Thomas looked at the pile and laughed. “Means you have to wait until you’re better with the peeler!”
Maeve’s crimson peel slipped to the floor.
“Oh, look,” Thomas said. “What’s your letter?”
Molly squatted next to the elaborate coil, traced the ragged peel. “Could be an M.” She tilted her head. “Or W.”
Faye caught Maeve’s eye in a sideways glance. “Oh, please,” she scoffed.
Maeve bent over in her chair. “That’s not a letter. It’s a broken heart, Grandpa,” she said, her voice small and blue.
Thomas tapped his lip thoughtfully, considered the peelings, considered Maeve. “Cursive,” he said. He told her the peels don’t lie, that hers would be a winding path with twists and turns to find true love.
After dinner, Faye cleaned up the apple peels from the table and floor, went about washing the last of the dishes. William had taken her father back to the cove. Thomas didn’t like to drive past dark anymore, part of whatever it was that was going on with him, this desire to be home more than anywhere else. Molly had asked to stay over at the cove house again, to sleep in Faye’s old bedroom there, but Faye couldn’t risk it, not with her father being in such a mood, the way he slipped up and slid back. She had waited with him at the front door while William warmed up the car. “She won’t use these stairs,” Faye said. “Molly. She doesn’t think I notice, but I do. She only goes up and down the back ones.”
He stared up at the new railing. “You’ll all forget soon enough,” Thomas said.
“I hope so.” The girls well out of earshot, Faye sat on the step, remembered the body that had broken there months before. “I used to sit on our stairs at home and eavesdrop on you and Jean in the living room.”
“Overhear anything good?”
Faye pulled her knees up. “Nothing really. I think I was trying to figure out a way in with her, figure out what she said to you or what you said to her that might help me. I never could unlock her. I’ve been mad for years that she treated Conor O’Kane like family, but I never got that from her.”
Thomas sat next to her, surprisingly nimble, put his hand on her knee. “If it makes you feel any better, she was nicer to him than she was to me, most of the time. The two of us, you and me, we reminded her of something she wanted to forget. Conor O’Kane reminded her of something she wanted to remember. He was tricky that way, sinister how he wheedled his way in. Doesn’t surprise me, him falling to his death.” He twisted his mouth and made a clicking sound. “Tough to stay upright on cloven hooves.”
“Papa!” Faye said, smiling despite herself. “You’re sure you don’t want to stay?”
But he said no, he only wanted her man to take him home.
Faye dried the last dish, felt the mist of Thomas’s thinning veil around her. She took the dirty washcloths and dishtowels down to the laundry in the basement. She did not want O’Kane’s ghost to skulk and stomp the dust of her home, disturbing thoughts she guarded. She would need to smudge him from this house, forget he was ever here. She spotted a leftover box of sparklers on the shelf next to the powdered detergent. Just the ticket.
Maeve and Molly huddled in the living room watching a rerun ofFamily Affair, the Uncle Bill in that show a spitting image of her William. Molly curled next to Maeve, head on her sister’s lap. “Look what I found in the basement. Why don’t we light them off andscare those ghosts away.” She put on her brightest smile, thought her brightest thoughts, forgetting that light reveals shadows.
“Sparklers!” Molly screamed, jumping out of Maeve’s embrace.
“Come on. You too,” Faye said to Maeve, who pulled herself up off the couch.
“Oh,” Molly said, more seriously. “I need gloves.”
“Honey, you—” Faye stopped herself. Let Molly wear her gloves if it made her feel better. “Hurry up and get them.”
In the driveway, Faye lit Maeve’s sparkler, and Maeve lit Molly’s. October frost coated the pumpkins and the field behind the house. Snow couldn’t be far behind. Tonight, though, wool sweaters kept them warm, and sparklers made it like summer with stars hanging so low they seemed to fly from the ends of their metal wands. Dancing shadows rose from the darkness.
“Let’s make wishes,” Faye said.
“Write your husband’s name, Maeve!” Molly said, her voice mocking.
Maeve’s brow furrowed in the flashing light, and she spun around like leaves on a dust devil, circles and circles, drawing cyclones up from the ground like she was spell-casting, no name at all as far as Faye could tell.
Molly leaped, feet twisted, eyes closed, muttering words Faye could not make out.
Faye saw it then, the milky veil.Everything will be better now,she thought as she blazed names—Thomas and William and Maeve and Molly—into the stars. She addedFiadhandJean. She wroteMuttiandVatibecause she had forgotten their given names. She thought of the boy marching on the wall by the sea, a wild thing like in the children’s book.Go away!she thought and wroteConor. When she wroteGisela, her old name, a flurry of leaves lifted around her. She spun, relieved and unfazed, torching the night with the last of her sparkler.
Elisabeth, she wrote as her sparkler flickered out.
Molly’s scream tolled crisp as a bell. Faye grabbed her outstretched hand, pulled off a singed glove, and held the child’s palm close. A red streak blazed her little lifeline. “What happened?”
Molly sputtered. “It hurts!”
