Now & Then

by Jacqueline Sheehan

  Anna choked and felt the gush of water leaving her lungs, mixed with the salt and acid from her stomach, as she spit out the water she had just swallowed. Her belly was scraped raw from being dragged by the tides, flipped by the waves. Was any part of her broken? As she lay sprawled on her side, she heard the thunderous roar of the surf, as loud as a jet engine. Her eyes stung from the salt and sand, but she let the lids open and waited for the world to come into focus. She was wedged between two slick rocks dressed with seaweed that looked like huge dark green lasagna noodles.

  It was the wind blasting and howling that created the overwhelming noise. When she was a child, she had gone with her family to Hammonasset Beach, and a storm had hit the coast of Long Island Sound. The wind had not allowed her to speak; she had experimented and even screamed as loud as she’d been able, but she hadn’t heard her own voice because the wind had grabbed any sound and swept it away, shattering it.

  She tested this wind and made a sound. “Hello,” she croaked. Only the vibration along her upper palate let her know that she had uttered a word. Anna pushed up to a seated position and began to check her body, running her hands down her torso. Good, the essentials were here: head, torso, and arms. Was this night, or was her vision impaired from the abrasive salt water? Whatever the reason, she could barely see her own body. She ran her hands down her right leg. Good, now the left. Bare thigh met icy cold hands, and as her hands slid below the knee, they were met by an eruption of skin and another vibration of sound that would have been heard as a scream had it not been for the cursed wind. An electric shock sizzled up her leg. She bent her head as close to her left leg as possible, and a deep gash stared back at her with shocking exposure; the leg was cut to the bone, a jagged lengthwise cut. She dove into her own memory; surely there would be a recollection of this. Nothing, only fragmented thoughts of fish and college recollections.

  She tested her other leg with renewed urgency, knowing how much depended on at least one good leg. The toes were bloody from being scraped along the shore but nothing else. Anna felt her chest again. She had on what used to be a white T-shirt. All that remained was the ringed collar and one strip of cloth, enough to cover one breast. She touched her waist and felt what had to be boxer shorts, or what used to be boxer shorts. This was part of her ex-husband’s underwear. The waistband remained, shredded of its cloth covering in all but one thin strip the width of her palm. She protectively pulled the bit of cloth around to her front. Oh God, someone had to find her like this.

  Whatever thoughts she had had the moment she’d been wrested from her home were gone now. Had there been an accident on her flight from Ireland? Her memory was pockmarked with bolts of bright scenes uninterrupted by continuity. Accident, yes, her brother, the terrible accident. And her nephew. She startled, fear helping to clear her head. Joseph, she had picked him up in New Jersey and they had driven forever until she’d thought she’d scream from lack of sleep. Where was he? She stood up, the thought of her nephew grinding into her chest. She put all of her weight on her right leg. “Joseph,” she screamed, cupping her hands around her lips. The wind slid greedy fingers around the name and blew it miles away.

  As her eyes adjusted, she saw the dark outlines of more rocks, a beach, a gray light that could have been either dusk or dawn. She picked up a long strip of seaweed and wrapped it around her calf, tucking in one end as best she could. Regretfully, she glanced down at the remains of her clothing and knew that one or both pieces would have to be sacrificed to her injury. Could the world of women be divided between those who would choose to be rescued wearing only a piece of cloth covering their breasts and those who would choose to cover their bottoms? No, the world of women could be divided between those who chose to survive and those who chose to cower in vanity. She pulled the remains of the T-shirt off her neck and secured the seaweed bandage, pulling as tight as she could bear.

  She began to climb her way over the rocks, and as she did, she picked a direction, keeping the ocean on her right side for this journey to find help. Anna knew two things: she could die from hypothermia or shock, and Joseph (if he’d survived the assault of the ocean landing), could die as well. She had to find him.

