Off the Rack

Thanks.”

  “You American?”

  “Yes.”

  The man nodded as if this fact alone explained Brian’s presence on the ferry slipway in the black of night. He adjusted his helmet and roared back down the road.

 

  It had all started to go wrong before they’d even left Edinburgh. There had been the hassle with the hire car return, then the drunken Glasgow girls with their lycra and cleavage, loud talk, broad laughter and double-fisted bloody Marys. It was bad enough in the queue at the bus station-like RyanAir terminal, but intolerable in the confines of the jet with its stagnant air reeking sourly of body odor.

  This was only Maisie’s second flight. Her first, the transatlantic flight to Edinburgh, had left New York at her usual bedtime and she’d slept curled against Brian’s arm, as soundly as if she was home in bed. Suzanne had tapped away at her laptop most of the night and Brian had put on his noise-reducing headphones and closed his eyes. He had tried to listen to his audiobook of Sherlock Holmes stories, but he couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t follow the exposition, couldn’t think of anything but every minute taking him closer to Ventry, closer to Nora. His insides were a twist of anticipation and dread. He tried to imagine how it would go, but the awareness of Suzanne beside him stifled the vision. At some point after the flight attendants had finished hawking their duty-free goods and the cabin lights had dimmed, Brian had fallen into a brief half-sleep: a confused dream of Nora, her house on fire, running back into the burning building to retrieve his photograph. He had awakened to the cabin lights on, coffee service rattling up the aisle, and Suzanne asleep beside him with her laptop shuffling a screensaver slideshow of Maisie picking flowers, Maisie on a pony, Maisie with fistfuls of her first birthday cake.

  Flight two was more eventful. The Glasgow drunks had started singing loudly and rousing the other passengers into cheers for Ireland as soon as the plane was airborne. Maisie looked wide-eyed at him for a cue to guide her reaction. Brian gave a grim head-shake of disapproval and watched it swell and echo in his daughter’s face as she craned her neck for a glimpse of the rowdy travelers and communicated her disapproval in a sign language of eye rolling and sighs.

  Suzanne hadn’t come to see them off. Hadn’t been able to, is how she would have put it, but Brian was sure that she could have ducked out of her meetings for an hour to see them to the airport. He wasn’t offended for his own sake, but Maisie . . . Her face was pressed to the window, watching the clouds.

  Brian’s knees wedged painfully against the reclined seat in front of him, and he felt as if his arms were confined in a straitjacket. The plane banked and descended low over a marshy-looking expanse of islets. Brian’s stomach flopped and squirmed. Two and a half hours. He still wasn’t sure what to do when he got to Ventry. Knock on her door? Imagine standing there, holding Maisie’s small hand, waiting. Imagine Nora opening the door. Imagine seeing her for the first time in all these years. What would he see on her face? Surprise, certainly. Maybe confusion. Anger? But Nora couldn’t misinterpret his motives if his daughter was at his side. It couldn’t go too badly with a four-year-old there. And if it wasn’t Nora who answered? He wouldn’t knock.

  The wheels clattered onto the tarmac and the plane dodged sharply to the left then settled. Seatbelts clanked and the reaching, shifting bodies released new waves of odor. Brian stepped into the aisle, slid a Cinderella rolybag from the overhead bin, shouldered his duffel, and levered Maisie’s booster seat out from under a briefcase.

  Pick up the hire car, two and a half hours. He would arrive at dinnertime. He could phone and ask her to meet him, to meet Maisie and him, for dinner.

  Maisie had gone ahead of him down the aisle and a whole family had somehow gotten between them while Brian had wrestled with her car seat. He could see her about to turn the corner toward the exit.

  “Mais!” She was around the corner and out of sight. He was only ten feet behind her, really, but the clog of baggage and bodies held him helpless in place. He reached the top of the steps in time to see the panic break over her face. She turned, searching, tears welling, lost.

  “Mais!” He waved, caught her eye, displayed the same fraudulent smile he’d used the time a big wave had knocked her down at the beach and she’d come up gasping and choking. The smile that said, this is all a big laugh we’re having together. He watched the corners of her mouth tug downward, the momentum still carrying her toward tears as he hurried down the steps.

