Now & Then

Chapter 1

The castle docent led the group along a roped path through a cold room. The early September air had already taken a turn, but it was doubtful that the stone castle ever warmed comfortably. Castles were expensive to keep up; the taxes were dreadful, and owners had to bear the humiliation of opening their homes to a weekly stage show of tourists if they expected to hang onto the family estate.

Anna didn’t like walking through living rooms with family photos on the end tables. She had been hoping for a bawdy ghost, a sense of Renaissance people gulping honey mead, their fingers greasy with smoked fish on wooden planks, bristle-haired dogs stretched on the floor surrounded by a pile of bones. She did not want to be the dreadful price that the present owners had to endure.

After silently counting them with her eyes, the guide led them through the library. One wall was filled with books—flat leather-encased pages—and, on the opposite wall, paintings.

And here, the docent pointed with her arm, this shred of cloth is all that remains of the Fairy Flag.

The castle held the tattered remnants of a banner. The faded fabric was framed in glass and hung on a north-facing wall to protect it from light.

What type of fabric is it? asked a woman who had not said one word until that moment.

Silk. See how it shreds? Linen, which would have been the other choice, frays in a bolder pattern and the dyes tend to take more of a toll on linen, said the guide. No one knows exactly where the flag comes from, but the story that has been handed down is that it had the power to save the local clan from destruction. And like all good tales, there was a catch; it could only be used three times. So you can imagine that they saved it for only the worst disasters, when invaders were at the gates and the clan had no hope of escaping a massacre. Then the Fairy Flag was flown.

The guide was a good storyteller, and she paused, knowing that the story begged for questions. She let the tension build, until she was prodded by the inevitable. A young boy with a Red Sox baseball cap shot his hand up.

Yes?

Did they use it up? Did they use it all three times? asked the boy.

We know it was used in 1490 and again in 1580, but we are not sure if it was used again. In those years, clans fought each other as well as invaders from the sea. Life was perilous. I rather think that it was used again, that we wouldn’t be standing here in the castle if it had not been used. This castle has remained in the same lineage for over seven hundred years. She looked at her watch and extended her left arm to the door. Let’s move along to the bedchambers.

Everything in Ireland was so unimaginably old, unlike the United States. People in Ireland referred to a day seven hundred years earlier the way Americans talked about the Eisenhower administration. Disagreements that had taken place in a village in 1251 were remembered as if they had happened last week. Time bent and folded like a piece of string looped around a stick. Since the divorce, Anna felt time slow down with a dark, rotted sludge clogging her every movement. Since she quit her job at the law firm, she sometimes forgot what day it was.

Three times, the flag was good for three times. Had Anna been good for three times? The first time was not the worst because Anna didn’t know there would be a second and a third time for miscarriages. She thought the first was a fluke. Anna and Steve each worked seventy hours a week at law firms, eighty if needed. They saw each other for a chaotic morning of shower, coffee, and dress for Boston’s legal world and then not again until evening. The first time she was pregnant, she told him by texting, Preg. That’s all she wrote, after peeing on the little paper strip first thing in the company bathroom.

She had been exactly three weeks pregnant. By six weeks, she told her mother, her brother, Steve’s parents, and her law school buddy, Jasper, who had emailed back.

You have my permission to name the baby Jasper. Boy or girl, doesn’t matter to me. Are posting the birth on You-Tube? he asked.

You’re an idiot, even for a lawyer, replied Anna.

Jasper had fled Boston right after he passed the bar and now specialized in entertainment law in LA.

How can you take entertainment law seriously? said Anna.

How can you take contract law seriously? said Jasper. Go have a baby.

At two months plus, her uterus twisted with seismic cramps, stripping itself of the baby-to-be. Anna was shocked by the decisiveness of her body, the bloody torrent that woke her and Steve at 4:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning.

She sat hunched on the toilet crying, while Steve crouched next to her, wearing only his blue Man Silk underwear. He pressed his forehead to her thighs, leaving the two of them wordless.

That had been the first time. Six months later was the second time. This time they only told her mother. The miscarriage, a word that Anna hated, like a miscarriage of justice, happened when Steve was on a case in Atlanta. She phoned him.

