Orange World and Other Stories Read online

  “I can’t put her back in the bog. It would be…”

  Silence drilled into her ears. Her family had a talent for emitting judgment without articulating words. When she was in high school and five months pregnant, everyone had quietly made clear that she was sacrificing her future. She’d run away to be with Cillian’s father, then returned to the boglands alone with a bug-eyed toddler.

  “I’m afraid,” she confessed to her sisters. “If I put her out of the house, he’ll leave with her.”

  “Oh!” they cried in unison. As if a needle had infected them all with her fear.

  “Do something crazy, stupid…”

  Silently adding, Like we did.

  * * *

  “Now, be honest, you little rat turd. You know nothing about her.” His uncle put a finger into his peach iced tea, stirred. They were seated on a swing in the darkest part of Cillian’s porch. Uncle Sean was as blandly ugly as a big toenail. Egg-bald and cheerfully unemployed, a third-helpings kind of guy. Once, Cillian had watched him eat the sticker on a green apple rather than peel it off. Sean was always over at the cottage, using Gillian’s computer to play Poker 3000. He smeared himself throughout their house, his beer rings ghosting over surfaces like fat thumbs on a photograph. His words hung around, too, leaving their brain stain on the air. Uncle Sean took a proprietary interest in anything loved by Cillian. It was no surprise, then, that he was infatuated with the Bog Girl.

  “I know that I love her,” Cill said warily. He hated to be baited.

  Uncle Sean was packing his brown, shaky weed into the rosy crotch of a glass mermaid. He passed his nephew the pipe. “Already, eh? You love her and you don’t know the first thing about her?”

  What did he know about her?

  What did he love about her?

  Cillian shrugged, his body crowding with feelings. “And I know that she loves me,” he added, somewhat hastily.

  Uncle Sean’s pink smirk seemed to paste him to the back of the wicker seat. “Oh?” His grin widened. “And how old is she?”

  “Two thousand. But she was my age when they put her in the bog.”

  “Most women I know lie freely about their age,” Uncle Sean warned. “She may well be eleven. Then again, she could be three thousand.”

  Gillian, plump and starlit, appeared on the porch. A pleasant oniony smell followed her, mixing with the damp odor of Sean’s pot.

  “Are you smoking?”

  “No,” they lied in unison.

  “Tell your…your friend that she is welcome to eat with us.” With a martyred air, Gillian lifted her kitten-print pot holders to the heavens. Cill smiled; the pot holders made it look as if she approved of the situation—two big thumbs-up! His poor mom. She was so nervous around new people, and the Bog Girl’s silence only intimidated her further. She was insecure about her cooking, and he knew she was going to take it very personally when the Bog Girl did not touch it.

  Dinner was meat loaf with onions and, for Sean, a thousand beers. It was not a comfortable meal.

  Gillian, stirring butter into the lima beans, beamed threats at her son’s new girlfriend: You little bitch. Crawl back into your hole. Stay away from my son.

  “Biscuit?” Gillian asked. “Does she like biscuits, Cill?”

  The Bog Girl smiled her gentle smile at the wall, her face reflected in the oval door of the washer-dryer. Against that sudsy turbulence, she looked especially still.

  Three drinks in, Uncle Sean slung an arm around the Bog Girl’s thin blue shoulder, welcoming her into the family. “I’m proud of my nephew for going after an older woman, a mature woman…a cougar!”

  Cillian fixed his uncle with a homicidal stare. Under the table, he touched his girlfriend’s foot with his foot; his eyebrows lifted in apology. His mother shot up with her steaming cauldron of beans, giving everyone another punitive lima ladle and removing the beer from the table. Their dog, returning from her dusk mouse hunt, came berserking into the kitchen, barking at a deranged pitch. She wanted to play tug-of-war with the Bog Girl’s noose. “Puddles—no!” Cillian’s vision was swimming, his whole body overheating with shame. He relaxed when he stared into the Bog Girl’s face, which was void of all judgment, smiling at him with its mysterious kindness. Once again, his embarrassment was soothed by her infinite calm. His eyes lowered from her smile to the noose. Of course, she’s seen far worse than us, he thought. Outside the window, insects millioned around the porch light. The bog crickets were doing a raspy ventriloquy of the stars; perhaps she recognized their tiny voices. Soon Uncle Sean was snoring lightly beside the pooling gravy, face down in his big arms. Cill sat slablike in the moonlight. The Bog Girl smiled blindly on.

