What the Wind Knows

by Amy Harmon

“Oh yes. Our stories belong together, Annie lass. Your story is a special one. It might take your whole life to tell it. Both of our lives.”

I was only six years old when I lost my parents. I was a little girl with a tied tongue and an overly active imagination, and Eoin stepped in, rescued me, and raised me.

When I struggled to get the words out, my grandfather would hand me a pen and paper. “If you can’t say them, write them. They last longer that way. Write

It all began—if there is a beginning—when my grandfather was dying.

“That is Dr. Thomas Smith, my father’s best friend. I loved him almost as much as I love you. He was like a father to me.”

“Don’t cry, Annie,” Eoin said, his voice so weak that I did my best to quell the tears, if only to save him from distress. “There is no end to us. When I die, take my ashes back to Ireland and set me loose in the middle of Lough Gill.”

“Yes. I told you. You told me. And you will tell me again. Only the wind knows which truly comes first.”

I was six years old when Eoin became my anchor and my caretaker.

“Don’t forget to read the book. He loved you. He loved you so much. He’s been waiting, Annie.”

The summer I turned sixteen, we spent July crossing the entire United States, starting in Brooklyn and ending in Los Angeles. That

Someday, I told him, I wanted to write a novel set in Ireland during the Rising of 1916.

“Asthma?” I asked absentmindedly. “Yes,” he said, surprised. “How did you know? It isn’t a well-known term. My doctors called it bronchospasms, but I came across an article in a medical journal published in 1892 that introduced the term. It comes from the Greek word aazein, which means to pant, or breathe with an open mouth.”

When one dreams terrible dreams, part of the unconscious mind reassures that wakefulness will summon reality and banish the nightmare. But it was not a terrible dream. It had become a sweet sanctuary.

and I was snagged between a future that was my past, and a past that might be my future.

“If you’re crazy, then so am I. I’ll be Tom the Lunatic, and you can be Crazy Jane,” he said. I smiled at his Yeats references even as my pulse pounded, and my fingers curled in his shirt.

My mouth forgot how to kiss, my heart forgot when to beat, my lungs forgot why they needed breath.

I’ve often wondered whether the Irish would be who we are if the English would have simply been more humane.

Our language was forbidden, and yet we speak it. Our religion was stamped out at every turn, yet we still practise it. When the rest of the world experienced a reformation of sorts, abandoning Catholicism for a new school of thought and science, we dug in our heels. Why? Because that would mean the English won. We are Catholic because they told us we couldn’t be.

What you tell him he can’t have, he’ll set his heart on. The only rebellion we have is our identity.

I bellowed her name and lunged again, insistent, and my fingers passed through a whisper of cloth. I closed my fist around the folds, drawing them to me like salvation, end over end, until my hands were filled with Anne’s dress.

“You really aren’t Anne Finnegan, are you?” “No, Thomas.” Anne shook her head, her gaze locked on mine. “No. I’m not. Anne Finnegan Gallagher was my great-grandmother, and I’m a long, long way from home.”

I’d often wondered, absorbed in piles of research, if the magic of history would be lost if we could go back and live it. Did we varnish the past and make heroes of average men and imagine beauty and valor where there was only dirge and desperation?

Or like the old man looking back on his youth, remembering only the things he’d seen, did the angle of our gaze sometimes cause us to miss the bigger picture?

I had the advantage of hindsight, where history had already unfolded and pointed the finger of blame.

Eoin is planning to go to medical school in the States; he’s got Brooklyn in his head. Brooklyn and baseball and Coney Island. When he goes, I’ll go too. I’ve fallen out of love with the view from my window. If I’m to be alone for the rest of my life, I’d just as soon see the world as sit here watching the lough, waiting for Anne to come home.

“Now, I want to know everything. I want to know what happened to you. Then and now. And don’t leave out the kissing scenes,” she barked. I refilled my cup, took a huge bite of a frosted pink pastry, and I told her everything.

“How is it that I’ve lost eleven years, and you haven’t aged at all?”

But this kiss was flavored with long absence and new hope, and with every sigh and second that passed, I began to believe in an afterlife.

It was the legend of Niamh and Oisín all over again.

The shower is delightful for a variety of reasons. But apparently there is a limit to the hot-water supply.

Then she handed me a box teeming with letters Eoin had insisted she keep. Hundreds of them. Anne says she never understood why he hadn’t sent them. They are dated and bundled in decades. There are more from the early years, but at least two for every year of his long life, and all of them are addressed to me. He promised he would write. And he did.