The Last Will of Moira Leahy Read online

  “I am not a lesbian!” I slouched low when a few faces turned our way.

  Kit glanced at a group of hunky physicians, then back at me. “So now the whole cafeteria understands you’re a heterosexual and thinks I may not be—”

  “Sorry.”

  “—tell me, how’s Noel?”

  I guess I deserved this. “He’s still in Europe. He’s not even coming home for Christmas. Garrick wonders if he’ll ever come back.”

  “Stop torturing him and he’ll come back.”

  “Stop torturing me! I have nothing to do with it,” I said. “God. He’s trying to find his mother. Can we talk about my stalker already, before you’re paged away or something?”

  She leaned forward. “You haven’t seen anyone? This is all based on feelings?”

  “Yeah, feelings.” My thumbnails picked together metronomically. “Your brother’s not in town, is he?”

  “No, Ian’s off a coast somewhere.” She threw her crumpled napkin on her plate. “Won’t you tell me what happened with you two? Did it have something to do with Moira?”

  “Kit, don’t.” She knew the rules. No discussing the past, period. “I have to admit, though …”

  “What?”

  “I’ve thought a lot about home lately. Memories.”

  “Aw, Maeve. Regression isn’t such a bad thing, you know.” She covered my hands with her chapped ones. I hated when she acted like this—as if it was her personal calling to be my protector—about as much as I appreciated it.

  “Don’t use psychobabble on me, Kit.”

  “Regression means you revert back a little.”

  Revert back? Like being attracted to things you had as a kid, buying the tool of a wannabe pirate? I’d admit nothing.

  “I’m not reverting,” I said. “And I don’t want to go back.”

  “Sometimes regression comes before you take a big leap forward,” she said, just as her pager went off.

  IT WAS A roller-coaster ride to the end of term. I rushed right along with my students: grade the finals, tally the marks, post them. And just like that—whiplash—the semester was over. This always brought on a mild case of the blues, probably because I had a like-hate relationship with free time. I forced myself to lie on the couch and watch two hours of TV that first weekend night—a behavior that felt more foreign than any language I taught.

  Sleep became more difficult, too. Sunday night was particularly bad; apprehension swelled in the back of my throat like a beached whale. Sometime around 1:00 a.m., the phone rang.

  “Dad?” I waited a beat. “Mom? Is it you?”

  No answer, but I knew someone was there. Long seconds passed before the line went dead.

  I wouldn’t think about Ian. I wouldn’t eling.

  I went back to bed, and tried to relax my muscles and my mind, sleep. I imagined her so clearly, though. Moira in the grass with her keyboard, chewing the end of her ponytail. Gliding her fingers through sun-cooked water on the seat of our boat as we planned our future.

  I tried to picture my saxophone, my fingers over its cold neck, but just as I managed it, it turned into Noel’s warm one. My second attempt was no better: I stood naked in a field of brown grass with my sax, blowing soundlessly through the mouthpiece. Noel was there, too, fully clothed and flipping through his passport. I threw down my saxophone and covered my chest when he looked at me. They all changed into something … other. Noel, the sax, and the passport grew forked tongues and coiled at my feet. I ran away, blades of dead grass catching between my toes, but I knew it was only a matter of time before one of them caught me.

  Out of Time

  Castine, Maine

  NOVEMBER 1995

  Moira and Maeve are eleven

  Moira woke in the middle of the night, though she didn’t understand why right away.

  “It’s happening.” Maeve was sitting upright in bed.

  Moira sat, too. “What’s wrong? Poppy?”

  Their mother’s howl splintered the night.

  “No, Moira, don’t—”

  But Moira leaped up and ran to her parents’ room. Mama writhed in their bed, and Daddy had his arms braced over her, his face close to hers.

  “Oh, sweetheart.” He made a noise—sibilant—a let of air. “Honey, it’s all right.”

  “Oh, God!” Mama howled again. “Jack, no!”

  Moira felt a tug on her arm and looked back at her sister.

  “Come away.”

  “No.” Moira spied the crimson stain on the sheet, watched, rapt and frightened as it spread, ate up the white. “No.”

