We stumbled in the darkness, our fingers stuck in cobwebs that looked like they were made of shining silver hairs. We were breathless, tired, rushing toward the road. I tripped over a tangle of gray hairs and couldn’t catch my breath, couldn’t keep the panic from rising in my chest.
I signaled to the others to stop, fumbled in my bag and pulled out my inhaler, took two long puffs.
“Sorry,” said Finn. “We can slow down a little.”
Ida shifted her bag on her shoulders. “Let’s give it a minute. It’s okay.”
I breathed deep, lungs fighting against the feeling I was drowning.
“There are places,” Cale said, as if to distract me, hand pressed against the trunk of an ancient tree gnarled over the road. “Places where you kind of almost remember how it used to be. Before us, I mean. When there were no roads or people or telephone poles.”
We shone our phones around the scraggly field, the grassy wilderness, the tumbledown wall. Piles of rocks in a weedy grave.
Ida said, “It’s because, in places like this, nothing’s really changed.” She shifted her weight, her shoes crunching brittle twigs underfoot, laces shining in the moonlight.
“We’ve changed,” I said, watching her.
Maybe Cale was right. In some places, it was easier to remember that you were standing on ground your ancestors once walked. There were places where you could touch the past. Press your fingertip into the bullet hole on an angel’s breast, brush up against a tree that was only a sapling when your road was built, walk paths that ancient armies once traveled on horseback. There were places where, if you listened closely, you could still hear the rhythm of long-ago hoofbeats.
When we reached the road, I knelt in the middle of it as if I was about to pray and pressed my ear to the potholed tarmac. Faintly, from far away, I was sure I could hear wheels turning, wooden carts creaking, the clump of horseshoes denting the ground.
“Deena?” Ida said, panic creeping into her voice.
Finn touched her arm gently. “She’s okay.”
Cale stepped out onto the tarmac and joined me, listening.
The others clustered around us. Ida crouched and touched the surface of the road. “Maybe that’s why Mandy wanted us to follow the map,” she said. “Maybe she wanted us to feel the past, smell it, taste it. Not just read a list of dead names off our family tree.”
I raised my head to meet my niece’s gaze, said in wonder, “That’s exactly what I was just thinking.”
The cartwheel rumbling beneath the road became a vibration that set small stones skidding. Before I could properly form the sudden fear that the past was about to run us over on this tiny country road, a car appeared from around the bend and stopped suddenly in front of us.
I stood. The car was an alien thing: old, large, once red, now dotted with rust and fallen petals from last spring that had never been washed off. For hours, we had felt so far from civilization that the car looked wrong, like it had come from another time. Or perhaps we had.
Behind the wheel was a broad, lined woman in her sixties, maybe older, with coarse gray hair escaping from a bun, wearing a shirt rolled up at the sleeves. She stared at us, unsmiling, and stuck her head out of the window like a dog. A real dog—large and black, the kind of Labrador that might have been crossed with a bear—bounded up from the back into the passenger seat and stared at us, tongue lolling.
“It’s late,” said the woman. Her voice was harsh, loud. “What are ye four doing out here?”
“We were out walking,” Finn said quickly. “Lost track of time.”
“We weren’t drinking or anything,” said Ida, immediately making it sound like we had been.
“We’re just heading home,” said Cale.
“We were looking for a lift,” I said.
The others gaped at me in disbelief.
“Were you now,” the woman said in a way that was more a statement than a question. “I’m driving up to Donegal—be there in forty-five minutes. There’s room in the car if that’s where you’re headed.”
“No thank you,” said Ida, as I said, “Yes please.” I added, “That’s exactly where we’re going, actually,” for good measure.
Ida’s eyes widened. She shook her head.
“We could be at the next place in less than an hour,” I whispered. My phone vibrated in my pocket again. Whatever the others thought, I knew we were running out of time. I knew that the faster we got to Donegal, the sooner we’d find Mandy. If we went back to Sligo, Rachel would be onto me by morning.
“This is crazy,” Ida hissed back. “We can’t just get in a car with a stranger.”
“People hitchhike all the time.”
Finn puffed out his cheeks. I could almost see the point at which he accepted the perfect serendipity of the moment, the point at which he convinced himself that this was just a story, a treasure hunt, an adventure, a way for me and Ida to grieve. “What the hell,” he said. “Let’s just go.”
“Back, Lucky!” the woman barked at the dog, who loped over the back seat to settle in the trunk. Finn got in the front and I sat at the window behind him, Cale in the middle and Ida behind the old woman, who grabbed the gearstick like it was the neck of a chicken she was killing, wrestled the car back into gear, and sped on.
* * *
—
Less than an hour later, the woman stopped unceremoniously just off the main road and told us we’d arrived. We tumbled out of the car and she gave a brisk nod, then shot out of sight.
“Well,” said Ida, when the roar of the car had faded into the distance, “that was weird.”
“That was weird,” I agreed. “And this is not what I expected either.”
This was our destination: a big gray building that looked like it might have once been a factory, and a dilapidated red-brick section next to it that looked somewhat more like an old boarding school. It was surrounded by a tall iron fence, the gates unlocked. The windows were high, only holes in the stone, the ones at ground level boarded up with thick sheets of metal. But the front door was open: a great black mouth.
The streetlamps on the road opposite shone eerily. It was past midnight. The roads were deserted. Only the wind whistling through the empty windows, small rustlings in the grass and weeds of a garden that seemed too scared to grow inside the old factory. Or maybe they’d been burned away. It looked like there were building works going on during the daytime. As if they planned to tear the place down or build it up, start anew.
“Okay. This is it.” I creaked open the heavy gates and walked toward the derelict building in the darkness.