CHAPTER 1
THE STOLEN CHILD
Come away, O human child!
— WB Yeats
The glare of fluorescents on hospital-white walls burned through her eyelids. Behind the thin shades, she could just make out an image of memory, a flickering of moving film from the past recreated in her mind and projected into her present. This time she wasn't a participant but instead hovered above the drama, observing it. As she followed along with the memory, she waited for the moment just before it had all gone dim, and she watched as it unfolded all over again. There was the moment when her body spasmed, pushed back across the kitchen floor from the force of the blast; and she noticed, almost simultaneously, her spirit lift from its physical shell and move toward another too-white light. She followed her body's progression through space and time to this light. The intensity of it did not offend, not as the white sheen of hospital walls did. Instead, its power shimmered; it fascinated, entranced, invited her in. Her senses obliged its summons to explore, and she reached out for the light, moving forward into feeling. All the love she had ever known or could ever imagine embraced her in its emotional cocoon. Her mother's smell, her grandmother's touch — all the sensations of the familiar she had once believed were lost — became a part of her, and she saw herself, or some manifestation of herself, moving willingly toward the light's source and into its belly.
Until, that is, something in the far reaches of her consciousness tugged at her for attention. When her father's voice — dislocated, distant, connected to the kitchen-floor vigil in which her dream-self now saw him — soothed and then begged and then pleaded with her to stay with him, to return to him, she wavered in her forward motion into the light for just a moment. She fought against his pull; she clung to the light, to that feeling of all-consuming love. I'm sorry, she thought, an apology for his ache.
"Come back, sweetheart; please come back," she heard her father pray through tears. "You can't leave me too."
Traveling through his words, his pain met her on the journey, marking the gap between her feeling of weightless delight and an overpowering commitment to her father's earthbound love. She turned from the light, just for the smallest of moments, and saw her father's broken, pitiful face. No matter how much she wanted to continue onto and through the light, she couldn't shake her father's anguish, so she turned her back on the love that overwhelmed her senses. The spirit touch of her mother and grandmother and of friends and family, known and unknown, dropped from her as she stood still in a tunnel of retreating light and love, the light speeding from what had been a great vortex surrounding her to nothing but a pinprick in front of her. She felt the emptying of absolute joy from within and the cares and worries of the physical world returning. Her limbs grew heavy and dense as she stood on the threshold between there and here. And then he spoke the line that brought her fully back:
"God, don't take her. Don't leave me alone."
In the moment of his plea, the heavyheartedness of her physical existence now tarnished by the unspeakable fully returned. A feeling of being sucked into the physical plane through the end of a straw completed her journey back from light. Whirling, swirling though consciousness, she landed, finally, with a thud on the kitchen floor of her parents' half double as the paramedics worked to revive her. Only she felt and heard the thud. If it weren't for the easing, and eventual cessation, of the flatlined tone, neither perceptible sound nor movement would have accompanied her return. When the monitors, hooked to her every appendage, beeped out her reentry into the world, her father's heartbeat fell in line, beating in tandem with hers. His daughter's restarted heart had an effect on his, reviving what had stopped in all but the biological sense when he entered his own kitchen to the bodies of his little girl and his best friend in their separate but quickly merging pools of blood. The gun, she noticed in her replaying memory, lay just out of the grasp of the other man's hand even as the paramedics worked on her, not on him. The acrid smell of gunpowder lingered crisp in the air.
All this she remembered as she lay motionless in the hospital bed. All this she saw play out in her mind-movie as she struggled between conscious states, wondering not for the last time if any of it was possible, if any of it had truly happened, if she would ever be able to forget.
In time, the young girl struggled to bring the room into focus. Her father sat at the side of her bed, him a sharp contrast to the clean of the room in which she found herself. She looked at her father through slits, not yet ready to open her eyes fully, the effort of it too great. He was unshaven — dirty, even. It was so unlike him, meticulous in his appearance as he normally was. Red lines crisscrossed the whites of his Kelly-green eyes; swollen shades of gray held them in place on his face. His dark brown hair fell matted against his head under the old baseball hat — Phillies — that he had worn off and on since Steve Carlton pitched his three-hundredth win sometime in the early eighties. The hat, his daughter knew, was pulled out of semi-retirement whenever her father needed some luck. It looked like it had been on his head for days now, unmoved, its luck being tested.
"Daddy."
His look was one of confusion. He didn't know if he had wished the sound into the room or if his little girl had actually said it. Hope laid itself on his face.
"Daddy," she tried again.
