Don’t say anything now.
I’m in a fog for the rest of the reception. Jack and Gavin are leaving for their honeymoon at the crack of dawn the next morning so I hug them goodbye at the end of the night. Once Zoey and I are alone in our room she asks how it went seeing Darragh again. I could admit what happened between us upstairs or say something dramatic but true like I’ll never be entirely over him. But I’m not ready to share those moments upstairs with anyone and I’ve spent so much time being sad about him in the past that I don’t want to give in to that again either. “I was nervous,” I say simply. “But it was good to talk to him.”
Good to know that he hasn’t stop caring about me and that our relationship meant something. But we’re also finite by definition. In his heart Darragh understands that, even if it pains him. And in my heart I can’t make sense of it. I just need to pull the plug.
Knowing Darragh still cares makes it easier on one level and more difficult on another. He won’t understand when he finds out I don’t want to spend the rest of my time in Dublin pairing up with him like we did tonight.
And I’m not ready to have such a painful conversation with him after what we did together. So I take the easy way out, leaving my cell off and making an excuse not to pick up the phone when my uncle answers a landline call from Darragh back in Dublin the next day. My parents and aunt and uncle have planned a trip out to Connemara to tour the rocky western countryside in three days’ time, and I’m going with them. We’ll be staying at a B&B for four days and there’ll be less than a week of our vacation remaining when we get back to Dublin. Less than a week that I could spend with Darragh, but that I won’t because it would only make things harder on me in the end. A line has to be drawn somewhere. If I don’t do it myself, it’ll etch itself the day I fly back to Toronto, just like last time.
On Monday afternoon, when I still haven’t returned Darragh’s call, he leaves a message on my cell asking if there’s something wrong. It’s cruel to leave him hanging, but he did the same to me in January and I switch off my phone again and tell myself that having a few days away from Dublin will help put things in perspective and make it easier for me to tell him the truth.
In my sleep Rana shakes her head disapprovingly. I’ve never seen her look at me with such discontent. “It’s already finished,” I tell her, feeling hurt. “It has to be.”
My sister clasps a crumpled piece of paper in one hand. I know what it is instinctively. A note I wrote her back in July, the one that said:
He makes me feel like I’ve woken up and that I’m being a part of me that no one else knows exists.
“Don’t you think I wish things could be different too?” I insist, turning away.
She’s still there when I swing back around. Rana hugs me close, pressing her cheek to mine. I can feel her dissent in the strain of her jaw even as she holds me. My own jaw aches with sadness when I open my eyes.
Tuesday I meet Clare from screenwriting class for coffee and pretend I’m fine. We talk movies and she tells me about her new boyfriend. I mention Sahan but not the night of the wedding. Joss is the only one who knows about that and she doesn’t judge me for it, or how I’m handling things. She understands the situation is a minefield.
When I arrive at my aunt and uncle’s later and turn on my phone there are three new texts from Darragh. The last one says he’s going to come over to talk to me, which means I can’t put things off any longer. There’s a fist in my heart when I call his number from Zoey’s room. I hold it there when he answers and asks why I’m avoiding him. “I’m leaving for the countryside tomorrow morning,” I say leadenly. “I won’t even have a week in Dublin when we get back. There isn’t enough time for us. And it’s like you said, the distance is too much to work around. At best we’d only ever have these little bits of time. I’m sorry.”
“But you’re here now,” Darragh protests. “A week is better than nothing. It’s just like last year when we knew we only had a few weeks. It doesn’t mean it’s not worth having.”
“You can handle it. I can’t.” My mouth skips ahead of my brain. “You don’t know what it was like for me at home last year. You broke my heart.”
I hear Darragh suck in his breath. “You broke mine when you left last summer. So I know exactly what it’s like. I’m sorry I didn’t answer that text or ring you or whatever else you wanted, but we said we wouldn’t be friends. And now you’re here and we have another chance.”
“To stir things up all over again just to end up how I felt last fall?” I snap. “I don’t want to end up there, Darragh. Maybe you can deal with it, but I can’t.”
“Stop saying I can handle it like I don’t have any emotions. How can you call things off after Saturday night?”
“How can you say you never forgot about me but that you slept with other girls while I was gone?” I fire back.
“There was no one who mattered like you did. But I thought I was never going to see you again. What did you expect me to do?” He’s beginning to sound angry, like me.
“That’s the difference between how I feel about you and how you feel about me. I couldn’t do that. I barely looked at anyone for most of the year because I was never really over you.” The naked truth.
“You’re not being fair,” he says. “You were the one who left. I told you if you were still here we’d still be together. It’s you I would’ve wanted to be with. I was gutted when you went home. But you were miles away and for all I knew you wouldn’t be back for years. Last summer you told me the only other time you’d been in Dublin was when you were eight. And you said your parents would never change their minds about me visiting you in Toronto. What the fucking hell were my options, Amira?”
He’s right about everything. It’s not his fault. It’s not anyone’s fault but now this will end badly, with us each of us feeling bitter and like the other is to blame for our shitty ending. The silence between us widens like two rafts on the water, a current forcing us apart.
