Ashes of Fiery Weather (39 page)

“She won't even remember them. A month is nothing.”

“Not to the McKennas.”

“Who cares? We'll take our baby back, they'll adopt somebody else's and decide it was meant to be.”

“It's done.”

“It isn't.” Maggie took his hand. “There's a reason the law gives birth mothers time to change their minds. We've only got two weeks left. We have to do it now.”

“The night she was born, Brian told me to stake my claim. He said you can't give your daughter away. He said we could name her Grace Elizabeth, after Mom. I told him no.”

“I like Grace. But her middle name is from my family.” Maggie walked over to the statue of the fireman holding the child and touched the name engraved on the monument. Patrick Devlin, her great-great-grandfather.

“Grace Devlin Grady. That's pretty,” Maggie said. “But then I thought it should be my grandmother's maiden name. So it's Grace Keegan Grady.”

“That's not her name.”

“That's what I put on her birth certificate.”

“Maggie, what are you talking about? The McKennas are the ones who named her.”

In the hospital, the day after the baby was born, the McKennas arrived to take her, sharing constant, uncertain glances. Maggie asked for the baby's name. They exchanged a quick look of utter relief and then, as Charlie swallowed again and again, trying to speak, Laurel answered casually, “We haven't decided yet, believe it or not. We were afraid we'd jinx ourselves.”

Maggie did not believe it.

She explained to Danny that adoptees have two birth certificates. The original one has the birth parents' names on it, and it gets sealed, locked away in some building in lower Manhattan. The adopted person is never allowed to see it, ever—at least in New York that's the law. The other one is the amended birth certificate, and that has the adoptive parents on it and whatever name they pick.

As the baby's mother, Maggie got to fill out the birth certificate. She could have simply put down “Baby Girl Grady,” since it was never going to be used, but she didn't. She put “Grace Keegan Grady” on it.

“So she's all set. She has a name and it's legal because there hasn't been any adoption.”

“Maggie, no. That's not her name. That'll never be her name. Please stop it.”

“If she were your son and not your daughter, would you go after her?” Maggie asked.

She expected him to get mad, but Danny only hunched his shoulders.

“No. The second I saw her, I forgot about a boy,” he said. “But the whole time you were pregnant, yeah, I was picturing me and Bri in some kind of bachelor pad with a little boy running around. There we are, just the guys. And then, there she was, and all I could think was how would I raise a girl? How could I raise any kid? I can't support her. I can't give her anything. It's just fucked up.”

It never occurred to Maggie that Danny might refuse. She'd assumed he was waiting for her to call it, like shooting off a starting pistol.

“We have a problem, Danny,” Maggie said. “The problem is that I had a baby. This is a very big problem.”

“Let her go.”

“It's a bad thing to give away your baby. I know this, because I did it.”

“I did it too, and I don't think it's wrong. Before she was born, I wasn't sure, but now I am. She deserves better than you and me. Everything you were saying the whole time is right.”

“I'm not always right.”

“You are, Mag. Being right is your thing.”

“Fine. Then I'm right about this.”

“You're upset, that's all. My sister-in-law told me that she hoped your mother was keeping an eye on you for postpartum depression.”

“My mother! Please. My mother, who didn't once tell me that I could bring the baby home if I wanted to.”

“Because we told everybody that we were giving her up at the same time we told them you were pregnant. Case closed.”

“Mom asked if I was sure, but she didn't once say I could live with her if I wasn't.”

“She's not a mind reader, Mag,” Danny said.

“She was afraid I would say yes.”

Danny shoved his hands in his pockets. “Maybe.”

“Your mother wouldn't have been afraid to ask.”

“Yeah.” Danny stared off into the trees. “I think about that all the time. She wouldn't have let us do it.”

Before the baby was born, if he'd said such a thing, Maggie would have been furious. Yet she knew there was truth to it. Grace would have supported whatever decision they made, but she would have offered other solutions. She guessed that Grace would have volunteered to watch the baby while she and Danny attended college and worked whatever jobs they could get around their class schedules.

