Racing up First Avenue, her ankles wobbling in stiletto-heeled boots, Annie slipped sideways between clusters of tourists descending toward Pike Place Market. It was raining, a soft weeping of the gray-white sky that epitomized late March in the Puget Sound. Rainwater filled the lid of her to-go coffee, and her dark-blond hair, pulled into a high ponytail, shimmered with moisture.
She pivoted out of the revolving door into the lobby and took the stairs two at a time to the mezzanine office of Magnuson + Associates: Strategic Communications. As she blew past the open threshold of Serena’s outer office, she caught Beth’s pointed look at the clock on the opposite wall. “I know, I know,” Annie said. “There was an accident on the Aurora Bridge.” The office manager waved a hand, as if pushing her through the air into the CEO’s inner chamber.
Serena, her lips drawn into a thin line, squinted over the top of her crescent-shaped reading glasses. “Annie. Come in and shut the door. We need to talk.”
Annie hesitated, swallowing back her dread. She was twelve again, called into the principal’s office for a reprimand at best, punishment likely. She pressed the door shut behind her.
“I know what this is about. I haven’t been pulling my weight.” Not giving Serena a chance to respond, Annie rushed on, spilling out the phrases she’d picked up in therapy. “It’s taken time to establish healthy routines, to get used to the idea of my life as a different person.” To get used to the idea of being alone. But no one other than her AA sponsor knew the current state of her marriage. “This isn’t me forever, Serena.”
Her boss held up a hand and removed her glasses, leaving them to dangle on a thin chain around her neck. Aware of and yet unable to stop the protective stance, Annie crossed her arms over her chest, elbows braced in her palms. A shield against what was to come.
“The problem is, it’s been you for a long time,” Serena said. “The relief around here while you were gone was palpable. I can’t deny that morale has tanked in the weeks since you’ve been back. This is a small firm, and we’re all bearing the burden of your crash. Your colleagues have covered for you, taken over your projects, managed your clients. They’ve done it out of love and respect, but everyone is tired. I’m tired. We can’t continue on this way.”
Sinking into the chair that faced Serena’s desk, she asked, “Are you firing me?”
“No.” Serena let the word hang, and it drifted into an unstated but. “I don’t know how much longer I can protect you,” she said at last. “The partners want to renew your performance warning.”
Cold fingers of dread squeezed Annie’s belly.
“We can’t—we wouldn’t—fire you for being an alcoholic. We can, and we will, fire you for not doing the work you’ve been given. And we already have enough incidents on file to do just that.”
Annie directed her gaze beyond the office’s glass wall to the bustle of the graphics studio, flooded with natural light, then to the boardroom, where a meeting was underway. Two of her colleagues walked by, their glances shifting sideways into Serena’s office, then quickly away.
She’d met Serena at twenty-three, not long after a slide down a mountain trail had shattered her left leg and her dreams of a running career. Before her injury, Annie had been a darling of the running-shoe company that had built the university stadium where she’d risen to collegiate championship levels. The Olympics were in her sights. Two months after the accident, Serena had approached her with a job offer. “I’ve seen how you work a running oval, a press box, a crowd,” she’d said. “You soothe egos and bring people together.”
Back then Serena was a junior partner at a public relations firm in Portland that managed the shoe company’s marketing campaign. She was setting up her own firm in downtown Seattle and brought Annie on board. They’d been together since the beginning of Magnuson + Associates; Serena had given her a first chance at a new life.
Fifteen years later, Annie sat in the silence of her shame. But she wasn’t being fired. Not immediately, anyway. She trembled as relief seeped in. This was the last thing of her old life she could hang on to—proof she’d been worthy of trust and respect and would be again.
Yet even as she sighed into the reprieve, a hollow of disappointment opened up. Rehab had meant finding new ways to cope with life without numbing the pain. But rehab wasn’t the real world. It was a controlled environment, deep in the woods, safe and protected and free from everything she’d been trying to escape. Returning to the same life she’d left to get sober felt like defeat. Without her job, she would be something undefined. But she would be free. Still Annie probed further, admitting that nothing had yet filled the cavern left by alcohol. And that terrified her. Where could she go but this place, at once so familiar and yet uncomfortable, no longer in need of her, no longer safe?
A sharp throat clearing made Annie refocus her attention.
