Sela puts her arm around Molly’s shoulder. “I know. You should try it. Let it all out. It feels great.”
“Ha!” Molly says, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “That’s not how we were raised. Keep quiet, keep quiet. Don’t tell. Don’t talk about anything. It was not wonderful.”
Sela shrugs. “Sounds like fear. Your mom had it, and I’m guessing old Batty Jean didn’t help that any. She probably passed it on to you two girls. What about Nola Wren? Will you pass it on to her?”
Molly scoffs. “I haven’t had much of a chance.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if you must know, Maeve’s been raising her. I’ve been an absentee mom. And I’m not with Nola Wren’s dad. He didn’t know a thing about her until last September. This whole revelation about our mom is quite a twist. Here I was thinking that I was the most shit mom ever.” Molly throws her head back, the words tumbling out of her. “God. And my dad. Yeah, I don’t know what I’m passing on to Nola Wren. I don’t know what’s going to happen to us. I told Leo—that’s her father—that I wish he could be in her life, but he was furious with me, as you can imagine. I’ve got amends to make. That’s what all this is, at least for me.”
“Oh, Molly. That makes me sad. I hope for both your sakes that you can get up off your knees. Otherwise, that little girl in there will catch it, too, and then what?” She lowers her voice. “Oh, look! A visitor.” She bends silently to quiet them both. In the distance between the garden shed and greenhouse, a fox soaks in the moonlight.
“Hello, friend,” Molly whispers. The vixen turns her head, regards them, then trots off blithely, three kits tumbling into formation behind her. “Do you think it’s a sign?”
“Of what? A fox is just a fox. Not everything has to be a big mystery. C’mon. Enough now. Let’s go inside and sober up.”
“Sela?” Molly says. “I need to tell Jem’s dad. About Conor.”
“Oh, don’t do that. Francis would not want to hear that name coming from you. Trust me. The Irish know how to hold a grudge, andFrancis holds one for Conor that your story would only make worse. And not because of anything you did, mind you, but because Conor was the kind of man who’d gotten himself into a jam such that one child had to protect another from him. Conor disgraced the old man in a thousand ways. I’m not sure Francis could stand any more. Jem and me are enough. Consider yourself confessed and forgiven if forgiveness is what you’re looking for.”
They walk toward the cottage, and Molly steals a glance over her shoulder. The path is moonlit and clear. The fox and her kits have moved on.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
1996: West Cork, Ireland
Faye and Sela steal away from the cottage after breakfast, leaving Maeve and Molly behind with Jem to play with Nola Wren in the gardens and greenhouses and flower beds and to read and nap under the apple tree. The morning mist in the valley lifts by the time Faye and Sela reach the main road on the way to the village and bay where they were last together as sisters.
On the drive, Sela prattles on about her and Jem, their nieces and nephews—children of older O’Kane brothers Faye never even knew existed—off in Dublin and London. About Jem’s brother Tim who died from pancreatic cancer—“an awful death,” Sela reports—and how his widow Jennie lives with their daughter in Bantry. She talks about her love of American films, all kinds “except horror movies.” She steers the car along narrow roads, her back and neck straight, and tells Faye she likes comedies and romances, action movies, dramas, adventures. She likes classics, too, especially the ones with that Jimmy Stewart, though she buys him better as a reporter than a cowboy. She loves movies set in the American west, the old south, in Los Angeles and New York City. She says she thinks she might be in love with Brad Pitt—though he’s no Robert Redford—and wishes someone would remakeButch Cassidy andthe Sundance Kidwith him as Sundance. “He needs a buddy, though. Someone to be Butch.” She tells Faye she imagined Fiadh Beatty the American woman who survives disasters, who stands up to bullies, fights aliens, who drives cars fast and drinks martinis dry. “It was better for me to think of you that way.” In Sela’s America, Fiadh wore sky-high heels and flowy dresses, overcame sadness and brutality, and got her man. “I went to the movies to see you,” Sela says, smiling.
This back and forth—family history and stories, lives lived and losses suffered, the pregnancies Sela and Jem attempted and lost—is at once comforting and exhausting to Faye. “You’re lucky to have children and grandchildren of your own,” Sela offers. In the quiet between ideas of what to talk about next, Faye wonders how she and Sela will ever be able to make up time. After Molly dropped her bombshell about Conor O’Kane, she and Sela and Jem had talked and talked about it, so much that Faye’s throat hurt and her head pounded. Still. To hear Sela talk was to relive her own life in comparison. She did not share every event with Sela but let herself put them in parallel.When you lived in Dublin while Jem was in college, I worked for Aldo in the flower shop. When you were trying to have a baby, I lost one. The year you went to London was the year Molly was born.Besides the day that Conor O’Kane arrived at her wedding, their lives never intersected. Yet they were always connected.
Sela veers off onto a narrow road, down an even more rutted lane that leads to the bay. “This is where we walked when Hannie and Hugh first brought us home. That farmhouse is where Hugh left the car. The Dalys still live here.”
Faye shakes her head. None of it is familiar to her anymore.
Sela dodges puddles deep from the morning’s rain. Sun dapples the bay, smooth and clear like it was that day three sneaky girls rowed out for a picnic. Faye touches her hip.
Houses pop up along the roadside, some new and fine, others little more than ruins. Beyond where the road ends is a cluster of vined chimneys, walls barely standing, thatched roofs long collapsed.
Sela turns off the car. “There they are, what’s left of them. Francis sold the O’Kane land years ago and lives in town now. Walks to the pub every day and sits with Brian, Theresa’s brother’s youngest son. He’s the barkeep you saw.”
The cottages seem so small, so close together. The Beattys’ cottage, Faye’s parents’ home with Fiadh, is nothing but a single wall and crumbled chimney. She and Sela stand in the doorway of what had been Hannie and Hugh’s house. The interior is collapsed, the blue sky shining through a hole where two girls once slept. Faye remembers backing down a ladder that is gone now.There was no way back to you once I went down.“It doesn’t seem possible that real people ever lived here.”
“We did. You and I,” Sela says, pointing. “Right up there by that cloud.”
They squeeze past a cattle gate, trespass on the abandoned property. Faye stands on a low rock wall. “Good God, this is beautiful, isn’t it?” Meandering lines of stone and brush divide the fields into paddocks. Her sister’s voice is in her ear.Das ist ein grünes Land.No harm was supposed to befall them here in this green place. She had promised. Faye steps down, and the ground gives, bogged and mossy. “Was it always like this?”
“Yes, I suppose it was,” Sela says. “Come on. Let’s go down to the water.”
They follow the green footpath between ivy vines and blackberry brambles. The buzzing air is lush with grass and manure and heather, bumblebees big enough for a faery harness. Faye follows Sela like a shadow. She has borrowed a pair of rubber boots so they are twins in this field, both in cream sweaters and blue denim, their hair in matched silvering bobs, though Sela wears a canvas gardening hat over hers. She stops at the top of a rise. “There’s Carbery,” she says, pointing to the island in the bay. “The accident happened about there. We’d have made it back if it was a day like today.”
Faye tries to imagine three little girls rowing out on their own. Too vast, too far, too deep. “We had no business trying to take that boat across.”
“We sure had fun, though.”
“How can you say that? I almost drowned. Fiadh did. And then ... someone should have stopped us,” Faye says.
