Despite asking, I hadn’t in a million years really thought she’d have known what she was getting into. That added a whole new level of guilt to the trip I was busy burying. Voice rising, I demanded, “Then what the hell’d you do it for!” even though the answer was terribly, terribly obvious.
Sheila said, “You,” and my world fell down.
The Dead Zone dissolved, which it had never done before. Soft green landscape melted like sugar in rain to reveal the black nothingness I was more familiar with. Then that softened, too, gray bleeding down to bubble against earth that slowly turned green with grass. Rigidly cut grass, millimeter-exact in height, but at least it was no longer so short the earth could be seen between individual blades. Elsewhere the Dead Zone’s matter began to burble, the sound of a small waterfall falling into a pool. There were paving stones leading hither and yon through the greening garden, and benches that had softened from concrete to slatted wood. I had a momentary vision of a day when they might just be moss-covered hillocks, cool and prickly to snuggle into, but the idea faded before the reality of my inner sanctuary.
I hadn’t been here in a while, truth be told. The tall ivy-covered walls were more fragile than they had been, time wearing away at them so they were lived-in and comfortable rather than imprisoning. A single bird twittered like mad, and I smiled. I couldn’t see him, but it was a robin. An American one, because it had twisted my brain inside-out the first time I saw an Irish robin and realized Mary Lennox’s key-finding companion had been a completely different kind of bird than I’d always thought. In my secret garden, the robins were like the North Carolina birds of my teen years.
“It’s not what I’d have expected of you,” Sheila said gently, and I closed my eyes. Her garden would have the sparrow-like robins, if it had birds at all. We were creations of completely different cultures, my mother and I.
“It’s a lot better than it was. The first time I came here it was almost dead. Not exactly the most spiritually competent kid on the block, me.”
“What happened?”
God. There was so much we hadn’t talked about. A whole lifetime, neither of us able to breach the chasm of my resentment in the few months we’d had. But I couldn’t just answer, oh no. That would be easy. Instead I said, “Don’t you know?”
She was silent a long time. So long I’d have thought she’d disappeared, except I had invited her here when I’d left the Dead Zone, and she wouldn’t leave without my permission. I wasn’t sure she couldn’t, but she wouldn’t, because this was the closest I’d ever come to opening up to my mother. This place was the center of my soul, with all the faults and flaws and strengths and wisdom exposed and on display. She’d have to be a real ass to walk out, and mostly that title belonged to me.
“Mother’s daughter was a little wild,” she whispered eventually. “Had herself a wee boy child.”
“And a girl.” I still hadn’t looked at her. I wasn’t sure I would, as long as we were in here. I already felt naked. Meeting her eyes seemed like it would be too much. “She died, she died right away. I wasn’t a healer yet. I’d stolen my own magic away and I couldn’t do anything to help. But that was after.” I made my voice harsh so I could keep talking. “The twins were the aftermath. That wasn’t what went wrong. My life is so screwed up, Mom. Do you reach through time? Because I’ve been doing it all my life. Right from when you were pregnant with me and we fought the Blade.”
Her silence this time was brief but full of the things I didn’t want her to say. I was about a hair’s breadth from crying on my mommy’s shoulder, and that was so far outside my comfort zone I couldn’t even begin to express it. I thought she knew it, too, because when she did speak, she said, “No, alanna. I suppose that would be from your father’s side of the family,” rather than offer any kind of sympathy or condolence.
That was okay, because it brought my brain to a full stop. Choked off Emo Jo and made me spin around on a heel to gape at her. “My father’s side of the family?”
Sheila MacNamarra got a sly little smile that made her look about nineteen. “Sure and you didn’t think I flew all the way to New York just for a pretty face, lovey, though oh my Lord, he was pretty. I could feel his pull from Ireland, Siobhán. The power, the passion for the earth, the…”
I could not have been more astonished if she’d pulled up her skirts and started doing an authentic Can-Can. She trailed off, then said, “You don’t know any of this, do you, my girl?”
“Dad…has magic?”
“A shaman’s magic, to be sure. Not like my own, oh no. Magery is spells and incantations, Siobhán. I could do most anything with it, but with preparation and study. Your father, though.” Mother’s eyes were shining. I’d thought she and Dad hardly knew each other, but it suddenly struck me that didn’t mean they hadn’t been in love. That she wasn’t still in love with him, a year after she’d been buried. No wonder I didn’t have any siblings. “Your father could just will it to be, and it was. He said it could be such a dangerous magic, such an easy path to the dark, but he shone like nothing I’d ever seen. Everywhere he went, the very earth responded to him like a lover, eager for his touch.”
Our endless road trips abruptly made more sense. I’d thought Dad just hated being in one place, since the only time he’d settled down for any length of time, an Irish woman had come back from across the ocean and handed him a baby before disappearing forever. I’d just found out a few days earlier that the only other time he’d come close to settling down, his mother had been killed in a horrific car wreck that had sent him away from Qualla Boundary for good.
But maybe we’d been on the road constantly because he was responding to the needs of a weary earth. My vivid memory of visiting Montana and the Battle of Little Bighorn site abruptly seemed a lot like the afternoon’s antics on Croagh Patrick. Dad had been disgusted with the white men who’d fought there, which even my eight-year-old self had understood. There were still bullets buried in the tops of the small, sharply rolling hills: it was not a site for modern warfare to take place. But Dad’s disgust could have gone much deeper than that…and so could have the time we’d spent there, crawling up and down hills, our hands in the dirt. I’d just been playing, but if Dad had power, too, then that wasn’t a place he’d be playing at.
An awful, awful lot of the places we’d visited came clear when seen in that light. We’d followed the Trail of Tears. Visited nuclear test sites in Nevada, and I remembered Dad talking with Shoshone tribal elders before we went out into the desert. The Hopewell mound cities in Ohio. Mount Rushmore, which I recalled had almost literally made Dad’s head steam. I’d been about twelve then, and wondered now if I’d been Seeing some of his anger at the desecration of ancient Native holy places.
I sat, face hidden in my hands. After a moment I spread my fingers to stare between them at Sheila, who looked discomfited. “You’d no idea, had you.”
“Not a clue. Not a single…” I closed my fingers again and sat there a long damned time. Finally, and more to myself than Sheila, I said, “I’d like a do-over. I mean, in the end I’m doing okay with my life, I think. I got the guy, I got the best friend, I got the magic. I’m doing okay. But I want a do-over. I want to go back through my life and knock the giant-ass chip off my shoulder. I want to hear what Dad might’ve been trying to say to me. I want to have the nerve to ask about my mother. I want…” It didn’t really matter what I wanted. I pushed my tongue around inside my lower lip, contorting my face before finishing, “I want to know what my life would’ve been like if I hadn’t been such a jackass through most of it. It’s too damned late to be sorry, but I am anyway, Mom. You probably deserved a much better kid than me. I’m sure Dad did. So I’m sorry.”