Author’s Note: Written for the September 25, 2021 Anniversary Challenge at CABB ~ New Chambers. The theme … Who Said That? The objective … to “borrow” a favorite iconic line from the original speaker and give it to someone else to say in a new setting and for a different purpose.

You will find all the submissions to that Challenge HERE.

* * *

And so may a slow
Wind work these words
Of love around you,
An invisible cloak
To mind your life.

                  ~ John O’Donohue

She made her way along Greenwich Avenue, gladder than glad she’d spent the summer patching together an extra-heavy winter cloak. The brightest fabrics she could find – greens and yellows, reds and blues, stripes and plaids and great blocks of color – seemed better able to ward off the January cold, better than plains and drabs, even though The Father encouraged subdued and inconspicuous for forays up top. She wasn’t hiding, didn’t have to. It wasn’t like she was walking down Fifth Avenue. This was The Village. Nobody looked twice.

She kept her head down though. The sidewalk was salt and slush under her boots, and the edges were hillocks of gritty snow hiding rubble and rubbish willing to trip her up. A roasty-toasty steam roiled from the beer cellars every time a door opened to the street, end-of-day, had enough’a all this hail-fellow-shouts surging out, sometimes a huffer-puffer red-faced boozer well into in his cups. She’d been bowled over before, ended up flat on her bum.

A week ago, the strangest thing … puddled on the concrete, folks blowin’ around her like she was mud to avoid, a woman held out her hand to help. Came outta nowhere, seemed like. She looked like an angel standing there, long red-gold hair a-wave in the icy wind, eyes a summer sky blue, skin as pale as a milky crystal. Heavy with child, she was, the baby carried low, low … soon to come. And her touch, the angel-lady’s … If light had a feel, that’s how she’d describe it … if she told anybody, which she hadn’t and wasn’t going to. She’d taken a moment to steady herself, re-shoulder her foraging bag, re-settle her cloak, and when she went to say thanks, maybe offer her own kind of help, the lady was gone, like she never was.

Her eyes might be giving her problems, but her senses weren’t. She still felt the energy of their contact, their … communication. Her helper’s voice was iridescent, like black opals – a play-of-colors, emerald pin-fire and cobalt broad-flash within a night-dark forever … And she’d never forget the woman’s only words – Mo sheacht mbeannacht ort – even if she didn’t understand them.

If she ever saw her again, she’d just out and out ask what they meant.

The only good thing she could say about the weather? It wasn’t as bad as the day before’s. And the day before that … even worse, the coldest, blowing-est she could remember … hardly any difference between midnight and noon. What on earth possessed Anna to venture out before its dawn, the snow blowing in sideways. Why that journey to that end? The questions might have been the first words off her lips if she hadn’t seen.

She crossed over 11th Street at 7th Avenue, navigated the smaller than usual crowd waiting at the crosswalk at 12th … but too slowly for someone behind her, someone with somewhere they had to be, had to be now. Somebody crowding her right and left, on this elbow, on that, before barreling past with a foggy grumble.

Get a move on, will ya?

Not the angel-lady talking this time.

Doin’ my best, she didn’t bother saying.

A line of poetry came back to her from one of their evening gatherings. The Father reading to those who’d circled around him in the candlelight. Miles to go before I sleep … Felt like miles for sure. Guessed it was. Only a few city blocks between the secret doorway off Sullivan Street, between Washington Square and St. Vincent’s, but then back again … then below.

Had Anna planned to return? Was hers a farewell wandering or did she choose the hospital’s grounds with an inner cry for help? Was she led somehow, called to the hideaway? In the end, who saved who?

It isn’t the end, though, is it.

She passed the window with the arrow and the Free Clinic sign taped to it, turned into the alley like she did every Friday late-afternoon. The hospital’s charity infirmary officially closed an hour earlier, but Doctor Peter volunteered to stay late, just him, every week, to watch for stragglers. Anybody looking would say she qualified. She’d bet good money on that … if she had any.

