Doesn’t he know? That’s the problem.
“Open your eyes.”
I open them and look. The bird is frozen and staring. Its feathers are clean and smooth. Eyes lifeless. It’s such a sad, still thing that my chest aches. Delicate and sweet and all the worse for it.
The professor lifts my hand and guides it to the carcass. I want nothing less than to touch it but I’ve entered a dreamscape and no longer have control of my limbs. The pad of my index finger is pressed ever so lightly to the edge of a wing feather.
“Primary coverts,” he says softly.
He traces my finger for me, up the length of the feather to different feathers of the wing, “greater coverts, median coverts, scapular,” then up over the body, the shoulder area, the neck, “mantle,” he murmurs, “nape,” and up to the soft shape of the bird’s skull, “crown.”
He lets me go and my hand drops away. And yet, in the quiet weightlessness of the moment, I feel it itching to go back, to touch the creature again. To join my skin with its feathers, breathe air back into its lungs.
“The vessel is as graceful as the life was,” the professor says.
I wake from the dream. “Is this how you seduce your students? With scientific terms in a dark lab?”
He blinks, surprised. “It’s not.”
“I didn’t say you could touch me.”
He steps back immediately. “Forgive me.”
My pulse is thrumming and on fire and I want to punish him for making me feel out of control, except that I also love being out of control and the whole thing is so confusing that it becomes repulsive and I turn for the door without looking at him.
“Don’t be late to class,” he calls as I grab my trolley and shove it into the corridor. But I don’t have any intention of ever nearing Professor Niall Lynch again.
* * *
The car that picks me up is a rusting old Ford, driven by two young women. I have rules about hitching: no vans, no trucks, no cars driven by single men. I learned this rule after stupidly climbing into a panel van when I was fourteen and being ordered to give the middle-aged driver a blow job.
There are two surfboards tied to the roof and sand all over my seat: the girls are surfers. They take me south along the coast and stop at a hostel, where we drink ourselves numb and talk about our fears. Their names are Chloe and Megan and they follow the swells. Outside a murmuration of starlings throbs its glorious way through the white sky.
I go in search of the water. It doesn’t take me long to catch the scent, to feel the tug. There’s a compass in my heart that leads me not to true north but to true sea. No matter which direction I turn, I will find myself being persistently corrected. The low roar reaches me first, as always, and the smell.
The girls follow me and I lead them down to it. We drink red wine that stains our mouths black and I gather sea spaghetti for later, when it can be cooked in a billy pot and eaten sloppily with fingers straight from the fire. There are empty shards of shells shining silver in the moonlight, and they grow into a shimmering trail I must follow, leaving behind the warmth of voices and laughter. The trail leads me into the water, so I take off my clothes and dive in, the cold a knife to my lungs and laughter flying from me in birdlike screeches.
This is the stretch of coast—the Burren, it’s called—where my mother’s family is from. They have dwelled here where the hills are silver with slate for hundreds of years. When I was sixteen I came back here, but found no one. I tried again at nineteen. And once more now, at twenty-two. This time I am determined to stay as long as it takes; I have rented a room in a shared house and found myself a job, and each minute I’m not working I spend in the library trying to sketch out a family tree. It’s been difficult because so many people share the same names and I have no idea which lines I belong to or even which Iris Stone is actually my mother. It’s my deepest hope that if I find even just one member of her family, they will lead me to her.
At sunrise I watch Chloe and Megan pull on their wet suits and run into the surf to press their powerful bodies into the teeth of it. I could watch the paddle and rise and twist of them all day long. They know the ocean well, but they fight it, somehow. They pound and bash against it as swimmers don’t, cleaving their waxed weapons through its walls. It’s violent.
I join them without a wet suit or a board, just my own thin skin. The ocean washes away anything bitter left upon me, remaking me fresh. I am smiling so widely as I emerge that it must almost split my face. The three of us collapse onto the warm sand; they unzip each other and wriggle free.
“Nine degrees in there,” Chloe says with a laugh. She shakes her matted locks and a kilo of sand pours free. “How do you do it without a suit?”
I shrug, grin. “Seal blood.”
“Oh, aye, you’ve the dark look of them, too.”
I’ve been told this before. It’s the black hair and the black eyes and the pale, pale skin. It’s how the black Irish used to look, back in the days when folktales were true and people might really have come from the sea. It’s how my mother looks.
“Where are we headed today?”
“I’ll walk from here,” I say. “Thanks for the ride.”
“How will you get back?” Megan asks.
“Back to where?”
“Galway. Your life. Isn’t that where it is?”
I don’t know the answer to that. I had thought my life was just here, with me.
* * *
The Bowens live in a pink cottage outside Kilfenora. They own the town pub, Linnanes, and they are all in the Kilfenora Céilí Band, which has traveled the world. I’ve watched videos of them online, and I found two of their CDs in an underground music shop in Galway, much to my delight. These I have been listening to on repeat for a month. Now that I’m here I can hardly speak for nerves. It takes all my courage to knock on the front door, but it isn’t answered and when I peek around the side I’m fairly sure no one’s home.
So I hop the fence, a woman possessed. I want to understand where my mam comes from. I want to know if she ever lived here, or even just visited. These would be her cousins, I think, maybe second or third cousins. A great-aunt, maybe? Or perhaps I have it wrong and they are even further relations than that, perhaps the branches skewed apart generations ago, but I know that in some small way they are family, and that is enough for me.
There is washing on the line and the back door is open a crack. Something barks seconds before it crashes into me and I find myself accosted by a black-and-white sheepdog, all tongue and eyes and paws of excitement. I wrestle the dog off me with a grunt and a laugh and that’s when—
“Who’s that?”
I look up to see an old woman in the back doorway. She has a violet woolen pullover on, and short white hair and glasses and slippers.
“I … Hi, I’m really sorry, I…”
“What’s that?”
I go closer, which is tricky with the dog leaning against my legs as though she’s missed me all her life. “I’m looking for Margaret Bowen.”
“That’ll be me.”
“My name’s Franny Stone,” I say. “Sorry to just come in.”