Moonshell Beach: A Shelter Bay Novel (31 page)

And in that moment, as she held on tight, Phoebe truly knew that she and her baby would be all right.

Just as she and Ethan would.

John Joyce was standing beside their grandmother’s hospital bed, when the others entered. As upset as Mary was, one look at the pain on her brother’s face, and the anguish in his gentle brown eyes, had her anger dissolving like sea foam.

They exchanged a silent message in the way of siblings. His offering apology, hers telling him that none was needed, before she turned to her grandmother.

Fionna had always been the most vital woman Mary had ever known. Her passion for her Bernadette campaign had blazed like an eternal flame. And even as she was grateful that the quest had been fulfilled, a part of her wondered if only Fionna Joyce still had that mission left to fight for, if she might fight harder for her own life in order to achieve it.

“Gran.” She pasted an indulgent, slightly scolding smile on her face as she walked over to the bed. “What are you doing, scaring us all to death like this? If you were that eager to have me come for a visit, you’d have only needed ring me up.”

“Well, you’re here now, which is all that matters.
I’ve said my good-byes to Nora and the other children. I just was waiting for my famous movie-star granddaughter to arrive before I joined my dear Declan and your father and mother in heaven. And, of course, St. Bernadette.”

“As happy as I am about Bernadette becoming a saint, I suspect, after all the work you’ve done on her behalf, she’d be wanting you to have some time to enjoy yourself and your great-grandchildren.”

After Quinn adopted Nora’s son, Rory, they’d gone on to have twin girls. While Michael and Erin had three sons. Celia, who was finishing art school, had yet to have a serious boyfriend, from what Mary had been told. And John had been so busy, first with his medical studies, then establishing a practice, he’d not married, either. Mary suddenly realized, with a little stab to her heart, that if she was ever to have children, they’d never know this very special woman.

She picked up her grandmother’s hand from where it limply lay on the white sheet. She’d grown up seeing those hands in rapid-fire motion, wielding steel knitting needles like heroes in her father’s fanciful stories had wielded their magic swords. Now that same hand, which was an unhealthy blue hue, felt as dry and frail as a bird’s claw.

“Although it’s glad I am to be back home, the only place you’re going at the moment is to the farm. Where you belong.”

“Oh, Mary, darling.” Her grandmother sighed. Then began to cough, struggling dangerously for breath. John moved forward and helped her sit up and readjusted her oxygen tube. It was obvious that talking took a major effort.

“You don’t have to talk, Gran,” Mary said, feeling a familiar knee-jerk guilt at causing her grandmother additional discomfort as the elderly woman’s eyes fluttered closed.

“Aye, I do,” Fionna corrected with a bit of her familiar spirit. “And I will.” She glanced past Mary to J.T., who was standing just inside the door. “Come here, young man, so I don’t have to shout.”

He immediately joined Mary next to the bed. “You’d be the man my daughter-in-law sent to our Mary,” she said.

John shot a quick, questioning look at Mary, who felt color, the bane of the Irish, flood into her cheeks. “He’s just a friend from America, Gran.”

“Don’t be wasting the short time I have left with foolish arguments,” she said. “What’s your name?” she asked J.T.

“J. T. Douchett, ma’am.”

“Douchett?” A brow lifted. “Eleanor sent Mary a Frenchman?”

“Cajun, ma’am.”

“Ah, well.” She nodded at that. “And didn’t your Acadian ancestors suffer the same diaspora as we Irish? Which gives you both something in common.”

“I suppose that would be right,” J.T. said.

“Well, of course it is.” She coughed again. “You’ll take good care of our Mary,” she instructed him. “She might be rich and famous now, but money can’t keep you warm at night, and fame is often fleeting. She needs a man who’ll stick. In good times and bad.”

Even as Mary desperately wished her grandmother would find someone else in the family to focus on, Fionna seemed bound and determined to say
what was on her mind. So what else was new? In a way, as embarrassing as it was, Mary found her grandmother’s behavior reassuring. Perhaps everyone was exaggerating her condition. And even if they weren’t, wasn’t Sister Bernadette’s canonization proof that miracles did happen? Why couldn’t the saint pull off one now?

