United States Weather Bureau
SEPTEMBER 9th, 1938
Shipping data reporting tropical cyclone south of the Cape Verde Islands in the eastern Atlantic. Further monitoring to follow as necessary.
AS THE HEAT of the summer dissipates, the tourists close up their beach huts and holiday homes and return to their jobs and brownstone apartment buildings. Shorts and sneakers are swapped for collared shirts and heels as the carefree summer months become a series of fading memories captured in photographs on desks in the skyscraper office blocks and typing pools of the city. I watch them go with a sense of contentment, knowing that I am the lucky one who gets to stay. Even better, I get to share it all with my beautiful daughter, Grace, named for the woman who, in many ways, saved us all.
I still can’t believe she is mine; that I get to keep her.
Harriet has agreed not to write to my mother since I am still a full month away from my time. “There’s no need for her to know yet,” she says. “Have this time to yourself. Hide away if you like. There’ll be time enough for other people to give opinions and advice.”
To have discovered the truth about Harriet being my birth mother should have thrown everything upside down, and yet it only seems to have set things to right. Like a house stripped of tasteless wallpaper and cleared of mismatched furniture, the space I inhabit finally makes sense. To learn that it was Harriet who had passed on the locket and the lighthouse manual completes the puzzle of the inscription to Grace Rose in the book. It is a wonder they were ever given to me at all.
“When I found them packed into the old tea chest we’d brought from Ireland, I sent them to Constance with a letter,” Harriet had told me one evening. “I explained the family tradition of passing them on to the next generation, and what it would mean to me to know you had them. I can’t say I really believed she would give them to you. I suppose she did that much right, at least.”
Harriet’s revelations make sense of the distance I’ve always felt from Constance Emmerson. Perhaps I should feel angry about all the years of lies and fabrication, but in the flush of motherhood, I feel only pity for her. She’d never bonded with me because she’d never felt my kicks and tumbling turns, or worried about me as she lay in bed at night, or felt the agony of labor, or the exhausted ecstasy of holding her child in her arms. Constance took me into her home with the same emotional connection as a new sofa for the sitting room. A child was something she coveted, something she must have to keep up with everyone else, something she believed would fix the distance she felt toward her husband. But I was not the solution to her faltering marriage, nor to her fragile sense of self-worth, or to any of the other failings she tried to pin on my tiny shoulders. None of it was my fault after all.
Like a hermit crab casting off an old shell and finding a new one to inhabit, I adapt to the role of motherhood with surprising ease. For the first time in my life, I have found something I can do well. The maternal instincts I’d feared would be lacking rush forward in enormous waves of affection and worry. When I hold little Grace in my arms I feel the deep bonds of love I have craved all my life. Finding my mother and becoming a mother in the same intense moment has affected me profoundly.
We settle into our own rhythm, Harriet, Grace, and I. Harriet dotes on the child and I am grateful for her experience and advice and the long hours in the night when she takes over to let me rest. I sleep well, safe in the knowledge that my daughter is in my mother’s arms, all of us cocooned in the embrace of the lighthouse on Rose Island. They are, without question, some of the happiest times of my life.
On warmer days, I push Grace’s pram to the little beach at the north end of the island where I sit and watch the breakers and think about fate and destiny and the people we have in our lives and the people we don’t. I think a lot about Cora, the sister I’d always sensed I was missing. I think of how easily our lives could have been swapped and who I might be now if I’d been the one to stay with Harriet. What might I have become if I’d grown up here? Questions without answers. All I know is that fate chose me to be the one to stay in Ireland, from where my daughter brought me back to my mother. Rebellion might have led me here, but courage, determination and love will see me stay.
Grace coos and gurgles on the blanket beside me. I lift her into my arms, rocking her in time to the rush and whisper of the sea. Harriet says I will have the child ruined, forever picking her up and carrying her around. I don’t care. I scoop her up, savoring the feathery weight of her in my arms, delighting in her squirms and snuffles and the sweet nutty smell of her. I wonder who she will become, this surprise child of mine. Where she will go. It is in these quiet moments that I plan our adventures together, determined to be everything to Grace that my mother wasn’t to me, determined to let her know how much I love her and that whatever storms might arrive, we will weather them together.