Chapter Twenty-Eight #2
The man let out a belly laugh of his own. “I’m only coddin’ ya,” he said. “The language almost died out, you know. It does us good to keep speakin’ it. Ask your sister, she knows.”
“Half of what she ever says to me is a quiz on Irish language or history,” Eamonn said. “She’d appreciate you.”
The man pointed at me. “And it wasn’t a famine,” he said. “Don’t believe ’em when they say that it was. It was an ethnic cleansing.”
“Oh, absolutely,” Eamonn said. “It wasn’t about the potatoes.”
“You can live without potatoes,” the man said. “So you wanted to use my paints?”
I assumed that was a misunderstanding born of Eamonn’s self-professed shaky command of the language, but I was surprised when he just nodded.
“If you wouldn’t mind,” he said, gesturing over at me.
“She’s an artist, too. I was wondering if she could use your paints just for a few minutes.
I’d pay you whatever your normal price for a picture is. Double that, even. It would only take—”
He glanced over at me. “How long would you say? To paint me one of your fairies?”
My stomach swooped. Panic, that he’d want me to paint something when I hadn’t painted anything in years, and those specific fairies in over a decade.
Trepidation, that of course now he’d see just how full of shit I’d been, talking about research for some art project when I clearly didn’t know what I was doing.
A little bit of something else, that he’d remembered. That he’d want one.
“It’s really okay,” I said. “I bet his seascapes are amazing. You should get one of those.”
“I don’t ever promise amazing,” the man said, getting up from his stool in front of the easel. “Just a nice little image of the sea to take home with ya, remember the day. But feel free to use whatever you like. I was about to pack it in anyway. It’ll be dark soon, and the rain’s coming.”
The sky was the color of smudged charcoal, but there were no clouds in sight. The entire landscape was a wash of blues and greens and grays, and I saw that those were the colors the man had put in his limited palette, purpose-made for his tourist paintings.
“You said you theme them around season, birthstones, stuff like that?” Eamonn said. “Mine is July, if it helps.”
It actually didn’t, from a painting perspective. July’s birthstone was a ruby, and this palette had no red. But I liked knowing his birth month.
“So I’ll be thirty in a few months,” he said. “If that helps.”
I shot him a look, but he just grinned at me. I took a seat on the stool, started sketching the basic outline of my fairy with the fineliner pen resting on the easel.
“I’m going to do one for my birthstone,” I said. “Just because of the colors. I’m aquamarine.”
“Even better,” Eamonn said.
There was a lot about painting with watercolors that I’d forgotten, but there was a lot that came back to me.
The way you had to control how hard you pressed the brush against the paper, lest the paint bleed out more than you wanted, blending into other colors.
The way sometimes you wanted that bleed, how satisfying it was to watch one color start to swirl into another.
I used a mix that was mostly water for the translucent wings, then saturated the paints for the deeper blue-greens of the fairy’s dress.
“When in July?” I asked. I needed to know if he was a Leo or a Cancer, so I could tell Mari and she’d tell me what that meant. Then I remembered that Mari was somewhere else, on the other side of that dream. I rinsed out my brush from one color, taking a deep breath.
“The first,” he said. “What month is aquamarine?”
“March.” I gave him a sideways look, rolling my eyes at myself. “My birthday was Friday.”
“Ah,” he said. “I thought that birthday card story felt a little fresh.”
I’d been so embarrassed telling him that story then, when I barely knew him.
Now I felt like I’d tell him anything. If that conversation already felt like so long ago, the birthday card incident felt like it had happened to a completely different version of me.
Maybe it had. It felt wild that I would’ve ever cared about something like that, that my pointless job could’ve had the ability to affect my mood and my quality of life.
But of course it had—those were the things we filled our days with.
They mattered. Until sometimes you got away from them and asked yourself…
Did they matter? Or had you just allowed them to take up space?
“Well, now,” the old man said over my shoulder. “That’s bang on. If you did this for little girls on the beach, I bet their mammies would buy ’em by the handful.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not coming for your job. I wouldn’t have what it takes.”
“I don’t believe that,” Eamonn said gently.
I made a noncommittal sound, putting my finishing touches on the painting. When I tried to hand it to him, he gestured for me to take it back.
“You have to sign it.”
I used the pen to add a small cursive Jess to a spot under the fairy, and this time when I handed him the thick paper, he took it.
He looked at it for so long without saying anything I got momentarily uncomfortable, thinking about how silly it was, to paint fairies of all things, how rusty my watercolor skills were, how he must be wondering what the hell I was doing supposedly working on some big artistic project when this was the kind of stuff I was churning out.
“It’s perfect,” he said finally without looking up. “Thank you.”
And then, in timing that felt almost cosmic, a giant raindrop plopped right onto the middle of the page, and it was only a few seconds before they started falling in earnest. The artist was already packing up his easel and paints, waving off Eamonn’s money when he tried to hand it to him.
“ádh mór oraibh,” he said. “Now get going, that painting won’t last in the rain.”
“Go raibh maith agat,” Eamonn said, wrapping the watercolor paper carefully in his jacket, forming a bulky rectangle that reminded me of when he’d first handed it to me yesterday at the embassy.
We started making our way back up the beach, but it was still too rocky for me to walk very fast, and the rain was falling harder now.
“Here,” Eamonn said at one point, crouching down. “Jump on.”
“I don’t think—” When was the last time I’d had a piggyback ride? When I was a child?
“We’ll make it to the car faster.”
I couldn’t argue with that. I climbed on his back, feeling the muscles of his shoulders bunch under my hands, the strong grip of his fingers on my calf as I wrapped my legs around his waist. “Hold on to me,” he said.
I linked my hands around his neck, trying not to choke him as he stood up and started heading back to the promenade, his boots crunching on the rocky beach below.
Once we’d reached the concrete walkway, there was no reason for me to stay on his back, but he didn’t move to set me down and I didn’t ask.
There was something exhilarating about seeing the world this way, about being so close to him that I could smell the nape of his neck.
I rested my cheek against his T-shirt, damp from the rain.
“How are you doing up there?” he asked. I wondered if he felt the way I’d been nuzzling into him or if it seemed like normal, everyday giving-someone-a-piggyback-ride type of movements. There wasn’t anything everyday about this for either of us.
I pressed a kiss to his neck, right under his hair. Surely he’d feel that. “I’m grand,” I said.