It’s OK, he said into his cell phone at the Marriott. We’ll try again. She’d heard a spray of voices in the background and a high peel of laughter, like crystals rising in the air.

The third time, six months after that, she’d been driving from Boston to Greenfield to visit her mother when the familiar eviction by her uterus began. She was on Route 2, going west into the sun and it was hard to get off. No place seemed right, not Fitchburg, not there. She hung on until she pulled into her mother’s driveway. She’d driven the last thirty miles with a dark gray towel stuffed between her legs.

Anna beeped the horn and her mother came out with a flutter of high school math papers in her hand. Anna beckoned her to the car and watched the smile dissolve from her mother’s face as she felt her own crumble.

I’ve just miscarried. Why can’t I do it? Why can’t I have a baby? What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with all of us? Anna opened the car door and felt another tight cramp that made her chest cave in.

Let’s get you inside and call your doctor. We can tackle the esoteric questions later, said her mother, placing a firm hand under Anna’s elbow and pulling her up.

Anna ducked for the castle exit, desperate to shake the images of failed pregnancies. The rest of the group followed the guide to the bedchambers. She was anxious to be outside, not inside with the poor castle all trussed up like a Disney exhibit. She felt uneasily like one of the invaders who must have been thwarted by the Fairy Flag. Tourists did not impale the locals on spiked poles, or pillage the castle, but they did break up the continuity of a place with gawking and pointing, eventually bringing big box stores to the edge of town, there to suck the life out of the tiny villages with their ancient family businesses. Anna didn’t know how her friend Harper made a living bringing attention to otherwise quiet locales so that they could be infested with visitors and digital cameras.

But she had been grateful that Harper had invited her on a trip to write about Scotland, Wales, and lastly Ireland. Anna was thirty-four and her life was a wreck.

She walked outside to the soft northern sun, leaving the relic behind. She strolled along the dirt path to the parking lot.

Psstt.

Anna turned her head toward a juniper tree but caught only a flash of color—a bright woolen hat knit of blues, pinks, and purples, and all the colors that permeate the hills, rocks, and fields. She walked around the tree and saw a small woman.

Do you mean me? Anna asked. At home she might have ignored a stranger who psstted at her, but here in the land of unrelenting civility, she responded.

The woman’s white hair was held by a clip at the back of her neck and she wore clothes that people might have worn in a National Geographic magazine about charming Ireland twenty years ago. The sweater was buttoned up and the skirt of well-worn plaid stopped just at the bottom of her knees. She held a yellow-and-blue plastic carryall bag.

Here, dearie. I thought you’d never come out. I’ve got a bit of something for you.

The woman had not been in the group of culture seekers from the castle. But she was clearly Irish, too full of culture to be seeking it. Law school and a few miserable years of law practice had made Anna suspicious. Her last research with corporate law had been about English contracts with the Irish during British occupation. Judging from the age of this woman, she had lived through the years when Ireland had clawed itself out of a wretched economy, not unlike a third world country. But on this trip Anna was practicing beating back her law school demons; she was done with law.

The woman tilted her head to one side and took a good look at Anna. I saw you when you came in. You’re not nearly as tall as I was told. For an American I mean, not so tall for an American.

Are you waiting for someone with the tour? asked Anna.

Oh, no. Not them.

You might have me mixed up with someone else, Anna said. I’ve noticed since I’ve been visiting here, that people tell me that I look familiar to them, like a cousin or a sister, their friend from school. My family is from Ireland but we weren’t very good at keeping track of that sort of thing. Not a genealogist in our whole family. Anna looked back at the entrance to the castle to make sure she didn’t miss Harper when she came out.

No, I’ve been waiting for you, waiting longer than you could guess. It must have made things worse in America, with so much time going by, building up a steam of misery. I thought of going there myself, but dreadful things happen to the likes of me when we travel over water. Don’t let me talk all day now. Your friend will be out the door in a few moments.

She dug around in the plastic carryall. Here it is. She pulled out a small bundle wrapped in brown paper, taped neatly just the way all the shopkeepers did in Ireland. It was soft and about the size of a deck of cards. She placed it in Anna’s hands.

