What Matters Most

by Luanne Rice

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part Two

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Part Three

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Also by Luanne Rice

  Copyright

  To Irwyn Applebaum,

  With love and gratitude

  Acknowledgments

  I’m grateful to everyone at Bantam Books, starting with my publisher, Irwyn Applebaum; my beloved editors—deputy publisher Nita Taublib and Tracy Devine; and Kerri Buckley. Thank you to Betsy Hulsebosch and Carolyn Schwartz for everything, including the What Matters Most website, and to Cynthia Lasky, Barb Burg, Gina Wachtel, Melissa Lord, Christian Waters, Sarah Elliott, Kenneth Wohlrob, Quinne Rogers, Sarah Smith, Jordana Schlisser, Stacey Levitt, Igor Aronov, Mark Brower, Kathleen Baldonado, Ruth Toda, Deb Dywer, George Fisher, Phil Canterbury, Lane Rider, and all the sales reps. I’m grateful to Paolo Pepe for the luminous book cover, and to Virginia Norey for the poetic interior art. I’d like to single out and thank Susan Corcoran, my publicist, because I’ve been with her since day one.

  Love and gratitude to my agent and close friend Andrea Cirillo, and everyone at the Jane Rotrosen Agency: Jane Berkey, Don Cleary, Meg Ruley, Peggy Gordijn, Annelise Robey, Kelly Harms, Kelli Fillingim, Christina Hogrebe, Trinity Boscardin, Lindsay Klemas, Kathy Lee Hart, and Penelope Bussolino.

  Much gratitude to Blair Brown for reading this novel, and to Sherry Huber, producer at Random House Audio.

  I am thankful beyond words for my sisters and their families: Rosemary, Roger, Kate, Molly, and Emily Goettsche; and Maureen, Olivier, and Amelia Onorato. Also, I send love to my parents and Mim.

  Thank you to Robert and Joan Arrigan, for the news from Ireland and Rhode Island.

  Mia and the BDG forever.

  Maggie, Mae-Mae, and Maisie always.

  My ancestors, my friends, my beloveds, the ghosts, my saints, the ones who guide me, thank you for letting me see what matters most.

  Prologue

  The annual Children’s Home summer beach picnic was on everyone’s mind, and the kitchen was bustling. A ham roasting, to be sliced and served cold; Dublin Bay prawns, a gift from one of St. Augustine’s benefactors, chilling in the huge refrigerator; fresh-baked bread cooling on the rack; cookies already packed into baskets.

  Kathleen Murphy, thirteen, stood at the long stainless-steel work table, peeling potatoes for potato salad. Her fingers worked so fast, a total blur to anyone who might be watching. Her long dark hair was held back in a ponytail, and her clothes were protected by a stiff green apron. She kept one eye on her work, another on the side door. Sister Anastasia would be back in five minutes, and if James Sullivan wasn’t here by then, there’d be hell to pay.

  She occupied her mind by imagining the elegant meal she wished she were preparing instead of the one she actually was. While her work as kitchen apprentice to Sister Theresa had taught her how to prepare institutional food as well as any other student, Kathleen dreamed of making gourmet meals—the kind she read about in Sister’s fancy cookbooks: artichoke and arugula salad, Marseilles bouillabaisse, rack of lamb, seared tuna, mushroom risotto…

  When the door finally opened and James came tearing in as if running down the football field, Kathleen finally let out a breath—along with the scolding he so desperately needed.

  “For the love of God, what’re you trying to do? Get us all in trouble? You want to ruin the picnic? You know if she gets mad she’s liable to cancel the whole thing! Here it is, our summer outing, and you’re trying to destroy our fun. That’s just like you, James. Just exactly, completely—”

  “Oh, stop it, Kathleen,” he said, grinning as he caught the towel she threw him. “You know Sister’s not canceling anything. She’s as excited as you are.”

  “Where were you, anyway?” Kathleen asked, suspicious. James had been late to his dishwashing job every day this week. Usually he told her everything. They lived in separate quarters, of course—him with the boys, her with the girls—but they had always arranged to be in the same classes, at the same recreation periods, and in the same general vicinity for jobs.

  “Could you possibly have used more dishes, cooking today?” he asked, viewing the pile in the sink.

  “Don’t give me any trouble,” she warned him. “I covered for you with Sister. She asked what you were doing, and I told her you were unloading the grocer’s truck out back. When she sees that sunburn and all those new freckles, she’ll know I was lying, that you’ve been out in the sun somewhere. Where were you? Tell me, James.”

  “I will,” he said, attacking the dishes. “I promise. But first, let me put a dent in this mountain.” He glanced over, gave her a devilish smile, making her melt. He always did. His hair was too red, and he had too many freckles, and his ears stood out, but the sight of him made Kathleen’s heart beat just right: nice and steady, safe and happy.

  She worked twice as fast, now that he was here, slicing up potatoes into perfect cubes, tossing them into the big stainless-steel bowl. She and James had met as babies. They had been born in the same hospital, three weeks apart, and their mothers—for reasons known only to God, the nuns, and their mothers themselves—had decided to drop them off at St. Augustine’s Children’s Home, a red-brick institution on a quiet side street in a residential Dublin neighborhood. Bye-bye, babies.

