Sandcastles

by Luanne Rice

  Ten

  You have to tell me,” Regis said, scrunched up next to Agnes on the bed. “What’s in the picture?” Cece had run down to retrieve Agnes’s camera last night after they got home (or that morning?) and brought it with her when she visited earlier.

  “I don’t remember,” Agnes said, lying back against the pillows. Her head was pounding so hard, she couldn’t think. Sunlight was flooding through the windows, and even though it was so bright and beautiful, she knew it was making her headache worse. “Tell me again—how was he, what did he look like?”

  “He’s like he always was. Our wonderful dad. I’m not sure I remembered that he was that tall. It’s weird.” Regis shook her head. “You should have seen him give you mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, lug you up the beach. He totally saved your life.”

  “Nothing like that ever happened before…”

  “You mean, having to have your life saved from bleeding to death and drowning? Jesus, Agnes…you really could have died.”

  “No. I mean hitting a rock. I’ve dived off that wall a hundred times. I know exactly where that rock was supposed to be; I swear, it moved. Or maybe I’d just lost my bearings…”

  “Looking for your lost vision,” Regis said wryly.

  “Don’t make fun of me,” Agnes said.

  “It’s just, people don’t look for visions,” Regis said. “They either have them, or they don’t. Aunt Bernie, supposedly…”

  “Exactly! That’s my point. She had one on the Academy grounds, and I swear I did, too. And besides, don’t you think that Dad being there, right at that exact minute, was pretty much a miracle? The way he saved my life?”

  “That part’s pretty cool,” Regis agreed. “But look, Agnes. Cece told me about the angel with red hair. You know? It sounds nutty. And the vision thing…”

  “Regis, it’s on my camera.”

  “Let’s see that,” Regis said, and Agnes handed it over.

  She watched Regis’s expression. Her sister was skeptical about religious matters, believed that nature held enough wonders to cover the mysteries of life. She was completely practical, relying on her own strength and willpower to make things happen. So, watching her expression change as she gazed at the digital camera’s screen, Agnes felt triumphant.

  “See?” Agnes asked.

  Climbing up on the wall, the stones had felt warm beneath her bare feet, holding on to the last of the day’s heat. And then she had started running. She had felt as if she could fly, take off like an angel into the sky. For all the light of the stars, the night was still so dark and mysterious, but then the white light had seemed to wrap her up, lift her into itself.

  “It’s your nightgown,” Regis said.

  “What?” Agnes asked.

  “A filmy white blur,” Regis said, staring. “That’s what it has to be.”

  “You’re ruining it,” Agnes said, trembling.

  “Agnes,” Regis said, taking her hand. “Maybe it’s seagulls taking off. You scared them when you dove in. It’s just a white flash, not a vision.”

  Tears popped into Agnes’s eyes.

  “What’s wrong?” Regis asked, looking scared.

  “Don’t you know how badly I need to believe in something good?” Agnes asked, breaking down. “That there’s someone looking out for us, after everything? With Dad gone, in jail for something he didn’t mean to do…and Mom just lost…and you marrying Peter…” The words were out before she could stop them.

  “Peter?”

  “Yes!” Agnes said, tears streaming as her head started to pound. “He’s just your version of a vision, or an angel. Someone you need to keep the darkness away…”

  “Agnes,” Regis said, blanching as her sister buried her face in her hands and sobbed.

  “I want to know someone is protecting us,” Agnes wept. She couldn’t bear the idea of Regis taking it away from her, the knowledge that she had seen something holy, mystical last night, that there was a good force keeping watch over their family.

  Regis took her hand. When Agnes looked up, her sister’s face was nearly in hers, eye to eye. “We do that for each other,” she said. “And yes, Peter does that for me. If you say those are angel wings in the picture, then so be it. What do I know?”

  Just then the door opened, and Agnes’s heart thumped. She sank into her pillows, depleted from everything, and tried to smile through her tears. Last night he’d promised to come back today, and here he was.

  “Speak of the devil,” Regis said. “Brendan, the redheaded archangel.”

  “Excuse me?” he asked.

