His anger was worse than a slap, and I ran to my room and slammed the door, crying and raging and making childish plans to run away.
But he never yielded, and I was not a rebellious child; he’d never given me anything to rebel against. He didn’t want to go to Ireland—didn’t want me to go to Ireland—and out of love and respect for him, I eventually gave up. If his memories of Ireland hurt him so deeply, then how could I insist he return? I threw away the brochures, retired my Irish accent, and read Yeats only when I was alone. We kept up the Gaelic, but Gaelic didn’t make me think of Ireland. It made me think of Eoin, and Eoin had urged me to pursue other dreams.
I began to write my own stories. To craft my own tales. I wrote a novel set during the time of the Salem witch trials—a young-adult book that I’d sold to a publisher at eighteen—and Eoin had spent two weeks with me in Salem, Massachusetts, letting me research to my heart’s content. I wrote a novel about the French Revolution through the eyes of Marie Antoinette’s young lady-in-waiting. Eoin happily arranged his schedule, reassigned his patients, and took me to France. We’d been to Australia so I could write a story about the English prisoners who’d been sent there. We’d been to Italy, to Rome, so I could write a tale about a young soldier during the fall of the Roman Empire. We’d been to Japan, the Philippines, and Alaska, all in the name of research.
But we had never gone to Ireland.
I’ve gone on dozens of trips by myself. I’ve spent the last decade of my life absorbed in my work, crafting one story after another, traveling from one location to the next to research and write. I could have gone to Ireland alone. But I never did. The time never seemed right, and there were always other stories to tell. I’d been waiting for Eoin, and now Eoin was gone. Eoin was gone, and I was finally in Ireland, driving on the wrong side of the road, with Eoin’s ghost in my head and his ashes in the trunk.
The anger I’d felt as a sixteen-year-old girl—the injustice and confusion at his refusal—reared in my chest again.
“Damn you, Eoin. You should be here with me!” I cried, pounding on the wheel, my eyes filling with tears, causing me to narrowly miss plowing into a truck that swerved and blared its horn in warning.
When I arrived at the Great Southern Hotel—a stately, pale-yellow establishment built a few years after the Irish Civil War—in Sligo at sundown, I sat in the crowded parking area and said the Rosary for the first time in years, grateful to be alive. I stumbled into the hotel, bags in tow, and after checking in, I climbed a staircase that reminded me of pictures of the Titanic, which was strangely symbolic of the sinking feeling I’d been battling since leaving New York.
I collapsed onto the big bed, which was surrounded by heavy furniture and papered walls in various shades of purple, and fell asleep without even removing my shoes. I awoke twelve hours later, disoriented and starving, and stumbled to the bathroom to huddle in the ridiculously narrow tub, shivering while I tried to figure out how to turn the hot water on. Everything was different enough that it took a moment to adjust but similar enough that I grew impatient with myself for the difficulty I was experiencing.
An hour later, washed and dried, dressed and pressed, I took my keys and headed down the ornate staircase to the dining room below.
I walked down the streets of Sligo in tragic wonder, the girl in me gaping at the smallest things, the grieving woman devastated that I was finally there and Eoin wasn’t with me. I walked down Wolfe Tone Street and over to Temple, where I stood beneath the bell tower of the enormous Sligo Cathedral, my head tipped back as I waited for it to ring. William Butler Yeats’s face—with white hair and spectacles—was painted on a wall next to words that proclaimed this “Yeats country.” The painting made him look like Steve Martin, and I resented the tacky display. Yeats deserved more than a shoddy mural. I passed by the Yeats museum in stony protest.
The town sat higher than the sea, and here and there, the long strand, glistening and bared by the tide, peeked