Take it now. Here, put it in your pack. You’ll be needing it. There’s nothing else for you or them now, she said and reached up to put her cool palm on Anna’s cheek. I shouldn’t say more, but I didn’t know that you would look so poorly, so filled with misery. Love will force you to make a frightful leap straight through the terrors. You can walk away from the call, but you’ll be left by yourself. And that would be the pure pity of it.

Anna froze to the spot, unable to break the trance.

Harper yelled from the gate of the castle. I’m coming, I’m coming. I had to stop at their gift shop. You wouldn’t believe the stuff you end up with for these travel articles.

Anna turned to see Harper with a small pile of bundles—more woolen fabric, no doubt, and a few books. Suddenly Harper tripped on the uneven stones and the packages scattered before her in a lava flow of souvenirs. Anna ran to help, looking back once to the old woman who had turned away and walked with an agile step along the path to the parking lot. Anna collected a few packages as Harper dusted her pants off.

Thanks, said Harper. Let’s put everything in your pack. We’ll sort it out later.

That woman just gave me a little package, said Anna.

Happens to me all the time when people find out I’m a travel writer. Tonight is our last night, I can’t believe it. Let’s dump this stuff back at the inn and head out for some good pub food and a few pints. Our flight leaves in the morning.

Chapter 2

In the cattle car section of Aer Lingus, the plane rocked as it was slammed by ever-stronger winds. Harper, who sat in first class, had come back to tell Anna in urgent whispers that the pilot was gambling on beating a storm to Boston. He had seen it on the radar, a giant swirl heading from upper Michigan, picking up speed across Pennsylvania and virtually following the Mass Pike to Boston. Landing at Boston under the best of conditions was congested. The approaching storm could cause hell.

Remember, we’re safer in a plane than we are in a car, said Harper.

Thanks for the tip, said Anna.

Seat belt signs blinked on and the flight attendants scooped all remaining beverages into black plastic bags, holding onto each seat back for support as they claimed they were thirty minutes out of Boston.

Two men in front of Anna began to vomit, first one and then the other, when the plane seemed to fall out of the sky and then catch itself. She handed three vomit bags from her row, hoping this would be enough to contain what sounded like an extraordinary event. The smell made others start to wretch. Once, when the plane rolled violently to the right and then just as violently to the left, she was sure they would roll over if they went even one inch farther in either direction.

Passengers pulled out cell phones to call spouses, children, and friends, despite the admonition from the flight attendants to keep cell phones off. One of the baggage compartments burst open and two Lands’ End backpacks flew out, followed by a plastic bag from the duty-free shop. Anna and the two passengers in her row gripped each other’s hands and squeezed hard. One was a man named Robert, from Glasgow, who was going to visit his cousin in Boston. He had a very large hole pierced through his earlobe, into which a silver plug had been inserted. He was dressed in black leather. He had immediately announced to Anna that he was gay, and then he’d speculated on which American actors were gay. Now he gripped Anna’s left hand and the hand of the older woman from Vermont on his right. Anna wished that she had gone to the bathroom earlier because she was afraid, for the first time since she was a toddler, that she was actually going to wet her pants right there in the seat.

She did not want to die in the Atlantic five months after a divorce. She couldn’t believe there was that much unfairness in the world. But then, she had been pretty sure that nothing could feel more unfair than Steven leaving her. If Steven had wanted to hurt her more, he could not have.

He chose their favorite Thai restaurant in Boston to tell her. Anna picked at her shrimp and lemongrass stir-fry. She cleared her throat. Anna had suspected something for months.

When were you going to tell me? she asked.

Steven’s eyes darted to the door as if calculating his escape.

There aren’t many reasons for asking that question. How did you find out? No, that isn’t the point. The point is, I’m seeing someone else.

She put down her fork. Seeing someone? As in dating? You can’t date someone else. You’re married. To me.

I’m sorry, there’s no way I can be anything but the bad guy here. I don’t have the right to ask anything of you, but could you please not turn into Anna the lawyer?