“Mom wasn't a widow, working and raising kids by herself,” Danny said. “We're not being fair.”

“I know,” Maggie said, and she meant it.

But Grace was dead; her own mother could have asked.

Maggie unzipped her jacket and, as much as it hurt, squeezed her right breast, just hard enough to dampen the front of her shirt.

“Maggie, Jesus Christ.” Danny snatched her hand away and yanked her jacket shut.

“I only did it at first because it hurt so bad I thought if I pumped a little bit, just to relieve some of the pressure . . . but then I started thinking. And then I kept going so I'd be ready for her, when she comes back.”

Danny glanced down at her father's grave, as though hoping Sean O'Reilly might be able to help.

“We'll just go get her,” Maggie said. “My grandmother's got the whole brownstone to herself. I think we can bring her there.”

There were tears in Danny's eyes. “We'll see her again.”

Maggie wrapped her arms around herself. She wanted the baby back because she couldn't stop thinking of that small face, and how her eyes opened suddenly and briefly before shutting tight again, the little moving mouth, the tiny fingers curled around her own index finger.

Surely it was the same for Danny, but he was willing to live around the chasm of her absence, hard as it was, for the baby's sake. She, Maggie, only wanted the longing to stop. Even without a daughter to parent, he was the better parent.

“What if she doesn't come looking for us?”

“She will,” Danny said.

“And if she never does?”

Danny exhaled again. “Then we miss her! We miss her for the rest of our stupid fucking lives!”

“Here's the thing. This is going to sound crazy, but I'm not crazy.” Maggie stepped closer to him. “I knew I'd have the baby, and she'd be gone. But it's like I thought I was giving her to my father, not some couple from Long Island. But it turns out I gave my baby to some couple from Long Island.”

Danny glanced around the cemetery. But there was no one to help him. Maggie looked down at her father's name.

“I don't know what you mean.”

“I don't mean anything.” She didn't know how else to explain.

Her father, who had been alone so long, was still alone because she had given birth not to an imaginary child but to a living daughter, who, like the rest of the family, was beyond his reach.

September 14, 2001

The gathering in the garden is just beginning as Maggie arrives. The service has been timed for shortly before twilight, and though it's open to the public, the garden is too small to accommodate all who have come. The crowd numbers far more than the Kilmaren community and the townspeople from Ivehusheen.

Ireland has declared Friday, September 14, a national day of mourning. The Irish government shut down its offices, and schools closed for the day. In Dublin, people waited for hours in front of the American embassy to sign a book of condolence that would be sent to New York and Washington. The Dublin Fire Brigade visited the embassy in a show of solidarity with the FDNY.

When Maggie tells the story of September 12, how she got out of bed and turned the television on, she says she stared at it in disbelief. But she leaves it at that, because the truth sounds like something a novice screenwriter would imagine for the daughter of a fireman who has grown up knowing that the Worst Day in the history of the FDNY was in 1966, at the 23rd Street Fire. Twelve men were killed. The Worst Day.

She was standing well beyond the border of the carpet as the anchorman gave the number of New York City police officers and Port Authority officers unaccounted for, but Maggie barely listened. She was waiting.

“—and as many as three hundred firefighters are dead or missing.”

Maggie dropped as if she'd been hit in the back of the knees with a baseball bat.

Since the afternoon of the twelfth, Maggie has been at her grandparents' house in Ballyineen, where she went to be with them while waiting for flights to the United States to resume. Cathal, her mother's brother, flew over from England, and Maggie was grateful the job of trying to comfort the Mulryans was not left to her. She has barely visited them during her time in Ireland, impatient with their shyness around her, too immersed in her own life to try to remedy it. Later, she'd always told herself. Later she'd plan a long visit.

