When Light Breaks

by Patti Callahan Henry

  “Oh? Well, if it’s about the palm trees . . .”

  She shook her head. “No, those are all ordered and arranged.”

  I grimaced. “I need to cancel them.”

  “Oh, why?” Mrs. Marshall tapped her chest.

  Charlotte petted the cat. “We don’t like palm trees anymore. We want large live oaks, real ones at least a hundred years old.”

  I laughed, shook my head. “You know better than to listen to Charlotte. There just isn’t going to be a wedding.”

  “Oh, dear.” She hugged me. “I do know these are the days you could use your mama. If there is anything I can do, please let me know.”

  I nodded. “No, I have to do everything.”

  “Ah, just like her. But you don’t need to, dear. There are so many people who love you in this town . . . we’re all here to help.”

  “Oh, I’m sure I’ve disappointed all of you.” I reached over and rubbed behind Azalea’s ears.

  “Disappointed them? No, Kara. We love you.”

  I smiled and bit back tears. “Well, why were you about to call me?”

  “You know that broken-winged angel you took?”

  I nodded. “I love that angel.”

  “You are not going to believe this . . . the match came in to me from a junker in Georgia, and this angel has both wings.”

  “Oh, wow.”

  She nodded. “Isn’t that just amazing? It seems the angels came from a garden in an old home in Savannah. They had markings on the bottom that stated they were a pair, and my junker remembered that he had given me the other one—incredible.”

  I wanted to speak, but I couldn’t.

  “A complete angel, she’s not broken anywhere,” Mrs. Marshall said.

  “Can I see her?” I whispered.

  Mrs. Marshall waved her hand. “Follow me.”

  We wound our way among the orchids and ferns, around the clay and concrete pots, until we reached the storage room. “Here,” she said, and lifted the small concrete angel.

  I took it from her, held it between my hands. “She’s perfect.” I looked up at Mrs. Marshall. “How do you think one of them got broken, and the other stayed whole?”

  “It is the same as life. Some things break us and others keep us together.”

  “How much is she?”

  “I have a feeling you need her more than I need the money.” She touched my arm.

  “I don’t know how to thank you. This is the miracle I needed right now.”

  “That’s how it works, my dear. That’s what miracles are for—when you need them the most.”

  I drove too fast toward the hospital, my nerve endings thrumming like the air before a storm. I ran through the front doors, up the escalator to room 214 in the extended care unit.

  The door was shut; I knocked lightly. Caitlin’s face poked out of the crack, tear trails on her face. My heart sank; my hands almost slipped from the angel.

  “Kara,” she said, and opened the door fully.

  I nodded. “Is Maeve . . . ?”

  Caitlin nodded. “She woke up this morning. My mother’s brother, Maeve’s son Seamus, was just about to call you.”

  My hands gripped the angel. “Should I come back?”

  She stepped out into the hall. “Let me tell you what the doctor said, then you can go in.”

  We stood in a corner by the window at the end of the hall. “She’s awake, but they say she doesn’t have long at all. Her stroke didn’t affect her speech, but has caused decreased blood supply in the rest of her organs. The doctor says they often see patients become completely alert just before . . . before they die.”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “I’m just telling you what they said, not what I believe. I think she’s waiting for my mother to come see her. . . .”

  “She hasn’t come?”

  “She will . . . my brother is bringing her now.”

  I glanced toward the door; an older man stood in the hallway, his head tilted toward us. His white hair was like a shock of bleached straw on top of his head. His nose was red, bulbous, and his grin spread wide and kind.

  “That’s my Uncle Seamus from Ireland.” Caitlin waved toward him.

  I walked over to him and held out my hand. “Hi, I’m Kara Larson.”

  He shook my hand. “Mam has asked for you.” Seamus took Caitlin’s elbow. “Let’s let Kara say hello to Mam while we go get some badly needed coffee.”

  As they walked down the hall, I pushed open the door to the hospital room. A soft swishing sound—like an angel’s wing—filled the room as the door closed behind me.

  Maeve sat up in bed, her hands folded on her chest, her gaze on me.

  “Maeve,” I said as I sat next to her. “It’s me, Kara.”

  “As if I wouldn’t be knowing who you are.” Her Irish accent was as soft as mist.

  “I’m so glad you’re awake. You scared me, you know?”

  She smiled. “Well now, it wasn’t exactly on purpose, aye?”

  I lifted the angel. “Look what I found.”

  “Oh, my. Oh, my. How did you get the wing on there?”

  “It’s a new angel . . . the match for the other.”

  Her eyes filled with tears. “What a miracle.”

  “That is exactly what I said.” I placed the angel on her bedside table.

  “Did you come here to show it to me?”

  “Yes. I thought it might help you wake up, but here you are already awake. I also brought this.” I held up the postcard. “I know they couldn’t bring your oil painting from Verandah House . . . and I thought this might be something you’d like.” I handed the postcard to her.

  She held it up; a single tear fell from her eye. “This is where he returned, right there—at the edge of the sea in one of those boats. Three brown sails.”

