Anna grabbed hold of Donal’s hand, then Joseph’s. They sat together, without speaking until Joseph’s hand grew sweaty.
“That’s enough hand holding for me,” said Joseph, trying to discreetly wipe his palm on his pants.
“I don’t understand how the two of you traveled from one time to another, but I’ve given up thinking you’re daft. I don’t know the depth of it, the reason,” said Donal.
Anna knew what she had to do, what Biddy told her must be done. This cannot be about love, thought Anna, stiffening her spine, preparing for her heart to be splayed open on the rocks. Real desire had taken her by surprise. If she thought too long about Donal, the soft skin of his inner arm or the scent of him directly behind his ears, she would weaken, turn back and hide her face in his shirt. The easiest thing in the world would be to stay with him and forget the dry desert of the future, where life had been bloodless corporate law seasoned with the prospect of online dating.
Biddy opened the door and a fresh wave of morning air rushed into the book bindery.
“Come sit with me, lad. Your auntie has recited every inch that she remembers about the night that you left your time and came to ours. Now I need to hear yours. Start with coming to Anna’s house.”
Biddy and Joseph sat in the chairs near the bookbinder’s desk.
“Anna’s house had her luggage all over it. Some was open, some was still zipped. I just wanted to go to bed. We were going to leave really early the next morning for the hospital. When I went to sleep, I had a dream that my father said I had to find something, that Anna and all of us needed it. When I got out of bed, it was like I was pulled to Anna’s suitcase. I put my hand on some little paper packages and I picked one up and opened it.”
Anna was spellbound, hearing the boy’s version, hating that she had yelled at him.
“That’s grand, Joseph. What was in the wee package?” asked Biddy.
Joseph laughed. “That’s what’s so stupid. It was a ripped-up pair of old boxer shorts, the silky kind. They even said something stupid on them, like Man Silk. Then Anna came in the room and she sort of shrieked and grabbed on to the package and that’s when we did it. We, ah, time traveled.”
“Aye, the silken cloth,” said Biddy. “Anna, will you show the boy the slip of cloth in your pocket?”
Anna heard the drum of waves pounding in her body. She stood next to Biddy and pulled the blue cloth from a deep pocket in her skirt.
“Would it be this?” asked Biddy.
Joseph reached his hand out and took the scrap of fabric. “Like this, except older. But yes, just like this.”
“Holy shit,” said Anna. “This is what the woman outside Bunratty Castle gave me? The shred of clothing that I arrived in, that I wore one hundred and sixty-four years in the future? I’m trying very hard to understand this, but this is making my brain hurt,” said Anna, taking the familiar blue silk back into her hand again.
“Jaysus. One hundred and sixty-four years. You told me you were from the future but you failed to mention just how far,” said Donal.
“Anna and Joseph are here because of a curse. Curses have a copper scent, and all of us in the room reek of it. Anna, we tried to fix the curse before in another patch of time. We failed, which made for years of suffering, with poison dripping in the veins of this entire family. We’ve been given another chance, and we must get it right.”
“How could we have already tried? I’ve never time traveled before,” said Anna.
“Stop thinking of time like it was a straight line; it never was and it never will be. I don’t know the half of it, but you met a woman outside Bunratty Castle who’d been waiting for you. If she recognized you, then I must have sent her; she’d be one of my own descendents. She said she couldn’t leave Ireland, did she? She was a seventh daughter all right. I must have made sure that someone would meet you there. We live famously long; we go through husbands like water, outliving them all.”
Donal and Anna stood closer together, their fingers reaching for each other.
“But why didn’t it work? Why am I back here, and why Joseph?”
They all startled at the sound of the front door unlatching. A man poked his head in the doorway.
Donal said, “Thomas, you’re a good man to let us take over your shop. This is the fine owner of this shop and our host, Mr. Thomas Fitzgerald.”
“You’ve some visitors outside. There’s no trouble, only Deirdre’s lass and her dog,” said Thomas.
Joseph stood up and ran outside.
