“Colin?”
He heard his name called faintly: that strange woman’s voice again, with its Irish lilt. He stopped playing and opened his eyes. The room was entirely dark, but the bedside lamp had been on only a few moments ago. He wondered if Jen had come in and turned off the lamp, if he’d been sleeping with his guitar in his hands, but that didn’t seem possible. “Jen?” he called out.
A laugh answered him. “Nah,” came the answer from the darkness, in a familiar accent. “Yeh should keep playing. ’Tis a lovely tune, that.”
There was a faint glow near the foot of the bed, almost like a campfire glimpsed through evening fog. He thought of reaching for his glasses, to try to see more clearly, but he found that he didn’t want to move. He could smell briny water and the distinct herbal scent of burning peat. A figure moved in front of the fire, a long skirt swaying, the woman’s face hidden in shadow and long, dark hair.
“Yer wondering if I’m real,” she told him. “I might be, or yeh might be dreaming and imagining it all. ’Tis difficult to tell. Mayhap a bit o’ both.” She didn’t come nearer, nor could he see her clearly. Her figure hovered against the light, enticing, but he couldn’t seem to make his legs swing over the edge of the bed to go to her. He clutched the neck of the guitar, harder.
“I’m waiting for yeh, Colin,” she said. “I need what yeh have to give. It hurts, the mistakes I’ve made. Yeh have no idea how much it hurts.” The pain in the woman’s voice made him ache, but still he couldn’t force himself to move. He lay there, stricken. In a rush of peat-laden wind, she was alongside the bed, her features faint and indistinct in the firelight and smoke and the weakness of his eyes, and she smiled wanly at him as she leaned into him fully. He could feel her breasts, her hips against his body. “Come to me,” she whispered in his ear, her tongue dancing along his earlobe. “It’s time. Come to me.”
The weight of her lifted from him and the firelight in the room faded. He reached for her one-handed, to put his arm around her and bring her body back to his, but there was nothing above him and the room had gone dark again.
He blinked, as if to clear his vision. There was light from the street outside leaking through the blinds: a true light, a solid light, and the bedside lamp was on again. Colin started; there was no one else in the bedroom, and in his hand he was still holding the guitar, clutching it so tightly that his fingers ached as he released it. Faintly, he could hear Jen and Aaron conversing in the other room, and he wondered whether they had heard him talking to the apparition. Seeing her, talking to her—it was all fading in his head, like the wisp of a dream collapsing in the morning.
“Goddamn it,” he said quietly. Then, even more softly: “Only crazy people are supposed to hear voices.”
He put the guitar back over his lap and sounded the first notes of the song again, but this time he played only the tune that he knew. That older tune, that strange forefather of it, seemed to be gone, the changed melody teasing him from memory but too elusive to catch and hold.
“Damn it,” he said, and put the guitar down.
It was Aunt Patty who called Jen’s apartment early the next morning.
Colin heard Jen’s cell phone ring through the closed door of his bedroom; Jen was in the kitchen. He heard Jen’s “Hi, Aunt Patty . . .” then several uh-huhs, and finally “Sure, we’ll meet you at the hospital then. Give us an hour.” He heard Aaron’s voice, though he couldn’t quite understand what he was saying. “I have to get Colin up,” Jen said, and he heard her footsteps approaching down the hallway, followed by a soft knock on the door. “Colin?”
“Come on in. I’m awake.”
The knob turned and Jen’s head—in soft focus since his glasses were still on the nightstand—peered around the edge. “Aunt Patty just called.”
“I heard. What’s up?”
“Mom’s made the decision; she’s told them to do whatever tests are needed so they can take him off the vent. If . . .” She stopped, clamping her jaw shut. “If we want to say good-bye before they take him, we need to be at the hospital in an hour.”
“You okay, Jen?”
Her voice shivered and tears threatened her eyes. “As much as I’m going to be.”
“Let me get dressed and I’ll be out.”
“We’ve already showered. The bathroom’s yours if you want it.”
