The Souls of Drowned People

Chapter Twenty

All Cillian wanted to do was go home and pull the splinters out of his hands, but I dragged him up the hill toward town.

“We’re going to the cemetery,” I told him, tugging harder on his hand when he looked longingly toward the warmth of the house. “I haven’t been yet. I need to see my father’s grave.”

He couldn’t object to that.

The grass up the hill was slick with rain, and when we finally stumbled to the top, the town looked like something from a horror movie, closed windows and the bright doors dulled with fog. It was eerily silent, except for the slapping on the rain against the streets. A door to one of the mailboxes had fallen open, the inside bulging with uncollected letters.

The cemetery was behind the church, the gate locked. Cillian pounded against the lock until black rust began to chip away, but it didn’t open.

“I’ll go ask for the keys,” he finally said in defeat, and disappeared into the church. He was gone for a few minutes, and I began to worry that someone had murdered him inside the dark church, throwing his body underneath a pew. It would have been unholy, but considering how much everyone in Ballycotton appeared to despise me, I wouldn’t have put it past them.

Cillian finally appeared on the other side of the gate, a set of keys jangling as he twirled them around his finger. “Good thing I’m Bridget Coneelly’s brother,” he said as he tugged the heavy gate open. “otherwise I’d never get any respect around this place.”

He lead me through the labyrinth of graves. I stepped carefully through the wet and squishing grass, wincing at the thought of death right below our feet. “Our families have plots right next to each other, did you know that? The Coneellys and the McCabes, best friends forever.”

“My family has more graves.” It wasn’t something to be proud of.

My father’s grave still looked new, even after twelve years. He could have been put in the ground yesterday. It suddenly felt like yesterday, as I knelt in front of my father’s grave for the first time. He had been gone years, yet I was finally here, like I should have been twelve years ago. I felt as heartbroken as I would have felt when he died, if I had understood.

 “I’ll be right over there, okay?” Cillian touched my shoulder gently, and nodded to the Coneelly’s patch of graves. He sat in the grass in front of his uncle Eamon’s grave, picking out bits of dirt from the letters engraved into the stone. He was mumbling softly in Irish, and I wondered if he was apologizing for the boat.

I felt like I should have been apologizing too, but I didn’t know where to begin. It wasn’t my fault that the gravestones of my family took up an entire corner of the cemetery. It wasn’t my father’s fault, and it wasn’t Brendan’s fault, or Iona’s. Or even my mother’s. It was the sea’s fault. All we had ever done was love it, and it killed us in return.

I imagined my father would try to see the positive of it. The sea drowned us, he would say, because it loved us back. It wanted us. The sea and the McCabes, we were meant to be together. I wasn’t meant for the land, and neither was my father or Brendan, and the water was doing us a favor it taking us down. It was meant to be, I imagined my father saying.

Brendan and Iona didn’t have graves in the cemetery. My father was there, next to my grandparents, buried together, and his little sister, who might have been my favorite aunt had she been given a chance to grow up.

“Where’s Brendan?” I asked softly. “And Iona.”

“The town was afraid to bury them.” Cillian moved closer to me, ignoring the stains the wet grass left on his jeans. “Afraid that the selkies would be furious, if they buried Iona in the ground. Everyone knew they would want to be together though, so they both got buried at sea.”