“Something tells me you’re that type of man,” she said. “Though, like Quinn”—she shot a look at her eldest granddaughter’s husband—“you look as if you’ll prove a challenge. Which will be good for the girl. No Joyce woman would ever want a man who’d let her run over him. We’re strong-willed females, J. T. Douchett. It’s best you know that going in.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “And I promise you that I’ll take good care of your granddaughter.”

“Aye, of course you will. Eleanor hasn’t made a mistake yet.”

Seeming satisfied, now that she’d settled that, Fionna lay back onto the pillows. As her eyes drifted closed yet again for the very last time, a single tear trailed down Mary’s cheek.

Even out in the west, the preburial Irish wake, which they’d held when Mary’s father had died, had mostly gone out of fashion. Quinn, whom the family had come to count on to take care of things, had made arrangements with Dudley’s Funeral Home. The father and son had come from Dublin some years ago, looking for the slower and friendlier pace of Castlelough life.

After the funeral mass and burial held the next day, the family went home to the Joyce farmhouse, which Quinn had expanded to allow for his writing office and more living space for Nora; their three children; Celia, when she was home from school; himself; and Fionna, who’d spent all but her last forty-eight hours in the house she’d been born in.

Urged by Nora to rest, Mary had gone upstairs to the room her sister had readied for her and J.T., and, still jet-lagged and emotionally spent, immediately fell like a stone into sleep.

It was evening when she awoke to find J.T. sitting in a chair by the window, watching her.

“How long have you been awake?” she asked.

“Long enough to decide that you’re the most beautiful woman God put on this green earth.” He stood up and crossed over to her. The mattress sighed as he sat down on it and brushed a tender hand over her hair.

“How are you doing?”

“As well as can be expected.” She felt the dreaded tears rising again behind her lids and momentarily squeezed her eyes shut as she dragged a trembling hand through her hair.

“I know she had a good and full life, and she accomplished her life’s goal, but even when I was in America, it was comforting to know that she’d always be here, with her knitting and her tea, and her sharp and clever tongue, whenever I’d come home.”

“She’ll still be with you,” J.T. said. “Just here.” He touched her temple. “And here.” Her breast over her partially broken heart.

Which was when, after doing her best to hold her pain in, Mary finally lost it. She pressed her cheek against his chest, clung to him, and let the flood of tears, more than the single one that had escaped at the hospital, flow.

He stroked her hair as she wept, murmuring tender words, encouraging her to let it all out.

And when she’d finally wept herself dry, he cupped her face between his large and gentle hands and kissed away the salty tears from her cheeks.

“Poor you.” She lifted his hand to her lips.

“Why poor me?”

“Because you no sooner escaped having to comfort grieving women than here you are again, stuck in that same situation.”

“Not the same at all,” he corrected. “Because being with you is no hardship.”

“And isn’t that a lovely thing to say?” She sat up and glanced over at the clock. “I’ve nearly slept the day away.”

“You needed it. Even without what you’ve gone through the past forty-eight hours, I didn’t let you get any sleep the night before we got the call from Nora.”

“That night was certainly no hardship,” she tossed his words back at him. “Where’s the family?”

“They’ve gone into town to arrange for Fionna’s stone.”

“Ah. Da bought his own before he died.” She sighed. “Although Nora was upset that he’d spent the money, I always thought the real reason she got angry at him was she didn’t want to think about him dying.”

“Perfectly understandable.”

“True. I wonder if he had a premonition.”

“Oh, perhaps your mother gave him advance warning.”

She couldn’t tell from his expression whether he was teasing or serious. But his words did bring back what her grandmother had told him.

“About Mam sending you to me,” she said.

“Yeah. I was thinking about that while you were sleeping.”

Terrific. Now he’d think they were all crazy. “And?”

“And I was trying to figure out how to thank her.”

Even if he didn’t mean totally mean it, it was the perfect thing to say.

“Are you up for a ride?” she asked. “Because there’s something I’d like to show you.”

“I’m willing to go anywhere you take me.”