  Kathleen remembered being in the nursery with James. She did—no lie, and when people tried to suggest she didn’t really remember that far back, she’d been known to fight them. This was her oldest, strongest memory, and she safeguarded it with a vengeance. Their cribs had been side by side. When she’d cry at night, she’d turn over and see his big blue eyes staring at her. No matter what time it was, he’d be wide awake, keeping watch over her. Always there, right there.

  The nuns kept infants and toddlers together until the age of four, not worrying about whether they were boys or girls. The cuter the baby, the faster the adoption. Perhaps it was James’s reputation for not sleeping that kept him at St. Augustine’s that first year; probably it was Kathleen’s propensity to wail her head off day and night that had thwarted her departure. Whatever the reason neither of them had been adopted, they made it through that first year together.

  Even before they learned to talk, they whispered and laughed in their own language. They chased each other around the nursery—first crawling, then toddling. James’s favorite toy was a corduroy lamb, and Kathleen’s was a baby doll with red hair.

  When he was two, a family took James for a tryout. Kathleen remembered, as clearly as if it were yesterday, the feeling that her right arm had been cut off. Instead of crying about it, she had stopped crying altogether—stopped babbling, gurgling, eating, and sleeping, too. She slept with her red-haired doll clutched to her heart. />
  One night she reached through the bars of her crib to pull James’s crib—even though he was no longer in it, and it was now occupied by a pudgy bald toddler named Bartholomew—close to her. All she’d wanted was to touch the mattress on which James used to sleep, to grasp a corner of his pillow in her little fingers. But poor Bartholomew had been terrified, not knowing what she was doing, and he broke his arm trying to climb over the bars to get away.

  The test adoption of James hadn’t worked very well.

  He came back to St. Augustine’s. Although the official reason given had been that he kept everyone up at night with his startling imitation of Dublin’s crows, Kathleen knew otherwise. “Caw!” he’d cry. “Caw, Caw!” To some, the noise he made sounded like the huge birds roosting in the trees along the serpentine of St. Stephen’s Green. But “Caw” was actually James’s way of saying “Kathleen.” It was his first word.

  When they were three, Kathleen was taken by a couple who lived in Dun Laoghaire, in a house near the harbor. They were older, disappointed by life and their inability to conceive a child of their own. They admitted to the administrator that their parish priest had suggested the adoption as a way to save their marriage. They smelled of cabbage and tobacco. Their house was small and cramped, unlike the sprawling, drafty Children’s Home.

  Kathleen’s heart constricted with grief, missing James. At night, she would sob silently in her bed, holding her red-haired doll close to her face. If she concentrated very hard, she could feel James with her, see his blue eyes through her crib’s bars. Her heartache was so deep she developed a fever, soaking the sheets with sweat and tears.

  “It has germs,” the couple told her, pulling the worn little doll from her arms. “There are diseases in that place, and this has to go.” Then they threw it in the trash.

  That night, after the couple went to bed, Kathleen climbed over the bars of her crib, toddled down the dark, narrow hall, and climbed backwards down the steep stairs. Her heart was broken, and even at three she knew she had nothing left to lose. Opening the cupboard under the sink, she found the overflowing kitchen garbage pail. Choking on sobs, she reached up, trying to get her little hand inside, where she’d seen them discard her doll.

  Tugging the pail over, she was suddenly covered with buttered noodles, cabbage leaves, tea bags, and cigarette butts. But she had her doll, and she held it to her thrashing heart. Awakened by the clatter, the couple came running downstairs. Kathleen heard them shrieking with dismay, felt them trying to pry her doll from her fingers. She wasn’t sure which one she bit—as hard as she could, sinking her teeth into his or her hand—and she honestly didn’t care. “James!” she cried. “James!”

  She was covered with garbage, but they didn’t even bathe her before driving her back to the Children’s Home.

  By the time they were four, James was moved into the boys’ wing, and Kathleen to the girls’. The adjustment was difficult, but they found many ways to be together. The Children’s Home was shaped like a big U, and every night before bed, they would stand in their respective windows and wave. When Kathleen couldn’t sleep, she would go to the window, and as often as not, James would be standing there, watching from his room across the courtyard for her.

  Years went by. When she hated doing math and science homework, he did it for her. When they had a Christmas pageant, he helped her rehearse to be Mary. When she got lice and the nuns made her cut off her long dark hair, he held her while she shook and shuddered, telling her she was the prettiest girl in the world. When Sister Anastasia gave Kathleen the much-coveted kitchen apprentice job, James took the conversely loathed and always-avoided dishwashing position.

  And sometimes, when the east wind blew and the smell of the sea wafted over the Dublin rooftops, they would stand in the tar courtyard and talk about going to the beach. The nuns took them once a year, during the summer, and to both Kathleen and James, those were the happiest times. Their feet in the sand, swimming in the water, playing all day and feeling as happy as anyone in the world.

