on the watch back. Every full moon means a patient of mine who’s died.
But not through your fault.
I hope not. It’s hard to be absolutely sure. In this job, one has to learn to live with that.
She asked, And the little curved pieces?
They’re crescent moons instead of full ones.
The babies?
She never missed a trick, this one. I nodded.
Bridie peered more closely now. Some are only little scratches.
Those ones were stillborn. Or miscarried, if far enough on that I could tell whether it was a girl or a boy.
So you scar your precious watch for all of them because you feel bad?
I shook my head. I just…
Bridie suggested, Want to remember them?
Oh, I remember them anyway. Often I wish I didn’t.
Do they haunt you, like?
I struggled to find the words. I have a sense that they want to be recorded somewhere. Need to be. Demand to be, even.
Bridie stroked the silver curve. It’s a sort of map of the dead, then. A sky full of moons.
I took the watch back and tucked it into my pocket. I told her, I’m often just as haunted by the ones who live. Mrs. White’s boy, for instance.
Bridie nodded.
I keep thinking, instead of him going into the pipe, if some nice young couple—like the O’Rahillys, say—if they didn’t mind his lip, and adopted him…
Bridie grimaced. Mary O’Rahilly’s a sweetheart, but he’s a thug.
I was knocked off balance by that matter-of-fact sentence. Her husband?
Well, he wallops her, doesn’t he?
She read my appalled face and saw that this was news to me. Oh. Couldn’t you tell?
She wasn’t triumphing at all; she was just thrown by my naïveté.
It added up. Young Mary O’Rahilly’s timidity, the many things that seemed to make her husband cross…and the old blue marks on both wrists. She’d claimed to bruise easy, and I, gullible as a probie on her first day, I’d left it at that.
Bridie, I breathed, you know things you shouldn’t. Especially not at about twenty-two.
Her half smile was rueful.
I admitted, No one’s ever lifted a hand to me in my life.
That’s good, she said.
I’m beginning to know enough to know that I know nothing.
Bridie didn’t contradict me.
I moved along the flat middle of the roof. I found a pitched section and put down one of the blankets against the slope. I squatted to sit, tucking my skirts around me to keep the cold out, and leaned back on the clammy slates.
Bridie fitted herself beside me.
Button up your coat to keep warm, I advised her. And here, lean forward—
I swept a second blanket over our heads and down behind us like a cloak. No, a magician’s cloth. I shook a third out to cover our knees.
Tell me about it, I said into the silence. Your—the home. If you don’t mind?
The pause was so long, I thought Bridie probably did mind.
Then she said, What do you want to know?
Anything you remember.
I remember it all.
Her face worked as she thought about it.
She said at last, Old pee and rubber, that’s what I smell when I think of it. So many of us had accidents in the night, see, that at a certain point they said we could just sleep on the waterproof undersheets and spare the laundry.
It was in my nostrils now, that acrid reek.
There was this one teacher who’d come into class, going like this—Bridie wrinkled her nose in imitation. Every day she’d call out, Who can I smell? Who can I smell? But the thing was, Julia, we all smelled.
That’s terrible.
She shook her head. What was terrible was how every one of us would throw a hand in the air, eager to call out another girl’s name, name her as the smelly one.
Oh, Bridie.
A long minute stretched while I let all this sink in.
She said, Then there’s the beatings. I can feel them in my bones.
I cleared my throat. Beatings for what?
She shrugged. You might be made an example of for sleeping in the wrong position, or sneezing at mass. Writing with your left hand, losing a stud off your boot. Having hair that was curly, or red.
I reached out to the faint fuzz of amber escaping from her pins. Why on earth—
They said it was a mark of badness and hung me up by my bun from a coat hook.
I pulled back my hand and put it over my mouth. Couldn’t you have told someone about the mistreatment? A teacher at school, say?
Her smile was dark. Oh, Julia. Any lessons we had were in the home—it was the school too,