“Taleen! You shouldn’t have followed us.”
Anna followed to the sea-slick cobblestones of the street, and instantly saw the spurt of adolescent love that surrounded Joseph and the dark-haired girl. Only the blind could miss the cord of light, as thick as a sapling emanating from the solar plexus of the two of them, powering through all misgivings, seeking one another. If only this had been about the powder keg of desire when first it lands in the hearts of a boy and a girl, then the decisions would not have been so devastatingly hard. If only.
Taleen took in the scene with fear in her eyes.
“Were you leaving me? Were you running away without me?”
Taleen placed a protective hand low on her belly. Anna’s radar for pregnancy saw the instinctive hand guarding the uterus, the way all women do, whether they are fourteen or forty. Here were the DNA generators, a young girl and a sixteen-year-old boy, dizzy and stupid with impossible love. Anna looked at her nephew and saw him for the first time as the man he would become, the kind of man who could love a son or a daughter. Or he could be, without the curse.
Here was the strange foreshortening of time. Joseph, the father of their clan from this point onward, standing front and center, and there in the faraway future was Joseph, heir to generations of a curse. No wonder we have flipped over in tendrils of time.
Taleen was pregnant. What would come of this babe from twenty-first-century sperm and a nineteenth-century ovum? One very notable thing was Anna, her brother Patrick and their wild, brilliant, tyrannical father and his miserable father before him. Was the whole story about one boy and one girl given over to the force of tender love and fumbling sex? Joseph and Taleen looked like babies, all soft around the eyes, and flushed around the cheeks.
Taleen had been crying and her eyes were dashed with red. “I’ve seen it! You’re leaving me Joseph. I see ahead and you’ve gone. Did all of this mean nothing to you? Is she taking you away?” she said pointing to Anna.
Joseph looked as though he’d been struck by a sandbag. The massive dog at Taleen’s side trotted to the boy’s side. The dog took the boy’s forearm in his mouth and wagged his tail.
“Not now, Madigan,” said Joseph, as if the dog had been an old friend.
“Biddy, she’s pregnant…” started Anna.
Biddy saw it first, took a step toward the girl, but she was too late. The wolfhound stepped neatly between Biddy and the girl. A swirl of rejected love took its dark slide into wrath and covered Taleen. Her uncontrolled powers of healing ignited into tattered spits of rage. The tenor of her voice grew deep. A sharp wind blew her skirt. If life existed beyond Joseph, or if the entire world incinerated, Taleen would not have noticed. She exploded in her shattered grief.
“I curse you. All grace will stop its flow from father to son from this day forth, down through every generation. You, Joseph, will beget a lineage of fathers with their hearts shriveled and torn. Not one father from this time forward will be able to love their sons,” said Taleen, her lips pulled back, her ebony hair wafting around her head.
Taleen suddenly swiveled to Anna, taking her in for the first time. “And your womb will be barren, dry as stone!”
Joseph froze in place, all the glass shards of the curse already cutting through his heart. Anna gasped and stumbled. She had been cursed by a child. The devastating miscarriages came from this moment; the almost-babies had never had a chance. She turned to look at Biddy, imploring her. “Biddy, please…”
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Anna took in the curse and saw it spinning through time, sucking under every good man in her lineage who fell in love and bore a son. Anna saw the Y chromosome of maleness embedded with the sly dark tinge of the curse that had followed every father and son. No matter what their hopes and dreams, no matter how totally in love they had been with their young wives, the men could not love their tender, sweet sons. And Anna would never, never have a child, never hold a newborn in her arms. If she had dared to want anything in life, it had been this.
Biddy Early pushed past the dog, who dropped his tail under Biddy’s glare. She grabbed the girl’s wrist.
“You are too young, too fresh at our craft to understand. And like all the young ones, healer or not, you are blinded by the wind of love. You don’t know what you’ve set in motion. Taleen, it has already happened. You’ve had your revenge, years of beaten sons, alcohol sodden fathers, women who have seen their good men go mad with rage. Joseph is the product of your curse. Is this what you wanted for all your sons? You’ve cursed your own baby.”
