The Serendipity of Flightless Things

by Fiadhnait Moser

  “Aoife,” I repeated, hollow voiced. The name struck my heart with memories of nightmares I used to have about the horrible mother in “The Children of Lir.” It nearly sounded like Aobh, but had more flounce to it and was a fraction as pretty. Even with a name like Aoife, though, the word mother skipped around my mind like fireworks because that was a word I would have to get used to using more often. It gleamed of new and shiny treasures.

  “She en’t all that bad, Finn. We had our disagreements, but she en’t that bad. An’ if one thing’s for sure, it’s that she loved you.”

  “She loved me?” Questions whipped fast through my head. “If she loved me so much, why’d she leave me? Why’d she leave and never come back?”

  “Because … I don’t know.”

  “And why’d you keep her a secret from me? Why’d you pretend Aobh was my mother when she wasn’t? And why—”

  Da twisted ’round to face me again and pleaded, “Finn! Just give her a chance for me, all right? You’ll be home in no time anyway. I promise that. Okay?”

  “Da?”

  “Hmm?”

  I pulled a thread from the collar of the funeral dress Da had shoved in the back seat. I wanted to confess to him what I’d said to Nuala just before she died, and I wanted to tell him that I didn’t mean it. That no family would ever compare to the family I had with him and Nuala, that even though our family was different, it was perfect. I wanted to tell him that when he left us the other night, my heart nearly burst with loneliness. I wanted to tell him how the emptier my heart grew, the heavier it grew too, which didn’t make any sense at all. Nothing made sense anymore, really.

  All I knew was that all I had was Da. And somewhere across the ocean, I had a mother. Somewhere, I had a family. Somewhere, I belonged. So instead, I said, “I’ll go.”

  Da stretched over the front seat and pecked a kiss on my forehead. “That’s my girl.”

  “Just one thing,” I said. “Do I look like her?”

  Da furrowed his eyebrows. “What?”

  I nodded. “Do I look like her? My mother.”

  Da’s jaw jumped thrice before he finally spat, “Not in the slightest.”

  Chapter 16

  NUALA’S RATTY BROWN SUITCASE stared up at me. Empty.

  My yellow duffel, I had left at Darcy’s, and I had no intention of going back there. So, Da dug Nuala’s suitcase out of her wardrobe because I had no intention of visiting Nuala’s room either. Everything would be exactly where she left it. The bed might not be made, just waiting for her to come home to it, flop down, invite me in, and spin a bedtime story. Her hiking boots would be kicked against the wall, and she’d have a pile of laundry in the corner that still smelled of her rosemary soap.

  I couldn’t avoid everything, though, and that was because wherever I went, whatever I did, I expected her. I expected her out hanging clothes on the line, and I expected her at the stove cooking porridge, and whenever the door creaked open, I expected her big-footed steps in the hall. She was never there, of course. She would never be there.

  I spent half the night clearing out my closet—I couldn’t sleep. The other half, I wandered the stairs, up and down, up and down, up and down. Then I conquered the hallways, crisscross, crisscross, crisscross. Then I opened and closed the doors, clickety-clack, clickety-clack, clickety-clack. Then I stood.

  I stood there for hours, my hand on the doorknob, and I wished. I wished doorknobs were like clay. That way, I would be able to feel the mold of Nuala’s hand, just this once more. I would be able to feel her every wrinkle, every scar, every callus. I would hold tight her hand in my grasp … just this once more.

  I left without a click, without a clack.

  Chapter 17

  BY MORNING, I STOOD IN A VALLEY of jeans and board games, old math tests and cracked seashells. Two weeks, I thought. What do I need for two weeks?

  “Finn!” Da called from downstairs. “Hurry up; it’s time to go!”

  Crumbs. I spun twice around before I spotted the black funeral dress strewn over my bedpost. I grabbed it and smoothed it flat on Nuala’s quilt so I wouldn’t forget about it when I came back.

  I grabbed from the top of my sock drawer, my Sunday dress—a lace-hemmed seafoamy frill of a thing. I hated it, but wanted to look nice when I met my mother, so I tossed it into the suitcase.

