Born of Earth

PROLOGUE

I have never been a diary kind of girl. Yet here I sit, laptop open, fingers flying. I’m imagining you are my future child or grandchild. It helps to think we’re related and that maybe these words will help you.

It’s the end of the most mind-blowing, disruptive, life-changing summer of my life. I am not sure how I would have managed to compute the happenings and changes I faced these past two months without the scribblings of an ancestor. And with that, I have become… a diary girl.

In a few days, I shall see my best friends – friends who have become my family. I haven’t decided how to tell them what happened to me, who I have become, what I am. I’m still trying to figure that out myself. I don’t want to spook them, especially with what I’ve learned about Saltford, our hometown. I guess I’ll worry about that when time comes. For now… I shall go back. Back to the evening I last saw them, and back to a place of blissful ignorance.

 

CHAPTER 1

I closed the front door and leaned back against it, sighing. Alone again. Our gigantic foyer echoed with the sound of my footsteps as I crossed the marble expanse in my Jimmy Choo flip flops, past our restaurant sized but mostly unused kitchen, through our quadruple sliding patio doors and into our perfectly-kept-by- complete-strangers back yard.

I dumped the melted ice from four used iced-tea glasses, stacked them, and folded the blankets, still warm from the bodies of my best friends – Targa, Saxony, and Akiko. They were gone. Gone for the summer. Our goodbyes had been said.

These are the girls who know that all it takes to make me cry is a video of a horse running in slow motion – I’m not kidding – the waterworks just start. These are the girls who know how to get me laughing so hard I get cramps. These are the girls that know that I left anonymous love notes inside the shoe of Gregory Handler in Grade 4.

A hollow feeling buckled my knees. The familiar metallic glint of loneliness soured in my mouth and I plopped down in one of the deck chairs. The dark sky, so beautiful in its star-spackled glory while my friends were here, now looked like it was going to swallow me in its cold gaping maw. I stared into the dying embers. The insects had stopped singing and the fire had run out of heat. Silence stuffed my ears in one of those moments where you wonder if you’ve actually gone deaf. The dwindling fire gave a snap and confirmed I hadn’t lost my hearing, just my besties for the summer.

The grinding hum of our garage door alerted me that Liz was home. Liz was about to get some happy news. Targa’s last-minute opportunity to go to Poland with her mom meant that I’d be leaving too. Decision made. Ireland, here I come. I hadn’t been planning on leaving. It had been ten years since I’ve been to visit my Aunt Faith, she’s practically a stranger. Then again, so is Liz. So what’s the differ‐ ence? Stay home in Saltford with my laptop? Or get on a plane and visit the emerald isle for the summer.

I loaded my arms with the blankets and took them inside the house. “Liz?” I closed the patio door behind me with my toes.

“In here, Poppet,” she answered from her home office, in her manufactured aristocratic English accent. Poppet. Why is it that when a term of endearment isn’t delivered with any actual affection it sounds like you’re calling a barnyard animal? Perhaps a piglet?

I dumped the smoky blankets in the laundry hamper and padded down our plushly-carpeted hallway, silent as a panther. I swear you could drop a dead body down our stairs and you wouldn’t hear a thing. Targa takes off her socks just so she can feel the thick softness of our carpet with her toes. I can’t bring myself to do the same, I hate the feeling of bare feet. My soles are too sensitive. Every little piece of dirt, pokey bit of carpet, or blade of grass feels magnified.

“Hey,” I poked my head into Liz’s office. She was already pecking away rapid-fire on her laptop, a stack of file folders at her right hand, her Prada bi-focals perched on the end of her nose. Her hair looked like it hadn’t budged since she left at 5:45 on the nose this morning. “Got a minute?”

“Just. What is it?” She didn’t look up from the keyboard, her fingers flew faster if that was possible. Any moment now, they could start smoking.

“I’m going to go to Ireland for the summer. Like you wanted.”

That got her attention. She looked up, lines creased her forehead as she peered over her glasses, her bionic fingers momentarily paused. “You are? What happened, I thought you and Targa were going to hang out, camp, that sort of thing. Isn’t that what you said last week? I’m sure that’s what you said.”

Camp? I hate camping. Seriously?

She took off her glasses and put the end bit in her mouth. I could see the gears turning, the drawers of files opening and closing in her mind as she searched for the most up to date information. “Did you and Targa have a falling out?”

Targa and I never fight. If Liz had ever observed us together or ever asked me anything about my best friend, she’d know that.

“No. Targa is going to Poland, last minute decision. No point in me hanging about the house by myself all summer. I thought you’d be happy.” I stepped inside and sat in one of the two matching leather chairs facing her desk, like a client. I crossed my legs and folded my hands in my lap. Might as well play the part, make her feel at home. My physical sarcasm was lost on her.

“I am happy, Poppet. That’s great. Call Denise on Monday and she’ll set you up with flights. She’s updated your passport already, so you’re good to go.” She put her glasses on and attacked her keyboard again.