It wasn’t their first rendezvous; she’d been making the trip on her own for a while now. But she missed her scrounging companion. She’d enjoyed the summer Fridays in the park with Anna, taking to a bench, listening to whatever musician or poet was holding forth on the wading pool’ concrete steps. Sometimes they’d bring Devin, let him toddle around in the sun until it was time to set out for the hospital. Two carry bags between them, they could rummage for other treasures along the way and still have room for whatever medical supplies Peter might have saved back.

But then Anna lost her baby. Walking might have been healing for her, but John wouldn’t let her out of his sight after, let alone up top. Wouldn’t let her be. Monitored every bite she took, concocted teas and tinctures he watched her swallow. Bad enough him not believing the blood, not acknowledging her tears, he’d taken to weighing and measuring her, chastising her failure to gain, and now … now he was hounding her to–

Well, she’d be talking to Peter about that.

He opened the service door before she’d even had the chance to poke around in the bins and barrels of trash still piled up at the alley, just like Anna said. Stacks of bulging cardboard boxes, paper sacks stuffed full, some half-busted crates. Any normal day she’d be thinking … fruit – lemons goin’ bad maybe, maybe oranges. Maybe some old medical magazines for The Father’s collection if they weren’t too wet and smudged. Worth a look. Almost every cast-off thing was.

She believed that … now more than ever.

But normal … She just shook her head at the thought.

Like normal, though, Peter had a package in his hands for her, wrapped and taped. Hit or miss what might be inside since the young docs working the clinic donated supplies and medicines from their own offices. Depending, too, on how many patients they’d have treated that day and for what. It’s not much, he always said. I’d just have trouble carrying it if it were heavier, she always answered when he apologized for not being able to help more.

‘Course, Peter was the first person The Father wanted below, once Anna got back with the child. The only other person helping. The only other person who knew … yet.

We must keep this private – people are terribly afraid of what they don’t understand, The Father said, with John nodding while he loomed over Anna in the chair, the babe in her arms. We can’t risk sending a messenger. Narcissa, you go, please. If I know Peter, he’s early to work. 6 AM. Be waiting. Explain … what you can. Relay our need. Guide him down.

The Father knew his friend well. She’d arrived even earlier to find a light on in the second-floor office she knew to be his. A single pebble tossed brought him to the window. A few running seconds brought him to the door, medical bag in hand. The only delay came from his return to the clinic for supplies he didn’t normally carry, that and the unbroken snow between St. Vincent’s and the doorway to home.

There it was, that never-mind word again. Normal.

Business first. Peter motioned her over into the shelter of the portico. The wind found its way in nevertheless, blustering the tails of his white overcoat, making a mess of his neat-combed hair. He had to be freezing, but he didn’t just hand her the goods and say goodbye. He gave her a run-down on what he’d gathered up. Rolls of packaged gauze and metal spools of tape, tins of antiseptic salve, a half-dozen bottles of silver nitrate and tincture of iodine, but no Mercurochrome, no Merthiolate. The Father had a fear of mercury.

She loaded the parcel into her foraging bag, situated it on her hip. Thanked him.

Time, then, for talk.

“How … how are they, Anna and … the baby?”

“The child cries. John … insists … Anna breastfeed him. Anna cries.”

“Breastfeed him? But she–”

“As you know, as I know. As Anna knows.”

“The formulas I brought down … The Similac? The Nutramigen? The evaporated milk and corn syrup?”

“He’ll not have any of them.”

Peter sighed. “I was … afraid of that. They’re hardly good enough for–” Peter ran a hand through his hair. “I spoke with Sister Mary Agnes about alternatives … without divulging any details, obviously. She suggested goat’s milk.”

“Well, I’ve milked plenty of goats in my life … in my old life … but what good is that skill in the here and now?”

“Sister said she had a source. I’ll run by her office before I leave. Maybe she’s made the call.” He took another swipe at his hair. “Cedella …”

“I’m Narcissa now, remember?”

“Yes, yes, right. Narcissa … tell me. When you say John insists … is he … hurting her?”

“Some bruises are not apparent to the eye. She is hurt; she is wounded. A deep pain I cannot reach.”

