or delay, or even a cold hearth when Da came home drunk or . . . well, none of that was real pain in any way. Only now do I understand, and at that moment, in a darker, sharper world, I fall to the ground. The cobblestones are cold against my body, but not uncomfortable. I know where they will take him—to an Industrial School, the worst place for a young boy in Ireland—and they won’t tell me which one, they won’t tell me. . . .”
Maeve’s eyes drifted upward, her hand fluttered in the air. I took her fingers, feeling I should say something, but I didn’t. There was a deeper need, hers or mine—I wasn’t sure, but it wasn’t about saying more; it was about saying less, about hearing more keenly.
She squeezed my hand. “He comes to me and lifts me from the ground. His beautiful wide hands, which I touched only in dreams or saw chop the wood, now touch me. After all my years of waiting, of lying in my upper loft and imagining his touch, what his hands would feel like on my face, on my arms, now I know. This caress is more, so much more than I’d imagined. This is now and forever—the moment everyone must have, the moment that encompasses all other moments; now and before, now and after: all time.
“He pulls me to stand and holds my face between his hands. ‘Maeve, I will find you,’ he says. The garda pull him backward, but in that moment, separate and true of time and space, they have no power.
“He kisses me. Everything around us disappears: sight, sound, rain, pavement, cold. None of them exist as his hands hold my face and his lips touch mine . . . then the world rushes back in. Like a great sucking vacuum, the world and all its evil rush in. They grab me, pull me backward. Pain and noise don’t return in small pieces, but large: a bombardment. My mam screams, garda holler, his brothers shout obscenities in Gaelic, neighbors beg for respect for the dead.
“Richard reaches down to the ground at the side of our lane, where we lived across from each other all our lives, the one with our clachan of homes, our thatched roofs and lime-washed homes, and pulls a mountain aven flower—white and pure with a yellow center—from the side of the road. It is a sole flower, which had forced its way through the broken cobblestones. These flowers usually grow in clusters, but only one grows at our feet that morning. He places it in my hands as they pull him away. He says again, ‘I will find you.’ ”
Maeve stopped and closed her eyes. I patted her forearm. “Did he? Did he find you?”
“For a long time,” Maeve said, “I saw him everywhere: in the waves, in the mountain aven, in the three brown sails of the hookers on Galway Bay. Everywhere. But he was gone.”
I held my breath; she stared at me and spoke. “What happened to your Jack? Did you even bother to look for him, find him, or he you?”
“This is your story. Mine is simpler. Next-door neighbor moved away. I’m in love now—getting married to the most wonderful man.”
“Oh, but this is your story. The truth of a story is what the storyteller aims for. You just haven’t seen it. We live our stories over and over in every generation, at the edge of every sea. And the mistakes go on and on.”
“What do you mean?”
“Finding what we long for and being brave enough and wise enough to build our lives around that, without considering what others expect of us or what we should do and who we should be.”
I sighed. “Are we still on the same subject, Maeve?”
“What, do you think me daft? Of course we’re on the same subject. Are you brave enough?”
“Maeve, now this isn’t like it was with you and Richard. These are different times.”
“And the same.”
“No,” I said.
“Yes, it is the same. Just tell me how you said good-bye. Tell me what happened.”
“His family moved away very abruptly when his father . . . it’s all quite sordid and sad. I don’t remember all of it.”
“You do remember.”
I leaned back in the chair. “I want to hear what happened with Richard.”
She grinned with only one side of her dainty mouth, as if winking at me with her smile. “I will tell you the rest of the story after you tell