  While workers at the Children’s Home said that James and Kathleen were like brother and sister, Kathleen knew that wasn’t true. What she felt for James was so much deeper than that. He was her family, yes, but not in the simple, innocent way kids felt for their siblings. Kathleen had seen brothers and sisters—orphaned by car crashes, or abandoned by alcoholics, or left homeless by fire—arrive at the Home. She had seen them stick together, protect one another, tease each other. Kathleen had watched how comfortable they seemed together, but also, sometimes, capable of indifference, sharp cruelty, and intense rivalry with each other.

  Kathleen had never felt those ways about James. She loved him down to her bones. There were moments of comfort together, but as time went on, they gave way to such deep, nameless longing, she felt it along every inch of her skin.

  Sometimes the nuns rented videos for them, and when Kathleen saw love scenes, a girl kissing a boy, she thought of James. Lying in bed at night, she used to imagine him kissing her like those kids in the movies. Last winter, on a cold night when everyone else was snuggled in their beds, they had made it come true. They had kissed in the warm furnace room, and in that moment when Kathleen had felt his shy arms around her, she had known the meaning of true, utter happiness; pure closeness with another human being.

  “How long are we going to live at the Home?” she asked him one day last spring, on a group excursion to Glencree, in the Wicklow Hills, shortly after a visit from the nun James called Sister Nemesis. Walking along a stream, they found a shady spot under a weeping willow tree, and sat down.

  “Until we grow up,” he said. “I guess. How long do other kids stay in their homes?”

  By then they’d both given up hoping and fearing they’d be adopted. The Children’s Home was where they belonged. The nuns were kind to them, and made special allowances for the kids who had been there longest—Kathleen and James, as well as five or six other older children. James had the attention of one nun in particular.

  She didn’t live at St. Augustine’s, but was a member of the same order as the Sisters who ran it. Sometimes she came alone, other times with a very heavy nun by her side. Stern and odd, she would ask James questions, give him IQ tests, things like that. Whenever she came, Kathleen would panic, thinking the Sister was going to tell him she’d found him a home. But she never did.

  “Do you ever think about where you came from?” Kathleen asked, shredding a willow leaf and staring at the water.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your mother and father,” she said. “Your parents. Do you ever think of them?”

  He shook his head. She stared at him, scared of the look in his eyes. “Never,” he said. “They didn’t want me. Gave me away. Why should I think of them?”

  “I don’t know. Just seems natural,” she said. “You could ask Sister,” she continued. “The one who always comes to check on you.”

  “Sister Nemesis?” he asked. “Or Sister Tub-o-Lard? What do they know?”

  “Well, they’re interested in you for some reason. Maybe they know where you came from, and they’d tell you if you asked—tell you your parents’ names!”

  “Why, so I could thank them personally for leaving me in this place?”

  “So you don’t think of your parents?”

  “Think of lousy rotten people who didn’t even want their own son? Ha! No way, Kat. Don’t tell me you think about your parents?”

  Kathleen shrugged, not wanting to admit to him that she thought of them often, sometimes had fantasies of them showing up together at the Children’s Home in a great big car, with fancy silver wheels. They would walk up the steps, her mother in a beautiful fur coat and her father in a striped suit—like the adoption lawyers who sometimes showed up to haggle over paperwork—and ask to see Kathleen Murphy.

  They would love her on sight, of course. She would tumble into their arms, and they would tell her it had all been a terrible mistake. They had never meant to give he
r to the nuns…on this her fantasy stumbled, but she figured it had something to do with amnesia, financial reversals, or a near-fatal disease. They would tell her they wanted her to return home with them, and she would ask if she could bring James. Because her parents loved her so much and could deny her nothing, they would agree instantly.

  “No, I never think of them,” she said to James, unable to admit the truth, knowing that he would take it as a betrayal.

  “Good,” he said, taking her hand. “We’re alone in the world, Kat, and don’t forget it.”

  “But what…” she began slowly, wishing she could win him over to the idea that maybe their parents were really wonderful people so he’d be more willing to join her when hers finally arrived. “What if they’re really good? What if they really loved us, but just couldn’t raise us?”

  “Kathleen,” he said, bringing his face close to hers, looking hard into her eyes, the way he used to when they were babies and their cribs side by side. And now, since that kiss in the furnace room, creating a rush of grown-up longing all through her body. “They don’t care about us. They threw us away. We’re unwanted.”

  “I want you,” she said, squeezing his hand, not really knowing what she meant, or why the words made her throat ache.

  “And I want you,” he said, squeezing back. “You’re mine, and I’m yours. That’s just the way it is, the way it will be forever. That’s why we’ve never gotten adopted—because we’re meant to be together.”

  “What will happen after we grow up and leave the Children’s Home?”

  He shook his head. “Don’t worry about that. I’ll take care of you, Kathleen. Haven’t I always?”

  “Yes,” she said. “You have.”

  “You’re mine, and I’m yours,” James said, and the way he moved his hand to her wrist and slowly up her bare arm, making her whole body tingle, the way he looked into her eyes, reminded Kathleen of the way love looked in the movies, the way she and James had started making it come true in their kiss that December night, and she nearly fainted with yearning.