Now & Then Read online

  Now & Then

  Jacqueline Sheehan

  Contents

  At Sea

  At the end of the jetty.

  Chapter 1

  The castle docent led the group along a roped path…

  Chapter 2

  In the cattle car section of Aer Lingus, the plane…

  Chapter 3

  Anna waited in the reception area of the detention center.

  Chapter 4

  “Why are we going to your house?” said Joseph. “You’re…

  Chapter 5

  Joseph lay on top of the bedcovers. This was the…

  Chapter 6

  The noise scratched her eyelids and her soft brain. Sleep…

  Chapter 7

  When Anna imagined what dying would feel like, or more…

  Chapter 8

  She had not been sleeping. Anna didn’t know what she…

  Chapter 9

  Taleen was there when the boy was brought in, fresh…

  Chapter 10

  Wherever he was, it was not the Essex County Detention…

  Chapter 11

  Joseph awoke to the elevated status of honored guest at…

  Chapter 12

  Here are things that Anna could have used in 1844.

  Chapter 13

  Joseph’s first order of business, if he was going to…

  Chapter 14

  Joseph ran his hands down one sleeve, where he met…

  Chapter 15

  “She’s just the sort who could be a British spy,…

  Chapter 16

  She wondered if they had been reported missing back in…

  Chapter 17

  “Come along and meet the best horse in Ireland, or…

  Chapter 18

  “Cork is rich and fertile; anything can grow here, anything.

  Chapter 19

  Joseph reveled in his new status as wrestling champion. A…

  Chapter 20

  Deirdre and Taleen slept together on exceptionally cold nights. The…

  Chapter 21

  “It’s time you saw more of our countryside, and, by…

  Chapter 22

  They had one more night before they reached Skibbereen and…

  Chapter 23

  Glenis’s euphoria could not be hampered by Donal’s grumbling. When…

  Chapter 24

  She walked in front of Donal, climbing up the path…

  Chapter 25

  Joseph was shocked at how strong his body had become…

  Chapter 26

  Anna and Donal did not emerge from the whitewashed cottage…

  Chapter 27

  It had been more than a week since Anna had…

  Chapter 28

  Anna and Donal stayed in the barn behind the cottage…

  Chapter 29

  The colonel and Joseph went directly to a tavern with…

  Chapter 30

  The shock of seeing Joseph left her rudderless. Everything had…

  Chapter 31

  Anna woke to a red-hot bolt of pain in her…

  Chapter 32

  By the time Anna woke, Donal was already gone, having…

  Chapter 33

  “Get me a dress, the finest dress you can manage.

  Chapter 34

  Joseph drank in the colonel’s adulation, feeling satisfied for brief…

  Chapter 35

  Taleen despised laundry work more than anything. Even with the…

  Chapter 36

  Anna and Biddy had boarded a small sailing rig from…

  Chapter 37

  Anna woke stiff and sore after having curled in an…

  Chapter 38

  Arthur Jones collected cans and bottles from the garbage cans…

  Chapter 39

  Two days after Anna and Joseph were spotted by Arthur…

  Chapter 40

  Patrick’s left foot still lagged slightly when he walked. The…

  Chapter 41

  Anna sat in the first-class section of Aer Lingus, the…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Jacqueline Sheehan

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Harry Francis Sheehan

  1906-1959

  At Sea

  By Wendy Mnookin

  At the end of the jetty.

  Where the boats come in. Where the boats go out. At the pile of rocks that swallows the sun at the end of the day.

  At the turn of the trail. At the last dune.

  In front of the hot-dog stand. At the door to the pub. By the shanty, the shipbuilder’s yard, the discarded yellow boots, the smashed clam shells.

  You thought I’d give in to despair.

  But today is today, everywhere I look. And I look everywhere.

  Chapter 1

  The castle docent led the group along a roped path through a cold room. The early September air had already taken a turn, but it was doubtful that the stone castle ever warmed comfortably. Castles were expensive to keep up; the taxes were dreadful, and owners had to bear the humiliation of opening their homes to a weekly stage show of tourists if they expected to hang onto the family estate.

  Anna didn’t like walking through living rooms with family photos on the end tables. She had been hoping for a bawdy ghost, a sense of Renaissance people gulping honey mead, their fingers greasy with smoked fish on wooden planks, bristle-haired dogs stretched on the floor surrounded by a pile of bones. She did not want to be the dreadful price that the present owners had to endure.

  After silently counting them with her eyes, the guide led them through the library. One wall was filled with books—flat leather-encased pages—and, on the opposite wall, paintings.

  “And here,” the docent pointed with her arm, “this shred of cloth is all that remains of the Fairy Flag.”

  The castle held the tattered remnants of a banner. The faded fabric was framed in glass and hung on a north-facing wall to protect it from light.

  “What type of fabric is it?” asked a woman who had not said one word until that moment.

