“Why are you doing this?” he groaned, closing his eyes.
“Why won’t you look at me?” I begged. “Why won’t you see me?”
Thomas raised his head, studying me. We stood in the grass on the side of the road, our eyes clinging, our wills clashing. Then he sighed heavily and ran his hands through his hair, turning once and coming back to me, closer than before, as though he wanted to kiss me and shake me and make me give in.
I felt the same way.
“Your eyes are different than I remember—a different green. The green of the sea instead of the green of the grass. And your teeth are straighter,” he whispered.
My great-grandmother hadn’t had the luxury of expensive braces. Thomas’s gaze slid to my mouth, and he swallowed. He touched my top lip and moved his hand immediately. When he spoke again, his voice was softer, begrudging, like he was admitting something painful.
“Declan’s Anne had a gap between her front teeth. I noticed when I watched you brush your teeth that the gap was missing. You used to whistle through that gap. You claimed it was your only musical talent.”
I laughed, releasing some of the infuriating feelings swelling in my chest. “I definitely can’t whistle through my teeth.” I shrugged as if it didn’t really matter. But it mattered so much I could hardly draw breath.
“You have the same laugh. Eoin’s laugh,” Thomas continued. “But you have Declan’s steadiness too. It’s uncanny, really. It’s as if they’ve both come back . . . in you.”
“They have, Thomas. Don’t you understand?”
His face shuddered with emotion, and he shook his head again, like it was all too much, too hard to believe, and he couldn’t grasp it. But he kept on, his voice low, almost talking to himself. “You look enough like the old Anne”—he winced like he couldn’t believe he was actually differentiating between us—“that no one would ever doubt you are her. But she was . . . much . . . sharper.” He latched upon the word as if he couldn’t think of a better one, but I flinched, and I felt my face grow hot.
“I’m plenty intelligent.”
“Are ya, now?” His lips actually twitched, humor chasing the strain from his face.
Outrage bubbled in my throat. Was he laughing at me?
“I’m not talking about your intelligence, Anne. The old Anne was all sharp edges. She didn’t have your tranquility. She was . . . intense. Forceful. Passionate and, frankly, tiresome. Maybe it was because she felt she had to be. But your softness is beautiful. Soft eyes. Soft curls. A soft voice. A warm, soft smile. Don’t be ashamed of it. There’s very little softness left in Ireland anymore. It’s one of the reasons Eoin loves you so much.”
My anger deflated, and my breast swelled with a different feeling entirely.
“You’re good, you know,” he mused. “Your accent. You sound like one of us. You sound like the same Anne. But sometimes you slip. You forget . . . and then you sound like the girl you claim to be.”
“The girl I claim to be,” I muttered. I had hoped, just for a moment, that we’d moved past disbelief. But maybe not. “Whether you believe it or not doesn’t make it less true, Thomas. I need you to pretend that I am exactly who I say I am. Can you do that? Because regardless of whether you believe me or not, regardless of whether you think I’m lying or deranged or sick, I know things that haven’t happened yet, and I don’t know half of the things you think I should. I am not Anne Finnegan Gallagher. And you know it. Deep down, you do. I don’t know the names of your neighbors or the shopkeepers in town. Or how to style my hair or how to wear these infernal stockings or cook or sew or Riverdance, for God’s sake.” I yanked at the corset strap beneath my skirt and it snapped against my leg.
Thomas was silent for several long breaths, considering, his eyes on mine. Then his lips quirked all over again, and he began to laugh, his hand hovering near his mouth like he wanted to stop but couldn’t. “What the hell is Riverdance?” he wheezed.
“Irish dancing. You know.” Keeping my arms straight to my sides, I began kicking up my heels and shuffling in a very poor imitation of The Lord of the Dance.
“Riverdance, eh?” he chortled.
He began to kick up his heels too, stepping and tapping, his hands on his hips, laughing as I tried to copy him. But I couldn’t copy him. He was wonderful, exuberant, dancing down the lane toward the house as though he heard fiddles in his head. Gone was the morose doctor, the doubting Thomas, and as the thunder cracked and the rain started to fall around us, we were transported back to Dublin, to the rain and the rocking chair, and the intimacy I’d shattered with impossible truths.
We didn’t go back to the house. Brigid would be there and so would at least four O’Tooles. Thomas pulled me into the barn, to the scent of clean hay and the chuff and whinny of the mare and her new baby. He bolted the door behind us, backed me up against the wall, and tucked his mouth close to my ear.
“If you’re crazy, then so am I. I’ll be Tom the Lunatic, and you can be Crazy Jane,” he said. I smiled at his Yeats references even as my pulse pounded, and my fingers curled in his shirt.
“The truth is, I feel crazy. For the last month I’ve been slowly going insane,” he panted. His breath stirred my hair and tickled the whorl of my ear. “I don’t know the right or wrong of it. I can’t see beyond tomorrow or next week. Part of me is still convinced that you’re Declan’s Anne, and it seems all sorts of wrong to feel the way I do.”
