I made a sound that would echo in my head long after the moment had passed, a keening that begged for permanence or completion, and he pulled me to the ground, his hands climbing my hips, wrapping around my ribcage until I was prone beneath him. He gathered my skirts in his hands as I clenched my fists in the rumpled waves of his hair and brought his tongue to mine, the heat spreading from my belly to the press of our mouths and the mingling of our breath.
Then he was moving against me, rocking into me like the waves licking at the shores of Lough Gill, persistent and smooth, rolling and retreating and coming again until I could only feel the liquid lapping and the lengthening tide. My mouth forgot how to kiss, my heart forgot when to beat, my lungs forgot why they needed breath. Thomas forgot nothing, lifting me up and into him, breathing life into my kiss, coaxing my heart to pound with his, reminding my lips to form his name. He stroked my hair, and his body stilled as the wave receded and left me breathless, all the forgotten things remembered.
1 October 1921
I’ve often wondered whether the Irish would be who we are if the English would have simply been more humane. If they would have been reasonable. If they would have allowed us to prosper. We were stripped of every right and schooled only in derision. They treated us like animals, and yet we didn’t yield. Since the days of Cromwell, we have been under England’s boot, and still we are Irish. Our language was forbidden, and yet we speak it. Our religion was stamped out at every turn, yet we still practise it. When the rest of the world experienced a reformation of sorts, abandoning Catholicism for a new school of thought and science, we dug in our heels. Why? Because that would mean the English won. We are Catholic because they told us we couldn’t be. What you try to take away from a man, he will want all the more. What you tell him he can’t have, he’ll set his heart on. The only rebellion we have is our identity.
Anne’s identity is its own kind of rebellion, and she refuses to relinquish it. For a month I found myself in constant argument with my heart, with my head—with her—although I hardly said a word. I silently cajoled, begged, pleaded, and persuaded, and she stood firm, insistent in her absurdity.
I told my heart I could not have her, and the Irish dissident in my blood rose up and said she was mine. The moment I surrendered, embracing the impossible, fate tried once more to take her away. Or maybe destiny simply pulled the veil from my eyes.
Anne was playing with Eoin by the lake, running in and out of the lazy surf, her skirts hiked up in a way that would have shocked Brigid had Brigid called them in to supper herself. I drew up, wanting only to look at her for a moment, to enjoy the flash of her pale legs against the grey-green backdrop of the lough. She made my heart ache in the best way, and I watched her dance with Eoin as they laughed in the fading light, her curls tumbling and her coltish limbs kicking up water. Then Eoin, his arms wrapped around the red ball he’d received from the O’Tooles on his birthday, tripped and fell, scraping his knees on the pebbled sand and losing his ball. Anne scooped him up as I started down the embankment, my reverie broken by his tears. But Eoin was less worried about his scrapes and more worried about the ball that was floating away. He squalled, pointing, and immediately Anne set him down and raced to retrieve it before it was beyond rescue.
She ran into the lough, knees high, holding her skirts from the inevitable. The ball bobbed out of reach. Anne moved out a little farther, straining for it, and the ball lured her deeper. I began to run, filled with an irrational terror, shouting for her to let the ball go. She surged forward, releasing her skirts and immersing herself from the waist down, wading towards the bobbing red sphere.
I was too far away. I yelled at her to come back as I raced across the shore, and for a moment her image wavered, a mirage on the lough. It was like looking through glass, the white of her dress becoming a tendril of mist; the darkness of her hair becoming evening shadows.
Eoin started to scream.
The sound echoed in my head as I splashed towards her fading form, shouting for her to turn back, to stay. The red ball continued to slink away like the sun on the horizon, and I threw myself across the water, to the place where she had been, reaching for the pale suggestion of Anne that still remained. My arms came away empty. I bellowed her name and lunged again, insistent, and my fingers passed through a whisper of cloth. I closed my fist around the folds, drawing them to me like salvation, end over end, until my hands were filled with Anne’s dress.
