The Last Will of Moira Leahy (2 page)

“They’ll let you whip up garlic mashed potatoes in the ER?”

“Funny.” She paused. “We still need to schedule your MRI.”

I wished she’d let that go, but I guess it was my fault for making a big deal out of it once when the noises came—scattery disjointed sounds, a little like you’d hear trying to tune in to a distant radio station. We’d been eating one of our rare meals together when I’d covered my ears and growled, “Knock it off!”

She stopped twirling pasta to stare at me. “What the hell?”

“Nothing. Just my personal noise factory.”

“You’re hearing things?” Her cat eyes narrowed on me, and then she’d provided an encyclopedic listing of every freakish thing that could make a person imagine sounds. “I don’t think it’s schizophrenia.”

“Thanks for that.”

“But what about a brain tumor or—” A gasp. “It could be post-traumatic stress disorder! You’re scatterbrained, you sleep for crap, you have zero sex drive—”

“Enough! I haven’t been in a war, Kit.”

“You have, kind of. It could be plain traumatic stress. That’s like PTSD, just not as severe.”

I understood the excitement of untangling a mystery and weaving a theory, but Kit was off the mark; I knew more about the noises than I’d let on. Those little immature sounds that wanted to bust free in my cranium were the remnants of a previous life, the parts that used to make up my sum. I’d moved on, and I wished the remnants would, too.

“Well, if I did have one of those diseases,” I’d said, “could you prescribe something to stop the noises? Does such a drug exist?” Maybe not my best idea, but what good was it to have your best friend become a doctor if she couldn’t whip out her prescription pad once in a while to simplify your life?

She’d just shaken her head and said, “You need to see a neurologist,” which I wasn’t about to do.

I tried harder after that to repress the sounds, though the effort stole my energy, and pretty soon Kit was saying I was too pale and my body temperature too low and that maybe I had chronic fatigue syndrome or a sleep disorder or needed to be tested for lupus and an array of other things. I thought she was the one with the clear diagnosis: medical residentitis.

“Hey, you there?” Kit said in real time. Me, I’d drawn my third tic-tac-toe board, and I hadn’t won a single game.

“Only if you promise not to start in with me.”

“Hallucinations can be serious, Maeve.”

“Random noises don’t count as hallucinations, just corroded brain joints.” God, if I told her about the little girl with the not-red hair she’d have me admitted to the psych ward for sure.

“Well, I think you should see someone,” she said.

“I know you do.”

“I love you, you know?”

“I know. I’ll leave a light on for you.”

I shut my cell, then found the Windex. I squirted solution onto the window markings I’d made and cleared them all away—just in case playing tic-tac-toe with yourself could be used as evidence of insanity. And if there were any noises other than that of squeaky-clean glass, I pretended not to hear them.

THAT NIGHT,
I had to force myself to read and grade half of the essays left on my desk. If not for Jim Shay’s effort—
“C
’è
un’orrenda creatura nel mio brood”
(There’s a gruesome creature in my soup)—the process would’ve been entirely unoccupying, which was odd, because I loved to teach, loved my students, loved to keep track of their progress and grade even the most Nytol-ish of papers. And I loved language—all those words with their own spin and dip, requiring their own special curl of the tongue:
ebullición, bellissimo, kyrielle, obcecação, labialização, babucha, l’Absolu, d’aria
.

I gave up on my work, sat on the couch, and unsheathed the dagger. My finger traveled the metal. God, it took me back.

Once upon a time, my parents liked to tell bedtime stories. My mother favored the parable of the Five Chinese Brothers, who were as identical as Moira and me, but whose different talents saved them from every imaginable catastrophe. One boy could hold an entire sea in his mouth, while each of the others could either go without air or survive fire unscathed, or had an iron neck or legs that could grow into stiltlike appendages.

But my father liked to tell Alvilda’s tale. She’d escaped a prince who wanted to marry her to become a pirate and ruler of the seas instead. Funny, that very prince bested her in battle later and made her fall in love and settle down. She became the queen of Denmark. A story far more satisfying than your run-of-the-mill Cinderella romance.

At the fearsome and fearless age of ten, I decided to become the next Alvilda. All I needed was a boat, a sword, and the sea. I had plenty of boats at my command, since my father made them for a living, and there was sea all over the place in Castine. That left the sword. So one day, I put on my best Alvilda clothes—a red coat, black boots, and an eye patch fashioned out of black construction paper and a shoelace—and sketched a plan for pinching the wavy blade from the artifacts cabinet. There were all sorts of things in that cabinet that my grandfather, an anthropologist, had brought to us from all over the world. But the wavy dagger was my favorite and would make the perfect accessory for my adventure.

