Brian leaned on the accelerator, coaxing the Micra up to 100.
“What’s he doing, Daddy?” On the hard shoulder of the motorway a man sat at a card table behind a hand-lettered sign offering WEXFORD STRAWBERRIES €6. The table held a few green plastic quart baskets.
“He’s selling strawberries. Wexford strawberries, the sign says.”
“Can we buy some?”
“Not right now, baby. We can’t stop right now, but we’ll get some on the way back, okay?” Maisie didn’t answer. “Are you hungry, Mais?”
“Yes.”
Brian dug into his duffel on the passenger seat and pulled out a granola bar and a bottle of water. He tore the foil with his teeth, loosened the cap, and handed them back to Maisie. “Have a snack now, okay? And then when we stop, we’ll have dinner.”
She didn’t say anything, but she took the snack and Brian could hear her crunching the granola bar. He blinked away a fantasy of Nora at his side sipping a pint of Guinness while Maisie sat across the table plowing through a plate of sausages and chips.
The traffic through Limerick was slow, but moving steadily. Past the city, the cars thinned out and the road narrowed to two lanes with pastureland on either side.
Soon now he would see the first hills of Kerry rising on the horizon, dotted with villages of earthen-floored thatched cottages, peat smoke rising from their chimneys. Nora had described them so many times, it was as if he knew them himself.
He rolled down his window slightly to smell the air of her Ireland, but the cold wind forced him to crank it up again a minute later. He felt as if his pounding heart was powering the car, every beat carrying him closer to her.
The last time he had seen Nora, nine years ago, she had walked him to the door of her building. He had wanted to kiss her, but she’d glanced at the doorman on the other side of the glass and held out her hand as if for a businesslike shake. He couldn’t shake her hand. He took it in his own and held it. He looked into her eyes, sending her all the words she wouldn’t let him say, until she pulled free and turned back inside. He’d gone through the door and walked away.
He still had no plan. Call her? She might refuse to speak to him, hang up on him before he could explain that he was here. He was sure, absolutely certain, that if she saw him again it would all be alright.
The road began to be dotted on both sides with brilliant orange hieroglyphed signs depicting workers with shovels, some accompanied by arrows and other cryptic shapes. The farmland gave way to the unnatural colors of construction machinery: glaring yellow bulldozers and dump trucks, electric blue sheds, fluorescent orange cones. Brian slowed as the pavement roughened, the light car bouncing over lumps of earth on the roadway.
An orange-vested worker held out a staff topped with a green sign instructing “Go.” Brian went, following the cones onto a single-lane stretch of poorly paved road with hedgerows encroaching on both sides. They passed a sign declaring “Hump-Back Bridge” and then the bridge itself, a perilously narrow structure spanning what appeared to be a dried-up drainage ditch. After what must have been ten slow miles meandering through a pastoral landscape, the road ended at an unmarked T-junction.
“Great.”
“What happened, Daddy?”
“I’m not sure which way to go.”
“We could go that way,” Maisie pointed right, where the road took a slight uphill climb.
“I don’t know. I think the other way is the direction we were heading before the detour. Should we try it?”
“Okay.”
“Or we could turn around and go back.” If they backtracked and asked directions at the detour, they might find a turning they had missed. Or they might be sent back along this lonely road to this same junction and have wasted another half hour. Brian could imagine going back and forth, eternally back and forth across this deserted pastureland in his tiny gold car, on a Sisyphean quest for the junction that would set him on a course to Nora; a Celtic purgatory. “What should we do, Maisie?”
“Keep going.”
Brian turned left: west, he was reasonably sure. On the rare occasions they met a car coming in the other direction, Brian stomped the brakes and pulled to the extreme left of the road, branches scraping against the car door as the other driver flashed past. His hands were stiff from gripping the wheel, and the tension in his shoulders was starting to make his head ache. Maisie was quiet in the back seat.
“Doing okay, Mais?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll be there soon.”
“Okay.”
“You’re my best copilot, Mais.”
The road looped northward, and then eventually back toward the west. Orange cones and earth movers replaced the stacked stone walls, and they rejoined the main road, or a main road—it was impossible to tell one from the others.
