Chapter Twenty-Four
Twenty-Four
The first thing I noticed was the sign that pointed to Uaigh Yeats, Yeats’ Grave, a church, a trail. We weren’t off the side of the road, technically—we were in a parking lot, although thankfully there were no other cars parked in it at the moment.
“I didn’t realize we were here,” I said as I walked up to Eamonn.
I didn’t know how to play this—if I should apologize again or if that would only make it worse, if I should pretend that everything was normal.
In the end, I figured some simple logistical statement was as good a starting point as any.
“You fell asleep on the drive,” he said. “And then I got here and was tired, so…”
So not only had I no doubt freaked him out with my wildness upon waking, but I’d disturbed his sleep, too. He did look tired, with shadows under his eyes.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
I didn’t know if he was referring back to the way I’d woken up, or everything that had happened after. Either way, there was only one answer I could really give. “Of course,” I said. “I’m fine. You?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Fine.”
He was already looking away, the words coming almost absently, and I knew neither of us was fine.
For my part, I was embarrassed and unsteady and still, perhaps most confusing of all, a little turned on.
I couldn’t tell what Eamonn was, if he was angry with me or frustrated or disgusted or something else.
“That’s Benbulbin over there,” he said, still looking at the flat-topped mountain in the distance.
The sun was more fully in the sky now, and it might’ve been an optical illusion but the steep-sided cliffs didn’t look too far, actually, close enough to walk to.
“Yeats wrote about it in his poetry a lot. He was a big believer in fairies, as you probably know, and it’s supposed to be one place where fairies are visible.
It’s thought to be a ‘thin place’—a place where the veil between worlds is extra thin, and you can pass from one to the other. ”
“Fairies?” I said faintly. Maybe that explained my dream, the fact that I’d felt like I was momentarily back with Mari in my real life even as I was still here with Eamonn. A thinning of the veil between worlds.
He gave me a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “I thought you’d like that.”
Black birds circled overhead, making an insane amount of sound.
It really did feel like the perfect circumstances for visiting a poet’s grave—the birds, the early-morning fog over the mountain, the scraggly trees, the fact that we were the only two people in that parking lot, maybe the world.
It was cold, and I’d grabbed his jacket again before leaving the car, but I wished I’d been thoughtful enough to grab his sweater, too.
He didn’t seem particularly bothered by it, standing in his shirtsleeves.
“The church doesn’t open until later,” Eamonn said, nodding toward the graveyard. “But we can see the grave now, if you want.”
“Sure.”
As we walked, his gaze cut over to me, until eventually he waved a hand generally in my direction. “Your, uh—”
I glanced down to see that the strings that normally tied in a bow around my waist were hanging loosely at my sides. I gathered them together, tying them back in a crooked bow.
“They don’t really do anything,” I said. “I mean, my dress wasn’t in danger of falling off or anything like that.” Then I closed my eyes. Every single thing I said was the wrong thing. “Thank you, is what I meant to say.”
“It must have just come undone,” he said. “I would remember untying that bow.”
I glanced over at him, trying to gauge if he’d meant that to sound as flirty as it had sounded to me.
If I’d thought being that intimate with him would make him easier to read…
well, it hadn’t. If anything, he felt even more opaque.
It was hard to believe he’d said some of the things he had to me in the car.
The graveyard was relatively small and unassuming, and when Eamonn led me right to a particular grave marker I wouldn’t have known there was anything special about it.
It was a large, modern-looking gray slab, less adorned or ornate even than some of the other markers in the graveyard.
But Eamonn stopped in front of it, and I read the inscription, the dates underneath.
Cast a cold Eye/On Life, on Death/Horseman pass by. He’d been born in 1865, and died in 1939, and I tried to do the quick math on that. Like seventy-five, to round up? That wasn’t bad. I’d take seventy-five.
“Had they but courage equal to desire,” I said, more to myself than to Eamonn, but I was surprised when I heard his low voice next to me.
“What could have made her peaceful with a mind,” he said, “That nobleness made simple as a fire.”
I glanced over at him. “What’s that poem called?”
“ ‘No Second Troy,’ ” he said, then shot me a look. “I thought you must be a big Yeats fan? If this was the one thing you wanted to do.”
