by Amy Harmon
People were trampled. Others were shot. Sixty injured. Thirteen dead. I spent the evening offering my services to the wounded, riddled with guilt at my part in the mayhem, seething with anger that it had come to this, and filled with longing for it all to end.
T. S.
11
BEFORE THE WORLD WAS MADE
If I make the lashes dark,
And the eyes more bright
And the lips more scarlet,
Or ask if all be right
From mirror after mirror,
No vanity’s displayed;
I’m looking for the face I had
Before the world was made.
—W. B. Yeats
Thomas knocked on my door after the O’Tooles, clearly reassured that all was well, left. I watched the couple walk past my window, their arms laden with loaves of bread and the mutton, potatoes, and gravy Eleanor had prepared for dinner.
I was burrowed in my covers, my face hidden and the light extinguished. The door was not locked, and after a moment, Thomas opened it carefully.
“Anne, I want to check your wound,” he said, coming no farther than the threshold.
I feigned sleep, keeping my swollen eyes shut, my face buried, and after a moment he left, closing the door softly behind him. He’d said I should go. I considered pulling on the clothes that sat on my top shelf, dressing myself for the life I’d lost, and tiptoeing out to the lough. I would steal a boat and sail home.
I pictured the morning dawning as I sat in a stolen boat on the lough, waiting to return to 2001. What if nothing happened? What if Thomas had to rescue me again, me dressed in my odd clothes with nowhere to go? He would think I was truly crazy. He wouldn’t want me near Eoin. I moaned, the thought snatching my nerve and quickening my heartbeat. But what if it worked? What if I could go home?
Did I really want that?
The thought brought me up short. I had a beautiful apartment in Manhattan. I had enough money to comfortably last a lifetime. I had respect. Acclaim. My publicist would worry. My editor would fret. My agent might even grieve. Would anyone else?
I had thousands of devoted readers and no close friends. I had hundreds of acquaintances in dozens of cities. I’d dated a handful of men a handful of times. I’d even slept with two of them. Two lovers, and I was thirty years old. The term lovers made me wince. There had been no love involved. I had always been married to my work, in love with my stories, and committed to my characters, and I’d never wanted anyone or anything else. Eoin had been my island in a very lonely sea. A sea I’d chosen. A sea I’d loved.
But Eoin was gone, and I found I had no desire to cross the waters if he wasn’t waiting for me on the other side.
Thomas had left before I rose the next day and was home again after I retired that night. I changed my bandages with very little trouble, confident that Thomas wouldn’t have to tend them again, but he obviously didn’t agree. When he knocked the following night, I had not yet extinguished my light and was sitting at the small desk. Feigning sleep would not be possible.
I knew Eoin’s birthday was coming on Monday, and I wanted to make something for him. I’d found paper in the drawer in Thomas’s office, along with a few pencils and a fountain pen that I had no idea how to use. Maeve had helped me put a long, fat stitch down the center of a thick stack of paper, binding the pages and making a spine. Eoin had danced around, knowing it was going to be for him, and I’d let him help me spread glue on the stitches to strengthen and harden them. When it dried, I’d folded the pages in half over the seam. Now I had to create a story just for him. He wouldn’t see the finished product until Monday, which was only three days away.
Now Thomas was at my door, and I didn’t want to see him. The memory of his words made my chest burn. I had not gone like he’d asked, and I’d been dreading the moment when I had to face him again, with no answers, no explanations, and no invitation to remain under his roof.
I wore the sweater and trousers I’d worn the day Thomas pulled me out of the lake. I hadn’t expected company, and I had no pajamas other than the voluminous nightgowns that tangled around my body and strangled me in the night. I was still flirting with the future, with going home. Plus, wearing the clothes made me feel more like myself, and I needed to be Anne Gallagher, the writer, to create a special story for a perfect little boy.
Thomas knocked again and gently turned the knob.
“May I come in?” he asked. He had his medical bag in his hand, the dutiful doctor till the end.
