September 1886 Dawrosbeg, County Galway, Western Ireland

It’s a week of lasts.

This morning, Grace collects Tommy and walks him back to the Laffey cottage so Mary Agnes has time with him alone. She is still not allowed at home. And don’t want to be.

They sit side by side on stools in front of the fire, their heads bent over Mary Agnes’s new journal, elbows touching.

“‘When I was down beside the sea . . .’” Mary Agnes begins. She pictures the strand at Dawrosbeg, her favorite place to walk, as she starts Stevenson’s poem.

Tommy continues with the second line. “‘A wooden spade they gave to me to, to, to—’”

“‘To dig the sandy shore.’ Good, Tommy, you’re learning.” Mary Agnes squeezes Tommy as she traces her finger over the lines of the now known-by-heart poem written in the journal.

“What’s next?” he asks. His freckled face scrunches like it does when he’s asking a serious question.

“‘My holes were empty—’”

“‘Like a cup!’” He claps his hands.

“Yes, like a cup. Now let’s say the last line together.” She trains her finger over the last line of the verse.

“‘In every hole the sea came up, till it could come no more!’”

Mary Agnes beams at Tommy. “We will have to dig holes together, just to see.”

But not next summer, or the summer after that, she thinks. How can I leave you, Tommy?

“I BEST BE GOING NOW, BEFORE . . .” Mary Agnes and Jonesy are stretched out in one of the empty stalls in the Jones’s barn, warm hay beneath them, kissing. They have never gone past kissing before, until today. She initiated it, her hands wandering over his chest, and placing his hand on hers. She thinks maybe, should we, before I leave? But no, no, we can’t, she says over and over to herself. There aren’t enough novenas for that.

Her breath is ragged. And I cannot have a babe. Not now.

He puts his head to her chest. “I c-c-can feel yer heartbeat.”

She runs her hands through his dark hair. “Can you now?” Fast she is memorizing every detail about this boy. The way his hair falls over his eyes just so. His clumsy hands. His stutter. His always-patched trousers. His every kindness. His kisses . . .

“I’ll wait for ya, Mary A.”

As she squeezes his hand, her heart squeezes, too. “I fear I won’t be coming back, Jonesy.”

“Well, Holy Mother of sweet divine suffering, I’ll c-c-come after ya then.”

“Where would you even start? Granda says there are more Irish in America now than in Ireland. You’d never find me. Plus, you’ve a farm to run,” she says. “Don’t go forgetting that. Your people depend on you.”

He strokes her face. “I would find ya, Mary A. I swear I would, if I tried. But I’ll wait. Ya have my word.”

“You’d be best to forget me, Jonesy. It pains me to say it, but there’ll be a great black ocean between us and neither of us can swim. And no one from America comes back.”

To keep herself from crying, she keeps on talking, something she’s good at, although for once she’s at a loss for words. She leans in to kiss him again. Afterward, her eyes lock on his and she feels a deep burning in her groin. No. She stops herself from doing something she’ll regret so she pulls away, sits up, and brushes hay from her skirt.

“Find another lass, Jonesy. One who won’t go off and leave you.”

MARY AGNES AMBLES DOWN THE LANE in the rain, holding back tears. Will I never see Jonesy again? Even though she saw Tommy just this morning, she is leaving tomorrow and feels it only proper to say goodbye to her other brothers. Especially Sean, the only one with a sense of humor. She’ll miss him, too. And she might never see him, or any of the others, ever again, either. Am I really leaving for America? Tomorrow?

She rounds the edge of her parents’ whitewashed cottage and snags her dress on a wild strawberry vine, like she used to do as a girl. Looking up at her old attic window, she has a flash of nostalgia, all the many nights she slept there. Unfortunately, one night blots out all the other nights. The green door to the cottage is closed, so she tries the latch, but it’s locked, as if her mam saw her coming and bolted it.

