girl with a tied tongue and an overly active imagination, and Eoin stepped in, rescued me, and raised me.
When I struggled to get the words out, my grandfather would hand me a pen and paper. “If you can’t say them, write them. They last longer that way. Write all your words, Annie. Write them and give them somewhere to go.”
And so I have.
But this story is like no other tale I have ever told, no story I have ever written. It is the history of my family, woven into the fabric of my past, etched in my DNA, and seared into my memory. It all began—if there is a beginning—when my grandfather was dying.
“There is a locked drawer in my desk,” my grandfather said.
“Yes, I know,” I teased, as if the locked drawer had been something I’d been trying to break into. I’d actually had no idea. I hadn’t lived in Eoin’s Brooklyn brownstone for a long time and hadn’t called him “Grandfather” for even longer. He was just “Eoin” now, and his locked drawers were of no concern to me.
“Don’t sass, lass,” Eoin chided, repeating a line I’d heard a thousand times in my life. “The key is on my fob. The smallest one. Will you get it?”
I did as he asked, following his instructions and pulling the contents from the drawer. A large manila envelope sat atop a box filled with letters, hundreds of them, neatly ordered and bundled. I paused over the letters for a moment, noting that none of them appeared to have ever been opened. A small date was written in the corner of each one, and that was all.
“Bring the manila envelope to me,” Eoin instructed, not raising his head from the pillow. He’d grown so weak in the last month, he rarely left his bed. I set the box of letters aside, picked up the envelope, and returned to him.
I opened the clasp on the envelope and carefully upended it. A handful of loose pictures and a small leather-bound book slid out onto the bed. A brass button, the top rounded and dull with time, rolled out of it last, and I picked it up, fingering the innocuous item.
“What’s this, Eoin?”
“That button belonged to Seán Mac Diarmada,” he rasped, a glint in his eye.
“The Seán Mac Diarmada?”
“The one and only.”
“How did you get it?”
“It was given to me. Turn it over. His initials are scratched into it—see?”
I held the button to the light, turning it this way and that. Sure enough, a tiny S followed by a McD marred the surface.
“The button was from his coat,” Eoin began, but I knew the story. I’d been steeped in research for months, trying to get a feel for Irish history for a novel I was working on.
“He carved his initials into his coat buttons and a few coins and gave them to his girlfriend, Min Ryan, the night before he was executed by a firing squad for his involvement in the Rising,” I said, awed by the tiny piece of history I held in my hand.
“That’s right,” Eoin said, a small smile flitting over his lips. “He was from County Leitrim, where I was born and raised. He traveled the country, setting up branches of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. He was the reason my parents became involved.”
“Unbelievable,” I breathed. “You should have the button authenticated, and put it somewhere safe, Eoin. This has got to be worth a small fortune.”
“It’s yours now, Annie lass. You can decide what happens to it. Just promise me that you won’t give it to someone who won’t understand its significance.”
My eyes met his, and my excitement over the button fizzled and fell. He looked so tired. He looked so old. And I wasn’t ready for him to rest—not yet.
“But . . . I don’t know if I understand it, Eoin,” I whispered.
“Understand what?”
“Its significance.” I wanted to keep him talking, to keep him awake, and I rushed to fill the void his weariness left in me. “I’ve been reading about Ireland—biographies and documentaries and collections and diaries. I’ve been doing research for six months. I have so much information in my head, and I don’t know what to do with it. The history after the 1916 Easter Rising is just a garbled mess of opinions and blame. There’s no consensus.”
Eoin laughed, but the sound was brittle and mirthless. “That, my love, is Ireland.”
“It is?” That was so sad. So disheartening.
“So many opinions and so few solutions. And all the