She pushed her plate away, bumping his water glass. His hand shot out and grabbed it. She looked down and saw with frustration that her hands were shaking.

Did you meet her while I was in the hospital with the first miscarriage or was it the second? The third? Is this a Henry the VIII decision on your part? Don’t tell me she’s pregnant?

Steven looked down at his mound of rice.

Oh. She is pregnant, said Anna.

Anna fell back against the padded seat of the booth. The blaring truth of Anna’s miscarriages, her one non-negotiable failing, had caught her unawares. She fell hard into a pool of bitterness and stayed there.

Three was a horrible number of miscarriages, a triumvirate of miscarriages, of fetuses begun but unable to hang on, hanging onto a cliff of a uterus, tumbling off, and washed away in a monsoon of blood and betrayal. There was nothing anyone could say after each miscarriage. There was nothing right to say because miscarriages came from forces unknown or at best, unstoppable, like lighting. But at night when she slipped from waking to sleeping, she saw the unfit part of her, the place inside where babies of all sorts refused to grow because she had produced a space that could not love a baby. Was that the family legacy, played out by the men, felt with exquisite pain by the women?

Anna saw baby spirits pondering an entry into life, selecting a mother and a father, shopping around for reasons indecipherable. And when almost-babies chose Anna, they soon saw their mistake and pulled the escape hatch. Steve had fallen away, not unlike the almost-babies, falling in love with the fertile delta of Rita, the receptionist at their dentist’s office, who already brimmed with life. An almost-baby had landed in a perfectly, color-coordinated uterus and was strapped in for a full-term ride aboard the Rita mother ship.

Bloody hell! said Robert. He crunched her hand as they were tossed about in the shaking plane. I don’t want to die in America! Oh, I’m sorry. Nothing personal about America, but I’d just as soon die in Scotland, thank you.

He must have seen something terrified in Anna’s face, something that broke through all his leather and body piercing.

Look here, nobody will die today. Not us. We’ve got a big life to live, he said.

She looked down and saw a watery stream of vomit under her shoes. She picked up her feet.

Flight attendants prepare for landing.

The landing gear opened with a familiar sound. She leaned across her two companions. I just got divorced, she said as loudly as she could to be heard over the racket. We have to make it. And more than anything, she wanted to believe that was true, that the worst had come and gone.

Since the divorce, she had lived in Rockport, a seaside town one hour north of Boston. She couldn’t afford a place right on the water; her house was a half mile inland, but during the months immediately following the divorce, she stationed herself on the immense gray slabs of rock that separated land from ocean. Her mother had said that tranquility was genetically out of the question with her, but she discovered that the roar of wind and ocean could temporarily scour the pain of divorce and for that she had been grateful. Stormy days had been her favorite, zipped up in a Gortex jacket, hood pulled tight, rain pants repelling all downpours. She sat on the unyielding mountains of rock and faced the ocean, squeezing her eyes to slits to keep out the driving horizontal rain. This had been her brand of therapy: harsh, punishing, and exacting. She used the rocks for everything. She even used the rock to file her nails, taking them past the bloody quick. She had wanted to exfoliate her pain, patting it with tinny placations. For every person who tilted her head and said, I know how hard divorce can be, she counted the seconds until she could run to the rocks, lay prostrate on its fat hard tummy, and take what the ocean and wind had to offer.

Anna said good-bye to Harper who had a slim thirty minutes before her connection to Chicago.

"You’re going to be fine. Anyone who can do a triathlon around Boston will survive divorce. I have great pictures of you jogging all over Wales and Scotland. Maybe I should use that as my theme; Running with Anna. I’ll send you the first draft," said Harper as she headed for her gate.

As the excitement of the flight receded, Anna felt an uncontrollable urge to sleep, which she did—deeply—for thirty minutes in the chairs near the Starbucks, with her feet on her luggage. She then had to drive another hour north to Rockport once she located her car in the labyrinth of the parking garage. The rain was fierce, and she realized that Harper really had been right; the greatest danger was driving her car in the rain, rather than flying in the storm. Many more things could go wrong in her car. Traffic was snarled hopelessly.

