The Gifts That Bind Us by Caroline O'Donoghue

Author:Caroline O'Donoghue [O’Donoghue, Caroline]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781536226973
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Published: 2022-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

The drive home is strange from the beginning. Fiona continues to hem and haw over the Well theory, and keeps coming back to what she believes to be the central question of the evening: namely, who is Manon, and when, exactly, did Nuala have a kid.

“Was she never going to tell us?” she exclaims. “Like, why now?”

“Because she’s an expert in what’s going on,” Lily says. “In Wells.”

“Lil,” I turn around in my seat to face her. “You get it, right? You believe her?”

A pause. “It makes sense to me.”

“I think it makes sense, too.”

“That’s how it felt when I was the river,” she suddenly says, her face against the cold, rain-splattered pane of the car window. “Like there was something underneath me. Something buzzing . . .”

Roe sighs loudly, and the wipers come on.

A silence falls on the four of us, the only sounds the swish of the wipers and the dim smattering of loose, noncommittal rain. I can’t stop thinking about the draining. The sense that I am just a tool for the Children. An organization for whom all people appear to be just tools in getting what they want. Who was that bus driver? The Chastity Brothers? The boy with the frog eyes? I think of the idiot girl at school. Are they all just conduits in the quest for more power, and what are they getting out of the deal if so?

How many of them even know what’s going on?

Roe drops Fiona home first, then Lily. “I’m just going to drop Maeve off,” he tells her. She nods and runs inside, coat pulled up over her head.

We drive the three minutes to my house and park outside. I ease into the driver’s seat, sitting on his lap, my head on his chest.

“How are you feeling?” He murmurs the question in my hair, his breath warm, his neck smelling of heat and home and lavender.

“Weird,” I respond, his heart beating against my ear. “The thought of Aaron just . . . taking stuff from me, without me even knowing. It’s . . .”

“I mean, your flu.”

I lift my head.

“My flu is fine,” I say, puzzled. “It’s fading.”

“Good,” he replies shortly.

There’s a silence between us, and a faint chill. “Can you turn the heat on?”

“Heater’s broken.”

Now I’m truly confused. “Can’t you just . . . ?”

But he looks at me blankly.

“Fix . . . it?”

“Oh,” he replies. “That.”

But he doesn’t fix it. He doesn’t really do anything. We just sit there, the cozy intimacy gone, and everything feels wooden and strained.

“How was Dublin?” I ask finally. “We hardly talked while you were there.”

His smile comes easy, his tone lighter. “Honestly, it was awesome. I can’t wait to play you the tracks. Honor is such a good producer. She taught me all these vocal exercises to protect my voice after recording so many takes. I can’t believe how much I was just, y’know, screaming into the mic and hoping for the best.”

“That’s great.” I smile and realize that this is the most committed to a sentence Roe has been all evening.

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