  After painfully slow progress, she stopped walking along the shore, with the cold driving deep into her bones, and considered that this could be a dream, since she had no logical explanation for her circumstances other than a hazy thought about dying and time travel. If it was a dream, perhaps it was a lucid dream, given the stunning reality of it. Her roommate from college had continually read books about dreaming and had said that the ultimate was lucid dreaming, being fully conscious in the dream. She looked down at her feet in the dim light, and the bluish tinge on her legs and feet was decidedly undreamlike. If this was a lucid dream, she could change any of this, she could fly, change scenery; too quickly, she knew this was not a dream. The rocks and the shore were slick, and she fell, with the greatest shock to her tailbone, which had smashed into an unforgiving rock. The jagged pain that shot up her left leg from the ugly gash hammered with a nearly audible throb.

  She rounded a corner of a rocky point and headed to a more protected bay, still seeing no one. Could it be that there were simply no people who lived on this stretch of the coast? And which coast was it? An inexhaustible force drove the wind, and Anna grew progressively sleepier. The rocks called to her as a perfectly reasonable place to sleep. She remembered hiking in New Mexico once, near the Mescalero Apache Reservation. When they’d gotten above ten thousand feet, Anna had felt her eyelids descend with an urgent demand to sleep. She’d said to her companions, “I’ll stay here and nap in this meadow while you go on. Pick me up on the way back.” And it had been sweet and pleasant. Perhaps it would be sweet and pleasant again here.

  No! That had been altitude sickness and was nothing like now. She shook her head, her hair heavy with salt and sand. Rocks slick with rain and salt water were not good places to sleep, and she could too easily slip into shock if she allowed herself to rest. If she died, there would be no hope for Joseph.

  She kept moving one foot in front of the other. The land had a bit of a rise to it and then grass was underfoot. That was the good news. The bad news was that the slim ribbon of light she had seen pierce the clouds was not dawn but dusk; darkness galloped in to ensnare her. Anna had never been this afraid before. She began to shake uncontrollably. Her body was trying to warm her.

  Anna had taken a winter outdoor survival course in northern Vermont last January. There had been something that the instructor had said again and again, aside from the basic mantra of Stay dry, at all costs, stay dry, which had already gone by the wayside. Now would be the absolute best time to remember the rest of it. Yes! Every victim that they had ever recovered had had one thing in common: dehydration. That was it; dehydration was nearly as deadly as hypothermia. How very interesting. She needed water.

  She continued to climb upward and away from the ocean, leaving the pounding waves at her back. And hallucinations; both hypothermia and dehydration could cause hallucinations. What part of this was a hallucination? If she’d been back in her winter survival course, she could have raised her hand and asked that very question of her polypropylene-clad instructors. And now would be a good time to ask that question, because Anna saw two lights bouncing erratically—and they were coming closer.

  As she pondered this question, she noticed that she was now on her knees. She couldn’t recall how that had happened, and she knew that it couldn’t be good for her leg, which she had wrapped with a good stout strand of ruffled seaweed. Anna fell forward and was eye level with an engaging rock that had a slight indentation filled with water. She was flat on her belly, a position that allowed her to lap at the rock with her swollen tongue. “Water,” her instructor had said, “will save you.”

  She heard a voice breaking through the wind.

  “Here’s one. Do you suppose more have landed on shore?”

  Anna’s left cheek pressed into a pocket of wet sa
nd. She knew she should rise up to greet her rescuers; that would be the proper thing to do. And she wanted so much to thank them for finding her. But more than anything, she craved the moment that their hands would touch her to confirm that she was alive. Soon they would touch her and she would be saved. The first hands touched her shoulders, and she heard a moan slip from her lips.

  “This one’s alive. As cold as death, but still alive.”

  Every word sounded different and the same. Their words turned and curled where hers were straight. They spoke English, but they were clearly from another country, visitors from Ireland, or the British Isles. Hands, one on her hip and another on her shoulder, turned her over, face up.

  “Jaysus and Mary! Cover the woman.”

  Anna’s eyes closed as she gave herself to warm hands.

