Chapter Thirty-Four
The Irish countryside moves past in a green current, narrow roads twisting higher into the Wicklow Mountains.
They left noisy central Dublin early in the morning, drove through the suburbs and past the harbor and docks of Dún Loaghaire.
Faye remembers little of it. Oranges. Chocolates.
Children vomiting. A lifetime feigning this Irishness, donning it like a costume.
She can’t bring up O’Kane and risk sending everyone into another tizzy.
But he is on her mind. Corrupter, meddler, pot-stirrer.
His final breaths held no truth for her at all.
In a way, he’d won out, upending them all.
Faye checks the map, gives Maeve turning instructions.
They’re close now, and the roads narrow even more.
A tourist bus squeezes past, sending their little car into hedges trimmed within inches of the car door.
“I think our transport bus was in an accident,” Faye says, shaking her head.
“Yes! When we arrived at the barracks, the bus had a gash in its side!” She feels the jolt, the fear they will slide down a mountain and die. Death always so close.
“We’re here,” Maeve says, pointing to a utilitarian sign that reads “The Glencree Center for Peace and Reconciliation.”
They wind their way along the edge of a small cemetery, through granite block walls and open iron gates, past a stone church.
A hardened barracks looms. Time folds over on itself, and though Faye wears jeans and a sweater, she feels the scratchy wool of an ill-fitting dress.
Maeve parks the car, and Nola Wren clamors over the seat and out the passenger door with Faye.
How strange, Nola Wren’s hand in hers. The last time Faye was here, she was the child, her hand the one held by an adult.
They walk to the church, and Faye stares up, tries to conjure the people who took her from here.
They were kind, she knows that. Nola Wren tugs her hand.
“Hold on, honey.” Faye glances over her shoulder.
She knows there is a lush fern grove and an emerald creek down the embankment.
She half expects a passel of children to scurry over at the ringing of a bell. They are all around her.
Inside the church, Maeve gasps. “Wow.” She gestures to a vestibule where a life-size statue of a seated and distraught Mary cradles the body of her crucified son. Jesus is plastered in brightly colored squares of paper, Post-It notes with prayers and confessions from visitors.
“Oh. Okay,” Molly says, leaning in closer to read the requests. “Here’s a good one: ‘Please help Rosie to stop losing things.’” They each tilt their heads, read others out loud.
“Help John understand his sins and come back to me and the kids.”
“Forgive me, Jesus and Mary and Our Father in Heaven.”
Prayers for Maile and Tristan and Paula and Linda. Prayers from Heather and Grace and Kathleen and Aoife. A special request sticks an inch below a painted wound dripping with painted blood. “May my arthritis be cured and my health restored.”
“I wonder what’s in that one,” Maeve says, pointing to a piece of wadded-up blue paper tucked into the hand of Jesus.
“Extra private,” Molly says. “We probably don’t want to know.”
Nola Wren gives Molly a pink paper square with what appears to be a bunny drawn on it. “Put it on the man,” she says.
Molly bares her teeth and stretches out her arm carefully, as if mother or son might grab her sinning wrist. “Here good?”
Nola Wren tucks her chin to her chest and smiles. “Yes.”
Faye shakes her head. “If this was here, I sure don’t remember it. But, then again, when were Post-It notes invented?” She sighs. “I’m old.”
“You know what’s wild?” Molly asks. “Look. Notice anything? It’s mostly women.
You can tell by the handwriting. Women asking for help and prayers, women confessing, women sending love up to heaven, women asking for love here on earth.
It’s the women looking for peace, women asking for grace.
And there’s Mary, cradling her son, after men—supposedly of God, by the way—vilified him, persecuted him, betrayed him, and nailed him to a cross.
The women were there to clean up the mess. Literally. Like always.”
“I sometimes feel bad we didn’t raise you girls to be better Catholics.”
“Don’t worry, Mom. We’re not mad,” Maeve says.
All three of them think the same thought, that their own guilt is heavy enough.
“The truth is it all felt too small for me. Claustrophobic,” Faye says.
“Plenty of phobias in the Catholic church,” Maeve says.
“In all religions,” Molly adds.
Faye wanders toward the altar and the girls follow.
They take in the light streaming through stained glass, the muted way it makes the walnut pews shine.
“I remember sitting in church with my parents, Thomas and Jean, and reciting the profession of faith. I knew all the words, but one day when I was a teenager—this is before I even met your father—I really heard the words I was saying and realized I didn’t believe it at all.
From that moment on, I looked for a way out.
I’ve kept an image of a god that is so much larger than what these religions allow.
” She shrugs. “That helped me through a lot of hard times. I didn’t need to feel seen in the eyes of some god.
To me, the fact that I am so small and so inconsequential is proof enough that we’re not even close to understanding the mysteries.
I’d hate to think of a god capable of saving lives who doesn’t.
The one all those women are praying to for help.
” She glances over at Nola Wren, who is drawing more bunnies for Jesus.
Faye blinks away welling tears. “I’m so sorry I let you all down.
I didn’t know how else to be, who else to be. ”
“You don’t have to keep apologizing, Mom,” Maeve says. “All three of us have been eaten up by secrets long enough. That’s what this trip is about, right?”
“And I love that this place is about peace and reconciliation,” Molly adds.