“Ah,” I said, a little embarrassed to have to admit this now. “I think I’m more a big Cranberries fan? I don’t know if you’ve heard it, the song…”
He drew his hand down over his face, laughing a little. It felt good to see him laugh, even if it was minor and at my expense. “ ‘Yeats’ Grave,’ ” he said. “Yeah, I know it.”
I started to apologize, then bit it back just because I couldn’t say those words again, not even in a different context. “I hope that still makes it worth a three-hour drive.”
“Of course,” he said, rocking back on his heels, his hands in his pockets again. There was a very fine scratch on his forearm that looked fresh. I had a sudden flash of the way I’d gripped him when he’d had his fingers inside of me, wondered if that scratch was mine.
I turned to look at the grave instead. “So why here?” I asked. “Was he from here?”
“Technically, he was born in Sandymount, south of Dublin. But I believe some grandfather or great-grandfather was the rector of this church, and his mother was from Sligo. He spent summer holidays here and thought of it as his spiritual home, or whatever you might call it. He loved the sea, the mountains. He wrote a lot about this area. He even wrote his last wishes to be buried right here, at this church, directly into a poem.”
“That’s kind of funny,” I said. “I guess that’s how you can do it, when you’re a poet.”
“There’s some debate whether it’s really even him buried here,” Eamonn said.
“He died in France, and specifically said he wanted to be buried there first and then quietly moved here later, once all the fuss had died down. But there’s some question whether they got it right, and for all we know we’re standing in front of a collection of bones belonging to someone else, and not Yeats at all. ”
“God, that’s…” I didn’t know how to finish that sentence. Morbid? A little sad? Amusing, to think that people like me make pilgrimages to places like this and don’t even know the ways they might not be what we think they are.
“At the end of the day,” I said, “it’s the symbolism of the whole thing, right? It’s less about the bones. We don’t need to exhume every grave to verify it’s really that person. It’s just a place to visit and think about that person’s life and whatever they meant to you.”
“For example, how they inspired a song you like,” Eamonn said, a smile threatening at the corner of his mouth, breaking out when I couldn’t hold mine back, either.
Then his smile faded, and he tapped the toe of his boot against the grass, like he was trying to knock dirt off the bottom of his shoe.
“I’m the one who should say sorry,” he said.
“I shouldn’t have let—you were clearly scared, or upset, or something.
I wasn’t trying to take advantage of that.
And the things I said…I got carried away. I’m sorry.”
Oh god. This was painful. The only thing worse than him not accepting my apology was him apologizing for it all himself.
And I didn’t like the idea that the things he’d said had been him getting carried away.
I wanted to think they were all solid and true, words I could keep and hold in my hands. I’d liked the things he said.
“Please,” I insisted. “It was all me. You didn’t take advantage of anything. I’m the one who practically jumped you, and then…”
Didn’t even finish what I’d started. But I didn’t want to say that part out loud. I couldn’t imagine anything more awkward.
“You’re in a foreign country,” he said. “You’re in a vulnerable position. I was supposed to be taking care of you, guiding you around. That’s on me.”
“Well, I’m older,” I said. “I should be more mature than you.”
I’d said it partly as a joke, to lighten the mood, but I could tell it was the wrong thing to say.
“You care about that a lot more than I do,” Eamonn said, his voice tight. “I’m a grown man. I can take responsibility for my choices.”
I thought for some reason, then, about that stack of paperwork neatly stowed in his glove compartment.
Even in the short time I’d known him, I could tell that was important to Eamonn, being responsible.
Taking responsibility. I didn’t want to take that away from him, but I also didn’t want what had happened between us to be one more thing he beat himself up about. That didn’t feel good.
“Let’s just say we were both caught up in the moment,” I said. “I don’t regret it.”
He glanced over at me. “You don’t?”
Feeling apologetic about some of the ways things had gone down was different from wishing it had never happened at all.
I couldn’t regret it, not when I’d been dying to touch him like that since practically the moment he’d come up to me at the bus stop, not when I’d been dying for him to touch me like that from the moment our hands brushed over an apple.
Even now, I could still feel the low, lingering throb from that orgasm he’d given me in the car.
He could get me there in thirty seconds if he touched me again.
“Do you?”
“No,” he said. “Not if you don’t.”