The Mermaids Singing by Lisa Carey

woke when Marcus and Clíona found me. Their mouths were moving, but I could not hear them because my ears were ringing with the echoes of moaning wind and sea. Clíona covered me with a waxy coat and Marcus lifted me. They carried me back toward the truck, their voices blending with the music that still sloshed in my head.

CHAPTER 10
Clíona
    She’s going to be a handful, this granddaughter of mine. Hardly here a day and she’s after running off by herself—straight to the sea, just as Grace used to do. Ever since that plane touched down, Gráinne has had the look of an immigrant child, lost and longing for home. I want to take her in my arms, though I can see she wouldn’t allow this. It is only because she’s exhausted that she lets Marcus carry her back to the truck, and wrapped in his coat she looks no bigger than ten years of age.
    I was not much older than you, I want to tell Gráinne, when I traveled on that ship to America. Eighteen. I certainly felt young when I arrived, though at home I’d been an adult for ages.
    My childhood is a common enough story in Ireland. I am not of the generation that blames present hardships on things gone past. God does not give you more suffering than you can handle. I saidthat to Grace once and her smart response was: “No, but your family does.”
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    My father was a fisherman like all the island men. My mother was with child almost constantly from the time she was sixteen until she was thirty. She bore nine children, with a miscarriage between each two. We were neither a large family for our island, nor a small one.
    When I was thirteen years my mother got the cancer. It killed her quickly. (It was probably the same cancer, once removed, that killed my daughter. I myself have always been healthy.) I did not mourn my mother deeply. I’d loved her, be sure, but she was a harsh woman, an unreachable woman, and I did not know her well. She was born in the North and met my father on a holiday in Galway. She was an outsider on our island and she had a habit of treating her children with the same suspicion the locals had for her. My brothers, sisters, and I obeyed our mother but adored our father.
    Da was the only one who seemed to suffer by her passing, and after that I always believed that he missed a younger version of my mother, that perhaps she’d once been lighthearted and lovable. He was a great man, my father, a funny, passionate man who always seemed mismatched with my mother’s sternness. He never remarried.
    After her death, the wee ones were farmed out to aunts on the mainland. My sister, Maeve, took over the care of my brother Colm and our father. It was lucky I was to be old enough to stay on the island and help Maeve. It was difficult for the wee ones who grew up like charity children in someone else’s family, though it was common enough at the time.
    When Maeve left for Boston two years later, I took over the keeping of the house. I remained until my sister, Róisín, was old enough to move back to the island. I was the thrilled one, following after Maeve on a boat to London then Boston. It was not difficult for Maeve to set me up with a job—caring for the Willoughbys’ first baby boy—and I did not suffer as an immigrant in America. Thecountry was always good to me. I stepped off the boat and the next morning I had a job, a home, a future.
    My plan was to work for a while, save money, then apply to St. Elizabeth’s to study nursing. I’d long dreamed of becoming a nurse. (I may appear at times cold and undemonstrative in my affections, but I have a brilliant bedside manner. Marriage proposals I’ve had, helping the island men to health.) I hoped someday to return to my island and take over the position of the existing nurse, Mariah O’Malley, a cousin of mine. She was getting on in years and was eager to defer to me. You see, I never planned to stay so long in Boston, I never