  My fear that Caitlin’s words were correct, that there wasn’t much time, filled me with the urgent need to know why Maeve had told me this legend. “Maeve, may I ask you a question?”

  “Anything, dear. There isn’t much I haven’t told you.”

  “Why did you tell me that myth about Richard Joyce? Why did you pretend it was your story?”

  “It was my story, child.”

  I sighed. “Caitlin told me it was the legend of the Claddagh ring. She told me it has been a favorite story of yours for your entire life.”

  “It has been my favorite story, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t the truth.”

  “But it wasn’t true, it didn’t happen to you.”

  “Kara, my dear child, all good stories hold truth whether they are true or not. This time, though, everything I told was my story. Mine has a different ending than the legend. I didn’t wait for Richard. When he came back, when he returned from the far side of the sea, I was married to Sean Mahoney. It was too late for me. But Richard’s love waited.”

  Her words took my breath away. An important truth awakened within that space. “And you wanted to change the ending to my story. You wanted me to wait.”

  Maeve stared at me with such clarity and brilliance in her gaze, I held my breath. “Kara, listen now. I wanted you to wonder how you would change your life if you knew he was coming back for you.”

  I released my held breath. “What?”

  “Did you not hear me? I wanted you to wonder how you would change your life if you knew he was coming back for you. Would you fill your life with all you have now if you knew, really knew he’d return?”

  I had no answer to this question—one I had never dared ask myself. What, if anything, would I change if I knew he’d come for me?

  I closed my eyes, but Maeve’s voice continued. “I never thought of this, I just merely believed that he was gone. I believed he would never return, and so I filled my life with other people. I wanted to give you the chance to at least think about it, no matter what you decided.

  “When you’re old, you too will see and know things you do not know now. I saw myself in you. I am old. I saw your p
ain and I did what I’ve done my whole life—I told you a story. How this story works in you is how it was meant to work in you. The same story has a different meaning for and effect on each person—this story was yours.”

  “Do you wish you’d waited, Maeve, or gone off to find him?” I placed my hand on top of hers.

  “Yes, I do. But I lived a full and beautiful life, Kara. No regrets, only a passing on of wisdom. But I believed he was gone. You think it is so different because you live here in this time, in this place, because I’m from the far side of the sea. But we are attached by the water between us. It is the same tide and moon, the same sea, love, fear, losing, and death. Love does not change with time. The love that fills us and empties us, that clips our wings so that we must decide whether to learn to fly after that. To love or to fear.” Maeve squeezed my hand, belying the weakness in her face and body.

  “Love,” I said.

  “I waited. I’d stand on the edge of the water while children played on the Big Grass, while the men fixed their nets. It was a terrible time in the village then—they were tearing down houses, building new and better ones. The young men had left for World War One. Some had come home, but many had died, and others had emigrated. I stood at the edges of the quay and waited for his hooker to return. Then they, my parents and the people of the village, told me to stop living in a dream, that he would never come, that he’d married and had children and lived in Scotland. They told me they’d learned this from his relatives in Connemara. I believed them.

  “I finally married the boy from down the lane, the one my parents had chosen for me since birth—a descendant of the Claddagh kings. He was a good man and the right man for me and my family. I loved him in faithfulness that lasted through seven children and numerous grandchildren. A love that may not have been born of passion, but that endured nonetheless. But, Kara.” She leaned forward. “Richard came back for me.”

  A free-fall feeling overcame me; I wanted to grab on to something to keep from descending into this truth—he came back and she hadn’t waited.

  “He came back.” Maeve’s expression became placid as the morning sea. “It was in August during the Blessing of the Bay.” She looked back at me now, but somehow seemed to be still there, in Claddagh at the bay. “Someday you must go . . . you must go see the Blessing of the Bay. It is the most magical, beautiful event you will witness beyond marriage or baptism. It marks the beginning of herring season. The altar boys and choir flow down from St. Mary’s on the Hill. Oh, Kara, they ring the bell and the boats form a grand circle. The priest reads from St. John—you know the story, about the Sea of Galilee, when the apostles cast their nets on the right side of the ship. Then all of creation is called upon, from angels to the fish, to give glory to God. We sing and pray.”

  Tears fell unguarded down her face. “Then a single hooker comes from ’round the bend of the quay. My body understands long before my mind does. I tremble when I see the brown sails; my limbs are weak, my heart races. I grab to my two babies, hold tight to them, believing my body is telling me to fear what comes. But it isn’t fear—it is an overwhelming knowing that the waiting has ended—but wrongly. So wrongly. All I believed of my own decisions fades into a vast uncertain place of unbelief. I hope you never understand what it is to know that all you believed is wrong—sorely wrong.”

  “Was it him?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

  She nodded. “Yes. He came during the Blessing of the Bay. He hadn’t come before because he’d been warned that if he returned to Ireland, he would be killed in retaliation for what his family did in the Easter Rising. But he came back . . . for me. He’d been living in Scotland with relatives; he’d been at the other edge of the sea. But it was too late . . . too late.”