I nodded, not looking up from the small stack of paper I was using to jot down my ideas before I committed them to the pages that waited.
He drew up behind me, a warm presence at my back. “What’s this?”
“I’m making Eoin a book for his birthday. Writing him a story that’s never been told before. Something just for him.”
“You’re writing it?” There was something in his voice that made my heart quicken.
“Yes.”
“You always made Declan read to you. You said the letters moved when you tried to read them. I assumed writing would be difficult as well,” he said slowly.
“No. I don’t struggle with reading or writing,” I whispered, setting the pencil down.
“And you’re left-handed,” Thomas said, surprised.
I nodded hesitantly.
“I guess I never knew that. Declan was left-handed. Eoin is too.”
Thomas was silent for several seconds, musing. I waited, afraid to resume my writing for fear he’d notice something else.
“I need to check your wound, Anne. It should be sufficiently healed to remove the stitches.”
I rose obediently.
His brow furrowed as his eyes traveled down my clothing and back up to my unbound hair.
“Countess Markievicz wears trousers,” I blurted, defensive. Constance Markievicz was a leading figure in Irish politics, a woman born to wealth but more interested in revolution. She’d been imprisoned after the Rising and enjoyed a certain notoriety and respect among the people, especially those sympathetic to the cause of Irish independence. The fact that she’d married a Polish Count only made her more fascinating.
“Yes. So I hear. Did she give you those?” he countered, a sardonic twist to his lips. I ignored him, walking to the bed and stretching out carefully on the crisp spread. I’d caught Maeve pressing it. She’d then given me a quick lesson in using the iron, though she’d insisted I wouldn’t need to press my own clothes. They’d already been ironed and hung in the huge wooden wardrobe in the corner.
I raised the hem of my sweater to uncover the bandages, folding the bottom over my breasts, but the waistline of the trousers still covered the edge of the bandage. I unbuttoned them and eased them down an inch, my eyes fixed on the ceiling. Thomas had seen me in less. Much less. But baring my skin this way felt different, like I was engaging in a strip tease, and when he cleared his throat, his discomfort magnified my own. He pulled the chair from the desk to the side of my bed and sat, removing a small pair of scissors, some tweezers, and a vial of iodine from his bag. He removed the bandage I’d applied the day before, swabbed the area, and with steady hands, began to pluck the neat stitches from my side.
“Beatrice Barnes informed me when we were at the department store that there were several things you still need. Since you had to resort to wearing Countess Markievicz’s trousers, I am inclined to believe her.”
“I didn’t intend for you to pay for my clothes,” I said.
“And I didn’t intend for you to think I wanted you to leave,” he countered softly, slowly, making sure I understood him.
I swallowed, determined not to cry, but felt a traitorous tear scurry down the side of my face and disappear into the whorl of my ear. I had never cried much in my life before Eoin died. Now I cried constantly.
“My car is filled with parcels. I’ll bring them in when I am finished here. Beatrice has reassured me that you now have everything you need.”
“Thomas . . .”
“Anne,” he responded in the same tone, raising his blue eyes to mine briefly before he continued his careful snipping. I could feel his soft breath on my skin, and I closed my eyes against the flutter in my belly and the curling of my bare toes. I liked his touch. I liked his head bowed over my body. I liked him.
Thomas Smith was the kind of man who could quietly slip into and out of a room without drawing much attention. He was handsome if one stopped to contemplate each feature—deep-set blue eyes, more glum than glittering. Long grooves in his cheeks when he flashed a brief smile. Straight white teeth behind well-formed lips that perched above a dimpled chin at the apex of a clean-cut jaw. Yet he had a slight stoop to his shoulders and an air of melancholia that had folks respecting his space and his solitude, even as they sought him out. His hair was dark, more black than brown, though the glint of stubble he removed from his cheeks each morning was decidedly ruddy. He was lean, his ropey muscles giving his spare frame girth. He wasn’t tall. He wasn’t short. He wasn’t a big man. He wasn’t a small man. He wasn’t loud or obtrusive even as he moved and acted with an innate confidence. He was simply Thomas Smith, as ordinary as his name, and yet . . . not ordinary at all.