  * * *

  For the first two weeks, the Bog Girl slept on the sofa, the television light flickering gently over her. That was fine by Gillian. She wasn’t about to turn an orphan from the Iron Age out on the street.

  Then, on a rainy Monday night, without warning or apology, Cillian picked up the Bog Girl. He cradled her like a child, her frondy feet dangling in the air. Gillian, doing a jigsaw puzzle of a horse and colt in the kitchen, looked up in time to see them disappearing. She felt a purple welt rising in her mind, the revelatory pain called wonder. Underneath the shock, other feelings began to flow, among them a disturbed pride. Because hadn’t he looked exactly like his father? Confident, possessed. He didn’t ask for his mother’s permission. He did not lie to her about what he was doing, or hide it, or explain it. He simply rose with the Bog Girl in his arms, nuzzling her blue neck. The door shut, and he was gone from sight. Another milestone: she heard the click of the lock.

  “Good night, Son!” she cried after them, panicked.

  She could not reconcile her knowledge of her sweet, awkward boy with this wayward, brazen person. Was she supposed to go up there now? Pound on the door? Oh, who could she call? Nobody, not even her sisters, would take a call about this problem, she felt quite certain. Abby’s son, Kevin, met his girlfriend in church. Cathy’s son, Patrick, had a lovely fiancée who taught kindergarten. Murry’s girlfriend was in jail for vehicular manslaughter—but at least she was alive!

  In the morning, she watched the mute, hitching muscles of his back as he fumbled with the coffeepot. So he was a coffee drinker now. News to her. He kissed his mother’s forehead as he left for work, but he was whistling to himself, oblivious of her sadness, her fear, completely self-enclosed in his new happiness. It’s too soon for this, she thought. And: Not you, too. Please, please, please, she prayed, the incomplete prayer of mothers everywhere who cannot conceive of a solution.

  That evening, she announced a new rule: “Everyone has to wear clothes. And no more locked doors.”

  * * *

  One chilly Saturday, Cillian took the ferry three hours to a mainland museum. Twelve bog bodies were on display, part of a traveling exhibition called Kings of the Iron Age. The Bog Girl had met his family—the least he could do was return the favor. Cill sneaked into a tour in progress, following a docent from sepulchre to sepulchre. Under the glass, the kings of the Iron Age lay like chewed taffy. One man was naked except for a fox-fur armband. Another was a giant. Another had two sets of thumbs.

  Cillian learned that the bogs of the islands in the cold Atlantic were particularly acidic. Pickled bodies from the Iron Age had emerged from these deep vats. Their fetally scrolled bodies often doubled as the crumpled maps of murders. They might have been human sacrifices, the docent said. Left in the bog water for the harvest god. Kings, queens, scapegoats, victims—they might have been any of these things.

  “From the contents of his stomach, we can surmise that he last dined on oat gruel…

  “From the forensic analyses, we can surmise that she was killed by an arrow…

  “From the ornaments on this belt buckle, we can surmise that these were a wealthy people…”

  What? No more th
an this could be surmised?

  The docent pointed out the dots and stripes on the potsherds. Charcoal smudges that might be stars or animals. Evidence, she said, of “a robust culture.” Cillian took notes:

  THEY HAD TIME TO KILL. THEY LIKED ART, TOO.

  Back on the ferry, he could admit to his relief: none of the other bog bodies stirred any feeling in him. He loved one specific person. He could see things about the Bog Girl to which this batty docent would be totally blind—for example, the secret depths her smile concealed. How badly misunderstood she had been by her own people. She was an alien from a planet that nobody alive could visit—the planet Earth, in the first century A.D. She felt soft in his arms, bonelessly soft, but she also seemed indestructible. According to the experts, a bog body should begin to decompose rapidly when exposed to air. Curiously enough, this Bog Girl had not. He told no one his theory but polished it inside his mind like an amulet: it was his love that was protecting her.

