Ashes of Fiery Weather (52 page)

Katie had laughed. Nobody else's mother talked like hers.

“She's determined,” Rose said. “And sort of dating the museum's president, not that she'll admit it.”

“Sort of?” Katie said.

“The president of this nonprofit organization.” Rose waved a hand. “It's all-volunteer, so they're not violating any code of conduct. It's pretty funny. She's been in this country most of her life but she's still Irish enough to pretend nothing's going on,” Rose said. “Stephen is a widower. He and his wife lost their sons on 9/11, and then Mrs. Crowley died a couple of years later.”

“They were firemen?” Katie asked.

“Yes. And Stephen was. At his wife's funeral, a lot of people said she died of a broken heart. Mom said that was ridiculous. Nobody dies of grief. The only people who say that are the people who've never grieved. Otherwise, they'd know it wasn't so easy. You don't get to just die.”

Katie nodded, uncertain if Rose was waiting for her to ask how her mother could know this. But then Rose continued, “Mom was planning a trip to Ireland for the Crowleys through her travel agency. They never made it. About a year after his wife's funeral, Stephen started going to Irish Dreams, to discuss taking a trip by himself or maybe with his daughter. It took my mom a while to catch on that he was visiting her. Then they both got involved with the museum, and there you go. We all wish she'd marry him.”

“She won't?” Katie asked.

“She says it's too late, but I think it's because she doesn't want to leave her sister alone. My aunt lives with her,” Rose said. “Her daughter died on September 11.”

Noelle Byrne,
Katie thought.

Katie fidgeted in the silence that might have simply been a respectful pause and not an invitation to share. Years ago, people used to do that whenever 9/11 was mentioned.

“Aunt Aoife came over from Ireland after, and she never went back, not to stay.”

“On September 11 . . .” Katie reached up to take her glasses off, then remembered she wasn't wearing them.

“Yes?” Rose asked.

“My friend's father was killed.”

Owney's face came quickly to mind. Nice save, she imagined him saying with a quirk of a smile.

“After 9/11, he and his mother kept moving,” Katie said. “They spent the off-season living in empty houses in the Hamptons. Sometimes his mom was caretaking, and other times she was renting. You can find decent rents in the off-season.”

“You too?” Rose asked.

“Me too?” Katie repeated.

“I mean, you're from the Hamptons?” Rose asked. She probably thought that Katie and Owney were neighbors or former high school classmates.

“We lived in Manhattan until I was nine. Then we were in Southampton for a couple years, and now my dad and stepmother are in Sag Harbor. I'm
not
from Long Island. I'm from the city.”

“Hey, sure, if you were nine before you left,” Rose said agreeably, holding up a conciliatory hand. “No Long Islanders here.”

Katie flushed. She hadn't meant to sound quite so vehement. But it was true that when she drove to the house in Sag Harbor, in spite of the road she was on, some part of her expected to arrive, not at the pretty white house with black shutters and generous front porch, but their building on the Upper West Side. She would take the elevator up to apartment 6R. The five rooms would be unchanged, with throw rugs in blue and green on the hardwood floors, black-and-white prints of city scenes on the walls, and the small terrace overlooking the courtyard that her mother always cited when her father argued they needed a house with a backyard.

“Just so you know, Quinn's very good at keeping secrets. She's got the blood of a pretty crooked cop running through her veins.”

Quinn was not, Rose surely meant, at this very moment telling every O'Reilly at her grandmother's house about the twenty-year-old Virgo she and Rose ran into at the FDNY museum.

Before Katie could formulate a response, Rose said, “I'm engaged.”

She held out her left hand.

Katie, confused, looked down. On her ring finger Rose wore a claddagh ring, heart out. Left hand meant she was taken, Katie knew. Heart out meant unmarried.

“Oh. Congratulations.”

“Right now this is my engagement ring, but on our wedding day”—Rose slipped the ring off and turned it right side up—“Xavier will pop it off, turn it around and slip it back on. Zave is a filmmaker. He writes and directs. We're broke.” She put the ring back on upside down.