  He grabbed her up and felt her hiccupping breaths against his neck. “I was right behind you, honey. I was right behind you all the time. Some people got in my way, but I was watching you the whole time. I would never leave you.”

  Brian held her until the sobs stopped. They were alone on the tarmac except for the ground crew readying the stairs to be pulled away. “Okay?” She nodded, face still pressed against him, arms locked around his neck. “That’s a big girl. Here, take Cinderella.”

  Would she tell Suzanne about this, he wondered. He could imagine the look: disgusted but unsurprised.

  He and Maisie followed the signs through a small deserted Customs room with a two-way mirror. No one even asked to check their credentials. He wasn’t sure whether it was Ireland or the absence of Suzanne that felt so quiet. She was a personality—that’s how she put it. Typical American was how Brian was starting to think of her, distancing himself even from their nationality. Suzanne was a one-woman show: tour guide, stand-up comic, chanteuse. She was a celebrity in her own mind, and her adoring entourage, all rolled into one. She’d strike up a conversation with anyone, whether they liked it or not, and she’d make sure that everyone within earshot knew exactly what was on her mind in real time.

  The terminal was poorly lit and minimally staffed. Brian led Maisy to the currency exchange booth, glad to trade his pounds for euros, and then they checked in at the car hire desk. Their hire car wasn’t parked in the numbered spot where the girl had told him it would be, so they had to make a second trip inside the dingy airport, interrupt the car hire girl’s phone conversation for a second time, and have her escort them to the car, parked just two spaces down from the number she’d given him.

  Brian felt like a diluted version of himself, not quite up to par in wits or initiative. Everything here was unknown. Any disruption to his expectations was crippling, as if navigating this place required more than just remembering to drive on the left side of the road; as if everything he was seeing was a mirror image and the slightest interaction with his environment required a series of complex calculations and backward figuring, a shifting around of all his perceptions to a perspective on the opposite side of a glass wall.

  The hire car was a tiny gold Nissan, appropriately called a Micra, with a driver’s seat that made the RyanAir seat feel like a barcalounger. He wedged Maisie’s booster into the back and buckled her in, then stowed her suitcase in the compact space behind the rear seat. He took a few moments to adjust his mirrors and tune the radio, narrating it all to Maisie because talking made him feel less alone.

  Having Maisie there forced Brian into a level of minimal competence—he had no choice but to manage because she was depending on him. There was no Suzanne; no option to yield to a higher authority. In Maisie’s eyes he was capable, so he would act it even if he didn’t feel it. And in the moment when he faced Nora, however it happened, Maisie would keep him steady. Maisie was his security blanket, his life preserver, his olive branch.

  Breathing slowly, glancing in the mirror to be sure the car hire girl was out of sight, he tackled the mental acrobatics of maneuvering them out of the car park. The green digital clock on the dash of the Micra said 3:20. They would probably hit Limerick at rush hour, so maybe three hours total to Ventry with traffic. It would be late for a social call, but still okay. Nora had always stayed up late, he remembered. It would be dark in another hour, but Brian had studied the route so many times, he knew that darkness would be
no obstacle.

  Not far outside Shannon the modern dual carriageway gradually narrowed, dropping one lane and then another and finally losing the low concrete center barrier. Brian’s hands were rigid on the wheel, coaxing the Micra to the far left edge of the two-lane road. The speed limit signs said 100. Brian tried to calculate how fast that would be in miles per hour, but the math wouldn’t work itself out for him. He glanced at the speedometer as often as he dared take his eyes from the road, and made a mental compromise to aspire to a steady 85, which felt recklessly fast in the tiny car.

  The road was bordered on the left with a low grassy embankment backed with trees, and on the right with rolling green fields bordered by stacked stone walls and the occasional pub or farmhouse. There were few cars on the road; they would sometimes go several minutes without seeing anyone coming in either direction. Brian fought off the feeling that he and Maisie were completely alone in an abandoned world of patchwork fields and gray pavement stretching endlessly into the rolling distance to meet an equally empty sky.

  Half an hour later the Micra was in a queue of cars and trucks merging into a roundabout that gave onto a dual carriageway promising Limerick ahead.