  * * *

  By August, their rapport had deepened immeasurably. They didn’t need to say a word, Cill was discovering, to perfectly understand each other. Falling in love with the Bog Girl was a wonderful thing—it was permission to ignore everyone else. When school started, in September, he made a bespoke sling and brought her with him. His girlfriend, propped like a broomstick against the rows of lockers, waited for him during Biology and Music II, as cool and impassive as the most popular girl the world has ever known.

  Nobody in the school administration objected to the presence of the Bog Girl. Ancestral superstitions still hovered over the islanders’ minds, exerting their quiet influence, and nobody wanted to be the person responsible for angering a visitor from the past. Soon she was permitted to audit all of Cillian’s classes, smiling patiently at the flustered, frightened teachers.

  One afternoon, the vice-principal called her into his office and presented her with a red-and-gold badge to wear in the halls: VISITING STUDENT.

  “I don’t think that’s really accurate, sir,” Cillian said.

  “Oh, no?”

  “She’s not a visitor. She was born here.” In fact, the Bog Girl was the island’s oldest resident, by at least nineteen hundred years. Cillian paused. “Also, her eyes are shut, you see. So I don’t think she can really, ah, study…”

  “Well!” The vice-principal clapped his hands. He had a school to run, quotas to fulfill. “We will be studying her, then. She will give us all an exciting new perspective on our modern life and times—oh my! Oh dear.” The Bog Girl had slumped into his aloe planter.

  Cillian put the badge on her polyester blouse, a loaner from his mother that was vintage cool. Cillian—who never gave a thought to his own clothing—enjoyed dressing the Bog Girl for school in the morning. He raided his mother’s closet, resurrecting her baby-doll dresses. The eleventh-grade girls organized a clothing drive for the Bog Girl, collecting many shoplifted donations of fall tunics and on-trend boots.

  Rumorsprawl. Word got around that the Bog Girl was actually a princess. A princess, or possibly a witch. Within a week, she was eating at the popular girls’ table. They’d kidnapped her from where Cillian had positioned her on a bench, propped between two book bags, and taken her to lunch. Already they had restyled her hair with rhinestone barrettes.

  “You stole my girlfriend,” Cillian said.

  “Something awful happened to her,” Vicki said reverently.

  “So bad,” Georgette echoed.

  “She doesn’t like to talk about it,” Priscilla said, looping a protective arm around the Bog Girl. The girls had matching lunches: lettuce salads, diet candy bars, diet shakes. They were all jealous of how little she ate.

  How had Cill not foreseen this turn of events? The Bog Girl was diminutive, wounded, mysterious, a redhead. Best of all, she could never contradict any rumor the living girls distributed about her.

  “She was too beautiful to live!” Priscilla gasped. “They killed her for her beauty.”

  “I don’t th-th-think,” Cill said, “that it happened quite like that.”

  The popular girls adjusted their leggings, annoyed. “No?”

  Cillian was dimly aware that other tables were listening in, but the density of the attention in no way affected him. “I am hers, and she is mine,” he announced. “I have dedicated myself to learning everything about her.”

  A sighing spasm of envy moved down the popular girls’ table—what boy alive would say this about them? A miracle: nobody mocked Cillian Eddowis. They were all starving to be loved like this. The popular girls watched him avidly as he ate a grilled cheese and waffle fries, his green irises burning. Between bites, his left hand rose to touch the Bog Girl’s red braid, tousling it like the pull-chain of a lamp.

  * * *

  Gillian couldn’t help it: she was heartbroken. The past that was most precious to her had filtered right through her son. The songs she’d sung to him when he was nursing? The care with which she’d cut the tiny moons of his fingernails? Their 4 a.m. feedings? Erased! Her son had matured into amnesia about his earliest years. Now her body was the only place where the memories were preserved. Cillian, like all sons, was blithe about this betrayal.

  “There is so much about yourself that you do not recall,” Gillian accused him after dinner one night. Cillian, writing a paper about igneous rocks at the kitchen table, did not look up.

