Chapter Four
Four
The mechanic was right, as it turned out. I couldn’t miss it.
There had been something so removed about that garage on the hill, or maybe it was just me, my imagination that could only fill out so much of the scenery at one time.
I was still buffering. But the minute I got to the road, I realized this was a whole town, with shops and buildings, cars driving by, a bicyclist who almost ran over me when I wasn’t paying attention and shouted something I couldn’t catch but assumed wasn’t flattering.
The cars were on the wrong side of the road.
More confirmation that I was in Ireland, or at least a dreamscape that simulated it as closely as my mind could muster.
Some of the shops I passed were unfamiliar—there was a bookmaker, a master butcher—but some felt more like home.
There were several corner markets. I even saw one of the same chain department stores I’d gone to for back-to-school clothes as a kid, although the name was slightly different so maybe it wasn’t the same store at all.
If this weren’t such a weird and stressful situation, it would’ve been a lovely walk.
Even the cold weather was kind of nice, now that I was moving.
The air was crisp and pure. People were out and about on the sidewalks, an old man with a cane looking down more at the ground than in front, so I was careful when I went around him.
A stylish young woman in a bright pink sweater, earbuds in and striding with the kind of straight-ahead purpose that said she had somewhere to be.
The first time I saw someone I could smile at, I did it just to get the smile back. It all felt so real.
The journey probably took me on the longer side of the mechanic’s estimate—I wasn’t normally a slow walker, but I was taking everything in—before I came upon the yellow pole with a sign that advertised the bus stop.
An older woman was already there, sitting on a motorized scooter with bags of groceries in the basket on the front.
She gave me a once-over as I came up next to her, looking irritated for some reason I couldn’t understand.
Because I was American? Could she tell that, just by looking at me?
The mechanic had clocked it immediately, but he’d also had my accent to go on.
I’d always heard that it was our giant, ugly white sneakers that gave us away, but I was still wearing the plain black flats I’d worn on my date.
“You’ll catch your death, dressed like that,” the woman scolded, giving my bare calves another disapproving glare.
I glanced down at myself, even though I knew what I’d see. “I came from Florida,” I said.
Her eyebrows went up. “All the more reason to cover yourself,” she said. “You’re not used to this.”
She didn’t know the half of it. If I had to guess, it was in the low fifties—not freezing by any means, but a good twenty degrees colder than where I’d been only a few hours ago.
Or at least, I thought it was a few hours.
I realized I didn’t actually know. When I’d fallen in that parking lot, it had been dark, and then by the time I woke up, it was light and I was halfway across the world.
“What day is it?” I asked. “If you don’t mind.”
“Saturday,” she said, giving me a strange look. “The Ides of March.”
“That’s what I thought,” I said, more to assure myself than her.
Yesterday had been my birthday. Yesterday, I’d had that awful date, and then I’d gone to the parking lot and talked to Marisol.
I’d been planning to pick up some cake on the way home, and then…
and then everything had gone black. Was it possible this was real, that I wasn’t in a dream at all but had been kidnapped somehow, left for dead in the middle of a foreign country?
I didn’t know if the idea made me feel better or worse. Better because at least it would be an explanation, worse because…well, nobody liked human trafficking.
“Have you ever had an out-of-body experience?”
This woman probably thought I was having an out-of-mind experience, but I didn’t care. If I couldn’t ask this question of a stranger at a bus stop in what was possibly, maybe, I couldn’t tell, a dream, then when could I?
But the woman, to my surprise, took the question in stride. “Ah, sure,” she said. “Florida—that’s got Disney World. Do you live near there? I went to Disney World once, long time ago.”
“Pretty close,” I said, not feeling like getting into Florida geography, the way that traffic could make pretty close into a decent drive. “Is that where you had your out-of-body experience?”
This time she did give me a look, like she couldn’t understand why I wasn’t dropping it. “No,” she said. “Although some of those rides, you’d think you left your stomach back at the start.”
“Very true.” I decided I was going to drop it. Whatever this woman was going to tell me, something made me doubt it would be along the lines of I woke up in a strange place and didn’t know how I got there.