“Look.” Serena’s brown eyes lost their hard veneer, and her shoulders dropped as she softened from boss to longtime friend. “I have fought to keep you. I’ll keep on fighting. I believe in the passionate, funny, razor-sharp woman who is determined to rebuild her life, the Annie who kept running despite the shattered leg, who pulled herself up after she lost her brother—”
“Stop,” Annie whispered, fighting back tears. “Just stop.” Serena had pushed her to the edge. “What do you want me to do?”
“I’ve handed you soft assignments until you got back on your feet.” Serena smoothed a hand across the pristine surface of her desk, and the moment of tenderness was gone. “But now I need you to pick up the slack. This contract with Eire-Evergreen is the biggest thing we’ve taken on since the viaduct campaign, and I can’t have a senior associate writing press releases and proofing copy.”
Annie held her breath, her thoughts spinning through the recent e-mails she’d only skimmed before dropping them into a virtual folder she’d then ignored. It hurt too much to be excluded from a project that once would have been her exclusive purview: a tangle of environmental versus business interests in a place she knew better than anyone here: Ireland. Eire-Evergreen Metals, an Irish-American subsidiary of an Australian mining conglomerate with a plan to develop a copper mine in a remote corner of southwest Ireland, had contracted Magnuson + Associates to develop its public relations strategy.
But Annie had shredded her credibility in the months before she’d entered treatment, and she’d done little to regain her footing in the firm since returning to work. She’d swallowed her protests when word got out that Jeff Franklin had been tapped to manage the Eire-Evergreen campaign. Perhaps she’d misunderstood. Perhaps Serena recognized her potential.
“If you want me to take a larger role, send me to Ireland.” The idea occurred to Annie at almost the same moment she spoke the words aloud. Working in a place she loved would take her mind off her failing marriage and the drudgery of recovery. Someplace far away from the disappointed scrutiny here. And not just anyplace.
Ireland. She’d felt whole there. A high school summer exchange in Cork, chosen by her dad from the available list of his Rotary club, had led to a love affair with the place that she’d tried to sate with repeat visits to hike its many national trail ways. She’d brought Stephen along once, a few years ago, and they’d hiked the Kerry Way, but Ireland had always felt like hers alone.
Serena curled her sleek, mink-brown bob behind her ears. “You know we’ve already assigned the project to Jeff?” she said, her voice even and low.
“I heard, yes.” Annie bit back the critical comments of her colleague that her fortified-by-booze self would have let slip through. Then she flushed with the sudden, manic conviction that she must be the one to go. Her knees knocked against the desk front as she sat forward, heart racing.
“Serena. Listen. I’ve proven I can take sticky environmental issues and spin them into pluses for the community. The Seattle viaduct campaign. I owned that.” She pressed her hands tightly between her thighs to keep control. “I’ll sell Eire-Evergreen’s dream so the community thinks they dreamed it first.”
She received a thin smile and a slight shake of head in response. “You’re two months out of rehab,” Serena said. “You couldn’t possibly take on a major PR campaign five thousand miles away from your support system.”
“What if I relapse? Is that what you’re thinking?”
Serena raised her eyebrows a fraction.
“I mark each and every sober day on my calendar. One hundred five and counting.”
“What would your counselors and your doctor say?”
What would they say? Annie had no idea, but she’d find a way to sell this to them, too. “What if they give the all clear?”
Serena sat for a long moment, eyes cast down to her hands, spread flat on the blotter. Then she drew her palms to meet, interlacing her fingers, tapping the lacquered red nails of her thumbs together. “You couldn’t know this, but I’ve got a dilemma on my hands.”
That dilemma played itself out in her uncharacteristic fidgeting. Annie held her breath.
“Jeff’s wife has just been diagnosed with preeclampsia, and she’s confined to bed rest for the duration of her pregnancy. Months. Jeff has asked to be taken off the campaign, and I need to make a replacement, immediately. Eire-Evergreen wants someone there, ready to go, in two weeks.”
Hope rippled through Annie. Please, she pleaded silently.
“Perhaps your instincts are right—perhaps this project could be a lifeline to you. But it may also be your last chance at this firm. Do you understand what I’m saying?” Serena paused, her gaze fixed and unwavering on Annie’s face.
Her boss’s scrutiny and doubt were almost visible in the air as Annie weighed all the arguments against her and tried to quickly build a defense. “It will be the last one I need. I promise. I won’t let you down. I’ll have a project proposal to you by Monday.” The AA insider’s joke came back to her: How do you know an alcoholic is lying? Their lips are moving. She’d promised herself she wouldn’t fuck up again. Which is precisely what she’d done in her marriage. But if she could just get out of here, away, back to Ireland, she’d be all right.
