C.E. Murphy - Raven Calls

She took a breath, but let it go again after a long few seconds and murmured, “It wouldn’t be mattering.” I imagined she’d just decided not to pursue a whole litany of questions, trusting that the modern world’s fascinating ways required no approval or understanding on her part. If she could accept them on any level at all, she was doing very well. I nodded and kept my mouth shut as I drove us to the graveyard. Méabh didn’t need any of my smart-ass side commentary to distract her from coping.

We got out of the car and I said, “Hey, wait up,” before we headed in. She glanced at me and I gestured at her clothes. “You sort of stand out. Maybe you should…”

Wear some of my clothes was the only way that sentence could end, but Méabh was the tallest woman I’d ever met. My shirts would stop halfway down her rib cage. My jeans would look like pedal pushers on her. There was no chance any of my shoes would fit her at all, so she’d have to leave the leather boots and greaves in place anyway. I gave up before I’d really begun, and dug the carry-on suitcase out of the car’s backseat as I said, “You should just keep right on standing out.”

Méabh, legendary warrior queen of Ireland, gave me a wink and a smile and strode past me into the graveyard.

Past a young woman on her way out, too. The girl lifted her eyes, gawked, tripped over her own feet and kept herself upright with a hand on a gravestone. I winced an apologetic greeting as I scurried by in Méabh’s wake.

A few seconds later, the girl called an incredulous, “Joanne?”

Méabh and I both stopped. She turned toward me curiously, and domino-like, I turned toward the girl, though not so much curiously as with a sinking heart. She was probably a decade my junior, had fire-engine-red hair as short as mine and a slightly too-chubby-for-hourglass figure. Probably baby fat. She’d grow out of it in another year or two and be very attractive.

As far as I was concerned I’d never seen her before. Her gaze flickered from Méabh to me, back to Méabh and then, with a Herculean effort, back to me, where it stayed. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

“Um. Well, no. Sorry.” She almost had to be related. I hadn’t met anybody in Ireland I wasn’t related to, which was more commentary on my limited social circle than the interconnected families on a tiny island. But I was pretty sure I’d remember that hair, and none of my cousins had worn that style or color.

“Caitríona,” she said. “Caitríona O’Reilly? Sheila’s oldest niece?”

Caitríona was one of those names a bit like Siobhán. To my English-language eyes, it looked like Cat-ree-OH-nah. It was in fact pronounced Katrina, which was most of why I remembered her at all. I blurted, “Oh! I didn’t recognize you! Your hair was—” I waved at the middle of my back. “And you were—”

“Shorter,” she supplied, which probably kind of covered the same ground I’d been going to cover with “rounder.” “Yeh.” She brushed a hand over her shorn locks. “Forgot that, so I did. I liked yours.”

I clutched my own hair, as if it had changed colors without warning. “I’ve never dyed mine.”

“Sure and I couldn’t have them all sayin’ I was trying to be like the American cousin, could I. Especially after—” Her jaw snapped shut, but I could fill in the blanks easily enough. Especially after I’d cold-shouldered everybody. Especially after I’d left on the next flight after the funeral.

Especially after, and this was the part they didn’t know, I’d been in large part responsible for my own mother’s death. In my limited defense, it had been her decision, but I’d made a lot of bad choices over the years that forced her hand toward that decision. I’d thought at the time that the woman had basically decided she was done living and had willed herself to death, which seemed pretty extreme for someone in her early fifties. I’d discovered later that yeah, she’d done exactly that, all in the name of making sure I stayed alive.

And now she was a banshee and I owed her every chance I could take to free her from that. I wasn’t exactly close with my Irish family to begin with, but I seriously doubted I’d win any friends if all of the sordid details about what I was doing there came out.

“What are you doing here?” Caitríona demanded. “And who’s that?”

That, of course, was Méabh, who required far more explanation than I was prepared to offer. After barely an instant’s consideration, I shrugged. “That’s Méabh. Méabh, this is my cousin Caitríona.”

“Méabh,” Caitríona said, and laid the accent on thick. “Av carse it is.”

“We’ve come to lay your auntie’s bones to rest,” Méabh said as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. “This is grand so, three of our bloodline to do the job. We couldn’t ask for better.”

Caitríona’s expression went peculiar. She said, “I’ve never heard an accent like that,” in English, then said something else to Méabh in Irish. It became instantly clear to me that Méabh had been speaking Irish all along, because Caitríona sounded more or less like Méabh did if I listened hard to the words and not to what my magic told me she was saying. Bizarrely, though, I couldn’t understand a word Cat said in Irish.

Worse, I then couldn’t understand Méabh when she answered. I made a strangled noise and waved my hands. “English, please, Caitríona. I can’t understand Méabh if you speak Irish. I mean, I can’t understand you, either, but—English. Please? Just English?”

“I only wanted to know if she’d learned Irish in the Donegal Gaeltachs.” Caitríona shrugged, then did something with her face that reminded me of me. It was this little quirk of her mouth, a tightening of the skin around her eyes, a tensing of the nostrils, all of it minute body language I’d felt myself do a thousand times. It indicated that she’d been ignoring the completely outrageous thing Méabh had said until it made some kind of sense in her own head, except the making sense part wasn’t happening so she might as well bite the bullet and ask.

I couldn’t decide if it was creepy or fascinating to see all of that on somebody else’s face. Especially somebody I barely knew. She also looked like she very much wished she could say two things at the same time as she opted for, “Lay me auntie’s bones to rest?”

That was the one I probably would have chosen, too. The whole bloodline thing was a little much to take a run at. But before I had a chance to explain, Cat said, “It’s just after fifteen months we’ll be doing that.”

My American-English brain cramped. Caitríona’s statement was a perfectly accurate comment on what was about to happen, but what she, the Irish-English speaker, meant, was that they’d done that fifteen months ago. I’d forgotten the peculiar direction sentences landed from in Ireland. I vowed to listen harder to what she meant and to focus less on how she said it. “There was a mix-up at the mortuary. I thought if I just came and dealt with it myself it would be less upsetting.”

It almost sounded plausible. Almost, except the part where no local undertaker would have called the American daughter instead of the extensive Irish family, which Caitríona’s expression indicated clearly. “Look,” I said a bit too loudly, and before she could speak, “look, just go with it, okay? And really, Méabh might be right but you’ll be happier if you just head on home and forget you saw us. What’re you doing here, anyway?” That was not a tactic to make her leave. I wanted to kick myself again.

“Sheila liked the old holidays. The solstices and Beltane and all. I come to put flowers on her grave at each of them, but I was away to Dublin for the Saint Patrick’s Day crack so only could come this morning.” Caitríona looked hard between me and Méabh, then crossed her arms under her breasts. “I think I’ll be staying.”