Back at the farmhouse, Molly sits on the floor in her old bedroom, which smells of fresh paint, though the color is the same yellow it has always been. Her back against the bed, she holds in her lap a vintage mahogany cigar box she bought at a thrift store when she was in junior high. She unhooks the metal clasp. The hinges move silently as she lifts. Inside, tamped blue velvet still reeks of wet smoke and banana peels. She removes relics one by one, lines them up on the braided rug.
Leo’s played-out, gnarled mixtape; matching wristbands she and Nola Wren wore home from the hospital; a tattered patch of silk from Charlie’s tie that she’d cut to shreds. She pauses, holds a purple plastic viewfinder to the light. Her and Leo, laughing at the beach. She sets it down, digs into the cigar box again. The key to her college dorm room.The ink-stained layaway ticket for the leather jacket. A scorched silver wire she knows fits neatly against her thin scar. She feels crosscut and hewn, each relic like a growth ring of a tree, the core of who she is.
Beneath a popsicle stick and a paper doll, she finds what she came for. A creased photograph, black-and-white and face down, lines the bottom of the box. She pinches it carefully using fingers on both hands. Three boys and three girls in two rough rows. A brawny girl in loose pants and a tattered-looking blouse, dark hair in short braids, stands toughly between two boys, their features similar and so dark they look drawn on with a marker. Behind them on one side crouches another boy—light haired and beady eyed, with a jutting chin and underbite. On the low wall on the other side, two girls, identical haircuts and faces, identical smocks over dresses, one grinning, one squinting. They hold hands. Molly turns the photograph over. The words are faded, the handwriting different from what they teach in American schools.
Denis Jem Fiadh Con and the doicha girls
Sometimes, when Molly thinks about Conor O’Kane falling, he sprouts horns and hooves and crashes through the floor, through the cellar, through layers of dirt. Other times, the roof lifts off, and his black coat becomes oily feathers, and he never hits the ground. And sometimes, he flutters like propaganda dropped from a plane, weightlessly taking his time before he comes to rest untwisted and unbroken on the rug below.
She runs her fingers along the photograph’s stained edge. Did it slip from his shirt pocket, follow him down when he fell? Was it in his hand all along? Like other relics in the box, Molly has never shown it to anyone. Before she had the cigar box, she’d pressed it deep between her mattresses along with the popsicle stick and the paper doll, beyond the reach of a mother making a bed. Once she’d put it in the box, it was left there to decay.
Maeve and Faye are at the door to her bedroom now. Maeve inches closer. “What is all this, Pix?”
Molly’s legs splay like a dropped doll, her ruins assembled between them. Her jaws feel wired shut. She points at her mother. “You told me, ‘Don’t say a word.’ You zipped my lips closed and never once asked if I was okay. Neither one of you did! And you know what? I was not okay. I’m still not okay.”
She feels him on her hands, in the lifelines of her palms, in the tension of her wrists. None of it was ever what it seemed. “It’s been fifteen years, but now it’s okay to talk about Conor O’Kane? Do you have any idea—?” She gets up, hands the photo to her mother, who takes it as if it is on fire. “I found it under the table. After they took his body away.”
It is Faye’s turn to go white. “Honey ...” Faye says. She stares at the picture. It’s the one from Hannie’s letter to Jean, she knows it. And there. A better likeness than the pixelated newspaper photo. Elisabeth, hopeful and happy, Faye next to her, suspicious of everything.
Had Jean given it to O’Kane, or did he swipe it when she wasn’t looking? She imagines the two of them, Conor and Jean, bent like buzzards over roadkill, smoking and telling tales of Ireland and its green fields and heartbreaks. Jean was not a drinker, but maybe she became intoxicated by O’Kane, the wild indelible smell of him. How it came to be in Conor O’Kane’s possession, she will never know. But she’s glad for it now, glad to see the last of herself again.
Molly makes a humming sound, anger and regret and bitterness swarming her. Her hands clench. “You have no idea. Neither one of you.” She juts her head toward her mother. “Look out there. Both of you. It was me! I pushed him over the railing. And then he died.” She mimes the pushing motion, daring them to mount a challenge. “Mommy,” Molly says, her voice tiny. “I killed that man.”
“No, honey. No,” Faye pleads. She flashes on Conor’s final desperate breath. Yes, she hesitated but could not have saved him. His neck was broken. His lung was punctured. “It wasn’t your fault. Forget about him.” She tries to embrace her daughter, but Molly wiggles free.
Molly’s brow tightens. “How convenient for you, Mom. To forget. What a goddamned luxury. Every day, he’s been with me. Every night.In every bed I’ve ever slept in. I have never once been able to ... forget,” she says, her fingers bracketing the word. “And Nola Wren! Mom. Look what happened to me. Look at me! I’m all tangled up in some kind of sick web. I can’t take any more!” She pushes past Maeve and runs out of the room. Moments later, the back door slams.
“I’ll go after her,” Maeve says.
Faye steps around the scattered remnants of a whole life. She has never felt so lost, so alone. Thunder rumbles the windows, and a whip of lightning flashes the room. Tree branches scrape the side of the house.If only William were here. “Come back!” she sobs. “Oh, come back.”
Maeve pulls the back of her shirt over her head and runs to the barn through sheets of rain. It’s the only place Molly could have gone. She finds her on the floor in the old goat stall, a playhouse and hiding spot they’d both used when they were kids. She’s soaking wet and shivering. Maeve wedges in next to her. “Maybe a tornado will lift up the barn and carry us away,” she offers.
“Just my luck, it would drop on someone and kill them.”
Maeve snorts, and the sisters sit quietly together—neither of them able to form a complete thought—and listen to the rain pelt the rafters. Molly taps her head against the barn wall. “Maeve. I miss Dad so much. It hurts so bad. Worse than anything. I can’t believe I’m never going to see him again.” She tries to gather herself, to stop the tears, but it’s no use. “Why did he have to go and die? I don’t understand.”
Maeve shuts her eyes. She has cried so many tears already. She hugs Molly’s knee, shakes her head. “God,” she says. “I don’t know.” She rubs her eyes and cheeks, sniffles. “You should have seen him with Nola Wren, Pix. He was so cute. He loved her so much ... and God, she adored him.”
Molly rests her elbows on her knees, her head in her hands, and sobs. “He’s everywhere in this barn and nowhere at all. Fuck, Maeve. What are we gonna do?” She lets out a laugh despite herself. “What a mess!”
“That night ... Conor O’Kane,” Maeve offers. “It was awful. You know Wendy and I had a thing in high school. You probably don’t remember, but her prom date was killed in a car accident that night. Her mom figured out that Wendy was with me. That’s why they moved away. Her parents would rather skip town than admit their daughter was gay.”
“Why have we never talked about any of this?” Molly asks. “Why do we bury everything?”
Maeve points in the direction of the farmhouse. “Well, that might be a clue.”
“Mom is not who we thought. Grandpa wasn’t really my grandpa. And now, I guess we’re German ...?” Molly says, incredulous.
“Guess so. C’mon. The rain’s let up. We better get back and face the music before she starts baking pies again.”
Sun streaks wetly through the open barn door. Storm clouds roll away behind spiky trees. Over the field, a rainbow appears, and then another. “Wow,” Maeve says.
Molly takes Maeve’s arm, stops her from heading in. “Maeve, I want Nola Wren to live here at the farmhouse. With me. I want her back.”
“Pix—”
“No. Just. I don’t mean right this second. We have all this ... whatever it is we’re supposed to do here. But I needed to say it so that you and Wendy know. I appreciate what you guys have done. But I’m her mother.”