  The baby was lost.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  SIGMUND’S SECRETS

  I wove my way down the familiar halls of Time After Time until I stood before a closed entry. I cracked the door, hoping to see Noel absorbed in his work. Instead of finding him as I often had—at an easel, barefoot on bleached tarps beside the long bank of windows—I discovered him asleep on his bench, slumped over a table streaked with colored paint and heaped with old palettes, tools and glues, an assortment of pigments. A sketchpad sat open beside him, and his fingers barely held to a teetering pencil.

  I stepped inside. Every barrier I’d erected toward the opposite sex, toward Noel, sighed away as if napping was the order of the day. A beautiful man, asleep and unaware. My eyes wandered over him like an eager adventurer. I scaled a cheekbone, skied his nose, and glided over the curve of a full bottom lip. I ran wild through a thatch of black hair, then lay in the hammock of his ear, the pinna, the little wing. I moved closer. Slid down his neck and loped across one broad shoulder and the curved part of his back. Dallied over a length of bare arm and lingered for ages on a hand—what gorgeous skin he had, how strong his musculature, how long his fingers.

  Then the fingers moved, and my reverie shattered. His eyes opened and fixed on mine. He lifted his head slowly.

  “I’m sorry,” I stuttered. “I never should have—” I spun around and faced a windowless wall, like I’d caught him naked or something. I repressed the urge to walk to a corner and press my nose into its seam. “Sorry.”

  “Maeve,” he said, “turn around.”

  But I ran out, closed and locked the door from the hall. Water spurted from beneath it. The wood shook as Noel pounded on it from the other side.

  “Open the door!”

  I sat up in bed, gasping, drenched in sweat, and saw that it was just after 4:00 a.m. I heard more pounding. Real. This was not Kit forgetting her key.

  I grabbed my robe, flung limbs where they belonged. I looked out the peephole and saw him, though I hardly believed it was true until I opened the door and met his eyes. And then I threw myself into my father’s arms.

  ALL THE SCENTS that were Castine hugged around my dad’s body like a net; he couldn’t escape them if he tried. He seemed thinner, his body and his salted hair, but his smile looked just the same. I didn’t ask why he hadn’t called to say he was coming or waited to travel during the day. My guess was that he’d finished his weekend chores and decided right then to make the trip, and hit the road.

  “It’s so great you’re here,” I told him. “What made you come?”

  “Well, you know how I love my girls,” he said, and I smiled what felt like the first honest smile in a decade. “I even brought one of them along.”

  My jaw slackened, but when I looked out at the blue pickup on the road I saw only a little fur face in the window. I didn’t have to ask to know my mother wasn’t hunkered down beneath the tarp-covered bulge in back, waiting for her moment to surprise me. The last time we’d met, over two years ago at a halfway mark in Boston, she’d barely offered a word.

  “That’s Sparky. I hope you don’t mind I brought her.”

  “No, she’ll be fine. Cute.”

  “Your mother wants me to bring you home for Christmas.”

  “No, Dad.” I didn’t believe him, but even if it was true, it was only so she could ignore me a little more directly.

  He looked p
ast me and into my living room—the sparse walls, squared-off piles of paper on the oak desk in the corner, uncluttered stone fireplace, single denim sofa, and entertainment unit with a television and no CD player. “No Christmas tree?”

  “My landlady doesn’t like trees,” I said. “Fire hazard.”

  The dog, a little thing with a white body and brown head, curled up on my couch when my father brought her in. Sam must’ve found a good hiding spot.

  “The couch is a pullout,” I said as he set down his duffel. “So you’ll have a place to sleep, if your dog will share with you. I’d offer you Kit’s bed, but I never know when she might actually use it, and I think you’d give her a heart attack if she found you under her sheets. I doubt even she could perform CPR on herself.”

  He smiled. “I can sleep anywhere.”

  “Are you tired?” It was, after all, still four-something in the morning. “Or are you hungry?”

  This was a rhetorical question with my father. I poached three eggs, firm, the way he liked them, brewed coffee. We made careful small talk in my kitchen. Ned Baker—a hellion I’d gone to school with—got married last month, Dad said. I told him about a student of mine also named Ned Baker who was just as troublesome as the Ned back home.