  I was about to grab a pair of socks too, but something more interesting caught my eye. From the left-hand corner of the drawer, I pulled out a small dollhouse full of all the hawthorn (and a few willow and ash) leaves I had collected with Nuala. “Our orphanage of leaves,” Nuala had called it once, because after we collected the leaves, we would name them and sew stories for them. “We’ll call this one Aisling,” she’d said, “because that means ‘dream.’ And this little leaf, she got blown all the way to Donegal through a faery bride’s dream. And this one, here, we’ll call Cian. He made it here tightrope walking on a raven’s breath. Did you know that?”

  I felt silly, all of a sudden, having been busying myself with socks and sweaters, when all that mattered was Nuala. I tossed the dollhouse in, then snapped shut the suitcase.

  My field journal lay spread open behind my door—Nuala must have tucked it there after coming home from Inis Eala. Feathers still stuck out of every page like overeager bookmarks. I kicked it under my bed. I didn’t want to think about those stupid swans ever again.

  I gave my room a good long look before remembering one last thing: the hawthorn petal. I’d left it in the back of my patch-pocket jeans, but where? Ah. They sat wadded up behind the curtain. I clambered across a mound of T-shirts—

  “Finn, come on!” called Da.

  I shoved my hand into the left pocket and revealed the tiny petal, now a ghost of a thing, yellowed like old parchment. I unclasped my locket and gave the petal to Margaret to hold. She smiled up at me as always, but just before I clasped the locket shut, I could have sworn I saw her wink. I narrowed my eyes, studied the curl of her short hair and the way her flowery dress caught in the breeze. She was exactly the same as always, and so were Ed and Oliver. Trick of the light.

  Da’s footsteps pounded up the staircase.

  I snapped shut the locket and stumbled toward my door, shouting, “Coming!”

  On the way out, I snatched my high-tops, then hopped down the stairs, lugging the suitcase in one hand, and in the other, wrangling the sneakers onto my feet. Darcy’s shoe-buckle wing was still looped around my ankle, and I tucked it into my sneaker to make sure it didn’t fall off. I didn’t want my last bit of Darcy to go missing too. I met Da halfway down the stairs, and he took my suitcase. “Packing light?”

  “Don’t need much.”

  Da nodded. “On our way, then?”

  I crossed the kitchen, but as I neared the doorway, I stopped short. “The mice,” I muttered.

  “The what?” said Da.

  I hurried over to the cabinet and pulled from the top shelf a bag of cheese puffs. I shook the puffs into three bowls and laid the bowls in the corner of the floor. “I won’t have the mice starvin’ to death while I’m gone,” I told Da.

  The look he gave me, I wanted to capture in a bottle because that look, that look, made me nearly laugh out loud. And laughing—even just near laughing—well, that was a feat that felt even more insurmountable than swimming to Inis Eala.

  TWO AND A HALF HOURS LATER, Da and I stood at a glass window gazing out over Belfast. A red-white-and-blue-winged plane wheeled around a large pavement, sending butterflies down my throat. “That’s it?” I said, looking up to Da.

  Da checked his watch and nodded. “Imagine so.”

  “Right, then,” I said. I tried to sound businesslike, but I couldn’t keep the fear from my voice.

  Da couldn’t either, even as he said, “You’ll be fine.”

  I clenched the muscles in my neck to keep the tears at bay. “Promise you’ll write?”

  “Promise,” said Da. He kissed my head, his hair flopping onto my forehead, then added,
“And when you get back, you and I are gonna have a feast of lemon drops.”

  I smiled. “Da?”

  “Hmm?”

  I stood on my tiptoes and swished aside Da’s bangs with my fingernails. I wished he had let Nuala cut them one last time. She used to cut them for him—always too short for his taste—but they would grow back within a month. “Your hair is in your eyes.”

  Da smiled wryly at me. “What would you say to your old man growing it long like a hippie?”

  I giggled and Da planted another kiss on my forehead. Then he stuffed his hands in his pockets and nodded toward the gate. “Go on, now. Don’t want to miss it.”

  I nodded and headed for the gate. I’ll do them right this time, I thought. My goodbyes. I’d do them the way I’d have done for Nuala if I’d known I’d never see her again. I looked back thrice to Da, waving each time. And when the plane took off, I blew a kiss to my Ireland, whispering love you, love you, love you, till the clouds became like ground, till the heather’s lament became breeze in my ears.