“Talk with your doctor,” Serena was saying. “Then talk to me.”
~
His 4Runner was gone—Stephen had left that morning for the IRONMAN triathlon in California—but Annie parked on the street anyway. The night he’d thrown the bottle at her, she’d found a room in an extended-stay hotel just off I-5, north of downtown. She hadn’t gotten around to thinking beyond that. Their Green Lake Arts and Crafts bungalow was no longer her home. But she still had her key.
The plastic archive bin she sought was on the top shelf of the guest room closet. Annie clicked on the closet light and tipped the bin toward her, catching it in her outstretched hands as it began to fall. Sitting on the carpeted floor, her back against the bed, she opened the bin.
Two maps were rolled tightly inside a cardboard poster tube—they hadn’t been unfurled since she and Stephen bought them at a Waterville souvenir shop during their hike four years ago. The top map was of the Iveragh Peninsula, the one they’d traversed on their walk of the Kerry Way. So enamored of their hike in Kerry, they’d decided to return the next summer and tackle the peninsula just to the south, which promised wilder beauty and more challenging trails than the Iveragh. But then her mother died and the world began to close in, one drink at a time. They did not return to Ireland that next summer, nor any that followed. The map became a memory never shared. The Iveragh remained curled shut beside her.
Annie held open the second map with one hand and her folded legs. It was an aerial drawing of the Beara Peninsula, the rises of its barren hills colored light brown, its pastured land in scales of soft green, the few villages a collection of white dots. Most of the space was devoted to blue: the Atlantic Ocean, Bantry Bay, and the Celtic Sea defined the craggy, narrow spaces of land. She ran her finger up one end of the peninsula and down the other, searching for Ballycaróg.
“It’s not even on the feckin’ map,” she declared in her approximate Irish accent. “Oh no, wait. Oh. You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Beara stretched away from the southwest coast of Ireland into the North Atlantic like the long foot of a lizard. At the tip of the foot was a gnarled knuckle of land: the Slieve Miskish mountains. The knuckle slid south to end in three claws—the westernmost tips of the country. Ballycaróg wasn’t at the very end of the earth—that distinction belonged to the edge of Dursey Island, ten miles south—but it was tucked into a cove that looked toward nothing but ocean, all the way to Canada’s Maritime Provinces. Annie lifted her hand, and Beara rolled up to the edge of Bantry.
She’d been to Bantry once, during her high school exchange in Cork. Her host family had taken her out for a Sunday drive, and by the time they arrived in that village by the bay, she was green to the gills from sitting in the backseat while her host father careened along the winding, narrow roads. She remembered the brightly colored buildings all in a row, their reds, yellows, salmons, and blues defiant behind sheets of June rain. The jumble ended where the hills began, covered in bright green pastures marked by hedgerows. Pastoral. Peaceful. Parish churches. And pubs.
She pushed back the rolled-up edge and searched again for the little cove that sheltered Ballycaróg. “What do you have in store for me?”
She tipped her head back against the bed, her finger still perched on the edge of Ballycaróg Cove. Her thoughts drifted away, but her eyes lit on a small black nylon bag sitting on a lower shelf.
Not long after she’d arrived at Salish Treatment Center in Port Townsend, Stephen had made the trip from Seattle with her Nikon. He’d pushed the camera bag across the cafeteria table, saying she was in one of the most beautiful places in the Northwest and that it might do her some good to show an interest in photography again. She took the bag back to her room and stashed it in her suitcase. The deeper she’d fallen into her addiction, the more she’d let her love for photography slip away, along with everything else that had brought meaning to her life.
Now, she rose and took another camera bag from the shelf. She carefully lifted out the camera, turning its cool, compact black-and-silver body in her hands. It was a Leica M-P Rangefinder, a manual camera that cost as much as a used car. Her parents had presented her with this camera fifteen years ago, while she was still in the hospital recovering from the shattered femur. But the camera had been Ryan’s idea. Only her kid brother knew her well enough, had listened to her chatter about photographer Sebastião Salgado during the rare times she could get free of school and training to come home. After her accident, Ryan had researched the Brazilian and the equipment he used, and set out to save his sister’s soul. She hadn’t touched the Leica since Ryan died.
Annie repacked the Leica, grabbed the larger Nikon bag with its lenses and accessories, and set the camera bags in a large duffel. Around them, she arranged all she thought she would need for Ireland: rain gear, suits, blouses, sweaters, a pair of running shoes. She left the house the way she came, through the kitchen door, into the rain.