My knees buckled and I braced myself for the ground, but Nuala caught me by the armpits and steadily led me across the beach. “You disobeyed me, Finn,” she said as we walked.
“I’m—”
“Your lungs, Finn. Do not speak.”
I nodded, and Nuala continued. “I told you about the waters. I warned you about the waves. That sea is as much a graveyard as it is a playground. You promised me—” Her voice chipped off there, and we were left with only the sound of the water kissing the sand. And then she whispered, “You always keep your word.”
I wanted to drag all the sadness out of Nuala’s voice, wad it up in my pockets like old handkerchiefs. But I couldn’t. All I could do was follow her silently across the beach. Nuala didn’t ask much of me. She asked me to do my schoolwork and feed the hens, stay clear of faery rings and keep my room smelling more on the side of fresh linens than curdled milk, but that was pretty much it—that, and staying away from the ocean. And I betrayed her.
At the edge of the beach, Nuala found a rocky staircase. Ivy and moss crawled the stone walls encircling the water. Mushrooms popped up in the cracks in the stone, and strange black berries dappled curling vines. Nuala helped me up each step, one foot at a time, the way I often helped her when we climbed the steeper cliffs of Donegal.
The island, I came to realize, felt much less friendly up close than far away, and thrice I lost my footing on the steps. Nuala, though, seemed to know every nook and cranny of the rock by heart, and she nimbly guided me up the staircase.
“Watch yourself here, lass,” she said as I was just about to step in an ankle-sized crevice. “Don’t want a broken foot, do we?” She eased me over the crevice and onto a grassy platform. Dew seeped between my toes as I gazed to the dusty pink horizon. As I looked to my left, I nearly tumbled back again, as not five paces to the left stood a house—a small one, albeit, with holes dotting the thatch roof and ivy seeping out from every crack in the stone, but a house it was.
I recognized it. It was the same house I had looked upon so many times before, the stark-white ramshackle cottage hardly a dot in the distance, now was a thousand times more real.
“Now,” said Nuala, “let’s get you inside.”
I gaped at her. “Ins—”
“Lungs, Finn. I will tell you when to speak. Understand?”
The word yes nearly escaped my throat, but when Nuala tipped up her chin, I bit my tongue and swallowed the word. What I really wanted to know, though, was, what sort of person would live on wild Inis Eala, why Nuala and I were sneaking into this stranger’s house, and how Nuala knew it was here to begin with.
But when Nuala pulled a key from a flowerpot I hadn’t even seen (it was covered in a thick blanket of moss) and chinked it into the doorknob, I was positive something was up; what that something was, that was the mystery.
Nuala ushered me into the low-ceilinged cottage. She quickly closed the door behind us—only to have it slam to the ground, hinges cracking free from the doorframe.
“Well,” muttered Nuala as light poured in. “There goes that door,” and she proceeded to rummage around in a drawer of a wooden desk as if she owned it. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could see that the cottage was more of a workshop with a rusty-framed bed stuck in the corner. Dusty bottles and silver trinkets cluttered the wall shelves. Book piles rose like stalagmites from the floor, balancing unwashed teacups and half-melted candles. There was a peculiar scent of forest trees and mothballs to the house, and as I flopped down onto the bed, a sour-then-sweet aroma erupted into the air; it left a taste in my mouth like the lemon drops Da brought from Belfast.
“That’s it now, good girl,” said Nuala, still rattling about in the desk drawers. “But don’t lie down just yet. There’s a remedy somewhere in here—ah, here we are.” Nuala twirled around to reveal a thimble-sized vial, its contents obscured by the thick dust coating its glass. “Drink,” she instructed, striding over to my bedside.
My eyes bulged at the look of the dusty vial.
“Drink, Finn. Have I ever led you astray?”
I shook my head no and took the vial. I squinched up my face ready for the foul taste and downed the medicine, only to realize a moment too late that it tasted of bubble gum.
“Now rest,” said Nuala, pushing me onto the mattress and tucking a blanket around me. “When you wake, you may speak.”
I didn’t hesitate at that. It was as if my entire body had been yearning to sleep, but my brain never got the message, and asleep I fell. And while I slept, I dreamed of a bird with wings made out of shoe buckles and a sea with waves made out of bones.
