Prologue
1995: Mid-Coast Maine
Faye puts the pies in the oven and turns on the timer, her hands quivering. She hears William in the living room reading picture books to their granddaughter, Nola Wren, the murmur of his voice, the kerplink, kerplank, kerplunk of blueberries hitting Sal’s pail. The child giggles, a joy-filled chirp, like birdsong from the yard.The Irish Timessits heavy as an anvil on the table, though the photo there billows like ash above the newsprint, an apparition, the past come to life. Faye wonders how she might lash herself to this kitchen, to William, to the life they’ve built—anything to keep from being swept away by what that newspaper could unleash.
This is her favorite time of year, the season turning from summer to fall, the way sunlight becomes shimmery and golden. Already, squirrels bustle about with green nuts from the oak tree. Already, robins congregate in friendly flocks. Yet some storm gathers. She feels it in her bones. It broods there on the table, black and white. She remembers a line, something from a Millay sonnet.My sky is black with small birds bearing south.
William gasps, and she knows he has moved on to the theatrics ofMiss Spider’s Tea Party.
That damned newspaper.
“Take a look,” he’d said earlier when he came in from the barn. “Are these your German girls? The ones from the boat?” When Nola Wren interrupted, tugged on his pant leg, William abandoned the paper asif it contained nothing but a human-interest story and not the story of lives tangled and lost and resurrected. And on this, of all days. Molly’s homecoming.
Faye grips the kitchen shears like a weapon, gingerly steps toward the table as if she might slay, with quick stabs, this beast that stalks her. The headline is bold and dark as a crow.
Officials, Families to Celebrate
Operation Shamrock 50th Anniversary
Beneath the headline is a photograph, a group of children, thirty or more, alive with ribbing and pushing and horseplay. She can almost recall the pop of flashbulbs. The boys perch in back; some hold archer’s bows and single arrows. The girls sit on a concrete barrier, arms draped around shoulders, scraped knees and slouched socks dangling lazily over the edge. They are happy and fed. Oranges and chocolate, milk and butter and bread. Faye’s stomach aches with memory. She is there, her younger self, peering past the camera and into the future. Her accusing stare gives Faye the shivers. Another girl, her face as familiar to Faye as her own, turned slightly, head tilted in laughter. Like a herding dog keeping sheep in line, a nun in black, her white wimple flapped like donkey ears, has corralled the group along with yet another woman, younger, hair spun up like sugar on a paper cone.
Faye sets the shears down, holds the picture to her ear. She bows her head, hoping to hear their voices, if even for the briefest moment, before she must quiet them again.
Part One
1946–1968
Chapter One
1959: Mid-Coast Maine
Faye pulled together a bouquet from the flower shop’s discarded stems. She laid out her choices on the rustic pine workbench behind the cash register and trimmed away the worst of the browning and dry petals. Her mother, Jean, had requested flowers to take to dinner at the home of William Sullivan, the widower son of Faye’s father’s friend Kevin, who’d died the year before. Faye remembered that funeral not only because Kevin Sullivan had been the man who’d welcomed them to America, who’d gotten her father, Thomas, his job at Bath Iron Works, but because one of Sullivans’ Boston daughters had specifically asked that there be no lilies, not one—an unusual request. So, they had made the family arrangements with daisies and stock and deterred mourners from lilies as well.
This dinner invitation, a bit out of the blue, was not a formal occasion but a thank-you, according to her father, for help he’d given William earlier that spring at the Sullivans’ rambling farmhouse. The day’s discards would be good enough for the bouquet. Likely, this William wouldn’t know the difference.
Faye could hardly tolerate the cinnamon smell of carnations, yet they were, by far, the flower she handled most. She had started working for the florist when she was still in high school, snipping thorns from roses, wiring tulip and daisy stems to keep them from goinglimp, making sweetheart corsages and boutonnieres for dances she herself didn’t attend. When she graduated high school, the stooped flower man, Aldo, offered her a full-time job, told her she’d gained a woman’s eye for the new free-form style. She took it as a compliment, though rarely did either of them have much opportunity to be creative. Most of the roses were red or white. Occasionally, Aldo would order pink or yellow for variety. The shop had a standing account with Saint Catherine’s for oversize altar arrangements every two weeks, with an extra refresh during Easter and Christmas. They tended to split weddings and funerals with the florist on the other side of the bridge, and those flowers were almost always white—the Sullivans’ dreaded lilies, roses, white carnations. Little imagination was called for when it came to affairs of the church.
Now that Faye was in the shop full-time, Aldo would often linger in his greenhouse or sit on the stool by the door with his beloved spaniel, Emily, who slept the days away in moving beams of sunlight. Honestly, it didn’t bother her, having him around while she worked. He would point a long finger at the flowers in the cooler, tell her when she’d chosen right or wrong, tell stories of his children who’d long moved away, a wife with legs like flower stems who left him for another man years ago.
Faye woke each day to the tang of fish, seaweed, and algae in the greening air. Even in town, the sea clung to the bricks and steel and iron. Everything here was about the ocean, the fish coming in on the day boats that cruised up to the docks and the bigger trawlers that would go out for weeks at a time. When she was a little girl, she would taste icicles and snowmen, certain that even winter was made of fish and salt.
In the shop, Faye was surrounded by flowers, a shelter of petals, a garden where she felt safe. Even the carnations were welcome sentinels. She liked flower names and would often whisper them to herself when she worked, the satisfying sounds and repeating consonants rumbling off her tongue. Rudbeckia and ranunculus, zinnia and cosmos, snapdragon and dahlia.
Words had not come easy to her, especially not important ones. It had been more than a decade since she’d spoken her first words in America. On the voyage from Ireland across a mercifully calm Atlantic, her father had turned two cane chairs so they could face one another in the tiny cabin. He would hold her hands in his while her mother Jean wept on the bunk, her back turned. “I know this is difficult. But we’ve done it now. You must say it.” Thomas had begged over and over. “Please. You must answer the question. For all our sakes. What is your name?”
She had felt the warmth of Thomas’s hands holding hers. “Fee. Ah,” she whispered, four days into their journey, five since the same sea had nearly taken her life.
“Yes, that’s a good girl,” Thomas said, exhaling his relief. “And? What else?”
“I am ten.”
Jean let out a wail, rolled back into her stupor.
On the long docks in County Cork, Jean had tried to turn them back. “What if we’re caught? They’ll send us to the jail.”
Thomas insisted. “What’s done is done. That’s all.”
“She’s tricked us.”