  PART II

  America

  Chapter 18

  “TEN MINUTES UNTIL ARRIVAL; please prepare for landing,” announced the pilot from a loudspeaker. He had an American accent, the kind where the vowels slanted and the consonants went slack, the kind that makes you taste iced tea and hear banjo music.

  I opened my locket and twirled the hawthorn petal in my pinch, while the woman beside me snored, lolled over on my shoulder.

  “It won’t be so bad,” I whispered to the boy in the photograph smiling at the camera—I supposed that must be Ed; Grandpa Oliver was camera shy, so I assumed he was the boy glancing away. “I’ll get to meet her after all, my—” What should I call her? Mother? Ma? “Aoife,” I decided. Aobh had been Ma for as long as I could remember. It would be too strange to call her anything but. “Though now that I think about it,” I added (to Margaret, this time) as I rolled up the sleeves of the shirt I’d nervous-sweated through, “I wish I’d brought more clothes.”

  And then I turned to Oliver. “I wish I’d brought you too,” I told him. And I thought about what Nuala had said about planting a hawthorn tree in Starlight Valley from a seed of Inis Eala’s hawthorn, how it made her less lonely. I wished I’d taken a seed from Oliver’s willow.

  “Me?”

  No. I knew that voice. I hated that voice. Something like lightning cracked my spine. I whipped around, my sleeping neighbor waking and surreptitiously wiping the drool from her chin. Sojourn sat in the row behind me, that spidery smirk playing at his mouth and clawing under my skin like nails on a chalkboard.

  “Forgot about it, did you, love?” he said. “I think someone owes me for a plane ticket.”

  The deal with the locket, I remembered from the first time I met Sojourn. I had promised to take him to America with me. “You followed me.”

  Sojourn shrugged. “At least one of us has got to keep their promises.”

  I thought of the nastiest word I knew and spat, “You’re despicable.”

  “Thank you,” he sneered.

  “Have you no mercy?” I huffed. “Don’t you know all I’ve been through? Don’t you know why I’m even on this plane?”

  Sojourn flapped his hand as if he were swatting away a fly. “Yeah, yeah, poor baby.”

  “Whatever,” I said, turning back to my seat. I had to put up with him for another ten minutes before the plane landed, and then he’d be stuck who-knows-where in America and I’d never see him again. He’d blow through places the way he blew through Carroway, rile up some otherwise nice folks, and then be on his merry way. He didn’t know where I was headed, and I wasn’t about to tell him.

  But then came the tap, a jabbing, bone-white finger on my shoulder accompanied by that insufferable voice. “Meet you in Starlight Valley.”

  THE TAXI CLATTERED DOWN dirt paths, over too-big rocks and loose-lying branches. The farther away from Lynchburg we drove, the narrower the roads twisted and the taller the mountains grew. Mist fogged the windows and pebbles flew up from the ground, clinking against the side of the car, causing the driver to grumble, “And this car’s a new one too …”

  I sat in the back seat, holding tight to my suitcase to keep it from hurling through the windshield. I had changed into my Sunday dress at the airport, but was deeply regretting it as I felt rather queasy with all the bumping. I tugged at the lace collar to give myself air and closed my eyes, pretending I was in a boat instead—I never got seasick—but was greeted only by the image of Nuala rowing us to shore away from Inis Eala. My stomach yanked even tighter.

  When at last we came upon a wall of trees, we rolled to a stop. For the first time in many years, I could not decipher which type of tree they were—thick and gnarled, certainly conifer, but spiked with thorns, needle-long.

  “Road stops here, kid,” said the driver, squinting at the address Da wrote for me on a slip of paper. “Starlight Valley’s just beyond those trees. That’ll be forty-two, fifty.”

  “But—I’ve no idea where to go, how to get in,” I said.

  The driver shrugged. “Beats me. Haven’t driven into that place for years, ever since those trees popped up. They say no one comes, no one goes.”

  My stomach squirmed again. I was in the middle of nowhere with no way of finding my way into the valley without being stabbed to death by a forest of needle trees. You couldn’t have told me that before, I wanted to tell the driver, but I held my tongue. I reached into my pocket for the money, and pulled out—crumbs—a handful of Irish pounds. I’d forgotten to exchange them into dollars at the airport.