Since she assured him she was rested, and the only experience he’d ever had driving on the left side of the road was a few days in London, he didn’t argue when she got behind the wheel. As they drove through the countryside, J.T. drank in the scenery—the stone fences, the fields, the meadows splashed with purple, white, and yellow wildflowers. Nearly every crossroads—and there seemed to be hundreds for such a small area—boasted a statue of the Virgin Mary in a small stone grotto, often adorned with seashells.

After parking the car on the side of the road, they began walking up a narrow trail, where they passed a cemetery, high Celtic crosses standing like sentinels over rounded stones covered with green moss. After continuing up the twisting mountain trail, they came upon a mound of earth blanketed with yellow poppies and decorated with more shells and stones.

“It’s a cairn,” Mary said. “Built about five thousand years ago. We have quite a few in this part of the country. They’re like a tomb, but since the ancients believed in an active afterlife, they were often buried with tools, weapons, and household goods.”

“Which saved them from having to go shopping to get stuff for their new life,” he said.

She smiled for the first time since she’d received the phone call. “Aye. The ancients didn’t have the benefits of Target or the Internet.”

J.T. had grown up hearing stories about the Grand Dérangement, the forced expulsion of the Acadians
from Nova Scotia by the British in 1755, which had resulted in his family settling in Louisiana. You couldn’t live in Shelter Bay without hearing the story of that town’s founding. Yet both events were like yesterday when compared with this land that had, in many ways, remained unchanged for millennia.

They left the trail, and were climbing over ancient, rounded mountains that were on the way to crumbling back to dust. Next they came to a towering hedge covered with shocking pink flowers. The thick greenery extended in both directions as far as the eye could see.

“There’s a secret passageway that leads to the lough,” she told him.

J.T. followed her through the bright, fragrant passageway, stopping in his tracks to look down into a valley that appeared to belong in an illustrated book of fairy tales.

A lake, surrounded by feather-crowned reeds, was a bold splash of brilliant sapphire on a mottled green carpet. Two swans—one white, the other black—that looked as if they’d just flown in from Sleeping Beauty’s castle glided serenely on the water. On the far bank of the lake a stone castle, slowly crumbling, was painted gold and crimson by the setting sun.

“It’s stunning. And very peaceful.”

“It is now,” she agreed. “We Irish have a saying:
ciunas gan uagineas
. It means ‘quietness without loneliness,’ which I’ve always thought suits the scene.”

J.T. agreed.

“This is also the lake where the Lady is supposed to live.”

The one Quinn Gallagher had written about. The movie she’d first appeared in. “I recognize it from
the film.” He hadn’t seen it at first, because, he supposed, he hadn’t really expected anything so stunning to exist in real life.

“But I didn’t bring you here to tell you the story, which you mostly know from having watched the film, although Quinn does admit to taking liberties.”

“As it seems most storytellers do.”

“True. Myself included…This place wasn’t always so peaceful,” she said. “The truth is that this land my family has lived on for centuries was the scene of many battles.”

Perhaps because he’d spent so many years in war zones himself, J.T. could picture them. And hear them. The clash of swords, the shouting, the confusion, the battle horses.

And suddenly, inexplicably, this place, which he’d never before seen, became very familiar.

“This is where we are together when I dream of you,” she said. “There’s a battle raging behind you and you come striding out of the smoke, with your armor and your sword, and take me.” She glanced down at the flower-strewn meadow. “Right here.”

Hell. It was probably his own imagination, but…

He shook his head. “It’s impossible.”

“Aye, it is.”

But he knew she believed it. And the crazy thing was, thinking back on those spirits at Little Bighorn, J.T. did, too.

He took her in his arms. Not to arouse, nor soothe, but to be close. “I want to give you what you deserve,” he said against her hair. “What you want.” Because this might be one of the most important conversations he’d ever had in his life, he had to be honest with her. “But I can’t.”

When she would have pulled away, he tightened his arms around her. “Not now,” he said.

She looked up at him, hope warring with pain in those remarkable eyes that were exactly the hue of the lake.

“When?”

And wasn’t that the question he’d been asking himself for the past twenty-four hours?

“Give me two weeks. Then I promise, we’ll meet back here.”

Although there was a sheen of tears in her eyes, the lips he could taste in his sleep turned up, ever so slightly, at that.