Ghosts of the Missing
Page 27
I reached into my bag and took out the book. I touched the title, the letters in gold against the red cover, and opened it to the drawing of the flying rowan.
Leo studied it, then looked up at me with a shake of his head, puzzled.
Then I showed him the book Libby had given me, A Charm for Lasting Love: Spells and Cures from Ireland.
“It was written by Lucy, Helen’s daughter. I think these were her mother’s remedies. Edward Adair did these drawings too. He was her husband. I assume it was among his books and papers donated to Moye House when he died. Rowan took it.”
I handed it to Leo. “Page fifty-two,” I said.
The heading said, “A Cure for the Chronically Ill.”
Cut a lock of hair from the head of the ill person. Go to the flying rowan and slice the bark of the tree. Put the hair inside the cut. The bark will heal over the hair. Pick three berries from the tree and plant them. The ill person will become well.
Leo closed the book and silently handed it back to me.
Then he leaned forward, and I knew that he understood what I did, that Rowan had seen and read these things and they had led her to believe she alone could save my life.
“Have you seen the flying rowan?” I asked. “Did she ever ask you where it was?”
“I know where it is,” Leo said. “It’s called an epiphyte. A tree that grows from another tree. One of the rangers I worked with at Degare showed it to me when I was training for the job. It’s off the regular hiking trails. Rowan never asked me about it. To go off and try to find it, that’s literally looking for one tree out of thousands. She wasn’t stupid, Adair.”
“But she was stubborn,” I said. “The sketch in the book shows the surrounding area. The ledge right above it? She might have thought it’d be easy to spot.”
“I bet she thought if she asked me, I’d have told her not to go off into the woods by herself.” Leo smiled sadly. “And I would have. But maybe I would’ve taken her there.”
“Tomorrow we can find it together. You’ll take me there.”
Leo spoke so softly that I had to lean in to hear him. “If she got lost out there looking for this tree, this flying rowan, there’s no telling where she is, Adair.”
I closed my eyes. Rowan, sitting still for the night, knees to her chest in the dark, moving again in the morning. How long? How many days? There may have been an accident. She may indeed have been gone before Evelyn began to look for her.
“Can I still root for Libby’s theory?” Leo smiled. “Rowan did go back in time. Maybe we can find a way to get there too. Nobody would know us.”
Imagine a life in the past. Imagine turning this life’s whole history into the future, safely distant. But the comfort in that was not for me.
“I couldn’t go with you,” I said, and felt the loss as if he’d really found a way to go. I’d never told him that I picked him the day he shook my hand.
I leaned over and touched his cheek. He turned to my palm, and I saw he realized why. Thinking, maybe, of the pill organizer, empty, the medication a century out of reach.
“I have to look. I have to try,” I said. “I owe her that.”
“It could take forever,” Leo said.
“I have forever.”
Rowan could not have known the virus that was supposed to be the cause of my death would soon be tamed, if not cured. She was my cousin, a cousin so distant it perhaps shouldn’t have counted, but it did. Still, set aside whatever blood we shared. She was my friend. She died for me.
Acknowledgments
Ghosts of the Missing sold on the basis of a single sentence and never would have become an entire novel without the guidance of my agent, Caryn Karmatz Rudy. Thank you, as ever, for your advocacy and for your friendship.
To my editors, Lauren Wein and Pilar Garcia-Brown, thank you both for the insights that made this book better with each draft.
Thank you to masterly manuscript editor Larry Cooper as well as the entire team at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for all their hard work.
My parents have always been supportive, and for this I will always be grateful, as I am to my sister Elizabeth, my brother-in-law Alex, and my nieces and nephews: Eddie, Megan, Nicky, Lily, Kristen, Michael, and Luke.
In the acknowledgments of my first novel, I thanked my sisters, “the two people who have always been on either side of me.” Though Jennifer is gone and we are now two, this will always be so.
As my writing desk is in a corner of my living room, I am indebted to both the Brooklyn Writers Space and Park Slope Desk for providing me with an affordable place to work outside my apartment.
To my husband, Travis, and my son, Liam, who said goodbye and good night for countless evenings as I left to “go writing”: when it was time to come home, it meant everything to know that you would both be there.
About the Author
© Beowulf Sheehan
Kathleen Donohoe is the author of Ashes of Fiery Weather. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Recorder, New York Stories, and the Washington Square Review. She serves on the board of Irish American Writers & Artists. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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