The men are together now, their attention focused on Faye and Nola Wren in the corner of the cemetery nearest the sea.
“I’ve got a bad feeling,” Molly says. “I mentioned the O’Kanes, and everything got really weird. C’mon. Let’s warn Mom. Be casual, though.”
Molly and Maeve pick their way through scattered headstones, trying to balance hurrying with being cool but also not trodding all over the dead. Maeve glances over her shoulder and sees the second man open the back door of the car and lean in. “Shit. Do you think they have a gun?”
Molly looks. “Why would they have a gun?”
A third person gets out of the car just as they catch up with Faye. She is kneeling now, head in her hands. Nola Wren pats her shoulder, saying “There, there,” over and over.
Maeve’s mouth falls open at the sight of the enormous gray angel, delicate stone wings raised in glory in front of a Celtic cross. The angel is a child, her eyes downcast, wavy hair long and free. She clutches three wildflower stems to the bodice of an ankle-length peasant dress that ends at delicate bare feet. The angel seems not as old as the simpler block of dark stone from which she rises that bears an inscription:Here lies a child, Elisabeth, taken leave from the weeping world. Nola Wren’s flowers lay where they were irreverently dropped.
Molly puts her hand on her mother’s shoulder. Faye struggles on weak legs to stand, and Maeve goes to the other side to help her.
“It’s her,” Faye says. “This is my Elisabeth. Oh, God. Oh, God.” She cries a life’s allotment of tears, tears for losing her mother and father, tears for war, tears for her failures as a sister and mother and wife. Tears gallop from her, wild ponies on a beach. “She swore. Together, always together. It was all she wanted, and I couldn’t give it to her. God, how I let her down.” Pain as searing as a stab wound punctures her belly. If this is the end of her life, she would not be surprised. It flashes in front of her. “What happened here? Oh, Elisabeth! What happened?” Her hands cup her mouth as she turns to her daughters, their arms open. The three women cling to one another tight as a root ball. Nola Wren plops down on the mound and plucks petals from the stolen flowers.
A gust comes off the water and captures the slip of paper Nola Wren pulls from the pocket of her blue wool coat—another drawing of a bunny she decided just then that she’d leave for the pretty angel. It skips away like a flat stone on a still pond. She runs after it, a rabbit herself, hopping between unruly graves and stones, unfazed by what lies beneath her feet.
Rock doves coo in the gorse as a figure passes through the first of two crumbling stone arches, disappears, then emerges through the second. It is a woman. She lifts her head, puts her hand up to shield her eyes from the white glare of lifting mist. The drawing flutters to rest at her feet. She picks it up and looks at the girl, who stops short and stares.
In the boneyard there are souls living and dead, but it is the living who for the briefest moment, think about the same thing—a rope to throw to save another person. Nola Wren looks back and sees two of her three moms with her grandmother. She looks at the woman holding her drawing of a rabbit, and surely that is her grandmother too. And that seems fine, so she goes to her to retrieve her rabbit and to hold this lady’s hand.
The breeze warms. Three crows circle overhead, and the rope that was tossed is gathered, hand over hand, until all are within reach of each other.
“Is it you?” the woman says.
Faye steps forward, caught in a spotlight. Everything around her fades. What she sees is a ghost, and it is her. The woman looks like her, dresses like she does, cuts her hair in a similar style. It could be that the sun sets and rises before Faye can move. Stunned and tear-choked, her voice as weak as it was when she was a child. “Bit?”
“Yes! Yes! And you are my Gisela! Oh, that sounds strange! Francis told us he saw a fetch, and she talked and said the name Fiadh Beatty. We knew we had to come straight away.” The woman’s accent is Irish, but even her lilted voice is Faye’s, though stronger, more spry. “I would know my sister anywhere!”
Faye brushes the woman’s cheek, taps her hands along the woman’s arms, making certain she is no figment. “You’re real? How can you be real? The grave!” she says, throwing her arms around the woman until the two seem like one. Kisses and tears, on cheeks and foreheads, temples and hair.
The sound of Faye’s voice, aching and plaintive, fills the graveyard. Maeve and Molly entwine arms, cling to each other.
Faye’s cleaved heart races. “They told us in Glencree that you were dead! You’re on the list of the dead! How are you here, alive? It says right there! ‘Here lies Elisabeth’!”
The woman takes Faye’s hands, turns them over and over, kissing them lightly. A thin memory, Mutti’s lips on her head and hands before tucking her into bed. “This is Fiadh’s grave. It’s her body that’s in there. Elisabeth is dead in name only. Dead but not buried. I’m right here.”
Faye’s head spins. “I don’t understand.” Conor O’Kane saunters up to her, laughs in her ear.If I am dead, as dead I may well be.How rotten, howcruel, to torture her that way.
“The name Elisabeth died the moment the Beattys concocted their plan. Old Father What’s-His-Name filled in the death certificate with my name on it. But it was you they took.”
Faye cringes.I will be Fiadh in America.
“Hannie was afraid to tell him he’d made a mistake. No one could tell us apart anyway except Fiadh, and she was gone. They called me Gisela, and no one was the wiser. Well, except the O’Kaneboys. Hannie convinced Theresa to keep her mouth shut, that you don’t go challenging a priest if you want to go to heaven. Theresa shut them up good.” Her laugh is carefree and mesmerizing. “They didn’t know it was Fiadh in there,” she says, nodding to the angel. “They thought it was you. Or me. I suppose in some ways it was all of us.” She takes Faye’s arm protectively as if they are old friends. “Magnificent, isn’t she?”
Faye, lifted from the ground, smells perfume blooming from stone flowers as she listens to her sister’s long-lost voice. The air trembles with the idle beating of muscular wings. Diaphanous fabric brushes Faye’s wrists.
“I feel her here. Fiadh. She was so clever and funny. Like her father. My father.” Faye shakes her woozy head. “Ahh. I have so much to tell you. So many questions to ask you. I don’t know where to begin except to say I’m so sorry, Bit.”
“Call me Sela. Everyone does. I hated being called Gisela. It reminded me of you too much. Oh! I would throw such a fit. Hannie came up with the compromise. It suits me now.”
Faye falters. She has so much to explain, so much to atone for.
“Such a miracle you’re here. Fiadh Beatty of America! My imaginary friend!”
“She talks a lot,” Nola Wren says, and it’s like the house lights come on and the audience is invited onstage.
“And who have we here?” Sela asks.
