The Last Will of Moira Leahy (7 page)

Out of Time

Castine, Maine

NOVEMBER 1995

Moira and Maeve are eleven

Moira woke in the middle of the night, though she didn’t understand why right away.

“It’s happening.” Maeve was sitting upright in bed.

Moira sat, too. “What’s wrong? Poppy?”

Their mother’s howl splintered the night.

“No, Moira, don’t—”

But Moira leaped up and ran to her parents’ room. Mama writhed in their bed, and Daddy had his arms braced over her, his face close to hers.

“Oh, sweetheart.” He made a noise—sibilant—a let of air. “Honey, it’s all right.”

“Oh, God!” Mama howled again. “Jack, no!”

Moira felt a tug on her arm and looked back at her sister.

“Come away.”

“No.” Moira spied the crimson stain on the sheet, watched, rapt and frightened as it spread, ate up the white. “No.”

The baby was lost.

CHAPTER FIVE

SIGMUND’S SECRETS

I
wove my way down the familiar halls of Time After Time until I stood before a closed entry. I cracked the door, hoping to see Noel absorbed in his work. Instead of finding him as I often had—at an easel, barefoot on bleached tarps beside the long bank of windows—I discovered him asleep on his bench, slumped over a table streaked with colored paint and heaped with old palettes, tools and glues, an assortment of pigments. A sketchpad sat open beside him, and his fingers barely held to a teetering pencil.

I stepped inside. Every barrier I’d erected toward the opposite sex, toward Noel, sighed away as if napping was the order of the day. A beautiful man, asleep and unaware. My eyes wandered over him like an eager adventurer. I scaled a cheekbone, skied his nose, and glided over the curve of a full bottom lip. I ran wild through a thatch of black hair, then lay in the hammock of his ear, the pinna, the little wing. I moved closer. Slid down his neck and loped across one broad shoulder and the curved part of his back. Dallied over a length of bare arm and lingered for ages on a hand—what gorgeous skin he had, how strong his musculature, how long his fingers.

Then the fingers moved, and my reverie shattered. His eyes opened and fixed on mine. He lifted his head slowly.

“I’m sorry,” I stuttered. “I never should have—” I spun around and faced a windowless wall, like I’d caught him naked or something. I repressed the urge to walk to a corner and press my nose into its seam. “Sorry.”

“Maeve,” he said, “turn around.”

But I ran out, closed and locked the door from the hall. Water spurted from beneath it. The wood shook as Noel pounded on it from the other side.

“Open the door!”

I sat up in bed, gasping, drenched in sweat, and saw that it was just after 4:00 a.m. I heard more pounding. Real. This was not Kit forgetting her key.

I grabbed my robe, flung limbs where they belonged. I looked out the peephole and saw him, though I hardly believed it was true until I opened the door and met his eyes. And then I threw myself into my father’s arms.

ALL THE SCENTS
that were Castine hugged around my dad’s body like a net; he couldn’t escape them if he tried. He seemed thinner, his body and his salted hair, but his smile looked just the same. I didn’t ask why he hadn’t called to say he was coming or waited to travel during the day. My guess was that he’d finished his weekend chores and decided right then to make the trip, and hit the road.

“It’s so great you’re here,” I told him. “What made you come?”

“Well, you know how I love my girls,” he said, and I smiled what felt like the first honest smile in a decade. “I even brought one of them along.”

My jaw slackened, but when I looked out at the blue pickup on the road I saw only a little fur face in the window. I didn’t have to ask to know my mother wasn’t hunkered down beneath the tarp-covered bulge in back, waiting for her moment to surprise me. The last time we’d met, over two years ago at a halfway mark in Boston, she’d barely offered a word.

“That’s Sparky. I hope you don’t mind I brought her.”

“No, she’ll be fine. Cute.”

“Your mother wants me to bring you home for Christmas.”

“No, Dad.” I didn’t believe him, but even if it was true, it was only so she could ignore me a little more directly.

He looked past me and into my living room—the sparse walls, squared-off piles of paper on the oak desk in the corner, uncluttered stone fireplace, single denim sofa, and entertainment unit with a television and no CD player. “No Christmas tree?”

“My landlady doesn’t like trees,” I said. “Fire hazard.”

