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A man raises his hand to strike his wife. Iris doesn’t know why, but this time something snaps within her. “No, not this time,” she says, raising her own hand and sending her husband flying against the wall. His eyes open wide with surprise. He struggles to stand, but finds he has been pinned in place.
Iris’s sister has died, and she’s been left to raise her girl. She had hoped she could count on Connor’s stepping up and being a father to Maisie. God knows her real daddy isn’t stepping up. He isn’t even owning up. But no, Iris is not going to raise the girl in a house with a man who’d ever consider hitting his wife. She can’t risk Maisie growing up believing on any level that this way of life is okay. If it had only been for her own sake, Iris isn’t sure if she’d ever have found the strength, but it isn’t just about her anymore. Connor squirms and tries to free himself, but defying all gravity, he begins to slide up the wall. His head bumps roughly against the ceiling.
“Pack a bag and get out of here.” Iris lowers her hand, and the man who just stopped being her husband tumbles to the floor. “You got five minutes.”
The rain falls so heavily it’s nearly impossible to see the road. The semitruck ahead jackknifes. Not enough time for thought, let alone magic. The father dies on impact, but by some miracle, just the slightest amount of additional force holds the boy tight against the seat as the car flips and rolls for what seems to him like an eternity.
Ellen rushes to the hospital, nearly crashing en route herself. At the sight of Paul, she snatches him into her arms, rocking her son as she holds him tightly to her breast. Paul is traumatized by his father’s death. He cries for Ellen as he endures X-rays and examinations, but in the end everyone is left to wonder at the accident that took the father, but left the son without a scratch.
A young woman lies on a bloodstained bed. The color of her hair is very nearly a match for the color of the sunshine flooding through the window. Ellen and Iris look at each other, and in that silent stare promise never to tell Maisie or her redheaded giant how close they’d come to losing both Maisie and their boy.
It had come with no warning. Maisie had gone from a perfectly normal pregnancy to crisis in a matter of minutes. Iris reckons sometimes it just happens that way. To look at them both now, mother and child, you would never guess they had ever been in the tiniest shred of danger.
“Go on,” Iris says and smiles at Peter. “Go call your parents. They are going to want to see this carrottop boy of yours.”
Peter is not budging. “You okay?” One hand holds tight to his wife’s, the other lies carefully on his son’s back.
“Yeah,” Maisie says, and for the first time in her life, she feels she really means it. “I’m incredible. Aunt Iris is right. Claire will take a switch to you if she finds out you made her wait a second longer than she had to.”
“Go on, we’ll get everyone cleaned up and presentable.” Iris gives her final command. She watches her sister leave the bedside and cross to look out the window. Maisie begins singing a lullaby, the same Iris remembers singing to her, about a place called Cill Airne, a place neither of them has ever seen.
Iris joins Ellen by the window. “I guess you can take a family out of Ireland, but you can’t—” The look in her sister’s eyes makes her words run dry. Ellen stares at the horizon, as if she can see something there Iris can’t.
Ellen’s eyes fill with tears. “I didn’t fail her, not this time.”
Iris shakes her head and pulls Ellen into her arms. “No, sweetheart, you didn’t fail Maisie at all.”
Ellen seems confused. “I don’t mean Maisie.”
Iris strokes Ellen’s hair. “You mean Emily, don’t you?”
Ellen considers the question. “Emily? No.” She pushes back from Iris’s embrace. “Honestly, I don’t know who I mean. Something just seems a bit off.”
“You’ve just worn yourself out. That’s all,” Iris says. “You go rest up a bit. I’ll take care of things here.”
Ellen hesitates. She wraps her arms around herself and tosses a nervous glance in Maisie’s direction. “You sure?”
“I’m sure. Everything here is in good hands.”
An arthritic hand hovers over the telephone receiver. Jilo has lifted it and returned it to its cradle ten times over. She’s an old woman, and she knows her end is near. Jilo grimaces. She doesn’t have time to pussyfoot around like this. She’s held on to her sister’s secret for years now, throwing all the hate she could find within herself against the Taylors. But then that fool Ginny went and got herself killed, and, well, somehow all the hate seems like too heavy of a burden to carry on her own.
She’s been watching the younger Taylors. Oh, sure, they’re snooty all right, but at the end of the day, they aren’t really bad people. And Jilo feels it in her aching bones: she has arrived at the end of the day.
She feels moved for reasons she can’t really understand to see to it that her sister’s children and grandchildren spend a bit of time getting to know the cracker side of their kin. Right now, she can’t remember why she ever felt otherwise. They might love each other, or they might wring each other’s necks, but that is none of her nevermind. They deserve the chance, regardless of the outcome. She stares at the avocado-green phone with its square of gray buttons. Finally she summons her determination and dials the number scrawled in pencil on the back of a used envelope. The dialed number begins ringing, and she very nearly hangs up, but a voice on the other end says, “Hello?”
Jilo hesitates. She can’t understand what is possessing her to do this, but doing this she is.
“Hello?” the voice on the other end says again.
“Hello. This is Jilo Wills. We have to talk.”
THIRTY-FIVE
Forsyth Park was nearly filled to capacity, but Iris and Ellen had claimed a spot for the family picnic in the shade of what had become known to the Taylor-Tierney clan as “the climbing tree.” Three blankets, six lawn chairs, and a touch of magic formed the boundary.
It would be a perfect Fourth. Mid-eighties, and for once a blessed streak of low humidity had claimed Savannah as its own. Ellen took off her sunglasses and placed them on top of her head. “I have to tell you, every time I look at that cooler, I think of Jilo.”
Iris smiled. “Hers was red. This one is blue,” she said, but seemed incapable of convincing herself. “No. I see what you mean. Who knows? Maybe it means somehow she is still here with us.”
