She sat at the end of the chaise and rested her hands on the blanket. “Oh, Grandy. Is it … are you afraid?”

He hesitated. “I am sometimes, when the confusion is so very intense and I don’t know what is real and what isn’t.”

“I’m sorry. How can I help?”

“Being here, in my place in the world—that is the help I need.” He gestured around the garden. “This is where I played as a little boy. Where I lived with Blythe and made a swing for you when you were a little girl. Where I used to sit and hold hands with May Lin. And now it’s where I spend time with a book, enjoying the autumn sunshine.” He covered her hand with his. “Help me remember the important things,” he said. “I don’t want to forget all the love in my life.”

“If you do, I’ll remember for you.” She tried to speak lightly, forcing the words past the ache in her throat. “And now, there is this.” She picked up the shipping box and opened the lid. “The scanned copies are back. I thought we could read Colleen’s story together.”

“I’d like that,” he said. “You’ll have to do the reading, though. I find the handwriting hard to decipher.”

“So do I,” she said. “But I’ll give it a shot. The archivist put things in what he thought was chronological order.”

He put up his feet and settled back on the wicker chaise. “Let’s begin, then.”

PART FIVE

Try to be conspicuously accurate in everything, pictures as well as text. Truth is not only stranger than fiction, it is more interesting.

—WILLIAM RANDOLPH HEARST

22

My name is Colleen O’Rourke. I am fifteen years old, and all alone in this world. This is a record of my days, as I live them. In the year of our Lord 1887, Mam lost another babe after Michaelmas, and Declan took his vows, and Da came home from the ropeworks with ill news. There was no more work for him. The great starvation was upon us. It was determined that we would go to America—Da and Mam, and the two little ones, Tristan and Liam. Da’s brotherhood, Clan na Gael, had a group in San Francisco called the Knights of the Red Branch. That was our destination.

Such tales we heard, this land of milk and honey, much of it nonsense as I am fast discovering.

Thanks to Da’s skill as a deckhand, he traded work for passage to New York City on the Mary Dare, and we made the crossing, a treacherous business to be sure.