Chapter Thirty-Nine
Thirty-Nine
It would’ve been great if, once I’d had my big epiphany about going to Ireland, everything would’ve fallen into place.
Of course, there were logistical hurdles to clear—it turned out I needed a different version of my birth certificate, which Mari was excited about because she said finally we might know my exact birth time.
She’d always sincerely held it against my mother for not knowing the answer off the top of her head.
I ended up working a couple more weeks at my job, even though it had become even more miserable since I’d put in my notice, just to try to save up the extra money for the plane ticket.
But I’d started to have all kinds of doubts. It was a wild thing to do, wasn’t it? Traveling halfway across the world for a guy, much less a guy who could be a figment of my imagination. No Yeats poem could change that.
It had also occurred to me, in my many late nights lying awake thinking about it, that maybe he’d already told me how the relationship would go.
He’d said that he didn’t believe in love—that the feelings could be real, sure, but he didn’t believe in the practice of it.
Even in my dreams, places had been closed and the shower had gone cold and I’d told a man I was halfway in love with him and he hadn’t said anything back.
How could I make him fall in love with me again when I didn’t know that he’d fallen in the first place?
Whether real or not, maybe the relationship had ended the exact way it was always going to, with both of us returning back to our lives.
And it obviously hadn’t been real. I had to move on.
So when my passport arrived, I put it in a drawer.
It would be good to have for the future, but now wasn’t the best time for a huge trip anyway.
Not when my money was less certain and I had jobs I needed to apply to.
I still got random headaches and had trouble falling asleep sometimes, although the doctors had assured me that was normal and would even out over the next six months.
In the meantime, I followed through with my resolutions I’d laid out with Mari the day I’d quit my job.
We took a couple of fun day trips together, and I did some on my own—to a glass museum, to the beach, to a romance-only bookstore I’d always wanted to check out.
We went dancing. I saw my hairdresser and let him cut my hair to just above my shoulders.
I did think of Eamonn then, remembered him saying I’m obsessed with your hair, but I put it out of my mind.
If I wouldn’t let a real man stop me from doing what I wanted with my hair, I wasn’t about to let an imaginary one dictate anything.
I even tried dating again. I went on one date with a doctor Mari set me up with from the hospital, except he mostly wanted to talk about my coma and share the grisliest stories from patients he’d seen over the years, medical journals he’d read.
At one point I said it was kind of hard to eat while he was describing things in such gory detail, and he apologized but then five minutes later was telling another story.
Besides that, he was a nice enough guy. It had been fun to have someone to sit across a table from and enjoy a conversation, even if it didn’t end up a love connection.
I still preferred a date with a book, it turned out.
I looked forward to the watercolor class every month, though.
Mostly it consisted of the instructor demonstrating some technique and then letting us all play around with it for the next hour.
I painted a lot of flowers to start, sometimes little bits of scenes from my dream, the car from when I’d woken up or the daffodils from the park or what I remembered of the stained-glass panel in the door.
My art class was one time when I allowed myself to daydream about these things without beating myself up about it, because I could say it was about the art.
When I packed away my supplies, I’d pack away every last ridiculous thought.
“That’s nice,” the teacher said now, walking behind me to lean over my work. “You’ve done this before.”
It was a statement more than a question.
When I’d filled out the application for the class, I’d indicated my past experience, so I couldn’t tell if she was going off that or if she saw something in my painting that suggested some ability.
Vainly, I hoped it was the latter, but I also had been feeling unsure of what I was working on, so I didn’t know.
“A long time ago,” I said. “I’m still remembering how it all works. I’ve already made a few mistakes in this.”
It was a scene of a dog running on a beach.
I’d painted the sky by letting pigment run down a wet strip of paper, shades of gray and blue.
I’d started painting some distant hills a little too early, and they’d bled into the sky, making their edges softer than I’d originally planned.
Now I was working on the dog, the trickiest part of the whole painting, because I’d need to be more detailed, try to convey motion.
The teacher was still looking at my piece, so I assumed she could see all of this.
But instead she just said, “I always like to think that the imperfections are part of the perfection with watercolor. There’s a looseness to it that can be forgiving if you let it.
No mistake is a disaster, unless of course you spilled water all over your picture, or got caught with it out in the rain. ”
I thought of that fairy I’d painted for Eamonn, so long ago now—it had been just over five months.
That first drop of rain that had fallen.
If I really let myself, I could still remember the way the cold water of the Irish Sea had felt around my ankles, could smell the nape of his neck when he’d carried me on his back.
That’s what we’d been, in the end. A watercolor in the rain.
Maybe there was something beautiful about that, too. Letting something wash away. It didn’t mean that it wasn’t important for as long as it had existed. Eamonn had changed me in some fundamental way, which was a part of me even if he wasn’t a part of my life.
I packed everything up at the end of class, leaving the painting I’d just done on a shelf in the back of the room to dry.
I exchanged a few pleasantries and goodbyes with some of the people I’d gotten to know a little better over the past few months, and then I stepped out into the oppressively humid Florida air.
Summer always felt like someone had just opened up a washing machine, fresh after a load of laundry.
I rummaged through my purse, trying to find my sunglasses before realizing I must’ve left them in the car.
“Oi.”
The word was gentle enough, no particular urgency to it, but it made me glance up. I couldn’t help but remember the last time a man had gotten my attention that way, outside a closed mechanic’s shop somewhere in Ireland.
“I like your hair.”
The voice was so familiar that my heart stopped. That accent, the way I could hear that he was smiling before I even turned toward the sound of it. And then I did turn, and there he was.
Eamonn.
He was leaning against one of the book-return boxes, a bouquet of yellow and pink and purple flowers in his hand.
He was exactly as I remembered him—those bright blue eyes, that buzzed hair, that restless energy even though his stance was casual, like he was ready to spring into motion at any second.
He was a little different, too. Wearing a T-shirt with a logo in the corner I couldn’t make out, jeans, sneakers instead of the boots I’d always seen him in.
It was so jarring to see him here, like when a beloved character from a TV show makes a cameo on another one.
I wanted to throw my arms around him and hold him so tight he knew I’d never let him go.
I was so afraid to even touch him in case he dissolved into a million molecules of my own private fantasy.
He’d come all this way. Whether that meant he’d taken a plane from Ireland or figured out how to make the same space-time jump I had…
he’d come all this way. I’d never thought he would.
“How are you…” I whispered. “Are you really…”
It was a dream. It had to be. And if it was, I didn’t want to wake up—not yet.
He pushed off the book return, coming over to stand in front of me.
“I know this is probably too much,” he said.
“Me showing up here like this, when you left. I know you said it wasn’t real, and maybe you don’t want it to be real, to be anything other than a vacation fling.
What happens in Ireland stays in Ireland.
Whatever you want to call it. But Jess, I can’t stop thinking about you.
I do want you to be happy. I think I could make you happy, if you let me try. ”
His face was so earnest, like he was desperate to convince me, but he didn’t even know that I needed no convincing. Not about that part.
“When I left?” I asked faintly.
“I didn’t know what to think,” he said. “At first, I was worried—did you ever get your passport situation worked out? Did you manage to catch the bus? You couldn’t have picked a worse day—practically half the roads in Dublin close down.
Then I couldn’t believe you hadn’t even left a note.
I tore the place apart, looking for one.
Eventually I realized it was my fault. You’d told me you were halfway in love with me and I got—I don’t know, my brain got scrambled, my throat felt tight.
I couldn’t find the words. I’m still trying to find ’em.
Jess, I’m in it. I think my heart knew from almost the moment I met you.
It only took you leaving for my head to catch up. ”