“I don’t need…”
“Do it.”
I do as she says, and as I start to speak, she stops me.
“Ah. No. Breathe first. I’m going to count your breaths. In, one – two – three. Out, one – two – three. Keep your head between your legs. That’s a girl. In, one – two – three.”
She makes me do this eight times before she eventually lets me sit up and speak. I do feel better, though, strangely. It must be a nursing tip she learned from her mum and aunts.
“Now. Who was that, and what did he do to you?”
It’s her emphasis on the word “do” that knocks the life back into me. She thinks that Aaron is some kind of ex-boyfriend, some guy I went on a date with.
“Aaron, Fiona. Didn’t you recognize him? He was part of the moral mob in Basement.”
She slaps her hand to her forehead. “Crap. OK. Agh, sorry, I just assumed he was one of your brother’s friends or something.”
She pauses. “Did you tell him about me, or something? Why did he know my name?”
“I never mentioned you to him. He has something. I don’t know. Some kind of power where he’s able to see the cracks in people. He knew about Lily. Did you hear that? He said I threw people away.”
“So what, he has magic, too?”
“I don’t know,” I say again, my voice cracking. “Maybe I’m going insane.”
“The month you’ve had?” Fiona says, sitting on the window ledge and draping her arm around my shoulder. “I wouldn’t blame you.”
Roe is walking back towards us, still on the phone. His jaw is tight, and he’s clearly immersed in a battle of his own.
“I’m sure … I’m sure it’s not related, Mum,” Roe says, his voice tense. “It’s nothing. Well, no, not nothing, obviously, but you know what I mean…”
He hangs up and joins us on the window ledge. Fiona and I shuffle along to fit him in.
“What was that?”
“I made the mistake of telling my mother about my Children of Brigid theory from before. She set up a Google Alert on them.”
“And?”
“And it seems that kids actually are leaving home to join them.”
“No!” Fi and I say in unison. And then: “We just saw him!”
“Who? Aaron?”
I nod. “He knew things about us, Roe. He knows about my relationship with Lily—”
“And he knows about…” interrupts Fiona, who then stops herself short. “He knows about me.”
The three of us walk to the riverbank, oddly silent.
Fiona kicks a rock into the river.
“Look,” she points at the reeds. “Frogspawn.”
She’s right. Bubbles of translucent, foamy spawn are floating on the water’s surface. Hundreds of them. Each dotted with a black speck, like a cartoon eye.
“I’ve never seen so much of it,” I say, trying to suppress the urge to poke at it with a stick. No, Maeve, you have a boyfriend now, resist the urge to act like an eight-year-old.
We stare at it for a moment, dumbfounded how something so calmly natural can exist at a time like this.
“It’s weird,” Roe says, finally, “that the river hasn’t frozen over.”
“Huh,” I reply slowly. “How cold does it have to be for that to happen?”
He shrugs. We go back to staring.
“Look!” Fiona says again, triumphant. “A fish!”
There is a quick gleam of radiant purple as a fish briefly bobs above the surface of the water and ducks back in again.
“Jesus,” Roe says. “And another!”
We stand and count the fish bobbing. None of us knows enough about fish to know whether it’s unusual for them to come so close to the surface in cold weather.
“They’re called rainbow trout,” says Fiona, reading from her phone. “And they … uh, they live in Australia and America.”
“Shut up. No, they don’t.”
“Look!” she says, brandishing her phone. “Is this or is this not the fish we just saw?”
I look at the picture of the fish with the purple stripe on its side. “It is.”
“So what are they doing here?” Roe asks. “The water will be way too cold for them.”
We stare at the river and I begin to notice wisps of steam coming off the water’s surface. Like fog from a mouth on a cold day.
Fiona must see it, too, because she crouches down, her long black hair almost touching the water. She dips her fingers in. Then, her entire hand.
“Jesus Christ, Fi, what are you doing?”
She swivels around to face us. Her eyes are wide and excited, like an owl’s. “Guys, it’s warm.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“THE RIVER IS PART OF IT. I KNOW IT.” EVEN AS I SAY THE words, I know how ridiculous it sounds.
“How?” Fiona and Roe say, together.
“How anything at this point?” I say, cracking my knuckles nervously. “It’s the common thread, isn’t it? All our dreams. Strange phenomena. Where Lily was last seen alive. It all revolves around the river. It’s the common denominator.”
We are in Deasy’s now, the three of us gathered around a single large chips and a pot of curry sauce. Lily and I used to come here on Saturdays, taking one of the diner booths, piling salt on the table and making patterns with our fingertips.
“The Australian fish. The water. The frogspawn.” Fiona ticks off her fingers. “Something is happening in there.”
“There’s something Sylvia said,” I say slowly. “Something about the physical world and the emotional world being more closely linked than people think.”
“Go on.”
“Look,” I say, grabbing the salt and pepper shakers.
“This –” I hold up the salt shaker – “this is emotional suffering. Say, being forced to leave your family.”
They peer at me, then look at each other.
“Salt is emotional suffering, Maeve,” Roe says patiently. “Sure.”
“And this –” I hold up the pepper shaker – “this is a physical landmark. Say, the Kilbeg river.”
“Uh-huh.”
I turn both upside down, and the salt and the pepper pool in one spot together, creating an ashy mountain on the table.
“Don’t you SEE?” I say, after a few moments of silence.
Fiona chews the end
