Chapter Thirty-Seven
Faye and Sela steal away from the cottage after breakfast, leaving Maeve and Molly behind with Jem to play with Nola Wren in the gardens and greenhouses and flower beds and to read and nap under the apple tree.
The morning mist in the valley lifts by the time Faye and Sela reach the main road on the way to the village and bay where they were last together as sisters.
On the drive, Sela prattles on about her and Jem, their nieces and nephews—children of older O’Kane brothers Faye never even knew existed—off in Dublin and London.
About Jem’s brother Tim who died from pancreatic cancer—“an awful death,” Sela reports—and how his widow Jennie lives with their daughter in Bantry.
She talks about her love of American films, all kinds “except horror movies.” She steers the car along narrow roads, her back and neck straight, and tells Faye she likes comedies and romances, action movies, dramas, adventures.
She likes classics, too, especially the ones with that Jimmy Stewart, though she buys him better as a reporter than a cowboy.
She loves movies set in the American west, the old south, in Los Angeles and New York City.
She says she thinks she might be in love with Brad Pitt—though he’s no Robert Redford—and wishes someone would remake Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with him as Sundance.
“He needs a buddy, though. Someone to be Butch.” She tells Faye she imagined Fiadh Beatty the American woman who survives disasters, who stands up to bullies, fights aliens, who drives cars fast and drinks martinis dry.
“It was better for me to think of you that way.” In Sela’s America, Fiadh wore sky-high heels and flowy dresses, overcame sadness and brutality, and got her man.
“I went to the movies to see you,” Sela says, smiling.
This back and forth—family history and stories, lives lived and losses suffered, the pregnancies Sela and Jem attempted and lost—is at once comforting and exhausting to Faye.
“You’re lucky to have children and grandchildren of your own,” Sela offers.
In the quiet between ideas of what to talk about next, Faye wonders how she and Sela will ever be able to make up time.
After Molly dropped her bombshell about Conor O’Kane, she and Sela and Jem had talked and talked about it, so much that Faye’s throat hurt and her head pounded.
Still. To hear Sela talk was to relive her own life in comparison.
She did not share every event with Sela but let herself put them in parallel.
When you lived in Dublin while Jem was in college, I worked for Aldo in the flower shop.
When you were trying to have a baby, I lost one.
The year you went to London was the year Molly was born.
Besides the day that Conor O’Kane arrived at her wedding, their lives never intersected. Yet they were always connected.
Sela veers off onto a narrow road, down an even more rutted lane that leads to the bay. “This is where we walked when Hannie and Hugh first brought us home. That farmhouse is where Hugh left the car. The Dalys still live here.”
Faye shakes her head. None of it is familiar to her anymore.
Sela dodges puddles deep from the morning’s rain. Sun dapples the bay, smooth and clear like it was that day three sneaky girls rowed out for a picnic. Faye touches her hip.
Houses pop up along the roadside, some new and fine, others little more than ruins. Beyond where the road ends is a cluster of vined chimneys, walls barely standing, thatched roofs long collapsed.
Sela turns off the car. “There they are, what’s left of them. Francis sold the O’Kane land years ago and lives in town now. Walks to the pub every day and sits with Brian, Theresa’s brother’s youngest son. He’s the barkeep you saw.”
The cottages seem so small, so close together.
The Beattys’ cottage, Faye’s parents’ home with Fiadh, is nothing but a single wall and crumbled chimney.
She and Sela stand in the doorway of what had been Hannie and Hugh’s house.
The interior is collapsed, the blue sky shining through a hole where two girls once slept.
Faye remembers backing down a ladder that is gone now.
There was no way back to you once I went down.
“It doesn’t seem possible that real people ever lived here. ”
“We did. You and I,” Sela says, pointing. “Right up there by that cloud.”
They squeeze past a cattle gate, trespass on the abandoned property.
Faye stands on a low rock wall. “Good God, this is beautiful, isn’t it?
” Meandering lines of stone and brush divide the fields into paddocks.
Her sister’s voice is in her ear. Das ist ein grünes Land.
No harm was supposed to befall them here in this green place.
She had promised. Faye steps down, and the ground gives, bogged and mossy. “Was it always like this?”
