Ashes of Fiery Weather (55 page)

What Owney didn't understand was her holding back. It was fear of rejection, fear of what she might find. Of course it was. But the thing was, after reading about them in the book and her subsequent cyber-stalking, Katie wanted them. The O'Reillys. She wanted the well of bravery, and Norah from Ireland, a great-grandmother, and the beauty of Rose's voice. She didn't want to relinquish them and begin again.

Owney got up off the bed and came to stand behind her. He brushed his palm against her shoulder. She reached up and took his hand.

The story was that Katie had not been able to handle it the second time they found her mother. She'd gotten lost for a little while. This was surely what Emma confided to her friends, and what her father would say if he spoke of it, which he probably did not.

But Katie had never tried to explain, even to Owney, how often she'd stared at women with dark hair and blue eyes when she was a child.

After 9/11, though, Katie had looked for Laurel. There was even a name for it: searching behavior. The grieving believe they glimpse their loved one among the living. Two rows ahead at the movie theater. In the next car while stopped at a red light. At a restaurant, ensconced with another family.

If one fragment of bone was a symbol, proof that Laurel Rourke-McKenna had not used the chaos of September 11 to start a new life, a fantasy Katie had occasionally indulged in, two fragments meant that there were hundreds more. Thousands? Katie began to understand for the first time that her mother had not only died, she'd had a death.

Yet this was not the reason Katie cut class for the first time. In the classroom across the hall, Katie had caught a glimpse of a new teacher who was petite with dark hair and fair skin. Three steps closer and Katie saw only a superficial resemblance between her and the teacher, who was far too young anyway. But logic always arrived too late to stop the surge of adrenaline. As her heartbeat calmed and her breathing slowed, Katie realized that she was no longer looking for the mother she'd known. No, she was back to searching for a stranger with a familiar face. She'd turned and walked out of the school.

Owney squeezed her hand. She squeezed back and pulled her hand away.

Katie gazed at Magdalena's—Maggie's—picture and understood that she was always going to know her first mother's face as soon as she saw it. As though she were remembering.

Rose led Katie outside to the garden.

The few people wandering around did not even glance at them. The leaves were beginning to show a hint of autumn color and there were flowers in bloom, mostly orange and dark purple. She and Rose paused at the saint's statue in the center. The statue used to be out front, Rose told her, but it had been moved now that the house was no longer a convent. The convent had closed in 2005 after the last two nuns died within a month of each other.

Rose started walking and Katie kept pace.

“Where do you go to school?” Rose asked. There was some hesitancy in her voice, as though Katie were a deer she didn't want to startle.

“Not too far from here,” Katie said.

Rose was silent, obviously waiting for her to continue. When she didn't, Rose asked, “What's your major? God, I sound like my mother.”

“Irish studies. You can choose a focus on literature or history, and I think I'm going to do the history track.”

Rose nodded. “I guess you want to teach, then?”

“Maybe.” Katie shrugged.

“You want to walk around all day talking about Ireland?”

“Maybe.” Katie laughed.

Rose made a noise low in her throat. “Were your parents really into the Irish thing?”

“No, not really. When I was eight, my mom decided I needed to do more on the weekends than sit around reading. She wanted to sign me up for this softball league that played on Saturdays in Central Park, or horseback riding. I asked if I could take step-dancing instead.”

“I did that. I wasn't competitive, but I liked it.”

“I sucked.” Katie remembered her disappointment, like she'd failed some kind of test. “But Mom wouldn't let me just quit. She said to pick another class. I switched to Irish Language for Kids instead. The teacher went into Irish history a little bit, about how the language was against the law and all that,” Katie said. “That's how I got interested.”

“Did you know you were Irish? Or did you guess?” Rose asked.

“I knew,” Katie said. “That was the one thing I knew for sure.”

She and Rose walked in silence for a few minutes, until they came to a bench set in a half circle of three evergreens. The garden was empty now, and Katie could hear nothing beyond the wall. She and Rose might have been the only two people in Brooklyn.

Rose sat, and so Katie sat beside her.

“Sometimes I wish I still did drugs,” Rose said.

“Me too.”

Rose laughed. “It's like that, then.”

“In high school, for a little while.”

“I'm sorry things had to be this way,” Rose said.

“They are this way. I don't know if they had to be.”

“That's not a question I can answer.”

Katie traced the squares on her skirt. She was not surprised when Rose spoke. Rose had, Katie had already learned, a knack for taking the measure of a silence, and ending it just before it became uncomfortable.

“Xavier and me might have our ceremony here in the garden,” Rose said. “I'm getting married on a Thursday. My grandmother asks me, What about people who have to work? I said, Gran, my friends are all actors and singers and writers. They've got the kind of day jobs they can handle with hangovers. She said I should get a better class of friends. She was mostly kidding. Me and Zave are moving in with her. She lost her best friend the January after 9/11—that was Nathaniel—and a few years ago, another friend from the neighborhood whose son was killed on 9/11 died. Gran's by herself now. She'll be ninety-four in a month.”

Delia O'Reilly.

“She's, uh, alert?” Katie said, realizing immediately that it was a dumb question.

“Sure. She's more with it than me. My niece once asked her how long she was going to live, and Gran said she was a vampire and was never going to die.”

“Your niece?”

“My other brother's daughter.”

“Brendan has a daughter?”

“He keeps her off his Facebook page. Offline altogether. A thing with her mom. She's—how do I put this politely? Kinda batshit,” Rose said. “She took off and Bren got custody.”

“How old is she?”

“Five,” Rose said.

Rose was probably great with her. Katie could imagine her slipping her niece and nephews Hershey's Kisses behind their mothers' backs. When she babysat, she probably hurried the kids to bed only when the key turned in the lock. When Brendan's daughter became a teenager, Rose would be there to dispense funny, inappropriate advice.

