The Souls of Drowned People

Chapter Four

Cillian and I watched reality TV together until three in the morning, when he finally yawned and said “jet lag is killing me.”

We had been watching with the volume turned low so Cillian could make up his own dialogue to go with their melodramatic facial expressions and exaggerated hand movements. His accent made it all the more ridiculous.

“Loser,” I said, scooping up the last of our popcorn.

“It’s nine in the morning already in Ireland. I’m tired.”

I smacked his cheek, stopping him mid-yawn. “Stop doing that. You’re making me tired.”

“Well, what else do you propose we do?”

“You should tell me another story.”

“About what?”

I picked up a blanket from the floor, sliding myself under it. “My father.”

The tiredness vanished from his eyes for a moment, replaced with bright panic. “What about him? I’m sure you knew him far better than I did.”

“I didn’t know him. No more than you did. You’re older than me. You have to remember something.”

“I’m only seven months older. That doesn’t make a whole lot of a difference in what I remember or not. He drowned, I know that. You know that. And even you said it tonight over dinner. Bless the souls of the people who have drowned. That’s what we have to do. We have to love, but move on.”

“Didn’t your uncle drown, too? That one winter?” The winter before I turned six, a total of seven people had drowned in the bay. It was said that they were dragging up more bodies than fish. I could only imagine my mother watching the search boats from her kitchen window, ringing her hands until they began to sweat as if it were summer again.

“There’s a difference between drowning and being so drunk that you fall off the side of your own boat when you try to stand up. When your father drowned, that was a tragedy. My Uncle Eamon’s death was a tragedy, no doubt, but an expected one.”

“Has anyone else drowned since we left?”

I had never asked these kinds of questions before, and the way Cillian picked at the running threads of the blanket told me he wished I never had.

“How many?” I demanded.

Cillian exhaled loudly. “At least one every summer.”

“Why?”

“Why does anyone die? If I knew the answer to that, I’d be a very rich man. I don’t know why they drown. Strong currents. Tired limbs that can’t swim anymore. Tangled nets, drunken movements, wrong steps.”

I curled into a tighter ball underneath the blanket. “Sometimes I feel like it’s all my fault. It has to be my fault. Otherwise my mother would never have needed to run away with me.”

“Moira.” Cillian took me by the shoulders. “Don’t say that. Nothing is your fault. Some things are just meant to happen, I guess. And it has nothing to do with you. Never has. It never will.”

“Well, if it is my fault . . . I’m sorry.”

“No need for that. The drownings keep Ballycotton interesting. We play a sick kind of game every summer, guessing who it will be. No one ever says anything about it, but everyone thinks it. They hold their breath and keep their children away from the water, but everyone is just waiting for it.”

“Who was it this year?”

 “No one yet. Maybe this’ll be the year that breaks the curse.”