The dog, a little thing with a white body and brown head, curled up on my couch when my father brought her in. Sam must’ve found a good hiding spot.

“The couch is a pullout,” I said as he set down his duffel. “So you’ll have a place to sleep, if your dog will share with you. I’d offer you Kit’s bed, but I never know when she might actually use it, and I think you’d give her a heart attack if she found you under her sheets. I doubt even she could perform CPR on herself.”

He smiled. “I can sleep anywhere.”

“Are you tired?” It was, after all, still four-something in the morning. “Or are you hungry?”

This was a rhetorical question with my father. I poached three eggs, firm, the way he liked them, brewed coffee. We made careful small talk in my kitchen. Ned Baker—a hellion I’d gone to school with—got married last month, Dad said. I told him about a student of mine also named Ned Baker who was just as troublesome as the Ned back home.

“Must be the name,” he said. I agreed, and then we fell into a silence that felt necessary but a little uncomfortable—like a straw bed when you’re just too exhausted to care about the bits and pieces sticking into your side.

“How long can you stay?” I asked as he scraped up the last of his eggs.

“Like I said, your mother wants me to bring you—”

“I can’t go home with you, Dad. If Mom really wanted to see me, she could’ve gotten in the truck with you and come.” I didn’t mean to sound so sharp. I swallowed guilt when he turned and looked out the kitchen window.

“There’s lightning,” he said. “Storm’s coming.”

“Lightning in late December? It’s been a little warm, but—”

Thunder like cannon fire rattled my windows, and that was all it took. Adrenaline tore through me.
It’s just a storm, Jesus Christ, don’t be a freak
. I couldn’t control my response, though I tried to hide it. I wanted my dad to see I’d become a well-adjusted adult after all, to tell my mother so.

He waited until another bolt of lightning flashed, and then he pushed back his chair. “I’ll stay through the weekend,” he said. “Your mother, she can’t do it all herself.”

I regretted the words right away but couldn’t stop them. “No, she can’t, but she’ll still try.”

I GATHERED SHEETS,
a pillow, and a quilt, and put them beside Sparky’s prone form on the couch. “Lazy dog,” I said, and scratched her head. She stretched, but kept her eyes closed.

“You going to sing, Mayfly?” My father leaned against the doorway to the kitchen. “Sing a bedtime song?”

Like I was fourteen again, and he was in the hammock with a lemonade cradled between his hip and hand as Moira and I played for him—
sang
in the only way we could. Neither of us could carry a tune with our own vocal chords.

My best naps I owe to you
, he’d say, and ruffle our hair.

“Sorry, but my landlady lives upstairs and she doesn’t like music.” This detail may or may not have been true, but it served the moment well enough. “I could recite a French poem, though. Italian. Latin. Spanish. Portuguese. Even Romanian, if you don’t mind a bad accent.”

“No music?” This was the real foreign concept to my father, the thing I couldn’t put words to. The sky rumbled again.

“Should we take the dog out before this hits?”

We stumbled into another uncomfortable moment outside. As Sparky did her business, my father looked back at my apartment and grunted. The blinking lights of my landlady’s Christmas tree illuminated a second-floor window. I pretended not to notice.

“Looks like less sky out here, eh?” he said.

I couldn’t see any sky at the moment, just dark, but I agreed. It had taken me a long time to get over the feeling of claustrophobia here. Less sky, too much land. I felt the draw of the sea, too, a force as ancient and enduring as a siren call.

“Some things never change,” my father said. I thought he’d go on about storms and how they smell and sound and feel on the skin before the first spill—he was a Castinian, after all—but he surprised me. “Stars are up there, Mayfly, above the clouds. Can’t see ’em all the time, but they’re there, day and night, fair weather or gale.”

He kept his face slanted upward as if he hadn’t meant anything more than what he’d said. I knew better. But so what if I didn’t have pictures on my wall or a tree covered in lights. So what if everything was neat and I had a nearly empty bottle of Windex. So what if I had no music in my home and couldn’t sing to my father. It had nothing to do with stars and constancy. It was just …
just
. And I had a lot, had done so much with my life. I was a great teacher, I—

Thunder split the air again, and this time I flinched.