  “Silk. See how it shreds? Linen, which would have been the other choice, frays in a bolder pattern and the dyes tend to take more of a toll on linen,” said the guide. “No one knows exactly where the flag comes from, but the story that has been handed down is that it had the power to save the local clan from destruction. And like all good tales, there was a catch; it could only be used three times. So you can imagine that they saved it for only the worst disasters, when invaders were at the gates and the clan had no hope of escaping a massacre. Then the Fairy Flag was flown.”

  The guide was a good storyteller, and she paused, knowing that the story begged for questions. She let the tension build, until she was prodded by the inevitable. A young boy with a Red Sox baseball cap shot his hand up.

  “Yes?”

  “Did they use it up? Did they use it all three times?” asked the boy.

  “We know it was used in 1490 and again in 1580, but we are not sure if it was used again. In those years, clans fought each other as well as invaders from the sea. Life was perilous. I rather think that it was used again, that we wouldn’t be standing here in the castle if it had not been used. This castle has remained in the same lineage for over seven hundred years.” She looked at her watch and extended her left arm to the door. “Let’s move along to the bedchambers.”

  Everything in Ireland was so unimaginably old, unlike the United States. People in Ireland referred to a day seven hundred years earlier the way Americans talked about the Eisenhower administration. Disagreements that had taken place in a village in 1251 were remembered as if they had happened last week. Time bent
and folded like a piece of string looped around a stick. Since the divorce, Anna felt time slow down with a dark, rotted sludge clogging her every movement. Since she quit her job at the law firm, she sometimes forgot what day it was.

  Three times, the flag was good for three times. Had Anna been good for three times? The first time was not the worst because Anna didn’t know there would be a second and a third time for miscarriages. She thought the first was a fluke. Anna and Steve each worked seventy hours a week at law firms, eighty if needed. They saw each other for a chaotic morning of shower, coffee, and dress for Boston’s legal world and then not again until evening. The first time she was pregnant, she told him by texting, Preg. That’s all she wrote, after peeing on the little paper strip first thing in the company bathroom.

  She had been exactly three weeks pregnant. By six weeks, she told her mother, her brother, Steve’s parents, and her law school buddy, Jasper, who had emailed back.

  “You have my permission to name the baby Jasper. Boy or girl, doesn’t matter to me. Are posting the birth on You-Tube?” he asked.

  “You’re an idiot, even for a lawyer,” replied Anna.

  Jasper had fled Boston right after he passed the bar and now specialized in entertainment law in LA.

  “How can you take entertainment law seriously?” said Anna.

  “How can you take contract law seriously?” said Jasper. “Go have a baby.”

  At two months plus, her uterus twisted with seismic cramps, stripping itself of the baby-to-be. Anna was shocked by the decisiveness of her body, the bloody torrent that woke her and Steve at 4:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning.

  She sat hunched on the toilet crying, while Steve crouched next to her, wearing only his blue Man Silk underwear. He pressed his forehead to her thighs, leaving the two of them wordless.

  That had been the first time. Six months later was the second time. This time they only told her mother. The miscarriage, a word that Anna hated, like a miscarriage of justice, happened when Steve was on a case in Atlanta. She phoned him.

  “It’s OK,” he said into his cell phone at the Marriott. “We’ll try again.” She’d heard a spray of voices in the background and a high peel of laughter, like crystals rising in the air.

  The third time, six months after that, she’d been driving from Boston to Greenfield to visit her mother when the familiar eviction by her uterus began. She was on Route 2, going west into the sun and it was hard to get off. No place seemed right, not Fitchburg, not there. She hung on until she pulled into her mother’s driveway. She’d driven the last thirty miles with a dark gray towel stuffed between her legs.

  Anna beeped the horn and her mother came out with a flutter of high school math papers in her hand. Anna beckoned her to the car and watched the smile dissolve from her mother’s face as she felt her own crumble.

  “I’ve just miscarried. Why can’t I do it? Why can’t I have a baby? What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with all of us?” Anna opened the car door and felt another tight cramp that made her chest cave in.

  “Let’s get you inside and call your doctor. We can tackle the esoteric questions later,” said her mother, placing a firm hand under Anna’s elbow and pulling her up.

  Anna ducked for the castle exit, desperate to shake the images of failed pregnancies. The rest of the group followed the guide to the bedchambers. She was anxious to be outside, not inside with the poor castle all trussed up like a Disney exhibit. She felt uneasily like one of the invaders who must have been thwarted by the Fairy Flag. Tourists did not impale the locals on spiked poles, or pillage the castle, but they did break up the continuity of a place with gawking and pointing, eventually bringing big box stores to the edge of town, there to suck the life out of the tiny villages with their ancient family businesses. Anna didn’t know how her friend Harper made a living bringing attention to otherwise quiet locales so that they could be infested with visitors and digital cameras.

  But she had been grateful that Harper had invited her on a trip to write about Scotland, Wales, and lastly Ireland. Anna was thirty-four and her life was a wreck.