The strain of the simple word on her was palpable; she suffered its formation in her throat as the sounds built themselves more from a croak than from speech. It was a word so often invoked by her before that, until that moment in the hospital room when it escaped her bruised, broken body, it had lost its magnificence and had become, for all intents and purposes, normal and ordinary. The simple word was nothing short of striking to her father now, and tears jutted straight out from his eyes as he recognized the importance of its expression to the continuation of his life.
"Oh, thank God," he choked out. "Thank you, God," he said, although he had never been one to pray. Instead, he was a man of poetry and had put his faith there. "Thank you," he called out again.
His little girl's eyes opened fully, just for a moment, and he saw another type of light: life. He had been waiting for it for an eternity of seconds since, after the tense moments of the ambulance ride and the hours-long operation, he had made it to her bedside. He spent hours at her side, holding her hand, wiping the sweat from her forehead, cleaning up the drool from around her lips, and rebuking himself over and over again for having left her on the night that the accident — as it would be called — happened. Because of his failure to protect her, she had to endure what no child should ever have to endure. "Only a few hours," he had told her that night. What could happen, he had thought at that time. But those few hours changed everything. Guilt and fear and pity consumed him in those days of vigil, keeping him company when his daughter couldn't. How different their lives seemed now as he moved toward her, unsure how to hold her, unsure how to touch her, unsure of what her eyes had seen and remembered. Nothing, he hoped.
Everything, he soon learned. She cringed when her father moved to touch her and turned from his kiss. While her movements weren't all that noticeable to most people, to her father, they were epic, and to the young girl too. She acted from reflex, not from desire. Her father's physicality had always been a place of comfort. She'd crawl up in his lap almost as soon as she could, and she'd snuggle deep into his chest. Although he was a thin-built man, he seemed a mountain to his little girl. When she pressed her head against his chest, she could hear the thump thump thump of his heart, and when he wrapped his arm around her back, the tick tick tick of his watch merged with his heartbeat in a comforting melody. She longed to feel her father's song again.
Over the next few days, her father's soft Irish rhythm repeated the words of Yeats's poetry over and over again, a mantra against facing the ugliness of what had happened to his little girl. He breathed out the melody of his home county without thought, without effort. And when he breathed out, his daughter breathed in. She heard his words even as she slept. "When you are old and gray and full of sleep," he murmured the start of one of her favorites, always one of her favorites. And later, "O heart! O heart! If she'd but turn her head, you'd know the folly of being comforted." As her father realized the irony of the poem to their own situation, he blushed. The poem disappeared from his repertoire.
She wanted to burrow into him and hear the rumble of his deep voice resonating in his chest, making its way into hers. But touch repulsed her now. Not his touch, but touch in general. Each time her father moved toward her, she flinched.
Try one more time, Daddy, she would think, but never say. She ached to be the girl she was before, his girl, and reclaim her safety in him.
Her father misunderstood. He chose to respect what he thought were her wishes rather than push his own on her. After a few more attempts on his part, he settled into a life without touch. Eventually touch in general became alien to the young girl. She sealed herself off from most people, including her father, and after a while, they existed separately in the same space, neither one knowing just how to breach the other's hurt.
The poetry of Yeats was the only bond, besides biology, between them now. The poet stood as the conduit between father and daughter, between daughter and the greater world. And, as the lonely little girl grew up, Yeats became for her a lifeline, a stand-in for life. She could interact with the greater world, not just her father, by quoting and studying and writing about Yeats. As she became a respected Yeats scholar, she learned to hide behind his words and images. She used him to be part of life without actually being part at all.
CHAPTER 2
THE CHOICE
The intellect of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life, or of the work.
— WB Yeats
As stomach cancer ravaged her mother, Maggie accepted a position at Penn State and returned the family to her childhood home in the States. They found themselves buried in the coal regions of Northeastern Pennsylvania, in a town populated by the descendants of the Irish immigrants from the previous century. Far from the rugged beauty of Ireland, the O'Connor home lay where slag heaps and culm banks, tall breakers and strip mines dotted the landscape, coating the surroundings with a semi-permanent layer of coal dust — gray and black and tactile. Only in hard rain would the dust layer dissolve, running off buildings, cars, and people in tiny rivers of soot onto the street, eddying down into the sewers. When the rain stopped, however, the coal powder veneer returned, a constant reminder of the mining process, the refuse of which swirled through the saturated air.
"You know, Mags," Kerry O'Connor would tease, "the O'Connors were the rulers of ancient Ireland. We have the blood of kings running through the lot of us."
"Kings, me ass," she'd tease him. "The O'Connors slipped a mighty long way since then."
"Be that as it may, darling, I'm not so sure that Pennsylvania is the appropriate place to revive the seat of our kingdom."
