The Last Will of Moira Leahy (28 page)

“I’m glad you dream of her.”

“I found something,” she said. “It’s been so long since Moira’s been sick.” Sick. Like a cold, the flu, a bout of fever. “It was time to tidy a little, donate some of her old clothes.”

I nodded, could see the therapeutic value in this for my mother even as part of me rebelled against the idea of her throwing out anything of Moira’s.
Let me go through things
, I thought.
Let me take pieces of her. Her stuffed bear. The laughing stone with the silly face she’d found on this beach. The T-shirt with her name on it. That wooden bird she’d carved with Daddy. Don’t throw her away
.

“A whale,” my mother said, pointing out at the bay. I looked in time to see a fin disappear into the water. “I forget sometimes how deep the Penobscot is. I spend so much time beside it that I don’t come out here to sit and look or think about what’s under it all. I should do that more often.”

I watched the complicated turn of her expressions, unsure exactly what to say.

“I found this,” she said, and pulled an envelope from her pocket. Moira’s tabby-cat stationery. My lungs deflated as she pressed the letter into my gloved hand, held there for a prolonged moment before letting go. “Read it when you can. When you have time.” She waited a few beats before standing, then laid her hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “It’ll be all right.”

I nodded, mute.

“It’s freezing out here,” she said, casting one last look at the sea, breathing it in. “I’m going to head back.”

“Be careful.” I watched her walk up the stairs, all the while consumed with one fact: I had a letter in my hand from my sister. A letter. Once my mother was out of view, I opened the envelope’s already unstuck flap and pulled out the paper.

Dear Ian
,

My insides sank a bit. I’d hoped the letter would be for me—words from the grave, of illumination and everlasting love. Still, I read on.

Dear Ian
,

This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do
.

I need to tell you something that may make you hate me, but I have to take the chance. Things aren’t what you think they are. In fact, things are very different than you think they are. Before I tell you what is different, I want you to know what is true about us. I know that sounds terrible, and I guess you’d be right to be scared about that sentence, because so much isn’t true. But let me start with the good stuff
.

We have shared so much together. You have taught me a lot about who I am and what I want to be. I admire you so much. I love you, Ian. That is true, and I hope that no matter what you believe about me after you read this, that you realize my love for you was always real. One of the most real things in my life. Along with the love I feel for my sister, Maeve. Yes, you read that right, my sister is Maeve
.

You see, Ian, I am Moira. The girl you’ve been kissing and meeting with, the girl you’ve been loving and who’s been loving you back is Moira. The boring sister. I don’t have a good excuse to give you. Why did I do it? Why did I take the saxophone stone that day and let you believe I was Maeve? Why did I meet with you and let you think you were kissing her? I guess the answer is that I wanted to kiss you, and I thought if you got to know me—no matter what my name was—that you could love me, too. But that doesn’t make what I did right
.

I know you love Maeve. Maybe you love me, too. Maybe you love us both. I hope so. But I know you love her because of her cool personality and the way she runs off with you and Michael to dig up treasure and play football and stuff. And I know you love that she’s going to get a recording contract and leave Castine someday. I wish I could play the sax, but my mother wouldn’t let me try. Oh, well. I wish you liked the piano, but I guess not everyone does, huh?

What I’m trying to say, Ian, is that I love my sister, too. And I
love you. And this lie is getting too big for me. I don’t want to hurt any of us, including me. I don’t want to hate my sister for being someone you like. It hurts me. And it hurts her. And I feel that hurt in a way I could never explain
.

So I’m sorry, Ian. If you love Maeve, you should just tell her and see what happens. I’ll try to stay out of your way. If you can forgive me, and you think you love me, then I will be the happiest girl in the world. I would like that more than anything. You and me. Ian and Moira. I’d be proud to hold your hand at school or anywhere else. And we can look for a new stone together—one shaped like a piano this time
.

I love you. I hope you can forgive me someday
.

Love, Moira

I shattered. Broke like I’d never cried before. A thousand glass-shard tears filled my eyes, and I bled them out. Oh, Moira! Why didn’t you send it?

I stumbled up the walk and slid twice on the stairs, caught myself with the rail. Once on flat land, I ran over the path. Ian stood there in the drive, packing his car.

“Maeve,” he said, noticing my approach. “What’s wrong?”

“Read it.”

He stared at me as I staggered before him, drunk on grief and regret, and then looked at the paper I’d thrust into his hand. I waited until I saw the words hit home. The admission that she’d pretended to be me. That she loved him. That she loved me. That she hoped he loved her. That she was sorry for all of it.

Misery scarred his features as well. “Jesus. You just found this?”

I nodded.

