How do you tell your best friend that you were personally acquainted with her great-great-grandmother, a woman who died the year before you were born?
No, I’m not crazy. I’m a college-educated, 35-year-old mother and widow. It all started the summer after my husband was killed in a car accident.
~~~ My neighbor, Emily Harris, was my best friend; and, the summer following my husband’s demise, Emily suggested that she and I take a vacation together.
“I want to go to Ireland,” she said.
“Ireland? Are you crazy? I’ve never been out of the state, not to mention out of the country!” Oh, I’d had dreams of faraway places, of climbing the Eiffel Tower, of riding a camel in the desert, even of cruising the blue waters of the Caribbean, which wasn’t all that far away, just different. As an avid reader, I’d been to many places through my books and in my dreams.
“Why Ireland?” I asked. It was a Saturday morning, and we were sitting on the front porch swing of Emily’s modest home. We waved to the Emersons as they walked past, moving as fast as they could on eighty-year-old legs. I repeated my question. “Why Ireland?”
Emily stood. “Wait here,” she said. “There’s something I want to show you.” She disappeared into the house and returned with a framed photograph.
“What do you think?” she asked, holding it so we both could see.
What I thought was that it must be important to her, and I didn’t want to say the wrong thing. “It’s very nice,” I said, tentatively. It was a black and white shot of four people of varying ages, plus a baby. “Who are they?”
Emily smiled. “That’s my mother, Lisa, holding me, the baby.” She moved her finger to the gentleman standing behind Lisa. “My grandfather,” she said, “John Sullivan. And the man beside him is my great-grandfather, Michael Sullivan.” She then pointed to the lady seated beside Lisa, an old woman with a twinkle in her eye and a smile on her face, who was concentrating on Emily. In fact, the woman and the baby were so delighted with each other that they were the only ones not looking into the camera.
My eyes were drawn to the old woman. There was something faintly familiar about her—not her face, of course, but her countenance—and I found that I was suddenly, inexplicably, unable to breathe.
“My great-great-grandmother, Catherine Sullivan,” Emily said. I coughed, trying to catch my breath, and Emily continued, “She was eighty-seven years old when the picture was taken. Mom told me that Great-Mom—that’s what everyone called her—was so excited about my arrival that she took on new life in the months before my birth. She started walking as much as she could and doing little arm exercises, even humming, which they’d never heard her do before. … Sadly, she died when I was not quite a year old.”
Emily was truly moved by what she’d been told, and I didn’t want to tread on her thoughts with meaningless words about my own weird feeling, my sudden loss of breath. I coughed again, hard.
“You okay?”
I nodded, my breath restored. Whatever had happened was over; the moment had passed.
A jogger went by and we waved to him. Then Emily said, “I guess you could say I’ve become obsessed with this photo. It’s Great-Mom that keeps drawing me to it, and I honestly can’t explain it.” Suddenly, she looked up at me with a bright smile, and her eyes began to sparkle. “That’s why I want to go to Ireland!” she said.
I blinked. “Am I missing something here?”
“They’re all Sullivans, formerly O’Sullivans. The whole family is Irish. I’m part Irish. … Rachel, I want to see where it all began. Grandpa said that the Sullivans came to the United States more than a hundred years ago to escape the potato famine.” She picked up a small envelope, holding it out to me. “He gave me these old snapshots.”
I took the envelope from her and carefully removed the photos. On top was one of a pretty young woman with pointy-toe boots peeking out from beneath her long skirt. Again, I had that strange sensation of my breath being snatched away, and I gasped.
“What is it?” Emily asked.
I coughed. “Nothing,” I said. “Just … uh, something caught in my throat.” But I knew—I knew the young woman was Catherine.
“It’s Great-Mom,” Emily said. “Wasn’t she beautiful?”
I nodded. “She certainly was.”
“I wish I knew her maiden name. It’s really her family I want to find. I feel a special connection to her.” So do I, Emily, I thought. And this is so weird!
Of all the places I’d dreamed of visiting, Ireland had not been one. At least not in my daydreams; and who knows where the places of my night-time dreams might be, or if they really exist—places of peace, places of pain. All I ever remember upon awakening are feelings, sensations, never details.
“So, what’s your plan?” I asked, interrupting my own reverie. “Just wander all over Ireland?”
She shook her head. “My great-grandfather, Michael, went there in the early nineteen-sixties and found his ancestors’ graves in a little village near the town of Mallow. Unfortunately, he didn’t write anything down, and Grandpa couldn’t remember the name of the village, only that all of the men buried in that particular Sullivan plot—he called it O’Sullivan—were named Conor, same as his grandfather.”
“Well, that’s a start,” I said. “We’ll go to Mallow. Maybe tracking the Sullivans will lead us to Catherine’s family.”
Emily reached over and pulled me toward her in a great big hug, squeezing so tightly I nearly fell off the swing. “Yes!” she cried. “I knew this would pique your interest!”
Actually, only one thing piqued my interest—Catherine Sullivan. I wanted to know why that lady took my breath away.
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