The Serendipity of Flightless Things

by Fiadhnait Moser

  For Aunt El and Uncle Chaz

  An imprint of Little Bee Books

  251 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10010

  Text copyright © 2019 by Rachel Moser-Hardy

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Yellow Jacket and associated colophon are trademarks of Little Bee Books.

  Interior design by Veronique Lefevre Sweet

  Manufactured in the United States of America LAK 0719

  First Edition

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-1-4998-0843-8

  yellowjacketreads.com

  Pronunciation Key

  NAMES

  Aobh (EEV)

  Aoife (EE-fa)

  Ciara (KEE-rah)

  Conn (KON)

  Ena (EN-ya)

  Fiachra (FEE-a-khra)

  Fiadhnait (FEE-ah-nawt)

  Finnuala O’Dálaigh-Sé (fin-OO-lah oh-DAWL-ee SHAY)

  Lir (LEER)

  Lorcan (LOR-can)

  Nuala (NOO-la)

  bodhrán (BOW-ran) — an Irish frame drum with a goatskin (or other animal skin) head tacked to one side with the other side open-ended in order to control the pitch and timbre

  craic (crack) — a term for news, gossip, fun, entertainment, and enjoyable conversation

  lough (lock) — a lake or partially landlocked or protected bay

  Contents

  Part I Ireland

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Part II America

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  PART I

  Ireland

  Chapter 1

  August 1971

  MY THREE BEST FRIENDS lived inside a silver locket. Their names were Oliver, Ed, and Margaret, and all three were dead. That locket was one of the four things I brought with me to America—the locket, my Sunday dress, my orphanage of hawthorn leaves, and the nine hundred stories my grandmother gave me. The day Grandma Nuala passed the locket on to me, I should have died. And it all began with a particular isle, a bird pale as seafoam, and a sprig of heather far luckier than me.

  Nuala gripped my hand as if she were walking me to grade school for the first time—tight, cold, brave. The way you’d hold a prayer bead. Her knees quivered as we took our final step to the tip-top of the Slieve League Cliffs and I pulled her over a moss-spotted boulder. When at last we reached the overlook, Nuala bent down, taking me with her. We sat a finger’s width from death, feet dangling off the ledge. Her fingers slipped from mine as my body went limp with awe.

  “There it is.” The wind carried away my words, lilting a banshee song so sad and sweet and aching with all the longing of a thousand stories. “Inis Eala.”

  “Aye, lass,” breathed Nuala. It was the sort of breath she usually spent on dandelion clocks or eyelash wishes. “Best view in all of Ireland.” She stretched out a wrinkled, dirt-caked hand toward the isle as if trying to touch it. “You know, even when the greyman’s out and about with his bucket of fog, spooking even the finest sailors, you can still see that isle from here.” She kissed the top of my head and whispered, “Happy birthday, Finn.”

  The isle rose like a lighthouse on the horizon, tall and emerald striped. My North Star, it guided me when I was lost; my Neverland, it listened to me when I was alone, which happened to be rather often. Nuala said that was because I had a “refined” taste in friends. My teacher, Mrs. Flanagan, said it was because most children don’t take their four o’clock tea and biscuits with an island for company.

  Though not once had I set foot on the isle, I knew its every inch like I knew my own home. Inis Eala and I had had hundreds of conversations—in rain, in snow, even once in a hailstorm. I had it memorized, from its lone dust mite of a ramshackle cottage to its speck of a white-flowered hawthorn tree hanging off the westernmost edge. Today, the hawthorn dripped scarlet berries, blooming like pinpricks of blood on a lace napkin.

  Nuala plucked a sprig of heather and let it flutter in her pinch, and I pulled loose a scarlet ribbon from my wrist. “They say it’s the home of the swan children,” I said, as I played tug-of-war with the wind—my hair, the rope.

  “Indeed they do,” said Nuala. Her hand landed on my scalp, and she took the ribbon and wrangled my hair into a ponytail, tucking the heather behind my ear.

