I glanced at him, making sure he meant it before I pushed the sleeve of his T-shirt almost all the way up to his corded shoulder. Sure enough, there it was—MJG, carved crudely into his bicep, the letters a little raised. I traced my fingers over them lightly.
“MJG?” I realized I didn’t even know Eamonn’s last name.
“Maura Jean Gallagher,” he said.
“That’s pretty.”
“Yeah.”
I let his sleeve drop back down, smoothing the edge, which had gotten flipped up when I’d moved it. Suddenly, something Eamonn had said earlier sparked another memory. “Wait,” I said. “You grew up around here.”
“So your tattoo,” he said. “Is it lewd? A pinup girl?”
I rolled my eyes. “No, but trust that to be a man’s first idea. Where exactly did you grow up?”
“About ten minutes north of here,” he said. “How did you know that?”
He obviously knew I must’ve gotten my information from his brother, but I could tell he was more expressing surprise that his brother would’ve dropped that detail, given what we’d discussed about him seeming to want as much distance from Ireland as possible. “Niall mentioned class trips to Carrowmore,” I said. “So when you named that one, it made something click. Can we visit there? The house where you lived?”
I held my breath. The fact that Eamonn hadn’t been the one to volunteer this information—that we’d driven three hours out to this part of the country, and he’d notoncementioned that he had any connection to it—told me that he wouldn’t be too keen on this idea.
“Nobody lives there anymore,” he said. “Orsomeonedoes, but not us. The house was sold after my mother died.”
I could admit that a part of me had been hoping one of his sisters might still be there, Kathleen maybe, with her family. I wondered if he still had any family living nearby, but I didn’t want to push it.
“This is what I want to do,” I said. “Since I would be absolutely hopeless at mountain biking.”
“I can’t interest you in a second tattoo?” he said. “Maybe another Cranberries lyric, to match the first one?”
“Why would I ever be embarrassed by a Cranberries lyric tattoo,” I said. “Why wouldyou?”
“I wouldn’t,” he said. “But you have to admit, if we drove allthe way out here because of a Cranberries song and then youalsohad a lyric tattoo…?”
“That’s just called cohesion,” I said. “That’s called bringing your whole self to something.”
I knew he was trying to distract me away from the conversation about his childhood home, and I was going to let him do it, because if he really didn’t want to visit there then I didn’t want to be the person who made him. I’d been trying to think of something else to fill the time, to make me forget about the dream or any of its implications, but in a way this conversation was only making me think about it more. It reminded me of that date with Niall, the last time I’d actually been positive I was still in a stable reality, instead of whatever this was now.
Eamonn sighed, reaching into the pocket of my jacket to retrieve the car key. He seemed to do it thoughtlessly, automatically, but it suddenly struck me as the most romantic thing anyone could do. I wanted him to take keys out of my pockets every day. “All right,” he said. “This time, I’ll drive.”
Twenty-Five
When we finally came toa stop, we were in a much more agricultural area than I’d expected. I didn’t know what I’d expected, really. My own childhood home had been a suburban ranch house in a neighborhood with trees that had been freshly planted, so there was never any shade as I walked home in the hot Florida afternoons from the bus stop. The houses were so close that if our neighbor was working in his yard I could hear him humming through my bedroom window.
Eamonn pulled off the side of the road in front of a large, grassy plot of land, lined with trees. There was the clear delineation of a small path, where the grass had all been flattened down, bordered by a fence on one side made of wooden posts and latticed wire. I couldn’t see any house or building at all.
“It’s up there,” he said, leaning over me a bit to gesture toward the window. “Up that road.”
I rolled my window down. “You lived on a farm?”
“Not really,” he said. “We did occasionally have some sheep, a cow named Bridget. We got wool and milk from them and everything, but we didn’t really do much with it except use it ourselves, or share with the neighbors.”
I wondered if this was part of why he hadn’t wanted to come, because there wasn’t much that we could see. At least, not without driving up onto the road that I assumed was a private driveway toward the property, which would constitute trespassing.
There were a few other homes that dotted the landscape ahead of us, little squares of white with gray roofs that were set at varying distances from the main road. No cows that I could see, but there were some sheep, including what looked like a family with a smaller lamb sticking close to its mother’s side. I’d paint this scenery in washes of green and brown and blue-gray, where the mountain rose up in the distance, looking almost ghostly and barely-there against the brighter blue of the sky. The houses and sheep would be stark contrasts of white, more negative space than anything painted in, a reminder that the landscape was bigger and older than anything else on it.
“Was it a happy childhood?”
A bold question, but I genuinely wanted to know. The way Eamonn talked about his family, I could tell there was love there—even for his dickhead brother. The fact that he’d gotten a tattoo of his mother’s initials suggested he really missed her. But then I also thought of all the pain in his voice when he talked about them, the way he said he wasn’t close with any of his siblings now.
