I sipped my tea, and Maeve smirked at me over the edge of her cup. “He wasn’t daft though, was he?”
“No.” Thomas wouldn’t have told Eoin everything. But he would have told him enough. He would have told him who I was and that he would see me again.
“I’d forgotten all about Anne Smith. I’d even forgotten about Doc and Eoin. It’s been seventy years since I last saw them. Then you showed up at my door. And I started to remember.”
“What did you remember?”
“Don’t be coy, lass. I’m not twelve years old anymore, and you are not the lady of this house.” She thumped her slippered foot on her carpeted floor. “I remembered you!”
I smiled at her vehemence. It felt good to be remembered.
“Now, I want to know everything. I want to know what happened to you. Then and now. And don’t leave out the kissing scenes,” she barked.
I refilled my cup, took a huge bite of a frosted pink pastry, and I told her everything.
In September, I awoke to news that the Twin Towers had fallen, that my city had been attacked, and I watched the television coverage, clutching my growing belly, sheltering my unborn child, wondering if I’d returned from one vortex only to be plunged into another. My old life, my streets, my skyline, was forever changed, and I was grateful Eoin was no longer alive in Brooklyn to witness it. I was grateful I was no longer there to witness it. My heart was incapable of holding more pain.
Barbara heard the planes—they shook the agency as they passed overhead—before they hit, and called me in a state days later, repeating over and over again how glad she was that I was safe in Ireland. “The world has gone mad, Anne. Mad. It’s upside down, and we are all holding on for dear life.” I knew exactly what she meant, but my world had been spinning for months, and 9/11 just added another layer of impossibility. It distracted Barbara from her worry over me, from my midlife crisis, and I could only retreat further into the corners of Garvagh Glebe, unable to absorb the magnitude of such an event, unable to process any of it. The world was upside down—just like Barbara said—but I’d been falling when it tipped, and I already had my sea legs. I turned off the television, begged my city for forgiveness, and pled with God to keep us all—even me—from losing ourselves. And I continued on.
In October, I ordered a crib, a changing table, and a rocking chair to match the old oak floors. Two weeks later, I decided that the floor in the nursery needed to be carpeted. The house could be drafty, and I had visions of my baby tumbling out of her bed and onto the unforgiving slats. The carpet was installed, the furniture assembled, and the curtains hung, and I told myself I was ready.
In November, I concluded that the soft-green paint on the nursery walls would look better with white stripes. Green-and-white stripes would work for a girl or a boy, and it would give the room some cheer. I bought the paint and supplies, but Kevin insisted that pregnant ladies should not paint and hijacked my project. I made a halfhearted protest, but my enormous belly made a mockery of my ambitions. I was thirty-two weeks along and could not imagine getting any bigger or being any more uncomfortable. But I needed something to do.
Barbara had called earlier in the week to see how my next book was coming along. I had to confess it wasn’t coming at all. I had a story to tell, a love story like no other, but I couldn’t face the ending. My words were a tangled mess of agony and denial, and whenever I sat down to plot or plan, I ended up staring out the window, traipsing through the yellowed pages of my old life, searching for Thomas. There were no words for the things I felt; there was only the rise and fall of my breath, the steady slog of my heart, and the unrelenting ache of separation.
Unable to paint and unwilling to write, I decided to walk. I pulled a pink cashmere shawl over my shoulders and stuffed my feet into a pair of black Wellies so they wouldn’t get wet when I walked to the lough. My hair danced in the gloom, waving at the naked branches of the shivering trees. No need to tame it now. No one cared if it hung halfway down my back and curled around my face. No one would look twice at my black leggings or disapprove of the way my cotton tunic hugged the swell of my breasts or clung to my pregnant belly. The beach was empty. No one would see me at all.
Western Ireland was caught in the damp doldrums of a dying fall, and the moldering mist licked at my cheeks and hovered over the lake, obscuring the sky from the sea, the surf from the sand, and the silhouette of the opposite shore. I stood facing the lough, letting the wind lift my hair and let it go again, watching the fog gather into ghosts and shift in the tepid light.
I’d stopped going into the water. I’d stopped rowing out, away from the shore. The water was cold, and I had a child to consider, a life beyond my own. But I still came at least once a day to plead my case to the wind. The blanket of fog cushioned the air, and the world was hushed and hiding. The lapping of the water and the squelch of my boots were my only company.
And then I heard whistling.
It stopped for a moment and it came again, faint and far away. Donnelly’s dock was empty, his business closed for the season. Light shone from his windows, and a tendril of smoke rose from his chimney, merging with the hazy sky, but nothing moved along the shore. The whistling was not on the land but in the water, like a foolish fisherman was hiding in the fog.
The sound grew stronger, drifting in with the tide, and I stepped toward it, listening for the whistler to finish his tune. It warbled and broke, and I waited for an encore. When none came, I pursed my lips and finished the song for him, the sound breathy and soft and a little off-key. But I recognized the melody.
They can’t forget, they never will, the wind and waves remember Him still.