I couldn’t see the shore or tell the water from the sky. I was caught between now and then, my feet on shifting sand, and I was enveloped totally in white. I could feel her, the line of her back and the length of her legs, but I could not see her. I wrapped my arms around the shape of her, refusing to relinquish my claim, and began to walk towards Eoin’s cries—a siren in the fog—drawing her back with me. Then I heard her say my name, a murmur in the mist, and as the white began to dissipate, the shore began to show herself, and Anne became whole in my arms. I held her body high against my chest, keeping her from the grasping water and the hands of time. When we fell to the pebbled sand, arms locked around each other, Eoin tumbled into the cradle of our bodies, clinging to Anne as she clung to me.
“Where did you go, Mother?” he cried. “You left me! Doc left me too!”
“Shh, Eoin,” Anne soothed. “We’re all right. We’re here.” But she did not deny what the boy had witnessed. We lay in a panting pile—limbs and clothes and reassurances—until our hearts began to quiet and a sense of reality returned. Eoin sat up, his fear already forgotten, and pointed happily at the innocent red ball that had found its way back to shore.
He untangled himself, freeing us from his clinging arms and unanswered questions. Then he was off, scooping up his ball and heading towards the embankment. Brigid had grown tired of waiting for supper and was calling to us from the trees that separated the house from the shore. But she would have to wait a bit longer.
“You were there, walking into the water,” I whispered. “And then you grew faint . . . like a reflection in thick glass, and I knew you were going to disappear. You were going to leave, and I would never see you again.” I had come to terms with the impossible. I had joined Anne’s rebellion.
Anne lifted her face, pale and solemn, and found my eyes in the twilight. She searched my expression for the baptismal glow of the new believer, and I proceeded to bear testimony.
“You really aren’t Anne Finnegan, are you?”
“No, Thomas.” Anne shook her head, her gaze locked on mine. “No. I’m not. Anne Finnegan Gallagher was my great-grandmother, and I’m a long, long way from home.”
“Jaysus, lass. I’m so sorry.” I brushed my mouth over her forehead and down her cheeks, following the rivulets that still clung to her skin and trickled towards her mouth. Then I was kissing her softly, chastely, afraid I would break her, the paper doll in the lough in danger of disintegrating.
T. S.
17
A TERRIBLE BEAUTY IS BORN
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
—W. B. Yeats
Like the sun coming out from behind the clouds, everything changed the moment I was believed. The storm receded, the darkness lifted, and I shrugged off the heavy layers I’d been cowering behind, warmed by sudden acceptance.
Thomas had been freed as well, liberated by his own eyes, and he began to shoulder my secrets with me, taking their weight onto his back without complaint. He had a million questions but no doubts. Most nights, when the house was quiet, he would slip into my room, crawl into my bed, and with hushed voices and clasped hands, we would talk of impossible things.
“You said you were born in 1970. What month? What day?”
“October twentieth. I will be thirty-one. Although . . . technically I can’t age if I don’t even exist yet.” I smiled and waggled my eyebrows.
“That’s the day after tomorrow, Anne,” he scolded. “Were you going to tell me it was your birthday?”
I shrugged. It wasn’t something I was going to announce. For all I knew, Brigid had known the “real” Anne’s birthday, and I doubted they were the same.
“You’re older than me,” he said, smirking, as though my advanced age was my punishment for withholding information from him.
“I am?”
“Yes. I turn thirty-one on Christmas Day.”
“You were born in 1890. I was born in 1970. You’ve got me by eighty years, auld wan,” I teased.
“I have been on the earth for two months less than you have, Countess. You are older.”
I laughed and shook my head, and he propped himself up on his elbow, staring down at me.
“What did you do? What did the Anne of 2001 do?” He said “2001” with carefully enunciated awe, like he couldn’t believe such a time would ever exist.
“I told stories,” I said. “I wrote books.”
“Yes. Of course. Of course you did,” he breathed, his wonder making me smile. “I should have guessed. What kind of stories did you write?”
“Stories about love. Magic. History.”
“And now you are living it.”