Peter’s face was ashen, the same as Anna’s these last days – blanched cheeks, a scorched expression. “I’ve been worried for a while. Those few visits she made to me – before she lost the baby – she wanted kept secret. Something was wrong, even then.” He drew in a breath that fogged and frosted the air on its release; his gaze swept the littered landscape. “Such a godforsaken place to leave a newborn.”

Was it?

A warmth bloomed at her elbow as if someone familiar clasped her arm … and faded away.

“What was Anna doing out in all that,” Peter murmured.  “And what if she hadn’t found him.”

“A mystery. A miracle. Near a tragedy.” Might yet be.

The service door snicked shut and she stepped down into what was left of the day’s light and all the bitter mid-January wind. Loose trash – crumpled bags and flapping wings of newspaper – swirled up from the still-full bins. She drew the strings of her hood down tight, crossed her arms, hiding her hands inside the opposite sleeves. No more rummaging today.

Almost to the street corner, she heard a door behind her whoosh open, her now-name carrying to her on crystallized air.

“Narcissa!”

Only two people up top knew to call her that: Peter and Sister Mary Agnes.

Sister had been behind the desk when she’d visited the clinic herself. I’m no ophthalmologist, The Father asserted. Doctor Peter only echoed him, but he’d arranged for her to be seen by one. A mystery, the diagnosis was, her now-and-then gauzy vision without a known physical cause, and, since, she’d come to welcome what she could see only when the veil descended.

Sister Mary Agnes never asked her for an address or for money, just her name. It bothered her some to lie, but she didn’t want to be Cedella anymore, and so it came to her … like a scrap of paper floating down with a scribbled message from else-where … Narcissa. Just Narcissa.

“Unique,” Sister replied without a blink. “And the one name will do.”

Now she turned to watch the woman fly her way, her long white nurse’s habit skimming the slush, her wide-winged coronet stiff in the icy draft. Sister Mary Agnes’s smile was wide enough and warm enough to deny the worst of winters, as was her embrace, unabashed, right there on the street. She pressed yet another wrapped package into her hands, whispering, “Three bottles of fine goat’s milk,” in her ear before she stepped back. Peter must have run to her office straightaway for Sister to catch her still so close.

“It won’t go far,” Sister Mary Agnes said. “You’ll let Dr. Alcott know, yes? If it helps? With a bit of notice, I can have you more.”

Again … no questions.

She stuffed the packet into her skirt’s deep pocket with a murmur of thanks for more than just the milk – for the hope, too.

A horn sounded, jarring and urgent.

Miles to go …

“A hard day it is,” Sister said, with a glance overhead.  “I’ll not keep you, my child. Mo sheacht mbeannacht ort!”

Those words again, the angel-lady’s words!

“Ahh, ’tis only an old Irish saying,” Sister Mary Agnes said, in response, no doubt, to her open-mouth surprise. She could feel the cold on her teeth. “My seven blessings upon you!”

Seven blessings. Whatever they were, she could use them; they all could.

* * *

Anna seemed small in the high-backed chair, the babe in her arms even smaller than she remembered. The wails and sobs, though, made for a deafening concert. For the first time she was glad John and Anna’s chambers were so far from the Convergence. The keen squalling would bring everybody running.

“Where is John now?” The Father asked Anna.

“He’s gone …”

For a moment, too brief, she felt an easing. Father sent a look her way.

“Gone …” Anna continued, “to prepare a place for us. Somewhere deeper. Grander, he says, befitting …” Her voice trailed away and she bent to kiss the yowling baby’s forehead.

Was it fever, was it fury? Pillars of heat radiated from the bundled, cradled boy.

“Narcy, you’re back,” Anna whispered without looking up. “I need you close.”

She removed her cloak, deposited the bag of supplies on John’s massive ebonized desk, finding its carved claw feet, its beast-mask drawer pulls more disturbing than ever.  She fished the Sister’s gift from her pocket.

“I have some new milk to try. Goat’s milk. I’ll start a bottle for you.”