“Thomas?”
I’d called to him before. I’d screamed his name across the water until I was hoarse and hopeless. But I called to him again.
“Thomas?”
His name hung precariously in the air, weighty and wishful, before it teetered and fell, sinking like a stone beneath the surface. The lough whispered back with liquid lips, slow and sighing. Tho-mas, Tho-mas, Tho-mas.
The bow appeared first, shifting in and out of sight. The lough was playing hide-and-seek. There it was again. Closer. Someone was rowing with steady strokes. The pull and release of the paddle through the water mocked a hushed endearment, the sound of his name becoming the sound of his voice. Coun-tess, Coun-tess, Coun-tess.
Then I saw him. A peaked cap, broad shoulders, a tweed coat, and pale eyes. Pale-blue eyes clinging to mine. He said my name, low and disbelieving, as the small red boat split the fog and slid toward the shore, so close I heard the oar scrape the sand.
“Thomas?”
Then he was standing, using the oar like a Venetian gondolier, and I was sinking to my knees on the rocky shore, crying his name. The little boat bellied up to the beach, and he stepped out onto solid ground, tossing the oar aside and pulling his hat from his head. He clutched it against his chest, like a nervous suitor come to call. His dark hair was shot with silver, and a few more lines creased the corners of his eyes. But it was Thomas.
He hesitated, teeth clenched, gaze pleading, as though he didn’t know how to greet me. I tried to rise, to go to him, and he was suddenly there, swooping me up and holding me against him, the swell of our child cradled between us, his face buried in my hair. For a moment, neither of us spoke, our burning lungs and pounding hearts stealing our speech and robbing our senses.
“How is it that I’ve lost eleven years, and you haven’t aged at all?” he cried into my curls, his joy tinged in sorrow. “Is this my child, or have I lost you too?”
“This is your child, and you will never lose me,” I vowed, stroking his hair, touching his face, my hands as delirious as my heart. Thomas was wrapped around me, so close I felt every breath, but it wasn’t enough. I drew his face to mine, frantic, afraid I would wake without kissing him goodbye.
He was so real and so wonderfully familiar. The scrape of his cheeks, the press of his lips, the taste of his mouth, the salt of his tears. He kissed me like he’d kissed me the first time and every time after that, pouring himself out, holding nothing back. But this kiss was flavored with long absence and new hope, and with every sigh and second that passed, I began to believe in an afterlife.
“You stayed in Ireland,” he choked, his lips skimming across my cheeks, down my nose, and over the point of my chin, his fingers cradling my face.
“Someone told me once that when people leave Ireland, they never go back. I couldn’t bear the thought of never going back. So I stayed. And you stayed with Eoin,” I said, overwhelmed.
He nodded, his eyes so full and fierce that tears trickled down my face and pooled in the palms of his hands.
“I stayed until he told me it was time to go.”
On July 12, 1933, the day after Eoin’s eighteenth birthday, Thomas lowered the little red rowboat from the rafters in his barn and packed a small suitcase with a box of gold coins, a change of clothes, and a few photographs. He thought he might need something that had belonged to me in 2001, something that would guide his travel, and slipped the diamond earrings I’d sold Mr. Kelly into his pocket; he’d bought them back the day after I pawned them. He had the empty urn that once held Eoin’s ashes, and he knew the verse I’d recited that day on the lough, the poem by Yeats that spoke of fairies and riding on the wind.
But Thomas was convinced the diamonds, the dust, and the fairy words made no difference whatsoever. When it was all said and done, he simply hitched a ride to 2001. The moment the boat was returned to the lough, it began to sail toward home, slipping through the ages, parting the waters, and calling the mist. Eoin had watched it disappear.
We left the boat on the shore, the paddle in the sand and the lough behind us. Thomas was wide-eyed but unafraid, his suitcase in his hand, his cap back on his head. I doubted much about Thomas would change, regardless of the decade he called home. For eleven years, two months, and twenty-six days, he had patiently waited. He’d worried that I would be gone, that he would have to find me in an unknown world and across an ocean. He expected to find a son or daughter half grown, if he found us at all. And what if time took him somewhere he didn’t want to go, and he lost everything? It was the legend of Niamh and Oisín all over again.
And still he came.
13 November 2001
Friday, 9 November 2001, was the day I arrived. Eleven years, two months, and twenty-six days were condensed to one hundred thirty-four days. Anne’s ten months in 1921–22 were reduced to ten days when she returned. I’ve tried to puzzle it out, but it’s like trying to wrap my mind around the creation of the universe. I spent ten minutes studying a child’s toy in Lyons department store yesterday—the store still exists! The expansion and contraction of the toy—Anne called it a Slinky—made me consider time in a whole new way. Maybe time is coiled into ever-widening (or tightening) circles, layered and wrapped around the next. I spread my arms as wide as I could, lengthening the coils of the Slinky, and then I pressed my hands together, flattening it between my palms, intrigued. Anne insisted on buying it for me.