“I’m sorry,” Darragh says eventually, emotion twisted up tight inside his voice. “I’m sorry about everything, all right? I don’t deal with things in the same way that you do, but if that hurt you, I’m sorry. Just don’t say you won’t see me after the way we were on Saturday. I’m coming round right now so we can talk in person.”
He’s going to make me cry on the phone. “I’m sorry too. For hurting you now. I’m glad we had Saturday. I’d never want to take any of it back.” My throat’s beginning to cave in. “But don’t come over. If you do, I won’t come down to talk to you. There isn’t any point.”
I disconnect, power off my phone and give in to raging, burning tears. When it feels as if there isn’t an ounce of water left in my body I slip into the bathroom and wash the sadness from my face. Then I sit on the closed-lid toilet until I believe I can act halfway normal for my family. Darragh never does show up on the doorstep. Maybe I got through to him in the end or maybe he’s sitting in his room with the sexy Alison Mosshart and Bat for Lashes posters beginning to hate me. Either way, we’re done. For the second and final time.
______
My family and I spend the first day of sightseeing in Galway City. It’s much smaller and more medieval looking than Dublin and you can feel the sea in the air. The winding streets and colourful house fronts are just as charming as you’d expect, and while I’m relieved to be miles from Dublin, I don’t feel solidly in the here and now. My parents’ enthusiasm for every stone archway, cathedral, and bridge we encounter quickly begins to grate on me. You’d think they’d have gotten their fill of such things on last year’s cruise stops.
By evening my mom and I are squabbling about nothing in a bistro bathroom and you’d also think that most people expect teenagers to be a little surly at times, but this isn’t the way things are with my mother. If I act grouchy she gets grouchier, like that’s supposed to snap me out of it. Sometimes it does. But not tonight in the bistro, and when she says, “What’s wrong with you today?” I implode, not into tears but into silent fury.
“What?” my mother prods, gazing steadily into my face. “What is it?”
“You would never understand.” The fury’s not so silent anymore and my mother’s taken aback. She can’t see what she’s done to put the fire in my voice.
“Why do you say that?” she asks.
“Because you didn’t understand last year.”
My mother’s eyes haven’t moved from mine. I watch her brain click into action, leapfrogging through the events of last year.
“You see, you don’t even know,” I say stonily. “You have no clue.”
My mother blinks, the wrinkles under her eyes deepening. She has a wad of damp paper towel in her right fist and she squeezes it, her lips puckering. “I think I do. This is about that dance with Darragh at Jack’s reception, isn’t it?”
I stare at the wall, my limbs stiff and my face aching. “I’ve never been able to forget him. But we’re impossible.”
“Being here and seeing him has temporarily dredged things up again and made you say these things,” my mother says staunchly. “You were fine at home. You haven’t talked about him in months and months. And there’s that new boy, Sahan, you’ve been seeing.”
“I stopped talking about Darragh because I had to. What was I supposed to do?” I shrug heavily, regretting beginning the conversation. “It can never work. Our lives are going in different directions. They just intersected for a while.”
My mother’s stopped mauling the paper towel in her hand. Her eyes soften. “You have your whole life ahead of you. I’m sorry you have to feel this way now, but you’re smart to know you can’t let what happened last year hold either of you back.” My mom wraps her left arm around my shoulders and smoothes her fingers over the ends of my hair. “You’re both so young. Things change quickly.”
I laugh harshly. It’s one year later and my feelings are like fresh paint. And not just because of Saturday. What happened Saturday happened because of the feelings I was already carrying around with me.
“It’s not that I don’t understand, Habibti,” my mother adds. “And it’s not that I didn’t understand last year either. There’s a difference between understanding your feelings and wanting to do what’s best for you. You hardly knew Darragh last summer. You let yourself get caught up too fast.”
Every word out of her mouth just proves my point—she doesn’t get it. “My feelings aren't something you can control,” I counter. “And sometimes I’m the one who knows what’s best for me, even if you don’t happen to like it. If I had to do it all again I wouldn’t change anything that happened between me and Darragh. That should tell you something.” But I don’t want to fight with my mother anymore, and I don’t blame her and my dad for not allowing Darragh to come visit me. According to Darragh himself that wouldn’t have been enough to keep us going.
“But it’s all beside the point now.” I force myself to sound resolute so that she’ll let me drop the subject. “We’re done.”
My mom’s arm falls slowly from my shoulders. She skirts to the right of me to toss her soggy paper towel into the garbage. “Maybe it’s a good thing that we’re spending this time away from Dublin,” she says quietly. “Maybe it’s what you need.”
A journey around Connemara is on tomorrow’s agenda. A windblown, craggy-rough beauty is what I expect of it. I’m sure the landscape will be stunning, but it won’t change the way I feel.
Nevertheless I’m up for breakfast at eight-thirty the next morning along with my parents and aunt and uncle. I have porridge with berries and herbal tea, eating so little that I’m the first one at our table to finish with their meal. One of the B&B owners, a twiggy woman in her early forties, fusses over me, wondering if I didn’t like the porridge and whether she can make me something else instead.