“Mam!” she calls. “I’ve come to say goodbye.” She knocks again, pleads almost. But the door never opens. By now she is drenched, her hair plastered to her face and boots soaked through. Tommy peeks out from the window seat, his hand on the pane. She places her hand on the pane from the outside and tries to smile. “I love you,” she mouths through the window. Suddenly, her mam snatches Tommy and he disappears. The window is empty, no Sean or Padraig or Ferris or Eamon, no shadow, just air.

If Mary Agnes has ever been lonelier, she can’t think of it. And then she sees Fiach coming up the lane and she runs, runs, but he is all over her, pushing her roughly down on the muddy lane, clamping his hand over her mouth and pinning her down in the muck. His hands are up under her skirt now.

“Stop! You’re hurting me!” she screams, and then “Mam! Mam!” but no one comes and this time she can’t get away and he’s fumbling with her and she retches. When he’s done, she knees him in the groin, and he yells as he gets up, leaving her there, covered with mud and sobbing.

“Ya’ll pay for this,” he hisses.

Mary Agnes limps back to her grandparents’ cottage, mute. Festus is out when she arrives, likely in the barn. As if she knows, Grace takes Mary Agnes in her arms and lets her sob. Tears course down Grace’s face as she undresses Mary Agnes and works a warm cloth over her face and shoulders and down past her narrow waist. Grace towels Mary Agnes off, helps her pull her nightdress on, and covers her with the new green shawl. Grace rocks Mary Agnes back and forth, back and forth, like a little girl, so long into the night that Mary Agnes wonders if her gram will ever let go.

A loud knock on the door arouses them.

“Open up!” a voice barks from outside the door. “Royal Irish Constabulary.”

Mary Agnes freezes. The RIC? Lorcan O’Connor and his gang? They are out for no good. Could they be coming for me? All of them?

“Coming,” Grace says. She puts her finger to her mouth and moves the rug under the table with her foot to expose the trap door. She opens it and signals for Mary Agnes to climb down into the shallow, damp root cellar.

Mary Agnes clambers down the ladder as noiselessly as she can, her legs shaking. When she gets to the bottom of the short ladder, she nods to her grandmother, who closes the trap door. From her spot cramped in the cellar, Mary Agnes hears her gram nudge the table back and shuffle to the door.

“And ya’d be?” Grace asks. “Ah, Lorcan O’Connor, is it? I recognize ya. What is it that I can do for ya lads tonight?”

It is Lorcan O’Connor. Who undid Mary Coffey.

“We heard the Coyne girl might be here.”

“The Coyne girl?”

“Mary Agnes, she’s called. Sister of Fiach.”

“Why, she would be at home, wouldn’t she? At this hour?”

“We’ve got some business with her but she’s slipped away, she has.”

“And what business is it that is so important that ya lads are out in this weather? And past ten o’clock?”

Granda!

“Sorry to bother ya, Mrs. Laffey, Captain Laffey.”

Mary Agnes hears the door shut, shuffling, the trap door hinging open.

“It’s alright, lass,” her gram says. “Ya can come up now.”

When the night passes away, she is still crumpled on her gram’s lap. She wakes to Festus’s voice.

“It’ll be time for leave taking, girl,” he says. “We’re off for Gaillimh.”

Galway. Fifty long miles away.

After a tearful goodbye to her gram, Mary Agnes sets off down the bumpy lane with Festus, their small wagon pulled by Festus’s sure-footed donkey. The sun is long from rising. It will take fifteen hours to get to Galway City via the Clifden Road, the first leg of her long journey to America.

Mary Agnes looks back at Dawrosbeg through bucketing rain, miles of green and ancient stones talking. They pass her mam’s and da’s cottage, but the windows are dark. As they turn right on the dirt road toward Clifden, she loses sight of the place she’s called home for thirteen years. More tears might have come if there were any left after last night, but this morning her eyes—like her heart—are bone dry.