“I’m not Declan’s Anne,” I said, urgently, but he continued, the words spilling from his lips, lips so close that I turned my face so they could trail across my cheek.
“I can’t fathom where you’ll go or where you’ve been. But I’m afraid for you and terrified for myself and for Eoin. So if you tell me to stop, Anne, I will. I’ll back away, and I’ll do my best to be what you need. And when . . . if . . . you go, I’ll do my damnedest to explain it all to Eoin.”
I pressed my mouth to the veiny ridge of his throat and pulled the smooth skin between my lips, wanting to mark him, to absorb the pulse that throbbed below his ear. His heart pounded beneath my hands where they pressed against his chest, and something within me crystallized, as though in that moment a choice was made, and I stepped into a past that would be my future.
Then his mouth was on mine, his hands gripping my face with a zeal that caused my head to thump against the wall and my toes to curl and flex, drawing me up onto the balls of my feet so I could more firmly align my body with his. For long moments, it was the clash and slide of mouths learning to dance again, of tongues teasing hidden corners and frenzy giving way to quiet fervor. His lips left mine to nuzzle the base of my throat; he slid his cheek along the neckline of my blouse before he dropped to his knees, his hands gripping my hips the way he’d held my face moments before, demanding my attention. He knelt there, his face to the most intimate part of me, pressing kisses over my clothes, creating a wet heat that coiled and crooned and called out to him.
I made a sound that would echo in my head long after the moment had passed, a keening that begged for permanence or completion, and he pulled me to the ground, his hands climbing my hips, wrapping around my ribcage until I was prone beneath him. He gathered my skirts in his hands as I clenched my fists in the rumpled waves of his hair and brought his tongue to mine, the heat spreading from my belly to the press of our mouths and the mingling of our breath.
Then he was moving against me, rocking into me like the waves licking at the shores of Lough Gill, persistent and smooth, rolling and retreating and coming again until I could only feel the liquid lapping and the lengthening tide. My mouth forgot how to kiss, my heart forgot when to beat, my lungs forgot why they needed breath. Thomas forgot nothing, lifting me up and into him, breathing life into my kiss, coaxing my heart to pound with his, reminding my lips to form his name. He stroked my hair, and his body stilled as the wave receded and left me breathless, all the forgotten things remembered.
1 October 1921
I’ve often wondered whether the Irish would be who we are if the English would have simply been more humane. If they would have been reasonable. If they would have allowed us to prosper. We were stripped of every right and schooled only in derision. They treated us like animals, and yet we didn’t yield. Since the days of Cromwell, we have been under England’s boot, and still we are Irish. Our language was forbidden, and yet we speak it. Our religion was stamped out at every turn, yet we still practise it. When the rest of the world experienced a reformation of sorts, abandoning Catholicism for a new school of thought and science, we dug in our heels. Why? Because that would mean the English won. We are Catholic because they told us we couldn’t be. What you try to take away from a man, he will want all the more. What you tell him he can’t have, he’ll set his heart on. The only rebellion we have is our identity.
Anne’s identity is its own kind of rebellion, and she refuses to relinquish it. For a month I found myself in constant argument with my heart, with my head—with her—although I hardly said a word. I silently cajoled, begged, pleaded, and persuaded, and she stood firm, insistent in her absurdity.
I told my heart I could not have her, and the Irish dissident in my blood rose up and said she was mine. The moment I surrendered, embracing the impossible, fate tried once more to take her away. Or maybe destiny simply pulled the veil from my eyes.
Anne was playing with Eoin by the lake, running in and out of the lazy surf, her skirts hiked up in a way that would have shocked Brigid had Brigid called them in to supper herself. I drew up, wanting only to look at her for a moment, to enjoy the flash of her pale legs against the grey-green backdrop of the lough. She made my heart ache in the best way, and I watched her dance with Eoin as they laughed in the fading light, her curls tumbling and her coltish limbs kicking up water. Then Eoin, his arms wrapped around the red ball he’d received from the O’Tooles on his birthday, tripped and fell, scraping his knees on the pebbled sand and losing his ball. Anne scooped him up as I started down the embankment, my reverie broken by his tears. But Eoin was less worried about his scrapes and more worried about the ball that was floating away. He squalled, pointing, and immediately Anne set him down and raced to retrieve it before it was beyond rescue.
She ran into the lough, knees high, holding her skirts from the inevitable. The ball bobbed out of reach. Anne moved out a little farther, straining for it, and the ball lured her deeper. I began to run, filled with an irrational terror, shouting for her to let the ball go. She surged forward, releasing her skirts and immersing herself from the waist down, wading towards the bobbing red sphere.
I was too far away. I yelled at her to come back as I raced across the shore, and for a moment her image wavered, a mirage on the lough. It was like looking through glass, the white of her dress becoming a tendril of mist; the darkness of her hair becoming evening shadows.