The Time Keepers

Chapter 4

CHAPTER 4

I N THE BACK SEAT OF THE CAR, THE LEATHER UPHOLSTERY sticky beneath her, Grace tried to push thoughts from her own childhood away.

Everyone had hidden pain. At least that was what Grace told herself on those particularly rainy days when she drove past the river near her daughters’ school and water spilled over the embankment and flooded the roads. The river’s flooding always stirred a deep melancholy inside her, its strong current drawing her back to her village on Ireland’s western shore. Even after nearly twenty years in America, she still felt the dark pull of the water. Like a ghost that lived deep within her bones.

Her father had been a fisherman, just as her grandfather and his father before him had been. On the nights when he left home to take his boat out into the ocean, he would cup Grace’s face in his large palms and bring his lips to her forehead, kissing her and her younger sister, Bridey, as though each time might be the last.

Even after all these years on Long Island, there were nights when Grace lay in bed and she could still conjure up the sensation of her father’s hands against her cheeks, their texture rough from a lifetime of pulling up ropes and casting nets into the sea. She had charted those lines on his palms time and again, her father telling her they were a map that would always bring him back home.

She had held her sister’s hand that day in early June, when the sun sparkled over the glen, pulling sheets of golden light over the grass. They were happy to leave behind their crowded home, attached to a row of others, and escape the mothers pinning clothes on laundry lines and chastising them for being too loud.

Her four-year-old sister had raced beside Grace to go meet the bakery van as it drove through the streets. Bridey was laughing with her head thrown back, the skirt of her cotton dress dancing in the wind. At her ankles, the family’s new puppy, with its soft coat, trailed beside her.

Grace had just paid for two iced buns when she noticed her sister was no longer next to her. Neither was the puppy. Grace assumed her sister had just lost herself in the familiar grounds of the village center. Children all roamed freely back then. The streets were full of boys playing with balls and girls jumping on hopscotch squares.

Eager to finish her sweet, Grace found some shade under one of the willow trees near the old church. She licked her fingers clean from the sugary glaze. She took off her shoes and wiggled her toe out of the hole in her white sock.

When Carol O’Reilly asked her if she wanted to come play with her, she followed happily into the meadow, where she and three other girls climbed trees and pretended to be fairies, weaving wild daisies and wisps of heather into garlands for their hair and using long sticks as magic wands.

Their fantasy world overtook them, and the girls soon retreated into the green terraced hills farther beyond the village. There, the flowers were even more bountiful, and the girls picked them by the fistful, stuffing them into their dress pockets and twirling until they fell breathless to the ground. Grace even discovered a long, narrow gull bone, bleached white from the sun, and lifted it toward her friend, like a queen.

It would be several hours later, after she wandered back toward her house, tired and with her imaginary scepter still clasped in her hand, that she ran into one of the men in the village.

“Hurry home,” he bluntly informed her. “Your mother thinks she’s lost two children in the river today. It’ll be a blessing to learn it was only the one.”

Grace hadn’t gone home straight away. Instead, she went down to the river to prove what the man had told her wasn’t true. There was even part of her that thought her white gull bone could resurrect her sister. But when she arrived, she saw a group of men standing over the rocks, her sister’s body covered by her father’s raincoat. Patrick McKinley’s large arm was wrapped around her father, whose eyes were fixed on Bridey beneath his dark jacket. His head lowered, his expression melting beneath his tears.

Grace threw the useless bone to the ground and ran all the way home.

Because she had died by drowning, the neighbors all called Bridey’s death a pisough, a bad omen. For several hours, not a single neighbor volunteered their home for the wake. Afraid of bringing tragedy upon their own families, people would only express how sorry they were for the family’s terrible loss.

As the sun began to set, her father had stayed by the river, refusing to leave Bridey’s side until someone offered their home for his baby girl’s wake. She later heard that he cradled Bridey’s body in his arms, rocking her like a newborn, howling as he held her to his chest.

It was the childless Delilah, nearly eighty years old, who eventually extended her house for the wake. She was far too old to fear bad omens, unlike the other women in the village who feared their husbands or sons might drown if they brought bad luck into their homes. “I’d be honored to have an angel in my house,” she said. And so little Bridey was washed and prepared for her burial by the ancient woman with the deepest respect. Delilah carefully bathed the girl’s body and pulled the seaweed out from her hair. She cleaned the sand from between her toes and powdered her skin so the blue of death was obscured.

Another family provided an old communion dress, a pair of rosebud-trimmed socks to cover her feet. Then, with the help of one of the fishermen, Delilah laid the girl out on an old wooden table near the hearth and laced Bridey’s fingers in front of her with a posy of forget-me-nots in her folded hands. A photograph of Saint Thérèse, known as “God’s little flower,” was placed by Bridey’s side.

From that day on, Grace would always cover her ears when the river became too high and crashed over the stones. Every time she heard the rushing of the river, it brought back the pain of Bridey’s death.

Years later, when she was eighteen and had won a lottery to emigrate to America, Grace went down to the river one last time and grabbed the ugliest stone she could find. She held it in her hand and marveled at its craggy shape, its mottled color, and she forced herself to still find beauty in it.

Then she cast it as far into the water as she could. Sinking all of her sorrow deep into the blue-green channel.

The melancholy still returned sometimes. Like now, when Grace looked at the little boy beside her. She wondered what lengths he had traveled to arrive at Bellegrove. The sorrows he had endured. She felt the pull of water stirring inside her again as they drove toward the police station.

“Tom, how about some music?” she asked, hoping to restore her sense of calm.

Her husband was kind. He didn’t remind her that he’d been the one who had just suggested the radio, believing it would soothe everyone’s nerves. He simply turned on the dial and let Karen Carpenter’s voice fill the air.