Taleen’s hair floated back down again.
“Anna, the blessing. Before it’s too late!” said Biddy, releasing the girl’s arm.
“I don’t know how to make a blessing or who to bless.”
Anna fingered the tattered shred of fabric in her pocket.
“A blessing is all about alchemy, it transmutes the poison of a curse, but do get on with it before the curse takes hold good and solid,” said Biddy, looking uncertain for the first time since Anna had met her. “It must be either you or the boy. That must be why you’re here.”
Biddy had been right about the sky; the morning fog had burned off unusually early, giving way to a blue sky with scratches of high clouds. Anna could see the long beach that started in Tramore and seemed to go forever. Thomas hung in the background, looking continually startled. Taleen and Joseph had edged together. Donal stood beneath the shadow of the shop sign.
Anna grabbed Biddy’s arm and pulled her a few steps away and whispered urgently. “Before I try to make a blessing, which could be a complete mess because I’ve never blessed anyone, you have to promise me something,” said Anna. “And I must tell you one thing about the future.”
“I wish you wouldn’t but go on, dearie, quickly.”
“There will be a famine. The potatoes won’t grow for years. I want you to make sure that Tom and his children move here. They must need a blacksmith. And Donal, will you look after him?”
“I can help with Glenis’s family if you insist. Sure, we’ve had famines before,” said Biddy.
“Yes,” said Anna, with the specter of the Great Famine staring at her. “But not like this one.”
Anna felt it first in her lungs, the sense of sweetness being drained off. Crows descended on the roof of the book bindery. Donal had called them hoodie crows. Donal stepped out from the shadow of the book bindery sign that caught the bright glare of the morning light. The air crackled with the taste of copper. The sun hit the side of Donal’s face and even from across the street, Anna saw three days worth of stubble.
He put his hand along his brow to keep out the sun. “You’ve found the lad. Let’s take him and go, if he’ll come along with us. But you’ve seen that he’s unharmed. Biddy can undo the curse…”
Anna shouted at him, “You must let me know that you’ve lived a life…that this all meant something, that I meant something…”
” What are you saying, woman?” said Donal.
Anna saw a woman in the distance, running down the street.
“Now, Anna!” screamed Biddy.
Anna went to Taleen and awkwardly got down on her knees in front of her, the way she used to do in church when she was a child, before their family blew apart. She cleared her throat.
“I bless this child inside you and all the children who come from this child. I forgive you for all that you’ve said in anger. I forgive you for not knowing, for being young and in love. I bless you and all the generations to follow,” said Anna, looking directly into the face of the long ago matriarch of the family. “I forgive you for cursing me and my family. And yours. Ours.”
Anna stood up, expecting something to happen.
“Biddy, how will we know if the blessing works?” said Anna.
Everyone turned as the woman running down the street came closer.
“Madigan, come here,” commanded the woman.
“That’s me mum,” said Taleen. “She’ll be furious with me. I’ve uttered a curse and she said that I must never.”
“That’s right. You must never and yet you did what you must never do. It’s the way of the young ones. And your mum’s name?” said Biddy.
“Deirdre,” said the girl, gulping hard.
“Aye, lovely name. I’ve heard of her from time to time. We are about to have three seventh daughters coming together with an Irish wolfhound and in all my years, I’ve never seen the likes of it.”
The dog galloped off to Taleen’s mother who stroked his head and put her lips to his ears. Anna reached out to touch Joseph and he jumped back as if her touch had scalded him.
“I’m not leaving her!” Joseph called out.
Anna did not hear the huge, strange dog. In fact she only saw it the moment that it took flight, some twenty feet beyond them, aiming for Joseph’s back. She reached out to grab the boy and the cloth burned hot in her pocket. She suddenly knew what was happening before Joseph did. She had a sense of things stirring, of rusty cogs beginning to shift and reverse. She had time to pull the blue silk out of her pocket, clutch it, and brace herself as the dog launched into Joseph and slammed him into her.