“Thanks,” he told her.
“I’m going to fix some toast and coffee. It’ll be ready when you get out.”
“Sounds good.”
All the mundane, everyday words dammed the emotional chaos underneath. The door closed.
Fifteen minutes later, showered and shaved, he went into the kitchen, where Jen and Aaron were sitting at the small table, coffee mugs steaming in front of them. He poured himself coffee and sat across from them. A plate of buttered toast sat untouched on the table. Colin wrapped his hands around the mug, just feeling the pleasant warmth but not drinking; his stomach was in an uproar and he was afraid the coffee would only make it worse. Jen looked at him and shook her head mutely. “God, I’m so scared,” she said. Aaron silently put his arm around her.
“I know,” Colin told her. “I am, too. Our grandparents . . . Mom and Dad only told me about their deaths afterward; I wasn’t there to see them on their deathbeds. This . . . this is different, and yeah, scary. I agree. Part of me doesn’t want to be there; the rest of me feels like it’s my responsibility. This is too sudden. I never had the chance to reconcile with Dad. I really wish I could have talked with him, or at least had a chance to try to explain to him, one more time, who I am and what I’m doing. Now . . . At least we don’t have to watch him die. We don’t have to see them take him off the vent. I guess that’s good.”
From the corner of his eye, Colin saw a darkness fluttering at the window of the kitchen. He glanced that way: a crow, its feathers blue-black and glinting iridescently in the sun, had landed there. The creature seemed to be staring in at them, its satiny black bill nearly tapping at the glass.
“Your mom’s made the right decision, though,” Aaron said as Colin stared at the crow. “Who knows whose life your dad might save with his kidneys, his liver? Or maybe his corneas might give someone back their sight. You have to remember that—his death will potentially help others.”
“Colin?” he heard Jen say, then she gasped as she followed his stare and glanced at the window herself. “Shit! What the fuck?”
The crow opened its beak; they all heard a faint caw through the glass, then the bird extended its wings and let itself fall away. The bird’s shadow slid over the glass and was suddenly gone. “Okay, that was too weird,” Jen said. “What the hell was a damn crow doing on my windowsill?”
Aaron shrugged; Colin sat silent. The crow, the raven, figured often in Celtic mythology—he knew that from his studies of the subject in school. That wasn’t a coincidence, Colin wanted to say. He remembered the dream—or at least what he assumed was a dream—the night before. The Irish woman . . . She wanted me to come to her . . .
Jen’s gaze was on him. He wondered whether she knew that the crow was also considered to be a harbinger of the bean shee, the “banshee” whose cry foretold a death. Colin took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose—at least he could no longer see Jen’s face except as a blur. That helped; he could pretend that he didn’t know what she was thinking.
“I guess we should get going,” he said. “Knowing Mom, she’ll be there early.”
He would mostly remember the smells afterward: the scent of his mother’s perfume and Aunt Patty’s when he hugged them; the antiseptic tang of the hospital air, the freshly-dry-cleaned scent of Tommy’s suit. They gathered around his father’s bed in the ICU, standing around him. His mother stood on the right side at the head of the bed, brushing his father’s short, gray hair with her fingers; Doctor Pearse—a nurse behind her—stood across the bed from his mother. Coli
n, Jen, Tommy, and Aunt Patty were arrayed around his father, with Aaron standing behind Jen and Harris sitting on one of the chairs against the wall. Father Frank stood next to Harris in his surplice and stole, his Bible open in his hand. Doctor Pearse addressed her words mostly to Colin’s mother.
“A colleague and I performed the tests independently last night, and again this morning, and we both agree. All the criteria for declaring brain death are there.” The doctor kept talking, going on about apnea tests, cerebral motor responses, corneal and tracheal reflexes, and more. Colin heard the technical details without really listening, the phrases just empty syllables in his ears. Dr. Pearse’s professionally sympathetic gaze swept over each of them. “What all that tells us,” she said finally, “is that we have a definitive diagnosis of brain death, which means—legally—he’s already passed on. With the DNR release you’ve signed, Mrs. Doyle, we’re ready to go ahead and take your husband’s body to the transplant surgical team. I just want to make certain that’s still what you want.”
