The Last Will of Moira Leahy

by Therese Walsh

  “I used to trust my feelings the way I trust the sun will rise and set. They told me when to be careful and gave me music. They prevented disaster at least once. But for the most significant event of my life, my feelings failed, because I blocked her. I blocked her to punish her.”

  “No,” he said.

  “Yes, I did, to punish her because she liked the same guy that I liked and because I thought she might be seeing him and because she’d shut me out.” I rocked a little, wanted to curl up on the floor. “I didn’t come close to understanding the depth of it all—her feelings or her lies, that she’d taken my name, or how far they’d gone.”

  “You couldn’t have known.”

  “I could’ve kept a link to her or at least kept my barriers up at the end. But I wanted her to know what she’d caused, and feel my pain and hatred.”

  “Maybe she didn’t. You can’t know what she felt.”

  “I do know. I made her feel it,” I said as rain spit at me. “I wonder if she still feels it.”

  “Don’t do that. You’re here. You’re still alive.”

  I looked at the oculus, but there were no rainbows—just the storm and a cluster of birds that flew in, out again. “So is she. She’s been in a coma for nine years. She’s brain-dead.”

  WE SAT SIDE by side until the rain stopped. Noel held my hand, rubbed my skin, mumbled kindnesses. What could he say? Mine was not an ancient history littered with beautiful relics. Nothing could be done to save Moira. There would be no miracle. There was what there was: A bitter mother who believed life cruel for stealing her good daughter, a lost father, and me.

  we bought sandwiches at the bar to eat in Noel’s room. I tore into my food, but Noel just sat, expressionless.

  “Aren’t you going to eat?” I asked.

  “What about music?”

  “What about it?”

  “Is Moira why you don’t play?”

  I took a sip of water and remembered when I saw Ian for the first time after. I didn’t like to think about this, the lost look of him. I didn’t like to think about him at all. But I still recall how the wind blew his too-long hair into his eyes, covered them like the veil my mother wore to Poppy’s funeral.

  “Ian came to me after the accident. He’d figured something out—that the woman he’d had sex with that night wasn’t the woman he’d been having sex with. ‘I think I accidentally had sex with Moira before the crash,’ he said. I’ll never forget that: accidental sex.”

  “Christ. What a blow to that guy.”

  “Don’t feel sorry for him,” I snapped.

  Noel said nothing, but his eyes held tight to mine.

  I took a deep breath. “I told him that Moira had been his lover all along. I was just the girl he’d raped.”

  Noel winced. Ian’s reaction had been much stronger.

  Rape? How can you say that? It was incredible, beautiful even—the storm, you, all of it. I love you, Maeve. You know it!

  Incredible? Beautiful? Love? I wanted to be sick. He made me doubt myself, though. I’d liked him, had kissed him back at first. Maybe I hadn’t struggled enough. Hadn’t said no enough. Had just lain there and let him …

  Had it really been rape? But it had. It had.

  “He wouldn’t believe he’d been with Moira all along.”

  Why are you lying? You don’t think I know you? I could pick you out of a thousand identical people. You’re just different, Maeve.

  “He must’ve felt some doubt though,” I said, “because he listed things he thought proved him right. His evidence.”

  What about the necklace you wore, the one I gave you?

  What necklace?

  The saxophone stone! And what about the time you played for me in the grass? That was real!

  Moira never played the saxophone for you. She couldn’t have, because she couldn’t play.

  You pretended to! he said. But it was all there in the touch of your hands. No, you’re lying, he repeated, and his eyes grew wide. Moira, Moira, he said in a crazy, escalating chant.

  What a twist. He’d thought I was pretending to be my sister.

  You’re not Maeve, he said, but you’re letting them believe it because you want to be her. Jealous bitch! You’re Moira! he shouted. Maeve’s the one fighting for her life in a hospital right now, and you stole her name because you’re weak! Don’t think I won’t know! I’ll know when you never play the saxophone again! I’ll know because you’ll be too chickenshit to do anything with your life but sit in your garden with a book and play that fucking piano!

