She gets out of bed. There is no need to dress because she still wears clothes from the day before when she was in the bookstore, when that book of war photography reduced her to a sad statistic. She puts on her slippers and goes downstairs to sit in the exact spot where William died. The funeral home gave her a paper bag with the clothes he arrived in, his personal effects. The bag is on the couch, though William will never be again. How had she not seen the way he held his arm? How had the strew of newspapers, the dropped box on his workbench not given her a clue? It was not like William to leave something undone, not like him to leave a mess.
If only she had stayed in the kitchen instead of escaping to the barn. If only she had not lingered there so long. It was like her father all over again. Had William cried out for her? Called her name? Had he uttered final words? And Nola Wren. That poor child abandoned on her dead grandfather’s lap. And Molly, waiting, waiting for a father who would never come for her. It was too heartbreaking to replay, yetit was all she did and what she did. She had let him down, let them all down, in so many ways.
She’d used scissors to cut clean the story fromThe Irish Times, folded it neatly. She keeps it with her always now. She unfolds it again, presses it flat against her wrinkled slacks.
Around her, sheer cotton curtains flutter in the windows. Jays squawk from the next field over. Golden grass sways along the fence rail.Dreamy.The veil thinned when William passed, and now ghosts come and go at will. She is surrounded. All those spirits tell William about his bride. He knows the truth. It’s the gift of death, finally seeing.All is revealed.She sets the clipping on the end table, covers her mouth with praying hands.
The house is too quiet. Faye doesn’t know what to do with herself. Molly talked Maeve into letting her stay the night at the cove house so she could tuck Nola Wren in for sleep and wake up with her in the morning. Faye knows that when she stays there, she sleeps on the couch. This has been Molly’s primary complaint. She is home, and yet there is no place for her.
She told Faye through tears, “I am trying so hard to stay, Mom. I need help, and no one is making room for me.” She’s right, the poor thing. Grief and ghosts take up all the space.
So, do something.
She slips on her muck boots and William’s jacket, grabs his keys off the hook by the door. She takes the newspaper clipping off the table and slips it into her pocket. The stone blue sky is specked with morning stars, a dusting of distant pink. She thinks of Jean and the way she stood on the granite rocks looking over the cove, waving her arms side to side.
Do something.
She drives the empty roads, her hands on the places worn smooth by her husband. He is with her around every familiar bend and over every hill, along the stands of pine and empty fields. They lived their lives between two houses, two landscapes, for more than thirty-five years. The sky lightens as she arrives at Maeve’s house. She closes the car door gently then makes her way toward the cove. She stands on Jean’s rock, lifts her arms as the sun rises. First, she pushes aside fog that settles around boats and buoys. Then she sweeps away the little island and fishing boats and trawlers already out of the harbor’s safety. She pushes Nova Scotia down to New York and Newfoundland up and out of the way to Greenland. She draws William’s coat around her body, nuzzles for him on the collar, closes her eyes and opens them again, and she can see the cliffs of Ireland and Sheep’s Head Peninsula and the gray-green water of Dunmanus Bay and Fiadh, standing on a stone, pointing directly back at Faye.
She will not be aware of it for hours, maybe even days, how she time-travels in that moment, how her clothes remake themselves into a girlish shape, never pregnant, sheep and goats in the old barn, bum on a wooden crate, sharp shears to cut lice out of little-girl hair, potatoes in a pot to boil, berries in a basket, fireside stories of faery mounds and children stolen and disappeared, eaten by witches or secreted into the never-grow-old land by leprechauns.
Faye can see Elisabeth’s sleeping face as it was the night she snuck away to walk the path into another body, another life. She can see Jean and the bed where Fiadh’s body lay, a shadow on a quilt. Faye sweeps her arm again, manifests the gritty floor under her bent knees, the rough of Jean’s dress against her face. She can hear her own broken voice, pleading to become someone new. She tells them, though they don’t understand, what Elisabeth doesn’t know: There is no mother waiting for them, no Germany to take them back. She saw it happen.Sie ist tot. Sie ist tot.
“Takeme.”
Yes, Thomas and Jean had taken her. But she left Elisabeth first. Sheleft. Like Molly left Nola Wren. To save a life. They were helpless children at the mercy of a world that had proven itself cruel. She and Elisabeth were not stronger together. They were twice as weak. If Molly was right to leave, if Nola Wren survived because of it, then maybe Faye had been right as well. Maybe Elisabeth survived because she left.
She holds up imaginary binoculars, though she knows there’s only one way to see what she wants to see, to know what she can no longer bear not knowing. Elisabeth, or what’s left of her, is out there somewhere.
And if Molly was healed and brave enough to return, maybe Faye could be brave too. Maybe Faye could heal.
