“Your bed hadn’t been slept in. I was worried,” Thomas said softly. “I thought—” He straightened, not finishing his sentence.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. I wasn’t the only one still dressed in the clothes from the night before.
“Robbie’s taken a turn for the worse. He needs a hospital. I think he’s got some swelling—maybe bone fragments—in his brain. I don’t have the facilities or the expertise to do what needs to be done. I’m taking him to Dublin.”
“Can I come with you?” I asked. I didn’t want to be left behind again. Not yet. Not with Liam Gallagher still lurking around. When the guns were gone, maybe he would go too, and I would have nothing to fear.
My question surprised Thomas. “You want to come with me to Dublin?”
“You drive, and I’ll do my best to take care of Robbie.”
He nodded slowly, as if considering.
“I wanna come too,” Eoin mumbled from his bed. “I’ll help take care of Robbie.”
“Not this time, Eoin,” Thomas soothed, sitting on Eoin’s bed and pulling him close for a quick embrace. “I miss you, lad. I would like nothing better than to bring you with me everywhere I go. But Robbie’s very sick. This won’t be an outing you would enjoy.”
“But Mother will enjoy it?” Eoin asked doubtfully.
“No. She won’t enjoy it either. But I might need her help.”
“But we’re working on our book,” Eoin protested. “She’s writing a new adventure for Eoin Gallagher.”
The book for his birthday had been a great hit. I’d written another and was working on a third, and Eoin had already asked for adventures in Japan and New York and Timbuktu.
“Are you leaving room for pictures?” Thomas asked.
Eoin nodded. “At the bottom. You’ll never catch up, Doc,” he said sadly.
“I promise I will. And you might want to try drawing some of the pictures too,” Thomas suggested. “Your drawings always make me smile.”
Eoin yawned and nodded. Rejected and still sleepy, he rolled over, and Thomas pulled the covers over his shoulders. I kissed Eoin’s cheek and whispered my devotion, and we crept out.
“We need to leave as quickly as possible. I’ll have Daniel help me get Robbie to the car. Can you be ready in fifteen minutes?” Thomas asked.
I nodded eagerly and started down the hall, making a mental list.
“Anne?”
“Yes?”
“You’ll need to pack a nice dress. The red one. There’s a suitcase in the closet beneath the stairs.”
I nodded, not questioning him, and raced to my room.
The drive between Dublin and Dromahair took much longer than it had in 2001. Dirt roads, lower speeds, and a patient in the rear seat all contributed to a stressful ride. However, traffic was minimal, and I was not the one behind the wheel dodging oncoming traffic and praying for deliverance like I’d done a lifetime ago. We stopped once for gas—petrol—and I had to disembark because the gas tank, much to my surprise, was located under the front seat. Thomas noted my surprise and frowned, asking, “Where else would it be?”
Three and a half hours after we left Dromahair, we arrived in Dublin. I should have been prepared for the clothes and the cars, the streets and the sounds, but I wasn’t. Thomas remarked with relief at the absence of checkpoints—the most glaring sign of the truce. I could only nod and stare, trying to take it all in. It was nine on a Friday morning, and Dublin was dingy, dilapidated, and completely unrecognizable until we neared the center of the city. The old pictures I’d studied were suddenly bustling backdrops; the black-and-white photos were now drenched in life and color. Sackville had been renamed O’Connell Street—I remembered that much—and Nelson’s Pillar had not yet been blown up. The post office was a burned-out shell, and my eyes clung to its skeletal remains. From what I remembered of the maps of 1916 Dublin—one of which was still pinned to my office wall—I didn’t think we were taking the most direct route to the Mater Hospital. I suspected Thomas wanted to gauge my reaction to the war zone. If my wonder confused him, he kept it hidden.
We drove past a row of tidy, connected brownstone-style homes, and Thomas nodded toward them. “I sold the old house on Mountjoy and bought another, three houses down. No bad memories there.”
I nodded, grateful that I wouldn’t be expected to remember a home Anne Gallagher would have been familiar with. We pulled in front of the Mater, the soaring columns and stately entrance not unlike the pictures of the GPO before the Rising. I stayed in the car with Robbie, parked at the front entrance, while Thomas ran inside for a gurney and assistance.
He was back within minutes, along with a nun in a white habit accompanied by two men and a stretcher. Thomas gave a brief explanation of Robbie’s condition, as well as a request for a particular surgeon, and the nun nodded, telling him they would do the best they could. She seemed to know him, referring to him as Dr. Smith, and clucked her tongue and shot instructions to the orderlies. We parked the car, and I spent the rest of the day walking the halls and waiting for news. Nurses in long white pinafores and pert hats strode through halls, pushing patients in ancient chairs and rolling beds, and though medicine had improved dramatically in eighty years, the atmosphere of a working hospital had not. There was the same sense of frantic competence, of sadness layered with relief, and most of all, the sharp tang of tragic endings. Eoin had spent his entire adult life in a hospital. I suddenly understood why he hadn’t wanted to die in one.
