Excerpt from Trouble the Living by Francesca McDonnell Capossela, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Everything would be different once he and Siobhán were married. The house would be hollower, the silences longer. Da's scowls would be concentrated only on Tad without Enda to share them. Siobhán was from Donegal, and he would be moving there, across the border. They would live in the South; we would stay in the North. The words were not literal. Looking at a map, you'd say Donegal was due west of Tyrone, not south. But he was moving to the so-called Free State, while we lived in so-called Northern Ireland, held tight in the grip of the United Kingdom, an assault passed off as an embrace. It was wicked, their assertion that our home was their territory, that we were their citizens.

With Enda gone, I would be the oldest in the house. Tad was a year younger, and Ina was fourteen. We didn't go into the woods much anymore. Tad played football with his friends. Ina and I went to the lough to swim, watched Countdown on Monday evenings, lip-synced to our favorite songs on VH1. And Enda lay in his room and dreamed, I supposed, of when he would be free of us.



Ina was in the bathtub, her eyes closed as she lay with her head against the porcelain rim. Her nipples, puffed with adolescence, peeked out of the water like frogs' heads. Her cheeks were flushed with the heat of the bath, and her eyes still had the residue of sleep in their corners.

"Hi," I said quietly, not wanting to frighten her.

"Oh." She opened her eyes. "I'm sorry—I'll be out in a minute."

Girls at school complained about sharing bedrooms or bathrooms with their sisters, but I loved to be alone with Ina like this, when nudity was natural, when our bodies were present but not the point. We were like children again. The steam from the bath made the room smoky. I sat down on the toilet seat and waited for my turn. Ina had always preferred baths to showers. Seeing her now, I wanted to copy her, to sink down into the water she had risen from. To exchange my body for hers.

Ina had somehow turned out more beautiful than the rest of us siblings put together. It was like a taunt, like divine intervention. When I was twelve or thirteen, I'd asked Father Jim what the difference was between envy and jealousy. Envy, he said, was the second-worst deadly sin. It meant wanting to hurt someone in order to take what they had. Being jealous was only a possessiveness, wanting to protect something, or someone, from being taken from you. "Can you be both?" I'd asked. "Can you be afraid of losing someone but at the same time want to hurt them, to take what they have?" The Devil, Father Jim had said, has many talons. He can puncture the heart in more than one place.

"D'you know why Ma's acting funny like?" Ina asked after a minute. "Why'd she sleep in our room?"

"It's nothing," I said, shrugging. "They just had a fight. You know how they are."

"She wants us to go to Mass with her tomorrow. I don't know why we need to go two times in one week. Sure we were only just bloody there."

"But you'll go, won't you?" I asked.

Ina was rubbing a bar of soap over her chest, under her arms. "I don't think I can like."

"What do you mean?"

"I dunno if I believe in God, if I'm honest."

I covered my face with my hands. "Ina," I pleaded through my fingers. "Don't be talking nonsense like that. You'll get yourself in trouble."

"You know, lots of people don't believe in God," she said calmly. "George Bernard Shaw didn't, and we learned about him in school."

"What do you even mean, 'believe in God'? The Almighty's not up there worrying about whether or not Ina Kane believes in him. You've just got to go to Mass is all."

She shrugged, but I could tell by the way her mouth was set that I had done nothing to change her mind. I wondered if I should be afraid for her. But then I sighed. It was just Ina being Ina. She could never go to Hell. She was too pretty.

Excerpted from Trouble the Living by Francesca McDonnell Capossela. Copyright © 2023 by Francesca McDonnell Capossela. Excerpted by permission of Lake Union Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.