I stared at my phone for a minute after she hung up, then turned it off completely. I shook away my worry. Rachel would understand. When I came home tomorrow with Mandy, she’d have to understand.
* * *
—
On the bus, I sat beside my niece. “Are you okay?” I asked her.
“Yeah. I mean, no. But yeah.”
The sun outside the bus windows strained to break through low rain clouds.
The next address on Mandy’s letter—a disused industrial school in a small town west of here—was only a brief drive to the Slieve League mountain, whose cliffs ended, with a steep and brutal two-thousand-foot fall, in the wild Atlantic Ocean.
It was at these cliffs that my sister’s car had been found.
24.
Kisses
Killybegs, 2012
Outside the window, the fields alternated cows and sheep, splashes of color on their coats to mark them. I let my eyes skim past them, barely registering, until I realized that I kept seeing the same thing. It started as a quick blur as we drove by, but once I’d noticed it was unmistakable. It was in the sheep fields and the horse paddocks. It was in among the cattle. Huge hulk of a thing, great white horns.
In every field, the same gray bull.
“I keep seeing a bull,” I told Ida.
“A bull?” She leaned around me, looked out of the windows on both sides of the bus, frowning. “Where? I haven’t seen so much as a cow for miles.”
I turned my head from the window, ill at ease.
Cale knelt backward on her seat in the row ahead of us, faced me across the rough fabric of the seat back. Her eyes were lined with the gray smudges of yesterday’s makeup, her hair sticking up slightly at the back from the way she’d slept.
“You okay?” she asked.
I hated that I blushed at a simple two-word question. I hated how hard it was to look her in the eye.
“Fine,” I lied, casting about for something else to say. The first thing that came to mind was: “So, what’s your alibi?”
“My alibi?” Cale asked.
“For being here. Ida’s supposed to be sleeping over with a friend. I’m meant to be at Finn’s. Finn’s parents think he’s at mine.”
“Ooh!” Cale laughed. “That’s a risky one.”
Finn’s head appeared over the seat back beside Cale’s. “She’s right, you know,” he told me. “One call from my mam or Rachel and our cover’s blown.”
“I had to think fast,” I said. “It’s not exactly like I had another choice.”
“I don’t really have an alibi.” Cale shrugged. “I just told them the truth.”
“The truth.” Ida looked about as incredulous as I felt.
“Yeah.”
“Let me get this straight,” said Finn. “You told your grandparents that you were following three complete strangers to an unknown location given by a woman who everyone else believes to be dead?”
“Pretty much,” Cale said.
I tried to pick my jaw up off the floor. “What did they say?”
“I dunno, like, have fun, be safe, let us know where you are?”
I was glad to see that Finn and Ida were both staring wide-eyed at Cale; it wasn’t just me whose mind reeled at the thought of being able to tell a family member the actual truth.
“Your grandparents sound . . . kind of unreal,” I told her.
“They trust that I know how to handle myself,” she said. Her eyes stared straight into mine, her mouth half a smile. “And I told them I’m with good people. Important people. People I have a connection with.”
My face lit up like a beacon at how much I wanted to connect with this strange, pretty girl who seemed to live her life with an authenticity I could only dream of. Instead, I let Ida lead the conversation to talk of childhood and grandparents, music and TV, as if to keep us all from memories of the laundry, of Mandy’s letters, of old ghosts. As if to keep me on the bus with them, instead of deep inside my head, staring out of the window at the same bull in every field: a sight that apparently only I could see.
* * *
—
A little after midday we arrived at the next address. The bus left us on a windswept road in a small village, in a sprinkling rain. The northwest of Ireland felt more remote than any place I’d been before. These were not destinations you chanced upon, took a wandering road toward. To get to these far-flung places, at least from Dublin, you needed to really mean it.
Our destination was a large redbrick building with arched doorways. Dumpsters stood half full on the street in front of it and a large sign announced the site as the new vocational college, opening next September. The concept art on the sign showed the imposing structure modernized with glass-fronted conference rooms, wheelchair ramps, tech labs. But today the place was closed, empty, looking more like the bleak industrial school it was decades before.
We stopped on the street, Finn and Cale circling the building to find a way in. Somewhere in the village, car brakes screamed. A sense of foreboding washed over me. I reached into my bag for my inhaler and, when my sleeves hitched up, I caught sight of scrapes on my arms. Raised red lines like I’d been scratched.
A cat, I told myself, closing my bag with shaking hands. A stray cat who’d crept through the old laundry last night. Brambles, from climbing through the thickets. Branches in the orchard at Ann and Mary Ellen’s cottage. Somehow I just hadn’t noticed. That’s all.
I rolled my sleeves over my hands, bit holes in the seams to poke my thumbs through. If you can’t see something, it may as well not exist.
Cale and Finn returned, pointed to the far side of the building where a door had, inexplicably, been left open.
“Time’s almost up,” I whispered without really meaning to. Ida shot me a strange look.
Finn came closer, touched the back of my hand. “You know we’ll have to go home soon,” he told me. “It’s been twenty-four hours already. They’re going to notice we’re gone. If they haven’t already.”
My phone sat heavy in my pocket. “I know.”
“Deena, if Mandy isn’t out here—”
“I know.”
“Okay. Okay.” He squeezed my hand.
Inside, the school was as black as night, one long beam of gray daylight stretching from the open door. The windows were boarded over with hammered iron sheets, and the thick walls kept in an unnatural cold. We clustered in the doorway, shone our phone flashlights at the high ceilings, the stark blocks of the stairs, the folded tables and workbenches the builders had set up. Everything was dust and rubble, coils of electrical wire and stacks of bricks, uncut sheets of glass.