  Chapter 8

  She had not been sleeping. Anna didn’t know what she had been doing, but her head was too thick, her eyes too hot, her skin prickled with sharp points of pain everywhere. And now there was something on fire in her leg, in the bone. Her tongue was huge and dry.

  Blinding light came from a window and blue sky filled the entire vista. She squeezed her eyes shut. What was left of her thinking brain, the large chunk of frontal brain, registered high fever, sensitivity to light, and skin painful to the touch. Where the hell was she?

  She rose up on her elbows, and black dots filled her vision. She felt a wool blanket on top of her. Anna sat up and swung her legs around. As soon as her feet hit the floorboards, a howl tore out of her and she crumbled, collapsing like a Tinkertoy with a missing piece.

  There was a deep chill to the floorboards, and Anna’s fevered skin sucked in the coolness like a tonic. Despite the burning pain in her leg, she pressed her face gladly to the floor and spread her palms broadly to soak up fresh cool. Exchange, she thought, this will be an exchange of energy, and Anna took in the cold and gave back the fire of her fever. This is what she was thinking when she heard the clatter of footsteps, the metallic slide of the door latch, and the draft of air rushing along the floor to greet her.

  “Here now, there’s no call for that. I’d have been here in an instant if you needed to get up,” said a woman, clearly from somewhere else.

  Anna, still facedown on the floor, tried to push up with her hands so that she could see something other than the woman’s shoes—boots really. She pushed and rose slightly, as if she’d been arching her chest up into a yoga pose, the name of which escaped her…lion, lotus, cobra, something. Only she wasn’t rising.

  “I can’t get up,” said Anna, more startled than anything.

  “Of course, dear. Tom, come in here and help me get her up. She’s fallen to the floor.”

  More footsteps; a sharper, longer stride. Two hands gripped her armpits and helped her float to an upright position, and they half dragged her, half lifted her to the bed. They sat her on the bed, and the woman reached down and lifted Anna’s legs onto the bed. A hot poker of pain shot through her leg again and she cried out. She gripped the wool blanket and squeezed her eyes shut. She needed to anchor herself. Where was she? Had there been some disaster? Was this a Red Cross disaster center? She clearly lacked a point of reference.

  She had been at home with her nephew. Her nephew. Anna’s eyes flew open. “Where is Joseph?”

  For the first time, Anna looked at the woman and the man standing beside her. With subtle turns of the head, they exchanged worried glances. The woman’s dress was long, loosely fitted at the waist. Her sleeves were rolled up and her hands were chapped and red. Anna was terrible at judging ages, but she guessed this woman might be in her thirties. Her reddish hair was pulled back from her face, and it hung down along her back. The woman turned to the man at her side.

  “She’s not from here, Tom. And if that midwife doesn’t get here soon, she won’t be with us long. Will you bring her a whiskey? I’ll get more wet cloths and try to bring down the fever, although it might have gone beyond cooling.”

  Anna sank back into sudden exhaustion. A doctor—she needed a doctor, not a midwife. Didn’t they know that she wasn’t pregnant? Yes, a doctor would fix everything. She could go back to sleep.

  This is what Anna dreamed. An army of men dressed in black was on a mission to cut off her leg. Her brother appeared in his swimming trunks and he was his younger self, ten or eleven. He held out his hand to her. “Take the dots, Annie,” he said.

  Anna woke. For the first time in she didn’t know how long, her head was clearer. The difference was dramatic. She didn’t move, but she thought about things on her To Do list: balance the checkbook, go through her mail, call her mother…. Oh no, now she did remember. The accident. Her brother.

  She sat up and remembered the room that she had seen before. The chalky white walls, massive by the looks of the windowsill.

  “Hey,” she yelled. “Hey, is anybody there?” She looked around for her clothes after peeking down at the white sack of a sleeping gown. She pulled back the covers and started to swing her legs around. But there was a damp cloth on one leg and she pulled it off. She stopped and stared. Large black dots, six or seven of them, lined either side of a nasty slice on her leg. She reached down to brush them off. They were soft and warm. They moved in response to her prodding and pulsed slightly, just like one might expect with leeches. Leeches.

