From behind me, there was a whistle, and I startled before turning to see an officer a few feet away. He had his hands shoved in the sides of his blue garda vest, as if using it as a muffler for warmth, and he didn’t bother taking them out as he jerked his head in an obvious gesture.Get off the fence.
I immediately jumped down, feeling like a child caught doing something wrong. “Sorry,” I said, but he didn’t seem to hear me. Once he’d confirmed I was doing as I was told, he’d already turned to survey the other side of the street.
I knew that the embassy would eventually be open. I knew that, in the meantime, I could walk right back over to that guard and explain my situation, figure out the nearest precinct and how they might be able to help me. I could ask to use their phone. I could stick to my original plan and see if a passerby would let me usetheirphone. But I also felt panic rising in mythroat, sure that nothing wasright, that nothing would be right again, that I was lost inside some snow globe and someone somewhere kept shaking it.
Part of the snow globe feeling was made worse by the fact that I was socold. Only minutes before, the chilled air on my cheeks had felt so good, had made me feel so alive, but now that all felt so far away. This was not the outfit I would’ve chosen to wear for Ireland in March, but then, I hadn’t exactly chosen to be in Ireland in March in the first place.
My face was particularly cold, and I realized part of it was because I’d started to cry, the wet tracks from my tears stinging from the wind. Embarrassingly, I knew that the guard’s whistle had been what really set me off—I’d always hated the feeling of being in trouble, since I was a kid. And right now, I felt in trouble in every sense of the word, because not only was I loitering outside a closed government building but I was also alone in a foreign city and had no idea how that had happened.
I tried to sit on the edge of the stone, but it was so shallow with the fence at my back that I had to more lean against it. Hopefully I couldn’t get in trouble forthatif I wasn’t bothering anyone. I was having a hard time catching my breath, and I’d think I had it under control until I felt another sob bubble up against a shaky exhale. I was still trying to recover, breathing in and then out again, counting intervals in my head, when a pair of scuffed boots appeared in my blurred vision.
“This is an extra from my car,” Eamonn said. “Might be a touch musty.”
He was holding out a jacket, made of the same gray twillmaterial as the pants he was wearing but with a quilted lining that made it almost too bulky to fold, although he’d clearly done his best.
I touched the sleeve of the jacket, giving a little laugh that was more a cathartic bubbling over of emotion than any real humor. I didn’t even want to consider what a mess my face must look like. “Turns out they’re closed on the weekend.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s a government building, I should’ve thought of that.”
He probably had no reason to ever come here, so why would he have known. And he wouldn’t have volunteered to drive me all this way if he knew the place would be closed. He was still holding out the jacket, so I took it, sliding my arms into the sleeves and wrapping the too-big front halves around myself. It did smell a bit musty, the way anything would after it had been in the trunk of a car for a while. I couldfeelthe seasons on this jacket, the way it would’ve been trapped in the heat of summer and then cooled off again once winter hit. But there was something crisp and clean underneath all that, too, like it was a time capsule right back to the very day it had been laundered in the first place. Wrapping it around me had sent a burst of fresh detergent scent right up my nose. It was comforting, the smell.
“Thank you,” I said, then felt my face crumple again. This man had to think I was out of my mind, and really, would he be wrong? If I even tried to explain half of what I was thinking and feeling, it would only make things worse.
Eamonn crouched down next to me, and briefly I thoughthe was going to put his hand on my back, give me a handkerchief,something. But who carried handkerchiefs anymore?
“That over there,” he said, pointing toward a closed gate a little ways from us. “That’s where Obama’s armored car got stuck trying to leave.”
I glanced over in the direction he indicated, even though I still couldn’t see much through the tears. “What?”
“Oh yeah,” he said. “It was on the news when it happened, they couldn’t get enough of it. Everybody cheerin’, the first car comes out the gate, and then the second car bottoms out. There’s this awful clanking sound and it just stops. Crowd goes silent, starts laughin’, they don’t know what’s goin’ on. Imagine, all that to make the car bulletproof, reinforce the shite out of it, and then it’s too long and heavy to make it over that little hump right there.”
That was the most I’d ever heard Eamonn say at once. There was something about it that made me feel calmer in a way that even my breathing exercises hadn’t done. Not just the sound of his voice, so much friendlier than it had been in the car, a little more animated as he got excited about this old embarrassing diplomatic moment from years ago. But even the fact that he’d referenced news broadcasts, a well-known political figure—they were touchstones of a world that already felt so far away to me. They made me feel normal.
“And do you know what your president said, when he got out of the car?”
“Whoops?” I guessed. Granted, it didn’t have the gravitas the office should require, but it’s how I would’ve responded.
“He said, ‘Don’t leave me here Obama self.’ ”
Eamonn’s face was so straight, it took me a second to realize that had been a joke. Of course the president wouldn’t have actually gotten out of his car; that was a security nightmare.
“I thought you’d left,” I said. “I thought you were just dropping me off.”
“I had to find parking.”
He’d been crouched next to me, his hands clasped between his knees, but now he had to touch down to the sidewalk to steady himself. Even that moment when he was off-balance helped steady me a bit, too, like it made me believe that he was here, that I was here, that we both existed in the same space and time. It also made me feel better that he couldn’t hold that position forever, either, because god knows I wouldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds before I’d have wanted to just sit down.
“Are you hungry?” he asked. “I don’t know about you, but I could be up for food.”
“Probably because someone ate half your lunch,” I said, trying to smile.
“Yeah, that’d do it.”
In a different situation, I might’ve wondered if he was coming on to me. I wasn’t always the best at picking up on signals of that sort of thing—Mari teased me about it all the time—but it wouldn’t be outrageous to wonder when a man offered to buy you a meal. I had a sudden flash to the nearness of his body when he’d reached over me in the car, the way I’d held my breath to make sure my chest didn’t accidentally make contact with his arm.
But Eamonn had given no sign of that. If anything, he seemed to think of me more like a stray cat, and he was willing to put out a saucer of milk if it meant that I’d move on.
While I was looking at him, he was looking at me. His eyes momentarily searched my face, like he could see every question I had written directly on there. He probably could. My cheeks still stung with drying tear tracks, and I’d never felt more laid bare in my life. I tried to remember the last time I’d cried that openly in front of a stranger and couldn’t think of one, but surelythiscircumstance warranted it if no other did.
