Ashes of Fiery Weather (54 page)

The firefighter on the cover was standing in front of a fire truck, grinning at the camera. He appeared to be around thirty or so, and his eyes were very blue.

She climbed on the bed and sat next to Owney, her shoulder touching his. She opened the book to page 42.

“See, this is the cover image? And here he is, dead.” She brushed her hand over the image on page 43, which was a black-and-white shot of a covered body on a stretcher being carried by a contingent of grim firemen. Only the big fireman's boots were showing.

“On 9/11?” Owney leaned over to get a better look.

“No, no. Sean O'Reilly was killed in 1983,” she said.

“1983? Okay.”

“I think he's my grandfather.”

Owney was hard to surprise. But his eyebrows went fully up and he pulled back from her as though she'd threatened to bite him.

Katie flipped to another page. Page 48, a firefighter on 9/11. She tapped the picture.

Owney leaned forward. “I've seen that one.”

“This is the one that came out years after 9/11. Aidan O'Reilly is Sean O'Reilly's son.”

“Right, fine,” Owney said. “But why do you think he's your father?”

“I don't,” Katie said. “I think he's my uncle.”

Owney waited as Katie turned back several pages, stopping at a picture of Sean O'Reilly's funeral. The coffin was being carried down the steps of a church. Behind it was Sean's wife, and two boys stood on either side of her. Aidan, the 9/11 fireman at eight years old, and Brendan, who was four.

“You can't tell, but the wife, Norah—that's her name, Norah—she was pregnant. She had a baby girl in December.”

“A baby born in 1983 would not be anywhere near old enough to be your birth mother.”

“I'm bad at math but not that bad,” Katie said. She placed a finger on the woman with white hair behind the widow. “This is Sean's mother.” She moved her finger to the girl standing in front of her grandmother, whose face was turned away from the camera.

“This is Maggie O'Reilly. She was nine years old.”

“So, old enough,” Owney said.

Katie nodded and tapped the picture.

“Hey, you didn't just open this book and pick some random Irish family to join, did you?”

He tried to say it lightly, but she read the concern in his expression.

Katie closed the book and moved back to sit cross-legged in the center of the bed so she could see Owney's face as she told him how she'd gone into BookMarks and passed the table of 9/11 books that were out for the anniversary.
Brooklyn Firefighters
was not one she would ever touch, but a glimpse of the fireman on the cover made her stop and stare. He looked familiar.

“I opened the book and read that his name is Sean O'Reilly, his son is that fireman from a lost roll of film, and the photographer was killed on 9/11, and it's all very, very sad.”

Owney shook his head. “Kate—not following.”

“That would have been it. I would have put the book down and walked away, question answered, except, once, I got this phone call.”

Katie let the silence build as she tried to think of a first sentence.

“The night of September 11, friends of my parents' made up a flier. They put a picture of my mother on it and our phone number.”

Over the next few weeks, strangers called their apartment. Men and women both cried as they said they were sorry. Some people were crazy or drunk, saying things like she'd run away to Florida, or if she'd been home with her kid, she wouldn't be dead.

Katie was told not to answer the phone, but her father was afraid to change the number even after it was clear her mother was not coming home. There was always the chance they'd hear from somebody who could tell them where she'd been at any point in the morning.

Her father started falling asleep on the couch by nine o'clock every night. Katie didn't think about it then, but she wondered now if he'd been taking something. She'd be wide awake until at least midnight, wandering the rooms of their apartment or sitting outside on the terrace. That winter was strangely warm, as though it were going to stay September forever.

“Yeah, I remember,” Owney said. “It didn't get cold until Christmas Eve.”

By early December, her father had secured the rental house in Southampton. Katie had already packed her books in boxes, shaking each one before she put it in. She could not help but wonder if her mother really had run away from home. Perhaps she'd hidden a note.

One night when her father was asleep, the phone rang. Katie answered. A woman asked for Charlie McKenna.

