“I don’t think you do. Appreciate it. I don’t think you get it at all.”
Faye waits for the girls in the kitchen. William’s voice tells her they need time. He was better with them than she was, especially as they got older.Something about their heat and passion, their fiery displays, frightened Faye, as if their outbursts might tempt her to show herself too. But now, she feels her walls crumbling. There’s nothing to guard anymore. Nothing to lose. The letter from Hannie to Jean is on the table next to the photograph Molly stashed.
She tries again to explain it all. “I didn’t save anything the way you did, Pix,” she says. “But this is the story, right here.”
“Did you fight them?” Maeve asks. “Grandma and Grandpa?”
“No. I told you. They didn’t kidnap me. I left with them. They were going to take one of us, and I told them to take me.” Faye’s own words crush her.
“How could you leave like that?” Maeve asks. “Without even saying goodbye.”
Faye steals a look at Molly.
Molly whistles. “Cut and run, right, Mom?”
Faye is more tired than she has ever been. Has she been pretending to sleep all these years? Sleep is upon her, dragging her down like a predator. “Please let’s stop for now. We can talk—fight—more later, I promise. Right now, I have to close my eyes.” She leaves her daughters as if she is not the one who flipped the table on them.
Molly reads Hannie’s letter again. “‘Grass covers ground now that should not be disturbed.’ Hm. Do you think Mom really wants to go back to Ireland?”
“I don’t know. Look. I’m sorry to leave you here—with her, with all this—but I have to get back,” Maeve says. “Tell Mom I took the car. We’ll bring it back later.”
“With Nola Wren?”
Maeve holds up her hands, exhales all her breath. “Please. Can you just ...?”
Molly follows her into the foyer. “Wait,” she says. “Do you remember if the police drew one of those tape outlines? Like on TV? I thought they did, but that doesn’t make sense now. Didn’t Daddy roll that rug up right away and get rid of it? He wouldn’t have lefta bloody rug. And I don’t remember when this one showed up. The floor must have been bare for a while.”
“God, I don’t know. I was such a mess. I feel like I should be able to rationalize everything, put everything together and make it make sense. But we were kids, and Mom and Dad were freaking out, and, well, the body. I hardly remember the police even being here.”
“That’s where I found the photo,” Molly says, pointing to a thick table leg. “It was dark. I wanted to see if the floor was still warm where he fell. I knew I killed him. It’s sickening to say it, honestly.”
Maeve pulls her in, gives her the last of her compassion even as her own grief rises. “It was an accident,” she says softly, tightening her grip with each gentle word.
It is a mother’s embrace, folded like rising dough. Molly slips her arms around Maeve’s waist, exhales against her pillowy chest, and lets her sister love her again.
Chapter Thirty-Two
1995: Mid-Coast Maine
The moment Maeve turns the key in the ignition of Faye’s car, it starts raining again. She flips on the wipers, puts the car in gear, and drives. The road clears and dissolves, clears and dissolves. Her mind is blank. She can’t keep a thought in her head. The kids are at school by now, unaware of what they have lost, what they will lose. Thankfully it’s Wendy’s day off. Maeve still needs to call and let her own job know she can’t come in.
The wipers rub the windshield, their swishing rhythm toggling her thoughts. Nola Wren and Molly on one side, her mother’s secret on the other. Wendy on one side, Conor O’Kane on the other. Ireland, Maine. Back and forth.
She drives in the pouring rain. Past the house around the corner from the high school where the German boy Oskar lived with his host family. Past the ghost of the house where Wendy lived, the actual house consumed by fire and replaced by something cheap and dull. She drives in the circle of her life, around the town she’s never left. She has fit herself into its shape and forced it on others—Dylan and Opal for certain, but Wendy and Sam too.
She likes to keep things straight. That’s why she’s made lists her whole life.
Things That Make Me Who I Am.
Nothing comes to mind.
She drives, feels the pain of losing her dad, the sting of what’s to come. They will lose Nola Wren. Back and back she tumbles, like a cartoon character in a vortex. She thinks about ifs and thens. If she had known this, then she would have done that. She plays it out, but there’s no going back, no stepping in the same river twice. She drives until she winds up at the cove house.
Home.
She remembers her grandfather, who is not her real grandfather after all. But what is that—to be real? Of course he was real. Velveteen, worn and loved. Yes, she loved him. Always reciting poems Maeve hardly understood, though she’s beginning to understand now. Things do fall apart. The center cannot hold. She feels the flinging off, the falling away.
She rests her head on the steering wheel, but the bumps punch like brass knuckles. She bangs her head against it once, twice. Then Wendy is at the car door, Nola Wren with her. The rain has stopped, but drops trickle down the window, distorting and magnifying what matters.