Sophie was almost thirteen when they made the move to the United States. By then, Maggie had begun to look into Yeats's life as a way to test her suspicions that he was actually her daughter's spirit guide. With her newfound knowledge, Maggie would quiz Sophie, who would, in turn, quiz her spirit guide. Each affirmation encouraged Maggie to move further into her quest, until it finally turned from a quest to an obsession. And so Maggie kept on, a detective on the trail of something completely new, closing in on the ultimate answer with each new tidbit of information. She filled notebooks with facts about Yeats's life and fragments of his poems, pieces of his plays, and snippets of his speeches. When she stepped back to peruse her work, Maggie was surprised by the amount and quality of it. Never one to waste research, Maggie decided to turn her personal exploration of Yeats into a professional windfall.
Maggie wanted to figure out what made the great Irish poet tick. But she wanted to get at the man, not just his poetry. Her goal was to create a characterization of Yeats that would breathe a bit of humanity back into the static icon that he had become. Besides, Maggie had developed a bit of a crush on the imperfectly handsome and long-dead Irish poet, something she passed onto Sophie.
She settled on writing a novel about Yeats, a novel that would highlight the whole person, not just the scattered pieces of his persona and genius. All the other books were an effort to aid in the analyses of his poetry, not him. So she began reading everything she could about the poet: the biographies and letters, the scholarly analyses, his plays, and his poetry. She spoke to Yeats experts and wrote to his relatives. And when her own daughter had something intriguing to say about Yeats, Maggie wrote it down as well. After a while, Maggie began to ask what she wanted to know.
"Soph, ask Willie what his brother's name was."
"Jack," Sophie would answer, not skipping a beat.
"That's right."
"And his sisters were Lily and Lolly, but Lolly's real name was Elizabeth."
As Maggie's confidence in her daughter's answers grew, the questions became more complex.
"Soph, why did Willie write poetry?"
Sophie would launch into a long and often convoluted explanation that involved Willie's belief that he was tapping into another dimension with his poetry. While this explanation was hardly unknown among creative types, Maggie was astounded that her thirteen-year-old could handle such a philosophical point.
"For God's sake, Mags," Kerry would admonish her from time to time. "She's our daughter, not a creature to be studied. Leave her alone, will ya?"
"But listen to the answers, Kerry. They're incredible."
"I don't mind, Dad," Sophie would chime in.
"You're both nuts," he'd finally relent.
Maggie began to daydream Yeats back to life. She spoke to him through Sophie and swore that, at least in her mind, he responded. She wrote everything down and discussed it all with her daughter. Sophie too began to believe that it was possible to reincarnate Yeats with her own thoughts just as her mother had. By this time in her young life, Sophie had a large canon of Yeats's work committed to memory. She didn't have to work at it; instead, it came naturally, the result of an established routine of reciting it from childhood. Sophie's father continued to quote the poet as well. And when her mother started her obsessive quest, Sophie accepted William Butler Yeats as surely and naturally as one might accept an unmarried uncle who lives and dines and interacts with the family on a regular basis. The fact that Yeats was dead never seemed to concern Sophie.
Eventually Maggie bumped into the esoteric work of Yeats. It fascinated her, and, in a strange way, provided confirmation about her own understanding of the spirit world. The connection between her gifts and Yeats's interests so intrigued Maggie that she carried her new research to the dinner table one night as her daughter worked on algebra and her husband worked on paying the mortgage.
"Kerry," Maggie breathed out excitedly, "did you know the man was into magic?"
"Haven't you read his poetry, dear?" Kerry teased, his right eye cocked.
"Spells and cauldrons, wands and tarot cards. No kidding."
Kerry wasn't as shocked as Maggie had been. The Pollexfen family, everyone in Sligo knew, were great astrologers. Kerry's own great-grandfather worked with Yeats's uncle, George Pollexfen, to read the stars, and he knew that other family members worked as psychics in and around the town.
"You're not listening," Maggie accused Kerry; she could tell, however, that her daughter's interest was piqued.
"His mother's family was into astrology, Mags. The Pollexfens were great readers."
"But did they wield magic spells and talk to spirits?"
"Shut up," Sophie added breathlessly. "Willie talked to the dead? Like me?"
"Not him, but Georgie did. She was into automatic writing."
Maggie explained to her daughter the occult practice of automatic writing, in which a practitioner puts pen to paper and, without thought on the writer's part, messages appear in script.
"It was the work of spirits, and they really believed it. And Georgie spoke to WB as she wrote the messages to prove that she wasn't making it up."
"Who's Georgie?" Sophie asked.
"His wife, darling," Kerry explained.