  “Maeve?”

  I lay my shredded napkin on the table. “Ian thought I was Moira after the accident. I considered the idea for a while—that I was her and I’d just lost my mind somewhere along the way.

  “A few days later I went out onto the Penobscot with my sax. I didn’t care that it wasn’t safe to be on the water anymore, I just had to get away from everything and everyone on the land. And I think I needed that communion, you know, to play my music and feel that I was me, Maeve. But when I tried, I couldn’t—” I choked on the words. “I couldn’t catch my breath. I felt like I’d lost a lung.”

  I’ll know when you never play the saxophone again.

  Random pieces of life fell into place there on the water. Ian watching me with his telescope, listening to me play in his boat. Ian making me a saxophone necklace that I’d never seen. Ian asking Moira to play for him. Ian asking Kit when my album would come out, if I’d really tour Europe someday, when I’d leave for good. Ian telling me I might just be the one to get out of Maine, a spark of grudging admiration in his eyes right before he kissed me on my birthday. The piano music I’d seen flung around the room. Moira’s desire to learn the sax. Moira’s anger, the way she’d blocked me out.

  “Moira had loved Ian, and he’d loved the idea, I guess, of someone who’d have a big career outside of Castine. How could I ever find joy in music again when it was at the center of so much jealousy and pain, and the greatest loss I’ll ever know? I tipped my sax over the side.”

  It had been quick, the sea’s claiming of my instrument. The bell had filled with water, bobbled and toppled and sunk below the surface. Gone.

  “It wasn’t your fault, Maeve.”

  “Well, not just mine.”

  He shoved his plate aside. “It wasn’t your music’s, either. It wasn’t even Moira’s or Ian’s.”

  “How can you—”

  “Hang on, hang on,” he said as I gritted my teeth. “It was bad luck.”

  “Bad luck?” I almost laughed.

  “A string of circumstances that ended in tragedy. None of you are bad people.” I glared at him. “Does Ian still think …?”

  “That I’m my sister?” I shook my head. “Reality kicked in after a few weeks. He tried to apologize.”

  I’m sorry. I’m sorry for everything.

  I’d said nothing. Just left him where he’d found me, standing on the stone beach to stare at the sea.

  Later, I’d gone to Bangor to see my sister. I went every day at first, then less often when they transferred her to a long-term facility closer to home. Each trip scored me like a fresh cut to my heart, so much worse than anything I’d seen with Poppy. No smile or glimmer of light from her, no feeling. Even her face began to lose its natural shape, the dips and valleys filling into roundness.

  Dead. Brain-dead. My sister was dead inside. She was no longer in the bed, I’d tell myself, she was … elsewhere.

  I couldn’t have imagined anything worse, until the day I overheard my sister’s doctor speaking with my father. He’d run some tests, he explained, because of abnormalities in Moira’s cycle, and they’d discovered something called a missed miscarriage. Moira had been pregnant. When my father noticed my presence in the doorway, he set the rules.

  We won’t tell your mother about this. She doesn’t need to know about another lost child. We’ll never speak of this again—not to another soul, not even to each other.

  I might hav
e gone crazy, if not for Kit. Something happened to her when I grew somber and careful: She asserted herself like never before. I suppose she recognized that no one, including me, was taking care of me—though my dad tried, when he wasn’t working all hours—so she decided to take up the cause.

  “Kit and I had both applied for early graduation and made it through the hoops. She pushed me to stick to that plan, told me it’d be good to leave Maine and start over in a new place. And I’d realized something. Hard work made the days move faster and unfocused my mind on everything I’d lost.”

  How easy it had been to submerge myself in language instead.

  Vinah way pleshee myna.

  “You know the rest. We were accepted at Betheny U. I haven’t been back to Castine in years. It’s just too hard. End of story.”

  After we finished eating, I gathered our dinnerware to return to the bar and caught him staring at me in that way that meant he was trying to puzzle something out.

  “What?”

  “Who—Forget it.”

  “Go ahead. Ask.” I’d made my soggy pages available for viewing. He could turn them if he wished.