  “Must be the name,” he said. I agreed, and then we fell into a silence that felt necessary but a little uncomfortable—like a straw bed when you’re just too exhausted to care about the bits and pieces sticking into your side.

  “How long can you stay?” I asked as he scraped up the last of his eggs.

  “Like I said, your mother wants me to bring you—”

  “I can’t go home with you, Dad. If Mom really wanted to see me, she could’ve gotten in the truck with you and come.” I didn’t mean to sound so sharp. I swallowed guilt when he turned and looked out the kitchen window.

  “There’s lightning,” he said. “Storm’s coming.”

  “Lightning in late December? It’s been a little warm, but—”

  Thunder like cannon fire rattled my windows, and that was all it took. Adrenaline tore through me. It’s just a storm, Jesus Christ, don’t be a freak. I couldn’t control my response, though I tried to hide it. I wanted my dad to see I’d become a well-adjusted adult after all, to tell my mother so.

  He waited until another bolt of lightning flashed, and then he pushed back his chair. “I’ll stay through the weekend,” he said. “Your mother, she can’t do it all herself.”

  I regretted the words right away but couldn’t stop them. “No, she can’t, but she’ll still try.”

  I GATHERED SHEETS, a pillow, and a quilt, and put them beside Sparky’s prone form on the couch. “Lazy dog,” I said, and scratched her head. She stretched, but kept her eyes closed.

  “You going to sing, Mayfly?” My father leaned against the doorway to the kitchen. “Sing a bedtime song?”

  Like I was fourteen again, and he was in the hammock with a lemonade cradled between his hip and hand as Moira and I played for him—sang in the only way we could. Neither of us could carry a tune with our own vocal chords.

  My best naps I owe to you, he’d say, and ruffle our hair.

  “Sorry, but my landlady lives upstairs and she doesn’t like music.” This detail may or may not have been true, but it served the moment well enough. “I could recite a French poem, though. Italian. Latin. Spanish. Portuguese. Even Romanian, if you don’t mind a bad accent.”

  “No music?” This was the real foreign concept to my father, the thing I couldn’t put words to. The sky rumbled again.

  “Should we take the dog out before this hits?”

  We stumbled into another uncomfortable moment outside. As Sparky did her business, my father looked back at my apartment and grunted. The blinking lights of my landlady’s Christmas tree illuminated a second-floor window. I pretended not to notice.

  “Looks like less sky out here, eh?” he said.

  I couldn’t see any sky at the moment, just dark, but I agreed. It had taken me a long time to get over the feeling of claustrophobia here. Less sky, too much land. I felt the draw of the sea, too, a force as ancient and enduring as a siren call.

  “Some things never change,” my father said. I thought he’d go on about storms and how they smell and sound and feel on the skin before the first spill—he was a Castinian, after all—but he surprised me. “Stars are up there, Mayfly, above the clouds. Can’t see ’em all the time, but they’re there, day and night, fair weather or gale.”

  He kept his face slanted upward as if he hadn’t meant anything more than what he’d said. I knew better. But so what if I didn’t have pictures on my wall or a tree covered in lights. So what if everything was neat and I had a nearly empty bottle of Windex. So what if I had no music in my home and couldn’t sing to my father. It had nothing to do with stars and constancy. It was just … just. And I had a lot, had done so much with my life. I was a great teacher, I—

  Thunder split the air again, and this time I flinched.

  “It’s a good storm, Mayfly,” my father said, as the first rain hit my cheek.

  Good storm. Heel. Roll over. Don’t stay.

  I left man and dog to their pseudonight, and crawled back into bed. I listened as clouds labored over drops of water, as the afterbirth of every storm known to man seemed to fall. The noises were there, too, riled up in my head like positive and negative charges, wanting to write themselves into a song about a storm out of time.

  Daylight filtered through the seams of my shade when I finally gave in to temptation. I pulled my dusty saxophone case out from under my bed and stared at it, perhaps the way an alcoholic looks at a bottle of Scotch. My hands shook as I opened the latches, lifted the cover.