When she pulled into her driveway in Rockport, the house was dark and empty. She had known that it would be empty, but since the divorce there were moments when she longed for lights to be on, footsteps thudding down the stairs even though this was not the house she had shared with Steven. The mail was piled high on her entryway table. The cat was at her neighbor’s house, and it was now too late to go get him. It was midnight, almost time to wake up for a good cup of tea in Ireland.

Anna peeled off her clothes and tossed them in the direction of the bathroom hamper. She pulled out a length of dental floss and wrangled the mint flavored string between each tooth, followed by a thorough brushing. She turned on the overhead fan to circulate the stuffy, warm air and slid naked between the sheets that had been changed three weeks ago, the day before she’d left. Her body jerked violently as if she had fallen from a mountain; then she dropped suddenly to sleep, and slumber took her into its grasp.

A voice broke into her consciousness, prying her out of sleep. Confused, she looked at her clock radio—12:40 a.m.—and wondered who could possibly be talking at this time. Then she heard, Anna, you must not be back yet and I hate to leave this kind of message for you…. It was her mother’s voice, deep and rich, but something was wrong; disaster poured into her house as if a dam had burst. The phone must have rung four times without Anna’s hearing it. She scrambled to reach her bedside phone.

I’m here. What’s wrong?

Oh. You are there. Did you just get back? Anna, your brother has been in a serious accident. I’m already at the hospital in Hartford. He’s still in surgery. This is looking…complicated.

When Anna arrived at the hospital in Hartford, she was aware that one layer of her was jet-lagged and sleep deprived. Another layer had lurched into overdrive when she’d heard that Patrick had been critically injured. She regretted every lapsed visit with him, regretted everything ever said to her older brother about how he treated his son; she needed to make a full list of her misdeeds because she didn’t want him to die. She wanted to argue with him about music, food, and politics. Anna had thought she’d have the rest of her life to joust with Patrick, to be criticized by him for being a low-life lawyer. They weren’t done yet. He was six years older and had hacked his way through childhood with a machete, battling with their father as the enemy. Anna had hated to be in the same room with them, had hated to see her mother reduced to tears again and again. Her father had bristled like a dog whenever Patrick had walked in the house.

The only good thing about the drive from Rockport was the fact that she had missed the commuter traffic flooding into Hartford. It was 4:00 a.m.

Her mother looked suddenly smaller; hospital waiting rooms did that. They shrank people until the only thing left was fear and skin and hearts that beat too fast. Anna wrapped her arms around her mother and sniffed her hair, breathing in a mixture of vinegar and almond. Her mother felt damp, as if her skin had been weeping.

Pretend that you can’t smell me, Ma, I haven’t bathed in two days and I stink like an airplane full of pukey people. What happened?

Her mother, wearing chinos and a long-sleeved cotton shirt over a tank top, patted Anna and pulled her into a chair next to her. We only know that they had to use the Jaws of Life to get Pat out. They aren’t sure that he is going to make it. That’s not exactly what the doctors said; they said with head injuries, things can change quickly, that we had to be prepared for things to go either way.

Her voice shook and she stuttered over head injuries so that it sounded like, hey-hey-hey-hey-ed injuries, as if saying head was too terrible. Anna felt a brown caustic juice descend from the top of her head and it filled all her soft places in her throat and stomach. Every inch of her intestines threatened to dissolve her from the inside. Anna looked around the waiting room and noticed Alice, her mother’s best friend, standing outside the door. Alice pulled a piece of paper from her back pocket.

Just when you think things are horrible, remember that they can get worse, said Alice. Your brother was on his way to pick up Joseph. Your nephew is in jail in Newark, New Jersey. They said it was the Essex County Detention Center. We wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t gone by Patrick’s house to get insurance information. I listened to his phone messages. There was one that said something like, ‘Where the hell are you, come get your kid.’ Anna, someone needs to go get your nephew.

Alice and her mother had been friends for over thirty years, since they’d started working together at the high school in Greenfield, where Patrick and Joseph lived. Alice taught Latin and Anna’s mother, Mary Louise, taught math. Both were approaching their sixties, but neither one of them was interested in retirement. Alice was long and lean, tan from daily tennis over the summer. Mary Louise had what she called a peasant body—short, close to the ground, and steady, with good wide hips.