I could have written stories about him.
He would be the character that grew on the reader, making them love him simply because he was good. Decent. Dependable. Maybe I would write stories about him. Maybe I would . . . someday.
I liked him. And it would be easy to love him.
The knowledge was sudden, a fleeting thought that settled on me with butterfly wings. I had never met someone like Thomas. I’d never once been intrigued by a man, even the men I’d temporarily let into my life. I’d never felt that pull, that pressure, that desire to discover and be discovered in return. Not until now, not until Thomas. Now, I felt all those things.
“Tell me the story,” Thomas murmured.
“Hmm?”
“The story you are planning for Eoin’s book. I’d like to hear it.”
“Oh.” I thought for a moment, putting the threads of my ideas into sentences. “Well . . . it is about a boy who travels through time. He has a little boat—a little red boat—and he takes it out on the water . . . on Lough Gill. The boat is just a child’s toy, but when he sets it in the water, it becomes big enough for him to climb inside. He rows across the lake, but when he reaches the other side, he is always somewhere else. America during the revolution, France with Napoleon, China when the Great Wall was being built. When he wants to go home, he simply finds the nearest lake or stream, sets his little boat in the water, and climbs inside.”
“And he finds himself back on the lough,” Thomas finished, a smile in his voice.
“Yes. Home again,” I said.
“Eoin will love that.”
“I thought I would write the first story, the first adventure, and then we can continue to add more, depending on what he is most interested in.”
“What if you give him the book you’ve already made, the one with empty pages, for that purpose, and I help you construct another?” Thomas straightened, drawing my sweater down over my stomach and tucking his tools away, the operation completed. “I’m a decent artist. I can certainly draw a picture of a wee boy in a red boat.”
“I’ll write the words, and you’ll draw the pictures?” I asked, pleased.
“Yes. It will be easier to do that on loose pages. When we’re done, we’ll organize the words and pictures so they correspond. Stitching and gluing will be last.”
“We don’t have much time.”
“Then we should get started, Countess.”
Thomas and I worked deep into the early morning hours on Friday and Saturday—how he managed to work all day and make a child’s book most of the night was beyond me. He created a system so that the pictures and text would align once we bound them, and I began to craft the tale, keeping it pithy, limiting the narrative to a small paragraph per page. Thomas added simple pencil sketches beneath the words, interspersing a full-page picture here and there to make it more fun. He gave me a fountain pen with a little well at the top that was big enough to insert ink tablets and a few drops of water. I had to hold the pen just so to keep it from dripping all over the page. I was so inept I resorted to writing in pencil, and Thomas traced my words in ink, his tongue between his teeth, his shoulder hunched over the page.
Brigid, Eoin, Thomas, and I went to Mass on Sunday; Thomas said missing Mass three Sundays in a row would cause almost as big a stir as coming back from the dead. Which was what I had done. I found myself eager to see the chapel at Ballinagar again but was filled with dread at the attention I would get. I took extra care with my appearance, knowing I would be judged by it. I decided I would wear the deep-rose dress with the cream-colored cloche hat Beatrice had sent home with Thomas. She had also sent a box of baubles, earrings that worked with several outfits, several pairs of gloves, and a charcoal-gray handbag that was neutral enough to carry with anything.
Beatrice had tucked a shaving kit in the parcels as well, one that was identical to Thomas’s—a little box of blades and a thick handle with a wide head, all kept in a small tin box with an eagle emblazoned on the cover. I wondered if Thomas had noticed that I’d borrowed his a few times and purchased another so that I would stop. The razor was bulky and unwieldy compared to what I was used to, but with care and attention, it worked. I didn’t know if women of the era shaved, but if Thomas had provided me with a razor of my own, it couldn’t be completely unheard of.
I experimented with the cosmetics, smoothing on the vanishing cream, following it with the powder, the rouge, and the eyelash tint, and was pleasantly surprised by the effect. I looked fresh-faced and appealing, and Beatrice had been correct about the shade of pink on my cheeks and lips—subtle yet becoming.