They were climbing, threading through rolling but increasingly peaked hills now, and Brian caught occasional glimpses of the gray sea between the stands of scrubby trees lining the right side of the road. The sun was lower in the sky, slashing his eyes. He fiddled with the sun visor, but he couldn’t get the flimsy thing positioned properly. The road wove left, providing momentary relief. He estimated that they were an hour from Ventry, from Nora. His stomach felt like it was filled with small beached fish, flopping desperately. He concentrated on slowing his breathing, relaxing his clenched hands and shoulders.
“Daddy?”
“What, baby?”
The acid sour-milk smell of vomit wafted from the back seat. Brian yanked the wheel, swerving the car to a stop at the edge of the shoulderless road. Maisie was crying, holding out her soiled hands and staring down at her wet, reeking clothes.
“Oh, baby, oh no.”
“I’m sorry, Daddy.”
“Maisie, it’s okay, baby. It isn’t your fault. I shouldn’t have kept you in the car so long. Come here.”
He unbuckled her, trying to keep the seatbelt out of the mess, and lifted her out of the car. She stood in the shelter of the car door, wiping her hands on his pullover while he rooted through her suitcase for clean clothes. A car zipped around the bend, swerving to avoid them by a narrow margin.
“We can’t stay here, Mais. Climb in and we’ll find a safer place to stop and get you changed.”
He buckled her into the front passenger seat, adjusting the shoulder belt underneath her arm. Her legs stuck straight out toward the dash. He made a five-point U-turn on the narrow road and pulled into a cowpath that intersected the brush on their left. They bumped down the single gravel lane to the gated mouth of a field where Brian parked and extracted Maisie, streaky-faced and stinking.
Brian cleaned Maisie up the best he could with a bottle of water and his own clean shirts for washcloths. He wrapped her soiled clothes in a bundle with his wet, dirty shirts.
A brown and white dog trotted over, followed by a loping shaggy black one and an elderly man leaning on a walking stick.
“Coco, leave off.”
“It’s okay,” Brian said as Maisie stretched her hand tentatively for the dog to sniff.
The old man took in Brian’s armful of soiled clothes and Maisie’s disheveled outfit that Suzanne would have pronounced outlandish. He nodded and walked on, calling over his shoulder, “Come and have a cup of tea and clean yourselves up.”
“That’s very kind of you, but we have to get back on the road.”
The old man raised his hand over his shoulder without turning and beckoned them on.
Maisie started after the dogs and Brian reluctantly followed, glancing at the sinking sun. Two and a half hours had somehow turned into four. It would be dark in minutes. It would be too late to knock on Nora’s door, or even to call. He would find her house, if he ever found her house, dark and silent, and after all this, he would have to drive away without seeing her.
He had thought that possibly seeing her town would be enough, or seeing her house. Walking on a street that was part of her me
mories. But that wouldn’t be enough at all. He could see now that nothing short of seeing her, touching her, looking into her eyes again could possibly satisfy him. That was why he had left Edinburgh a day early, left his wife behind. Not to see Nora’s town, some houses and trees, but to see Nora herself, whatever that took and whatever it meant.
The old man took them through a side door into a small sitting room crowded with furniture. “Kathleen,” he called, “see what Coco found in the road. Will you put on a pot of tea?”
Kathleen turned out to be the sister, not wife, of the old man who at last introduced himself as Tommy. After a brief debate over whether to give Brian a glass of Bailey’s or port, despite his insistence that he was fine and required no refreshments, he had been installed on a couch wedged between a bookshelf and a small television, a glass of port in his hand. Maisie had been washed up and pampered by Kathleen, and now sat on a stack of books at the table, blowing into a cup of generously sweetened tea.
Brian sipped his port and described their efforts to get to Ventry, the detour and his wrong turn.
“That’ll be the improvements on the Dingle Road,” Kathleen said. “You’ll have to take the Conor Pass, but you’d best wait till morning. The road is narrow and winding, and this little lady doesn’t seem to care for our country roads.”
“And will ye two be staying over in Ventry?” Tommy asked.
Brian had a momentary vision of a Nora opening the door to a warmly lit cottage, a peat fire burning in the