Moira was nervous—

“We’ll get in trouble!”

“Shush, Moira, ’cause if Daddy comes now I’ll tell him it was your idea.”

—but she went along in the end. I found the key, opened the cabinet, grabbed the blade, and bolted with my reluctant shadow. We didn’t stop until we reached the docks, and I barely waited for Moira to hop in before I started the motorboat.

We went pretty far out for us, and then I stood on a seat near the prow and acted my part as the mighty Alvilda.

“Bring it on, matey!” I crowed, waving the blade around until Moira squealed—

“Shark, shark!”

There weren’t many words that could snuff out my bravado, but
shark
did it when we were in a tiny boat and far from Daddy’s help. The blade and its sheath were lost in the water. I don’t know if I dropped them in or if they slid from a precarious perch as I hovered over my twin. Regardless, by the time I realized the fin belonged to a whale—who lifted his harmless black head just once—they were gone.

My gut had ached more than my thwacked backside, knowing that beautiful blade lay at the bottom of the ocean, gone forever, thanks to me. But now I had one again.

Shadows drifted over the ceiling like a sorcerer’s fingers, until my eyelids grew heavy and I gave in.

With sleep, though, came the nightmare.

Water seeped beneath the closed door as it always did.
Open the door!
the voice commanded as a growing stream drenched my shoes, socks, and skin. The pounding began.
Open the door!

Then, something different: Tinny music, “The Entertainer,” began to play on the other side of the wood.

I broke from the dream. My skin prickled with the icy-wash feeling I loathed, and my heartbeat thundered in my throat. The music box lay open on the floor, combing through its circular song with its many pins and pegs. I must’ve kicked it off the couch in my sleep. I shut the lid and “The Entertainer” stopped. But sound remained, intensified, then mutated.

My mind filled with its own music: Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody no. 12, each hammered string tinkling through my memory like water torture. All in my head, yes, but far from a hallucination.

I tapped into an old skill and pressed back the sound until song became broken notes, and notes became a weak scatter of between-station noise. Why was it that whenever it snuck in, it was piano, like a knife scraping at the last of my nerves?

An owl hooted outside my window, and I thought with a mix of exhaustion and irony that perhaps I’d just been answered, but in a language I would never understand.

Out of Time

Castine, Maine

JULY 1995

Moira and Maeve are ten

Sounds eddied around her—of voices and her twin sister’s music—but still Moira kept her feet planted on the hot stone walk between her home and the house that had been her grandparents’ all her life. Her gaze caught on the yellow moving truck in the drive. Everything had changed. First Grandpa had died, then Grandma three months later. Daddy sold their house. Little by little, her grandparents’ furniture and clothes were taken away, until a single solid item remained: the piano.

She had to have it.

“Huh, she’s good,” said the bushy-haired woman who was their new neighbor.

Moira’s sister, Maeve, had just finished a busy phrase on her saxophone. Moira could picture the lost butterfly of the song, its journey through a wild storm before finding right-sided stability and sunlight again.

“She is good,” Mama responded, full of pride. “I taught her the basics, but within a few months she was beyond my ability to teach. She’s studying with Ben Freeman now.”

“Never heard of him.”

“He’s a pro just north of here,” Mama said. “But Maeve’s real talent is writing her own songs.”

“That one there was putting puzzles together upside down when she was three,” the other woman said, motioning toward an elm tree. A girl with two short blonde pigtails sat there, her hands busy trying to clothe a fat gray cat in a doll’s dress. Moira hadn’t even noticed her. “Smarter than me already. Mark my words, she’ll get a scholarship and go to college and make something of herself. Ian, my older one, he’s clever enough, but he’ll stay and be a lobsterman like his daddy. Ain’t no shame in that. Come here, Kit,” she called.

The girl uncrumpled herself and walked toward them. She stood as tall as Moira and Maeve, maybe even a little taller, and her eyes were like Daddy’s—blue with a dash of algae, as Mama sometimes joked. The cat, half-clothed, followed the girl.

“We saw a show about a boy like your daughter, Mrs. Leahy—”

“Call me Abby.”

“—but he played the violin. What did they call him, Kit?”

“A prodigy,” the girl said.

“Prodigy, that’s right. Four years old, he was, if you can believe. How a boy like that can play a violin when he can’t probably even tie his shoes is beyond me.” The neighbor woman snorted, then eyed Moira. “That one play, too?”

Mama smiled. “Moira plays the piano.” She shouted for Maeve just as she started a new piece. “Come and be sociable.”