“It’s a good storm, Mayfly,” my father said, as the first rain hit my cheek.

Good storm. Heel. Roll over. Don’t stay
.

I left man and dog to their pseudonight, and crawled back into bed. I listened as clouds labored over drops of water, as the afterbirth of every storm known to man seemed to fall. The noises were there, too, riled up in my head like positive and negative charges, wanting to write themselves into a song about a storm out of time.

Daylight filtered through the seams of my shade when I finally gave in to temptation. I pulled my dusty saxophone case out from under my bed and stared at it, perhaps the way an alcoholic looks at a bottle of Scotch. My hands shook as I opened the latches, lifted the cover.

Vivid scent hit me first—dusky brass and bittersweet cane. My mouth watered, but no instrument lay atop the matted-plush in-sides. Instead, there were folded notes, mementos, my passport, a few reeds from my old sax, and some stones from Castine. I stared at it all for a moment, then opened one of the notes.

Maevy Gravy
,

Guess what number I’m thinking of. Come on, guess!

Oh, God. Nauseous. Bleeding memories. I hated
eling
.

I tucked some rocks into the pocket of my pajamas, then put Noel’s postcards into the case with my sister’s note and closed the lid. And then I shut my eyes and let myself sway with the turbulence, feeling like the First Chinese Brother—my mouth filled with water, the ocean pressed against my ribs.

Out of Time

Castine, Maine

JUNE 1999

Moira and Maeve are fourteen

Kit had requested a personal concert, so Moira and Maeve set out one day with their instruments in the lobster boat—a vessel that was sturdy and long and had decent coverage. No clouds roamed the sky, but because Moira had a keen and personal appreciation for how weather conditions changed in the bay, she took care to drape an orange rubber coat around the edges of her keyboard.

Maeve warmed up with a series of arpeggios as Kit made her requests: “Don’t Speak,” “Nothing Compares 2 U,” “My Heart Will Go On” (Maeve pulled away from her sax and made a retching noise), “Sowing the Seeds of Love.”

When Maeve smiled, Moira set her keyboard to Reverse Gurgle, put her right thumb on D, and began. The brass of Maeve’s sax caught and threw sunlight, and her clear tone rang out. Moira knew her sister was a true talent, the prodigy she’d been labeled years before. Ben Freeman said he’d see to it that she made an album someday.

If I do, so will you
, Maeve always said.

Sometimes, alone with her thoughts as her sister slept, Moira wondered what might’ve been if she’d tried the sax first. She might’ve been a prodigy, too. Then she remembered the things she liked best—her piano, her roses,
Jane Eyre
, and solitude—and knew she wouldn’t have liked the attention so well as Maeve.

Later, as Maeve played a piece she’d written herself, Moira noticed a lone boat lingering nearby. She pointed it out to Kit, whose lips twisted into a parody of a smile.

“It’s my brother,” she said.

“Ian?”

“Well, yeah, I only have one brother, thank God. See the little red cat on the mainsail? That’s Michael’s boat.” Kit leaned close, whispered in her ear, “I think Ian likes Maeve.”

“He does not!”

Maeve’s cadence faltered.

“Shh! He always talks about her.”

“That’s not a good thing. He probably has a voodoo doll with red hair and pins sticking out of it.”

Kit giggled quietly as Moira studied the boat. It was Ian, all right. He was hard to miss. Though just a grade ahead of them, he was more than a year older and had sprouted taller than anyone in his class. He looked dusk-gilded and windblown, like a storybook hero with a kind heart. Moira knew better, even if he did look softer, more mortal somehow, surrounded by so much sea.

“When Maeve plays in your living room, Ian takes out his telescope and watches her,” Kit said.

“He doesn’t!”

“The first time I saw, he said he’d give me ten bucks not to tell anyone. I told him to keep his money, and then he told me he’d break my legs if I said anything.”

“Maybe he just likes the saxophone?”

“Maybe, but whenever Maeve’s over he gets all googly-eyed and dopier than usual.”

Moira dredged up a smile for that. Everyone knew Ian was wicked smart. Almost as smart as Kit.

