The other piece of paper was a reminder:
Collect Call
“Pixie” = All Okay
“Molly” = Please pick up
Faye, her hand on the receiver, was about to call Noel to find out whether William had left the antique store yet. She looked at the numbers. It was her life there, everyone she loved and cared about. Except Molly. Maeve had a number she could call to get a message to Molly if it was a real emergency. And Faye had had it, too, for a while. But seeing it made her want to call, made her want to force Molly to explain herself.How could you walk away from your own child?Other questions burned at her, resurfacing wounds she thought were healed.How could you give her away like she was a thing and not a person? How does any mother walk away from her child? What makes a mother give up? What kind of mother turns her back on a child?And even deeper questions that Faye could hardly allow herself to consider.Did I do this to you? Is this my fault? Am I looking for absolution for my own sins? Comfort for my own pain?
The last time Faye called the number, she’d asked Molly the same questions of why and how. Molly had given the stock answer. “I told you. I thought I might harm her, Mom.” But that time, Faye had persisted until Molly said something that made it crystal clear. “I had a vision that I threw Nola Wren over the railing and that she died on the floor. What would you have done if you were me? If you thought leaving would save her life, wouldn’t you go too?” Faye handed the phone to William, too stunned to say another word.
While William sat at the kitchen table, the phone cradled in the crook of his neck, Faye had eavesdropped on the rest of the conversation from the front hall. He was full of warmth and understanding, acknowledging to his missing daughter how hard it must have been to leave her own flesh and blood, how he understood that she didn’t know why she’d done such a thing, that yes, yes, he knew she’d been so afraid, that yes, he’d heard how hard it can be on a woman, childbirth, especially if she was already dealing with loss—“that Leo sounds like a nice young man”—and no, no, he wasn’t trying to tell her what to do, only that he loved her and wanted her to know they were taking good care of Nola Wren, and that, “Molly, Pix, darling,” that everyone missed her, everyone wanted her to be safe out there, and they all wanted her to come home as soon as she was able. “Molly,you’re so young,” he’d said, unwittingly knocking Faye to the ground. “Oh, honey! Don’t cry. It’s okay. I know you weren’t trying to hurt anyone. No one blames you. No, Mom doesn’t blame you, honey. I promise. We know you were only doing what you thought was right at the time. Fear and heartbreak are powerful, powerful emotions. You did what you thought you had to do to keep the two of you safe. Yes, I know. Even if that meant leaving without her. No, honey. It’s never too late to come back. But do it as soon as you can. As soon as you can. We all love you. We do. Okay, honey. Goodbye for now.”
A memory had erupted, buried so well and deep Faye could not recall ever having thought on it at all, a memory so old and new that she was not sure it was real. It was her own mother, her real Mutti, in a room so distant Faye had to close her eyes to see any details. There was a red chair, velvet, and her mother in a yellow dress, her eyes sunken and hollow and colorless. Faye could feel her mother’s hand, gentle on her cheek. She could smell her unwashed skin, see the stains and wear on the once-lovely dress. “I have to go,” she’d said, though Faye couldn’t be sure because, in this memory, her mother spoke English, a language she hadn’t known. The memory must be distorted, she reasoned. And yet. Her mother walked out the door. Faye waited for it. The click of the lock. She’d thought it was their mother who’d locked them in, left them for dead. But William’s words to Molly:You did what you thought you had to do to keep the two of you safe.She remembered. It was Elisabeth who got up from the couch and bolted the door, Elisabeth who said they must stay put and wait for Mutti to return, even as bombs exploded around them. Faye felt it like a slap on her face.Wake up! Your mother did not abandon you. She did not lock you and your sister in, she did not leave you to die alone. She simply went out—probably in search of food—like she had many times before. She left you to keep you safe. And you left Elisabeth. And now Molly left Nola Wren.
How desperately Faye had wished in that moment that she had one complete memory of her German childhood that did not include war. But even the softest fragments had faded with the yellow ofMutti’s dress and the velvet of a once-fine chair. Mutti and Vati must have known love. They brought two girls into the world as a monster was gaining power, after all. They must have had hope that love would endure.
William had found Faye cross-legged on the floor in the very same spot where she’d watched Conor O’Kane die, crying tears for herself and her daughters as she had done that night, hoping silence would keep them safe. “You heard all that?” he asked, crouching next to her.
Faye nodded, unable to even speak. And, like he had that night years before, William pulled her to standing and took her in his arms. “It’s like she’s fighting a war, our Molly,” he said. “We have to hope eventually it will end, and she can forgive herself.”
Faye spent every moment since trying to minimize casualties. That’s why she had rewritten her list of phone numbers that she stared at now, left off Molly’s emergency contact. In return, Molly—or rather “Pixie”—called every couple of weeks to let them know she was fine.