  “Moira’s been brain-dead for almost a decade. What about closure? Wouldn’t everyone like it? Have your parents considered taking her off life support?”

  “They did. They took her off four years ago.” I rubbed my arms; this particular ache never lessened. “Moira’s case is a medical anomaly,” I said. “She kept breathing without any help at all. No one understands why.”

  Out of Time

  Castine, Maine

  MAY 1992

  Moira and Maeve are seven

  “It was the summer of 1779,” said Mrs. Markey. She stood in the field with all of Maeve and Moira’s first-grade classmates. It was a familiar field, home to ball games and sometimes long walks. Moira watched a cricket leap around a patch of grass until she heard the word ghost. “The story goes that a ghost lives here, down deep in a cavern beneath the bricks. Castine’s drummer boy died during a battle in the Revolution, which is very sad, isn’t it, boys and girls?”

  They all nodded, quiet.

  “Some people used to say you could hear the boy pound on his drum at midnight. That’s kind of scary, isn’t it?”

  They nodded again, and Mrs. Markey smiled a little. Moira took Maeve’s hand and squeezed.

  “But we don’t really believe in ghosts, do we?”

  Moira shook her head so hard, she gave herself a headache.

  “Legend says the ghost decided to leave the field where he’d died to come here to the dungeon of Fort George.” She pointed at a brick-and-cement structure that didn’t seem much longer than Daddy was tall. “Are there any questions?”

  No one seemed to have any.

  “Then we’re off to Fort Madison. Come along, class.”

  Maeve grabbed Moira’s arm, which made her trip a little. “Why do you think he went?”

  Moira screwed up her face. “What do you mean?”

  “The ghost boy. Why would he leave a big field and go into a tiny dungeon?”

  She didn’t know; she shook her head.

  “It doesn’t seem very smart.”

  Moira agreed with her that it didn’t, then picked a dandelion and blew white fluff in Maeve’s face, happy to be free of ghosts and dungeons and all things that go bump in the night.

  The Third Will

  MOIRA

  SEVERAL TIMES DURING THE NIGHT I WAS AWAKENED BY THE TOUCH OF THE WIND STIRRING THROUGH THE SLEEPING TREES, WHISPERING GENTLY IN MY EAR A THOUSAND REMINDERS OF YESTERDAY’S DREAMS. STAY A MOMENT, I ASKED, BUT BEFORE I COULD OPEN MY EYES THE FRAGRANCE WAS GONE, AS A BIRD IN WILD FLIGHT.

  —NOYES CAPEHART LONG, FROM HIS PAINTING WHISPERER

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  SECOND CHANCES

  “I have something to tell you,” Noel said the next morning. We had turned the settee in my room toward the window and sat watching raindrops smear over our reflections. “I hate to bring it up after yesterday.”

  I couldn’t take any more pity. Not from either of us.

  “It was sad for me, remembering,” I said, “but I’m okay. Moira’s accident happened years ago. It’s not my now.” Or it wasn’t, usually. I propped my feet against the window’s wooden framework. “Shoot.”

  He leaned back, appraised me for a second. “I called my grandfather last night to say we’d be home soon. He wasn’t happy.”

  This threw me. “He misses you, I know it.”

  “He wants me to stay and hand those notes over to Jakes.”

  “Okay, this might be a stupid question,” I said, drumming my fingers over my thighs, “but why didn’t he send everything to Jakes himself?”

  “Because he promised my mother that any search would go through me. The risk would have to be mine.”

  “Risk?”

  “Evocative word, isn’t it? I heard it for the first time yesterday. He threw in some guilt, too.” Noel’s accent thickened to Garrick levels: “‘You don’t know what it’s like to want something and have no choice but to wait with hope?’” His look took on a new significance and lassoed me in.

  “The risk,” I said, after a hard swallow. “What did he mean?”

  “On my eighteenth birthday, he gave me a letter from my mother—something she’d written years before. I wouldn’t read it. That letter was in the first FedEx.”

  “Jesus, Noel! You never opened it?”

  “I didn’t want her excuses.”