  “Never mind,” Regis said with a quick squeeze of Agnes’s hand. “Private joke.”

  “Feeling better?” he asked, looking straight at Agnes.

  She nodded. “Yes. Thank you.”

  “That’s really good to hear,” he said. “It’s a good sign.”

  “Are you her nurse today?” Regis asked.

  Brendan didn’t reply. He gazed at Agnes, eyes sparkling. He looked a few years older than Regis—maybe twenty-two or twenty-three. He was about five-nine, very thin, with bright red hair. Agnes had never seen such clear blue eyes, and she tingled, knowing they were trained on her.

  “Brendan McCarthy?” Regis asked, leaning forward to read his name off his badge. “Hello? Are you her nurse today?”

  “Uh, no. I’m in the ER…they told me Agnes had been moved to the sixth floor. I just wanted to check and see how she was doing. And…” he said, trailing off, looking at Agnes again, “and bring you this…” He placed a shell on her tray. She reached for it—a perfect channeled whelk.

  “Thank you,” she said. “How did you know I like shells?”

  “I didn’t,” he said. “But I found it and thought of you.”

  “Hey, were you on the beach last night?” Regis asked, starting to hold up the camera for him to see. “Before you came to work? I think my sister got a shot of your wings.”

  “Regis, stop,” Agnes said, red with embarrassment.

  “Plus,” Regis said, “I noticed you had a burr on your jeans last night. Like the kind that grows on the top of the beach…”

  “That’s some other angel,” he said, glancing at the screen.

  Agnes felt absurdly pleased as he looked back at her, ignoring Regis’s odd question about the burr.

  “I’ll make sure the nurses on this floor take good care of you,” he said.

  “Did you straighten out your work schedule?” Regis asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “No problem.”

  “It’s funny,” she said. “Most people miss work when they screw up their schedules—not show up for extra shifts. But then, angels probably work a lot of overtime, right?”

  Brendan shook his head, bemused. “Whatever you say. Look, I’ll check back later, okay, Agnes?”

  Agnes just nodded. She held the shell in her hand.

  “Okay,” Regis said for her. “Check back.”

  Brendan left the room, and Regis smiled down at Agnes. “He likes you,” she said.

  “That’s because I was his patient last night.”

  “You should have seen him standing guard over you. His supervisor came in and was all confused, because he wasn’t even scheduled to work. It’s as if he knew you were going to be here and came rushing in. Do you know him?”

  “No,” Agnes said. “Not before last night.”

  “He was wearing jeans under his ER clothes, and he had a burr stuck to the hem. I swear, it came from the thicket between the beach and the vineyard.”

  “What would he be doing there?” Agnes asked, frowning. Her head hurt, listening to Regis’s theories. They were so practical and earth-bound.

  “Maybe he was looking for his one true love…and maybe that’s you.”

  Agnes gasped, and the intake of breath hurt her bruised ribs. “Don’t say that,” she said. “Don’t you remember?”

  For once, Regis was silent. Agnes looked up, saw that Regis remembered very well. “It’s what Dad
used to say about Mom. That she was his one true love.”

  “I know.” Regis held Agnes’s hand softly, as if she were a bird with a broken wing. She stroked it gently.

  “Well, he’s home now,” Agnes went on. “He saw his one true love last night…”

  Regis didn’t say anything.

  Agnes hurt all over; the doctor said it was from being revived, having her rib cage nearly cracked by CPR. Her father had given her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Agnes was alive because of him. It was all so miraculous; why did it have to feel so tragic? The confusion made her shimmer and start to cry again.

  “Did I upset you?” Regis asked, surprised.

  “It’s not that,” Agnes sobbed. “I just hurt all over.”

  “You’ll get better fast,” Regis said. “Mom’s out there talking to the doctors, but they already told her—you’re going home tomorrow. You’re going to be fine.”

  “That’s not why I hurt,” Agnes said.

  “Then what?”

  “Why isn’t Dad here?”