  Vivid scent hit me first—dusky brass and bittersweet cane. My mouth watered, but no instrument lay atop the matted-plush in-sides. Instead, there were folded notes, mementos, my passport, a few reeds from my old sax, and some stones from Castine. I stared at it all for a moment, then opened one of the notes.

  Maevy Gravy,

  Guess what number I’m thinking of. Come on, guess!

  Oh, God. Nauseous. Bleeding memories. I hated eling.

  I tucked some rocks into the pocket of my pajamas, then put Noel’s postcards into the case with my sister’s note and closed the lid. And then I shut my eyes and let myself sway with the turbulence, feeling like the First Chinese Brother—my mouth filled with water, the ocean pressed against my ribs.

  Out of Time

  Castine, Maine

  JUNE 1999

  Moira and Maeve are fourteen

  Kit had requested a personal concert, so Moira and Maeve set out one day with their instruments in the lobster boat—a vessel that was sturdy and long and had decent coverage. No clouds roamed the sky, but because Moira had a keen and personal appreciation for how weather conditions changed in the bay, she took care to drape an orange rubber coat around the edges of her keyboard.

  Maeve warmed up with a series of arpeggios as Kit made her requests: “Don’t Speak,” “Nothing Compares 2 U,” “My Heart Will Go On” (Maeve pulled away from her sax and made a retching noise), “Sowing the Seeds of Love.”

  When Maeve smiled, Moira set her keyboard to Reverse Gurgle, put her right thumb on D, and began. The brass of Maeve’s sax caught and threw sunlight, and her clear tone rang out. Moira knew her sister was a true talent, the prodigy she’d been labeled years before. Ben Freeman said he’d see to it that she made an album someday.

  If I do, so will you, Maeve always said.

  Sometimes, alone with her thoughts as her sister slept, Moira wondered what might’ve been if she’d tried the sax first. She might’ve been a prodigy, too. Then she remembered the things she liked best—her piano, her roses, Jane Eyre, and solitude—and knew she wouldn’t have liked the attention so well as Maeve.

  Later, as Maeve played a piece she’d written herself, Moira noticed a lone boat lingering nearby. She pointed it out to Kit, whose lips twisted into a parody of a smile
.

  “It’s my brother,” she said.

  “Ian?”

  “Well, yeah, I only have one brother, thank God. See the little red cat on the mainsail? That’s Michael’s boat.” Kit leaned close, whispered in her ear, “I think Ian likes Maeve.”

  “He does not!”

  Maeve’s cadence faltered.

  “Shh! He always talks about her.”

  “That’s not a good thing. He probably has a voodoo doll with red hair and pins sticking out of it.”

  Kit giggled quietly as Moira studied the boat. It was Ian, all right. He was hard to miss. Though just a grade ahead of them, he was more than a year older and had sprouted taller than anyone in his class. He looked dusk-gilded and windblown, like a storybook hero with a kind heart. Moira knew better, even if he did look softer, more mortal somehow, surrounded by so much sea.

  “When Maeve plays in your living room, Ian takes out his telescope and watches her,” Kit said.

  “He doesn’t!”

  “The first time I saw, he said he’d give me ten bucks not to tell anyone. I told him to keep his money, and then he told me he’d break my legs if I said anything.”

  “Maybe he just likes the saxophone?”

  “Maybe, but whenever Maeve’s over he gets all googly-eyed and dopier than usual.”

  Moira dredged up a smile for that. Everyone knew Ian was wicked smart. Almost as smart as Kit.

  “You don’t have to tell Maeve, do you?” Kit asked. “I mean, it’ll make her uncomfortable, and, I mean, Ian wouldn’t really break my legs”—she paused for a moment as if considering the legitimacy of this statement, then continued—“but I’ll have a miserable summer if he’s mad at me.”

  “Uh, I can try.” Already, Moira felt the pulse of her twin’s curiosity. Maeve’s last notes still hung in the air when she turned to Moira.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Ian and Michael boated out,” Moira said, hoping Maeve would be satisfied with that. She nodded toward Michael’s craft, now turned landward.