“Yes, I suppose it was,” Sela says. “Come on. Let’s go down to the water.”
They follow the green footpath between ivy vines and blackberry brambles.
The buzzing air is lush with grass and manure and heather, bumblebees big enough for a faery harness.
Faye follows Sela like a shadow. She has borrowed a pair of rubber boots so they are twins in this field, both in cream sweaters and blue denim, their hair in matched silvering bobs, though Sela wears a canvas gardening hat over hers.
She stops at the top of a rise. “There’s Carbery,” she says, pointing to the island in the bay.
“The accident happened about there. We’d have made it back if it was a day like today. ”
Faye tries to imagine three little girls rowing out on their own. Too vast, too far, too deep. “We had no business trying to take that boat across.”
“We sure had fun, though.”
“How can you say that? I almost drowned. Fiadh did. And then . . . someone should have stopped us,” Faye says.
“Maybe,” Sela says. “Over here.” She leads Faye to the precipice, which overlooks a rock-lined green pool, clear as glass fishing floats. “We used to come here to swim when I was growing up. After.”
After. Yes. “I never liked swimming. Or boating. After,” Faye says.
“Jean was nervous about water. Understandably. This reminds me of Maine, these rock formations, how craggy they are. Imagine Ireland floating across the Atlantic to Maine and docking like puzzle pieces. Then there wouldn’t be this wild and green sea between us.
We could walk to each other.” She pauses.
“I never imagined you were still here. Or maybe I did. I didn’t know where you were. ”
“Somewhere along the line, I lost the fact that you went to Maine. I only remembered America. Like I said, it was fun to think of you there.”
Faye prickles at the word. “Fun. You keep saying it. Was your childhood fun?”
“Was yours?”
“Are you angry with me?” Faye asks.
“You’re the one who seems angry,” Sela says.
“And to answer your question, yes, my childhood was fun, eventually. This was my home.” She spreads her arms open to the countryside and sea.
“I tried to be two people for the longest time—the self I was inside, a girl who was Elisabeth, and also you, the sister I swore to protect, this girl everyone called Gisela, who I thought I had failed. We got separated, and I thought it was my fault. Maybe it was when Hannie told me she knew about Mutti and that I could stay here with her and Hugh. You kept telling me Mutti was dead. I didn’t want to hear it.
I thought if we believed, we could go home eventually—”
“But we didn’t have a home.”
“I know that, Faye! But I was foolish. Then you were gone, and the sun came up anyway. Every single day! It dawned on me that no one here expected anything of me. Hannie and Hugh were kind and good, but I didn’t owe them anything.”
“How liberating for you,” Faye says.
“You are mad!”
Faye breathes in this place, tries to bring the memory back.
Fish smells, seaweed and algae on the shore.
She imagines it like she is watching it happen.
She hits the gunwale, tumbles under water, churning in her own bubbles.
She surfaces, choking. Elisabeth is on the boat, but it is Fiadh who jumps in, Fiadh who saves her.
A seahorse. Not her sister. She is pulled onto a boat deck, taken ashore.
The coughing. Her lungs ache. A crowd has gathered.
“I’m not mad. But I think I was. I told William the story of the accident as if I was Fiadh.
I told him about foolish German girls and how careless Fiadh was standing up like that.
Do you remember that you coughed like you’d fallen overboard too?
I thought I was going to drown, and you pretended you almost did.
You didn’t save me. You couldn’t save me. Fiadh did. In so many ways.”
“Do you want me to thank you for being the one the Beattys took? Is that it?” Sela’s face collapses. “Are you trying to punish me? I did everything I could.”
They are the same height, the same build.
Faye suspects they even smell the same. But they are not the same person.
They never were. “I know you did,” she whispers.
“And so did I.” Faye wonders how she will ever stop crying.
“I have to tell you something.” She looks back at the remains of the cottages, crumbled by time and neglect.
“It wasn’t only Jean and Hannie who cooked up the plan.
I think I was the one who put the idea of a switch into their heads in the first place.
And then, when you went to sleep, I snuck out, and I told them to take me instead of you.
That’s why your name is on the death certificate. They planned to take you.”
Sela pushes away, her face childlike with shock. “What?”