  Regis didn’t answer. Agnes knew her sister didn’t think she was strong enough to take it. Drifting in and out of consciousness last night, before being loaded into the ambulance, she had heard her mother yelling at her father—screaming, really, as if her insides were pouring out like black fire.

  “She won’t let him see me, right?”

  “It’s more like he doesn’t want to rock the boat. All he cares about is you getting well now. He’s just waiting to see if you come home today. You’re all he’s thinking about right now.”

  It made Agnes so sad, to think of him so near, yet so far. How must her father feel, knowing everyone was gathered together but him? Agnes wept. Why couldn’t her parents realize that they all needed to be together?

  “You know what I like thinking?” Regis asked. “How happy Dad will be when he sees Sisela. He loved her so much, didn’t he?”

  But Agnes couldn’t reply. All she could do was hold the shell Brendan had given her, and think of her father, and try not to break apart.

  That night John borrowed the nuns’ station wagon to drive to the hospital. Bernie had told him they wanted to keep Agnes in the hospital one more night, to be safe. It felt strange, driving these familiar roads again. He remembered coming this way the night Agnes was born—for the births of all three of his daughters, in fact.

  Parking in the visitor’s lot, he felt a steady breeze blowing off the harbor. He entered through the main doors, and his whole body tensed. The plaster walls and linoleum floors reminded him of being in an institution; it was a visceral reaction, and he tried to shake it off by running up the stairs.

  When he reached Agnes’s room, his only reaction was to the sight of his daughter. She lay back against her white pillow, her head bandaged, her eyes closed. Her mother and sisters had left for the evening; she was all alone.

  “Sweetheart,” he whispered.

  Her eyes fluttered open. “Daddy!” she said.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “My head hurts,” she said.

  “I’m sorry, honey. It probably will for a while, but not too much longer. You really gave us a scare.”

  “I didn’t know that rock was there,” she murmured, tears squeezing from the corners of her eyes.

  “The tide must have been covering it.”

  “I’m sorry for making you worry,” she said. “And for hitting the rock…”

  “Please don’t be sorry for anything, Agnes. As long as you’re okay, that’s all we care about.”

  She nodded, but her shoulders began to shake with helpless sobs. It had all been too much for her. John sat beside her, holding her softly. She cried against his chest, her tears soaking his shirt. He thought of that treacherous boulder protruding in the bay, of how close they had come to losing her to it.

  “You need some rest,” he whispered now.

  “Don’t go, Dad,” she wept quietly, fists balled like a small child’s. “Don’t leave before I go to sleep.”

  “I won’t, Agnes. I promise I won’t,” he said.

  And he didn’t; he stayed until she had fallen back to sleep, and just to make sure, for quite a long time afterward.

  The next day, after Agnes was home safe, in her bed, Honor stood in her studio, covered in oil paint. The craziness of it—preparing a canvas, setting out her paints, getting to work, after Agnes had had such a near miss—sort of stunned her. But she’d gone to bed last night, wrung out with worry and relief and about a million other emotions, and found herself completely unable to sleep—or even shut her eyes.

  All she could see was John. Soaking wet, covered in sand, lifting Agnes into his arms…It all felt so unreal. It had haunted her all through the hours she couldn’t sleep last night, the sense of John there, holding their daughter. First Agnes, then Regis—the image shifted.

  She had practically run into her studio to paint it. The color and lines had flowed, keeping her focused on the canvas instead of her child in the hospital.

  She stroked paint onto the canvas, a rough image of John with their daughter in his arms. Was it Regis or Agnes? She didn’t even know, and she wasn’t sure it mattered. Her emotions came gushing out in the work. He looked so tender, yet his intensity came through as well. His darkness had caused so much turmoil, and she didn’t want to leave any of it out.

  Now, in the background, the vanishing point: the top of the hill, crowned by the old stone wall. She lowered her brush. Why was she painting that now? Yet she couldn’t leave it out.

  There, her brush rounding the stones, dotting on specks of white, lichens softening the contours. She left a dark spot, the hole in the wall where the box had been hidden.

