“Oh, about five hundred years ago,” Eamonn said, breaking into a full smile after I couldn’t contain my laugh. “I know. My mam could hold a grudge.”
That made his smile fade, and for a minute we just focused on walking. The sky was as clear and blue now as if it had never rained at all, but I could still see the occasional drop hit the pavement at our feet.
“I like this kind of rain,” I said. “This barely-there rain. When the sun’s out but it’s still coming down a little.”
“Sure, the weather’s desperate in Ireland. Can never make up its mind.”
Desperate. I liked that word when applied to weather. I felt in a unique position to understand it.
“Florida’s that way, too,” I said. “I remember one time when I was a kid, standing on the front lawn, which was dry as a bone, and looking to my left to see it raining over at my neighbor’s house. Or you’ll head into a matinee movie, the sun so bright reflecting off the sidewalk it hurts your eyes, but by the time you leave the theater it’s storming.”
“You know the kind I like?” he asked, and I shook my head, even though it had been a rhetorical question and he wasn’t even looking at me. “I don’t know if you have this. But I love an inhospitable rain, when it’s deadly cold and lashing down and all you can think isfuck,get me out of these clothes, get me somewhere warm.”
“Youlikethat?”
“I do, yeah.”
“Because of how good it feels to get out of it?” There was something about the contrast, I supposed, the relief. When you’d been miserable and then found comfort again.
“Because of how good it feels to gothroughit,” Eamonn said. “It feels…”
He gave an exaggerated shiver, as if he were experiencing the sensation even now, laughing at the tail end of the gesture as if caught up in the joy of the memory and the self-consciousness of talking about it all at once. Even in the moment I thought,I’m going to remember that laugh.
I really wanted him to finish his sentence. “It feels like what?”
“Like survival, I suppose.” He reached up to scratch theside of his nose, giving a little laugh that was definitely all self-consciousness this time. “Not in a bad way. Not in the way ofyou’re not living, you’re only surviving.More in a way like, the world can be hard and you give yourself up to it. I like that feeling, when there’s nothing to do but get through something, but it’s something you know you can get through. I don’t know how to explain it. I like a cold, bracing rain. Have done, since I was young.”
I understood what he meant. The part about survival being a good thing in particular—how sometimes it could feel like just to survive was settling, not reaching your full potential, and other times it felt like the biggest achievement in the world.
“I had an abortion,” I said. “When I was nineteen.”
I wasn’t quite sure why I’d brought it up. Maybe it had been talking about his own mother earlier, thinking about the Catholic church. Maybe it was a test in a way, wanting to see how Eamonn would respond to that information, if it would make him think any differently about me. I didn’t know why it mattered, how he even thought of me.
Maybe it was because suddenly I couldn’t help but think of the various choices you made throughout your life, the ones that felt crucial to your survival at the time and eventually became a distant memory, the ones that were important in ways you only later fully understood.
“I’d been dating this guy in college,” I said. “I thought it was serious…until I found out I was pregnant, and then suddenly it became clear it wasn’tthatserious. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be a mother at all, much less at that time in my life.And he definitely wasn’t ready to be a dad, especially not withmewhen we were just having fun.”
“That’s what he said?”
I nodded, even though I didn’t know if Eamonn could see it. It was easier in a way to talk about this kind of thing when you were walking side by side, where you didn’t have to actually look at the other person. That was probably another reason I’d brought it up. His observation about the rain had felt oddly vulnerable, and it got me feeling brave enough to share something of my own.
“He helped pay for it,” I said. “To his credit.”
That was about all the credit I could give the guy. He’d dropped me so fast after everything that it had made my head spin. I knew it had been a lot to process—it had scared me, too, it had made me sad and stressed out and lonely, too—but it had felt worse not to have anyone to process it with. Especially the person who would’ve made the most sense, who’d been the other person involved.
“I don’t regret it,” I said. “I barely even think about it anymore. But it just feels strange to have these moments in your life when everything really cleaves into two distinct paths, does that make sense? If life is a series of choices, and each one affects everything else, then you’re surrounded by these kinds of moments. What job do you pick? One will set your career down one track, and another will send you down a completely different one. What time do you leave for work? That could be the difference between getting into a car accident or not, it could change your whole life, but there’s no way toknow.”
“It’d probably do your head in, if you could know.”
“Right,” I said. “It breaks your mind to even think about it. And I don’t regret my choices so much as I sometimes feel panicked at the idea that things could’ve gone a different way, that I had such a close call with a completely different life. Like I was in this dead-end relationship for so long, I swear I gave him the best six years of my life, theexacttime when everyone else was settling down and getting married, having kids, and we were both pretending we were on the same track and ignoring the fact that we liked each other only sometimes and loved each other not really at all, not the way you should love someone you’re going to be with forever. But even that, I can’t regret. Because that relationship brought me Marisol, my best friend, and the idea of not havingherin my life makes me cold all over.”
I had to breathe. It was too much, the walking together with that onslaught of words, which I hadn’t been able to stop once they’d started pouring out of me. It also wasn’t lost on me that I was in another of those crossroad moments right now, only this one had set me on a path whether I liked it or not, and I had no idea how to get back to the path I’d originally been on or if I ever would.
We’d stepped off to the side, letting other pedestrians who were actually moving get by, and I attempted a shaky smile once I’d gotten myself a little more under control.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I wasstillreferring to my offhand comment about his mother back from the very beginning of this conversation, but also everything that had come afterward. He hadn’t asked for such a colossal overshare.
“You don’t have to apologize,” he said. “I’m sorry you went through all that.”