  Maeve turned away, then back to me. “He came back and I was married, with two babies. I struggled with a heart full of such grief I could barely move; I was weighed down with the knowledge that I hadn’t waited for this man, that I’d believed the lies, that I hadn’t had faith in him.

  “In Claddagh there is no such thing as divorce. The battle that waged inside my heart was fiercer than the storm that came months later.”

  “Storm?” I leaned forward.

  “Child, you’re always trying to jump ahead. Just listen. Finally he begged me to see him; he slipped me a letter on the Big Grass during an afternoon festival. The note contained a W. B. Yeats poem called ‘Where My Books Go.’ ” She stared off and recited the poem.

  All the words that I utter

  And all the words that I write

  Must spread out their wings untiring

  And never rest in their flight

  Till they come to where your sad, sad heart is,

  And sing to you in the night,

  Beyond where the waters are moving,

  Storm darkened or starry bright.

  Maeve looked at me. “I will not tell you the rest of his words—they are mine to hold close.”

  “That is the most beautiful poem I’ve ever heard . . . I would’ve run to him . . . run,” I said.

  “For two months I struggled with my heart, with my reason—until I decided I’d meet him the next evening. He lived in Connemara, up the coast, with relatives. The Blessing of the Bay was in August—it was now October when I agreed to meet him. And what happened next, what happened that night was my doing because I was intent on betraying my family, my name, my honor.”

  “What happened next?”

  “It was October, 1927. He had left the village and waited for me to respond, waited for me to meet him. Above all, he was a fisherman and needed to be in a city with a port, with fishing boats. The night before I was to leave to meet him, with the pitiful excuse of shopping in Connemara, a terrible storm arose. Our Claddagh men were out fishing in the night, in this storm, on the TrueLight—one of the remaining hookers.” She stopped, closed her eyes.

  “You don’t have to finish if this . . . hurts,” I said.

  “Oh, child.” She opened her eyes. “I must. I have never spoken these words until now and I must.”

  I nodded.

  “It is called the Cleggan Bay Disaster. Forty-four men lose their lives when the storm hits our coast without warning. All night long the storm rages around our village, our bay and up and down the coast. All the wives whose husbands are on the TrueLight huddle together. We pray and mourn what we believe is the inevitable—the loss of our husbands to the sea.

  “It is there, on that night, in the darkness of the storm, in the fear, that I make a decision. I walk out to the dock above the quay and lift my face to the storm. I hold my hands out, offer my own life if it will not take my husband, the father of my children, into this night, into darkness and mourning. I am selfish, mortally selfish, and am willing to take leave if Sean will live, if his children can have their da.

  “But the storm doesn’t take me. Rain pelts me with its stinging reminder of my own greedy needs. I lay on the dock, flat and cold, and I hear the Spirit again—the same as the day in the Industrial School—say, ‘Is this the woman you want to be? Running off with another man? Is this who you want to be?’

  “And I know that is not the woman I want to be. I rage at the storm, at the wind and rain, and promise I will not run hard after Richard, that I will stay if the winds will cease.

  “The storm settles then, calm and still like it is holding its raging breath. But I do not move; I stay flat on the dock, waiting for the news of my husband’s death, which will be my own fault for the evil I was planning the next day.”

  “This is so . . . sad,” I said. “My heart is breaking—”

  “No. The TrueLight survived that night—another story entirely. Sean found me on that dock, and when I fell into his arms, I did not leave them again. Ever.”

  “What happened to Richard?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Chills ran down my arm, across my body. “You never heard from him or about him again?”

  “No. I mourned him as if
he were dead, and from that moment on went forward in my life. I chose to be the woman I was meant to be, regardless of who I was with. But I never found out what happened to Richard—when I didn’t come, where did he go, what did he do? Did it break his heart beyond repair or did he move on with his life? I do not know any of this.”

  “The Industrial Schools . . . you devoted yourself to making them better?”

  “That was my memorial to Richard.”

  A tear ran down my face; I wiped it away.

  “Now, no crying,” Maeve said. “I’ve only told you this story of mine because I needed to tell it. All that remains of him is our story, and his spirit out there beyond the moving waters in Yeats’s poem. Your reason will understand this story on one level, your spirit will understand it on another . . . and you must understand both. All of our lives we must choose between what others define us to be and who we were meant to be, but this struggle is not a safeguard from sorrow. I believed my parents—believed in who they said I was and who they said I should marry. But I wish I had the chance to choose otherwise, before it was too late. But it is not too late for you. Base your choices on what you believe, on who you truly are.”

  “So, your story’s true?”

  “It is my last story. And it is fully my story, Kara. This time—it is mine.”

  “You asked me to find him.”

  “I was not free to ask this until Sean was gone. My precious husband died two years ago, and I have only now allowed the thought to enter about what finally happened to Richard, where he went, who he became.”

  Her hand loosened in mine, her eyes closed, and she faded to a place far away—perhaps to where sailboats dance on an ancient sea.

  Caitlin entered the room, patted my shoulder. “Did you have a nice visit?”

  “Yes. . . .” I stood. “She’s asleep now. I’ll let the family be alone with her. Do you promise to call if there’s any change?”