I AWOKE TO SUNLIGHT streaming through my eyelids. As my eyes flickered open, the dizzying sensation of waking in someone else’s house hit my stomach, but disappeared as memory settled in. I was alone, but not for long. Nuala peeked around the fallen door, a basket in her arms.
“Ah, good, you’re awake,” she said, hurrying over to my bedside. “Do your lungs feel better?”
I nodded, realizing the pressure on my chest had lifted.
Nuala handed me a pile of blackberries from her basket and said, “Eat. If you like, you may speak now.” She paused and added, “But I want the first thing out of that mouth to be an explanation of why you disobeyed me.”
I was about to babble on about how I wasn’t thinking, how it was a mistake, but … it wasn’t a mistake. And I had thought about it. Nuala’s words from the previous day rang in my ear: “You may go when you are needed there.”
“I didn’t disobey you, though,” I said. My voice sounded horribly froglike.
Nuala raised her eyebrows.
“Not really,” I croaked. “Someone needs me here—look.” And from my jeans pocket, I pulled the hawthorn bark that had fallen out of my locket after Sojourn returned it to me, after the swan that saved me nicked it from my throat.
But when I looked to the bark, it was message-less. I flipped it to the other side, but it was just as blank. “No,” I whispered. “The sea must have washed the message off. But—but I swear—yesterday it said, ‘Meet me at the bleeding tree.’ And—and I got my locket back, too, after the swan took it. A boy, Sojourn, got it for me, and this note was in it, and I just knew that swan left it for me, Nuala. I knew it in my head and in my heart and in my bones. I knew that swan needed me to meet him or her at the hawthorn tree on this very isle. Won’t you believe me?”
Nuala pursed her lips, and I quickly added, “I am sorry, though. Really, truly sorry.”
Nuala nodded and then breathed, “Why’re you so keen on flyin’ away, lass?”
“I …” My stomach flip-flopped. “I’m not.”
“You got a father who loves you and a little girl who idolizes you and a town full of people who want to get to know you if only you’d let ’em. And you got me.”
“I know,” I said. “I know, I just …” The word lonely pounded in my heart, rattled my rib cage. “That’s why, I guess. ’Cause I’ve got everythin’, all these people who love me, and still I’m lonely. I’m always lonely and I don’t know why. It’s like a piece of me is missing, and it’d take a miracle to make me feel less alone.
“But if I could find the swans, if I could find them … maybe my miracle wouldn’t feel so big. Maybe if I found them … my miracle’d feel more like somethin’ I could ask for at Christmas or Easter. Small. Somethin’ I could touch and hold, somethin’ not too expensive or rare or hard to fit through the door. If I could find the swans, my miracle would feel like wishin’ for a bag of lemon drops instead of a talking hippopotamus. That’s why I want to fly,” I said, my words finally slowing their rumble-tumble. “It en’t about being here or there or anywhere. All I want is to give my dream a pair of wings.”
I waited for Nuala to scold me for making excuses, lined up my sorries in my mind. But she didn’t. She just sat at the edge of my bed, closed-eyed, nodding. Finally, she said, “Maybe … maybe you should see the isle.”
My heart sung a swan song an
d my eyebrows jumped three inches. “Really?” I gasped. “You mean it?”
Nuala waved a hand toward the door. “Come on. I want to show you that bleeding tree.”
Chapter 12
WE CROSSED INIS EALA the way explorers would a new country. I knew I shouldn’t call the isle my property, so instead, I decided I would be property of the isle. No place I’d stepped had ever felt so right and so wrong. It was, after all, the place the Children of Lir had taken their last humanly steps. But it was also the place where their littlest sister was saved. It was a place of tragedy and of hope, and whether the tale was real or not, every stone and twig and blade of grass pulsed with story.
Brambles of blackberries, bushes of hydrangea—blushed fairy-tale pinks and blues—and stone walls created a maze within the isle. The trickle of water leading to a larger waterfall rushed in my ears, and the hummingbirds sang.