“Come here,” he said, and I let his arms encircle me. What strange war comrades we made. What a strange war it had been. “I’m sorry, Maeve. Believe me, I’m so horribly sorry.”

I pulled away, gripped his arm. “Forgive her.”

“What?”

“You need to forgive Moira. It’s important. Forgive her.”

“I forgive her,” he said. “I forgave her a long time ago.” The wind ruffled his hair as fine lines grew around his lips. “Can you ever forgive me? Would she? Not a day goes by that I don’t regret … everything.”

He looked me straight in the eye, and I didn’t look away.

“You hurt me, Ian, and you hurt Moira. But I know you didn’t set out to hurt either one of us. I think we’ve all suffered, more than enough.”

Open the door
, said the voice of my memory.

“Ayuh. I forgive you.” I heard the caw of a bird and finally understood.
“We
forgive you.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

ALPHA AND OMEGA

I
took a leave from the university, over the objections of the dean of my department, several of my colleagues, and Kit. My parents nodded when I told them, seemed to understand, though my father took me aside later and asked if I was sure, if I was all right, if I needed to talk.

“I just want to stay, Dad. Not forever. Just for a while longer.” I had the most overpowering urge to see flowers in bloom again here, to be around for the moment the snow would clear away at last, the rains would come in earnest, and the trees would ripen with flowery fruits.

Noel also seemed to understand. I couldn’t bring myself to speak with him for long or even often—once a week, maybe twice. It was a step back for us, this silent
wait for me, wait
request I made of him again, and I didn’t always know that either of us would stay true to it. I had a difficult time seeing beyond Castine.

I did keep my appointment with the neurologist in Bangor. Dr. Philip Heath ran tests, gave me an MRI, took my blood, and made me fill out endless paperwork. In the end, he proclaimed me fit and well—though he asked that I call his office immediately if I ever experienced another waking dream or heard abnormal sounds. I agreed that I would, but I knew his definition of
abnormal
would differ from mine.

One day, I walked to the corner store for some essentials—milk and eggs, some coffee. Before I left, a package of glow-in-the-dark stars caught my eye. “With Adhesive! Guaranteed!” the sticker promised. I added it to my pile of goods and left for home.

I worked that day to cover my bedroom ceiling with those stars. Sure, I’d nicked the idea from Sri Putra, but I wasn’t a complete copycat. I made constellations: Cygnus, Corvus, Orion, Gemini. Over my sister’s bed I made Virgo, for our birth month.

At night, I’d drift off to sleep with my eye on those stars. Moira, I’d think. Bloo. Are you there, riding Delphinus’s back? Where is your light? Where have you gone?

In my worst moments, I grieved over the wasted years when she’d lain comatose, when I might’ve felt her spirit join mine if I hadn’t been so fearful and closed. Now my mind was home only to my thoughts and my voice.

But I dreamed of Moira every night.

There were no doors, no water, just her and me. Usually in the sunshine, sitting in the grass, playing our music or looking at the clouds. Sometimes we were young, sometimes old—with white hair and sagging breasts and false teeth that we would pluck out of our skulls and laugh over. Sometimes we would speak our language, and I would grasp it for a second as I woke, then lose its meaning again, like a slick eel diving back into the deep. But that was all right. I knew I’d catch it again.

THE SUN BEGAN
to show itself on a more regular basis and wake me early in the morning. The snow did melt. Birds returned from their hideaways. Buds appeared as white-speck life on the otherwise bare and winter-ravaged branches. And Moira’s roses, my grandmother’s old yellow blossoms, tight and closed at first, unfurled in the warm rays.

One afternoon, I felt particularly restless. I retrieved the
keris
from its place beneath my pillow. (My mother no longer asked why I did this unusual and seemingly perilous thing.) I went onto the front porch and sat in a splintery rocking chair with the blade on my lap. The thin white scar lines on my palm reminded me that the
keris
was a true weapon, so I took care with it, sheathless as it was.

I rocked and studied the new spring colors as my fingers traced over the curves of the blade and the resilient blood mark—something I’d done so often, I could probably do it in the dark. I’d just lifted the
keris
and looked through the aperture when the mailman approached our door with a package in both hands.

“A big one,” he said, and asked me to sign for it.

My pulse leaped a little when I saw my name on the box, but it wasn’t until I was alone with it that I realized it came from Noel, postmarked Betheny, New York.

I hurried to the kitchen and grabbed a pair of scissors, then went back to the porch and scored along the edges of the box. I tore and cut at some difficult tape before managing to open an end. Beneath wrappings of silver lay a beautiful wooden case. Waves of shock eroded something in me as I took it in, what it was, and what it meant. And then I flipped open the duet of latches and looked at the instrument that sat like a golden moon against a thick pile of midnight velvet.

Noel had sent me a saxophone.

