When Light Breaks

by Patti Callahan Henry

  I held my breath; she stared at me and spoke. “What happened to your Jack? Did you even bother to look for him, find him, or he you?”

  “This is your story. Mine is simpler. Next-door neighbor moved away. I’m in love now—getting married to the most wonderful man.”

  “Oh, but this is your story. The truth of a story is what the storyteller aims for. You just haven’t seen it. We live our stories over and over in every generation, at the edge of every sea. And the mistakes go on and on.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Finding what we long for and being brave enough and wise enough to build our lives around that, without considering what others expect of us or what we should do and who we should be.”

  I sighed. “Are we still on the same subject, Maeve?”

  “What, do you think me daft? Of course we’re on the same subject. Are you brave enough?”

  “Maeve, now this isn’t like it was with you and Richard. These are different times.”

  “And the same.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Yes, it is the same. Just tell me how you said good-bye. Tell me what happened.”

  “His family moved away very abruptly when his father . . . it’s all quite sordid and sad. I don’t remember all of it.”

  “You do remember.”

  I leaned back in the chair. “I want to hear what happened with Richard.”

  She grinned with only one side of her dainty mouth, as if winking at me with her smile. “I will tell you the rest of the story after you tell me about saying good-bye to Jack. How old were you?”

  “Fourteen, almost fifteen.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “Ooh, I don’t want to tell this story. It’s old and irrelevant now.”

  “Then don’t.” She closed her eyes, and in less than a breath, she was asleep, like a child collapsing after Christmas morning. I slumped back in the chair—so weary. Weary of my work, of being sick, of the knot in my neck, of the wedding plans.

  I rose from the chair and placed the concrete angel on Maeve’s dresser, on top of one of the many lace doilies. I walked over to the oil painting, ran my finger along the bottom metal label on the frame: GALWAY BAY: CLADDAGH.

  “What are you doing with Grandmama’s painting?” a voice said from behind me.

  I jumped, turned to a woman standing in the doorway, her hands on her hips, her mouth straight and bloodless. Her auburn hair was pulled back in a clip, yet curls sprang from all directions, as if fighting the hold.

  “Nothing . . . nothing,” I said. “I was visiting her today . . . and she just fell asleep. I left my angel for her. . . .” I pointed at the statue. “And I was getting ready to leave.”

  “With her painting?”

  “No,” I shook my head. “I’ve been her assigned companion.”

  She turned toward the door, waved at it. “Let’s talk out there, please.” She nodded toward the hall.

  I followed this woman through the door. When we reached a sitting room, she guided us toward an empty corner, where we sat opposite each other in floral armchairs. “What do you need with my grandmama?”

  “I don’t want or need anything from her. I care about her. I’ve been visiting her for a couple weeks. I just sit and talk to her . . . that’s all. I don’t want anything from her.”

  The woman rubbed a trembling hand over her forehead. “This just sucks. Like I don’t feel guilty enough already, now I have a stranger making me feel worse because you see her more than I do.”

  “I’ve only met with her twice before. I’m not trying to make you feel guilty.”

  She looked up. “I know, I’m doing that all by myself.” Her features softened as she removed her suit jacket, leaned back in the chair. “Grandmama came over to the States for a visit, and then she got too feeble to live with us, and we’ve all been so damn busy . . . and now Mom is sick too and I’m just tired of it all. I can’t take care of everyone. I have a six-year-old too. . . .”

  “I’m sorry you’re going through all that. Really I am. I don’t want anything from Maeve. I’ve just grown . . . fond of her. I’ve wanted to meet the family.”

  “Why do you want to know about us?” Her face closed in again; she turned her wedding ring around and around without looking down. I glanced at her hand: a Claddagh ring with a large emerald encircled her left ring finger.

  “A Claddagh ring,” I said.

  “Yes. You haven’t answered me. Why do you need to know about our family?”

  I sighed. “Listen, I’m not trying to find out about your family. Just Maeve. You see, she’s been telling me the most beautiful story, a love story really, and she never gets to the end, and I want to know how it ends . . . if she married . . .” I bit my lip.