Denise is Liz’s secretary. She makes sure I don’t miss a dental cleaning, a haircut or a manicure (I don’t do pedicures. Ugh.) They all happen like clockwork. Thanks Denise.

“Are you going to talk to Aunt Faith? I mean, she already said I can come, right?”

Liz didn’t look up. “Yes, Poppet. She’s good with it. Denise will settle everything with her next week. She’ll even pick you up from the train station. Faith, not Denise, obviously.” Liz was especially adept at clarity-to-go. It’s a lawyer thing.

“I have to take a train?”

“Fly to Dublin, train to Anacullough. You don’t remember?” Type.

Type. Type.

“I was seven.”

“Denise will explain, it’s easy. Ireland’s public transport is excellent.”

“Excellent.” I watched her type. I cleared my throat.

She blinked up at me, then back down. “You’ll have fun. Jasher will be there too, your cousin. You’ll have a friend to play with.”

Wow. Did she really just say that I’d have a friend to play with?

What was I, three? “What’s he like?”

She frowned. “I don’t know, never met him. You know that. I’m sure he’s lovely.”

“Well, how old is he? I know he’s older than me but by how much?

What does he do? Is he a baseball kind of guy, or a movie-buff?”

She blinked. I’d bewildered her with these questions about her adopted nephew. She wasn’t prepared. She hated not being prepared. “Ah,” she said, holding up a finger. She opened one of her many desk drawers. Rummaged. Closed the drawer. Opened another one. Rummaged. She pulled out a stack of envelopes wrapped with an elastic band. She plopped them on the edge of her desk with a thwack and set her shoulders back triumphantly. “There you are.”

“What are these?” I crossed the expanse to her desk and picked up the stack of letters. Elegant handwritten scrawl. Postmarked from Ireland.

“Letters from your Aunt Faith. Once you’ve read those you’ll know everything I know about Jasher, and you’ll be all caught up on the goings on over there,” she waved her fingers as though doing a spell. Embarrassment magically averted.

“Looks like I’ll know more than you, Liz.” I thumbed through the stack. “Half of these aren’t even open.”

“Good!” She looked up and flashed me one last winning smile.

“Good,” I echoed. I stood there for a moment, bathing in the sound of typing. In her mind, I was gone already. “Ok, I’m going to go numb myself with technology now.”

She glanced up as briefly as blinking. “Ok, Poppet. Have fun.” I left, the carpet muffling the sound of my exit.

 

 

CHAPTER 2 

My room looked like a bomb had gone off. I was sitting on my bedroom floor, suitcase open, stacks of clothes around me sitting in ‘yes’, ‘no’, and ‘maybe’ piles. I kept checking the weather in Ireland and trying to pack appropriately. So far, all I had learned was that Irish weather in summer was as predictable as the stock market. Layers it would be.

The stack of letters on my dresser caught my eye. I had packing fatigue anyway so I pushed myself up from cross-legged, unfolding myself on stork legs. I grabbed the stack and went to make a cappuc‐ cino from our one-of-a-kind espresso machine. Liz had imported it from Naples. It looks like a spaceship.

I sat in our bright, airy kitchen, with only the sound of the ticking clock for company. I took a sip of my frothy drink and pulled the elastic off the stack of letters. The rubber band broke, snapping against my fingers. Guess these letters had been in that drawer for a while. At least Liz was kind enough to stack them chronologically before she hid them away from the light for all eternity. I shook my head as I shuffled through the letters, the majority with unbroken seals. No wonder Faith had stopped writing. Why bother?

There was no word of Jasher until several letters in. So far, it was  mostly about her work as a nurse and then her struggles with the medical establishment, her desire to change occupations. She espoused a strong wish to bring together modern technology and ‘ancient wisdom’, she called it.

I came across a photograph of the property in Ireland. It looked exactly as I remembered. The Victorian house that Faith and Liz referred to as Sarasborne was old but well kept, white with sage trim. There was something regal about that house. The yard was severely manicured – topiaries perfectly trimmed, closely clipped grass, well pruned shrubs and carefully monitored borders of domestic flowers in alternating colours.

According to Liz, my grandmother Roisin (pronounced Rosheen) had been a clean-freak inside the house, and my grandfather Padraig (Patrick) had been a rabid gardener on the outside, wielding his control over nature like a dictator. It showed in the organized perfec‐ tion of every detail of the yard.

The date on the back of the photo was 2000, the year after I’d been born and the year my grandfather had passed away. Our family had been whole at that point and we had gone to Ireland together for the funeral. I don’t remember anything about the trip. The next time we’d gone was for my grandmother’s funeral. I had never gotten to know my grandparents very well, but I was sufficiently aggrieved for the visit because my dad had just abandoned us.

Liz and Brent had divorced the year before, but had agreed on joint-custody. Turned out my dad didn’t even want that because in less than a year he was gone in a puff of cigarette smoke, leaving only a cell phone number for emergencies. Liz was never the same. She tried to be a good mom, for a while. But then she threw herself into work, made partner, and that, as they say, was that.

