Prologue
Across the sea from where I was born, what was Ó Cathaiseach is faded away to the mere unmusical Casey; my kin, Ó Murchadha, descended from the sea wolf, in this place shriveled like a salted snail: Murphy. According to the pages in their Bible and the blessing of a traveling priest who left after breakfast the following morning, I am a Ganey (once Ó Geigheannaigh, alas).
They did not before, but now, how names especially vex me.
I am not a Ganey, and I only belonged to Patrick Casey for a time. I must be a Murphy, then. Though truly my end would shame the sea wolf.
I am caught here. Remaining was my choice. This mostly soothes me. But time has become peculiar. When once hours flowed from day to night in measured drams, now ungainly bits catch in time’s spout, slowing a gush to a trickle. Nights, I glide above treetops over the lines the living have drawn (and redrawn, soaked with their blood and sweat and rage, traded and cut to suit, named and renamed), until the morning sun swells over fields bristling with growth, and for a moment I cannot remember who I was.
But I always come back to myself. And to the fact of the names, too: dripping with meaning one minute, wrung dry of all sense the next.
The names of my girls are never in my mouth. I think of them as Patrick might, in the colors of horses. The eldest a golden palomino, prancing, arrogant; the middle child a flossy white unicorn, shimmering in her slightness; the youngest a cautious dark bay whose eyes are always watching. She does not see me; at times I wish she could. A living body contains such fires, and my body, so long underground, is become earth itself, not merely beneath it. Sweet woodruff and gentian, ferns and milkweed, the orange fringe of mushrooms, a sturdy oak: what was me became as something whispered in the dark, a secret turned up like a clutch of newborn rabbits under a plow. I am naught more than the sound of a pipe pitching out notes before a revel. All angles, yet no set size. Only nights when the moon turns its face can I move freely, traveling above rooftops and along windowsills until dawn calls me back.
I am no longer a creature, yet my habits remain. My desires, still the old ones. Lurking amidst the brush, watching squirrels collect acorns and deer drink from puddles. Watching my girls. I am allowed pleasure here, too, despite the warnings of the Bible my mother loved so well. It is pleasure, and my delight, to see my girls, their skin supple and sweating, their mouths eating, their fists clamping over their hips as their legs bend and stretch over the earth. The work of bodies never ends. I particularly like their hair, how it grows long and shaggy until lopped off by one of their mothers, the priestly one whose thoughts swirl like perfume in lilac time; she finds such joyful thrift in snipping the little girls’ tresses. Where I had watched Patrick feed Arthur Ganey’s horses is now a kitchen with an unlikely polished floor; over what was dirt and hay, the priestly mother sweeps up the girls’ lost tresses—gold, white, mahogany. The priestly one’s sister, a midwife, makes each daughter gulp down spoonfuls of castor and fish oil; one year, they each suffered needle jabs, given for their own good. Their tears brimmed and they winced under the puncture, their betrayed howls ringing out through the open windows.
The palomino girl loves so harshly; she sees everything as a prize to be won or lost. The unicorn girl’s love ripples uncontained; her soul is flimsy, easily stained by sadness or goaded into laughter. The dark bay foal, who has since become steady on her feet in a manner that I envy, rushes through the brush. She is a thirsty creature. I ache when I see her touch the cool water at the bottom of the ravine where Patrick liked to wash.
A house helmed by two sisters, and their three daughters. The mothers’ love, borne of their sister pact, has made a world where no men ever deigned to rule. The daughters’ love sometimes passes heavy, a pail of milk to a waiting hand; other times it passes light, easy, a hairbrush before a Sunday service. It is most visible in their hands: what they make and toss away, what they strive to hold. I watch for restfulness. The after hours of tables cleared and dishes washed and floors swept and pencils and needles jabbing at paper and cloth; here their thick love dreams and wraps over each other, like hair in a braid. This reminds me of my own sister, and I recall my beating heart, strong beneath my chemise, galloping in grief for her. I think of my own hair—long gone, a cat’s cradle for the faeries—and the relief of unwinding it each night, the burden heavy no more. I think of my own hands and what they learned about desire.
How quickly everything in God’s world disintegrates. Everything but the loneliness of young women.
Chapter One
“Okay, you know what’s metal?” Wade asked. “An angel comes down to earth, smashes a guitar against the ground, and a whole shitload of bats flies out.”
“What’s metal about that?” Lilah asked. “The guitar? Is that even actually made of metal? Is it an acoustic guitar? Because those aren’t metal at all.” She laughed and poked Wade in the ribs, which made him jerk the whole truck, slamming Daisy into Poppy, who groaned and put on her sunglasses.
“This is so stupid,” Poppy said.
“I think it’s kind of funny,” Daisy offered.
“Lilah’s turn,” Wade said.
Lilah pushed her hair out of her eyes while she thought. They sat four across in Wade Dunedin’s truck: Poppy at the opposite window, then Daisy, then Lilah smashed against Wade, who took up a third of the cab. Daisy pressed her knees together, tense and sweaty. Sometimes, Lilah was unaware of how long she took to say something, even in a normal conversation, not a game like this one. Even on regular days when they weren’t coming back from a funeral.
“Jesus, Lilah!” Poppy said. “It’s not like it’s fucking astrophysics! Just make something up!”
“I’m thinking!” Lilah shouted.
“Good things take time,” said Wade as he steered his truck out onto Warren Street, diverging from the convoy of other funeral goers.
Daisy agreed. She wished Poppy would stop being such a bitch. Half an hour earlier, Wade had been in tears in the pew next to them, watching his best friend, Hugh Isherwood, and Hugh’s older brother, Brian, set flowers beside a blown-up photo of their mother, Evie Isherwood. The whole service had been nonstop bawling, which Daisy expected. But seeing Evie Isherwood’s younger son in tears had never been anything she expected to see in her entire life of knowing him: Hugh and his handsome, brash pride, whether they were in the hallway at school or running along the dirt roads off Old Blackmun Road. She herself had not cried at all.
“All right,” said Lilah. “I’ve got one. Wouldn’t it be, don’t you think, so very metal if, say, an eagle swooped down from the sky just as a bear was swiping a fish out of a river and poked out its eye?”
“Whose eye?” Poppy asked. “The bear’s or the fish’s?”
“It’s pretty metal either way,” Wade said.