Ashes of Fiery Weather (48 page)

“Jesus, Maggie,” Eileen said. So much for the idea that Maggie was doing well now.

“But I sort of got together with someone on September 11,” Maggie said. “Someone I knew, before. We happened to be together when it came on the news.”

Eileen had heard stories like that down on the Pile—or rather, the Pit, as it was now being called. So-and-so is hooking up with so-and-so. Starting a relationship in the middle of a crisis was not the best idea, Eileen knew. She'd hooked up with Madd weeks after Sean died, when she was still playing Sean's death in a loop in her mind. Sean radioing for help as he ran out of air and the basement filled with water.

“You can't be dating the September 11 guy,” Eileen said. “You left a few days later.”

Maggie shrugged. “I guess we'll see when I get back.”

Eileen nodded. She was thinking, It's late. What do you want?

Maggie pressed her hands against the table. “Do you think Aidan will be all right?”

“Eventually,” Eileen said. “They found his buddy. The one he jumped on the truck with that morning.”

“That was his idea, you know.”

“He didn't tell me that.”

“I guessed,” Maggie said. “He's still beating himself up over Rose too.”

“He needs time.”

“He's drinking too much.”

“A lot of guys are, Maggie. I don't know what to tell you. You must know as well as I do that you're not getting his ass to a therapist.”

“I know,” Maggie said. “Mom suggested it. He almost took her head off.”

“Let him do his job. Later, when we've gotten back everybody we can get, you can try and talk him down, if you're still here.”

“If,” Maggie said. She nodded.

“Are we done?” Eileen rubbed her forehead. The stitches were long gone, but the spot ached when she was tired.

“No,” Maggie said. “I have to ask you something. I didn't actually come here to talk about Aidan. I've been meaning to, yes, but that's not why I climbed a ladder in the dark.”

Eileen waited.

“You've never found your birth mother?” Maggie asked. “I remember what you said about adoptions from Ireland being dodgy. That's how you put it. But there are reunion stories too. I've read them online.”

Eileen shook her head. “It's been a long time since I've tried. The place where I was born won't give it up. The records are sealed. One nun told me she's never come looking for me, and maybe that's a lie but I have no idea. I will be happy to go into more detail, Maggie, but not now. There are nine kids from this firehouse alone who lost their dads.”

“A lot of them have been to my mother's house. I've met them. I
was
them,” Maggie said defensively. “One more question?”

Eileen sighed and nodded.

“If your birth mother suddenly contacted you when you were a kid, what do you think your reaction would have been?”

Eileen wanted to put her head down on the table. She took a deep breath instead.

“Adoptees fantasize about meeting their birth parents. I did. They're famous, they're royalty. They left us with our adoptive parents only for safekeeping until they could make it back. She's somebody you know already. She had a very, very good reason for giving you away, a better reason than being a kid herself. Something you can't even imagine.” Eileen paused. “But if she had called up out of the blue, I probably would have been pretty confused. I would have been scared of being taken back to Ireland, away from my brother and my mother.”

“You and Gran don't exactly get along.”

Eileen controlled her temper with great effort. In the months after the baby was born and gone, and Maggie was walking around with shadowed eyes and looking past anybody who spoke to her, like somebody who was actually caring for an infant, Eileen had wanted nothing more than to yell in her drawn face, “What the hell did you think was going to happen?”

“That doesn't mean I wanted to trade her for a stranger with red hair.”

Eileen paused again, trying for a calm, neutral voice.

“I'm guessing where this is going, and let me just say, Maggie, I don't think the parents are going to say, Sure, because of September 11, it's fine to barge into our lives.”

Maggie reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a folded newspaper clipping.

“This is from the
Irish Eagle,
an article called ‘Those We Lost in the Irish-American Community.'”

“Noelle?” Eileen unfolded it.

Her eyes immediately went to the color picture in the center of the page of a very pretty woman with wavy brown hair. She was leaning against a fence, a green landscape behind her, unmistakably Ireland.

“I give up. Who is she?” Eileen asked.

“Her mother,” Maggie said. “She worked in a law firm in the South Tower. They haven't found her, but they had the funeral last week.”

Eileen was about to ask if Maggie was sure, but she recalled that she and Danny had met the adoptive parents.

“God, no,” Eileen said. But three thousand people were dead. Why not the baby's adoptive mother?

“What's her name?”

“Me and Danny called her Grace.”

“This child's parents didn't name her after Danny's dead mother, Maggie.”

Maggie looked at her strangely, as though she'd made an inappropriate joke.

“Her name is Kaitlyn Rourke-McKenna. A friend is quoted as saying the family had recently gotten back from a vacation to Ireland.”

Eileen repeated the name to herself. Sean's granddaughter. She could not grasp it. When she thought of Sean, she preferred to think of the boy who still had years and years to live.

“My daughter was there, in the same country, and I didn't even know it.”

“Why would you? You haven't had any contact—”

Maggie shook her head once. “I feel like I should have known she was nearby.”

Eileen had nothing to say to that. “Does Danny know?”

“No. He's got seven fatherless nephews to take care of. I thought I would talk to you first and then—”

“You want me to give you permission to . . . what? Call her up?”

Maggie met her eyes. “Yes, Aunt Eileen. Yes.
That
is why I'm climbing ladders in the dark.”

She was quite serious. Eileen's first thought was to remind Maggie that she had rejected her adoptee expertise nine years ago and then to say that it was too damn late.

“What if, after your father died, some man rang you up and said, ‘It's sad that Sean O'Reilly got killed, but it's okay now because I'm stepping up'?”

“Isn't that what the firemen did?”

Eileen shook her head. “It's not the same thing, and you know it.
Don't.
”

Maggie said, “When I was pregnant with her, you told me she'd be looking for me everywhere.”

