“Take your time. You’re okay,” he soothed, crouching beside me, patting my back. I knew his voice. Eamon. It was Eamon Donnelly. Thank God.
“Liam. Where’s Liam?” I rasped. My lungs burned, and my scalp screamed. I laid my head on the shore, grateful to be alive.
“Liam?” he pressed. “Can you tell me more, ma’am?”
“Eamon,” I coughed. “Eamon, I need Robbie, and I can’t go home.”
“Robbie?” Eamon pressed, his voice rising in confusion. “Robbie or Eamon? Or Liam? I’m sorry, ma’am. I don’t know what you’re asking or who you’re asking for.”
I rolled back onto my side, too tired to push up to my hands and knees. I peered up at Eamon, a Herculean effort. But it wasn’t Eamon. I stared, trying to orient myself to the face above mine, the face that didn’t match the voice.
“Jaysus wept!” he gasped. “It’s you, lass. Dear God. What the . . . where the hell have you been? W-what . . . w-when,” he stammered, asking questions that I couldn’t process.
“Mr. Donnelly?” I cried, the horror rasping in my throat. Oh no. No, no, no.
“That’s right. You rented the boat from me, miss. I didn’t want you to take that damn boat out. You know I didn’t. Thank Mary, you’re all right. We thought you’d drowned in the lough,” he confessed, horrified.
“What day is it? What year?” I mourned. I couldn’t look around to ascertain for myself. I didn’t want to see. I pushed up to my hands and knees, struggled to my feet, and stumbled back into the water.
“Where’re you goin’?” Jim Donnelly asked. Not Eamon Donnelly. Jim Donnelly, who lived in the cottage by the dock and had rented me a boat. In 2001.
I fell into the lough, desperate to return, even as I refused to admit I’d left.
The man yanked me up. “What are you doing? Are ya out of yer mind?”
“What day is it?” I cried, fighting him.
“It’s July the sixth,” he bellowed, wrapping his arms around my upper body, dragging me back to the shore. “It’s a feckin’ Friday!”
“What year?” I panted. “What year?”
“Huh?” he stammered. “It’s 2001. We’ve been lookin’ for you for more than a week. Ten days. You never came back to shore. The boat, everything, was just gone. The rental company came and took your car when the Gardai were done with it.” He pointed toward the parking lot that didn’t exist when Thomas lived at Garvagh Glebe. When Eoin lived at Garvagh Glebe. When I had lived at Garvagh Glebe.
“No,” I wept. “Oh no.”
“The Gardai have been here. They’ve been over the lake with equipment. They even sent divers down,” he said, shaking his head. “What happened?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t really know what happened. I don’t really know.”
“Is there someone I can call, ma’am? Where the hell did you come from?” he muttered, trying to coax me back to his cottage, to warmth, to the call he was desperate to make. I wanted him to leave. But he kept his arm firmly around my shoulders, leading me away from the lough. I needed to return to the water, to slip beneath the surface and back to the time before, to the place I’d left, to the life I’d lost.
Lost. Gone. Just like that. A breath, a submersion, and I died and was born again. Liam had tried to kill me. And he’d succeeded. He’d taken my life. Taken my love. Taken my family.
“What happened to ya, lass?”
I could only shake my head, too distraught to speak. I’d been through this all before. And this time, Thomas and Eoin weren’t here to help me through it.
26 April 1922
Anne’s gone. She’s been gone for ten days. I returned to Garvagh Glebe late on Sunday, the sixteenth. My home was in chaos. Maggie held Eoin, who was feverish and ill in her arms. His crying made each breath a struggle. Maggie could hardly look at me, she was so distraught, but she murmured one word—lough—and I was out the door, running through the trees to the beach where Robbie and Patrick were scouring the shore for Anne’s body. Robbie, doing his best to explain the unexplainable, wept as he relayed the day’s events.
Liam had tried to force Anne into a boat on the lough at gunpoint, and Robbie had shot him. When Robbie ran into the water to pull Liam off her, she was gone.
Robbie said he searched the water for an hour. All he found were her shoes. He thinks she drowned, but I know what happened. She’s gone, but she’s not dead. I try to console myself with that.
Robbie dragged Liam back to the house where Brigid did her best to tend to him. Liam has a bullet wound in his shoulder, and he lost a lot of blood. But he’ll live.
I want to kill him.
I removed the bullet, cleaned the wound, and sutured it. When he cried in pain, I showed him the morphine, but I didn’t give him any.
“Thomas, please,” he moaned. “I’ll tell you everything. All of it. Please.”
“And how will you ease my pain, Liam? Anne is gone,” I hissed. “I’m letting you live. But I will not ease your pain.”
“That wasn’t Annie. She wasn’t Annie. I swear it, Tommy. I was trying to help you,” he moaned.