  My feet hit the floor. “You have a window to the past! You can finally understand! If you won’t, then give it to me and I’ll—”

  “I opened it last night. After.”

  After my meltdown. After he’d found me in the rain. After we’d talked about After.

  “What you told me, it made me think …”

  “Good,” I said. “If any part of my history inspired you to take real action now, then I’m nothing but glad.”

  “I don’t know if I am.”

  His mother’s letter, he explained, had been far from a sweet bedtime tale. She’d written of a man who beat a woman, who broke her nose and ribs, shoved her down an elevator shaft. A woman who ran but was always found, who was threatened with a gun and death. A woman who became pregnant and ran harder, hid better. Who landed in an asylum.

  “That’s where I was born, in a nuthouse, and then I was shipped off to my grandfather. They kept her for another five years, until she stopped insisting my father hid behind every closed door with a gun,” he said, as I dug my nails into my palms. “She lived with us for a while. I remember a skinny woman. Bedraggled with a crooked nose. Big brown eyes. Ticklish feet.”

  I imagined this: a child pulling off socks, making a tattered woman smile and laugh. “Why didn’t she stay?”

  “She said she felt him out there searching and had to go before he found her, and me. Her paranoia made her leave.”

  “Maybe she did feel him. How do you know she didn’t?” Suddenly, I felt a kinship with this woman. “Does she know your father died years ago? Does she know he’s gone?” A terrible thought: “Did she kill him?”

  Noel gripped his skull, closed in on himself a little. “Nothing’s what I thought. My father’s alive, Maeve. He doesn’t know I exist. Wareham isn’t a family name, and neither is Ryan. Those names were changed because she insisted I could be stolen or hurt if he learned about me and found us. So my grandfather isolated us in a little town. Kept me out of public school. Didn’t let me walk more than a block from the shop without him, Christ, for the longest time. But I had a roomful of art supplies, didn’t I? It’s a miracle he ever gave me that motorcycle. She wanted me kept.”

  “Kept safe. She was afraid for you.”

  “She could’ve taken me with her.”

  “She didn’t want you to be hurt.”

  “I could’ve helped.”

  “You were a child.”

  “Not always a child.” He rose and clutched the curtain. I stood, too, sque
ezed his tense arm.

  “She left that letter, Noel. Wasn’t that her way of inviting you into her life, when you were ready to search?”

  “I don’t know. She could be anywhere. In an asylum, bloody well off her rocker. Dead. Or still hiding, scared.” His expression bled desperation and regret.

  What would a man capable of beating his wife do to learn she’d hidden a child from him, changed his name? What would he do, him, the worst kind of monster? Like Ian, a part of me cried, while another said, No, no, not like him. Noel’s father was far more dangerous, far more conscious of his decisions.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “The only thing I can. Find her.”

  Find her! You have to find her!

  Maybe I was living vicariously through Noel, but I ached for him to succeed and find peace. Because it was still possible.

  “I faxed everything to Jakes, including the letters in the second package. They weren’t from her,” he said, answering the question before I asked. “A next-of-kin notice that she’d checked out of a hospital in Lucerne, another note from a safe house in Purbeck, that sort of thing. Now that he has it all, things could move quickly.”

  “Should you leave for Paris today?” I asked, as a cold wind leaked through the window seams.

  “He said I should wait until he knows which side of the continent she’s on, if she’s here at all. So I need to stay. More than that, I want to. Effing weird, eh?”

  “Not weird. She’s your mother.” I smiled as reassuringly as I could and stifled what I knew to be true: Life made no guarantees when it came to closure.

  THE WEATHER, loyal to the forecast, stayed wretched all day. Noel and I didn’t do much. Played cards. Watched TV. Waited for the phone to ring. I lay on the bed at one point with my legs straight up against the headboard and wall.

  “What’re you doing?” Noel asked.

  “Imagining life as a ceiling creature. See that lamp there?” I pointed at the scoop-bowl light above me. “A ceiling creature could sit in that.”

  “A ceiling creature would burn its ass on the bulb.”