“Part of me wants to walk down the aisle alone, but my oldest brother would be very hurt. He's got three sons, and he jokes that he's fine with that because I wore him out. I think he really wants a girl, though. We all think they'll give it one more try. That's the joke, Aidan says. Once you're outnumbered, you might as well keep going.”

Katie nearly second-guessed her assumption that Rose knew she was talking to someone whose parents had not been able to have children. But most people were that casual about having babies. They could be. Perhaps she was wrong to expect any O'Reilly to understand the other side of the story. Katie pushed aside her disappointment.

“Aidan deserves this moment, if he wants it. He's never disappeared on me,” Rose said.

Who had? Katie looked at her, but Rose didn't turn.

January 2012

Eanáir. Fuar. Sneachta. Geimhreadh.

The Irish words turned to frost as Katie whispered them, alone on the path that cut through the center of campus.

January. Cold. Snow. Winter.

After Beginning Irish, when the teacher's accent and her own enthusiasm were still fresh, Katie always felt as if she might yet piece the whole language together. In this flush of confidence, she liked to speak out loud. Usually, after about an hour, she was back to the reality of long words stuffed with consonants and a grammatical structure whose rules sounded simple, but proved baffling when applied to actual sentences.

Leabhar. Peann luaidhe. Múinteoir.

She could almost see the syllables in the blue winter light.

Book. Pencil. Teacher.

Since she'd tried to learn Irish as a child, returning to it at nineteen gave her a strange sense that she had indeed once spoken it, but let it fall away.

Though she kept her voice to a whisper, Katie could have shouted and nobody would have heard. It was early afternoon, January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany. Since winter intersession classes didn't begin until next week, the campus was almost entirely deserted. She had come back early because, since mid-December, she'd been taking Beginning Irish at the McNally Irish-American Heritage Center, which was a fifteen-minute drive from the college.

Katie was walking swiftly from the parking lot to her on-campus apartment, where she had a bedroom to herself but shared the rest of the space with three other girls.

She left the path and cut across the lawn where, according to a photo on the website, students had friendly snowball fights in the winter, and in the spring sat reading and strumming guitars. Katie, now midway through her sophomore year, had never seen anybody do either. The school drew its student body from neighboring towns along the Hudson River, and many students retreated to their parents' houses from Friday afternoon through Sunday evening. On weekends, Katie often felt like an orphan abandoned at a boarding school over the holidays. “Campus life” was not something she'd thought to ask about. But then, she'd never seen the school until after she got her acceptance letter.

The three-day-old snow was hard-packed, and Katie's boots did not leave a trace as she walked. She thought it fitting on this day when she was seriously considering that she should indeed disappear. That is, transfer out of this quaint, decent college in upstate New York, where she would probably choose English literature as a major next semester when she had no choice but to declare one.

Her college GPA was high enough to nullify the grades she'd earned during her junior year of high school, those C's and D's that canceled the life she'd been headed for, at least in theory, since kindergarten. Columbia. NYU. Vassar. Stanford. Johns Hopkins.

Today as she was leaving class, Katie had stopped, one arm in her coat, to ask the receptionist-registrar if the class on
Dubliners
was filled yet. She hadn't planned on taking it, but the thought of the coming semester, which would include math for non–math majors and biology, made her pause.

Dubliners
was still open, Mrs. O'Dea said, and then offhandedly asked if Katie wanted her to email a list of schools that offered Irish studies as a major. McNally's liked to keep people paying for its classes, Mrs. O'Dea added, but Katie was young. Her interest in Irish culture seemed to be more than a hobby. Get a degree. Make it pay.

“Yes,” Katie managed to say. “Send me the list, please.”

That moment, Katie thought now, was like the morning after a bad hangover, when you open your eyes and sit up, stunned to be cured.

She started hurrying, not because of the cold but because she hoped that Mrs. O'Dea had sent the email already.