But that was still about ten years away. Katie might be casting Rose in a role meant for a much younger aunt.

“Things are fine,” Rose added. “Bren's overcautious. I'm not actually convinced the woman can read.”

Katie thought that was a little harsh, and although she didn't say it out loud, her expression must have shown what she was thinking.

“Trust me. It's the best thing that could have happened,” Rose said. “She's way better off with my brother.” Her tone closed the subject.

Katie wished it hadn't. Then she could say, Yes, isn't that how it works? Walking away is not the act of a bad or indifferent mother, but a good one. The very act of doing so is transformative. But again, Rose was not the one to put that question to.

“You're going to take care of your grandmother?” Katie asked.

“More like the other way around,” Rose said. “I'm kidding. Sorta. We're paying rent. We offered her market value—okay, a little below, that's sixteen hundred a month—for the rooms on the third floor, and she asked if we'd both gone insane. Aidan and Xavier might put in a kitchen. Gran says we can use hers. I said, Then we're just living with you, and she said, Fine, then you're just living with me. Can't wait to see how this goes.”

Katie laughed.

“Truth is, she'd rather it were my sister,” Rose said. “She lived with her for a few months. In the summer of  '92.”

“Did your mother kick her out or something?”

“God, no. But she was nineteen, sharing a room with me. Needed her privacy, I guess.”

“Why?” Katie tried to keep her tone light. “Did she have a boyfriend?”

“Yes.”

“Was he nice?”

Rose was silent for so long Katie didn't think she was going to answer. Then she half smiled. “He used to call me Roses.”

Katie slouched on the bench. That did not sound like a jerk. He did not sound like an arsonist, walking away without looking back. Only rarely had Katie pictured a couple still together at the time she was born. But if so, then she'd been given up by two people, not just one.

She pressed her temple, as though trying to dislodge the thought.

“Does she ever come back to New York?” Katie asked.

Rose was watching her carefully. “Maggie's lived in Ireland for a long time. Hasn't been back to the States for any long stretch since after September 11, when she stayed for a couple of months. Last year, she took a position at the school where she got her degree. Head of the English Department. She teaches Irish literature. It's not far from where Mom's from, in Galway.”

“Galway,” Katie said.

At home in New York, strangers had often looked at her brown-eyed father and hazel-eyed mother and asked where Katie had gotten her eyes. Who had passed down that shade of blue? But they never suggested Katie did not originally belong to them. The Irish, though, did just that.

Waitresses and tour guides and the women showing them to their rooms in the bed and breakfasts saw Katie and said:

She's got the postman's eyes, I think!

This one doesn't look like a Yank at all.

Lord love her, but she's got the map of Ireland on her face.

You'd better put that one back where you found her.

Once, the three of them were in the back seat of a cab in Dublin, stopped in traffic. The driver peered in the rearview mirror.

“Are you sure she's yours, with those eyes?”

Katie's mother answered, “We bought her from the Gypsies.”

“The faeries, it would be,” the cabbie said. “A changeling, that one.”

Her mother laughed, but her father turned his head away.

A changeling, Katie later learned, was a faerie's child meant to take the place of a stolen human child.

The afternoon before her birthday, she and her mother went to a pub for lunch while her father “relaxed at the hotel.” Katie knew that meant he was shopping for her gift.

Katie waited until after the waitress took their order.

“Do you know if my birth mother has blue eyes?”

Her mother had been smiling, about to say something. She sat back abruptly.

“Dad and I have explained that we'll talk about this when you're eighteen, not before.”

“What does it matter if you tell me what color her eyes are?”

“Your mother's eyes are hazel.” She tapped her temple with one finger.

“Did you get to meet her, or did she meet only the lawyer?” Katie asked.

“When it's time, we will talk about this.” She put her hand over Katie's hand.

“Was I born in Ireland?”

“Born
here?
Of course not. You were born in New York, like me and Daddy.”

“Did she have the map of Ireland on her face?” Katie asked.

Her mother gazed at her and then withdrew her hand. “Yes.”

In one of Katie's worst 9/11 nightmares, her mother calls from the office and says that she is about to start down the stairs. It will take hours, but don't worry. She will get out. Eventually she'll make it home.

Katie asks, “What's my mother's name?”

On the bench, Katie sat still and Rose did too, simply waiting. It was like they were together in a car, companionably trapped.

Katie wanted to ask what August 27, 2010, had been like for the O'Reillys. That is, if they'd been aware of her eighteenth birthday and its significance, legally. The secret's expiration date. Maybe Maggie alone understood.

“I keep wondering,” Katie said, “what it's like to be dreading a phone call for two years.”

“Or waiting for twenty,” Rose said.

Katie looked at her, but there was no hint of humor in her expression.

“My wedding is on April 8,” Rose said. “Maggie teaches a lot of summers, but she can take off if she wants to. But that's my busiest time of year, and Xavier's too. Also, it's hot as fuck in this city. The week after Christmas was another option, but a lot of our friends are from out of town. They go home for the holidays through New Year's. We would make our families and whichever friends can afford it fly to Ireland, but my grandmother can't travel. And this April is the thirtieth anniversary of my father's death. We're going to have a second wake for him. It was Aunt Eileen's idea.

“My sister would fly home for my wedding no matter when I set the date. She would rearrange a million things at work and she'll come. But why make her go back and forth twice within a few months? Mama Bear said, Well, Miss Picky, if not Christmas, if not summer, then there is no reason, after three decades, to keep April a sad month.”

“Maggie's coming in April.”

“Maggie's coming in April.”

April, Katie thought, as though the month were a foreign country.

“They'll be here for at least a week,” Rose said.

“She's married?”

“Yes.”

“Does she have kids?”

“No.”