Thomas was able to observe the surgery, and at six p.m., he joined me in the hospital mess hall, where I’d purchased us both some bread and soup that had long ago grown cold.
I’d eaten my portion huddled over the pages of a new story for Eoin. I’d decided I should plant the seed of Brooklyn in his little head. In this episode, Eoin Gallagher crossed Lough Gill and found himself in New York harbor, looking up at Lady Liberty. He walked across the Brooklyn Bridge on one page, walked to the corner of Jackson Street and Kingsland Avenue on another, and strolled through the halls of old Greenpoint Hospital, built in 1914, where my grandfather had worked until it closed in the early eighties. I included a page where the young adventurer watched the Dodgers play at Ebbets Field, sitting in the upper deck that hung over left field, listening to Hilda Chester ring her cowbell when Gladys Gooding wasn’t playing her organ. I described the brick arches and the flagpole and the Abe Stark advertisement on the bottom of the scoreboard that said, “Hit Sign, Win Suit.”
I’d never been to Ebbets Field. It was demolished in 1960. But Eoin had loved it, and he’d described it to me in great detail. Eoin said baseball was never the same after the Dodgers left Brooklyn. But he’d always said it with a nostalgic smile, the kind of smile that said, “I’m just glad I got to be there.”
I sketched a small picture of Coney Island with little Eoin eating a hot dog and staring up at the Ferris wheel, another thing my grandfather had loved. It wasn’t as good as Thomas’s renderings, but it would do.
When Thomas sat down beside me, a cup of black coffee in his hands and declaring Robbie’s surgery a success, I read the story to him. He listened, his eyes far away, his hair tousled.
“Baseball and Brooklyn, huh?” he murmured.
“Eoin said he wanted an adventure in New York,” I said. Ebbets Field was completed before 1921. I knew I was safe with my dates, but his attention made me squirm.
“Eoin wants an adventure in New York. But do you want an adventure in Dublin, Anne?” he asked softly.
“What did you have in mind, Dr. Smith?”
He set his coffee down and took a chunk of the hard bread and dipped it into the cold soup. He chewed slowly, his eyes still on me, considering. When he swallowed, he took another swig of his coffee and sighed as if he’d come to a decision.
“There’s someone I’d like you to meet.”
Beatrice Barnes, the pretty sales clerk at Lyons department store, had chosen a red figure-skimming dress with a boat neckline, cap sleeves, and a slight dropped waist. It swished around my lower legs, making me feel like I should break into the Charleston like a flapper girl—which I wouldn’t be doing—but I could not fault her taste or her eye. It fit me perfectly, and the color made my skin glow and my eyes sparkle. She’d included a red rouge and a matching pair of silk gloves that enveloped my arms past my elbows, leaving only my upper arms uncovered. I put them on and immediately pulled them off again. August, even in Ireland, was too hot for full-length silk gloves, whatever the fashion. I parted my hair deeply on the side, wrapped it into a loose knot low on my neck, and gently pulled a few curls free to brush my collarbones. Powder, lash tint, and the red rouge on my lips made me look like I’d made an effort, and I stepped back from the mirror, hoping I would please him. Thomas rapped on the door, and I called out for him to come in. He stepped inside, freshly shaved, his hair slicked back in sooty waves. He was wearing a black three-piece suit and tie over a crisp white shirt, a long black duster over his arm.
“It’s damp out. You’ll want a coat over that dress,” he suggested, walking to the wardrobe where I’d hung my things. The room was well appointed in rich tones and dark furniture—nothing ostentatious yet nothing inexpensive. The whole house was furnished in the same manner, timeless and unassuming, welcoming yet slightly aloof, like a gracious butler. Like Thomas himself.
“There’s no curfew. Dublin’s celebrating the truce,” he said, his eyes soft on my face, and I had to mentally amend my description. He was not always aloof. I smiled, welcoming the warmth of his gaze.
“Are we celebrating?” I asked.
“I suppose we are. Do you mind walking? It’s not too far.”
“Not at all.”
He escorted me to the door, helped me with my coat, and offered his arm. But instead of taking it, I threaded my fingers through his. His breath hitched, and his eyes flared ever so slightly, making my pulse quicken and my heart quiver. We stepped out into the night and made our way down the street, hand in hand, our footsteps echoing in clicking syncopation.
The mist hung low, making the streetlamps look like candles behind a cloth, smeared and tepid. Thomas didn’t stroll; he strode, his long black coat making him blend oddly into the fog, just another shape melding in and out. The stockings, secured to my legs by the corset straps I couldn’t get used to, were little protection against the damp, but the air felt good against my skin. I’d left my hat behind, not wanting to flatten my hair, but Thomas had pulled on his peaked hat, the style he seemed to favor, the kind Eoin had worn his entire life. It sat above Thomas’s deep-set blue eyes, a hat jaunty and boyish, so unlike the man. I noticed many men wore a bowler hat, the hat of a more genteel set. But Thomas rarely wore one. It was as though he liked the statement the peaked hat made: “I’m just a regular fellow. Nothing to see here.”