  “When you were my boy, just a wee boy,” Gillian said in a voice of true agony, “you used to be terrified of the vacuum cleaner. You loved your froggy pajamas. You used so much glue on your art projects that your teachers—”

  “Quit it with these dumb stories, Ma!”

  “Oh, you find them dumb, do you? The stories about how I had to raise you alone, without a penny from your father—”

  “You’re just trying to embarrass me in front of her!”

  The Bog Girl smiled at them from the amber armchair. Her leather skirt was outrageously short, a donation from tall Bianca. Decorously, Cillian had draped the cable guide over her lap. Bugs spun in her water glass; mosquitoes and dragonflies were always diving into the Bog Girl’s food and drink, as if in strange solidarity with her.

  Cillian drew himself up triumphantly, a foot taller than his mother. “You don’t want me to grow up.”

  “What? Of course I do!”

  But Cill was ready with his rebuttal: “You gave us rhyming names, Ma!”

  This was true. Gillian and Cillian. She’d come up with that plan when she was a teenager herself, and pregnant with a nameless otter, some gyring little animal. A rhyming name had seemed just right then; she couldn’t have said why, at seventeen. Had Cillian been a girl, she would have named her Lillian.

  “You’re so young, you can’t know…” But what did she want to tell him?

  Her body seemed to cave in on itself then, becoming smaller and smaller, so that even Cillian, fortressed behind the wall of his love, noticed and became alarmed. “Ma? What’s wrong?”

  “It’s changing all the time,” she murmured ominously. “Just, please, wait, my love. Don’t…settle.” What a word! She pictured her son sinking up to his neck in the reddish bog water.

  She was hiccuping now, unable to name her own feelings. Without thinking, she picked up the murky water glass, drank from it. “Your potential…all the teachers tell me you have great potential.”

  Just come out and say it. “I don’t want you to throw your life away on some Bog Girl!”

  “Oh, Ma.” Cill patted her back until the hiccups stopped. Her face looked crumpled and blue in the unlit room, hovering above the seated Bog Girl. For a second, they might have been sisters.

  * * *

  The Bog Girl floated, thin as a dress, on the mattress. Barrettes, pink and purple, were scattered all over the pillow. She smiled at Cillian, or beyond him, with her desiccated calm. Downstairs, Gillian was making breakfast, th
e buttery smells threading through his nostrils like an ox ring, tugging him toward them. But when she called up for him he was barely in the room. He was digging and digging into the peat-moss bog again, smoothing her blue cheeks with both hands, spading down into the kingdom that she came from.

  “Cillian! The bus is coming!” It should have taken him twenty seconds to put on pants. What was he doing in there? Probably jacking off to a “meme,” whatever that was, or buying perfume for the Bog Girl on her credit cards.

  “Coming, Ma!”

  Cillian was always learning new things about his girlfriend. The longer he looked at her, the more he saw. Her face grew silty with personality. Although she was young when she disappeared into the bog, her face was plowed with tiny wrinklings. Some dream or mood had recurred frequently enough to hammer lines across her brow. Here were the ridges and the gullies her mental weathers had worked into her skin.

  Cill studied the inflorescences on her cheeks. Her brain is in there, the university man had said. Her brain is intact, preserved by the bog acids. Cillian spent hours doing this forensic palmistry, trying to read her mind.

  * * *

  On the weekends, Cillian still drove the Peatmax in the boglands. They needed the money. On the radio one Saturday morning, he was surprised to find two men debating whether or not turf cutting was evil.

  “Turf is a fuel that’s dirtier than coal,” said a representative from Friends of the Island.

  “Europe can’t tell us what to do with our bogs. We’ve been working in the bogs for a thousand years…”

  Cill switched off the radio. It was strange to hear the very verb he was performing so vehemently condemned. Stranger still that he could feel so perfectly indifferent to the debate, even seated in the cab of the world-killing machine. Right or wrong? Right or wrong? The Peatmax had already been in gear when he started listening to the program. Love had completely insulated him from all fear of the future. A hundred times a day, a thousand times a day, he pictured her blue hand reaching up for him. People waste a lot of time trying to make it one or the other, thought Cillian. It was right and wrong to be with her.