Chapter 3: Aoife (part 2 of 4)

  After Niall and Clodagh started eating too, there were two untouched bowls of soup left. Aoife took one of the bowls along with a spoon and a candle lantern, and made her way to the staircase. None of the children stopped to ask what she was doing. It had almost become a part of their dinner routine.

  The Griffins' living space was divided into the master bedroom shared by Ma and the girls and a small, walled-off section at the end of the hallway that housed the two boys. The whole of upstairs was currently unlit, and Aoife relied on the candlelight for balance to keep the soup from spilling.

  She opened the bedroom door and held out the lantern. It illuminated the far corner where her mother lay bundled up in layers of blankets, her back turned to the door. Aoife carefully set the lantern and the bowl of soup on the side table and sat down at the foot of the bed. Her mother stirred, turning over on her back and finding Aoife with bleary eyes.

  "Aoife," she rasped, then sighed heavily, immediately closing her eyes again as if this one action had already taken all of her strength. "What... what time is it? The children, are they—"

  Aoife shushed and gently stroked Ma's hair—dark and straight, the odd one out in the family. In the flickering candlelight, it was hard to see how pale she was, but the lines on her face seemed deeper, giving Ma a more frail appearance than she had looked in the morning.

  Asha Griffin had never been a lively woman for as long as Aoife had known her, prone to sickness and bouts of low mood. She had been in an especially dire state after her husband died, and the family suffered greatly for it in Dubhlind. Now, Aoife was old enough to support the household herself, with Clodagh ready and willing to help. She had quit her schooling a year early to take over Ma's shifts at Aunt Cara's shop. Clodagh tried to do the same, but Aoife wouldn't hear of it. Through fits and starts, she had found a way to keep the family together and mostly out of trouble in Thameside, and the Griffins were just starting to enjoy a kind of normalcy. They were still far from comfortable, but at least their lives had become bearable and more or less predictable.

  That was until a few months ago when Ma's health took a turn for the worse. On some days, she had just enough energy to tidy up the place and fix something for the younger kids when they came home from school. Then, there were other days when she would be exhausted from the moment she woke up and would spend the whole day in bed. She was starting to have more bad days than good.

  Her misery also manifested itself physically. The bags under her eyes swelled and darkened while her copper skin—once a shade darker than her children's—took on a dull, yellowish appearance. Aunt Cara had taken one look at Ma and declared that it was 'bloodlessness', and that Da himself had suffered with it as a child, though not to anywhere near this extent.

  Aoife had urged Ma to go see a doctor. Ma refused, saying they couldn't afford the fees. Aoife then scraped together enough money for more than a few doctor's visits—a boon of her new job—and showed it to Ma. She refused again, this time saying she was too tired to go. It wasn't just the physical illness that had done her in; it seemed that her mind too had quietly resigned to living out her days on Ember Lane, wrapped up in blankets and lying still in the corner of a dark room.

  If Aunt Cara happened to be present during one of Aoife's many attempts to cajole, goad, and plead with her mother, she would tut and huff something about the old days when doctors wouldn't take payment from poor folk and some of them could even be persuaded to visit the sick at home. According to her aunt, this too was somehow the fault of the East India Company. Aoife couldn't fathom what the EIC had to gain from keeping doctors away from the poor, but her second-hand resentment of them grew just a little more.

  And now, she sat next to her mother, feeling her bony shoulder and her lack of warmth despite the layers of blankets. Aoife's eyes stung when she realized that she was watching her mother fade away.

  Is Ma really going to die like this? In truth, Aoife didn't have many happy memories with Ma, but throughout all of their unhappiness and hardship, her mother had been the one true constant. She braced herself to push away the tearful thoughts, and forced out a smile. "Don't worry, Ma. Everyone's downstairs eating. I made soup. Want some?"

  Ma didn't speak or open her eyes. Instead, she sighed heavily again and gave an almost imperceptible shake of the head.

  "You think you'll have some in a few minutes? I can leave it here for you, but it'll get cold soon."

  No response. Aoife hung her head, trying to collect herself. She didn't know how to help her mother. She didn't know how to cure the sickness, much less how to pull Ma out of the unseen depths she seemed to be drowning in. Aoife had made a promise to Da but in this moment, she simply didn't know what to do. Unless...

  "Ma, I want to try again," she said in a near whisper. "Can you give me your hands?"

  Ma still kept her eyes closed but obediently took her hands out and laid them on top of the blankets, palms down. Her callused, veiny hands had a greyish tint to them, apparent even in the candlelight. They were the hands of someone much older. Aoife fought down another pang of heartache and forced herself to look at them. She gently rolled up Ma's sleeves and warpped her own hands around each wrist. The hands felt clammy and already icy cold. Aoife stroked the insides of the wrists with her fingers until she felt and settled over the pulses. She didn't know how to count pulses, but she was certain that her mother's heart was beating much too fast for someone that had been lying in bed all day.

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  About a week ago now, in a moment of desperation, Aoife had somehow stumbled on a way that could make Ma feel better, at least for a short while. It had been a particularly bad day for Ma. The children were having dinner downstairs when they heard a loud thud from above. Having rushed upstairs, they found Ma lying on the floor a few steps from her bed, unconscious. Aoife and Clodagh together carried her back onto the bed, a surprisingly strenuous task considering how small and thin Ma looked then.