My hair continued to be the most difficult part of the costume, and I wrangled it into a French braid, weaving the curls into place and wrapping the tail of the braid into a knot at my nape. I stuck the knot with a few long pins and willed it to stay put. I wore a corset for the first time, attaching my stockings to the long straps, and I was so tired and winded after dressing, I pledged to never wear it again.
Brigid sniffed when I climbed into the rear seat of the car with Eoin, leaving the front seat to her, but Eoin’s countenance brightened considerably.
“Mass is very long, Mother,” he whispered, warning me. “And Nana won’t let me sit by my friends. But if you sit by me, maybe it won’t be so boring.”
“Someday, you will like it. It can be very peaceful being surrounded by people you care about and who care about you. That is really what church is for. It’s a chance to just sit still and think about all the wonderful things God has made and count all the blessings we have.”
“I am a good counter,” Eoin said hopefully.
“Then you won’t be a bit bored.”
We drove through Dromahair and into the fields, following the same road—albeit an unpaved one—I’d taken with Maeve O’Toole’s instructions ringing in my ears. When I saw the church, it was like glimpsing a familiar face, and I found myself smiling despite my apprehensions. We rumbled to a stop among cars of a similar shape and style, and Thomas opened his door and stepped out, lifting Eoin from the back seat and helping Brigid alight before doing the same for me.
“Brigid, take Eoin and go inside. I need to talk to Anne for a moment,” Thomas instructed. Eoin and Brigid frowned in tandem, but Brigid took the little boy’s hand and started across the grass to the open doors that welcomed the stream of congregants arriving in cars, delivery trucks, and the occasional horse-drawn wagon.
“I saw Father Darby early this morning. He was giving last rites to Sarah Gillis, Mrs. O’Toole’s grandmother.”
“Oh no!”
“The woman was so old, she was praying to go,” he said. “She was a hundred years if she was a day. Her passing is a blessing on the family.”
I nodded, thinking of Maeve and the
longevity she would inherit.
“But that’s not why I needed to speak to you. I asked Father Darby to make an announcement today from the lectern. He makes announcements every week—church picnics, death notices, birth notices, pleas for help for this parishioner or that parishioner. You know the kind,” Thomas explained. He took off his hat and placed it on his head again.
“I asked him to announce that you’ve returned home after a long illness, and that you are residing at Garvagh Glebe with your son. I thought it would be easier than trying to tell people one at a time. And no one can follow up Father Darby’s announcement with questions, although they will try when Mass is over.”
I nodded slowly, both nervous and relieved. “What now?”
“Now . . . we have to go inside,” he said with a wry smile.
I balked, and Thomas tipped my chin to meet my gaze beneath the brim of my hat.
“People will talk, Anne. They’ll talk, and they’ll speculate about where you’ve been and what—and who—you’ve been doing it with. What they don’t know, they might fabricate. But in the end, none of that really matters. You’re here, impossible as it seems. And no one can dispute that.”
“I’m here. As impossible as it seems,” I repeated, nodding.
“What you say to fill in the blanks—or not—is entirely up to you. I’ll be beside you, and eventually . . . they’ll lose interest.”
I nodded again, more firmly, and linked my arm through his. “Thank you, Thomas.” My words were paltry, considering how much he’d done for me, but he let me hold on to him, and we entered the church together.
8 July 1921
She is the same. But not the same at all.
Her skin has the same luster, her eyes the same tilt. Her nose, her chin, and the shape of the fine bones of her face are all unchanged. Her hair has grown so long that it brushes the middle of her back. But it is still dark, and it still curls. She is as slight as I remember and not especially tall. Her laugh made me want to weep—a memory come to life, the sound of a sweeter time, of an old friend and new pain. New pain because she has returned, and I’d given up on her. I didn’t find her. She found us, and oddly, she isn’t angry. She isn’t broken. It’s almost as if she isn’t Anne.