Colin saw his mother nod faintly. Her hand pressed her husband’s once.
“We have Mr. Doyle on a morphine drip,” the doctor continued, “as well as lorazepam for sedation. I want you know that he is feeling absolutely no pain or discomfort. For the viability of his organs, though, we need to keep him on the ventilator until we’ve harvested all the viable organs.”
“You’re sure there’s no possibility you’re wrong?” Colin asked. “I mean, you hear of someone suddenly coming out of a coma after months or years . . .”
Dr. Pearse was shaking her head before he’d finished. “Your father’s not in a coma.” She wasn’t harsh, only factual. Colin wondered how many times she’d said something similar to other families. “I know that you’re looking at him and he seems to be alive. You see his chest rising and falling and can see his heartbeat on the monitor. But on an EEG, looking for brain activity—and we did that last night and this morning as well—you’d see no electrical activity at all. That isn’t the case for coma patients, and a coma patient would have had responses to the other tests we’ve done.” She took a long breath, and her voice changed, a warmth and sympathy entering her tone and attitude. “I’m truly sorry and I know how hard this is for all of you. But I can tell you that there isn’t any clinical evidence of recovery from a patient who has met all the criteria for brain death. None. I promise you that if I had any uncertainty, any at all, I would tell you to wait and let nature take its course. But with your father’s situation . . . If I were to take him off the ventilator, he would stop breathing, and he’d die within a very few minutes. This way, with the transplant team, some good will come from his death. I hope that can be of comfort to you.”
Colin watched his father’s chest, which lifted once, then slowly fell. The ventilator hissed in time to the breath. The tableau would be fixed in Colin’s mind: all of them leaning forward over the bed; his mother whispering to his father as Tommy put his arm around her. “Tom, you just rest now. I’ll miss you, darling. I love you. I love you so much . . .” Her voice broke and she began to cry, an aching, terrible sound that, contagious, rippled around the room. Colin’s eyes filled with tears, blurring the scene, and his breath shuddered. He felt someone’s hand on his back and didn’t know who it was and didn’t care. The comfort was all he craved.
“I’ll wait outside while you say your good-byes,” Dr. Pearse said. “Call me when you’re ready for us to take him.”
She left the room, closing the door behind her. Father Frank rose from his chair and went to the head of the bed to intone the Last Rites. Colin’s mother gave a sharp, birdlike cry of pain as she listened. She bent over the body, kissing her husband softly as Tommy held her. Colin heard Jen crying hard, and he started to go to her, but she had already turned into Aaron’s embrace. For a moment, Colin felt adrift, alone in the midst of a terrible pit of black grief, but then Aunt Patty found him; he let her hug him, comforting him as she might have when he was a child. He let himself cry then, fully, pulling away from her several gulping breaths later, wiping at his eyes. He looked at his father lying warm and breathing and empty on the bed; at his mother sitting now in a chair someone had brought her next to the bed, still clutching his father’s hand.
“Go on,” she said to the room. “All of you should tell him good-bye.”
One by one, they made their way to the head of the bed to whisper their last words to him. Colin hung back, watching as Harris came forward to pat his father’s hand. “You’d have won, Tom,” he said. “Now it’ll be Tommy. I’ll make sure of that.”
Colin went up last. He touched his father’s hand, still impossibly warm. His eyes filled with tears again, blurring his vision. The ventilator chuffed; his father’s chest rose. “Sorry, Dad,” he said, knowing the others were listening to him. “I’m so sorry . . .” His voice choked and he stepped back. “Sorry,” he repeated. Aunt Patty put her arm around his waist and he leaned into her as he glanced at his mother, who was crying also. She nodded to him.