  “Let me guess . . . a young man and his true love are separated by the sea when he is taken away. The young maiden waits and waits and he returns with a gift—the skill of knowing how to make a Claddagh ring.” She held her hand in the air, pointed to her ring—a crown over a heart held by two hands. “This is what they look like. They stand for love.” She pointed to the heart. “Loyalty”—she pointed to the crown—“and friendship.” She ran her finger around the hands.

  “I know,” I said, a memory bumping the surface of my consciousness. “I have one.”

  “Well, anyway—the Richard Joyce she talks about gives his lover this ring and they live happily ever after.”

  “Is that how it ends?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She only got as far as Richard being taken . . . how the sea will separate them and how she doesn’t know where he is.”

  “What did you say your name is?”

  “I didn’t; you didn’t ask. It’s Kara Larson. And yours?”

  “Caitlin Morgan. Listen . . . Kara, I hate to burst any bubble you might have about my grandmama, but that story is an ancient Irish legend about the Claddagh ring. A man named Richard Joyce from Galway—the Claddagh village where she lived—was on a merchant ship headed to the West Indies in the 1600s. He was captured by Algerian privateers and sold into slavery to a Turkish goldsmith who trained him for over fifteen years. All during that time his lover believed in his faithfulness and waited for his return.”

  I stood up and began to pace the room. “Maeve didn’t say this man was kidnapped . . . she said he was taken by the garda.”

  Caitlin nodded. “Yes—she gets her stories confused now.”

  “Okay—did he return to her? He said he’d find her no matter what. . . .” At least I could discover if that part were true.

  “Yes. When William the Third ascended the throne, he freed all the slaves in Algeria. The goldsmith valued Richard, since by then he had become an expert designer, so he offered Richard money and his firstborn daughter in marriage. But Richard returned to Claddagh, to his true love. There he designed and made the Claddagh ring—for her.”

  “Oh . . . and this is a legend?” I stopped in front of Caitlin’s chair, my voice broke.

  “It depends on who you talk to. Some believe it is true, others don’t. Richard Joyce is known to have made the first Claddagh ring, but whether the story is true? Who knows? It doesn’t really matter—the point is that it is Grandmama’s favorite. She’s told it over and over to us until I have it memorized. We all wear the ring; we all know the story and what the ring stands for: love, loyalty, and friendship.”

  I stared out the tinted nursing home window. “Wow. I thought she was telling a story about her life. She didn’t change his name. She said his name was Richard.”

  “Richard Joyce. Grandmama is a bard—a storyteller in Ireland. She loves to tell stories. She believes they guide and define our lives.”

  “But she changed the names and even some of the places.”

  “Galway Bay?”

  “No, she didn’t change that, but here’s the weirdest part—she asked me to find him.”

  “Find him?” Caitlin Morgan twisted her Claddagh ring again. “She must be
even more confused than usual.”

  “Or maybe she wanted me to find . . .” I stopped, reached for my own engagement ring and held the top of the diamond with my thumb and forefinger.

  “Find what?”

  “Nothing,” I said, waving my hand. “She did tell me he was taken into an Industrial School—some kind of horrible foster home in Ireland.”

  “Oh . . . I get it. Well, that makes me even sadder . . . she’s mixing up her stories. Grandmama was a huge advocate in the reformation of Industrial Schools, where she believed children were neglected. She was instrumental in exposing the maltreatment and horrible facilities. She is very well known in Ireland for her devotion to this cause. She just got her two stories mixed up. Bloody hell, she’s ninety-six years old. Of course she got her stories mixed up. She calls me by my cousin’s name sometimes.”

  I sighed. “Well, it was a pleasure to hear the story anyway.” I turned to walk away, slinging my purse farther up on my shoulder. I lifted my chin. “It was nice to meet you.” My feet were leaden, my heart as well.

  “You too.”

  I walked away, my soul opening in the wrong places—the sad places where Mama’s absence throbbed, where hurt and disillusionment lived. Maeve’s story was just a legend—her own concoction of truth and myth, fiction and nonfiction.