When the ground grew scattered with wrinkled crimson berries, I knew we were getting close. And sure enough, one hill later, a tree rose on the horizon. It was attached to the side of a cliff, roots like octopus arms gripping the cliff. The wood twisted up like a swirl of whipped cream, and the trunk curled over the way Willow Oliver did, as if it were listening. Except the hawthorn looked more like it was listening for something, not to someone like Oliver. That was because its branches stretched out toward the sea, fingers permanently frozen in a wind-blown, west-facing arch, as if the tree yearned to touch America. As if it were waiting for a tree in Boston to reach out and grab its branches, pull it across the sea the way Nuala used to pull me over rain puddles.
“This tree is always in bloom,” said Nuala as we drew closer.
“So you have been here before.”
Nuala nodded. “Long ago.”
The waves thrashing against the rock grew louder. I squinted, trying to make out the Slieve League Cliffs, where I had stood gazing out to this very spot not twenty-four hours ago, but all the cliffs on Donegal looked the same.
When we came close as we could to the tree, Nuala reached up to the tree’s branches and picked off a handful of white flowers. She cupped my hands around them and said, “That hawthorn has a daughter halfway ’cross the world, Finn.” Nuala’s voice grew soft and soothing like fresh water over river rocks. That was how I knew I was in for a story.
“When I was a girl,” Nuala said, “I lived here on this isle. It wasn’t so deserted back then, but when business got low and money got tight, all of us scattered off to Dublin or London or Philadelphia or heaven knows where. Well, when my father decided to ship us off to America, I decided to take a piece of Inis Eala with me.
“I plucked a seed from this tree and stuffed my pockets with its flowers. Three weeks later, we ended up in a little mountain town called Starlight Valley in Virginia—that’s a state over in America. My father promised there would be a better life for me there, but all I felt was lonely. So one day, I walked to the edge of the valley and planted my seed. I took the flowers from my pocket and played a game with the petals. This is how it went.”
Nuala took a flower from my palm and plucked a petal. “I won’t be lonely,” she whispered, and the petal drifted off to the sea. “I will be lonely.” She plucked another petal; it followed the first down the cliff. “I won’t be lonely.” She plucked another. And another. “I will be lonely.” And on the last petal, she smiled. “I won’t be lonely.” She twirled the stem in her pinch before pocketing it in her patchwork-pocket jeans. “Except I would do it with a bunch of hawthorn flowers, and not all of ’em had five petals, mind you—that way I’d never know what fate I was gonna end up with.
“Well, magic must have worked in those petals, because that May, I met the most wonderful friends of my life. Their names were Margaret, Ed, and Oliver, and, my, did we have a good craic that summer.”
“Wait—Grandpa Oliver?” I said.
“The very same.” Nuala paused and eyed my hands. “Why don’t you give those flowers a try. I’ve got a good feeling about them.”
Ordinarily I would have shied away, except the flowers were already in my hands and Nuala’s story had already crawled into my heart and I didn’t really have anything to lose, so I whispered, “Okay.”
I counted off each petal of each flower, breathing story words beneath my breath, “I will be lonely. I won’t be. I will be lonely. I won’t be.” And when I came to the final three petals, my heart sank. The first would be lonely. The second would be not lonely. And then I’d be stuck with lonely, lonely, lonely.
But as I tore off the first petal, something magical happened: The second petal pulled off too. I stared at the final petal, twirled it ’round the stem like a pony flying ’round a carousel. The words won’t be fell from my mouth half by accident. By another accident, my lips slipped into a crooked moon smile.
Nuala’s eyes sparked with galaxies drunk on stars and cleverness. She stared at my petal and breathed, “That’s the sort of thing miracles are made of.”
I kept smiling, but there was something about that word miracles that left a bitter taste in my mouth. It was flouncy and far-fetched, strung of pipe dreams and mythology. It was practically the same as impossible. So instead of miracles, I’d call it serendipity. That meant “happy mistake,” and there’s nothing impossible about a happy mistake. In fact, I realized, there was nothing more possible than a happy mistake.
I’d remember this petal. I’d keep it in my locket, soon as I got it back from Darcy, those three children in the photograph keeping it safe for me.
