Chapter Thirty-Eight
Maine, America
In Maine, America, the mornings are chilly, but the days still warm up enough to shed jackets by afternoon.
The leaves change from green to rust and crimson and gold.
The house on the cove sits empty for the time being, cleared out and buttoned up for Molly and Nola Wren in case they decide to come back.
Over the summer, Sam remarried, and Maeve and Wendy and the kids moved in with Faye.
Settled now, they will spend the winter months modernizing the barn and making plans for goats and chickens and a farm stand to sell cut flowers and pottery and jam and fresh produce.
Faye will sort through William’s heaps of antiques, decide what they can sell and what to keep for displays.
She will hand-letter and paint a rainbow-shaped sign that will read, Windy May Farm.
She feeds on the energy of ideas and feels young and useful.
At night, she falls asleep easily and dreams dreams without ghosts.
Faye discovered Jean’s lost journal when she and Maeve emptied the bookshelves of the cove house.
It is Jean’s story of coming to America, bent with grief and regret.
Jean paints a clear picture of how Hannie planned to keep Elisabeth and Gisela in Ireland all along.
The nuns knew they had little to go back to in Germany and had told Hannie as much.
Hannie thought of the girls as her own and loved them both.
But Hannie loved Jean more and for longer and “selflessly” (Jean’s word) gave away something that didn’t belong to her. She gave away a person as if she could.
In her telling, Jean realized too late that what they’d done was not only a crime but a sin, a whip she beat herself with every day, a sin that prevented her from loving a child who could never replace her own.
At least the girl won’t miss me when I’m dead, she wrote, though she adds that she hadn’t banked on Thomas loving the changeling.
It’s true he’s the bigger of the two of us.
There is a lofty holiness in her writing as if she believes this great sacrifice—denying Faye love so that she won’t experience grief—not only honors Fiadh’s memory but will assure Jean a spot in heaven.
And there, too, is Conor O’Kane, showing up in the journal on Faye’s wedding day as in real life.
Faye winces seeing his name, afraid he told Jean the truth about Elisabeth and that she’d kept it from Faye.
Or worse, that Thomas had found the journal and had done the same.
But there is no mention of Sela and Jem.
Conor O’Kane, she wrote, was like her own boys, a proxy for all that she’d lost to God or the sea or to bad luck.
With him, she could talk about Fiadh, about Ireland, about a life neither of them lived.
The two of them come alive in the pages, smoking and smiling and scheming.
Jean’s last entry: It must be I am dead now, otherwise why read this account? I beg you pray for me and my sinner’s soul that I be forgiven. I want to reach Heaven and see my children. This is my wish and my dream and my last hope spread here in ink.
Though she doesn’t believe, Faye sends up prayers for Jean and for Thomas, prayers that they have found each other again.
He loved her, after all. She adds one for Hannie and Hugh, another for her friend Fiadh, none for the old priest who looked the other way, who should have known better than to do this to children.
Faye made photocopies of relevant pages and mailed them off to Sela.
It is our story, Faye wrote. Yours and mine.
On one crisp spring morning, Maeve and Wendy welcome three baby goats to the farm.
Molly and Nola Wren board an airplane that flies over Fastnet Rock, the last land Faye glimpsed when she left Ireland.
When their plane arrives in Boston, America, America the Beautiful, Leo will be waiting at the gate.
And on that same day, Faye receives a letter from Sela.
“In some ways, we all went to our graves when Fiadh did. Jem and I thought it only right.” With the letter is a photograph of a rough standing stone next to Fiadh’s grave.
Three names are chiseled around a triskelion spiral, no spaces between the letters, no beginning and no end.
Faye traces the whirling maze onto the soft veins of her wrist like a tattoo, three circles connecting clockwise and counterclockwise, meeting and parting like contra dancers.
Quietly, she casts the names like a silver net.
Fiadh. Gisela. Elisabeth.
They were children once, arms linked, weaving the ring, cracking the whip, laughing wildly and bravely together in the gray sedge and sea spray and fading light.