* * *
A few days later, I’m walking down Grafton Street.
Grafton Street in November.
It’s full of tourists and I dodge them, heading down to the bottom. Someone’s playing a Lady Gaga song on a saw. Someone else is playing the fiddle badly, trying for “Danny Boy.”
The air smells of peat smoke and apples. There’s not a rain cloud in sight.
I cross Nassau Street with a thick clot of students, the girls young and bright and laughing, teetering in high-heeled boots. The city feels familiar to me now, the dark faces of buildings, the distant mountains, the way the clouds run across the sky. Something leaps within me when I see the gray archway and I duck under it, standing there for a moment in the frigid shade. The table offering student tours looks exactly the same. The group of girls are still ahead of me, shouting and joking.
On the other side of the arch, in the courtyard, the sun is shining, Even Lecky looks happy today.
I have that feeling of coming down off a mountain and into a valley, a warm, homecoming sort of feeling. Ireland.
I sit down on the cement wall by the library, where the sun can reach my face for as long as it lasts. I have an Irish Times and a coffee and nowhere to be.
It’s two hours before I look up and I see him coming out of the main doors and down the steps.
He’s looking down, his hair flopping over his forehead, his shoulders bent, his frame thinner in profile. It feels like I’m getting a glimpse into time, the way it will line his face and gray his hair, the way his shoulders will carry years.
He looks up.
Conor.
Finally, Conor.
Erin is leaving for Dublin on a bitter Saturday morning early in January, a new beginning, a fresh start for a new year.
I wake up early and do seven miles on the roads that wind down toward the water. I finish up on the beach, my sneakers turning up the wet gray sand and pebbles along the shore. Long Island Sound is dark and rough, the wind whipping up little meringues of whitecaps here and there. The air is thick with salt water; I can’t tell if it’s raining or if the wind is lifting it up from the Sound, but I can feel my soaked ponytail slapping against the collar of my running jacket.
I see her once I’m past the big houses west of the Tide Club. She’s wearing one of Uncle Danny’s old yellow raincoats and standing on the beach, smoking and looking out across the water. I slow my pace and jog up to her, letting her hear me. She drops the cigarette on the beach, grinds it into the sand with her heel. When she turns her face toward me, her cheeks are pink, her mouth grim. We’re still careful around each other, her hurt feelings a haze around her body. I’ve only seen her once since Christmas Day, and that was at the bar, where we could pretend nothing had happened, that nothing had changed.
“You all packed?” I ask her, huffing the cold air. I run my hands over my face, wiping off the salty rain. It is rain, I realize, coming faster now. Out in the bay, a Boston Whaler chugs slowly through the water.
“Yeah. My dad’s loading my stuff into the car. I wanted to say goodbye to the beach, you know?” When she turns to look at me, the hood falls back and her hair, curly in the wet air, springs out around her face. She has on her leather jacket under the raincoat, the scarf I gave her for Christmas, her claddagh necklace, the amethyst heart held by the little silver hands, glistening with a tiny drop of rain.
She looks down the beach toward Jessica’s house and something crosses her face, a little spasm of sorrow tugging her mouth down. She and Jessica are going to miss each other.
“You can look at it from over there,” I tell her, pointing vaguely to the mouth of the Sound, to the ocean, to Ireland.
“What? Oh.…” She smiles. “Yeah.”
“How’s Danny?” I bend over, pulling up on my toes. I don’t want my Achilles seizing up again.
“Trying to pretend he doesn’t care but I think he’s kind of a mess. He said California was one thing. Or Florida. But Ireland feels really far away. You’ll check on him, won’t you? You and your dad?”
“Of course. I’ll be at the bar.”
She looks up, a flash of concern crossing her face. “I know. He appreciates it. He feels like, really guilty you didn’t go back to finish school out there.”
“So not his fault.” I bend again to stretch my right hamstring. I can still smell cigarette smoke, mixing with her perfume, Anaïs Anaïs, and I have a sudden flashback to the pile of magazine samples she used to keep on her dresser, before she saved up enough money working at the bar to buy a whole bottle.
I take a deep breath, start, stop, start again. “Are you sure about this?”
She looks back at the water one more time and then turns around.
“Bye, Mags,” she says. She doesn’t move to hug me. She starts walking.
“Good luck.”
She turns around. Her eyes are bright against the gray sky, the exact blue of my eyes, of my mother’s eyes, of our grandmother’s and countless unknown ancestors who crossed that ocean behind me. “It’s going to be okay, Mags,” she says. “It’s really going to be okay. I just need … it’s going to be okay.”
The wind picks up. A gull wheels overhead and drops a clamshell on the rocks. And then she smiles, a huge, glorious smile that crinkles her eyes and lifts her whole face toward the thin light. She’s so beautiful I can’t help but smile back.
“Love ya, Mags,” she says.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, but I don’t know if she hears me.
I watch her as she walks up toward the house, a bright, shining yellow form glowing through the gray. I wait until I can’t see her anymore.