AUGUST, 1996
The boat and the pier smelled of fish and Codman Cody.
“You shouldn’t be going, Caitlyn,” Gary told her. “If you fell in somehow . . .”
He didn’t say the rest. He didn’t need to. Caitlyn knew it all too well. In the last few months, the rigidity of her body had become worse. She couldn’t sit at all anymore, and getting in and out of bed was difficult because she could barely bend from the waist. She could walk, albeit slowly and with a strange, lock-kneed gait like someone pretending they were a doll. Her shoulder and elbow joints still worked, but detail work with the hands was now impossible; she would never knit or sew again. She smiled at Gary—it hurt too much to frown. “I’ll be fine. Codman has life jackets, and I can stand near the cabin, away from the side. Gary, I need to be there. Please don’t argue.”
His face softened. “All right,” he told her. “But you wear a life jacket. Moira, you want to help your mom?”
Moira nodded. Cody blinked his round, wide-set fishy eyes, the scales on his skin glinting in the light from the lantern hung on the piling of the tiny pier at the western end of Church Bay. He tossed a life jacket to Moira with the shorter, two-fingered hand, webbing stretched between the wide-spread digits. “Hurry,” he told them. “The tide’s running out strong now.”
Moira fastened the straps of the life jacket around Caitlyn, and then hugged her. “Be careful, Máthair,” she said.
“I will. I’ll see you soon. Remember, you’re to go right over to Alice’s house; I’ll pick you up there.” Moira nodded solemnly. She was blinking back tears, Caitlyn noticed, and she patted the girl’s head. “Go tell Gary goodbye.”
Caitlyn watched her run over to Gary, watched him effortlessly pick her up as Caitlyn once had and embrace her as Moira wrapped arms around his neck. “I wish you didn’t have to go,” Caitlyn heard her say to him.
“Part of me wants very much to stay,” Gary told her, still hugging her. His gaze was on Caitlyn. “But I want to go home. You understand that, don’t you? I want to go home.”
“Máthair says they’ll arrest you if they catch you. They’ll put you in jail.”
“Then I have to make sure they don’t catch me, don’t I?” He put her down. “I’ll miss you so much, Moira. Give me a kiss?”
She kissed Gary, hugging him fiercely, and then turned and ran down the pier to the shore. Caitlyn could hear her crying as she ran, turning toward Codman Cody’s small house, where his wife Alice waited.
“’Tis nothing,” Caitlyn told Gary, who stood watching Moira’s sudden flight. “She’s just upset, but she’ll be fine. Help me into the boat . . .”
A few minutes later, the áilteoir (“That’s ‘joker’ in Irish Gaelic,” Caitlyn had told Gary when he asked) was grumbling its way toward the entrance to the harbor and out into the open waters of Church Bay. The night was moonless, the waves gentle as the small fishing vessel moved out into the open water, rolling sofly. The light of Ballycastle shown directly ahead, and the line of the Irish coast was a blackness against the star-dappled sky. Cody steered the áilteoir due south, following the line of Rathlin’s southern arm. Once past the Rue Point and the South Lighthouse at the tip of Rathlin, he turned southeast, intending to land east of Ballycastle in the less-settled land between Fair Head and Torr Head. From there, Gary would try to make his way south to Belfast, where he could determine the best way to the States.
Caitlyn felt worry settle in her stomach. She’d helped him plan this escape, keeping to herself all the doubts and fears. She’d judiciously enlisted Duncan MacEnnis’s help, and the Constable had recommended a local joker who could create the false IDs and passport Gary was now carrying, under the name he’d first given her: John Green. It can’t work, she wanted to tell him. A black man walking about in Ireland—how more conspicuous could you be? The first garda you come across will figure out who you are and place you under arrest.
She clamped her lips shut, and concentrated on keeping her balance with the motion of the boat in the long swells. If he were going to leave, she wanted to be with him as long as she could. She wanted to see him on the shore. She wanted to watch him walk away into the night. She didn’t think she could bear the pain of the loss if something went wrong and she hadn’t been there.
“We’re coming up on the two-mile mark,” Cody said from his seat at the controls. He grinned at Gary and Caitlyn, exposing the twin rows of tiny triangular teeth that lined his mouth. “Another few minutes and you’re technically off the island.”
Gary nodded. He was standing alongside Caitlyn, his body a welcome warmth against the stiff sea breeze. He put his arm around her. Neither one of them said anything—it had all been said earlier that day, along with the tears, the kisses, a final few stolen moments of intimacy. His arm brought her close; she tried to bring her head down to lay against his chest and halfway succeeded. “Promise you’ll be careful,” she said, no more than a whisper. She wondered whether he would hear her, but she felt his lips on her hair and a kiss.
“I will,” he answered.
“Shite!” The curse came from Cody, and Caitlyn felt Gary’s body jerk and then move quickly away.