But she seemed to take pity on me, or at least understand that the question was important to me in some way.
“The out-of-body experience, that was at my wedding to my Seamus, going on fifty years now. He was spinnin’ me around so fast I couldn’t keep my head on.
My feet were off the ground, and for a minute, I swear to ye, I was floating above the dance floor and could see everyone below like something out of the cinema.
My Uncle Frank wearing the most ridiculous secondhand suit, so big it was falling off him.
My sisters, who’d been arguing over Gran’s necklace, I’d worn it for the wedding and they were sayin’ how I’d better not think to keep it.
And then I saw my own father, who’d died twelve years before. ”
She blinked her watery blue eyes up at me before giving me a smile. “Course, I hadn’t slept more than an hour the night before, and I didn’t eat very much to make sure I’d fit my dress. No wonder I was seein’ things. I was also in love. Bit of an out-of-body experience, that, when you’re young.”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been in love like that.”
“Ah,” she said. “Well, you would know if you had. It’s not got a reputation for being subtle.”
I almost asked about Seamus, her husband, but then there were those groceries in her basket. Microwave meals, a couple single bananas, a small carton of milk.
The bus came around the corner, and the woman thrust her arm out to flag it down. There was a whoosh of air brakes, and the wheelchair ramp started lowering to accommodate the woman’s motorized scooter.
“You go on before me,” she said. “I’ll be a minute.”
But I’d just realized that, even if I wanted to go to Dublin—and I wasn’t sure that I did, wasn’t even sure that I could or if I’d only take another dream-turn where suddenly I was back in my childhood bedroom or flying through the air like a bird—I had no money.
I had no ticket or token or card or whatever else was required to use public transportation, and I wasn’t about to ask this nice woman for a handout.
“I just remembered I have something else I need to do first,” I said. “I’ll catch a later one.”
“I hope that something else is getting yourself a coat,” she said, giving me one last look-over and a cluck of her tongue. “God bless.”
I watched her navigate up the ramp, stopping at the front to chat with the driver for a moment before disappearing inside the bus.
I was surprised at how lonely I felt the moment the bus pulled away.
I wouldn’t go so far as to call that woman a friend—we’d spoken only a few sentences to each other, and I hadn’t even learned her name.
But it had felt good, to have a somewhat normal conversation with a seemingly normal person.
I was glad to have been able to express how unmoored I was feeling, even if I couldn’t explain why because I didn’t know myself.
There was a low stone wall by the bus stop that might have been part of private property, but I just had to sit down.
I boosted myself up there, scraping my palms a bit against the stone as I settled in.
That brief, stinging pain was another jolt, a reminder like when I’d pinched myself.
I could feel things, and I still wasn’t waking up.
That woman’s story was living inside me, so vivid I could’ve painted the scene of her wedding, viewed from above—her uncle with his ill-fitting suit and her arguing sisters and her father, and in the middle of it all, her and Seamus dancing, young and in love.
It had been a long time since I’d gotten that kind of flash, not since I’d packed away all my art supplies and stopped looking at the world with an eye to put it on canvas.
But here, I wanted to paint everything—the line of cars parked along the curb, the shrubbery spilling out over the stone wall, that blue sky.
The woman had a point, though. It was chilly, and I was only becoming more aware of it as I sat there, some of the initial exertion from my walk and the adrenaline from my situation having worn off a while ago.
I was still on that wall, hunched over and trying to tuck my body into itself as much as I could, when a shadow fell over me.
He was backlit, the expression on his face impossible to see, and he was wearing a chunky knit sweater now instead of the grease-stained T-shirt I’d seen him in before.
But I recognized him immediately, because of course he was one of two people I’d spoken to so far on this bizarre and unexplainable journey. The mechanic.
“The bus not come?”
Something tightened in my stomach. I should’ve said Not yet, which would’ve been simpler, but instead I shrugged. “It did,” I said. “I’m just waiting.”
Again, even though I couldn’t see his face, I thought I could read the set of his shoulders loud and clear. What the fuck are you waiting for? This man had very expressive body language, and somehow it always conveyed the f-word.