  Oh, what a scavenger hunt the box had provided. There was the ticket stub, and a gold ring, a death certificate and a hand-drawn map of Ireland had shown the places most precious to Cormac Sullivan: Counties Cork and Kerry, their jagged peninsulas reaching into the Atlantic Ocean like long, rocky fingers; at the tip of one, Ballincastle, was the word “home.”

  Tom and Bernie had gone to Ireland first. They fell in love with Dublin—land of the Kellys—and every week they sent John and Honor postcards of castles, the River Liffey, and flower-bedecked pubs. Slowly painting now, Honor remembered reading those cards, dreaming of Irish romance and magic.

  Not John, though. He had his own dark obsessions about the box and what it meant, took it to the deep, hidden part of himself that nurtured his work. His family’s struggle and suffering, and the choices they’d made to create a better life for their children grew in him with a kind of rage and fury that Honor had never seen in him before.

  The famine; not enough to thrive, not enough to live. The British versus the Irish—hoarding food, and work, and life. The famine shrinking John’s ancestors’ bodies, leeching the strength from their bones. They had lived on the westernmost land in Ireland: what must it have been like, knowing that salvation lay across the waves, in America? How could they leave their beloved land and families—and how could they not? Oh, and the famine ships—families piled in, crammed together, the stench of illness and death. Losing what they loved, every inch of the way.

  John had always known his installation had to be on a cliff, at the very edge of Ireland—to symbolize how young Cormac, his great-great-grandfather, had yearned toward the opposite shore of America.

  Cormac Sullivan had been born August 1, 1831, in West Cork, and had died on November 14, 1917, in Hartford, Connecticut. He had become a stonemason in Ireland, working for his father, Seamus, who had learned the trade during the famine—a token job created by the British, indifferent to their suffering. Every bit of strength had gone into survival, but the Sullivans had become artists at the stone trade. Clearing land, building stone walls, starting their own stonecutting firm, becoming well respected in the county and beyond.

  It was on a job, clearing some seacoast property on West Cork’s Beara Peninsula, that Seamus Sullivan’s shovel struck gold—literally.
Working for the Dargans, a family that owned a farm on Ballincastle Head, he uncovered two objects: a gold chalice and the gold ring with the red stone.

  He’d gone straight to the family, given them the treasure. They had been so grateful to receive them, Mr. Dargan had given Seamus the ring—and told him the story.

  Algerian and Spanish pirates had sailed north—with the Armada and in fleets of their own—during the late 1500s. Ireland, jutting out into the Atlantic, had been irresistible, and the pirates had laid siege all along the west coast. One group had kidnapped an entire Irish town, taken them back to Algeria as slaves.

  “Dargan” was derived from “D’Aragon”—and the family’s Black Irish looks, with dark hair and blue eyes, had come from the invasion. Some of the pirates had stayed in the area, hiding their treasure in the many sea caves scored into the rocky coastline, burying it on land marked by distinctive outcroppings. The family’s dark coloring came from pirate blood.

  During the time he worked on the Dargan land, Seamus Sullivan fell in love with their daughter, Emily. She was a feisty beauty, and in a letter, he wrote, “She has black curls and blue eyes the color of Bantry Bay.” Because he had been so honest with the family, Seamus won her hand in marriage. But when he tried to give her the pirate’s ring, she gave it right back. Hating the greed and violence the pirates had visited on her family, she told Seamus to throw it into the ocean.

  Seamus knew he should have. He wanted so badly to please Emily. But his family had also been scarred, by the first famine’s poverty and starvation. Two of his brothers had died, and so had his mother, pregnant with his sister. His aunt and cousin, a neighbor, and a family friend had starved to death as well. So although Seamus had pretended to cast the ring into the ocean off Ballincastle—told Emily so—he had kept it.

  So he and his beloved Emily were married, and for such a long time, she didn’t know that he’d told her a lie. They inherited the farm when her father died; they lived there with their eight children—the oldest being John’s great-grandfather, Cormac. Perhaps Seamus considered the ring to be an insurance policy. Or maybe he just felt it had brought him so much luck—the love and trust of the Dargan family, and the hand of Emily in marriage.