“What if she doesn't know she's adopted?”

Maggie looked so stricken, it was clear this never entered her head.

“She's an only child.”

“So is my kid. So are a lot of people,” Eileen said. “Her father just lost his wife. I sure as hell don't think he's going to let you contact his daughter. You must realize that.”

“What if he's glad that there's somebody with a connection to her who knows what she's going through?”

“Maybe he would be,” Eileen admitted. “The mother died with co-workers?”

“There were sixteen others from her firm.”

“She probably had friends in the group, and some probably had kids. I think it's way more likely that her father would be afraid of losing his daughter, too, and he'd never let you near her.”

“I'm not talking about trying for custody!” Maggie said. “I'm talking about letting her know that I've been where she is.”

“She's traumatized as hell. Then she meets you and finds out that her two uncles and a cousin also died on 9/11? How does a kid process that?”

“They said they were going to adopt again,” Maggie said bitterly. “That was a lie. She's all alone.”

“Maybe they tried and it didn't work out,” Eileen said.

“I don't think so,” Maggie said. “She told me she was quitting the big job to open her own law firm, and she obviously never did.”

Eileen shrugged. “She chose her career over more kids. I've heard a million times that I'm a bad mother, if not in those exact words, because I have a dangerous job. You know how many times the guys hear it? Zero. I waited to have a baby until it was too late to try for another, and my husband left me for it. There you go.”

Maggie reached across the table and took the clipping back. She smoothed a hand over the picture. “I just wish she weren't alone.”

“She's got her father.”

“She needs a mother too.”

“Her mother got killed,” Eileen said.

Maggie crossed her arms over her chest. “You were the one who told me to keep her.”

“I said then you should keep your baby,” Eileen said. “I'm saying now, you don't barge into the life of a nine-year-old. It's too late.”

“I'm her mother too.”

“Listen to me.” Eileen leaned forward. “You are not her mother. You're an idea in her head, if she even knows you exist at all. She is not ready for you to be real.”

“But I am real.”

“I'm sorry you have to live with this kind of regret, but you don't get to give away your kid and then, when it suits
you,
walk back in.”

Maggie flinched, then rested her arms on the table and laid her head down.

Eileen stood and got a box of tissues from the counter. The only thing to do was wait it out. Nobody stuck his head in the door to see what was going on. Things were that fucked up these days. A woman sobbing in the kitchen late at night was not unusual.

Maggie wasn't being quiet about it either.

After several minutes, she raised her head and wiped her eyes. She got up to throw the tissue away. Eileen thought Maggie was going to leave, but she sat back down.

“I told Danny it was my mother's fault, because she never said I could bring her home.”

“Yeah? You don't get to blame your mother or Delia or me or anybody else for your decision.”

“I don't anymore,” Maggie said. “I gave my daughter away to pick up my life where it left off.”

“And then didn't,” Eileen said.

“I wasn't ready to be a mother at nineteen,” Maggie said. “But I
was
a mother at nineteen. That's what I didn't understand until after I handed her off. You were right.”

“Fine. Nine years ago I was right,” Eileen said. “You gave her away for
your
reasons, but you need to stay away from her for
her
reasons. Her mother is dead. That is more than enough to deal with for now.”

Maggie smoothed the newspaper again. “How long do I wait?”

“The technical answer is, you wait until she's eighteen. But the real answer is, you wait for her.”

The funeral service at Holy Rosary was for a firefighter who hadn't been found. Since neither Eileen nor Aidan had known him personally, it wouldn't be right for them to take up a seat in the church. They stood in formation as the coffin was brought in, and when the doors closed and the Mass began, they went to Delia's.

They found Delia and Maggie in the kitchen. Maggie was filling the coffeemaker with water. She greeted them, her eyes lingering on Aidan. Eileen willed her not to ask him how he was doing. Something had sunk in of their conversation in the firehouse, because Maggie turned away and starting scooping coffee.

“Hey, how's Nathaniel?” Eileen asked. “I haven't seen him in weeks.”

“Not so well,” Delia said.

“Is he sick?” Aidan asked.

Delia shook her head as she explained that all of the stories on the news of the posters of the missing had hit him hard. The descriptions of what clothes they wore, the jewelry and tattoos. He looked at them and pitied the hope.

Him, as he said, of all people.

“He told me he's planning to sit shiva for his brother,” Delia said. “Next week or the week after.”

Eileen went still. The myth of Nathaniel's brother was impossible to separate from Nathaniel himself. All of them, she and Sean, and Sean's kids and her own daughter, had grown up on it. The lost boy.

Maggie started the coffeemaker and turned around, leaning against the counter.

“He gave me a book when I left for Ireland,” Maggie said. “
Schindler's Ark
by Thomas Keneally.”

Tucked between the pages, Maggie explained, was a copy of an old photograph of two dark-haired boys, one little, one much taller. On the back, in his careful penmanship, Nathaniel had written,
Mikolaj Kwiatkowski,
a sentence in Polish and beneath it, his phone number.

There was a separate note to her on a slip of paper.

Dear Maggie,

Please look.

Your friend,
Nathaniel

“And the thing is, I did. I
do,
” Maggie said. “He would be an old man now, but I look for the little boy.” Abruptly, she left the room.

Eileen wanted to be anywhere else. Back outside the church, at the funeral. At the Pit.

She thought it might have been the most she had ever heard Maggie say at once.

“Yeah,” Aidan said. “When you don't know where someone is, you look for them.”

“You leave her alone, Aidan. Enough.” Delia spoke quietly. “
Enough.
”

Did Delia know? Eileen thought Maggie might very well have told her.

“With Nathaniel, his brother—would we go?” Aidan asked without meeting Delia's eyes.

“No,” Delia said. “Just me.”

He nodded, relieved.