feet. The fabric is ripped in places, the skin parched and drawn-thin from years and years of use. Tufts of creamy-yellow stuffing bulging, oozing, from the cracks.
“Good evening, Father,” her mother says, at her side. “Merry Christmas.”
Kayleigh does not lift her head, but the polished toe of the priest’s brogues glint in the candlelight in her periphery. The starched white of his garments brush against the laces, the neatly looped bow of them.
He’s waiting.
Kayleigh has nothing to say to him, but suddenly her mother’s hand is sliding slippery behind her to pinch at her hip in warning.
Her head is so heavy that she struggles to look up. She is helped along with a sharper, nippier pinch.
The priest’s eyes are sharp as razors when Kayleigh crawls her gaze up to meet his. He sees her, she feels, right down to the bone, right down to the heart. The violation of it tingles in her fingertips.
“Good evening,” she says, softly, “Father.”
He watches her with pursed lips. Then, tilting his head to the side, he glances down at her lap, at the bundled-up knitted scarf she has tangled in a protective lump over her thighs, in front of her belly.
Her mother stiffens. Kayleigh can almost hear her skeleton creak.
“Thank you for gracing us with your presence, young lady,” the priest finally says. “It’s important to stay grounded in your roots, after all. Too easy to lose yourself, out there, in America.”
Kayleigh nods.
“The women’s group will need help with refreshments after mass this evening,” he continues. “Maybe you could be of assistance.”
It’s not a question, but her mother answers it anyway, with a soft, “Yes, Father.”
Kayleigh draws a scarf tight round her neck as she steps out of the house and onto the cold street. She huddles the tip of her berry-red nose down snugly into the fabric.
She thinks -- really, truly, she does -- that her baby is a little boy.
When she closes her eyes, she imagines rocking him to sleep and kissing the chubby, doughy palms of his little hands. She thinks of bathing him in buckets full of bubbles, of washing him with soft, vanilla soap. Carrying him to the park to push him on the swings. Buying him his very first Exy racquet and easing his arms through a tiny, tiny jersey.
When she thinks of the future, he’s always there. He is always there.
She hurries across the snowy street and nudges open the door to the post office. Tucked in the back, there is a single phone box station. She climbs onto the rickety stool in front of it and fishes a handful of loose coins from her pocket.
Her fingers shudder with the cold as she presses them one-two-three-four-five into the money slot.
He answers, blessedly, on the sixth ring.
“What do you want?”
“David Wymack?”
Silence. Then-
“Kayleigh? Is that you?”
She cups her gloved hand over the receiver, her fingers curling tight round it. A relieved sigh scrapes out. Buckling forward, she thumps her forehead against the plastic casing of the phone box.
“I need you to book me a plane ticket, David,” she whispers. “The earliest flight out of Ireland.”
When Kevin is born, one of the nurses nestles him snug-as-bug in Kayleigh’s arms, swaddled in a powder-blue blanket.
He’s like a just-opened flower, so rose petal-pink in the cheeks. Tucked in snug and snoozing against her collarbone, his small hand wrapped cosily round her thumb.
The church may condemn her, may say that she is a fallen woman, but this baby is sweeter than anything Kayleigh has ever been offered on her knees in a chapel pew.
Each time the door to the hospital ward squeaks open, however, she stiffens. She waits, holding her breath, for the click-click-click of rubber heels to wind their wicked way to her bedside. In just a moment, she knows -- oh, God, she knows, she knows -- the papery privacy curtain will be ripped back, and in will slither the awful, awful head of one of the Nuns.
She braces for her baby to be torn from the nest of her arms.
She waits to be told that he will be sold to a nice, American family.
He’ll have a big back garden to play in, Kayleigh
He’ll go to a prestigious school and they’ll tutor him in Latin.
He’ll take his baths in a tub so huge that he’ll disappear in the bubble bath.
He’ll grow up far, far away from the stain of your sins and maybe, just maybe, if he’s kept far away, the burden will not cripple him, too.
Maybe he’ll escape it, Kayleigh. Maybe he doesn’t have to be bloodied by it all.
You fell from grace, but should he?
Should he?
Shouldn’t you do this for him, Kayleigh?
She lifts him higher on her chest and leans down to press their foreheads together, bumping the tip of her nose against the soft button of his. There, her eyes droop shut, her eyelashes dusting his skin light as the kiss of a butterfly wing.
