ease my pain, Liam? Anne is gone,” I hissed. “I’m letting you live. But I will not ease your pain.”
“That wasn’t Annie. She wasn’t Annie. I swear it, Tommy. I was trying to help you,” he moaned.
Brigid claims she found a “plot” in Anne’s drawer, a list of dates and details outlining the assassination of Michael Collins. Brigid doesn’t know what happened to the pages. She said Liam took them, and he said he must have lost them in the lough. They are both convinced my Anne was an imposter. They are right. And they are horribly wrong. I want to wrap my hands around Liam’s neck and howl my outrage into his ears.
“She looked like Annie. But that wasn’t Annie,” he said, shaking his head, adamant.
I was flooded with a sudden, terrible knowledge.
“How do you know this, Liam?” I whispered, almost afraid to ask, yet filled with a dizzying reassurance that I would finally know the truth. “Why are you so sure?”
“Because Annie’s dead. She’s been dead for six years,” he confessed, his skin damp, his eyes pleading. I could hear Brigid approaching, shuffling towards the room I used as a clinic, and I rose, slammed the door, and locked it. I couldn’t deal with Brigid. Not yet.
“How do you know?” I demanded.
“I was there, Thomas. I saw her die. She was dead. Anne was dead.”
“Where? When?” I was shouting, my voice so loud it echoed in my grief-soaked brain.
“At the GPO. Easter week. Please give me something, Doc. I can’t think straight through the pain. I’ll tell you. But you have to help me.”
With no fanfare or finesse, I jammed the syringe into his leg and depressed the morphine, pulling it free and tossing it aside as he wilted into the bed beneath him. His relief was so pronounced, he began to laugh softly.
I was not laughing. “Tell me!” I roared, and his laughter turned into chagrin.
“Okay, Tommy. I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you.” He sighed heavily, his pain retreating, his mind travelling somewhere else. Somewhere far away. I could see it in his eyes, in the way his voice fell into a storyteller’s rhythm as he shared an account he’d probably relived a thousand times in his head.
“That last night . . . at the GPO, we were all trying to be nonchalant. Trying to act like we didn’t care that the roof was about to cave in on us. Every entrance was in flames but the one on Henry Street, and getting down Henry Street was like running a feckin’ gauntlet. Men were running with their weapons, shooting at sounds, and in the process, shooting each other in the back. I was the last to go. Declan had already gone on ahead with O’Rahilly. They were going to try to clear Moore Street for the rest of us, but right away the word came back that they’d all been shot down. My little brother was always so feckin’ willing to be a hero.”
I felt the memory rise, thick and hot, like the smoke that had filled my lungs as I’d gone to Moore Street that long-ago Saturday, looking for my friends; 29 April 1916 was the worst day of my life. Before today. Today was worse.
“Connolly told me to make sure everyone was out of the GPO before I evacuated,” Liam continued, the morphine slowing his cadence. “That was my job. I had to watch as men ran for their lives, one after another, dodging bullets and tripping over bodies. That’s when I heard her. She was suddenly there, in the GPO, walking through the smoke. She scared me, Thomas. I was half blind and so tired, I would have shot my own mother had she come up behind me.”
I waited for him to say her name yet recoiled when he did.
“It was Annie. I don’t know how she got back inside the post office. The place was an inferno.”
“What did you do?” The words were a rasp in my throat.
“I shot her. I didn’t mean to. I just reacted. I shot her several times. I knelt beside her, and her eyes were open. She was staring at me, and I said her name. But she was dead. Then I shot her again, Thomas. Just to make sure she was real.”
I couldn’t look at him. I was afraid I would do to him what he’d done to Declan’s Anne. To Eoin’s mother. To my friend. I remembered the madness of that night. The exhaustion. The strain.