“Your birthday is July the eleventh, isn’t it? I remember that,” I said.
Eoin nodded enthusiastically, his skinny shoulders crowding his too-big ears, and he smiled as if I’d redeemed myself a little bit. “Yes.”
“And . . . what month is it now?”
“It’s June!” he squealed. “That’s why I am almost six.”
“Do you live here, Eoin?”
“Yes. With Doc and Nana,” he said impatiently, as if he’d already explained as much.
“With the doctor?” The good doctor, Thomas Smith. Eoin had said he was like a father to him. “What’s the doctor’s name, Eoin?”
“Thomas. But Nana calls him Dr. Smith.”
I laughed softly, delighted that my dream was so detailed. No wonder he’d been familiar. He was the man from the pictures, the man with the pale stare and the unsmiling mouth, the one who Eoin said loved Anne. Poor Thomas Smith. He’d been in love with his best friend’s wife.
“And who is your nana?” I asked the boy, enjoying the dizzy dream conundrum I found myself in.
“Brigid Gallagher.”
“Brigid Gallagher,” I breathed. “That’s right.” Brigid Gallagher. Eoin’s grandmother. Declan Gallagher’s mother. Anne Gallagher’s mother-in-law. Anne Gallagher.
Thomas Smith had called me Anne.
“Thomas says you’re my mother. I heard him tell Nana,” Eoin said in a rush, and I gasped, the hand I’d raised to touch him falling back to the bed. “Is my da comin’ back too?” he pressed, not waiting for my reply.
His father? Oh God. This was Eoin. This was my Eoin. Just a child. And his mother and father were dead. I was not his mother, and neither of them were coming back. I put my hands over my eyes and willed myself to wake up.
“Eoin!” The woman’s call came from somewhere else in the house, seeking, searching, and the little boy was gone in a flash, racing to the door and slipping out of the room. The door shut carefully, quietly, and I let myself fall away into another dream, a safe darkness, where grandfathers didn’t become little boys with crimson hair and winsome smiles.
When I awoke again, there were hands on my skin, and the bedcovers were pushed aside, baring my abdomen while my bandages were changed.
“It will heal quickly. It made a furrow in your side, but it could have been far worse.” It was the man from the pictures again. Thomas Smith. He thought I was someone else. I closed my eyes to keep him away, but he didn’t leave. His fingers danced around my denial, steady and sure. I started to panic, my breaths coming in short gasps.
“Are you hurting?”
I whimpered, more afraid than in pain. I was terrified of giving myself away. I was not the woman he thought I was, and more than anything, I was suddenly, desperately afraid to tell him he’d made a terrible mistake.
“You’ve been asleep so long. You’ll have to talk to me sometime, Anne.”
If I talked to him, what would I say?
He gave me a spoonful of something clear and syrupy, and I wondered if laudanum was responsible for my hallucinations.
“You saw Eoin?” he asked.
I nodded and swallowed, recalling the image of the little boy with his vivid hair and familiar eyes peeking at me through the brass footboard. My mind had created such a beautiful child.
“I told him not to come in here,” he sighed. “But I can’t really blame the lad.”
“He’s exactly the way I pictured him.” I said this softly, slowly, concentrating on saying the words the way my grandfather would have said them, the soft burr something I could imitate, something I had imitated, all my life. But it felt false, and I winced even as I tried to deceive Thomas Smith with the accent. The words were true. Eoin was just as I’d pictured. But I was not his mother, and none of this was real.
When I awoke again, my head was much clearer, and the colors that had swum in deep burgundy and orange in the firelight now remained still, within concrete lines and solid shapes. Light was gathering—or going?—beyond the glass of the two tall windows. The night had faded, but the dream continued.
The fire in the grate and the little boy with my grandfather’s name were both gone, but the pain was sharper, and the man with the gentle hands remained. Thomas Smith slumped in a chair, as if he’d fallen asleep watching me. Once, I had studied him in black and white as he stared up at me from an old photograph, and I did so