Faye didn’t want her father to die. He had been hers for so long. But she would do this. For him. She could be whomever he needed her to be. “I’ll take you home, Papa. Don’t worry.”
Faye sighed, checked her watch, though she knew the ambulance still hadn’t left the hospital with Thomas. She surveyed the living room of the cove house again. It was good. Her father would be happy to be home.
Molly had been so angry when they told her that her grandfather wasn’t going to get better. She’d yelled about the stupid doctors and the stupid hospital and yelled at Faye and William for going along withthe whole stupid plan. Maybe Molly was right to be angry. It seemed impossible that Thomas should die.
Faye had to coerce Molly into helping her clean the cove house, though she’d been belligerent the entire time. They neatened the mess Thomas left in the kitchen, straightened cushions and slipcovers and ran the vacuum, tossed out molded cheese and cold cuts from the deli drawer in the refrigerator, Faye all the while on quiet lookout for what might have been in that envelope from Ireland.
Before her grandfather had taken the fall, Molly had spent most Fridays with him, sleeping over in the room that used to be Faye’s, waking up there on Saturdays to make pancakes and bacon that she and her grandfather shared. Sixteen now, Molly didn’t make friends easily, didn’t play sports or an instrument. Besides Thomas, she only had one friend, a girl Jonie who shared Molly’s penchant for dark eyeliner and cut-off gloves and layers of lace and cheap jewelry, who talked incessantly, ping-ponging between dragons and Madonna and a stepmother she hated. Mostly, Molly liked to read, and it was a thing she shared with Thomas, a love of poetry and mythology, words on a page. Faye had hoped Thomas might talk sense into Molly, encourage his granddaughter to ditch her trashy thrift-store style, make friends, maybe even get her driver’s license.
Now, as she waited for his arrival, Faye recalled Thomas chuckling at the suggestion that he’d have sway over Molly. “Her and that Jonie. The sullen sisters,” Faye had lamented. “I’ve tried, but it’s like we don’t speak the same language. I bought her a sweater I thought she’d like—black, of course—and you know what she did? She took the scissors and cut the neck out of it! It’s all frayed now!”
“‘What could have made her peaceful with a mind simple as fire?’” he’d responded in his lofty poetry voice.
Simple as fire, indeed.
Faye took his wool coat from the hook by the door and wrapped herself in it. What would this house be without her father? She still had time. Outside, she traced her finger down the door frame, stood thecoat collar up, pulled on her hat and mittens, then set off to walk her father’s favorite path to the docks.
She was certain it was the coat the gulls recognized as they circled, their bird voices shouting for the old Irishman to toss a bit of fish or a slice of bread or popcorn from the pub. Faye went to the spot where her father had fallen, sat on the splintered bench. She took off her mittens, held out her hands to prove to the birds they were empty. She set the mittens beside her, stuck her hands into the coat pockets in case Thomas had left some stale treat behind.
She withdrew a sheet of oniony paper, swollen with ink and creased from decades of folding and unfolding. Her eyes darted to every corner of the page before she could focus.
My friend, my friend, it is me, Hannie. I have burned your letter. You must not correspond. Grass covers ground that should not be disturbed. What we did cannot be undone. Nothing here for you but the risk of Fr. and his outstretched hand and loose tongue. He is a man first and would so save himself if it were Big Seamus to start with the questions or worse, the Sisters. I looked about and found nothing to soothe you. I went to Theresa, tho the two of us have little to speak over, her being so full of herself. I drank her weak tea and fluffed her feathers so she would show me photographs from that Camera of hers. Boys and Cows is all except the one here included from Summer and the six of them, strange as it is, the way they stand there out of time, though maybe that is but the light upon them. I stashed it when her back was turned. It is dagger and salve, I fear. I think of you fondly and wish for God to carry you in the palm of His Righteous Hand. We sinners meet in the Churchyard soon enough.
Frantic, Faye turned out all the coat pockets, even felt along the hem and seams as if he might have sewn the photograph into a hiding place. Only crumbs and cracker bits. Her parents had never even owned a camera, which seemed so strange to her now, the way she brought out her own Kodak for special occasions. The letter said “the six of them.” Faye’s math only went one way. Three O’Kane boys. And three girls—herself, Fiadh, and Elisabeth.
Elisabeth.
