Read Online When Light Breaks by Patti Callahan Henry - Free Book Online Page A

is more beautiful than any man I have seen before or since, even in the ninety-six years I have been on this earth.” She tilted her head against the pillow. “And you will help me find him. You will.”
    “What?”
    “You will help me find him.”
    “How can I possibly help you find him?” Maybe Maeve thought it was 1922 again, or maybe she believed I was someone else. “I don’t even know his last name, Maeve.”
    “You can’t help me until I get to the end of the story . . . until I tell you everything.”
    I grasped her hand. “What then? What happened to him?”
    She pressed her lips together, then spoke. “All anyone ever wants to do is get to the end of the story, find out what happened, what happened, as if that answers any questions at all. It is not about how it ends; it is about the journey. The full story. You have to know the full story to care about or know the ending.”
    I nodded. “Okay, then what happened next?”
    Maeve smiled, then looked over my shoulder as if she could see him. “He has dark curls.” Maeve lifted her fingers as if she felt his hair. “Soft like a baby lamb in the back fields. He has freckles over his cheeks and a row across his nose. His skin darkens in the few months of summer when he goes out on his hooker to fish, but it is translucent the remainder of the year. You would not know it darkened as it does, but when he found me again—when the sails returned him over the sea, when the edges drew nearer . . . he was darker. . . .” Maeve’s voice stuttered now, like the end of a scratched CD.
    “The edges?” I whispered.
    “Edges of the ocean. The water is what ties us together, yes? You at one edge, me at the other, but the same ocean, the same water. He was on a different edge and I couldn’t get to him. . . .”
    I squinted. “And?” I wanted to get lost in the story, in the unhinged feeling of floating into another life.
    Then she continued. “But at that moment he stands against the wall. His brothers slouch in chairs around the room. Their expressions are blank, their eyes are dead as the ashes in the fireplace, but not Richard’s. He looks at me and I see laughter he will not allow escape—laughter at the way I’d burst into the room wearing my nightclothes, my hair wild from the cold and wind.
    “I run over to him and throw my arms around him—this boy whom I have known since birth and loved almost as long, but have never touched except in games of tag, or diving for the coppers or to pass the communion cup. I hold to him as if I am drowning, but I know, as only children can, that he is gone. I fall against his shoulder. ‘No,’ I cry into him. Then he holds me as if there is nothing else to hold on to in that world. And for us, there isn’t.”
    Maeve sighed, then closed her eyes. A smile as faded and wrinkled as the linen gown she wore crossed her mouth.
    “Then?” I asked. “Then what? Did they take him? Where did he go? What happened?” I grasped her hand. My heart beat faster than when I had run the three miles that very morning; my limbs were alive. I wanted to sprint from here and find this boy for her.
    Beneath Maeve’s eyelids, the rapid eye movement of the dreamer flickered. Then a tear, one small, oblong tear, leaked out beneath her left eyelashes, ran below the wrinkles of her eye and settled in the nest of her facial creases.
    I reached for a Kleenex to wipe the tear away, and then thought better of it. For some reason it seemed appropriate to leave it alone, leave it for what it stood for: lost love. I sat quietly, anxious for more. After a moment, I squeezed her hand. “Then what?”
    Maeve opened her eyes and stared at me. “You know, the oatmeal was cold again this morning and the—” She glanced at me. “Are you going to fix this or not?”
    “Fix what?” I asked, my heart heavy.
    “The incompetence. Bloody incompetence.” She rolled onto her right side, and the soft sound of sleep came through her lips.
    I stood and