  A dewdrop slipped off the stem and down my earlobe, like a child down a slide. When I was small and scared of night howls, Nuala would take me out to the wildflower garden and tell me about the dew and the heather. “Don’t you see their tears?” she would say. “Can’t you hear the heather’s lament? They’re sisters with the sun, see, and when she sails off to America at dusk, the heather weeps. That’s what goes a-wailin’ in the nighttime, Finn. Just a field of souls as mournful as our own.” And then I could sleep.

  I waited for Nuala to say more, but she didn’t, so I cast my eyes down to the blissfully swaying sea. And then slowly, carefully, I ventured, “So … what d’you think? Can I go?” I spared a glance up to Nuala and spat out, “I’m twelve now, plenty old ’nough. Please?”

  A perpetual hurricane whirred behind Nuala’s eyes. I feared her—most everyone did—but loved her too, most days more than I feared her. “No.”

  Something in my chest plummeted. “But it can’t be so dangerous. Da says that Ma used to visit all—”

  “You know nothing of that. Do not speak of things you do not understand.” Nuala squeezed shut her eyes as if my words had chopped a sliver off her shoulder. When she opened her eyes, she added in gentler tones, “Just don’t talk about her.”

  “Sorry,” I mumbled. “It’s just—I’ve got it all planned out, I’ve learned to swim, everythin’. I’ve been charting swans for months—years practically—and collecting stories from the village folk and the trees and the Ogham runes. I just … have to see them.”

  Nuala said nothing. I took the sprig of heather from behind my ear and began to tear off the pink-purple blossoms, letting them fly away to Inis Eala. How unfair it was that such tiny things could simply flutter off to wherever they pleased, whenever they pleased. I was a thousand times bigger, yet still I was stuck in Donegal, and the blossoms caught free flights to my dream. I closed my eyes, breathed. “I’ve never wanted anythin’ more in all my life.”

  Nuala stood, took my hand, and pulled me up. She pursed her lips and said, “My answer is no, Finn. That’s my final w—”

  “But you want to see ’em too, don’t you? I can see
it in your own two eyes, the way you look at—”

  “Finnuala O’Dálaigh-Sé.” My mouth snapped shut. Even the wind grew quiet and the heather stood still. “I only say it for your—”

  “Protection, I know.” My shoulders sagged, and I turned from Nuala, a hollow feeling creeping under my skin.

  At those words, something sounded below—a low, steady thrump-ah-thrump-ah-thrump-ah-thrump. Like the sea had grown a heartbeat. I spared a glance down into the abyss to see if I could spot a selkie, seal skin covering their maiden form, perhaps cloud-watching on a rock, but there was just water.

  I took a gulp of sea-salt air and stuffed my hands into my pockets. “So, when can I go? When will I be old ’nough, strong ’nough?”

  “You may go when you are needed there.”

  I bit my lip. “So never.”

  “I’m not fond of that word. Never,” spat Nuala. Her lips puckered and nose crinkled as if the word had left a tarry taste in her mouth. “Not fond at all.”

  “Sorry,” I said, tracing a circle in the dirt with the toe of my sneaker. “I just … I know they don’t need me, but I need them. I need the swans. I need Inis Eala, and I need the story.”

  “And you’ll have the story,” said Nuala, taking my hand.

  I kicked a speckling of dirt over my circle and looked up to her. “In time,” she whispered, “when I have gone, the story will be yours.”

  “Gone?” I choked on the word. A feeling of vertigo took hold of my knees and I stumbled back with a particularly strong gust of wind. A colony of dried oak leaves rattled through the grass and off the cliff’s edge. “Wh-what do you mean?”

  I gripped Nuala’s hand tighter. For some reason, her fingers felt frailer, each wrinkle now a scar I wanted to heal instead of a story I wanted to hear. “You’ll always be around,” I said. “Always. Won’t you, Nuala?”

  Nuala let go of my hand and reached up to the nape of her neck. There was a tiny tinkle of metal clinking, and Nuala revealed a tarnished silver necklace.