  “Any day now,” pressed the driver.

  I made a series of ers and uhs as the driver tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. I glanced furtively toward the window, wondering first how fast I could run—fast, but surely not faster than a taxi—and then how sharp those thorns really were. But then I saw it. A hole in the branches had appeared, and standing within it was a woman.

  Impossible, I thought, for there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that the trees had been thick as custard but a moment ago, not a branch or twig letting a droplet of light through.

  Branches framed the woman like a photograph. She was tall and willowy, sleek as a selkie seal. Her skin stretched taut over her cheekbones, and her eyes glittered green as the thorn trees. She wore a white fur coat that draped across her shoulders, soft as snow, despite the hot summer sun, and on her tiny feet were a pair of dainty stilettos, heels carved from what appeared to be wood painted black and orange. Her hair was blond like mine, but hers was darker, the color of luxury and sophistication, like spun threads of gold. They fell around her face in curls like a 1940’s movie star’s. She looked fancy, the sort of person who served salt in little dishes and never got the hiccups.

  I almost believed Da was right about me looking nothing like her—but then she smiled. Apple-lipped and dimpled cheeks, she looked like me. But there was someone else in her too. And I knew Nuala was Aobh’s mother, not Aoife’s, but still, there was something in the lines around Aoife’s lips that whispered Nuala. It made my skin prickle. Tears stung my eyes at the very thought of Nuala.

  Darling was the first thing out of her mouth. I couldn’t hear her, of course, but the word was written on her lips.

  I rolled down my window and stared as she glided over to the taxi.

  From the front seat, the driver huffed, “Every minute you sit there, I add another twenty-five cents, you know.”

  When Aoife reached the window, she bent down and kissed my cheek. Her lips were cold, but soft. I said nothing. My eyes caught on her white coat. Up close, I realized it was not made of fur, but feathers. Hundreds and hundreds of swan feathers stitched together. Chills scurried about my spine.

  “You must be Finnuala,” she said. The lilt of her voice was something I had never heard before—not quite American, not quite Irish. It was a halfway voice.

  My own voice caught in my throat. I meant to say “yes,” or “hello,” or “pleased
to meet you.” Instead, I spluttered, “Actually, they—er—call me Finn now.”

  Aoife peeked over to the driver and flashed a hundred-dollar bill. “Keep the change,” she said, and opened the taxi door.

  I stepped out of the cab, sneakers sinking into the moist soil as Aoife took my suitcase and slammed shut the door. She took my shoulder and squeezed me close, leading me to the gap in the wall of thorns. As we entered, Aoife whispered in my ear, “This is Starlight Valley.”

  I didn’t know what I was expecting, but there was something about the place that made me wonder if there was such thing as a yellow greyman. Old greyman’s little brother perhaps, little goldman. Blue misty mountains surrounded the place—beautiful, lovely—but caging. The valley was sunlit, but it swallowed me in a sadness I could not explain.

  A small ravine cut between the thorn trees and the path, and we crossed a wooden bridge to the isle in the valley.

  The path we came to was cloaked by alders and honeysuckle, though, as far as I could tell, the thorn trees seemed to ring around the valley—I could just make out the tip-tops of them on the other side. Up and over a hill, I could see a small village of shops and houses. A church steeple and a clock tower with its hands stuck at 7:32 rose above the hill, and there, in the far distance, something glinted. Something big and white and starry and bright. Something magical.

  But the strangest thing of all was, I never heard the engine of the taxi revving up or the tires against the mountain stones as it sped away. And when I looked back to see if it was still sitting there, I saw nothing but thorn trees. The bridge and the gap, they just disappeared.

  Chapter 19

  I KNEW A STORY ABOUT A CHILD who followed a faery to an isle of clear waters and red berries. Both the faery and the child were obsessed with each other, and neither one could help from drawing close together. It happened in a dream, while the world was resting by the fire, weeping. The child took the faery’s limp wrist, and they wandered into faeryland, hand in hand. What happened after that, I knew not, other than the child did not return. Some stories were just like that. Stopping in the middle of their paths, quick as gunshots—