“What’s the matter?”
“I have a blip on the sonar. Out there.” He pointed to starboard, close to where Ballycastle glittered. Red and white lights blinked closer to them, sending wavering reflections chasing themselves over the water. They all heard the noise at the same time: the full-throttled roar of powerful engines. “Bleeding patrol boat. You’d best get in the cabin, Gary. Don’t want them seeing you out on the deck . . .”
Gary ducked into the small cabin and closed the door behind him. A few moments later, the blue-white glare of a spotlight stabbed across the waves and settled on them. The patrol boats, a fast cruiser, pulled within hailing distance and shut its engines. “Hey, Cody!” someone yelled. “What the hell are you about in that rusting tub of yours, now?”
Cody blinked into the spotlight, shielding his eyes. “Cap’n Blane, is it? What’s the problem? I’m still in Rathlin waters.”
“You’re a good half-mile outside, man.”
“Not according to my instruments.”
“Then your instruments are off or you’ve forgotten how to read them. And since when do you do your fishing at night? You know the regs, Cody—prepare to be boarded for inspection.”
“Ah, now, Cap’n, you don’t be needing to waste your time with that,” Cody protested hurriedly. He clambered down from the top of the cabin to stand next to Caitlyn. The spotlight widened as he moved, then narrowed again. Caitlyn lifted her arm, squinting into the light. “The truth be, Cap’n, I’m not exactly fishing. I was taking Caitlyn here for a bit of a ride, and I suppose I wasn’t paying as much attention to the instruments as I might be, if you take my drift. You’re a married man too, are you not, Cap’n? So I expect you understand. Do you think I’d be trying to smuggle something over in this puttering slow thing?”
Cody’s arm was around her, and she could smell the odor of rotting fish. But it was easy to smile . . . “I’d hate for something like this to get back to my missus,” Cody said.
Caitlyn could hear conversation, then a burst of rough laughter and someone’s voice saying audibly, “She’s missing a nose if she’s shagging the Codman . . .” The spotlight snapped off. Afterimages danced purple and yellow in Caitlyn’s vision. “Turn that rustbucket around, then,” Blane’s voice called loudly. “And next time, keep it closer to home.”
Cody waved; the patrol boat’s engines coughed and then roared as the prow lifted and the props churned the water to white froth. The lights receded, heading back toward Ballycastle. Cody went back to the wheel; Gary emerged from the cabin.
Cody spun the wheel, and the áilteoir turned. The South Lighthouse gleamed ahead of them. “They’ll be watching now,” Cody said. “I don’t have a choice.”
“I know,” Gary said. “Maybe next time, eh?”
Cody sniffed. “Don’t know about this ‘next time,’ either,” he said. “The áilteoir ain’t much but she’s all I have. I come out again like this, and Blane or whoever’s out there waiting isn’t going to be so accommodating. I lose the boat, and I lose everything. Doing this once is one thing, doing it again . . .” Codman gave a massive blink, his bulbous eyes seeming to vanish into his skull and them pop out again. “I’m sorry. I hope you understand.”
Caitlyn thought Gary might be angry or upset. Instead, strangely, he shrugged and sighed. “I know, Codman. I have a plane rusting on the bottom north of Rathlin that was my life, that I’d scraped and saved and borrowed to buy. And I threw it away for . . .” He shook his head. “I don’t even know for what, but it sure as hell wasn’t for me. So yeah, I understand.”
He said nothing else on the way back. He held Caitlyn’s hand, and he stared over the stern of the boat toward the lights of Ireland.
MAY, 1997
Each word was a separate, labored breath of air. “Tell . . . them . . . to . . . come . . . in.”
The doctor’s eyestalks blinked, and he scuttled away crab-like, his brilliant orange and blue carapace leaving her vision. Caitlyn heard him talking softly with the two of them, and a few moments later, she heard Gary and Moira enter the bedroom. Their faces swam above her as they stood over the bed. Gary was trying to smile; Moira was openly crying.
Dying was suffocation by inches. Dying was slowly being turned to painted stone. Dying was forcing the muscles of lungs and heart to pump and knowing that it was a battle she had already lost, that she could continue fighting for only a few more minutes.
At least she would be a beautiful, smiling corpse.
“I . . . love . . . you,” she told them. “I’m . . . sorry.”
“You can just be quiet,” Gary told her. “There’s nothing to be sorry about.” His hand stroked her face; she felt nothing of the caress—not the touch, not the heat. “We love you, too. I wish-” He stopped.
She would have nodded, would have smiled. She could only cry. “Moira?” she said.
“What do you want, Máthair?” She sniffed and scrubbed at her eyes with her sleeve. It hurt most to see her, to see how her face had lost its baby fat over the last few years. To see her shape changing to that of a young woman. To see the glimmer of the adult that she might become—and to know that because of the virus, she would never be that person.