Maeve’s expression fell flat as she laid her sax in the grass. “But I’m making a song about seals, Mama. You can hear the Bagaduce in it.”

“And the waves,” added Moira.

“And the birds—”

“You can smell the fish in it!”

“Like the time we—”

“That’s rude,” Mama said as Maeve stepped up beside them. “You know no one but you two can understand when you do that.” She stared until Moira stopped smiling. “This is Mrs. Bronya and her daughter, Kit. You girls are all in the same grade.”

“You play real good,” Mrs. Bronya told Maeve. She turned to Moira. “You make your own songs, too?”

“I’ll teach her how,” Maeve said.

“She’ll teach me,” Moira said. They both nodded.

The woman looked between them. “How do you know who’s who?”

Mama laughed. “It’s easy once you know them.”

“I’ve never met twins before,” the girl, Kit, said.

“I’m older by six minutes.” Maeve’s red hair blew into her mouth as a gust of wind drew up. “Mama says I was harder to push out and I’ve been harder ever since, but she’s just teasing, because me and Moira are exactly identical.”

“Ayuh!” Moira gave her ponytail a twist.

“You should’ve seen the twin convention in New York City a few years ago,” Maeve said. “Twins everywhere! Some like us with their own language when they were little—”

“Your own language?” Kit asked.

Moira giggled. “It’s called cryptophasia.”

“I always called it
Trying Twin,”
said Mama with a smile.

“Lots of twins have it,” said Maeve. “But it’s not the same for anyone but those two people before they forget it. I wish we remembered ours, because then me and Moira could say secret things at school and everybody would think we’re aliens!”

“That’s weird,” Kit said.

“Nah, what’s weird was that at the convention there was a pair of twins hooked together by their butts,” said Maeve. “Mama said it was freakish, so we left after that.”

“Maeve, that’s not what I said.” Mama glanced at Mrs. Bronya.

“There were twins with polka-dot dresses and a bunch with jeans and yellow T-shirts and even some dressed in matching suits, but Mama made Moira wear a skirt and I wore shorts, and we don’t even have two of the same shirt”—Maeve pulled at her stained Smurfs shirt while Moira touched the sunflower on hers—“but Daddy said people would know we were twins anyway.”

Mama sighed, but Kit laughed.

“One twin’s brother died,” Maeve said solemnly, and Kit leaned closer. “His wife said he felt it when it happened.”

Moira remembered the man—how he’d rubbed his hand against his cheek and said he needed to sit, his eyes stumbling around. Moira thought he was looking for his brother, that he couldn’t help it, even though his own twin boys swung from his arms.

“I’ve heard of that sort of thing, but I thought it was bunk,” said Mrs. Bronya. “You girls read each other’s minds?”

Just that morning, Mama had warned them about this stuff:
I want you to have friends, but it’ll be hard unless you stop playing games. People don’t understand you—not even me sometimes. There are five known senses, girls. Remember that
.

“We have the best card tricks,” Maeve said. “I can be in a different room and still know what Moira’s holding.”

“Is that so?” Mrs. Bronya’s eyes were as wide as Maeve’s.

Moira tried not to look at Mama.

“And I swear I felt it on my big toe the time Moira stepped on a bee, even though I was with Daddy on—”

“Look, the piano!” said Mama in a loud voice.

They all turned to see Daddy walk out of the house backward, one end of the instrument in his grasp. His face, ruddy by nature, bloomed like a beet. He faltered a little on the walk, repositioned a squat cart of wood and wheels, and said, “A’right, one more push!”

The other end appeared with a man in tow—tall, plump, and bald but for some fringe around his ears. A blond-haired boy followed in their wake.

“Help your dad, Ian,” said Mrs. Bronya. The boy scrunched a cheek up at her. He was tall like his father, but thin, and Moira thought he must be going into sixth grade at least. He stopped beside his sister, and they all watched as the men rolled the instrument across the walk, to the other door. And then—after another lift and shove, and a few more grunts—the piano disappeared inside the house.

“Is it your piano?” asked Mrs. Bronya, and Moira realized she’d let loose a gusty sigh.

“It was my grandma’s.” Moira looked at the yellow roses growing up the side of the old house and remembered soft, paper-thin-skin hands. “She wanted us to have it after she—”

“Did she die in our house?” the boy asked.

“Ian’s afraid of ghosts,” Kit said with a smile.

“Shut it, guano breath,” he said. “What do you know?”

“More than you.” Kit lifted the cat and stroked its head; its back legs were still stuck in the dress.

Mama used her patient voice. “She died in the hospital.”

Moira remembered those last days, the liquid sound of every breath her grandmother took. Dying seemed a painful thing.