Back on the path, Katie rounded the corner, skirting a patch of ice, and then she stopped, confused at the sight of her father pacing back and forth in front of her door. On Friday afternoons the restaurant was open; he should be at work. Then, panic. Ben and Will. If it were Emma, her father would have stayed with the boys and sent one of his cousins to pick her up.

She'd turned her phone off for class and hadn't bothered to turn it back on. How long had he been waiting in the cold? She passed by him and unlocked her door. He followed her inside, rubbing his gloved hands together, as she shut the door and leaned against it.

“Who is it?”

As soon as she spoke, Katie realized that there was only one reason, besides a recent accident or death, that he would have driven two hours to see her, unannounced.

“Katie—”

“They found more of Mommy,” Katie said.

Her father nodded. Katie nodded once. She started to unbutton her coat, but stopped.

“Something they've had, or—?”

“Something they've retested.”

Retested, he meant, against the DNA sample her grandmother had given, or maybe from whatever they'd culled from her mother's toothbrush, which they'd handed over in a Ziploc the week after.
Laurel Rourke-McKenna.
No brothers. No sisters. Abandoned by her father when she was six. Her only child a procured daughter, though she'd always sworn it did not matter.

We waited so long. It's love that matters, not blood.

At least it had not mattered until her mother was lost in the city and blood was the only thing that would find her.

“You didn't have to drive all the way up here to tell me,” Katie said.

“Of course I did.” He cleared his throat.

Emma must have made him. He looked tired. She never thought of him as aging, except when she considered her mother, who had been forty-six when she died. Her father was now fifty-seven.

“Katie?”

“Closure,” she said, borrowing a word from the old days.

They arrived back in Sag Harbor at four o'clock in the afternoon. Ben and Will had been sent to a neighbor's for a playdate.

Katie hefted her backpack, in which she'd hastily tossed enough clothes for the weekend, and said, “Well, I'll just—”

Her father and Emma exchanged a look.

“We'd like to talk before the boys come home,” her father said.

Katie held back her sigh and perched in an armchair, and her father and Emma settled on the couch.

“Emma and I were thinking that we shouldn't have a service. We'll just take care of it ourselves.”

“You were
thinking?
” Katie said. “She was my mother.”

Twice already they'd had the grave opened to bury keepsake urns, pretty little boxes used to divide ashes among family members. The casket from November 2001 held her mother's locket with Katie's baby picture in it, a silk scarf that had been an anniversary gift and a selection of photographs.

“And she was my wife,” he said.

“Charlie,” Emma said, nearly whispering.

Considerate, patient Emma. She liked to talk things through, and she often repeated what was said to her as proof that she was listening.

Katie marveled at how selective her father's memory had grown. He seemed to have forgotten that they'd lived in an apartment where the sound of her parents' raised voices was as constant and unremarkable as the footfall of their upstairs neighbor or sirens wailing outside.

“Okay. I understand what you're saying. You're over eighteen now,” he said. “You let us know what you decide to do, then.”

Katie nearly said, Hey, no, wait. But she caught herself. She looked at Emma, expecting her to protest.

But Emma nodded. “Maybe it's better this way.”

Wordlessly, Katie left the living room and headed upstairs. She should not have come back here, but there was no way she could have told her father that when he'd driven two hours to fetch her.

The boys' baby pictures lined the wall going up the stairs. Her mother used to make fun of people who'd decorated their homes that way. A sincere lack of imagination, she'd called it. Katie spent more time than she should have scripting her mother's reaction to her own photo, which was on a shelf in the family room. Beside it, in a matching silver frame, was a picture of Emma's husband Philip, who'd called to say that everyone in his office was evacuating and he was about to start down the stairs.

Katie's bedroom was on the third floor. The staircase was hidden behind a door that she'd initially thought was a closet until the real estate agent opened it with a flourish. Later, when asked for her opinion, Katie said she loved the house, but she meant she loved that door.