Chapter Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Eight
The watercolor workshop met on the 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 my imagination, I reminded myself—because I really did love that book and it felt like time for a reread.
I checked out Atonement, because I figured since I’d already seen the movie and knew the specific ways it was going to hurt me, I could probably handle it.
I had debated trying Ulysses, but even flipping through a sample had felt like a headache about to come on, so No thank you, sorry, James Joyce.
I did the math. Technically, seventy-three years old, if you paid attention to the months.
And why would I even know that, 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 have to 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 I knew they 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 no way I 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, there was a real Eamonn. He existed.
He was Niall’s younger brother, he was too young for me, Niall thought 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 to me, and I’d have to accept that and go home.
There was another scenario I could barely let myself imagine.
Maybe Eamonn was somehow exactly as 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.
I knew I 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…
Well, it would be grief in a different way.
I wanted all those memories to stay between us.
They were such a core part of me, I wanted them to be a core part of him, too.
But at this point, I supposed I would take what I could get.
There really was something so hopeful just about allowing myself to think about him as a person.
I wanted that relationship back, I realized, but I also just wanted him to exist in the world, exactly as I’d known him.
I thought the world would be a better place for having him in it.
When I looked up, I saw a sign for passport services offered at the library, a code to scan to make an appointment.
I liked to think of it as some cosmic message even though I knew I’d passed that exact sign every single time I’d come to the library before.
What could it hurt, to apply for my passport, to plan a trip to Ireland.
Just to see. If you haven’t traveled, you haven’t lived… right?