  I left Verandah House and walked down the block toward my car, then changed my mind and my direction and ended at the community dock on Bay Street. I sat and took my shoes off, let my feet dangle above the water. When high tide rolled in, I’d be able to just touch the surface of the water. Low tide. High tide. They rolled in and out twice a day, a continuous movement of the earth’s oceans. If only my memories were as reliable. If I told the story of Jack Sullivan, of his leaving, would I, more than thirteen years later, now confuse the truth in the telling? Would I mix the facts up like Maeve had?

  Well, maybe Maeve knew exactly what she was doing—maybe only the myths were worth recounting. A true story: Jack Sullivan. Now there was a very true story.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Some of those days with Jack were blurred around the edges and couldn’t be brought into focus, even with the magnifying glass of pure concentration. But I did remember crab trap buoys bobbing on the surface of sharp winter whitecaps, barefoot races over the dunes, sea oats dancing in a storm, the wind warm and moist on my face, a corner of yellow sailboat—snapshots someone forgot to label with place and time.

  Our street had been thick with oaks, planted so closely together that their branches and roots intertwined to form a wall, but within those roots Jack and I found caverns, private hiding places for when the dinner bell rang or Jack’s dad came screaming drunk to the front porch.

  If we hid long enough, dinner would pass or Jack’s father’s anger would subside, and we’d emerge. Sometimes it was just Jack and me, but many other times my brother, Brian, or Jack’s brother, Jimmy, joined us. We were pirates or explorers—anything other than ourselves. Deirdre never came. She was older and behaved more appropriately than I did. And I knew this because I was told so numerous times a day by Aunt Martha-Lynn, who lived with us in the days before Mama died and for a while afterward.

  Mama died on a winter day when I was nine years old, and I don’t remember a time of not knowing she would die. I don’t remember finding out or being told that she would let illness take her, I just understood it. Someone must have told me she was sick, because she didn’t get the ovarian cancer until I was seven years old. But even in the days before I was five years old, in the fragmented memories of toddlerhood, I knew she’d leave us. This can’t be true, but demonstrates how memory is a cloudy and upside-down thing, shifting like the topography of the earth after a quake, tectonic plates of memory and imagination re-formed. This was one of the reasons I took pictures now—to keep the memories in order.

  After Mama died, Jack knew I craved more than ever those moments of solitude in the cavernous root system of our trees. In this hidden place, our friendship grew with each season and became separate from what we had with his brother, and my family. Eventually it was a bond of just Jack and me: one single tree.

  Our friendship then flowed to the estuary, which ran sideways past our houses, to the river, the marsh, the beach. We spent all our free time together when he was not playing a sport, and I wasn’t reading or studying.

  I don’t believe we would have defined our relationship then as boyfriend and girlfriend—our constant companionship was not planned or discussed. Boyfriends and girlfriends asked each other out. Our coming together was a natural outgrowth of something planted in the caves of the live oaks, in the solitary moments of grief and confusion.

  One morning, a humid August morning, with few precious days remaining until high school began, I curled into my sheets, turned my face toward the fan in the corner of my room. The morning light whispered across my windowsill, but had not fully arrived. I had been in the same bedroom in the east corner of our home since the day I was born, since the day Mama brought me home from the hospital wrapped in a white lace blanket crocheted by Aunt Martha-Lynn.

  I saw the coming day—every day—before anyone else in my family, and there was something amiss with this particular morning, something my half-asleep brain defined as wrong. I walked to the window and lifted the Battenburg lace curtain. Sun sifted through the lace holes like honey poured onto the floor, my arm, my cotton nightgown.

  I heard the sound before I saw the truck: a grinding, damaged sound not meant to exist in the dawn. Gas odor joined the morning fog, which still lay between our homes, not having yet rolled back toward the water. The truck was visible over the trees: a large moving van in the Sullivans’ driveway.