Brigid claims she found a “plot” in Anne’s drawer, a list of dates and details outlining the assassination of Michael Collins. Brigid doesn’t know what happened to the pages. She said Liam took them, and he said he must have lost them in the lough. They are both convinced my Anne was an imposter. They are right. And they are horribly wrong. I want to wrap my hands around Liam’s neck and howl my outrage into his ears.
“She looked like Annie. But that wasn’t Annie,” he said, shaking his head, adamant.
I was flooded with a sudden, terrible knowledge.
“How do you know this, Liam?” I whispered, almost afraid to ask, yet filled with a dizzying reassurance that I would finally know the truth. “Why are you so sure?”
“Because Annie’s dead. She’s been dead for six years,” he confessed, his skin damp, his eyes pleading. I could hear Brigid approaching, shuffling towards the room I used as a clinic, and I rose, slammed the door, and locked it. I couldn’t deal with Brigid. Not yet.
“How do you know?” I demanded.
“I was there, Thomas. I saw her die. She was dead. Anne was dead.”
“Where? When?” I was shouting, my voice so loud it echoed in my grief-soaked brain.
“At the GPO. Easter week. Please give me something, Doc. I can’t think straight through the pain. I’ll tell you. But you have to help me.”
With no fanfare or finesse, I jammed the syringe into his leg and depressed the morphine, pulling it free and tossing it aside as he wilted into the bed beneath him. His relief was so pronounced, he began to laugh softly.
I was not laughing. “Tell me!” I roared, and his laughter turned into chagrin.
“Okay, Tommy. I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you.” He sighed heavily, his pain retreating, his mind travelling somewhere else. Somewhere far away. I could see it in his eyes, in the way his voice fell into a storyteller’s rhythm as he shared an account he’d probably relived a thousand times in his head.
“That last night . . . at the GPO, we were all trying to be nonchalant. Trying to act like we didn’t care that the roof was about to cave in on us. Every entrance was in flames but the one on Henry Street, and getting down Henry Street was like running a feckin’ gauntlet. Men were running with their weapons, shooting at sounds, and in the process, shooting each other in the back. I was the last to go. Declan had already gone on ahead with O’Rahilly. They were going to try to clear Moore Street for the rest of us, but right away the word came back that they’d all been shot down. My little brother was always so feckin’ willing to be a hero.”
I felt the memory rise, thick and hot, like the smoke that had filled my lungs as I’d gone to Moore Street that long-ago Saturday, looking for my friends; 29 April 1916 was the worst day of my life. Before today. Today was worse.
“Connolly told me to make sure everyone was out of the GPO before I evacuated,” Liam continued, the morphine slowing his cadence. “That was my job. I had to watch as men ran for their lives, one after another, dodging bullets and tripping over bodies. That’s when I heard her. She was suddenly there, in the GPO, walking through the smoke. She scared me, Thomas. I was half blind and so tired, I would have shot my own mother had she come up behind me.”
I waited for him to say her name yet recoiled when he did.
“It was Annie. I don’t know how she got back inside the post office. The place was an inferno.”
“What did you do?” The words were a rasp in my throat.
“I shot her. I didn’t mean to. I just reacted. I shot her several times. I knelt beside her, and her eyes were open. She was staring at me, and I said her name. But she was dead. Then I shot her again, Thomas. Just to make sure she was real.”
I couldn’t look at him. I was afraid I would do to him what he’d done to Declan’s Anne. To Eoin’s mother. To my friend. I remembered the madness of that night. The exhaustion. The strain. And I understood how it had happened. I would have understood then. I would have forgiven him then. But he’d lied to me for six years, and he’d tried to cover his sins by killing again.
“I took her shawl—she’d been holding it—it was too hot in the GPO to wear it. It didn’t have a single drop of blood on it.” He was obviously still awed by the fact. I grimaced, imagining the blood that must have pooled beneath her bullet-ridden body.
“And her ring?” It was all so clear to me now.
“I took it off her finger. I didn’t want anyone to know it was her. I knew if I left her in the GPO, her body would burn, and no one would ever have to know what I’d done.”
“Except for you. You knew.”
Liam nodded, but his face was blank, as though he’d suffered so long with the sharp edge of guilt it had carved him into an empty shell.
“Then I walked out. I walked to Henry Place, Anne’s shawl in my hands, her ring in my pocket. I felt the bullets whizzing past me. I wanted to die. But I didn’t. Kavanagh pulled me into a tenement on Moore Street, and I spent the rest of the night burrowing through the walls, from one tenement to the next, working my way towards Sackville Lane with some of the others. I left the shawl in a pile of rubble, and I kept the ring. I’ve carried it in my pocket ever since. I don’t know why.”
“Ever since?” I asked, disbelieving. How was that possible? Anne had been wearing the ring when I’d seen her last. My Anne. My Anne. My legs buckled, and for a moment I thought I would fall.
“Surely you noticed that Anne was wearing the same ring,” I moaned, covering my face with my hands.