The First Day of Spring

by Nancy Tucker

“But we are made of each other. We are parts of the same whole. Don’t you know she grew inside me, like one of my organs?” It seemed extravagantly cruel that there was no biological system for keeping Molly with me always, no way of carrying her around in a pouch above my pelvis like a joey.

When you did bad things like that the keepers descended, one for each limb, held you so tight you couldn’t move. I did lots of bad things. It felt nice to be held. I liked going limp in their arms and hearing them say, “There. Well done for calming down. Good girl, Chrissie. Good girl.” It was almost like I wasn’t bad at all.

That was the worst thing—the fact that Sasha was cruel to take her, and wicked to take her, and right to take her. Because any kid who stayed with me would grow up a jigsaw of rotted, crumbling parts. If Molly stayed with me, she would grow up to be Chrissie.

she was like an organ, that I felt about her the way I would have felt if someone had scooped out my heart and put it on top of me.

You’re never going to stop being miserable if you read books like that. You should read a joke book. That would make you laugh.”

It was the same game we had been playing for eighteen years: seeing how much we could push away while still holding on with our fingernails.

No keepers keeping me safe.

freedom wasn’t the same as feeling free.

Anyway, that was how I knew being dead wasn’t forever. Not always. People who talked about dying as if it was forever were either lying or stupid, because I knew two people who definitely, definitely came back from being dead. One was Da and the other was Jesus.

We were bonded by something thicker than water, thicker than blood: a tar-dark soup of hate-want-need.

I couldn’t think how to articulate that food stopped being food when you didn’t have it, that it swelled and bloated as you shrank. It became the way you ticked off the hours, how you judged a good day from a bad one, something you stored when you had it and mourned when you didn’t.

Kids aren’t born loving you. Needing you, maybe. But not loving you. You have to put the work in for love.”

Perhaps that was what felt biggest of all—having found Mam unrotted. She was smaller and quieter and better than before. She was clean. She was stable. She was earning money and stocking her cupboards. It was what had happened for me when I had found out I was pregnant with Molly, except it had happened in reverse. I had built myself up because Molly had arrived. Mam had done it because I had left.

I don’t have a home. I just have a house.

For years I had been hung up on Mam, because your mam was the one who was supposed to fill you up when you felt empty, but she had never done that for me. She had given me dregs and scrapings of warmth, and now that I had seen her again, I believed it was all she had been able to give, but it hadn’t been enough. She was never going to give me enough. I knew, because when she had told me what she wanted, she had talked about going back and making things different for her. She hadn’t talked about doing things better for me.

Only one person in Chrissie’s life had loved her in an ordinary, everyday way, the way you love salt or sunlight. Linda hadn’t been able to tie shoelaces or tell the time, but she had been the cleverest at loving, at loyalty, at giving everything and expecting nothing in return.

When someone you knew died, you didn’t die with them. You carried on, and you went through phases and chapters so different they felt like whole different lives, but in all of those lives the dead person was still dead. Dead whether you were sad or happy, dead whether you thought about them or didn’t, dead whether you missed them or not. If it didn’t last, it wasn’t real dying, it was just someone caring so little they disappeared.

You couldn’t understand about fair and unfair when you had a mammy who made scones and a da who put your name into songs.

I want you to remember me. I want you to remember to be my best friend. I want you to remember that you have to like me, that it’s your job to like me, because you’re the only one in the whole wide world who does.

have done badly at so many things in my life. But I have done well at being this little girl’s mum.”