I stroked the smooth mother-of-pearl keys with the tip of my finger and took in the engraved lettering of the brand-new Selmer. I opened the note.

Dear Maeve
,

Call me selfish. I want to hear you play your instrument again sometime soon. Everyone needs their paper and paint—especially a red woman like you
.

Yours, Noel

p.s. No throwing this in the ocean
.

   It was the closest he ever came to pressuring me back.

I HAD THE
most fantastical dream that night. A man, very like Sri Putra in appearance, sat on a dirt floor near a great stone hearth and blazing fire. In his hand he held metal tongs and worked something—a blade, I realized—hot, alive, over the flame. His arms curled and wrists bent as he muttered words I could not understand.

This
keris
he then passed on, and so it went from man to man. Finally, a young Sri Putra gave this blade to a man with a straw hat and sunburned skin. The man was Poppy.

“Thank you for saving my wife,” Sri Putra said, and Poppy nodded before the scene changed again.

Moira and I played Alvilda, the
keris
in my hand and raised to the sky, just moments before being lost in the sea. I saw the blade covered in seaweed, caught in a lobster trap.

Time slurred. I saw an aperture form in the blade’s metal and knew, somehow, that the
keris
meant for this to happen. The Third Eye. The
keris
needed it to find its way back.

I saw the blade ascend through the water and lift into hands. Saw it pass from a man with a fishing cap to another in a great wool coat. It traveled in a boat and then an airplane. It lived awhile with a thin woman and a Pekingese.

Two times more it changed hands before finding Sri Putra in Rome. The
empu
held the
keris
and knew it for his kin’s own creation—the
keris
he’d given to my poppy for saving his wife after the explosion of a young volcano, long before the cancer had taken hold.

And then the uncanniest part: Sri Putra looked straight at me in my dream. “I am a professor now,” he said. “Found. We will see each other again. I have made a new sheath.”

I didn’t forget any part of this odd tale, and so the next day, as my mother worked soil in the garden, I told my father about the dream.

“Interesting,” he said as I set a plate of eggs before him.

I raised my brow in a way I believed would make Giovanni proud. “That’s it? Interesting? How about plausible?”

“It was a dream.” He shrugged and took a bite of egg.

Yes, it had been a dream. But I knew dreams. They held answers. Sometimes questions. Challenges. Puzzles.

“I’ll never forget that Alvilda business, though,” he said, wiping his mouth with his sleeve.

“Well, we were crazy then.” I handed him a napkin. He took it without looking remotely abashed.

“Queen Alvilda, piratess of the sea. Even she settled down for her king eventually.”

“Even she did, huh? Are you trying to say something, Dad?” I smiled. “Want to get rid of me?”

“Oh, no. No. Just saying that after all her war and craziness, even she found peace in the end. And she loved him, after all. That’s all I’m saying. Nothing but that.”

THE DAY CAME
when my father proclaimed it safe to go out onto the Penobscot again, and so I trudged down to the dock where he’d uncovered our motorboat and set it in the water. I relieved it of its ropy confines and started the engine. Wind whipped my cheeks and ears, and made my hair come loose from its short ponytail. I steered out of the mouth of the bay, just a bit, then shut off the engine and sat. The air was cold still and the water choppy, but the sun shone.

Of course I missed my sister acutely in these moments—there was one now where there were once two—but I wasn’t alone in the boat. I opened the wooden box beside me and pulled out the new saxophone. I tucked a reed in my mouth, then fitted pieces of the instrument together. I attached the neck strap and looped it over my head, set the reed into place and secured the ligature. I put the sax’s neck on its body and tightened the screw, feeling tighter still in my chest.

Déjà vu
. The last time I’d been here with a sax, I’d dropped it in the bay. So much had happened since then.

You have suffered
, Sri Putra had said.

I knew this to be true.

I forgive you
, Moira had said.

I felt the truth in that as well.

No throwing this in the ocean
, Noel had said.

I didn’t want to.

I closed my eyes and lifted the mouthpiece, felt the cold press against my lips, took a breath, and played a long note, held it until my lungs ached. I opened myself—every part and bit—and out poured a song of anguish and love and acceptance and hope. I felt, quite strongly, that Moira came through in that song, that she’d handpicked every note herself; and when I finished, when I put the saxophone down on my lap and wept, I thought I heard her voice.

Don’t be afraid of death. It’s so much like birth
.

I shivered long and violent, and felt a shift along all of my faults as the greater part of me gave way to that, believed it. I held a vivid image in my head of my old saxophone at the bottom of the sea, shifting as well, displacing sand and weed, then lifting, rising beyond the sea’s sky, and releasing a bubble of air and a single solemn note.

And it was like death.

And it was like birth.