I felt Eamonn come up to my side, and for a few minutes we didn’t speak. When I finally broke the silence, I kept my voice low.
“Do you believe in god?”
Another question that could definitely be filed undernone of my business, and that even a bit ago I might’ve assumed would’ve gotten me a snort of laughter at best, a noncommittal shrug-off at worst. But now Eamonn was quiet, seeming to really think about it.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I feel like I have to say yes. It wouldbreak my mother’s heart to hear me say otherwise, and I already—”
He swallowed, so audibly I could hear the click in his throat, and for a moment I thought he might actually have gotten choked up. But when I looked over at him, he was completely composed, and I felt foolish for the thought. When he glanced at me, one side of his mouth tilted up in a crooked smile.
“Put it this way,” he said. “If you’d asked me that in this empty building, I might’ve said yes. But then there’s all these people, there’s a gift shop over there selling socks with stained-glass patterns on them…things get a little muddied in my head. So I would say I don’t know. I’m trying to feel it and I don’t know if I always feel it.”
“That makes sense,” I said.
“What about you?”
I had to think about that, even though I was the one who’d posed the question in the first place. I’d never been one for organized religion, I wasn’t raised that way, but a belief in a higher power could be separate from that. At this point, it was obvious to me that there were things we couldn’t explain, and whether that was due to magic or folklore or divine intervention or just some aspect of science that had yet to be discovered, I had no idea. It was comforting to have faith insomethingbigger than yourself, whatever that might be.
“I think god has to be in the people,” I said eventually. “In the gift shop. If you’re to believe. Do you know what I mean?”
“God’s shopping for a pair of stained-glass socks?”
“Metaphorically,” I said, smiling a little. “Yes. That’s exactly it.”
We couldn’t help but wanderthrough the gift shop after we’d walked through the cathedral, for all our making fun of it. If I’d had money on me, I definitely would’ve bought a pair of the socks, half for the reference of it and half because my feet were a little cold.
“Jess,” Eamonn said, calling me over to a display of key chains. “Look, they have yours.”
Sure enough, he was pointing to a metal key chain with the Irish flag on it,Jessicaprinted in old Gothic-style lettering. Just hearing him say my name made that one syllable hum through my entire body. Which was so silly, I suddenly couldn’t wait for us to get out of this cathedral and back into the fresh air again, as much as I’d loved seeing the inside of this place. I was entertaining way too many ridiculous thoughts.
“Not to brag,” I said, “but they always have my name. I think it was number one in the baby books the year I was born.”
“You know an Esther in the seventeen hundreds hated to see Jonathan Swift coming,” Eamonn said. “It was a real problem.”
I snorted, and he gave me the kind of boyish grin that reminded me again thathe’dbeen born eight full years after me. That was barely any time at all. It felt like the most significant amount of time possible.
“Do they have Eamonn?” I asked, more to say his name, feel it in my mouth, than anything else.
He leaned around the corner of the display to see the earlier names in the alphabet, pulling a key chain off its hook and holding it up, making a face.Eamon. “It’s always a toss-up,” he said. “My mother just liked that secondn.”
Thirteen
It was still sprinkling whenwe left the cathedral, the finest mist that we agreed wasn’t too bad to walk through. Eamonn always seemed to know exactly where he was going, where he wanted to take me next, and I liked giving myself over to it. It wasn’t like I had any agenda or map I was trying to tick off attractions from, and I trusted him to show me whatever parts of the city he felt like.
“Will your mother be happy to hear you set foot in a church?” I asked when we hit a clear bit of sidewalk. I was thinking about how he’d brought her up a couple times, how he’d made that comment about it breaking her heart if he didn’t believe in god. That made me think she must be religious.
“My mother’s dead.”
“Oh,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
I intended the word to have its every meaning—I was sadto hear he’d lost his mother, I regretted that I’d brought it up in such a blunt way. The tense he’d used when talking about her had thrown me—notwould’ve brokenbutwould break—but I could see now how he’d meant it.
“No, I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought you might’ve known that.”
He said it like a statement, but there was a slight uptick at the end, like it was a bit of a question, too.Believe it or not,I wanted to tell him,listing all your sisters in age order was my only party trick. I don’t know all the family lore, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to.
Eamonn was silent for so long I braced myself for whatever follow-up he might have, but eventually he only sighed. “My mother would’ve pointed out that Saint Patrick’susedto be Catholic,” he said. “And still would be if anyone knew what was good for them.”
This, at least, seemed like relatively stable ground. “When did it change over?”