  She walked outside to the soft northern sun, leaving the relic behind. She strolled along the dirt path to the parking lot.

  “Psstt.”

  Anna turned her head toward a juniper tree but caught only a flash of color—a bright woolen hat knit of blues, pinks, and purples, and all the colors that permeate the hills, rocks, and fields. She walked around the tree and saw a small woman.

  “Do you mean me?” Anna asked. At home she might have ignored a stranger who psstted at her, but here in the land of unrelenting civility, she responded.

  The woman’s white hair was held by a clip at the back of her neck and she wore clothes that people might have worn in a National Geographic magazine about charming Ireland twenty years ago. The sweater was buttoned up and the skirt of well-worn plaid stopped just at the bottom of her knees. She held a yellow-and-blue plastic carryall bag.

  “Here, dearie. I thought you’d never come out. I’ve got a bit of something for you.”

  The woman had not been in the group of culture seekers from the castle. But she was clearly Irish, too full of culture to be seeking it. Law school and a few miserable years of law practice had made Anna suspicious. Her last research with corporate law had been about English contracts with the Irish during British occupation. Judging from the age of this woman, she had lived through the years when Ireland had clawed itself out of a wretched economy, not unlike a third world country. But on this trip Anna was practicing beating back her law school demons; she was done with law.

  The woman tilted her head to one side and took a good look at Anna. “I saw you when you came in. You’re not nearly as tall as I was told. For an American I mean, not so tall for an American.”

  “Are you waiting for someone with the tour?” asked Anna.

  “Oh, no. Not them.”

  “You might have me mixed up with someone else,” Anna said. “I’ve noticed since I’ve been visiting here, that people tell me that I look familiar to them, like a cousin or a sister, their friend from school. My family is from Ireland but we weren’t very good at keeping track of that sort of thing. Not a genealogist in our whole family.” Anna looked back at the entrance to the castle to make sure she didn’t miss Harper when she came out.

  “No, I’ve been waiting for you, waiting longer than you could guess. It must have made things worse in America, with so much time going by, building up a steam of misery. I thought of going there myself, but dreadful things happen to the likes of me when we travel over water. Don’t let me talk all day now. Your friend will be out the door in a few moments.”

  She dug around in the plastic carryall. “Here it is.” She pulled out a small bundle wrapped in brown paper, taped neatly just the way all the shopkeepers did in Ireland. It was soft and about the size of a deck of cards. She placed it in Anna’s hands.

  “Take it now. Here, put it in your pack. You’ll be needing it. There’s nothing else for you or them now,” she said and reached up to put her cool palm on Anna’s cheek. “I shouldn’t say more, but I didn’t know that you would look so poorly, so filled with misery. Love will force you to make a frightful leap straight through the terrors. You can walk away from the call, but you’ll be left by yourself. And that would be the pure pity of it.”

  Anna froze to the spot, unable to break the trance.

  Harper yelled from the gate of the castle. “I’m coming, I’m coming. I had to stop at their gift shop. You wouldn’t believe the stuff you end up with for these travel articles.”

  Anna turned to see Harper with a small pile of bundles—more woolen fabric, no doubt, and a few books. Suddenly Harper tripped on the uneven stones and the packages scattered before her in a lava flow of souvenirs. Anna ran to help, looking back once to the old woman who had turned away and walked with an agile step along the path to the parking lot. Anna collected a few packages as Harper dusted her pants off.

  “Tha
nks,” said Harper. “Let’s put everything in your pack. We’ll sort it out later.”

  “That woman just gave me a little package,” said Anna.

  “Happens to me all the time when people find out I’m a travel writer. Tonight is our last night, I can’t believe it. Let’s dump this stuff back at the inn and head out for some good pub food and a few pints. Our flight leaves in the morning.”

  Chapter 2

  In the cattle car section of Aer Lingus, the plane rocked as it was slammed by ever-stronger winds. Harper, who sat in first class, had come back to tell Anna in urgent whispers that the pilot was gambling on beating a storm to Boston. He had seen it on the radar, a giant swirl heading from upper Michigan, picking up speed across Pennsylvania and virtually following the Mass Pike to Boston. Landing at Boston under the best of conditions was congested. The approaching storm could cause hell.

  “Remember, we’re safer in a plane than we are in a car,” said Harper.

  “Thanks for the tip,” said Anna.

  Seat belt signs blinked on and the flight attendants scooped all remaining beverages into black plastic bags, holding onto each seat back for support as they claimed they were thirty minutes out of Boston.

  Two men in front of Anna began to vomit, first one and then the other, when the plane seemed to fall out of the sky and then catch itself. She handed three vomit bags from her row, hoping this would be enough to contain what sounded like an extraordinary event. The smell made others start to wretch. Once, when the plane rolled violently to the right and then just as violently to the left, she was sure they would roll over if they went even one inch farther in either direction.