Chapter 2 #2
This was the version of physical effort that her body understood.
Not the gym, not the choreographed discipline of maintaining herself for a camera.
This was older than that. Her forearms burned with the good ache of repetitive lifting, the kind of tired that lived in the muscles rather than the mind, and she wanted more of it.
She wanted to be wrung out by it. Every sod she lifted was a small subtraction from the heap and a small addition to the wall Emma was building inside the shed, and the arithmetic of it pleased her in a way that was almost embarrassing in its simplicity. Task. Progress. Completion.
“So how was your last movie? That legal thriller?”
Emma’s voice came from inside the shed, muffled slightly by the walls and the growing stacks of turf.
Natalie loaded three more sods into her arms and carried them to the doorway.
Emma was crouched against the far wall, fitting sods into the top of a row with the precision of someone laying bricks, her tank top dark between her shoulder blades where the sweat had soaked through.
“It was good. Intense, but good.” Natalie set the sods down beside Emma’s knee and straightened. “I played a prosecutor who discovers her mentor faked evidence thirty years ago. Lots of courtroom scenes. Lots of standing very still looking devastated.”
“So your specialty.”
Natalie laughed—a short, unguarded thing that escaped before she’d thought to moderate it.
It had a looseness to it that felt borrowed from a younger version of herself, the laugh of a woman who hadn’t spent eleven months calibrating which emotions were safe to display.
“I’m going to choose to take that as a compliment. ”
“It was.” Emma glanced up, and the shed’s dim light caught the green in her eyes, the hazel shifting the way it always did when the light changed. A strand of hair had escaped her ponytail and was stuck to her temple. “You do a good job of looking like your world is ending.”
Something in Natalie’s chest turned over, a quiet rotation like a lock finding its tumbler. She went back to the heap.
The pile was shrinking now, the visible ground around it expanding, and she could measure their progress by the growing patch of dry gravel where the sods had been.
The barrow had been abandoned somewhere in the last fifteen minutes.
They’d stopped using it once the shed wall got high enough that stacking required passing sods hand to hand rather than wheeling them in bulk.
A more efficient system for the final stretch.
She hadn’t suggested it. Neither had Emma.
They’d just shifted, the way water finds a new channel when the old one fills.
Her hair had given up entirely. The knot at the back of her head had loosened in stages, first a slow sag, then a sideways drift, and finally a quiet collapse that left waves falling around her face and sticking to her neck.
She didn’t fix it. In Los Angeles she would have fixed it, or someone would have fixed it for her, because loose hair was a thing that happened in private and she was never in private.
Here there was no one to see except Emma and the jackdaws on the shed roof and Gran in her window chair, and none of them required her to be assembled.
She hoisted another armload and turned for the shed and her boot caught the edge of a sod at the bottom of the pile and the whole base shifted.
Not dramatically. Just enough. The sods beneath her feet rolled like loose cobblestones and her weight went sideways and she sat down hard in the remains of the heap, turf cascading around her thighs in a small dark avalanche.
She sat there for a moment, legs out, palms flat in the peat dust, and then the laugh came up from somewhere deep in her diaphragm and she couldn’t stop it.
A full, stupid, graceless laugh that shook her shoulders and made her eyes water.
She looked absurd. She could feel the absurdity of it in her bones, the turf dust in her hair, the black prints her hands had left on her jeans, the indignity of a forty-year-old woman sitting on her arse in a pile of bog fuel on a Tuesday afternoon in July, and it was the best she’d felt in months.
Emma appeared in the shed doorway, framed by the rectangle of light behind Natalie. She looked down at the scene with an expression of such studied composure that it was clearly costing her something.
Then her phone was out. One smooth motion from her back pocket to her hand, and the shutter sound was so quick Natalie almost missed it.
“I wonder how much a photo like that would get me.”
Something tightened across Natalie’s shoulders, a flinch that hadn’t quite reached her face—the old reflex, the one she’d spent years training inward so no camera could catch it. Photographs. Publication.
Emma must have seen it. Something in Natalie’s expression or her posture, some shift so small that anyone else would have missed it, but Emma read bodies the way other people read weather.
“I’m joking, Natalie. Jesus.”
The words were easy. Unbothered. But underneath them was something careful, a gentleness that didn’t call attention to itself.
Emma slid the phone back into her pocket and leaned against the door frame, one ankle crossed over the other, and the casualness was so deliberate it was practically something she’d done for Natalie’s benefit.
“I’m the only person who’ll ever see that photo.”
The cold thing in Natalie’s stomach dissolved.
Not slowly, not in stages. Just gone. Replaced by a warmth that had nothing to do with the sun and everything to do with the particular quality of Emma’s certainty, the way she said things like that without drama or emphasis, as if protecting Natalie’s privacy was not a kindness she was extending but simply a fact about who she was.
Natalie swept the hair from her eyes and squinted up at Emma.
The light behind her made a bright corona of the loose strands around her face, and from this angle, from the ground looking up, Emma looked tall and solid and permanent, and Natalie’s ribs ached with a longing so sharp she almost flinched from it.
She kind of liked it. The thought arrived uninvited, settling in.
Emma, somewhere in Galway, holding this version of her on a small screen—the one with turf dust in her hair and a laugh that came from her belly.
Not the woman from the magazines, all angled jaw and careful eyes. This one. The real one.
Maybe they should take one together before the summer was out. Then Natalie would have one of Emma, too.
She reached up and Emma took her hand and pulled, and Natalie came to her feet with the momentum of it, landing closer than she’d been sitting, close enough to see how the sun of the last three days had deepened the freckles across Emma’s nose, a calendar it kept every summer.