She thinks, God. If you are up there, let me keep him. Please, let me keep him.
She thinks of the old statues that fill the alcoves of the chapel in her hometown. In the one closest to the altar, right up at the top of the centre aisle, there stands a statue of our lady, the virgin Mary. A little baby Jesus cradled lovingly in her arms. They are immortalised in that polished, shiny porcelain.
Maybe if Kayleigh holds still long enough, she will become a statue, too. A home that her baby can never, ever be wrenched away from him.
But… nobody comes to her bedside.
Nobody rips baby Kevin from her.
There is no Nuns. Nobody at all into the ward, but a pleasant nurse with a jaunty skip in her step and a chipper, warm-yellow hum in her voice. She wanders down the middle aisle of the beds to reach the windows on the back wall, and when she heaves the wooden frame open, the summer breeze bursts in.
She’s escaped to America.
She’s escaped to America, and nobody threatens to sell her baby, here.
There is nobody here to force her fingers round a pen and pin her fingers down to an adoption certificate. There is nobody here to forcibly sign her name.
Kayleigh’s eyes fall to Kevin, again. She thinks they always will, now.
There’s nowhere else she’d rather look.
Kevin takes his very first steps on American soil, but Kayleigh brings him home to Ireland long before the pawprint designs on the sole of his baby shoes have begun to fade
Every summer, she rents a little cottage on the coastline. It sits in a cosy patchwork of other crooked homes. Charming with their mossy walls and sea spray-speckled gates.
One afternoon, as they are leaving the cottage to walk the short minute to the beach, they bump into an older woman who lives in the home next door. Eileen, she introduces herself as, with warm eyes and a gentle smile. She reaches out a wrinkled hand to touch Kevin’s chubby cheek, to caress him, but he’s so shy, her little Kevin, and he wraps his small legs as tight as he can around Kayleigh’s waist and nuzzles his way into the crook of her neck.
“Sorry,” she says. She rests her chin on his head. “He’s quiet today.”
“Like butter wouldn’t melt,” Eileen hums. “Have fun!”
The beach is less of a honeyed oasis and more … a grey crochet of pebbles, seashells, and soggy seaweed. It’s a thin patch of land, all in all, shrouded in the shadow of the overhanging cliff, but when the tide pulls back, the sand peaks through in strips.
That’s where Kayleigh carries Kevin to, each day, his too-big yellow wellies knocking against her thighs as she picks her way precariously across the stones. When she sets him on his own feet, the ground squelches wetly beneath his weight.
He falls over, a lot. He’s always tumbling over. Tripping over his toes in his haste to run from one wonder of the world to the next. To scramble after a group of hop-hop-hopping seagulls, squawking at the top of his lungs at them. To crouch down low and hunched at the edge of rock pools and coo and ooh! and aah! at the tiny creatures skittering through the water within it.
He always gets up, too, after he falls. Her little Kevin. Her little Kevin. Nothing keeps him down for long. She watches, now, as his body wobbles forward in chase of another bird and thumps him like a sad sack of potatoes onto the ground. The wet sand immediately gulps his arms up to the elbows. But before she can even move to pluck him from its gloopy grasp, he has shoved himself back to his knees, then scrambled to his feet.
Really, truly, nothing keeps him down for long. There’s a spark in his chest, she knows. Matchstick to fire whenever he should be snuffed down to ash. The harder misfortune presses, the brighter Kevin burns.
Once he is up, he twirls around to face her, still rocky on his heels in the sludgy sand. Big, green eyes above round cheeks, tickled pink from the whip of the wild wind. She crouches down and opens up her arms for him.
And he runs.
He’s fast, for such a tiny thing. Snap, crackle, pop, he gobbles the distance between them with his yellow boots slip-sliding on a clutch of seaweed and, once he’s close enough, he jumps at her with all the might that such little legs can possess. He trusts her to catch him.
Of course, she catches him. She will always, always catch him.
And when he presses his triumphant grin into her chest, into her collarbone, into her neck, she scoops him off his feet with a swoop and she kisses the crown of his head.
And she thinks: there is no shame here.
There is no shame in Kevin.
There is no shame in her little Kevin as she wraps him, later that evening, in a fluffy towel after a bubble bath and cuddles him cosy beside the fireplace. The heat coaxes the ends of his still-damp hair into loose, sleepy curls. She strokes the tip of his button nose and his eyelids trail her finger in honey-sweet slow drips of sleepiness.