  “Your locket?”

  Nuala nodded. “Your locket, now,” and she enclosed it in my palm. “This way, you’ll always have me around. You’ll never be alone.”

  And as if it held all the stories I’d ever been told, I gently opened the latch. Inside was a black-and-white photograph of three children sitting on a tree branch: one girl, head tossed back in laughter; and two boys, one wearing an impish grin and the other smiling shyly away from the camera.

  “Who are they?” I asked, hooking the locket around my neck. “The children.”

  Nuala half opened her mouth to speak, but as she did, the thumping returned, stronger now. And this time, I had the uncanny feeling that someone was listening to us. But that didn’t make any sense, all the way up here.

  Worry lines laced Nuala’s eyes as I whispered, “Did you hear—”

  I ducked as something cold, fast, and feathery swooped up from below the cliff and over my head; my foot caught the edge of the cliff, and I toppled back. My scarlet ribbon spiraled into the blue below, the breeze cushioning its fall like it would a parachute. The purple and gray of the sky swirled together in a dour bruise, and white feathers caught on my eyelashes like snowflakes, just as cold.

  “Finn!” The beating of the bird’s wings muffled Nuala’s voice so to sound as if she were shouting my name all the way from Inis Eala.

  I grappled for dandelion sprouts, clawed at the just-rained-on dirt turning to mud beneath my fingernails—and then I was falling. “NUALA!” My stomach lurched as if I were stuck on a merry-go-round, and as I sped downward, the world slowed in my eyes. Nuala’s face was ashen, her fingers still outstretched over the cliff’s ledge even though I must have been a dozen feet below her reach. There was something about the veins in her fingers I hadn’t noticed before—they shone vivid blue through translucent skin, like veins of a cornflower corpse preserved in pages of a hundred-year-old book. They mirrored in her forehead, around her eyes, under her collarbone—

  Something was choking me. I gagged, and my hands lunged for my throat—the locket was clenched tight around my neck, strangling me.

  I yanked to pull it free, before it occurred to me that either way—by strangulation or free-falling impact from the cliff—I was going to die.

  But if that was so, why was I going up, not down?

  Gravity turned itself on end, and I peeked up and glimpsed two muddy, bat-wing-like feet! They clutched the silver chain of my locket still cutting into my throat, and a pair of wide, pale wings flapped heavily against the wind. I counted the wings’ beats—one, two, three—and then remembered that was a trick for falling asleep, not staying alive.

  The ground caught me by surprise. I tumbled headfirst into a thistle patch, spat prickles from my mouth, and wiped grime from my cheeks with grimier hands. And then arms enveloped me in a rosemary-soap-and-burnt-brambleberry-pie-smelling hug. I nestled my head in Nuala’s patchwork sweater as she lilted over and over, “My Finnuala, my Finnuala, my Finnuala …”

  Nuala huffed and leaned back, examining me from arm’s length as if I were a puzzling abstract statue in a museum. She then patted my cheeks, pinched some warmth back into them, and heaved, “Don’t you ever scare me like that again, Finn, don’t you dare.”

  But I wasn’t in the mood for making promises. I squinted past Nuala’s shoulder; the bruised sky had flushed a sickly mauve, and I searched for a scab of white somewhere in the horizon. “Where’d it go?”

  Nuala narrowed her eyes. “Where’d what go?” I stood and whirled twice around, Nuala leaping to catch hold of my wrist. “What in heaven’s n—”

  “You know, the bird—a swan, I think,” I said, my heart trilling against my rib cage. “It saved me. And—” My hand lunged to my neck, but was greeted only by an even more pronounced hollowness than I had felt before. “The locket—it’s gone.”

  Nuala’s mouth twitched, but she plastered on a smile and stuttered, “D-don’t fret, it’s just a silly piece of jewelr—”

  “That’s what it wanted, en’t it? It came for me and my locket. And then …” I looked around. The water below had stilled, and not even a distant big-bellied honk or the slightest ruffling of feathers could be heard. “It disappeared.”

