Six weeks earlier.
Sheila O’Byrne sorted through what was left of her husband Tom’s belongings, the first time she’d been able to face it since the storm.
The navy suit he wore to Rich’s wedding; Rich was now a fireman down in Delaware. Tom’s favorite Hawaiian shirt that he always wore at the grill for his famous summer barbecues. The old Yankees cap with a Yogi Berra autograph on the bill that his father had given him. Everything she held brought back an important memory for her. Memories she struggled to have to relive right now. Their lives. He had been gone only two months. It was still too soon. Too raw. She ought to do this some other time, she began to feel. Or with her sister, when she came back from Ohio.
This was the second time that the person who meant the most in the world to her had been stolen.
The first, it took months just for her to be able to go out again or do her chores. But that was twenty years ago. She never thought she’d have to go through it all over again.
Go through it all again, she thought, and alone.
Two months out, the house was still mostly rotted roofing and drywall, and covered with debris. It was still laid open where the elm had gone right through their roof and the bay had rushed in, her only protection a weatherproof tarp and some temporary insulation to bar the cold. Everyone promised help; so far none had come. Other than Joe’s son, Patrick, who had come back to help his dad rebuild. Volunteers were everywhere; but volunteers could only help clear the mess and bring them food and blankets. They couldn’t rebuild their homes. They couldn’t give her back her memories.
Sheila took out the white dress shirt with his initials monogrammed on the sleeve that Tom had worn to Rich’s graduation from the academy.
T. L. O’B
The tears rushed in again. Like the storm. She put her hand in front of her face and began to cry.
That was when she heard a knock coming from downstairs, and a voice from the front porch. “Hello. Anyone here?” The stairs were about all that was structurally left of their old place; everything else was still gutted and open to the world. And to the biting wind and the cold. And now the snow. For a few weeks Sheila had gone to her son’s place in Delaware, but they didn’t have much room. And then to a cousin’s in Ridgewood. Finally she just thought, Tom would want me back here. There were all their memories to protect. And a house to rebuild. Their house. That was all she had now.
Sheila went downstairs to see who it was. A young couple was at the front door, visible through the glass. They looked in their thirties maybe. Sheila opened the door. The woman was pretty in a quilted down jacket, carrying a shopping bag. The man was tall and thin, and wore glasses. He looked professional. They were probably from a church group with some food or a prayer to deliver.
Food helped these days.
“Mrs. O’Byrne?”
“Yes.” Sheila pointed to the mess. “Sorry not to invite you in. In or out, I guess it’s all the same now,” she said with a smile.
“That’s okay . . .” The woman smiled back. “We won’t stay. We just . . .” She glanced at her husband as if searching for the right words. “We think we have something that might belong to you.”
“To me . . . ?” Sheila looked back at her with surprise.
“Yes. We’re the Richmans,” the husband said, introducing them. “Alan and Nina. We have a beach house in Deal, on the Jersey shore. We were pretty battered too. But we were out on the beach the other day looking at the erosion there and we saw that this had washed up. There was a name inside it . . .” She opened the bag and took out the hand-painted lacquer box that was inside. “Deirdre Annemarie O’Byrne. It said Midland Beach. Is this yours . . . ?”
Sheila’s breath went out of her. She stared. At first it was like her heart just stopped, like someone pulled the plug in an instant. And then it kicked right up again, not in worry this time, but in giddiness, joy, something she hadn’t felt in a long time. She took the box in her hands, let her fingers wrap around it. Lovingly. “Oh good Lord . . .”
She felt as if her legs were about to give out.
“Are you all right?” the husband asked. “I hope we didn’t upset you. Maybe you ought to sit down.”
“Please.” Sheila nodded, a little wobbly. They helped her over to a chair in what used to be her living room.
The wife came over to her. “Can I get you some water?”
“No, I’m fine. I’m fine. It’s just that . . .” She looked up at them. “This was my daughter’s.”