I scanned more letters: Faith offering moral support to Liz, inviting her to come back and live at home. Suggesting they could raise me together in Ireland. She admitted to being lonely, to having a few suitors but none were ‘the one’. I was feeling drowsy when Faith finally wrote something interesting about witnessing a medical mira‐ cle. A patient had died in childbirth, but the baby had been saved.

Never have I seen such a thing, she wrote. By all that is  medically  sound, this child should not be alive. His father christened him Jasher.

There he was – the first mention of my adopted cousin. If he had a father, how did he end up with my Aunt? I read on, supposing that a tragedy had claimed his dad as well. But there was no mention of Jasher for the next several years. I scanned, looking for his name.

The next letter dumped two photographs into my lap. The first was of Faith squatting on grass and holding a small boy in her lap. On the back of the photograph was written Faith & Jasher, summer 2004. I studied the boy. He was lean and lanky, dark skinned, dark eyed, and dark haired. In spite of all the sun he was obviously getting, he looked like someone had just shot his puppy. Haunted expression. No smile. Circles of sleeplessness under his eyes.

The second photograph was of Jasher alone. A little older, he was standing next to a fountain. Taller, still scrawny and still with those tortured eyes.

I know you’ll be shocked to your core, Liz. But I’ve taken the decision to adopt Jasher. His father never really recovered from the loss of Maud, and seems now incapable (by his own admission) of raising the lad. He and I have yet to settle the paperwork, which will be arduous, but Jasher is already living with me, and seems to be in better spirits. Faith’s tone was formal, always skimming the surface.

I continued to read, sniffing for clues like a hound. Jasher had a hard time in the school in Anacullough. He didn’t make friends easily. He wasn’t sleeping, and he faced every day with dread. Faith finally took him out of school for a year and hired a tutor to home-school him while she continued to work. She wrote that Jasher’s health improved after that, he slept better and seemed happier. She admitted to being concerned about his hermit tendencies, as he never liked to go anywhere. He was always outdoors, working in the yard, but he didn’t like to leave the property.

I had finally hit the last letter in the stack. My eyes were taken by a picture of a faerie on the back of the envelope. It had yellow hair and yellow wings that looked damp and crinkled. I peered closer, and ran the pad of my thumb over it. The drawing had been done by hand,  probably with pencil crayons, and it was very well done. The little fae face was sleepy and realistic, not cartoonish in any way. “Huh,” I said. Faith had some artistic skill.

What I had learned so far was that Jasher was a social recluse but as he had grown he had found his stride. He had a taste for horticul‐ ture, landscaping, and carpentry. He was as outdoorsy as they come.

Another photograph fell out from between the two pages and landed face down on the floor. Scrawled on the back in Faith’s neat handwriting was Jasher Sheehan, Summer 2013. He was officially sporting the name Sheehan. He would have been 16. I picked it up and turned it over.

I’d like to think that I can see deeper than a pretty face, but I’ll admit that I dropped an inadvertent ‘Holy wow’.

Faith and Jasher posed in front of a wooden gazebo, his arm around her shoulders. For the first time, there was a smile on his face. The man in the photograph looked like a completely different person than the boy in earlier letters. He towered over Faith. He wore a plain white t-shirt and a pair of jeans. Bare feet poked out from under the frayed denim hems. His shoulders stretched the fabric of his shirt and a muscled arm draped over Faith’s neck. The other arm was propped over the railing of the gazebo. A tanned hand curled around one of the posts, the fingers square and the nails bluntly cut. A baseball cap turned backwards covered thick brown curls and his head was tilted up towards the light. His dark eyes were half closed. His white teeth shone starkly from his tanned face. The shadow of a black beard played about his jaw. He looked twenty-five, not sixteen. He looked like a toothpaste ad, not a hermit. He looked like a hale and hearty farm boy, not a recluse.

This was the guy I’d be spending the summer with? I gulped. He was too perfect for words.

This photograph was three years old already. What was he like now? I stacked the letters as they had been but kept the photo of Jasher and Faith. I found a fresh elastic to bind them. I threw them into Liz’s office drawer and went back to my room. I tucked the photo into the corner of my corkboard and looked at it thoughtfully. I was swept through by a desire to know Jasher and Faith, and maybe figure out why my mom had distanced herself from her family so much.

Knowing Liz, Faith would have not had a single reply to any of those letters. Maybe a couple of the early ones, but certainly none since she’d made partner. If Faith was lucky, she would have received a digital Christmas card (sent via Denise) but that’s about it.

Jasher knew I existed for sure, but he’d know hardly anything about me. How did he feel about having his cousin come and stay for the summer? Was he still painfully shy, the way Faith described him in his youth? Would we get along?

I turned back to my packing. I picked up a pretty teal summer dress which I had tossed into the ‘no’ pile because I thought it was more for a tropical destination. I held it up thoughtfully. It did look cute on me, maybe even sexy. I folded it and put it on the ‘yes’ pile.