She wheeled around like one of the gulls, practically screamed at the notion that somewhere in the cove house, the image lived on. She’d been on the lookout for something from Ireland, but it had never occurred to her that what was missing might be a photograph. After Conor O’Kane died, she’d had dreams of her lost sister, dreams that bled into daytime thoughts as if a ghost were trapped on the wrong side of the veil. She’d even bought a little diary like the one Jean had, thinking she would secretly write it all down, reconcile that she had a sister and that she, Faye, had left that sister for Fate to do its business. She’d hid the diary in the back of a kitchen drawer, though it didn’t matter who found it. The diary sat blank. To commit the truth to paper felt impossible. Yet here was part of it, obscured by time and Hannie’s cryptic words.
If only she could see the photograph, hold it in her hand. She closed her eyes.My Dear Elisabeth,she would write.Forgive me. Just now I’ve seen a photograph of us together as children. Forgive me ...She could get no further. This letter from Hannie did not mention Elisabeth at all. Had Jean written to Hannie, begging to come back with the sorry imposter who’d drowned Fiadh? Had Elisabeth been sent away?If I am dead, as dead I may well be.Conor said those words to her. What had it meant? And how could it matter now? It had been forty years. But the photograph. She had to see it. She hurried to the cove house in time to watch the ambulance back up to the door.
Faye walked alongside the gurney as the medics brought Thomas into the house. “Here she is!” Thomas said. “My little Faye, my good faery, my beautiful girl.” They transferred him to the hospital bed by the big stone fireplace positioned so that Thomas would be able to see out the window. Faye hung Thomas’s coat on its hook but put the letter in her own pocket. She stopped herself from tapping her foot impatiently as the medics finished settling Thomas. She thanked them, ushering them out the door like unwanted guests, then turned her attention to Thomas. The sight of him there—his favorite quilt tucked around him, his silver hair spilled onto the propped pillow like a furry halo—took her breath away. For all the questions she had about the letter, what was in front of her was quite real.
She pulled a chair up next to the bed, dabbed a cool washcloth onto his forehead.
“Papa,” she said, holding out the letter. “I found this in your coat pocket.”
Thomas groaned, flicked his brittle wrist, turned away from her like a stubborn child. “I don’t want to see that.”
Faye scooted closer, pulled his shoulder gently toward her. “Papa, where is the picture? The one from the letter?”
“She would be your age. She would be you.” He squeezed his eyes shut. “But you are you, Faye, aren’t you? Where have you been? I haven’t seen you since you were ten years old. I’ve been so worried.”
“I’m fifty years old, Papa. I’ve been here the whole time,” Faye said. “The letter, Papa. It says there’s a photograph.”
Suddenly lucid, eyes wide, Thomas glared at Faye. “That letter, it fell from the cookbook, which itself jumped from the shelf. I looked everywhere.” He threw up his hands weakly, a washed-up magician disappearing a long-toothed rabbit. “She didn’t let me even have a look at it, not the letter or whatever picture it held. I looked everywhere! Oh! To see her face!”
Faye tried to calm him. “Jean? You want to see Mama again?”
Thomas gaped at Faye, his neck tensed. “Fiadh. Fiadh! God, if I don’t miss that child still. How could she keep it from me? My own wife!”
Faye could almost remember the day the photograph was taken, the boys’ mother with a camera, the way Fiadh grinned and the boys put their hands in their pockets to look tough. Who among those children was dead now, besides Fiadh and Conor, besides the girl she once was? Seeing her father’s pain was too much to bear. There had always been reasons to keep the door closed. Besides, who was she to criticize Jean for keeping the letter a secret? Look at the pain it caused her father even now. If anything, this confirmed Faye’s own decisions to keep the past hidden. She looked at Hannie’s letter again.What we did cannot be undone.It was far too late.
“Go to sleep now,” she said to Thomas, gently lowering him onto the pillow.
He did not sleep well that night, in and out of quiet and rest, moans of what sounded like pain, though it was impossible to pinpoint. Faye tried to sleep on the couch but woke in the chair next to his bed when Thomas cast a line of ache into the room pinked with sunrise.
“Fiadh,” he said, smiling as if he had reunited with a bold, brash child with strong arms who could stand up to boys, who could row the little punt, who did not live to smoke a cigarette or kiss a boy or sail to America. He said it over and over, wistfully, pleading, scales on his eyes.