“You don’t have to tell Maeve, do you?” Kit asked. “I mean, it’ll make her uncomfortable, and, I mean, Ian wouldn’t really break my legs”—she paused for a moment as if considering the legitimacy of this statement, then continued—“but I’ll have a miserable summer if he’s mad at me.”

“Uh, I can try.” Already, Moira felt the pulse of her twin’s curiosity. Maeve’s last notes still hung in the air when she turned to Moira.

“What’s going on?”

“Ian and Michael boated out,” Moira said, hoping Maeve would be satisfied with that. She nodded toward Michael’s craft, now turned landward.

“And?” Maeve prompted.

Moira shrugged at Kit, who looked between them with exasperation. “How do you two do that?”

“It’s because we’re witches, according to your creepy brother.” Maeve smirked. “What did he want?”

“He likes you,” Kit said, then added hastily, “but please, please don’t ever tell him I said so.”

Maeve’s mouth fell open.

“Tell her the rest.”

Kit glared at Moira for a second. “And he watches you sometimes when you play the saxophone.”

“All of it,” Moira said.

“Through the window.” Pause. “With a telescope.”

Maeve’s tongue hung from her mouth as if she’d eaten something shockingly bitter. She coughed and danced in circles as the girls choked with laughter, and then she spouted various things in French that Moira understood but Kit did not—that Maeve would be forever scarred by the knowledge and would never play near a window again for the rest of her life—all of which made Moira laugh until her sides ached. Finally, Maeve said something Kit could understand: “That’s disgustipatingly horriflable!”

They giggled for several minutes more as the concert came to an official—if not dignified—end.

THE NEXT DAY
began with their regular morning order: “Girls, go find something to do.”

“We can help with Pops—”

“No.”

“We can watch a movie. Daddy rented
The Wizard of—
”

“No.” Their mother held an empty plate in one hand and dirty laundry in the other. Beneath her eyes lay dark creases that looked to Moira like crescent moons, dead on their backs. “Go on,” she said. “Do something
outside.”

Moira waved to Maeve, and together they walked downstairs. “Let’s practice at the picnic table.”

“No.” Maeve bowed her head. “I thought we could practice in the basement today.”

“Mom said outside, and the basement’s gross.” The cellar air tasted stale and clogged Moira’s nostrils. They didn’t even have chairs down there, just a few bones Maeve thought belonged to a dinosaur, the prow of a wrecked boat, some line Daddy had called
the shittiest piece of lash I’ve ever been sold …
and spiders. “Forget it. Why would you even want to?”

Maeve rubbed her arms, bit her lip. And then Moira knew.

“You can’t avoid Ian forever!”

“I don’t want him to watch me. How would you feel?”

Moira thought she might not mind so much, but she didn’t want Maeve to know that. “We’ll wait until his driver’s lesson,” she suggested. “He should leave soon.”

“We should take his telescope when he’s gone and break it.”

“You’ll be cranky later if you don’t use your Ian-free time to practice.”

Maeve’s hands danced around her. “Fine. I don’t want to spend my summer in jail for stealing someone’s telescope anyway, especially when that someone isn’t worth jail time and is the one who should really be in jail for peeking around and making girls younger than him so wicked uncomfortable.” She paused. “Unless the jail is air-conditioned.”

Maeve snorted. Moira laughed.

“Plenty of people will be looking at you if we travel the world like gypsies,” Moira said. “You’ll have plenty of admirers.” She tried to leer the way she’d seen a man leer at a woman once in a movie—mouth open a little, eyes piercing—and then she threw in a wink.

Another snort, another giggle.

They waited until they heard the Bronyas’ rumbly old truck heading down the road, then went outside with their instruments. Lilac trees snowed blossoms along the pebbled path in the backyard, and even though the picnic table was in the shade of one of those trees, it was still unseasonably hot.

“Let’s go,” Maeve said, and soon they were in the thick of a classical piece,
Trois Romances sans Paroles
. But even though Maeve’s line in the first part should’ve been a clean bit of melody, she stumbled through it.

Daddy, who’d emerged from the docks, tapped his fingers against the table, and when Maeve paused after a run of errors in part two, he spoke up. “You okay, Mayfly? Need a break?”

“No, Daddy,” she said. “I’m just sloppy today, and we didn’t warm up.” She squinted at the sky. “Or maybe we’re too warmed up.”