  “Haven’t a clue what you’re talking about,” said Nuala, shaking her head in concern. “You took a tumble backward, but caught hold of the cliff, and thank our lucky stars you did.”

  I gaped at her. “You’re telling me you never saw it—the bird, massive and white and strong as an archer’s bow?”

  “It was a blackbird, lass,” soothed Nuala. “Certainly not a swan. But it did nothing more than give you a fright.” She bit her lip and laid a hand on my forehead. “Feel a tad warm, perhaps you’ve—”

  I shook Nuala’s hand away. “I know what I saw.”

  Nuala smiled pitifully at me and pulled me up by the elbow. “You’re in shock, lass; let’s go home. We’ll bake a birthday pie, whatever kind you like.”

  My mind was about as far from pies as it was from promises. “No,” I breathed, an idea creeping into my head. “Er—no thanks, I’ve got to go to the willows.”

  “Finn, you just fell off a cliff—”

  “You always say it, don’t you? Never break a date with a willow.”

  The willows were the most magical grove of trees in all of Donegal. Secrets whispered among their leaves, a place where the dead and the living could hold hands if even for but a moment.

  The willows would help; they would always help. Stories rumbled through their veins, cracked down their branches like the spines of old books. I simply had to find that swan. It had come for me. I could feel it in my bones.

  Nuala sighed. “Best not be late. You don’t want to end up on a willow’s bad side. Would you like my company?”

  “I—I think I’ll go alone, thanks.”

  Nuala nodded. “See you for supper, then. But, Finn?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t want you go
ing near Inis Eala,” she said sternly. “One day, perhaps, but not now. Not yet. It is a faery place, and faery do not take kindly to uninvited visitors. Try to swim, and the waters will be restless. Try to row, and they will be twice so. Fly a plane there, and in one breath, they’ll blow you all the way to Madagascar. Do you understand me?”

  I nodded. “Sure, Nuala.”

  “No ‘Sure, Nuala’ today. You’ve got to promise.” Sometimes I had the oddest feeling Nuala could gaze straight through me, as if my mind were a looking glass to her.

  My fingers fiddled with a hole in my sweater, stretching it twice as big. Never had I broken a promise with Nuala before, and I didn’t intend to start now. When at last I spoke, my voice chipped on the words. “I promise.”

  Nuala nodded delicately. “Pick up some blackberries from Mrs. McLean in the village when you’re through, why don’t you?” she said. “We’re runnin’ a touch low.”

  I nodded and scampered down the Slieve League Cliffs, quick as my feet would carry me. Nuala was right—it was best to keep on a willow’s good side.

  Chapter 2

  WHEN I CAME TO THE WILLOW GLADES, a small place tucked between two hills, all I wanted to do was tell Grandpa Oliver about the swan and Inis Eala and how I wouldn’t be traveling there like I’d been planning for practically ever. Also about Nuala, how transparent her skin had seemed, how blue her veins had looked, how wrinkly her hands had felt. How fragile.

  I found Oliver by the creek, leaves bathing in the water, evening light dancing about his topmost branches. “There you are,” I said, kneeling in his shadow. I rolled up my jeans and dipped my feet in the sun-warmed water, a swirl of minnows scattering with the ripples.

  I watched an ant, tiny and determined and probably lost and lonely, crawl over the mountain ridges of my jeans. I named it Deirdre.

  “Nearly died at the cliffs today,” I told Oliver. “Got to see Inis Eala. You won’t believe what happened.” And I told him all about the swan and the locket, and when I finished, I said, “But it doesn’t matter. Nuala won’t let me visit the isle.”

  A breeze swept through the glade, and Oliver leaned in close. I remembered my ribbon and freed my hair for the wind to comb, then dug up a flat stone from beneath the grass and the brambles and the cool, soft dirt. “It just en’t fair. If only she’d let me try, maybe …” I sighed and flung the stone down the creek, watched it skip three times before sinking like a shipwreck. “Maybe then she’d see I’m ready.”