Chapter Thirty-Six
Jem warned Maeve to watch for chickens and dogs and sheep, especially after they turn from the highway onto the two-track dirt road. Sure enough, as they approach the cottage, a tabby cat darts from a clutch of bluebells. Maeve slams on the brakes.
“Can you imagine if I killed one of their animals?”
“Just what we need, considering,” Molly replies. It has taken her the bulk of the ride to calm down, to agree there will be time to bring up Conor O’Kane, but that the time is not now. “How you doing, Mom?”
Faye can hardly catch her breath. “Okay,” she replies uncertainly. What would she have done if Conor had told her the truth? Faye briefly loses sight of the other car and fears that her sister might be the one to leave this time.
When Maeve rounds the last bend, Jem is out of the car waving his mitt hands like he’s bringing in a plane.
He is tall and broad with a head full of glowing hair and a belly ribbed like a pony keg.
A spotted farm dog runs circles around him then jumps on Sela.
Faye feels it again, that sense that she is not alive or, at the very least, that she is not awake.
She tingles at the sight of her sister, this version of herself who became a true Irish woman. Her tongue goes numb.
“What a pleasure to have you here!” Jem says as they emerge from the car, faces red and puffed with emotion.
A gray-and-white cat slinks out of the vine-cloaked shed and lumbers past their feet and around the corner.
Nola Wren chases after it. “Go in, get settled. I can look after the little one. Nola Wren, right?”
Molly nods.
“Lovely name, lovely child.”
Jem ambles away, a lightness about him despite his size.
“You think she’ll listen to him?” Maeve asks.
Myrtle and hydrangeas and prickly heath bloom in a bobbled skirt around a peach-colored cottage tucked neatly in a dell between rolling hills.
Gray stone faeries peek out from beneath massive rhubarb leaves, mischief-makers playing freeze tag.
Nola Wren’s laughter reaches around the corner, taps Molly playfully. “Yes. I think she will.”
There is pot roast for dinner, carrots and potatoes, and the conversation turns from Jem’s love of cooking to Faye and her life in Maine with William.
“You never told him the truth?” Sela asks. There is judgment in the way she says it, and Faye’s hackles go up.
“I believed I was protecting him. And Thomas and Jean. They were my parents, and I’d grown to love .
. .” Even now, Faye finds it hard to say she’d loved Jean.
But Thomas. In that moment she wishes he was sitting next to her at this table.
He could make them all understand. “Wouldn’t you agree that some secrets are kept to protect the people you love?
I don’t think I should be judged for that.
You lived your own sort of lie here, didn’t you? ”
Sela smiles tightly, forks a carrot into her mouth. “It’s not judgment. And yes, we kept the truth about that girl in the grave hidden. I have no guilt about it.”
Under the table Molly gives Maeve an I-can’t-believe-this kick, and Maeve responds with a quick I-know tap on Molly’s thigh.
Wine flows, and Molly is quick to refill.
Something about the conversation, the way her mother glosses over the most difficult parts of their lives, with still no mention of Conor O’Kane dying in their foyer.
She swills more wine, shakes her head as events tick by, stories casually laced with facts about Germany and war that Molly and Maeve have only recently learned, things kept from their father.
Maeve shoots her a warning glance as if she can see that Molly’s fuse has been lit.
It’s the way Faye sugarcoats it that galls Molly.
“Did I tell you Maeve has two kids, Dylan and Opal?” Faye asks, clearly eager to change the subject.
That she completely skips over the worst of the years unglues Molly. Brave with wine, she clinks her glass with a fork. “Hang on, Mom,” she says. “Before we go into how perfect Dylan and Opal are and what a great mother Maeve is—maybe we should tell your new family about our other secret.”
“Pix!” Maeve hisses.
“Oh, don’t worry. I’m not talking about the fact that you’re gay and all of that.” Molly flicks her wrist and takes a quick sip of wine.
Maeve scoffs in disbelief, sits back in her chair.
“Stop it, Molly,” Faye says, adding apologies to the table.
“No, you stop. Look. I like you both. And your house? This place? Wow. It’s a faery tale.
So magical. And look at Nola Wren. She’s in there asleep on the floor next to a cat!
Do you have any idea how hard it is to get her to sleep?
She loves it here. But it’s like everyone is under a spell.