For an instant, as if he’d been somehow transported outside of himself, Colin caught a glimpse of himself on some shore, looking out over the cold, gray waves of the Atlantic: gazing eastward and south, toward what he knew was a distant America. The sea contains the world’s tears, he thought he heard someone say: again, the woman he’d heard before. The Old Ones say the sea holds all the sorrow there ever was, and all that is to come. Someone’s arms curled around him from behind; he felt her body press against his back. Come to me. Let me share your grief. Sing your song for us.
Then she was gone, in a whiff of salt air, and he was back in the hospital room.
“It’s time,” he heard his mother say. “Tommy, tell the doctor she can come in now.”
9
My Sorrow and My Loss
MAEVE LEANED BACK and heaved a long sigh. She could feel Keara watching her from across the table, through the fume of the brazier. The faint images of the bard and his surroundings had vanished from the smoke, though the feel of him lingered along her body. She had enjoyed that sensation; it reminded her of another time.
“M’Lady?” Keara asked.
“’Tis done,” Maeve answered, and smiled at the young woman. “Or at least things are put in motion. I couldn’t have done this without yeh, Keara. I want yeh to know that.”
Keara favored her with a small, almost shy smile. “T’anks, m’Lady. ’Tis m’pleasure.” Then her expression settled. “He will be arriving, then?”
For a moment, Maeve considered telling her the truth: that she couldn’t know that; that all she could do was push and nudge at the bard from a distance; that if he ignored her voice and the signals she sent him, if despite all that he was going to hear soon he decided to ignore her, there was nothing she could do to compel him to come.
That she was bound to this land more than any one of them and couldn’t go to him even if she wished to do that.
“Aye,” she told Keara, because there was no other answer that any on the island cared to hear, because it was the only message she could send to them or they’d begin to drift away or give up, and any chance for them—and for her—would be lost. “He will come. Soon.”
“Good,” Keara agreed. “Aiden and the rest will be glad to know that.” She began gathering up the herbs and powders into the leather bag she carried, then stopped and swept back her long hair over a shoulder. “Will yeh need me any more today?”
“No,” Maeve told her. “Tomorrow, though, I need yer help again with the spell, just so we can put an end to any questions. Come in the morning, and if yeh have some of your scones ready, that would be grand as well. I’ll have tea waiting.”
Keara grinned. “I will at that, m’Lady. I’ll see you then. Sleep well, tonight, and don’t forget the stew I brought for yeh. Aiden said it was tasty enough, and yeh need to keep up yer strength.” With that, she swept the last of the herbs into her shoulder bag,
gave Maeve a brief curtsy, then went out into the night. Maeve could smell the briny wind from the open door and glimpse a starry, clear sky against which Keara was briefly silhouetted, then the odor and the night sky vanished with the closing of the door.
Maeve sat at the table for a long time before finally throwing a few more turves on the hearth. She glanced at the covered bowl of stew on the stones of the fireplace as she sat in the wooden chair facing the flames. She leaned over to lift the cloth napkin and stared at the chunks of lamb, potatoes, and carrots swimming in a thick broth, the savory steam wafting up enough to make her salivate. But she covered the bowl again, watching the flames beginning to lick at the new bricks of peat.
The fire reminded her of another time, another place, another body.
“I love you,” he said to her, and the words fell through her like mirror shards, reflecting back to her how much she’d changed. She said the same words back to him—“And I love you”—knowing that in the past the words would have been simply empty vessels, and that she could have put that person to the sword the next day without any regrets at all.
But slow time as well as the slow change of the culture around them had changed her, at least somewhat, though some of the Old Ones seemed entirely untouched. She was no longer the being that she had been, and there was something in her that echoed the leamh, the mortals, around her. There were times when she nearly envied them, because sometimes now her life seemed far too long and far too lonely.
She looked at this leamh, who had just professed his love for her, and she felt that mortal part of her warm to those words. Could she actually feel love for one of them? Could she one day say those words in return and fully mean them, if not for this one, then another in some future time?
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