“No. She won’t enjoy it either. But I might need her help.”
“But we’re working on our book,” Eoin protested. “She’s writing a new adventure for Eoin Gallagher.”
The book for his birthday had been a great hit. I’d written another and was working on a third, and Eoin had already asked for adventures in Japan and New York and Timbuktu.
“Are you leaving room for pictures?” Thomas asked.
Eoin nodded. “At the bottom. You’ll never catch up, Doc,” he said sadly.
“I promise I will. And you might want to try drawing some of the pictures too,” Thomas suggested. “Your drawings always make me smile.”
Eoin yawned and nodded. Rejected and still sleepy, he rolled over, and Thomas pulled the covers over his shoulders. I kissed Eoin’s cheek and whispered my devotion, and we crept out.
“We need to leave as quickly as possible. I’ll have Daniel help me get Robbie to the car. Can you be ready in fifteen minutes?” Thomas asked.
I nodded eagerly and started down the hall, making a mental list.
“Anne?”
“Yes?”
“You’ll need to pack a nice dress. The red one. There’s a suitcase in the closet beneath the stairs.”
I nodded, not questioning him, and raced to my room.
The drive between Dublin and Dromahair took much longer than it had in 2001. Dirt roads, lower speeds, and a patient in the rear seat all contributed to a stressful ride. However, traffic was minimal, and I was not the one behind the wheel dodging oncoming traffic and praying for deliverance like I’d done a lifetime ago. We stopped once for gas—petrol—and I had to disembark because the gas tank, much to my surprise, was located under the front seat. Thomas noted my surprise and frowned, asking, “Where else would it be?”
Three and a half hours after we left Dromahair, we arrived in Dublin. I should have been prepared for the clothes and the cars, the streets and the sounds, but I wasn’t. Thomas remarked with relief at the absence of checkpoints—the most glaring sign of the truce. I could only nod and stare, trying to take it all in. It was nine on a Friday morning, and Dublin was dingy, dilapidated, and completely unrecognizable until we neared the center of the city. The old pictures I’d studied were suddenly bustling backdrops; the black-and-white photos were now drenched in life and color. Sackville had been renamed O’Connell Street—I remembered that much—and Nelson’s Pillar had not yet been blown up. The post office was a burned-out shell, and my eyes clung to its skeletal remains. From what I remembered of the maps of 1916 Dublin—one of which was still pinned to my office wall—I didn’t think we were taking the most direct route to the Mater Hospital. I suspected Thomas wanted to gauge my reaction to the war zone. If my wonder confused him, he kept it hidden.
We drove past a row of tidy, connected brownstone-style homes, and Thomas nodded toward them. “I sold the old house on Mountjoy and bought another, three houses down. No bad memories there.”
I nodded, grateful that I wouldn’t be expected to remember a home Anne Gallagher would have been familiar with. We pulled in front of the Mater, the soaring columns and stately entrance not unlike the pictures of the GPO before the Rising. I stayed in the car with Robbie, parked at the front entrance, while Thomas ran inside for a gurney and assistance.
He was back within minutes, along with a nun in a white habit accompanied by two men and a stretcher. Thomas gave a brief explanation of Robbie’s condition, as well as a request for a particular surgeon, and the nun nodded, telling him they would do the best they could. She seemed to know him, referring to him as Dr. Smith, and clucked her tongue and shot instructions to the orderlies. We parked the car, and I spent the rest of the day walking the halls and waiting for news. Nurses in long white pinafores and pert hats strode through halls, pushing patients in ancient chairs and rolling beds, and though medicine had improved dramatically in eighty years, the atmosphere of a working hospital had not. There was the same sense of frantic competence, of sadness layered with relief, and most of all, the sharp tang of tragic endings. Eoin had spent his entire adult life in a hospital. I suddenly understood why he hadn’t wanted to die in one.
Thomas was able to observe the surgery, and at six p.m., he joined me in the hospital