When I awoke two days later I was in a hospital bed in Belfast. I was not a mother. I would never be a mother. Everything within me that could make and hold a new life had been torn out of me.
I was in hospital for ten days. Colm did not come to Belfast to visit me. My mother came every day to sit with me and cry with me. I told her what Colm had done even though I knew it would hurt her.
“You’ll not be going home to him,” Mam said. “You’ll not.”
But I did. It was Colm who came for me the day I was discharged. He told me he couldn’t bring himself to come visit, and he felt bad for what had happened. But he did not seem sad that he had killed our baby girl and nearly killed me. When we arrived home, my mother came to the cottage and Colm sent her away. I watched her at the window crying as she went back to the house I had been born in, too weak to run after her.
I had cried my eyes dry, and I now felt nothing except for a cold, hard rumbling that was lurking deep within me, like water just about to boil. I didn’t know what to make of it. It didn’t feel like hatred; it felt stronger than that. The first time that Colm reached for me in bed after I miscarried our child, I just let him have his way. I felt nothing except that cold boil at the core of me. It was as if there was another person inside me with a plan, but I didn’t know what it was other than I wanted Colm to pay for what he had done. He had killed our daughter.
I knew that if he were to strike me again, I would hit him back. I was looking forward to it. I started looking for things around the house that I could use to pummel him. I began practicing with the fireplace poker, but in the end I needn’t have practiced with anything at all.
Four months after our baby girl died I walked to the docks where his boat was tied up because he’d asked me to bring down his supper. He had too much repair work to do to come up to the cottage. He was in a foul mood and I could tell there was going to be trouble. He and his father had had another fight and I was going to be bearing the brunt of it if I didn’t leave.
So I said nothing, placed the covered iron skillet that held hisdinner on an overturned crate, and turned to go. He grabbed my arm and twirled me back around and asked where the hell was I going. We were close to the railing and there were ropes and nets and pipes littering the deck and I started to slip on them. I tried to wrench my arm free to regain my balance, which made him begin to lose his. He raised his hand to hit me and I ducked and grabbed the skillet. I lifted it and then brought it around with all the strength I had. The pan connected with his head and he pitched backward and over the railing.
There was a splash as he hit the water. I looked over the side to see him under the surface holding his head, with ribbons of red swirling through his fingers. His eyes were scrunched shut, but as he realized where he was, he opened them wide and looked up at me. He shot one hand out of the water toward me—his fingers splayed like limbs on a sea star. I stood there and did nothing.
His eyes widened and he shot up the other hand, the one that had been holding his head. He surfaced for a second and tried to say my name, but he was struggling to tread water and his head was bleeding, turning the water red around him. And I stood and did nothing.
He began to drift downward, still looking at me, still reaching one hand toward me. He was losing consciousness, and I did nothing.
I did not save him.
I waited until I could not see him any longer. I wiped the skillet with the cover I had brought and replaced the sausages and potatoes that had fallen from it. Then I ran, yelling for help.
It came too late, of course. I told the other fishermen who came in answer to my cries that Colm had been drinking and hadstumbled and fallen overboard. I had been coming to the boat with his dinner when I saw him fall, and I ran but I couldn’t get to him in time.
He was pulled from the water, dead. The gash on his forehead looked so small compared to the amount of blood that had flowed from it.
I wasn’t sad that he was dead.
I wasn’t ashamed of what I had done.
He had killed my little girl. He was slowly killing me.
And now I was free of him. Or so I thought.
His brother and father could not believe that Colm had not been able to swim to shore after he fell, even with a gash on his head. He was a good swimmer. They wondered why I hadn’t jumped in after him or thrown him a life vest. They wondered what he had hit his head on when he fell. They’d been with him only a short time before and he’d not been drinking then. How was it that he was drunk—as I had claimed he was—so soon after they’d left him? They began to talk with others after the funeral and after I’d returned to Mam’s house. It was just talk at the pub, but Mam heard of it and began to worry for me, because I had told her the truth of what had happened. She knew how Colm ended up in the water.
It was Mam’s idea for me to go to America to be with Mason, her idea to use Sophie’s birth certificate to get a passport in Dublin, far away from home. It was her idea for me to have a fresh beginning with a name she still loved so very much and which would ensure no authorities in Donaghadee or County Down would ever know where to find me. It would also give me what she felt I deserved and what she had been unable to give me—a new and happy life.
I went to Dublin with my dead sister’s birth certificate. I worked in a restaurant there for two months as Sophie Whalen, and then I got a passport and booked a passage to America. My letters to Mam I sent to my brother Niall in Bangor so that the postmaster in Donaghadee wouldn’t know an S. Whalen was writing to her from New York.
I wasn’t anxious to get out of Manhattan because the tenement I was living in was appalling. It was, but that is not the reason I answered Martin’s advertisement. The tenements were full of other Irish girls like me, and a young woman I knew and who knew me had arrived from the village next to Donaghadee. She was living on my block. If I had stayed, she would’ve recognized me. I couldn’t take the chance that she would write home and that word would get out where I was. So I left and became Sophie Hocking. I became her. That’s who I am now.
Sophie Hocking.
There is no Saoirse Whalen McGough.
32
When I’m finished telling Deputy Logan what he insisted on knowing, my only thought is that I will not return home to Kat tonight and I promised I would.
This deputy sitting across the table will surely arrest me for killing Colm, even though I know it was not I who took his life. The ocean took him, as surely as the fire took Martin. Forces of nature stepped in to balance what had been set off-kilter. But how in heaven can I convince him of that?
Worse, I have not made arrangements for Kat if anything should happen to me. I will want her to stay with Belinda, but will that lawyer of hers let her? Might he contact Candace’s cousin in Texas? Is that who will take Kat when I am sent to prison? Or will I be hanged for what I’ve done? Will I be sent back to Ireland first to face my judgment?
All of these thoughts are zipping around in my head like flashes of lightning, each one quick and hard and blazing. I wishit had been me who fell overboard that night in Donaghadee. I wish I’d been the one who’d been hit in the head and plunged into the frigid water. I wish the water had taken me instead, embraced me like a lost soul and carried me far away from this world of sorrows.