  I turned from the window and never hesitated as I ran from my room, down the side stairs, through the kitchen and out the back door. My feet were bare; the ground was warm and sticky like chocolate. I ran across our wide front yard, then through the trees and hedges to the Sullivans’ yard.

  I ran smack into a large man carrying a box. “Whoa, missy, watch where you’re going.” He shoved the box into the back of the truck, its interior already filled with containers and furniture stacked against each other in odd-shaped patterns of morphed monsters.

  “Whose stuff is that?” I squinted against a spotlight, which shone into the rear of the truck.

  The man wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, waved at the Sullivans’ house. “Excuse me, we’re in a major rush here. You best get out of the way before you get hurt. The missus wants to leave before sunrise.”

  He pointed to the horizon, to the sliver of dawn on the marsh beyond our creek that seemed to be waiting for permission from this man before it burst forth.

  I pushed past him and ran to the front door, where Mrs. Sullivan sat on the stoop, her head in her hands.

  I stopped short. I had never seen her in any position but standing tall, smiling with her hand holding a dripping paintbrush or molding a wet lump of clay. She was an artist, something Aunt Martha-Lynn often said with a smirk, or an acid tone to her voice. “You know how artists are, always flighty and—”

  No, I didn’t know how artists were, but if they were all like Mrs. Sullivan, I thought they must be pretty cool people. Her house was always a bit messy with interesting things, like a birds’ nest on the kitchen counter (Aunt Martha-Lynn would’ve had a heart attack), or a clay pot drying in the sun, or a half-finished oil painting on driftwood. Pieces of Mrs. Sullivan’s art were piled in corners and on tables.

  Often at night she had friends over, friends who wore long beads and beards, who smoked cigarettes that were thin and simmered sweet and heady compared to Daddy’s pipe.

  Daddy often forbade me from going into Jack’s house, which Aunt Martha-Lynn called a den of iniquity, whatever that was. But I had enough friends, including Charlotte on the next street, for Daddy not to know where I was all the time.

  I reached down and touched the back of Mrs. Sullivan’s head. She looked up at me. A ripe bruise, like
an apple tossed on the road, covered the left side of her face, distorting her features. Her eye was swollen shut.

  I’d seen other bruises on Mrs. Sullivan before: her arm, cheek, calf. She always told me the marks were from horseback riding, or a fall or clumsy motion on her part.

  I gasped. “A horse again?”

  “No,” she whispered, “there never was a horse. It was and always will be from Mr. Sullivan.” She stood and placed her hand on the side of my face. “Precious Kara, so sweet, so innocent. I’m sorry.”

  “For?” A fear rose, a fear I had never felt before, one of unexpected abandonment. It was tinged with the fear I’d felt when Mama was gone, but that had been planned for, expected.

  In my experience, people you loved were not allowed to leave unannounced before dawn’s light with a bruise covering one eye. Mrs. Sullivan wrapped her arms around me, pulled me into her patchwork shawl. “We are leaving today, Kara. I am taking my boys and we are leaving with what we can before Mr. Sullivan returns.”

  “No!” I screamed and pushed her away.

  “Dear child, I was hoping you would not awaken, but you are here, and of course you would be. Your sensitive spirit felt Jack leaving.”

  “Where are you going?” I whispered.

  “I don’t know.” She looked away.

  “Yes, you do,” I said, because I saw it was true, in her eyes, in her glance toward Jack.

  “Please try to understand,” she said without meeting my gaze.

  Jack came up next to his mother. We had danced around our growing relationship all summer, touched hands and cheeks and legs more than was necessary on the beach, in the water, on the boat. The sensations and promise they held were too enormous to talk about. We’d been approaching our growing love quietly, like coming near a scared baby osprey in the nest without its mama. Gentle now, slow now . . .

  There would be no more waiting. Jack stood behind his mother and I loved him, enormously, fiercely, openly, and desperately. Of course I did—I had for my entire young life. But there had been time then, huge swaths of time, in which to discover our feelings, to let them grow. Or maybe we love so profoundly when we know love is about to leave us, empty and alone.