Carrying the phone out onto the terrace, Katie said he was busy and offered to take a message. The woman said she was sorry about Laurel.

“The strangers and the crazy people almost all called her Laura. But this woman said
Laurel.
I thought she must be a law school or college friend,” Katie said. “I didn't ask for her name. I guess it didn't seem important. We talked for a few minutes.”

Telling the story out loud was like describing a dream.

“The woman said she'd read in the paper that we'd gotten back from Ireland not long before 9/11. She asked if we were there over my birthday.

“I told her yes. We always went on vacation for my birthday. Ireland was supposed to be saved for when I turned ten, but that spring, my mother all of a sudden decided we shouldn't wait. So we went a year early. I said that I wished we'd never left. She told me her mother was from Ireland and that her dad died when she was nine. After his death, she'd wanted to move to Galway, but her mother said no.”

Her father, she said, was a fireman who was killed in a hardware store fire in Brooklyn. He was the only one who died that day. She told Katie that she'd miss her mother forever, but after a while she'd be able to remember her without thinking of how it happened.

“Everybody else kept giving me that ‘time will heal' bullshit. But she explained
how
time might heal. Your memory of the death gets separated from all your other memories.”

“Do you even know if your parents met your birth mother?” Owney asked.

“I have no idea. Before 9/11, I was too young to be told anything. After that, I never asked. I didn't want to hurt my dad's feelings,” Katie said. She had not wanted him to think she was looking to defect to another family, should she find them.

“If they all knew each other's names, it probably was her,” Owney said. “Your birth mother could have seen it in the papers. But why would you think she's this fireman's daughter?”

Katie picked up the book again and opened it to the picture of Sean O'Reilly's funeral. She passed it to Owney so he could read the paragraph on the page.

She watched his expression change as he read the words.

Firefighter Sean O'Reilly, the only firefighter killed in a fire at Lenny's hardware store on Flatbush Avenue. His wife, Norah O'Reilly, was a native of Ireland.

“Okay, that's why,” Owney said.

“She never said ‘Lenny's.' An old friend of my mother's might know my birthday, and it's a safe bet that Sean O'Reilly wasn't the only fireman married to an Irishwoman.”

Owney slowly closed the book and tossed it across the bed.

“Do you look like this Maggie O'Reilly?”

“I can't find her, Own. I maybe look a little like Rose, the younger sister. Our coloring's the same, but she's really pretty.” Katie ran a finger from her forehead to her chin, which she tapped once. “When I Google ‘Maggie O'Reilly' or ‘Margaret O'Reilly,' a lot of stuff comes up but nothing that fits. The name is too common.”

“If it was your birth mother who called, did she break the law?”

“No,” Katie said, affronted. Then, less certainly, “I don't know. I don't care. It was right after 9/11. Nobody was in their right mind. Anyway, it was at night. She asked for my dad, not me.”

Owney nodded, a concession. Then he asked quietly, “How come you never told me any of this?”

“It all happened after we—when we weren't talking.”

Six months had passed after their breakup before Owney texted her.
KT?

“Then, when we were talking again, I'd known too long to say it out loud,” she said.

“It was a secret by then,” he said.

Something in his tone, or perhaps just that he had understood so readily, made Katie wonder what things he had never told her.

“Yes,” Katie said. “And I didn't want you bugging me to find out for sure.”

“Like I'm doing now,” he said unapologetically. “If you're waiting for everything with your mother—and I mean Laurel—to be settled, you know they might never stop finding her.”

Katie returned the book to the shelf and knelt beside the bed. She pressed her face into the mattress before tipping her head back to look up at him. She envied Owney's ability to simply leave his father wherever he was, and his belief that it was not abandonment but the only way forward.

“Sometimes I think I want to marry you because you have such a funny name.”

Owney laughed and opened his arms to her. Katie got up, crawled across the bed and laid her head on his chest. His arms came up around her.

