Epilogue
Five Years Later
“Tom, we’re going to be late!” I’m nearly at the front door when I remember my thermos of Barry’s steeping in the kitchen. My voice needs all the help it can get for the last show tonight.
“Conry’s gotten into a patch of something,” he calls from the garden. “I just need a minute—”
The kitchen is diffused in pearlescent sunlight.
I close the window to keep springtime insects out and watch a blue-feathered bird land beside another on a leafy branch.
Tea secured, I walk past Tom’s drawings and out the front door, weaving through our long, overgrown grass.
Come summer we’ll need to trim it back before it turns brown and paper-thin, but when it’s vivid green like this we can’t bear to shear it.
Tom comes around the back and slides into the driver’s seat not a minute after me. I roll down the windows and inhale the late-afternoon air. Somewhere, a sprinkler clicks on while crows jabber and squawk.
“The rooks are chatty tonight. You hear ’em?”
“Just like in Kerry,” I say.
“A universal truth,” he says, taking my hand in his. “Rooks are chatty everywhere.”
There’s quite a lot about the Greenwich countryside that reminds us of County Kerry. The winding forest roads, the foxes and rabbits in our yard. It was part of why Tom bought the farmhouse in the first place.
After I’d gotten the chorus role in West Side Story and moved to Manhattan to live with Indy, we’d done long distance for a handful of months.
I’d become an excellent flyer, using the seven hours from JFK to Dublin to study lines and sheet music.
Sometimes I’d spend the whole flight devouring whatever book Tom and I were reading—we took turns, a mystery, then a classic.
Then I’d gotten Frenchy in Grease . It hadn’t felt real until my mom took her first flight in two decades to see me perform on opening night.
She brought Everly, Beth, Mike, and his new girlfriend.
Tom flew out, too, and brought Conor. We’d all played Monopoly back at Indy’s and my cramped Avenue C apartment.
The ceiling in the bathroom was so low there Tom had to shower on his knees.
Eventually I was booking too many shows to fly home and to Ireland as often as I wanted to, and Tom was beginning to record his new album with a producer in the West Village.
It only made sense then for him to get a place outside the city, and only took two years until Indy and Jacob got engaged and I moved in with him.
“Conry all right?”
“Sure, he’s delighted with himself. Destroyed the sunflowers you planted, though.”
I shrug. “They would’ve been terrible for my allergies.”
“Ah. That reminds me.” Tom fishes something out of his back pocket as he drives. “I didn’t know if you had any for tonight.” He hands me a travel-sized packet of Zyrtec. “These winds have been murder.”
He’s right, and I’d skipped my dose today—old habits die hard. “You’re the greatest.”
“Can’t have Eurydice sneezin’ like a kazoo when her lover discovers her in Hell.”
“No, you cannot,” I say, mouth full of allergy meds.
“Lad at the pharmacy convinced me to buy an oversized pack for the tour. Says they don’t make them the same in Europe. That’s not even true, is it?”
“Actually I think it is. But we could’ve gotten them cheaper in Texas next week.
” More habits that die hard: saving every dollar even though I haven’t been a struggling waitress in quite some time.
My mom has adjusted much quicker than I—embracing her new pottery studio and car without a second thought.
Though she, like Tom’s parents, had no interest in giving up the old Cherry Grove house.
Thankfully her new medication means fewer flare-ups and a lot more ease hiking up those stairs.
“How does it feel?” he asks after a minute. “Last show?”
Playing Eurydice in the Hadestown Broadway revival is a dream I never fathomed achieving. Not even when I got my first starring role in a production, or was nominated for my first Drama Desk Award. It’s been the honor of a lifetime and I’m already nostalgic for this wonderful cast and crew.
But that seems to be the nature of what Tom and I do.
These people, these songs, these moments in time—we have to soak up every drop before they end all too quickly.
Tom’s third album came out a week ago and already it’s looking like he’ll hit the number one spot on the Billboard Hot 100 again.
The European leg of his tour begins soon, so we’re going home to Texas to visit my mom before it kicks off in London.
Each of these experiences, bright and ephemeral as comets in the sky.
There and then gone. It’s a lesson in mindfulness, and that there’s always something new around the bend.
“Oh, that reminds me.” I find my phone and open the group chat.
EVERGREEN TREE TOUR
Clementine: Is anyone in the Austin area at the end of next week?
Clementine: We’ll be flying to London from there, not NY, and can take whomever
Indy Russo: Break a leg tonight!
