I thought back to dancing in the club in Temple Bar, not just with Eamonn but with those girls from Georgia. Most of my waking introspection focused on him, I couldn’t help it, but there had been other parts of that two-day dream sequence that were important to me. My conversations with that woman at the bus stop, the couple who lived in Eamonn’s childhood home, the man at the beach. Dancing with those girls had unlocked something in me, reminded me that there was no reason to feel self-conscious about something that my body enjoyed doing. What did I do with my hands, my arms? Who cared. Was I too old tostartgoing out? Genuinely, who gave a fuck.
The bartender came to take our drink order, and at the last minute I changed my mind and ordered a Guinness in addition to my water. Mari raised her eyebrows, which I knew came as much from her being a nurse as her being my friend. I wasn’t supposed to drink while I was healing.
“Just a couple sips,” I told her.
Her face still registered some misgivings, and I realized she was also probably thinking,Oh no, not this Ireland fixation again. She’d been nothing but supportive of me since the incident, but I could tell she didn’t know what to do with all the dream stuff, and so I’d mostly stopped talking about it.
She must’ve been thinking the same thing, because there was that hesitation in her voice as she grabbed two coasters off the stack for us, where I knew she was about to say something but thinking how to phrase it. “What about dating?” she asked. “You feeling ready to put yourself back out there?”
If I told her that I needed more time to recover, that I was feeling shaky and unsettled from the mugging, the resultant health scare, she’d drop it in an instant. And that was definitely part of it. But if before I’d sworn off dating because I’d been so sure that there was nothing out there for me, no point to even trying, now my situation was even worse. Because I knew therewassomeone out there for me, and for one brief magical weekend I’d gotten to feel what it could be like to have him. Lovewasan out-of-body experience, it turned out, and I hadn’t all the way returned to my body. I didn’t know that I wanted to.
Luckily, the bartender came with our drinks then, giving me time before I had to answer. I took a sip of my Guinness only to almost reflexively spit it back out.
“Jesus,” I said. “This was so much better in—”
My dream. Or else it had been better in its country of origin, a foreign place that I’d never even officially been to. Or else it had been better when I’d had Eamonn watching medrink it, gently teasing me and encouraging me to take a bigger sip. However I finished that sentence, it wasn’t going to help me convince Mari that I really was doing just fine.
“I’m not used to dark beers,” I said, holding up my glass for her to clink hers against. “But here’s to quitting my job.”
“And art classes, and dancing,” Mari said. “I’m not going to let you forget.”
I smiled. “And having more fun in general.”
“And allowing yourself towantthings,” Mari said. “Including a relationship whenever you’re ready.”
I thought about what Eamonn had said to me, while I was driving his car.I like the way you see the world, he’d said, and then he’d started to say something else. It made him think. What did it make him think about? It killed me that I’d never know.
“I do want things,” I said to Mari now. “And I’ve decided it’s one of my favorite parts of myself. I have a hopeful heart. It’s been through a lot lately, it’s been hard to see what my future might look like. But I’m really excited to have a future, whatever it holds.”
“Adventure and romance,” Mari said. “In our everyday lives.”
“I’ll drink to that,” I said, taking another sip of my Guinness, the last I would allow myself. It might not taste quite as good as I’d remembered, but it still felt like a step in the right direction, just to try something new.
Thirty-Eight
The watercolor workshop met onthe last Saturday of each month, so I was just in time to slip in for April’s meeting. As expected, it was mostly retirees, a single mother who said this was the one thing just for her she made time for in her schedule, a young guy who mumbled when it was his turn to introduce himself around the circle but ended up painting really cool hypersaturated art of some anime characters by the end of the class. When it was my turn to introduce myself, I just said hi, my name was Jess, and that I was happy to be there.
I also had holds to pick up, which made the trip to the library extra convenient. I’d checked out the Sherry Thomas I’d recommended to Eamonn back in Ireland—back in myimagination, I reminded myself—because I really did love that book and it felt like time for a reread. I checked outAtonement, because I figured since I’d already seen the movie and knew thespecific ways it was going to hurt me, I could probably handle it. I had debated tryingUlysses, but even flipping through a sample had felt like a headache about to come on, soNo thank you, sorry, James Joyce.
There was a display by the checkout for National Poetry Month—a bunch of different poetry collections face out with little signs of biographical information about the poets. Right there on the top shelf wasThe Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, a sepia-toned picture of a distinguished-looking man with glasses on the cover. The placard next to the book said he was born in 1865 and died in 1939.
I did the math. Technically, seventy-three years old, if you paid attention to the months. And why would I evenknowthat, why would I have been able to dream the exact years he’d been born and died? Mari had maintained her position that the mind was a funny thing, and there could be all kinds of stuff knocking around your subconscious that you didn’t even know about. Like maybe once, way back in some high school English class I didn’t even remember, I’d read this information in a textbook and it had gotten stored away like the boxes of old case law in a closet at work. Still there, technically available to peruse at any time, but gathering dust while we turned to newer, more relevant information. My coma brain had just shut me up in that closet and made me open the boxes.
I set my books down on the shelf, picking up the Yeats collection to flip through it. I couldn’t remember the exact name of the poem, but he’d said it was an early one, and luckily this book had everything compiled chronologically. I scanned each page quickly, looking for certain key words, and I didn’t haveto go far before I found it.Shy one, shy one, / Shy one of my heart…
It was the exact poem. It wasn’t like I’d memorized it well enough to recite it, but Iknewthey were the same words Eamonn had said to me in his bedroom, his hand on my lower stomach. The candles, the dishes. The poem was called “To an Isle in the Water,” and the words rippled through me as I read them.
There was nowayI just had this rattling around in my subconscious. I refused to believe it. I’d seen locations around Dublin in a movie and put them into a dream, sure. Maybe that was why he’d taken me to some of the most touristy locations, not out of a sweet deference to me like I’d thought, but because it was all my subconscious could come up with. I’d looked up the Old Library at Trinity College—it really was being redeveloped, that much was true. Every book had been removed to be painstakingly cleaned and cataloged. A once-in-a-millennium undertaking, the article I’d read had called it. I didn’t know how I would’ve been aware of that, but I’d called out an answer in bar trivia before without any earthly idea of how I’d known it. These things happened.
There was even a Cranberries song—Electric blue eyes / Where did you come from?My romance-reading mind could’ve invented Eamonn whole cloth from that one lyric alone. My heart rejected that idea, but I had to allow that it was a possibility.
But there was no way I’d known this Yeats poem.
The thing was, therewasa real Eamonn. He existed. He was Niall’s younger brother, he was too young for me, Niallthought he was a waste and that he wouldn’t waste his time. Those were facts about him, or at least opinions from his brother in the real world. And maybe what I needed to get past this was to meet him and be able to put everything to rest.
There was a scenario where he was completely different from the Eamonn of my dream, his own person that bore no resemblance to whatever version I’d crafted. Maybe I wouldn’t be drawn to the real Eamonn in the first place. Maybe he’d be with someone already, or not be particularly drawn tome, and I’d have to accept that and go home.
There was another scenario I could barely let myself imagine. Maybe Eamonn was somehowexactlyas he’d come to me in the dream—a psychic premonition? a telepathic connection?—but he had none of the memories or experiences that I had. I could work to make him fall in love with me again. IknewI could do it, in some ways maybe it would be easier, now that I knew certain topics of conversation that could unlock him, ways he’d responded to me the first time around. That scenario was the most exciting of all, but it also made me a little…