She picks her way across the granite to the path back to the house. Sunrise banks off billowing clouds, pure and golden from having traveled across the wild ocean. It shimmers on the dew, gleams against east-facing windowpanes. The wind flutters leaves on the trees, blows needles from the boughs.Der Wind, der Wind, das himmlische Kind.Hansel and Gretel. Faye avoided it when the girls were little. “Mama is afraid of witches,” she told them, making fun of herself. So many stories had witches in them, witches and foolish children.I was the one who nibbled at the house. America fattened me up. Now she will eat me.
At the front door, Faye lifts the mat, turns the spare key in the lock. Molly is curled up on the overstuffed couch. This house belongs to Maeve and her messy American family now, most signs of a German girl and her Irish parents gone, save for a row of books on the built-in, Thomas’s beloved Irish writers that Maeve keeps for show. After today, Maeve will want to be rid of those, she imagines. She sits on the couch, shakes Molly gently. “Honey. Wake up.”
Maeve wakes to the sound of a car door closing, eases out of bed so she won’t rouse Wendy. At first, she fears it’s Molly, sneaking out with NolaWren. She slips out of the bedroom into the open door across the hall, peeks in on Nola Wren and Opal. Sound asleep. She wants to crawl back under the covers with Wendy for another half hour of sleep but has an uneasy feeling. She goes to the window and sees a figure move across the dewy lawn to the back of the property. Her mother. Maeve has few memories of her grandmother Jean, but this is one: a somber woman standing on those rocks. It’s a memory in silhouette, a shade, more gothic than it was in real life, but her grandmother radiated old country like a Grimm witch. And now it’s her mother out there, swishing her arms elegantly, a summoner parting the sea or charming fish into nets. When her mother’s arms drift down to her sides and she turns back to the house, Maeve steps into a pair of jeans, throws a sweatshirt on over her T-shirt, and heads downstairs.
From the landing, she sees her mother sitting on the couch next to Molly. Maeve rubs her eyes. It’s too early for another confrontation. Yet here it is. “What’s going on?”
Molly sits up. It takes her a moment to ground herself in yet another place that isn’t her own.I am in Maine. I’m in Maeve’s house. My child is upstairs in Maeve’s house.And then a tugging inside reminds her. Sorrow.I have lost my father. I have lost my child’s father.She pulls the blanket around her.I will not lose my child.“Be quiet! You’ll wake the baby.”
Maeve rolls her eyes dramatically to make a point. “She’s not a baby anymore.”
“And you don’t need to be like that.”
“Girls,” Faye says. She reaches into William’s coat pocket and pulls out the newspaper clipping, holding it between her fingers. It will come out now, not Fiadh’s story that she told William all those years ago. Her own story. Her own consequences. She draws Molly into her, smells that spicy sharpness piping from the part of her hair. Faye would know herscent anywhere, both of her girls. “I love you so much, you know.” She reaches out to Maeve, who takes her hand and squeezes. “Both of you.”
“You’re scaring us, Mom,” Maeve says, pushing at Molly’s legs to make room on the couch. “What are you doing here? I saw you out on the rocks.”
Faye takes a breath like it’s her final meal. “I’ve kept something from you both. And from Dad. It’s eating me alive.”
Molly tries to focus but flashes to her conversation with Leo, the truth-telling about Nola Wren and the fact that Molly had left her. “Abandoned her, you mean,” Leo had said. She’d never thought he could be so angry. As bad as it was watching him seethe and storm off, she thought it was the reckoning she needed. But to find out about her dad. Had her leaving strained his heart? Had coming back killed him? She snaps herself out of the memory. “Mom ...?”
“Please, honey.” Faye looks at a framed picture on the mantel, another remnant from when Thomas lived in this house. William and Faye with the girls when they were younger. Maeve wears bell-bottoms and a tight orange T-shirt, Molly, a short denim dress with a picnic-checked bow, both girls in rubber-soled sneakers. William wears jeans and a plaid shirt, Faye, a sleeveless green shell the color of canned peas, blue ankle-length pants, white sandals. There is nothing spectacular about any of them except that they are happy. It’s spontaneous, and it was her father who had taken it with a camera William had gotten at a yard sale.
“Earth to Mom,” Maeve says, snapping her fingers. She instantly regrets it. Wendy has chastised her over the last couple of weeks that she’s too short with everyone and needs to settle down. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be like that.”
Faye points to the picture. “Pix, you must have been about seven or eight when that was taken. I was about that age when I came to America.” She should start at the beginning she knows, but she thinks about a picture that used to be on the mantel, a long time ago, of her and Jean and Thomas. She was standing in front of her father in a dark coat and a furry hat of some sort. One hand was on her shoulder,and the other was around Jean’s waist. They’d moved so many things out after Thomas died, making room so Maeve and Sam could build their own life together. Where was the photograph now? How could it have disappeared, something so rare? Perhaps all photographs eventually fade, first out of time and then out of memory.