  “Get them off! Get them off me!”

  The door flew open. A familiar-looking woman came in and rushed to her bedside.

  “All right now. There’s no need for screaming. The leeches have done their work for you. Tom, bring a candle, no, the lantern. We need to take off the leeches even if they aren’t full to bursting.”

  Anna had pulled herself up to the edge of the bed. She pulled the front of her nightgown out a bit and peered down to scan her body to see if there were leeches anywhere else.

  “Are there leeches anywhere else? On my back?” Her entire body felt as if it had been covered with black leeches, sucking away at her.

  “No dear, only where they were needed. Now be still and we’ll have them off.”

  This is what happens when you lose your mind. You wake up floating in the ocean, and then you crawl along a rocky shore in the shredded remains of your ex-husband’s T-shirt and his blue Man Silk underwear. Oh, and you wrap thick, slimy seaweed around your leg because that’s gashed open. Then you wake up and leeches are sucking blood out of your leg. The leeches are removed, presumably because they have done their job. Then you get dressed in a long linen skirt and blouse and you stand outside and you suddenly get it; this is madness, because you don’t know how you got here or where you are. Everything is wrong.

  Anna looked out the window. The thatched roofs were wrong, the man hitched to the plow was wrong. She was pretty sure this was Ireland, given the accents and the landscape, and that was very wrong. And it wasn’t now, not Anna’s now.

  She surfaced for a brief moment. Rohypnol, the date-rape drug; that was it! She’d been drugged and kidnapped by back-to-the land isolationists. She could integrate that possibility, but it included the possibility of the present. That was still now.

  It was time to get up and get a better look at the surroundings. She limped out the front door, past the three children who lined up behind their mother as if Anna was going to eat them. Anna kept one hand on the door frame and took in the stone walls, the fields, the barn behind the house, and the rutted lane in front of the cottage. The woman, who’d said that her name was Glenis, had also said that fresh air would be good for her.

  Anna went back to the house through the tiny door. “Glenis, could I talk with you for a moment?”

  “Aye. Michael, go help your father and take the two little ones with you.” Glenis was wearing an apron that covered as much of her dress as possible. The children backed out the door eyeing Anna. Glenis looked expectantly at Anna, taking the pause to dip her fingers into a piece of lard and rubbing the grease into her red hands.

  “I don’t remember how I got here, and I don’t
know where I am,” said Anna.

  “You’ve had a terrible fright. We think there was a shipwreck somewhere along the coast; that happens too often for me. We’re always finding bits of wreckage along the rocks. And when they found you, you were near cold as iron. I wasn’t sure we could warm you, if you know what I mean. I thought the Archangel had you by the toes.”

  Anna didn’t answer. No, she thought, I was not on a ship. I was not shipwrecked.

  Glenis went on. “And if I may ask, where are you from, where did you start out?”

  What could Anna possibly say when everything was so wrong and when she had tipped over into madness? Maybe she’d had a stroke; she was only thirty-four, but it was still possible. Maybe she wasn’t really hearing what people said. Her vision could be affected also. She blessed every minute of law school that forced her to read a situation for all possibilities.

  “America. The United States. Massachusetts,” she said.

  Glenis let a sigh slip out, and her shoulders dropped a bit lower. “America, that explains a lot. And you’ve not been sent by the British?”

  Anna thought of possible reasons why Glenis would lead her down this particular path. The British?

  “Glenis, where are we? What town is this?” Anna felt a buzzing in her head like crickets. She gripped the back of a straight-backed chair.

  “We’re not in a town as such, but we’re most near Kinsale. The village is down the hill. Does that help?” asked Glenis.

  “And the date, could you tell me the date?” asked Anna.

  “The back end of summer, as you can see. Coming into second potato harvest, September,” said the woman.

  “No, the year, tell me the year.” Anna’s stomach turned over and she headed for the door. As she did, Glenis called after her.

  “Well, it’s 1844, such as it is,” she said as Anna made it to the door just in time to heave all over the stone steps.