And the baby, Faye thought now, how she had grown among them all, a wild daisy! She learned to walk, to use a spoon, to say one word then two then to speak her toddled sentences. Her home was at the cove house with Maeve and Wendy, Nola Wren—fair skin, hair black and curly, with Molly’s eyes only blue as flame.
At the sound of the nasally honk of the pickup horn, Faye startled, set the receiver down again. She and William had talked about taking a drive up to Camden or maybe into Boothbay. Maeve and Wendy had Nola Wren for the weekend, and Sam was camping with Dylan and Opal. But from the back porch, Faye could see that William had made other plans.
After he retired, he built himself a wood shop out in the barn, where he tinkered with his own designs for stools and did some restorations with Noel. His knuckles ached with arthritis, but Faye knew how much he loved finding treasures under layers of paint and rottedveneers. Noel sold the better pieces at his antique shop, but over the last few years the rest had stacked up, William’s imagination outstripped by the limits of time and the aches in his back. His simple painted milking stools were hits at the farmer’s market that buzzed with tourists in the summer and early fall. William had sold out for the season two weeks earlier.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said when Faye came out onto the back porch. “We can unload this in no time, then take our drive. I couldn’t resist. Noel and I went out to that estate sale I told you about, and would you look at that? Matching Morris chairs, and they’re not in that bad of shape. I’ll strip them and see if I can get Sandy to make me a couple of cushions. We could keep them or give them to Maeve and Sam—er, Maeve and Wendy. But maybe Sam would like them too. Right?”
“William Sullivan,” Faye said. “Have you not looked in your barn? You could open your own antique store. Forget Noel all together.”
“I guess I best not tell you about the box of glass and figurines in there. Told you keeping that stack of newspaper in the truck would come in handy.Irish Timesto the rescue! I’ll get them unwrapped so you can take a look, see if there’s anything you want before I let Noel have a crack at it.” He was like her father in that way. His devotion toThe Irish Times. How many conversations had he started over the years with, “I saw in theTimes...”
At almost seventy, his hair had thinned some, had gone to white, though the waves were still there. He had the belly of a man who drank beer, laugh lines of a man who enjoyed his friends, ruddy neck and forearms of a man who spent time outdoors.
The house phone rang across the yard. William jumped. “I’ll get it. Hang on.” He’d stopped adding, “Could be Molly,” though Faye knew it was his thought. He was quickest to defend her, likeliest to bring her up, the one who said he prayed every night for her safe return. They weren’t big believers in God, yet William told Faye he said this one prayer. “Just in case.”
When William didn’t come out, she followed him into the house.
He was sitting at the kitchen table, hands on his lap.
Her first thought went to Nola Wren. An accident. “William, what is it? What happened?”
“It was Molly. She says she’s coming home, Faye. Our girl is coming home.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
1995: Boston, Massachusetts
As the train left Providence, Molly pulled a worn notebook from her backpack, the floral cover bent and tattered now, the pages warped with two years of ink and tears. One last stop, and she would be home. She had been all over the country, passed time in moments and months, hurt herself and healed herself in a thousand ways. She had never meant to stay gone so long.
It had been difficult at first to write anything, thinking it would need to be profound in case someone found her body somewhere and that the notebook would eventually get back to Nola Wren. She had starts and stops—dear baby, dear daughter, dear Nola Wren, dear Mom and Dad, dear Maeve, dear Leo, dear Leo, dear Leo. The looking back killed her. And looking forward was too grim. So, the notebook became a day-to-day account of what had mattered to her when anything mattered at all. It was all there now as she thumbed through the pages.
Her friend Camille had married a graphic artist and lived in an A-frame house on a mountain lake outside of Asheville. It was her phone number that Molly had given to her parents and Maeve. Besides her family, Camille was the only person who knew about Nola Wren. From the moment Molly boarded the Greyhound, she’d never spokento a soul, except for her own in the pages of the journal, about the baby she’d left behind.
In Seattle, she had worked in a coffee shop, dated a guy who looked like one of her grandfather’s dead Irish poets—wire-rimmed glasses, sweeping bangs, blank eyes. She was convinced he would kill her for no good reason. One night, they were supposed to go to a grunge bar with friends, but instead he drove her deep into the woods. He stopped the car in the middle of the road. “Get out,” he said, not meanly, and she did, though later she wondered if this was a kind of death wish to go along with whatever scheme your killer had dreamed up. But he’d only wanted to show her the dam, how the river somersaulted over and swirled with starlight, he said, like a Van Gogh and he’d pronounced theghlike anfand she knew that would be their last date because she hadn’t wanted to die—not then, not at all—and she’d felt so close to dying there. She would replay it for weeks, how the shove would feel on the receiving end, what shock her face would register, what thoughts she might have while flailing in the indigo air, whether she would live and then die or simply die.
