What the Wind Knows(103)

“Okay, Tommy. I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you.” He sighed heavily, his pain retreating, his mind travelling somewhere else. Somewhere far away. I could see it in his eyes, in the way his voice fell into a storyteller’s rhythm as he shared an account he’d probably relived a thousand times in his head.

“That last night . . . at the GPO, we were all trying to be nonchalant. Trying to act like we didn’t care that the roof was about to cave in on us. Every entrance was in flames but the one on Henry Street, and getting down Henry Street was like running a feckin’ gauntlet. Men were running with their weapons, shooting at sounds, and in the process, shooting each other in the back. I was the last to go. Declan had already gone on ahead with O’Rahilly. They were going to try to clear Moore Street for the rest of us, but right away the word came back that they’d all been shot down. My little brother was always so feckin’ willing to be a hero.”

I felt the memory rise, thick and hot, like the smoke that had filled my lungs as I’d gone to Moore Street that long-ago Saturday, looking for my friends; 29 April 1916 was the worst day of my life. Before today. Today was worse.

“Connolly told me to make sure everyone was out of the GPO before I evacuated,” Liam continued, the morphine slowing his cadence. “That was my job. I had to watch as men ran for their lives, one after another, dodging bullets and tripping over bodies. That’s when I heard her. She was suddenly there, in the GPO, walking through the smoke. She scared me, Thomas. I was half blind and so tired, I would have shot my own mother had she come up behind me.”

I waited for him to say her name yet recoiled when he did.

“It was Annie. I don’t know how she got back inside the post office. The place was an inferno.”

“What did you do?” The words were a rasp in my throat.

“I shot her. I didn’t mean to. I just reacted. I shot her several times. I knelt beside her, and her eyes were open. She was staring at me, and I said her name. But she was dead. Then I shot her again, Thomas. Just to make sure she was real.”

I couldn’t look at him. I was afraid I would do to him what he’d done to Declan’s Anne. To Eoin’s mother. To my friend. I remembered the madness of that night. The exhaustion. The strain. And I understood how it had happened. I would have understood then. I would have forgiven him then. But he’d lied to me for six years, and he’d tried to cover his sins by killing again.

“I took her shawl—she’d been holding it—it was too hot in the GPO to wear it. It didn’t have a single drop of blood on it.” He was obviously still awed by the fact. I grimaced, imagining the blood that must have pooled beneath her bullet-ridden body.

“And her ring?” It was all so clear to me now.

“I took it off her finger. I didn’t want anyone to know it was her. I knew if I left her in the GPO, her body would burn, and no one would ever have to know what I’d done.”

“Except for you. You knew.”

Liam nodded, but his face was blank, as though he’d suffered so long with the sharp edge of guilt it had carved him into an empty shell.

“Then I walked out. I walked to Henry Place, Anne’s shawl in my hands, her ring in my pocket. I felt the bullets whizzing past me. I wanted to die. But I didn’t. Kavanagh pulled me into a tenement on Moore Street, and I spent the rest of the night burrowing through the walls, from one tenement to the next, working my way towards Sackville Lane with some of the others. I left the shawl in a pile of rubble, and I kept the ring. I’ve carried it in my pocket ever since. I don’t know why.”

“Ever since?” I asked, disbelieving. How was that possible? Anne had been wearing the ring when I’d seen her last. My Anne. My Anne. My legs buckled, and for a moment I thought I would fall.

“Surely you noticed that Anne was wearing the same ring,” I moaned, covering my face with my hands.

“Those English bastards thought of everything, didn’t they? Feckin’ spies. But they didn’t count on me. I knew it wasn’t her all along. I told you, Doc. But you wouldn’t listen, remember?”

I stood abruptly, knocking over my stool in my haste and moving away from him so I wouldn’t strangle the righteous indignation from his face.

Anne told me her grandfather—Eoin—gave her the ring along with my diary and several pictures. They were the pieces of the life he had wanted her to reclaim. Oh, Eoin, my precious boy, my poor little boy. He would have to wait so long to see her again.

“Where’s her ring now?” I asked, overcome.

Liam pulled it from his pocket and held it towards me, seemingly relieved to be rid of it. I took it from him, reeling with the knowledge that someday I would give it to Eoin. Eoin would eventually give it to Anne, his granddaughter, and she would wear it back to Ireland.

But that chapter had already been read, and my part in the rippled progression of future and past had already been played. My Anne had crossed the lough and gone home again.

“Last July, when you were moving guns on the lough, why did you shoot Anne when you saw her? I don’t understand,” I asked, seeking the final piece of the puzzle.

“I didn’t think she was real,” Liam murmured. “I see her everywhere I go. I keep killing her, and she keeps coming back.”

Oh God. If only she would come back. If only she would.