She opened the box’s clasp and peered inside. The bound leather diary was still there, amazingly intact. And the little box containing Deirdre’s baby teeth, along with a cutting of her hair. “She’s not with us any longer. This is all we had left of her. I was sure it was gone. We lost it in the storm.”
“I’m so sorry,” the wife said. “It’s amazing, it doesn’t even seem so badly damaged. It must have been carried by the tide.”
“Yes. All the way down to Deal,” Sheila said, her eyes glistening. She took out a couple of the waterlogged pictures. And Deirdre’s journal. Miraculously, it seemed like most of the handwritten pages—pages she had written right up to the day she disappeared, the day, they found out later, she had died—still seemed legible. “She was headed to college. Up in Buffalo. She was killed. August 21, 1992. We never even found her body. For over ten years . . . until they dug up the ground in the area over by the Goethals Bridge to make some new apartment complex. We never knew what she was even doing over there. Or if that’s just where they dumped her . . . She had some boyfriend we never knew . . .”
“I’m so sorry,” the woman said. She looked at her husband. “I wish there was something we could do.”
“Oh, you have. You already have!” Sheila O’Byrne looked up at them. “The storm took everything from me. Everything. But this . . . This is almost like you gave me something back. Thank you,” she said, and stood up and hugged them both. “You can’t know how much it means.”
Later, in the kitchen, warmed by a blanket and a space heater, she ate the Chinese meal that Patrick had brought her and brewed herself a cup of tea. She knew she should have called Rich and told him what had turned up today. What she was holding in her hand.
But just for a few minutes, Sheila wanted this moment to herself.
She opened Deirdre’s journal. Many of the pages had the crisp, dried-out feel of antique parchment; on others the twenty-year-old ink had run. Over the years, she’d read through it so many times. Maybe a hundred since Deirdre had never come back that day. She knew the musicians her daughter had liked by heart: Cyndi Lauper, Madonna, Michael Jackson. The boys she had an eye on then. Her inner dreams and ambitions. She said she wanted to study veterinary medicine.
And this one boy . . .
She had never had much to say about him. She never even wrote his full name, only some nickname. He was a year younger and came from a different school. He was poor. How they met at a summer street fair.
What was the point? Sheila shut the book tight. All it brought back was pain that was twenty years old. And now, with Tom gone, the tide of it felt as strong and wounding as if it had all happened yesterday.
It had taken twelve years to even find her. And then it was just by matching up her DNA; what was left of her was too far gone. The first year or two she and Tom still held out hope that one day she’d come running back through the door. But in their hearts they knew. They always knew. Deirdre would call if she was going to be home an hour late from school.
They knew.
One of her girlfriends confirmed for them that she’d recently met this guy. He didn’t have much; Deirdre was always a rescuer. Some stray cat, a dog, a homeless person. She was there for any cause. No one knew his name or how to locate him. They tried, of course. Even just to see if he knew where she was that night. What time she might have left him. She was leaving for college in a week. The pain came back. She was just eighteen . . .
Why? Sheila sat there with the journal and asked herself. Why play this old record all over again and again . . . ?
She opened it once more. Like she had so many times. To the same, familiar spot. Near the end.
“It makes it all the more fun,” her daughter had written, “if we keep everything shrouded in mystery. As if we were at some kind of masked ball, like in The Count of Monte Cristo. There’s no hope of it lasting, of course. I’m leaving on the twenty-fourth for college and he’ll be going back to school. So we decided not to even call each other by our real names. He only calls me Cordelia. What a beautiful name. From King Lear. The most beautiful and the most loyal.
“And I call him by this name his family had given him . . .”
Sheila paged to the last entry: August 22.
They never knew if it was him or someone else. They could never locate him. But reading the name again brought everything back. As if it had all happened yesterday. As if it was happening all over again.
His name, like a knife piercing her heart, the name of the person who had cost her everything.
“Streak,” her daughter had written in that graceful, familiar script of hers.
That’s what she called him.
She wrote, “We’ll see how it goes. I’m going to meet Streak one last time.”