Molly Moreno: Wait I might be let me find out
Indy Russo: Clementine do you have an extra ticket to the wrap party (I am assuming Tom is skipping?) Jacob had to give his to some playwright
Clementine: Yes you can have Tom’s!
Conor Callaghan: Kick some arse tonight Clementine. See you lads over the pond soon
Pete Sullivan: Good luck tonight C
Pete Sullivan: And when are you flying out? I’m always interested in a PJ.
Wren Morgan: I don’t like the way you made that sound
Pete Sullivan: Sure you did
Molly Moreno: Is tonight the last show?
Clementine: Yes closing night and Pete, next Sunday!
Molly Moreno: kill it babe. I won’t actually be near Austin so meet u in London xx
Clementine: Ok Molls see you soon
Pete Sullivan: Shit I can’t make it either
Indy Russo: Guys, I miss Lionel
Wren Morgan: Did he die
Clementine: What?!
Conor Callaghan: Feck not Skechers!
Indy Russo: No!!
Indy Russo: He’s like a super successful manager now! I just miss him as our PA, you know??
Wren Morgan: not really
Molly Moreno: Wait nvm I can fly with you two
Pete Sullivan: Same
Conor Callaghan: Pull yourself together kid
On the trillionth buzz in his pocket, Tom groans. “My phone is being assaulted. Please, I beg of you, free me from the chat.”
“It’s your tour. You can’t leave the group chat.”
“It’s really your tour.”
“I’m not even singing this time!”
Tom’s half grin makes my knees pinch. “The record, I mean.”
Five years together and I still blush. “Texting is not a social commitment.”
“It is, though.” He presses my hand to his lips and the diamond on my left hand sparkles in the fading afternoon light. “There are expectations.”
I know even without Jen, or the guilt of Eden’s judgment weighing on him, the tours take a toll on Tom.
Part of that mindfulness means we spend many late nights talking about what journey might come next for us after this one.
Perhaps we’ll write a show of our own—some bluesy rock musical about a girl who’s afraid to fall in love.
Or maybe the story of Alcyone and Ceyx set to Tom’s discography.
Or maybe a different adventure. Ruddy-cheeked children, running around in the Kerry meadows, scraping knees and laughing until we sing them to sleep.
“Fine. I’ll make you a bet: If my song is playing right now, you have to remain in the confines of the group chat. If not, you can be released until our first show.”
His laugh is bright like the dawn. “Easy. It won’t be, love.”
His humility will be his downfall: the new song is always playing. I flick on the radio just in time to catch the end of a synth-pop banger.
Tom unleashes his half grin. “Sweet freedom.”
I open my mouth to argue, when the DJ chimes in over the car’s speakers. “Up next we have Halloran’s newest single, ‘Fruit from the Evergreen Tree’ off the album of the same name.”
I stare at Tom, big eyes going even bigger, as if to say told you.
Tom offers a rueful grin of his own. “A bet’s a bet.”
“Fine.” I sigh, removing him from the group chat and bringing my bare feet up to the dash.
“I don’t know about you all,” the radio DJ continues, “but this song is so addicting I wake up singing it. Anyone nab tickets here in NYC before they were all gone? Well, if not, you’re in luck. Stick around, we’ll be giving away tickets to his sold-out Maddison Square Garden show in September.”
The lifting opening notes begin and Tom can’t help but nod his head to the rhythm.
He’s happier to be free of the group chat than at the success of his song, but what else is new?
He’s always cared more about the craft itself than how it’s perceived.
As he told me once, the song is completed by the listener.
He’s done his part—taken the palette used to understand the human condition and made it wider with his poetry.
The prose of being alive. And all in a handful of wondrous minutes.
A single, eloquent sound that serves to translate some of the most profound experiences of his life.
Once that sound is on the radio, warbling out like it is now, it’s up to the listener to make of it what they will.
Not only that, but make of him what they will.
Sometimes that’s a lyrical god or a private recluse or a shoulder to cry on.
That’s the beauty of his music: Tom gives himself to the world and allows them to craft him into whatever it is they need him to be.
As he holds my hand and taps it on the leather divider to the song’s rhythm, my eyes roam his kind features, the countryside rolling behind him—wooden fences, spruce trees—and I’m reminded once more who Tom is to me: the man who scored my soundless life with a love song.
The lyrics drift out my window and float into the setting sun: “Sweet as honey from the bee, is my fruit from the evergreen tree. Voice of a swallow, just as free, I only hear music when she’s with me . ”