Caitlyn had thought that the worst thing would be there to witness what the wild card virus would do to her daughter. Now she knew it was worse to leave and not know. “You . . . be . . . careful,” she told Moira. “Every . . . one . . . will . . . watch . . . out . . . for . . . you.”
“I know, Máthair.” Then the tears came, and Moira hugged her desperately as Caitlyn strained uselessly to hug her in return, to move the arms frozen at her sides.
“Go . . . on . . . now,” she told her. “Please.”
Gary slowly, gently, pulled Moira away from Caitlyn. They started to walk away, but Caitlyn called out to him. “Gary . . .”
“Go on, Moira,” she heard him tell her. “I’ll be right out.” Then his face returned, hovering over her. “Hey,” he said. “Are you in pain, love? Maybe Doc Crab can-”
“No,” she told him. “No . . . pain.” She forced another breath through her lungs. She would have closed her eyes, but those muscles were no longer working, either. “You . . . kept . . . your . . . promises.”
“It was easy. You made it easy.”
“One . . . more.”
“What?” She saw his face, his eyes narrowing. “Ah,” he said, and the exhalation said more than words.
“No . . . you . . . don’t . . . understand . . . Promise . . . that . . . if . . . you . . . get . . . the . . . chance . . . to . . . go . . . home . . . you’ll . . . still . . . go. Don’t . . . worry . . . about . . . Moira. They . . . will . . . take . . . care . . . of . . . her . . . here.”
“Caitlyn-”
“No!” The shout, though hardly more than a hoarse whisper, cost her. She had to struggle for the next breath and was afraid it wouldn’t come. He waited, his hand stroking her hair. “Promise . . . it. That’s . . . all . . . I . . . can . . . give . . . you . . . now. It’s . . . what . . . you . . . want.”
“I know,” he said. “But it’s not going to happen.”
“. . . promise . . .”
Gary sighed. “All right. I promise. I’ll go home.”
JANUARY, 1998
“. . . it’s not simple, I know, but you can get it. First you have to isolate ‘x’ on one side of the equation, so . . .”
A knock on the door interrupted the algebra lesson. Moira shrugged at Gary and went to answer it. “Good evening to you, Moira,” Constable MacEnnis said. The garda stood outside the door in a misting drizzle, beads of water running down his cap, the impossibly round, white eyes bright in the murky day. “This just came for Gary. I think he’ll want to read it.” He handed Moira an envelope. The ivory paper felt thick and heavy in his hand, spotted a bit with the rain. “It’s from Mayor Carrick,” MacEnnis added.
She could feel Gary behind her at the door. She handed him the envelope and stepped back. “Come on in,” she said to MacEnnis. “No sense in standing out in the rain.”
MacEnnis touched the crown of the cap with knobbed, scarred fingers. “I don’t think so, Moira. I should get back . . .” He nodded to them and walked back to the Fiat parked at the side of the road. Moira shut the door, turning to find Gary still staring at the envelope in his hands. She knew then.
“Go on,” she told him. “Open it.”
He seemed to start, as if she’d shaken him from some reverie, then slipped his forefinger under the flap and slid it along the seal. He pulled out the paper—cream-colored legal bond—and unfolded it. She could see him reading the words, saw the tremble start in his hands and the eyes widen. Without a word, he handed it to her.
. . . granted a presidential pardon, effective immediately. Any and all charges pending against you have been dropped by the governments of the United States, the Republic of Ireland, and the United Kingdom . . .
She handed the paper back to him, then flung her arms around his neck, giggling as if she were nine again. “Oh, Gary! I’m so happy for you!”
He hugged her, but the embrace was half-hearted and he released her almost immediately. “Moira, I can’t . . .”
She didn’t answer. Instead, she went to the mantle, standing there for a moment as the heat from the peat fire warmed the front of her body, then turned, serious. “The night Máthair died, I listened to her talking to you.”
He rattled the paper in his hand. “Moira, this doesn’t mean that I have to go now. Or . . . we can both go. Would you like that? Would you like to go to New York City?”
She shook her head. “No. I wouldn’t like that at all. I’m staying here. I’ll be thirteen this year, Gary, and there’s plenty of people here to look out for me. I’m Rathlin’s only child, remember? They all know me.”
“I should stay until-” He stopped. They both knew what he meant.
“I know my odds, Gary,” she said. “I’ve known them for a long time. I also know that almost all latents express either at puberty or during some great emotional crisis. Well, the virus didn’t show itself when Máthair died, and I doubt anything will be more traumatic than that, so . . .” She shrugged. “I don’t want you to see me die, Gary. I don’t want your last memory of me to be something awful. I’d rather stay that little girl you helped to learn her math.”
“God, you sound like her.”