Late Sunday night, Katie was online, reading admissions requirements for the schools with Irish studies programs that interested her. The thought of writing an admissions essay again was depressing. She'd done a coward's job the first time, ignoring her guidance counselor's hesitant suggestion that she write about “her loss.”

She scorned the idea, not because she believed it wouldn't work, but because she thought it probably would. She didn't want to be admitted to college on sympathy.

Her phone buzzed and she jumped and scooped it up. Owney.

I'm here.

Owney had called this afternoon and asked if she wanted to go to Brooklyn with him. He had done some Internet searching himself. The sister of the photographer of
Brooklyn Firefighters
had owned a bar in Brooklyn, in Cross Hill. It was still there and still called Lehane's.

The photographer had spent decades taking pictures of the neighborhood firefighters. The fire company where Sean O'Reilly worked was near the bar.

Katie refused. She wasn't twenty-one.

Owney didn't point out that her age had never stopped her before. He asked if she minded if he went by himself, adding that it might even be better. Nobody could tell the family that a young woman had been asking questions about them. Katie told him he could do whatever he wanted.

When Katie opened the front door, Owney already had his sneakers off.

Again they crept through the quiet house. Katie shut her bedroom door, and when she turned around, Owney was sitting on her bed, leaning forward.

“The bartender at Lehane's knows the family.”

Katie sat down at her desk.

“He's new to the neighborhood, but he says they're ‘old stock.' That's how he put it. They've been there forever.”

“They're still there?”

“Sean O'Reilly's widow and his mother are, and the younger sister.”

“Rose.” Katie gnawed on her thumbnail. “Did he know Maggie?”

“No,” Owney said. “But he told me I should come in around six o'clock when the firemen get off work, or on a Saturday when there's a Mets game on. But . . .”

“What is it?” Katie asked, certain he was about to repeat some rumor about Maggie O'Reilly.

Cystic fibrosis, hemochromatosis, celiac disease, Tay-Sachs, schizophrenia.

What Katie found when she Googled “diseases that run in Irish families.”

Schizophrenia. Average age of onset, eighteen to twenty-five.

Someone mentally ill might not appear in an Internet search, because she had no career. She might not be mentioned on siblings' Facebook pages, or talked about at all.

“Sean O'Reilly's wife lost a niece on 9/11. If this
is
your birth family, she'd have been Maggie O'Reilly's first cousin.”

Katie tried to absorb that. It had never occurred to her that her 9/11 losses might extend beyond her mother.

“Did you get this cousin's name?” she asked.

“The guy said he remembers that she was Noelle, because she worked for some theater that had a fundraiser in her memory at the bar around Christmas. He couldn't remember her last name.”

“Did you do any searching?”

“I figured that was up to you.”

Katie swiveled her chair to face her laptop.
Noelle, O'Reilly, 9/11, September 11.

She read the visible lines of the first link.

Katie opened the link and it brought up a September 13, 2001, edition of a newspaper called the
Ivehusheen Herald,
which filled the whole screen.

. . . is missing and feared dead in the terror attacks on the World Trade Center complex in Manhattan. Twenty-nine-year-old Noelle is the only daughter of Peter and Aoife Byrne. She did not work in either of the twin towers, but had an early-morning meeting in the South building. Cathal Mulryan, identified as Ms. Byrne's uncle, said that the family fears the worst.

A spokesman for the Kilmaren College has confirmed that graduate student and teaching assistant Magdalena O'Reilly (pictured left), from Brooklyn, New York, is a cousin of Ms. Byrne's. Ms. O'Reilly has been studying in Ireland and is a candidate for a master's degree in Irish literature. She could not be reached for comment and is said to be at her grandparents' home waiting for news.

Pictured left. Katie shifted her gaze. Only the edge of the photo was showing. Sliding the screen was like drawing back a curtain.

The photo had been taken in an office. She was seated at a desk and there were bookshelves behind her. Magdalena O'Reilly. Long brown hair and blue eyes in an intelligent face. Only the hint of a smile. A pair of glasses in her hand.