EVIE MCCARTHY WOULDN’T SAY SHE WAS SURPRISED WHEN she came face to face with the Grim Reaper. A little shocked, definitely, but not surprised. The signs had been there, nudging her for months now, demanding that she pay attention. But she didn’t want to, she wasn’t ready. Who’d be ready for that?
Instead, Evie decided to stop draining her teacup a few weeks back when the tea leaves started to form a very clear pattern. She threw stones at that bloody magpie perching on the gate of her cottage, as brazen as you like, eyeballing her every morning. She ignored it when the painting of Kilmore Beach toppled off the mantelpiece one evening as she was watching Coronation Street. What a clatter it made when it fell onto the hearth, and how the glass glistened as it smashed into smithereens and mingled with the ocean spray on the shore of the beach. She had made love hidden in those sand dunes fifty-something years ago, huddled under a picnic rug when herself and Michael were newly engaged, fumbling and reaching for each other. It had been a little bit of a disappointment, the sex, Evie remembered, not Michael—being that close to Michael was always glorious—but the deed itself wasn’t quite how the novels had made it out to be. They got much, much better at it as the years went on.
Evie had also turned a blind eye to the single snowdrop that peeped up under the oak tree in the back garden. A snowdrop in autumn only meant one thing. But it was proving more difficult to ignore the scent of roses that followed her everywhere: down the aisles of Tesco, into the changing room at aqua aerobics, it even lingered at choir class when she stood next to Sean Roche, the mushroom farmer, who hadn’t changed his clothes in over a decade. Deliciously sweet, she could close her eyes and allow herself to drift into the magnificent aroma, to fall deeply under its heavenly spell. But that’s what it wanted, wasn’t it? It wanted you to just drift away into its comforting arms.
But Evie McCarthy had never been passive; she had never floated into anything. She was a woman who had always confronted her life head on. Wasn’t it Evie who had rallied the women of her hometown Ballyhay to march on the streets of Dublin for divorce in the nineties? And wasn’t it her who’d thrown a full glass of whiskey over John O’Brien and punched him square in the eye after he’d accused her of trying to fix a race? (He had been right, but that’s beside the point.) And wasn’t it Evie herself who called door to door to get donations for the Syrian refugees? She was a woman of action. So, she knew she needed to face up to what had been poking and prodding her for the last few months.
Evie slung her forest-green cardigan with a real fur trim that tickled her neck over her shoulders, fastened the top button across her chest, checked her bright red lipstick in the hall mirror, smoothed out her auburn curls and headed into the kitchen on a mission.
She’d found the tarot cards a few years back at St Columcille’s school fair. They were on a bric-a-brac table with brightly coloured plastic toys missing pieces, and some of that awful chutney that Brigid Mahoney who ran the stall insisted everyone buy. Evie didn’t remember picking them up but there they were in her hand as Brigid bagged up her chutney and called out for fifty cents.
They were beautiful, heavy cards, and when she clasped them Evie could feel the many hands that had held them before, hands like hers—knowing hands, seeing hands. The intricate designs wove their way around pictures, showing stories of journeys and golden chalices. She hadn’t known what she was doing at first, how to lay them out, but she let the cards guide her, and over time they found their own pattern.
She gazed at the deck lying on the Formica-topped kitchen table, took a deep breath and laid her hands down.
‘Are you watching, Michael? I just hope there’s enough time to sort out our girls.’ She shuffled the cards slowly, carefully, her mind and her heart focused on her daughter Yvonne and two granddaughters Molly and Rosie. Evie spoke into thin air, her words bouncing across the burnt-orange tiled floor of the kitchen. The sunniest room in her three-bedroom cottage, where her children had squished carrots into the floor, her grandchildren had streaked naked, where herself and Michael had drunk icy gin and tonics and mulled over the everyday. She knew every corner of this room, the ghosts that walked it, the secrets it harboured, the memories.
Evie fingers stopped and she spread the cards face down in a half-moon shape. She paused for a moment, closed her eyes and allowed her fingertips to hover and slowly descend, sliding six cards out and away from the pack.
As each card turned over, there he was, in one form after another. Death was coming for her and he was coming soon.