Anna stopped short when she heard her nephew’s name. She had not been able to have a real conversation with him since he was about ten years old; now he was sixteen, had a bad haircut and pimples, and seemed to practice squinting his eyes to look evil.

Why is he in jail?

Mary Louise, who was a militant supporter of her only grandchild, said, They said he stole a car with his friend Oscar and got as far as New Jersey. The state police claimed that they may have found drugs. They’re threatening to put Joseph in jail with adults. You’ll go get him, won’t you? I am not leaving this hospital. I am not going to the parking lot, the restaurant, or the bathroom until I know how Patrick is. And you’ve got to tell Joseph about his father.

There was not room to negotiate. Anna wanted to do both things, but more than anything she wanted to be with her brother, to act as his advocate with the hospital. She knew he would want that, and she knew that he would guard her like a pit bull if she was unconscious in the hospital.

Do we have to post bail? asked Mary Louise.

Not as long as they’re treating him as a juvenile, said Anna. She had twisted her hair into a knot and held it in place with two chopsticks. The bamboo sticks were gradually loosening and her hair bulged in an auburn bundle at the back of her neck. She felt one stick dangling perilously. She dug in her bag for something else to bind her hair. Alice handed her a coated hair tie, the kind she bought by the dozen in the drugstore.

I’m not leaving until I see Patrick. Joseph is not the most important person in this scenario. Other than being scared shitless, he’s not going to be damaged if I get there a couple hours later, said Anna, with her hair tightly tied back. Although he might advance his newly found criminal career by being in Essex County Detention Center.

If she left immediately, she’d be there in about five hours, maybe six, considering the fact that she was going to be hitting peak rush-hour traffic. She had only unpacked a few things from her trip and had grabbed the small backpack as she had charged out the door: it had a change of clothes and a toothbrush in it. But the boy would need to wait until Anna learned more about the fate of Patrick before she would leave.

After two hours, a surgeon came into the room where they sat. Mrs. O’Shea?

Mary Louise stood up slowly, as if bracing for a catastrophic blow. Anna noticed that her mother’s umber toenail polish was perfect. She was particular about her toenails and went every two weeks to have them done. She had always said, I want something to be perfect in my life and if it’s only my toenails, then so be it.

The surgeon stood with his feet wide apart and his hands held together in front of his pelvis. Anna stood up and held her backpack in front of her torso. Alice, who had not sat down since arriving at the hospital, sank slowly into a green, vinyl chair. She brought her knees together, leaned forward with her elbows tucked into her thighs and held her head in her hands, fingers pointing up to her eyes.

Patrick is stable for now. We had to alleviate the bleeding in his brain. We do that by making a hole in the skull.

Mary Louise made a noise like air escaping from a balloon, whizzing into the atmosphere.

The surgeon, dressed in sky blue scrubs, continued. We were fully able to set his leg; because it was broken in three places, he may end up with a shorter leg. And his pelvis was broken as well. But the bones will mend. We almost wish for broken bones with car accidents because we are so damned good at fixing bones… He faltered for a moment, uncovering his pelvic area and bringing his hands together in front of his chest like a prayer. Brain damage is unpredictable. For now, we will keep him in a medically induced coma and we will wait and watch. But he needs to be transferred to Boston as soon as possible. He brought his hands up to his face so that his two pointer fingers pressed against his broad, soft lips, tapping them. He’s young and strong. Patrick is in great shape. That goes a long way in my business. Does he have a wife, kids?

Anna looked over at Alice; Mary Louise swiveled her head to look at each of them. They were conspirators now, agents of Patrick, to do his bidding while he was unconscious.

Mary Louise straightened her spine. He’s a widower. His wife was killed in a fall from a horse twelve years ago. He has a wonderful son. I have a wonderful grandson, Joseph. He is out of state at the moment. We are making plans to bring him home.

The surgeon nodded. Good. Anecdotally, if there is a child in the picture, I have seen parents fight harder to come back from injuries like this. They have a reason to come back.

Later, when they