” Molly breathes through her mouth, hot as a dragon. She can’t stop the eruption.
“Pix,” Maeve warns. “Stop being an asshole.” She grimaces a fake smile for the table.
Molly’s eyes roll like flicked marbles. “First. Stop calling me Pix. I hate it. I’m not a pixie, and I haven’t been since—well . . .” She sits up proper, shakes off years of pretending. She tastes guilt in her mouth as the words form there.
“I’m sorry,” Faye says, knowing that the time is now.
“Jem. Mr. O’Kane,” Molly says emphatically, the wine speaking volumes.
“Your brother Conor was, well, something of a friend to my parents. But I don’t think he was a very nice man.
I didn’t know him because I was little the night he died.
” She was wearing a red nightgown, with white rickrack around the cuffs and collar.
She touches her wrist where the elastic dug in.
“He came into our house and ran up the stairs and yelled at Maeve and my mom. And what I did, Mr. O’Kane .
. .” Molly pulls her lips in and out of her mouth, wetting them to keep them from gluing shut.
“What I did, was I got between him and Maeve, and I shoved him. As hard as I could.” Molly gulps for air, and Faye is by her side, kneeling, telling her to breathe, rubbing her arm, but she is back there watching as he flies through the air, the bottom of his boots pointing at her, that look on his face.
They are out of her, the words she was told to never speak.
Molly sucks in air through her nose, inflates herself like a balloon, floats above the table.
“I killed your brother. Sir.” Trembling, she splashes wine into her glass then stands with a flourish.
“I need air. You all, talk among yourselves.”
Outside, a full moon turns the garden blue.
Molly sinks onto an iron bench that faces it perfectly.
She pushes up the sleeves of her sweater, admires the way her skin looks pasted in moon dust, more film than flesh.
Leo said she was a goddess in the moonlight the night they broke into the garden pool.
Some goddess you are, Molly Sullivan. Vengeful fury, more like it. She hears footsteps on the pebble path.
“May I?” Sela asks.
Rage shoots off Molly like heat vapors. Still, she makes room.
Sela sucks air in through her nose, holds it, lets it out loudly.
“You know,” she says. “It’s in our nature to put our best foot forward.
We do it in job interviews, when we go on dates, when we make new friends.
We’re so certain other people are judging us.
Especially women. We’re the worst.” She pauses, like she’s taking Molly’s temperature, then tilts her head at the cottage.
“I suppose Jem’s telling them the story now about Con and what happened.
You were right. He wasn’t a nice person.
Even when he was younger. He was a shit.
The kind of kid who dropped boulders on frogs and pulled wings off butterflies. You know the type?”
“Yes, but that doesn’t mean he needed to be dead.”
“Molly, think about it. You were a very little girl. And you pushed a very grown man. He must have been plenty drunk if a tiny thing like you pushed him over. You probably could have blown on him, and he would have fallen. He’d been in a bad way for a long time. Trust me.
“He and his brother Denis ran around with a rough crowd. Con tried to rope Jem into their business—hijacking trucks—but Jem would have none of it. Denis was a bit slow. When we first came to live here, your mom thought Denis was the scary one, but he was a big lug, a bit short tempered like Conor, sure, but mostly just gullible. When the two of them got arrested, Conor put it all on Denis, and he went to jail. Got in a fistfight in there and took a bad blow to the head. Died in the cell. Theresa—that was their mother—she threw Conor out over it. Told him she never wanted to lay eyes on him again and never did. We heard he’d died in America.
A letter came from some woman that said he fell down a flight of stairs.
We never doubted he’d come to a bad end.
You can’t live the way he did—careless mouth, reckless behavior—and expect to die of old age.
Con drew the short string a long time back.
I know this doesn’t take away your memory of what happened.
But I hope it might give you some peace.
What a terrible thing to go through, and at such a tender age. ”
“I see him sometimes.”
“I bet you do.”
“Falling. Sometimes he doesn’t make it to the ground. Other times he crashes through.”
The night is quiet in the pause, save for a sawing band of crickets.
Sela sighs. “When your mom was taken away, I wasn’t much older than you were when Con died.
Your mom never talked much. And I talked enough for both of us, even before we came to Ireland.
It might be in her nature not to dwell on hard things.
Maybe you’re a little like me. I play things over and over in my head, burn it in.