“Right.” She let go of Emma’s hand and brushed off the seat of her jeans, a gesture so futile it bordered on comedy.
The peat dust had worked itself into the denim’s weave, into the seams at her hips, into the creases behind her knees.
She looked like she’d been rolling in a bog, which was not technically inaccurate. “How much is left?”
Emma turned to assess the heap. What had been a mountain was now a low mound, maybe thirty barrow loads at its peak reduced to a scattered remainder that barely reached their shins.
The shed behind them was full. Natalie could feel the satisfaction of that fullness like a physical weight in her chest, the way the dark rows of stacked sods filled the space from floor to nearly the roof beam, each one fitted into the next with the tight interlocking precision that Emma brought to everything she touched.
“Two hours. Maybe less.”
“Food first.”
Emma raised an eyebrow.
“We’ve been at it for over an hour. I’m not finishing that on an empty stomach.”
Emma didn’t argue, which was its own kind of agreement. She pulled the elastic from her ponytail and shook her hair loose and retied it in one fluid motion, and Natalie turned toward the house before she could catalogue the gesture any further than she already had.
The kitchen was cool after the garden, the stone walls holding the morning’s chill the way they always did, reluctant to surrender it even on a day like this.
Gran had moved from her crossword to the radio, some talk program murmuring low about hurling fixtures, and she looked at the pair of them with an expression that suggested she’d been expecting this interruption for the last twenty minutes
Gran had made sandwiches. Of course she had.
Thick slices of brown bread with butter that had gone soft in the warm kitchen, ham from Connolly’s, a smear of mustard so sharp it hit the back of the throat.
They were stacked on the familiar blue plate in the center of the table, its chipped rim a monument to Gran’s refusal to discard anything for a minor imperfection.
Natalie scrubbed her hands at the kitchen sink, watching the water run brown, then black, then grey, then clear, the bog surrendering itself in layers from her skin.
Emma waited behind her and took the soap when Natalie moved, and they sat down at the table still smelling faintly of peat and sun and honest effort.
She bit into the first sandwich and the bread was dense and good and tasted the way bread was supposed to taste, the way it never tasted in Los Angeles no matter how much she paid for it.
The ham was thick. Gran’s radio murmured on about nothing.
Emma ate steadily across from her, one ankle hooked behind the chair leg, and the kitchen held them all in its cool stone quiet and Natalie wanted absolutely nothing.
Not a single thing in the world beyond this table, this bread, these two people, this afternoon with nowhere left to be.
Then they went back to it. The last stretch was always the best part because the end was visible, the ground underneath reclaiming itself sod by sod, and every armload felt like the final one even when it wasn’t.
Natalie’s shoulders had passed through burning and come out the other side into a kind of heavy warmth that she knew she’d pay for tomorrow.
She didn’t care. Her forearms were black to the elbows.
A line of grime had settled into the hollow of her throat where the sweat collected, and when she wiped her face she left new smears on top of old ones until she must have looked feral, some creature dug out of the earth itself.
And she was happy. It was simpler than contentment.
The animal satisfaction of tired muscles and dirty hands and work that had a beginning, a middle, and now, an end.
She stacked the last armful into the gap Emma had left for it, and they stood together in the shed doorway, looking at what they’d built.
The wall of turf rose in neat courses, dark and dense, each layer offset from the one below.
It smelled like the interior of the earth.
Like cold rivers running underground, like centuries of slow compression, like rain that fell before anyone alive was born.
This wall would keep Gran warm through October and November and into the worst of December, the stove in the parlor fed and glowing, the heat banking against the stone walls and holding there the way it had held for a hundred winters before this one.
The simplicity of that chain, bog to trailer to heap to shed to stove to warmth, was so clean it made her feel briefly and unexpectedly ashamed of how complicated she had let everything else become.
She leaned against the door frame. The wood was warm where the sun had been hitting it all afternoon.
Her body felt wrung out in the best possible way, hollowed of everything except the immediate: the heat on her skin, the ache in her hands, the sound of a wood pigeon somewhere in the trees behind the garden wall.
Two months of this. Two months of days that ended in this particular kind of tiredness, where the work was done and the light was long and there was nowhere she had to drive and no one she had to call and no version of herself she had to construct before stepping outside.
Emma stood beside her, arms folded, surveying the shed with the same quiet appraisal she gave everything.
Her tank top had dried in patches, still dark along the spine but lighter at the shoulders where the sun had found it.
There was a smudge of peat dust on her jaw that she hadn’t noticed, or had noticed and didn’t care about, which amounted to the same thing with Emma.
She looked settled. Present in her body in a way that Natalie found difficult to look at for too long, the way you couldn’t stare at a fire without your eyes starting to water, not from pain but from the impossibility of holding something that bright in focus.
“There’s still a few hours of sun. We could go to the lake.”
Not a question. Not even a suggestion, really.
A statement of what the evening could contain, offered with the same matter-of-factness as passing a sod through a doorway.
We could go to the lake. As if the afternoon had always been heading there, and Emma was simply naming what they both already knew.
Natalie’s skin prickled. The sun, probably.
The cooling sweat, the shift from exertion to stillness.
She thought about the lake, the still dark water ringed by birch and alder, the flat rock on the far side that held the afternoon heat like a stove plate.
She thought about the twenty-minute walk up the boreen with the hedgerows buzzing and the light going gold.
“Obviously.”
Emma smiled. Not wide. Just the corners of her mouth and something shifting in her eyes, and she turned and walked back toward Gran’s kitchen door to grab towels.
Natalie followed, turf dust drying on her arms, the sun still high and the whole evening still ahead of her, unhurried and unscheduled and more than she’d expected.