Faye wipes her eyes. “Thank you both. This would be impossible without you. I say we get out of here and find the office. The last thing we need is for one of us to burst into flames.” She stares at the altar, taps her lips absentmindedly. “I think I might have bitten a priest in here.”
In an office tucked away at the end of a long corridor, a balding man in a gray cardigan greets them.
Faye steps forward. She rehearsed with the girls.
Give the least amount of information possible.
If you start with something that smells fishy, alarm bells will sound, and what should be a simple task will become too complicated.
You do not want to become a headline in The Irish Times.
She tells the man she was childhood friends with a girl who was fostered near Kilcrohane.
“Elisabeth Sonntag. I’m hoping you might help me find her. ”
The man spins around to a filing cabinet and removes a list from a manila folder.
“It’s taken time to locate the children, you see.
Some remained here in Ireland, and others, of course, returned to their families.
Tell me again the girl’s name.” He puts on reading glasses and thumbs through pages of names.
“We’ve put them in a spreadsheet, and then Janet comes in on Tuesdays to make updates and check the mail and such. Quite the undertaking.”
Faye nods. She wants to rip the document out of his hands, search it for herself.
“I’m not finding it here,” he says, thick fingers running two at a time down the pages.
“Ah, hang on now. Let me look at something else.” He spins and takes out another folder.
In it is a single piece of paper. He removes his glasses and sits back in the office chair.
“Well yes, there it is, I’m afraid. Your friend has sadly passed.
Seems she never did make it back to Germany.
Listed here that the parish in Kilcrohane buried her in 1947. Shame that. And so young.”
Faye can see the man’s mouth moving, his gestures, the sympathetic tilt of his head, but the room has gone quiet except for the reverb of the bell that has tolled.
Elisabeth is dead. Elisabeth is dead. “Bit,” she murmurs, recollecting her sister’s nickname.
“I called her Bit.” The man behind the desk apologizes as Faye retreats.
Maeve thanks the man as Molly sweeps up Nola Wren.
The three of them follow Faye into the hall.
She is gone. She’s not on the wide lawn or at the car either.
“You check the church and cemetery. I’ll follow that path she pointed out.
Does that make sense?” Maeve asks, though nothing makes sense anymore.
The cemetery is empty. In the church, a man in black pants and a black shirt slips hymnals into a pew.
Molly stares at Post-It Note Jesus, tries to imagine what her life would have looked like without her own sister.
It was Maeve who went on her magic carpet journeys, Maeve who taught her how to jump rope, Maeve who played 45s on the record player on stormy afternoons.
And after the night Conor O’Kane died, for a while, she’d even let Molly tag along with her and her friends.
And Molly had kept hoping that, at any minute, Maeve would whisper in her ear or pull her aside and tell her she saw the ghost, too—accusing, taunting, laughing, hovering.
She had been so angry when Maeve went off and married Sam, when she left her behind to deal with the dead on her own.
Nola Wren taps her leg, and Molly looks down.
Without Maeve . . . Molly shudders, remembering putting the baby in her sister’s arms. “Your Molly needs a hug,” she says, and the little girl wraps around her.
Forgiveness is breathtaking, she thinks, whether it’s requested or granted. “How about we each make one more?”
Prayer or wish? Which one, she isn’t certain, though she doubts there’s a big difference. Nola Wren draws a bunny and Molly, after careful thought, writes her note.
“Grant us peace.”
Maeve finds Faye sitting beneath a stone bridge in a green gully. Next to her is a mossy grotto with a statue of Mary surrounded by petitions and photos and relics left for loved ones. “Mom?”
Faye turns to her but doesn’t respond.
“Are you okay?” Her words are muffled by rock and river.
“The boys told scary stories down here about leprechauns stealing children and making them live under rocks. I was afraid all the time. Elisabeth tried to protect me. She could always see the bright side of things, and that felt so futile to me. So many bad things happened. It seemed impossible that anything good ever would again.” Faye puts her hands behind her ears, rubs them down her neck.
Her fingers are cold as death. “No matter what the weather was, it was cool down here. It feels like a grave now.”
Maeve sits beside her. “It’s beautiful.”
“I could lie down right here and die, and by the end of the day I’d be turned to stone and covered with ferns and toadstools.”
“I’m sorry, Mom. I know it’s not the news you wanted.”
“I waited too long,” Faye says, and the tears fall.
She thinks about Elisabeth, but she thinks about Conor O’Kane, too, and the night he died.
How he fought for breath, his lungs surely collapsed, how his cold eyes pleaded for help or comfort.
If he knew his life was ending, maybe all he wanted from her was kindness so he would not be alone.
She gave him nothing. She wanted him gone and didn’t give enough thought to how his dying might impact her daughters over the long run.
She is furious too. Elisabeth died in Ireland.
Why couldn’t he have simply told her the truth? Why be cagey about it?
Maeve leans in, shoulder to shoulder. “It was so long ago. What could you have done?”
“I could have fought for her. She wanted to stay together. I could have fought for that.”
“Maybe you were fighting to survive. We do that alone too often.”
Faye stands, examines the photographs in plastic bags, the crucifixes and trinkets. “I wish I had something to leave. But all I have is the photograph. I won’t leave that.”
“You both left so much of yourselves here already. Isn’t that enough?”