“John says …” Anna struggled for breath. “A tea he’s compounded … He’s bringing it … soon, too soon. If I can’t feed him … And I can’t. I want to, but I …”

At Anna’s side, she stroked hair from her friend’s face, clumpy strings soaked with sweat and tears. A shudder shook the baby, head to foot; his arms escaped his new swaddlings … in one waving fist, a wadded scrap of the rags he was found wrapped in. His howls rose, doubled in the chamber’s echo.

Anna’s shoulders rounded, more with defeat than protection, she sensed.

“Three days,” she mourned. “He’s cried for nearly three whole days. I’m afraid …”

“He does need nourishment,” The Father said, almost to himself. “Perhaps this new–”

“It’s not that!” Anna shouted, new vigor drawn from somewhere. “Not just that! It’s John, what he’s done, what he will do!” Her eyes were wide; her pupils dilated. “Narcy, you know!”

She’d seen what others surely had; the future she’d sensed. Through a glass, darkly, in a casting of bleached bones – bitter chaos, grudges, revenge.  A foretelling she’d never shared with Anna, with anyone.

“I want him,” Anna professed, though no one had questioned her. “I want this baby so much.” She touched her lips to his ruddy forehead again. “Lost little boy, lost little one, I found you, I found you. I love you. But I’m not … I can’t be your mother.”

“Anna, Anna,” The Father crooned. “You don’t have to leave with John; you don’t have to stay with him. Come with us, you and the baby. Come home.”

“It’s too late for me.” Anna’s gaze was riveting. Her voice, so choked before, was now stone-sure. “I can’t keep him safe, but I can’t give him up. Take him, Father. Take him from me, please.”

Anna’s knuckles were white, her clutch of the child’s wraps that tight. The Father knelt before her, eased his steady hands between her arms and the child’s peevish body. Anna, at last, surrendered him with silent, streaming tears, his absence for her a tangible, terrible emptiness.

“Go now,” she said, having pushed to her feet. “The three of you, away. I’ll deal with John.”

They were through the chamber’s arch when Anna called them back.

“Whatever happens,” she said, “whatever comes, know that I love you. You, Jacob. And you, Cedella. You are my friends, my true family. Keep him safe, our baby. Read him poetry. Show him the stars. Teach him to love. He deserves everything.”

* * *

The baby cried and cried and cried in The Father’s arms, the long walk home otherwise silent.

At the last junction before the chambers of the Convergence, they settled to the welcoming, chiseled stone bench. The Father shifted the baby to his shoulder, patted his back, jounced him a little, all in vain.

“Narcissa … could you …”

The changeover startled the baby into a moment of merely breathy gasps.

“John was once a different man,” The Father said. Sadness drew down the planes of his face. “A pioneer, a shepherd, a luminary. A man Anna could trust.  A man I admired. A man I called Friend. I don’t … I don’t know what happened.”

“Oh, most likely you do,” she said over the baby’s renewed wails.

The Father sighed. “Another time. I need to call an assembly. Explain …”

“What you can.”

The Father nodded. Sighed again.

“Let me carry him on a while,” she said. “I’ll do a little walk-about before I bring him into the circle.”

* * *

What led her to the Bridge of Whispers, she didn’t know, but she wouldn’t question the call. In the middle of the span, she stopped, held herself as still as she could with a squirming baby in her arms. The winds spiraled high, drew down to rise again, swirled and sang around them. The long caress quieted the child at last. His grip on the knot of fabric loosened, but she caught it before it fluttered away. A keepsake she’d hold for him always.

Her vision veiled to blue …

“Your road” she whispered at his strange ear, “will seem at times all ruts and obstacles, a barren way between one dark place and another. But I promise … you will thrive. I feel it in you. You have the strength. You have the courage. We both know that.”

In her arms, he tipped up his odd little chin and opened his sky-blue eyes. He turned his head, an ear to the breezes.

“What’s that you hear, child?”

And then she heard it too. A voice as blue as sapphire, as light as silver seabirds, arriving from some golden distance through the glistening, misted air …

Mo sheacht mbeannacht ort
Mo sheacht mbeannacht ort
Mo sheacht mbeannacht ort