Ian kicked a rock in his sister’s general direction before looking at his mother. “When are we going to eat? I’m starved.”

“Let me make sandwiches for you.” Mama ignored Mrs. Bronya’s objections. “No, no, I insist.” She shot a quick warning glance at Maeve and Moira, then strode into the house.

“That one’s a fancy musician,” Mrs. Bronya told Ian, jerking her head at Maeve. “At least I think it’s that one.”

“Oh yeah?” he said. “A strung-up lobster pot would sound better than that old piano.”

“It just needs tuning,” Maeve said. “Then Moira will be playing perfect piano and I’ll be playing on my sax, and we can have duets like we had in Grandma’s house. Grandma said we’d be famous someday and travel the world and play our music, so that’s what we’ll do.” She nodded and patted Moira’s shoulder.

Ian huffed. Moira thought he sounded like a horse. “Haven’t you heard?” he said. “Nobody born in Maine ever leaves Maine.”

“It’s easier to leave Castine than come in new,” Maeve said. “You’re from away now, and you always will be.”

“We’re from flipping Bucksport. Throw a stone!”

“Watch that lip, boy,” said Mrs. Bronya.

“Our grandparents came from Cape Breton when my daddy was just a baby and everyone here still says we’re from away,” said Maeve. “Course it didn’t help that they spoke French or that we do.”

“Sure you speak French,” Ian said, and Kit giggled.

“Do too, best of all, and some Italian and Spanish, because my poppy’s an anthropologist and he knows about different cultures. He’s even eaten monkey brains before!”

“What a little liar you are.”

“Am not.”

“Prove it then, unless you don’t have the balls,” Ian said.

“Third strike,” said his mother. “I’m telling your—”

“Tu peux me passer les dés s’il te plaît?”
said Maeve. The Bronyas stared. Kit stopped laughing.
“C’est mon tour.”

“What did you say?” Ian asked, his voiced edged with surprise and annoyance.

“I said, ‘I do have the balls,’ in French.” Maeve squared her shoulders. “And then I said, ‘What’s the matter?’ in Spanish and ‘Cat got your tongue?’ in Italian.”

Kit’s face scrunched up, and Moira tried not to laugh. Maeve had asked Ian—entirely in French—if he would pass the dice because it was her turn to play. They’d played dice a lot with Grandma Leahy.

“Well, huh,” said Mrs. Bronya. “A whiz at music and language both? What weird kids you are.”

Ian snickered. “More like witches with your freaky hair and fat eyes.”

Moira frowned as Mrs. Bronya thwacked Ian’s arm. Daddy said their eyes looked big and beautiful: Maeve’s like the sky before the rain, Moira’s like the sea. They were the same shade, really, but Daddy swore he could tell them apart by their eyes.

“Ayuh, maybe we are witches,” Maeve said, her mouth pressed in a line. “Better watch out or we’ll cast a spell.”

That’s when Mama came out with a tray of sandwiches. Even Maeve knew to stop talking after that.

“I DON’T LIKE
that boy,” Moira said later that night. She and Maeve sat on the living-room floor together, hunched over
Webster’s New World Dictionary
.

“But that Kit with the cat seemed okay,” said Maeve.

“There.” Moira pointed to an entry. “Is that it?”

prod | i•gy 1
[Rare] an extraordinary happening, thought to presage good or evil fortune
2
a person, thing, or act so extraordinary as to inspire wonder; specif., a child of highly unusual talent or genius

“Crap on a cracker,” Maeve said. “Now we’ll have to look up ‘presage.’”

“No, it’s number two: ‘a child of highly unusual talent.’” Moira pursed her lips.

“Well, if I’m a prodigy, you’re a prodigy,” Maeve said.

Moira rose, then lay a hand on her grandmother’s piano and ran a finger over the sharp edge of a chipped ivory key. “How do you make your music? Can you really teach me?”

Maeve looked through the opening to the kitchen, then moved beside her sister and sat on the piano bench. Moira sat as well. “I’ve told you, you have to be open to the sounds,” Maeve said in a low voice. “The notes are in the air.”

Moira closed her eyes tight and tried to hear the notes.

“It’s like when I know things sometimes,” Maeve said.

“But I can’t do that.”

“You could if you tried hard enough.” Maeve sighed. “It’s like when we block—that feeling of shutting everything up and going inside yourself. It’s like that, but … more like going out.”

Moira hated blocking, being separated from the pulse of her sister’s energy and emotions. She thought again of the lost twin at the conference, his despair at being only one, and felt grateful she and Maeve never blocked for long—and only when one of them was sick or hurt.