I don’t believe this man. I run toward Richard’s house. The garda grabs my arm and pulls me back toward him. ‘No, child.’
“I pry myself loose from this man as Da comes from behind. ‘Maeve . . . no.’ Da wraps his arms around me as the chaos increases. Neighbors come out as the sun ascends. Women scream, run toward the home of their friend. Men come up behind them, hollering at their women and children to go back into their homes.
“I push free of Da—for the first time ever—and wind my way, low and crouched, through the crowds to Richard’s house. One small thirteen-year-old girl is inconsequential as they try to push back the others.
“I shove Richard’s door open with a forward momentum that carries me across the room to land by the fireplace hearth. I stumble and fall in a heap in front of the dead ashes. The ashes sadden me with the knowledge that no one was there, or would ever be there, to light the fire, to keep it going so these boys would wake to a warm house as we did.
“I struggle to stand, choke on my tears at the sight of the barren hearth. Richard stands erect, his back to the wall, a fifteen-year-old boy staunch as a man.”
Maeve paused in the middle of her story. Her eyes glazed over, perhaps from medication, or perhaps once again she’d returned to the land of the lost love. But she turned to me, and it was only pain and sorrow, not confusion, that lay in a fine mist over her eyes.
“He is the most beautiful child. He is more beautiful than any man I have seen before or since, even in the ninety-six years I have been on this earth.” She tilted her head against the pillow. “And you will help me find him. You will.”
“What?”
“You will help me find him.”
“How can I possibly help you find him?” Maybe Maeve thought it was 1922 again, or maybe she believed I was someone else. “I don’t even know his last name, Maeve.”
“You can’t help me until I get to the end of the story . . . until I tell you everything.”
I grasped her hand. “What then? What happened to him?”
She pressed her lips together, then spoke. “All anyone ever wants to do is get to the end of the story, find out what happened, what happened, as if that answers any questions at all. It is not about how it ends; it is about the journey. The full story. You have to know the full story to care about or know the ending.”
I nodded. “Okay, then what happened next?”
Maeve smiled, then looked over my shoulder as if she could see him. “He has dark curls.” Maeve lifted her fingers as if she felt his hair. “Soft like a baby lamb in the back fields. He has freckles over his cheeks and a row across his nose. His skin darkens in the few months of summer when he goes out on his hooker to fish, but it is translucent the remainder of the year. You would not know it darkened as it does, but when he found me again—when the sails returned him over the sea, when the edges drew nearer . . . he was darker. . . .” Maeve’s voice stuttered now, like the end of a scratched CD.
“The edges?” I whispered.
“Edges of the ocean. The water is what ties us together, yes? You at one edge, me at the other, but the same ocean, the same water. He was on a different edge and I couldn’t get to him. . . .”
I squinted. “And?” I wanted to get lost in the story, in the unhinged feeling of floating into another life.
Then she continued. “But at that moment he stands against the wall. His brothers slouch in chairs around the room. Their expressions are blank, their eyes are dead as the ashes in the fireplace, but not Richard’s. He looks at me and I see laughter he will not allow escape—laughter at the way I’d burst into the room wearing my nightclothes, my hair wild from the cold and wind.
“I run over to him and throw my arms around him—this boy whom I have known since birth and loved almost as long, but have never touched except in games of tag, or diving for the coppers or to pass the communion cup. I hold to him as if I am drowning, but I know, as