Recognition shivered my bones. “Nuala—the children in the locket—those were Oliver, Ed, and Margaret, weren’t they? Your friends. And that tree they’re sittin’ in—that’s the one you planted, en’t it?”
Nuala paused, then said, “Indeed it is.”
I beamed. I had names now, and that made them feel close. And later, I’d study their smiles and memorize their eyes and learn their stories too.
“Don’t you still talk with ’em?”
Nuala bit her lip. “Afraid I’ve lost contact. Anyway. Here,” said Nuala, pulling something shiny from a kitten-patterned pocket. “They’re missin’ you,” and she handed me the locket.
The metal was warm to the touch, but nothing compared to the heat striking my forehead, sending sweat down my brow. “Where did you get that from?” I choked.
Nuala narrowed her eyes. “The beach, of course. That’s how I knew you’d tried to swim here. Found it along with your field journal and didn’t want it getting swept out with the tide.”
“But Nuala,” I said, “I didn’t have the locket tonight. Darcy did.”
Chapter 13
I’D NEVER SEEN NUALA’S ARMS move so fast as she rowed the little boat back across the sea. When we came upon the shore, we were greeted with wailing. A woman was sitting in the sand, head between her knees, breath spiked with cries. It was Nanny Hurley. Darcy’s dance teacher, Miss Eileen, sat beside her, arm wrapped over Miss Hurley’s shoulder. Sean and Mary, Darcy’s teenage neighbors, were holding each other tight. Every teacher and student from the village school was there, some crying, some holding their head in their hands. Mr. McCann paced back and forth along the beach, puffy-eyed, as two policemen surveyed the area, clipboards in hands. It seemed the only person missing was Da.
My throat tightened, heart thumped thrice as fast. When the police caught sight of Nuala and me rolling onto the beach, they hurried over to us.
“Where is she—the child; have you found her yet?” Nuala babbled. I’d never heard Nuala babble before.
“If we’d found ’em, we wouldn’t still be looking for ’em,” said the first policeman, scowling down at us. “Names, please.”
Before either me or Nuala could answer, my teacher, Mrs. Flanagan, and the village librarian, Mrs. Dempsey, tackle-hugged me from the side. Mrs. Flanagan planted a kiss on my forehead and Mrs. Dempsey squeezed my cheeks till they burned. “You’re safe, thank the good and gracious Lord, you’re safe,” bubbled Mrs. Flanagan.
The policeman tilted up his chin. “I take it this is the elder missing child? Finnuala O’Dálaigh-Sé?”
Mrs. Flanagan and Mrs. Dempsey both nodded vigorously as the villagers gathered ’round me. I passed around hugs like Mr. McCann would Guinness, but the policeman soon shooed them off. “Now … tell me where you’re coming in from, why don’t you?”
“Inis Eala,” said Nuala, nodding to the isle, and she told all that had happened that morning.
When Nuala finished, the policeman said, “And why were you at Inis Eala?”
A flicker of discomposure crossed Nuala’s eyes, but she recovered within seconds. “I’m not sure what you mean, Officer,” she said.
“Well, if you didn’t know your granddaughter was stuck at sea, what prompted you to go to the isle? You fancy boat rides in thunderstorms?”
I turned to Nuala, wanting to ask, Yes, why were you rowing to Inis Eala? But Nuala gave me a look that said I’d better hold my tongue.
“I do actually,” she said.
The policeman raised his eyebrows.
“My father was a fisherman. Took me out to sea during storms when I was a lass. I go out every now and then and think of him.”
I could tell she was lying—or, at least, not telling the whole truth.
The policeman jotted down Nuala’s answer on his clipboard, then turned to me. “Now, tell me something, child. Marjorie Hurley says you slept over at the Brannons’ house last night, but left sometime between ten o’clock at night and eight in the morning, when she found you and Darcy gone. So my question is, who left first—you or the Brannon girl?”
“Me,” I said. “I left just after Darcy fell asleep. I know nothing, I swear it. If I had any inf—”
“I trust them, Officer,” piped Miss Hurley. “Finn and Nuala wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“Just standard procedure, miss,” said the policeman. “Now, does this paper mean anything to you?” He held up a scrap of sparkly pink paper that read:
The Serendipity of Flightless Things Page 6