  Aoife could still picture the scene clearly. Ma, eyes closed in a faint frown and unrousable. Clodagh, dashing out of the room to call for help. Niall, eyes wide and feet rooted to the spot, with Liam and Fiona holding onto him and crying. And Aoife herself, kneeling on the floor beside the bed and clutching Ma's frigid hands, gripped by terror at the thought that those eyes would never open again.

  It had happened then. That familiar burning in her heart, then heat coursing through the rest of her body. Somehow, she knew that the heat was running through her bloodstreams. It was the same heat in her blood that she would tap into to jump from rooftop to rooftop, the same heat in her blood that—all those years ago—had helped her save Ma from a lecher in the night, aboard the ship that had carried them away from Dubhlind. She still didn't know what it was—this blood trick of hers—but over time, she had learned how to summon it on command. Only on this occasion, as she knelt clutching at her dying mother, the heat had come to her before she knew she had asked for it.

  With her hands still wrapped tightly around Ma's cold, unmoving hands, she had felt the heat fill her body then extend past her, into Ma. Just as surely as she knew the heat belonged to her blood, she could sense it then within her mother's bloodstreams. First the hands, then up the arms, down to the chest and shooting out again. Aoife's eyes stayed upon Ma's lifeless body, yet what she saw was the heat—her heat—coursing through Ma.

  Her mother had woken up then with a gasp, the colour quickly returning to her face. Aoife let go in surprise, and her younger siblings moved in behind her. Ma looked around in confusion, then upon seeing most of her children gathered around her, asked after Clodagh. By the time a tearful Clodagh had rushed in with a stricken Aunt Cara in tow, Ma had recovered enough strength to chat with them late into the night.

  That improvement had been short-lived. Ma had another one of her bad days the very next day, her burst of colour and energy quickly forgotten. And today, she seemed worse than she had been on the day she fainted. Aoife didn't understand what she had done that day to wake Ma up, but whatever it was, the time seemed ripe for another try.

  Once she set her mind to the task, calm settled over her. She closed her own eyes and felt the room. She felt her own breathing, slow and steady. Felt Ma's soft and accelerated pulse. Felt the faint glow that emanated from the lantern on the side table. She then let her mind take a step toward the place it needed to be, the place from which she summoned her mysterious heat. Yet as soon as she did, she noticed that something was different.

  Lying awake in a pitch-black room. Wood creaking. Coughs and sniffles, most of them distant, some uncomfortably close. The smell of mold and dried vomit, inescapable. Then she hears it. A gentle rush of air, rising and falling. Rhythmic. Hypnotic. Her mother is asleep beside her. The sound joins those of her sisters and brothers around them. The chorus of her sleeping family. On a ship full of strangers, headed to a strange land. Yet in this moment, all is well. All is calm. Aoife Griffin's eyelids begin to droop...

  Her heart stirred again, but this sensation was unfamiliar. Something rose from the heart and traversed the rest of her body, but it wasn't quite heat. What was it? Warmth. It had a gentler, more patient cadence as it bubbled through her bloodstreams, eventually touching upon the intersection where Aoife ended and Ma began.

  Instead of exploding toward Ma's heart, the warmth—her warmth—caressed the new set of bloodstreams as though greeting an old, dear friend. As the warmth spread to the rest of Ma's body, Aoife once again saw with her mind's eye. She saw her mother's blood becoming livelier, busier, somehow redder. Woken from a long slumber, the rusty machinery creaked itself back into shape.

  And this time, Aoife did not let go. She kept her warmth glowing and continued to feed it into Ma, gently and patiently. Ma's response too was more gradual. She started to breathe slower and easier, then gingerly opened her eyes. Colour rose to her face, and beads of sweat formed on her forehead. Just now, she looked like someone who had just been through the worst of a fever and come out on the other side. A tear rolled down Aoife's cheek.

  "How are you feeling, Ma?" she croaked through a lump in her throat.

  "Aoife," Ma whispered back, no longer looking disoriented. She kept her eyes open, and kept them gazing into her daughter's. "How did you...?"

  Aoife shook her head, more tears forming and rolling down. She didn't know, and she didn't need to know. All that mattered was that Ma was alright again. For how long, who could say? But for now, she was alright.

  "Aoife, help me up," Ma said, and Aoife felt a hint of panic. What would happen to the renewed warmth in Ma's body if Aoife let go of her wrists?

  "Wait, Ma, I still need to—" she began to say, but found that she didn't know how to finish the thought. How could she explain what she herself didn't understand? But Ma looked at her with calm, gentle eyes, the most assured and present she'd been in months. It felt as though Ma somehow understood what Aoife couldn't.

  "It's alright, love. You can let go."

  Aoife did, and felt the connection sever. She could no longer see into Ma's bloodstreams, and she also felt her own warmth fade to a low thrum. She helped Ma sit up, keeping one hand on her back. As she sat upright, Ma closed her eyes again with a slight frown, and teetered momentarily, but she recovered quickly and looked at Aoife again. "Thank you."

  "Do you think you can eat the soup now? You haven't eaten all day, have you? Might have gotten a bit cold but—"

  As Aoife made to reach for the bowl of soup, her mother stopped the motion by wrapping her arms around her. It was a sensation so long-forgotten that it took a startled Aoife several seconds to recognize that Ma was hugging her. She slowly—uncertainly—brought her own arm around to return the embrace.

  Aoife couldn't remember the last time the two of them had held each other. Her mother was smaller than her now, and it was her head that was buried in Aoife's shoulder. The faintest of memories told Aoife that the last time, it had been the other way around.