Anna tried to turn her head to see Donal but the gut-inverting sensation had already grabbed her and the roar of the deep ocean filled her ears and the ability to move began to fall away from her. With supreme effort she twined her fingers into Joseph’s hair. The last thing she saw before the water took them was the dog, with his great long jaw clamped around the boy’s arm.
“I bless us, I bless us, I bless,” she thought as they dissolved among the depths of the ocean.
Chapter 38
Arthur Jones collected cans and bottles from the garbage cans along Rockport’s beaches and craggy seaside. He no longer slept past 4 a.m.; his Gulf War PTSD required an early-morning vigilance. He started downtown and worked his way south along the little nooks of beaches where the town crews left the fifty-gallon drums lined with black plastic bags to slow the tide of trash. A few houses still had their Christmas decorations up.
Arthur outfitted his bike with large plastic crates on either side of the back wheel. He knew what he looked like—one of the mentally ill, homeless Vets. Except he wasn’t homeless; he had a furnished apartment behind the library and his own cell phone. He wasn’t sure about the mental illness part.
The cove was his last stop before the sun came up. Stuff washed up on the beach all the time and sometimes he checked it out and sometimes he didn’t. He was almost always disappointed with what he found. This morning a ruby blade of dawn had just hit the watery horizon and he saw a dog, one of those huge dogs. He ran the names: mastiff, Great Dane, Bernese mountain dogs. No, this was an Irish wolfhound. He’d seen one on the Animal Planet. The dog guarded something, a big pile. Oh no.
Arthur had been a medic, and his PTSD relaxed. True disasters were easier for him to handle than the imagined ones. He got off his bike and walked across the sand, his feet sinking in with each step. The dog didn’t look so great. The animal hung its head and weaved a little, like he was forcing himself to stand up.
Arthur pulled a granola bar out of his pocket, opened it, and placed it on his palm to let the dog know he was a friend. There were two bodies behind the dog, covered with sand and seaweed. One of the bodies moved, rose up on an elbow, and shook long hair off her face. It was a woman, her breasts bloodied and raw, and her eyelids swollen from saltwater. She turned her head toward him.
“Donal?” she croaked.
He slip
ped his other hand into his inside coat pocket and pulled out his cell phone and called 911.
Chapter 39
Two days after Anna and Joseph were spotted by Arthur Jones, they were released from the hospital after being treated for hypothermia and abrasions. Anna had lost twenty pounds and Joseph had gained fifteen since their disappearance. They told the police that they didn’t remember anything. They told them again and again and finally the police stopped asking.
As they walked out of the hospital with Mary Louise O’Shea, Anna stopped on the sidewalk.
“We remember everything. We have to tell you what happened but you may not believe us. We’re not the same. We’ve both lost something unimaginable,” said Anna, twitching from the noise of cars, buses, and cell phones. She was jumpy around the crush of twenty-first-century sounds and inundated by the smells of shampoos, lotions, conditioners, and most offensive of all, room fresheners.
“I thought that I had lost something unimaginable and I’ll spend the rest of my days counting my blessings for your return,” said Mary Louise. “I can hear the worst that you have to tell me. Just don’t disappear again.”
“I want to see my father,” said Joseph. “And Madigan, I’ve got to see him. He won’t understand it here.”
“Madigan is at home with Alice and he seems to have taken a liking to her. The dog is adjusting,” said Mary Louise.
The two women turned to him. He’d been nearly silent since they were recovered from the beach. Anna said, “Let’s go see your Dad, and we’ll tell them as much as we can.”
They went directly to the rehabilitation center where Patrick was finishing his treatment. Anna and Joseph rammed a chair against the door in Patrick’s room and told them all the parts that mattered—the time travel, Glennie and Biddy Early, and even Donal and Taleen. And the pregnancy. They said enough to make them understand. They didn’t tell them about the curse. Not yet.
Now & Then Page 31