“Ayuh, it’s hot.” A bead of sweat trailed down his cheek as he glanced at Moira. “How ’bout you, squirt?”

“I’m good. There’s lemonade in the fridge,” she said. “I made it how you like with extra sugar. Don’t tell Mom.”

“Good girl.” He tousled her hair and went into the house.

Maeve blew out a gusty sigh. “Pick it up from part two?”

They were just about to start their fifth piece when Maeve abruptly dropped her sax and sprinted inside. The porch door slapped shut behind her.

“What the heck’s wrong with you?” Moira yelled, just before she heard another slam, a car door. Ian and his dad were back. She left her keyboard and followed her sister into the house.

Maeve stood with her back against the kitchen wall, twisting a strand of hair. “Can you grab my saxophone for me?”

“You’re so weird about him that you can’t get it yourself? Are you going to be like this all summer?” When Maeve gave her hair another twist, Moira locked her jaw and strode back into the sunshine. Her hand had just gripped the sax’s hot brass when a voice behind her said, “You sounded good the other night.”

Ian sat in the grass with Gorp, their wandering mongrel. The dog writhed with pleasure as Ian scratched his stomach.

Maybe it was because of her rare edgy mood that Moira didn’t startle or even think it odd that he spoke to her civilly. “Thanks,” she said. “I saw you there.”

He dipped his chin, and his blue eyes grabbed at her as he smiled slow and warm. She half-wondered if he’d open his mouth a little and wink, but those things never came. The effect was better his way. Maeve would’ve passed out. A nervous giggle caught in her throat.

“You’re good,” he said. “Really talented.”

“Thanks.” She almost uttered,
So are you
. That would’ve been embarrassing—though not insensible. He was talented at math and blood brothering and taunting them all, and at making Moira nervous and curious with his so-blue-stay-here eyes.

“I almost forgot.” Ian stood as Gorp whined for another scratch. He reached into his pocket, and a moment later revealed something small and white on his outstretched palm. “It’s a rock I found inside a mussel shell that looks like … you’ll see.”

The tiny curved bit of stone was about the size of two pencil erasers but shaped like an irregular
Z
, fat on one end and tapered on the other. “What’s it supposed to be?”

“Forget it. It’s stupid.” He closed his palm and made to throw the stone, but Moira grabbed his arm before he could.

“Show me again. I’ll figure it out.” She slid her fingers to his fist, worked it open, and removed the stone. She stared at it with as much imagination as she could muster. A snake, she thought, a second before he said—

“It’s a sax. See it?”

“Oh—oh yeah! That’s cool!”

She was about to ask him if he’d seen a keyboard on the beach as well when he said, “It reminded me of you. Keep it.”

When it hit her, she felt number than a pounded thumb:
I’m holding Maeve’s sax. He thinks I’m Maeve
.

“Your dad could maybe put it on a chain or something for you, you know? There’s already a little hole on one side.”

She looked away. She had to tell him—

“Or just chuck it. I don’t care,” he added gruffly. The Ian she knew.

“No, I wouldn’t.” He’d be mortified now if she revealed herself. It would be kinder not to. And what harm could it do to let him think she was Maeve for just a moment? Decided, Moira said what she would if the gift had been meant for her. “That was nice of you to think of me. I’ll take it, if that’s okay.” She smiled as warm a smile as she had to give.

“Sure,” he said, though the word sounded as slow and muggy as the day. He bent to pat Gorp on the head one last time, then took a step toward his house. “Me and Michael are going to the island later if you want to come.”

“We’re pretty much grounded. But thanks.”

He took another step. “Sure. Seeyaround.”

“Okay,” Moira said. “See ya.” She didn’t laugh when he tripped on his own porch stair, and she turned quickly away when he looked back to see if she’d noticed.

Alone in the kitchen, she set Maeve’s saxophone on the table and looked again at the rock in her hand. A gift from Ian. Holy heck. Maeve wouldn’t play anywhere but the basement again if she knew. So Moira wouldn’t tell her; there was no need. But she couldn’t throw the gift out, either. With a rush of guilt, she tucked the tiny charm into her pocket, where it burned for the rest of the day with all the weight of a stolen sun.