The only phone calls she answered were from her family. It was nearly three p.m. on the fourteenth before she sat on the narrow bed that had once been her mother's and listened to her voicemails. Message after message from friends and even students, telling her how sorry they were and letting her know about the commemoration in the garden.

Go, her uncle told her. See your friends. There's nothing you can do here.

There is a crowd gathered outside the garden wall, huddled in small groups. Many are holding candles. Without hesitating, Maggie heads for the open garden gate. People glance at her and then step aside to let her pass. Whispers rise and fall her in her wake. She remembers well the privilege of loss. It is easy to assume again.

The group of traditional musicians who play at Derrane's are assembled at the far end of the garden. Maggie keeps walking until she is near the front. There are no seats except for the performers. This event was put together hastily.

She deliberately stands off to the side, and it is understood that she wants to be left alone. She sees Rory McAlary with his wife and sons. Because he is her boss, more or less, Maggie had emailed him to let him know that she was going home as soon as she could get a flight. She could not say for sure when she would be back.

Maggie nods and Rory nods back. His wife has a hand on each boy's shoulder, and that's when Maggie realizes that the wife knows. She looks away, too tired to be ashamed, or possibly not ashamed.

The musicians, the regulars from the Derrane's
seisiúns
—the bodhran player, the uillean piper, a tin-whistle player—are seated in a semicircle in front of a cluster of moonflower vines. Without prelude, they begin to play. Cillian is on the fiddle.

Cillian says the titles of the tunes in a low voice in Irish and English before they begin each one. They are playing traditional Irish songs only, with Irish language lyrics, as if to please not the dead in the city across the sea, but the dead whose bones lay beneath them.

“Dóchas Linn Naomh Pádraig.”

“Caoineadh Cú Chulainn.”

“Caoineadh na dTrí Mhuire.”

As Cillian says the last one, a girl moves forward from the crowd and stands to his left. He nods. The musicians relax above their instruments. She begins to sing
sean-nós.
Literally, old mouth. Unaccompanied.

Maggie knows what the title of this song means, “Lament of the Three Marys,” but she doesn't know the lyrics in Irish or English, so she cannot follow the path of the song, only listen, and it is beautiful to hear, the way the garden is beautiful to see.

She is afraid to turn around, afraid she will see that the famine dead have come to stand and listen among the living.

Maggie isn't sleeping when he comes to her apartment at midnight. She lets him in and leads him into the living room. They kiss once, then again.

Maggie lifts her shirt, just enough to show her stomach.

Cillian shakes his head. He doesn't understand.

“Nothing,” she says.

It is possible to die in a fire and it is possible to have a baby without being marked. She is like her father in his coffin. She pulls her shirt down.

The first night of the wake, as they went into the room, her mother told her and Aidan not to be scared. He looked like he was sleeping. But her father slept on his stomach, often with a pillow over his head, a firehouse habit from trying to block out the sound of the other men's snoring. In the coffin he lay on his back, in uniform. There were rosary beads entwined in his hands. A firefighter stood at either end of the casket, staring fixedly ahead, an honor guard. The men switched every hour, the whole two days and nights of the wake. There was a kneeler in front of the coffin, and she and Aidan sank in perfect unity. They landed together and their shoulders bumped. Aidan tried to get up right away, but she pulled him back down because she was trying to be proper and say the Hail Mary but the words kept breaking apart in her throat.

Maggie does not call Daniel James John Grady on their daughter's birthday anymore. They have nothing to say to each other. This past August 27, and the one before it, she hiked up Slievekeeran and spent the afternoon wandering the deserted famine village on the side of the mountain. For the first few years after, Maggie was grateful. She could undress for a man without having to explain. But for a long time now she has wished for a C-section scar or stretch marks. Something to see in the mirror. Something to touch.

“The picture in your office?” Cillian says.

Maggie explains that it
is
her sister, but the question is the reason the photo is there. She likes to hear it. Each time she's asked, she comes close to saying yes, just so she can. Is that your daughter?