‘I’m here for you,’ he said, touching her hand lightly. ‘Please let me in.’
‘I can’t,’ she had croaked, shaking her head at him.
‘Emer, Orla wouldn’t have wanted this.’ He looked into her eyes, and it was all she could do to stop herself from falling into his arms. ‘You won’t let me near you since she passed away.’
‘I should have been there, with her,’ she managed to whisper.
‘Emer, darling,’ he said, ‘it’s not your fault.’
Someone was calling him. He was needed on ward, but Lars held her gaze.
‘I’ll call you later,’ he said. ‘I’ll come over, we’ll talk.’
But when he’d called that night, she’d already left. Said her goodbyes to Ethan and walked away from the house in Quincy.
‘I went over to your house, but Ethan had gone,’ Lars said on the phone now. ‘The neighbours said back to New York. Where are you?’
‘I’m on an island.’
‘In Ireland?’ he asked. ‘I can take some time off. Fly over…’
‘No. I’m not in Ireland. I’m on Vinalhaven; it’s an island off the coast of Maine.’
‘What are you doing there?’
‘I’ve a job. I’m looking after an old lady who has pancreatic cancer. Helping manage her pain relief.’
There was a pause. Emer imagined putting her hand on Lars’ heart, feeling its steady beat.
‘Do you think that’s a good idea, after everything you’ve been through with Orla?’
‘I just can’t be in Boston, Lars. Working every day in the hospital where she was… I can’t…’
She could feel the hysteria rising in her chest and she forced it down.
‘I get it.’ He paused. ‘I’ve got some time off. We could go somewhere. A place you’ve never been.’
‘It’s no good,’ she said, her voice breaking despite herself. ‘Don’t you see? How could it ever work between us? I was with you when I should have been with Orla. She must have been so frightened and I wasn’t there for her.’
‘But Emer, please…’
‘It’s never going to work between us, don’t you see? What we have will always be tainted.’
‘You can’t mean that?’ She could hear the disbelief in his voice and it broke her heart.
‘I’ve got to go,’ she said, whispering, ‘sorry,’ before she cut him off.
She waited for him to ring back, but he didn’t. She sat on the quilted bedspread and stared at her phone, willing it to ring, although knowing she wouldn’t answer it again. But the phone remained silent. She threw it on the floor. He’d given up on her, finally. She should be relieved. She’d told him it could never work, and yet her heart was breaking all over again. She threw herself face-first on the bedspread. Buried her face in its soft contours and sobbed, clutching on to its trimmed ends. She let her grief rip loose as a loud wail escaped her mouth. She listened to her own crying, and tried to soothe herself. Soften your hands, child. Was it her mother or Orla speaking to her? Let go.
She released her hold on the quilt, but as she did so, she felt an opening in the seam and something hard inside it. She sat up and pulled the edge of the quilt towards her. Examined the seams. It was ripped. No, not ripped – the opening was too neat for that, and about the size of her hand. She pushed her hand into it and felt her fingers touch paper. She pulled the paper out and unfolded it. It was a letter, dating back to 1958 and addressed to Dearest Katie. Without reading the whole letter, she scanned the neat black script to see who it was from, already suspecting the answer. Sure enough, it was signed ‘your sister, Susie’, the capital ‘S’ an exuberant flourish, contrary to Emer’s perception of Susannah’s personality. Emer pushed her hand inside the quilt again, pulling out letter after letter. She stacked them up, putting them in date order, while managing not to read a word of the content, which was clearly private. When she’d finished, Emer thought about bringing the letters to Susannah. But considering Susannah’s mental state at the grave, it was possible that these missives from the past could make her feel worse. Even so, they were her letters to her sister, and she might not even know they were there in the quilt.
Emer lifted the stack of letters off the bed, placed them on the dressing table and stared at them. What should she do? Stuff them back in the quilt? Try to forget she ever found them? Tell Susannah, and risk distressing the old lady further? Or read them herself? If she knew what was in the letters, perhaps she could work out when the best time to give them to Susannah would be. Maybe she would find out why Susannah was so defensive and bad-tempered all the time. But that would be a terrible invasion of privacy.
Emer circled the room before picking the letters up again. She took them towards the bed to stuff them back into the quilt. It would be a terrible betrayal of her position as Susannah’s nurse to read them. But as she reached the bed, one of the letters fluttered off the top of the pile and onto the wooden floor. As Emer bent to pick it up, she couldn’t help but read the first line, and then she was hooked.
13
Susannah
October 20th, 1958
Harvard, Cambridge
Dearest Katie,
I am in love! Before you get too excited, it’s with a place, not a person, but truly I am besotted with Harvard. I keep thinking I’m in a dream. I wish you could see how different it is here. There’s all this history going all the way back. Most of the buildings are redbrick and, I’ve been told, are just like the houses in England from the seventeen-hundreds. Sometimes I just walk around Harvard Square again and again, breathing in all the learned minds from the past. Reminds me of when you talk about how much you love Vinalhaven, the rocks and the sea, the