There is no shame in her little Kevin when, at seven years-old, he fills the bathroom sink in the cottage to the very tip-top with warm water and, tongue caught between his teeth with concentration, tips his plastic bucket of precious seashells into the basin. He collected them on the beach that morning, with painstaking precision. Huddled down low in the sand and turned the options over-and-over in his hands, eyes scrunched-up tight in thought. Only broken or chipped treasures made it into his bucket, in the end. He carried it so carefully home, his arms wrapped fully around it.
Now, his fingertips are gentle as he traces the pink curves on the insides of the seashells. Brushing away sand and debris from their grooves, plucking tufts of limp seaweed from the backs.
A while later, they sit side by side on the doorstep together, and they pat-pat-pat the seashells oh-so carefully dry with towels. Kevin dusts each one so cautiously, with a tenderness that speaks of his worry that his new friends might crumble.
“How did you know which ones to pick?” Kayleigh asks. “There was so many on the beach.”
“These ones… they were hurt,” he says. “I didn’t want the hurt ones to be lonely.”
Kayleigh loves him.
There is no shame in her little Kevin when, one afternoon, she explains that the rain is far too heavy to risk a third trip to the beach and he collapses himself down into a dramatic, noisy heap on the floor. Full of emotion, her little Kevin, as he thumps his curled-up fists and feet in fury against the world.
There’s that spark of feisty flames in him, again. Hissing to life, raw, raging. He would set the wooden floors of an Exy court alight if he ever decides to pick up a racquet. Maybe he will, maybe he won’t. Kayleigh hopes he will, because to share that passion with him would be nothing short of magic. But, if he doesn’t…
Well, her love would never change, either way.
There is no shame in her little Kevin when a lady at the market asks about the whereabouts of his father and Kayleigh replies, snap-of-the-fingers quick, that his father is long, long dead. Not because she is embarrassed, no. She’s not at all. But because there is so little, little shame in the small boy holding her hand. The small boy walking himself in circles on his toes in his too-big yellow rainboots and matching coat.
There is so little shame. There is so little shame.
There is so little shame in her Kevin that… she doesn’t understand. She doesn’t understand.
How can they? How can they, how can they, how can they.
She thinks of the visceral, seething disgust that her parents twist with just at very existence of Kevin. The pain of it is a blunt knife through her ribcage. It steals her breath, this blade of grief.
She sees her mother in Kevin’s eyes, just as she once hoped. Her father in the crooked pinky finger on his left hand. Her sister lives in the hiccup of Kevin’s laugh, and her brother’s love for storytelling shines through in his interest for history, for folklore, for mythology.
She doesn’t understand. She doesn’t understand.
How can they? How can they, how can they, how can they.
Because there is nothing emptier of shame and fuller of light than her little Kevin.
Because there is no altar on earth that could hold anything holier than each sweet little freckle on his rosy, rosy cheeks.
Because there is no god in any heaven that could seduce her into regretting a single strand of hair on his head.
They walk back to the cottage together from the market, that day, hand in hand. The sky above their heads is grey, roiling with heavy rain, but Kevin’s babbly voice pop-pop-pops with bursts of bright colours against the clouds.
Once home, he asks to bake fairy cakes. Kayleigh watches him hurriedly gather all of the ingredients from the cupboards, toppling armfuls of them onto the countertop.
She watches him reach for the bowl of sugar and struggle to pry the sticky lid open.
“Mammy?” He asks. He looks at her over his shoulder. “Can you help me, please?”
Kayleigh touches his cheek with the back of her fingers, so gently.
“I’ll always help you,” she says. “Always.”
Kevin is one years-old and Kayleigh loves him.
He is two years-old.
He is three.
He is four, five, six, seven. He is eight. He is nine.
He is nine.
He is nine, today, and he is hers, just as much as he was the morning he was born.
Each and every year, she sings happy birthday to him. Her voice hushed above the flickering candles of his homemade birthday cake, his hands wrapped up snugly in hers.
Squeezing around her like a heartbeat, badum badum badum.
Nine candles, this time, and his nose is still so button-y sweet, despite how big and tall he’s growing. She is helpless but to kiss it.
“Happy ninth birthday, Kevin,” she whispers. “We’re going to do great things this year, me and you.”