I feel the weight of Mom’s penetrating gaze on me as I tell the woman the porridge was fine and that I don’t normally eat very much in the morning. Before long everyone’s caught up to me and we’re filing through the front hall with a collection of guidebooks, maps, and cameras in our hands. The first stop we’re making today is Connemara National Park, then on to Clifden, Connemara’s largest town. Yesterday was cool and overcast and I’m wearing layers, prepared for anything.
Anything except what happens when I step out the door and into the B&B parking lot. Darragh’s standing beside his Yamaha in the spot next to the minivan Uncle Frank borrowed for this trip. My running shoes stick to the pavement, my eyes freezing on Darragh roughly thirty feet away from me. His phone is pressed to his ear, his expression miserable, and when our eyes collide my stomach drops to the pavement.
I hear my parents hustle outside behind me, my dad muttering something about ‘Matias déjà vu’ underneath his breath. I whip around to glare defiantly at my father. My mom grabs his arm and begins to shepherd him—and my aunt and uncle who are now standing uncertainly behind me too—back the way they came.
Mom shoots me a wary but not unfeeling look as she closes the B&B door firmly behind her. Then Darragh and I are alone in the lot, him sliding his phone into his pants. His hands disappear into the pockets of his hooded jacket as he walks slowly towards me like he doesn’t want to be here. So why do this then? Why come all this way? Avoiding the motorways the scooter probably wouldn’t be powerful enough to travel on it would’ve taken him over three hours to make the trip.
I shiver and begin walking too, both of us stopping in front of a planter filled with hardy red and yellow flowers. “What are you doing here?” My voice slices through the chilly morning air.
“I have to go in a minute.” Darragh sounds worse than I do. The bleakness is cold in his throat and stark in his features. “Zoey told me where you were staying. I know you wanted me to leave you alone, but I couldn’t. Not if there was anything I could do to change your mind. So it’s my turn to ask whether it’s too late, and I thought my chances were better if you had to look me in the face.”
Darragh’s open stare undoes me in a way I’ll never get used to. I glance down at my feet, feeling this thing between us stretch like an elastic band as he says, “I reckon if we both want this, there has to be something we can do. You’re almost eighteen. If your parents still won’t let me visit you in Toronto, I could buy you a flight to come see me in Dublin whenever you like. So what if the distance is hard? Having whatever time I can with you, when we can make it work, is better than not knowing you anymore.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he continues, his eyes liquid blue. “That I’m only saying this because you’re back in Ireland and that as soon as you go we’ll burn out. But it doesn’t have to be like that, if we don’t let it. I wish there was more time to convince you, but I have to leave.” Darragh holds his spine unnaturally straight. “That was Derek on the phone with me a minute ago. He said he was trying to reach me for hours while I was driving out here. My mum’s overdosed. She’s in ICU. On a ventilator. She was in respiratory failure when the ambulance picked her up early this morning.”
I’ve hardly had a chance to grasp what he said about us, let alone his mom’s condition. For a moment my mind rebels against Darragh’s words; I don’t want them to be true. That dishevelled picture of Michelle Donlon from months ago shouldn’t lead us here.
“Listen, your mom is strong,” I tell him, closing my hand around his arm. My doubts about us instantly seem stupid and selfish. The only thing that matters now is that Darragh’s mom pulls through. “She’s young.” Younger than my parents. “She can fight her way through this.” I picture Shel D singing You’re a Hazard, so vital that I can’t imagine her unconscious in a hospital bed.
“Yeah,” Darragh says faintly. “I hope you’re right.” He stares past me, at the B&B door. “Your dad looked like he wanted to throttle me.”
“Don’t worry about him.”
Darragh nods haggardly. “I have to go. I need to catch a flight to London. I reckon I should head for the Shannon airport. It’s only an hour away.”
“Go,” I say gently, my heart breaking for him. “Call me to let me know how your mom’s doing when you can.”
Shell-shocked, Darragh turns away from me and trudges to his bike. He tugs his helmet on, straddles the seat and starts the engine. Then he steers the Yamaha rapidly towards my spot by the planter. “Thanks,” he tells me.
“I didn’t do anything.”
“It feels like you did.” He stares at me from under his helmet, hesitating. “Amira?” I stare tensely back, waiting for the next bomb to drop. “Whatever happens between us, you should know I’ve been in love with you since last summer and it’s as real as anything gets. I should’ve done something about it sooner. Life’s too short for the bullshit I was telling myself—for being afraid and thinking that being with you was too hard to try for. Don’t say anything now. Just think about what I said about us working something out.”
Darragh’s bike veers sharply to the left and then tears down the driveway and onto the street. My heart’s still hammering when he fades from view, becoming one with the Connemara vista. Left alone on the driveway it’s quiet like you never hear in the city, only the sound of the wind whistling to keep me company as my mind tumbles and tumbles, my heart falling along with it, following Darragh down the narrow country road.