Maeve got bit that time, that first time we went out to the mainland.
Nearly exactly three years after Mam died, so it was. I’m not sure she’d have wanted to linger longer, even for me.
We’ve been walking for a few hours inland, Maeve and me, when Maeve says to stop and show her where we are exactly. I open up the map, and she hunkers down on the ground and shields her eyes from the glare of the sun. I’ve one thick, dirty finger on the old paper, tracing the blue of the road. The big blue lines are still okay to trust, Maeve says. She’s different now, off-island, more awake, brighter in herself.
I stop and look around us again. Mostly the land is like on Slanbeg: green and brown and flat, cowering underneath the sky above it.
“Show me where we are,” Maeve tells me, and I crouch beside her in the dust.
It’s an old map, Maeve has explained to me before, and I know things won’t match up exactly. The smaller roads anyway have mostly been swallowed up by the woods, and maybe even the courses of rivers have changed, but I know where home is. I know the straight high road that goes all the way east.
I try to guess how far we’d have come along the road. Beside me, Maeve has stood to stare about us real obvious to let me know that this is serious and that I should be doing the same thing when I’m not looking at the map. She crouches again to look at the point I’d put my finger on, a spot nearly in the middle of Ireland, and I take my turn to throw my eyes around at the barren landscape. Doing it even more obviously. To poke fun, but to show her I’m on it as well, I’m ready.
“No,” Maeve says, “look again.”
It turns out that we’ve walked about a quarter of what I thought. At this rate, it would take four or five days to get to the east coast, and that’s if the map is mostly right. Not that Maeve would ever let us head east, I’d guess. That’s where Phoenix City is, off in that direction, somewhere toward or near Dublin. Only Maeve knows now.
“Think now about where to aim for tonight, where we’ll make camp.”
I don’t want her to think things are fixed just because she’s talking, just because we’re here now, though if I was asked why I was so angry with her still, I don’t know could I say.
I want to go east just so we can walk that road a little, and nearly point at a town some distance down the blue line in front of us, but in the end I put my hands behind my back and stare her out.
Maeve maybe doesn’t notice or maybe doesn’t care. She shakes her head beside me. “Too many places to hide in a town, too hard to keep an eye out for ourselves. Beware tall buildings,” and I stiffen up in annoyance because I’ve heard her say it a million times, but on she goes. “They’re liable to falling down. We’re headed south.” She’s murmuring to herself, her words, now they’re coming, tumbling out of her. Her voice is scratchy. “We’ll have to get through the town to stay on this road, and this road is the right one for meeting up with the bigger road. That’ll take us … here. We don’t want to be going through the village just when it’s getting dark.”
She gives a little nod at last. “Let’s camp here,” and she points to a stretch of blue beside a bend in the river. I can see how it’s a good place. If we’re lucky, we’ll be able to get off the road and get fresh water.
“Move out.”
I concentrate on keeping up, keeping my eyes on the road and trying not to get distracted by the changing landscape around us.
Maeve walks with purpose. She leans heavily on her stick, but her strides are strong. She is light on her feet, tense and quiet. There’s power in her yet.
I try to be quiet and vigilant. I try to be like Maeve even while I’m raging at her.
We stop to eat when the sun’s at its highest and hottest, taking shelter in the long shadows of a rough patch of ramshackle houses. It’s so good to sit, to flex my arms and to look at things that I have never seen before.
We each eat a potato and I eat two eggs, and I am about as close to full as I get. I watch carefully to make sure Maeve eats her share. She’s had a cough, and I can hear her wheeze. She hasn’t shaken off the winter yet. We make ourselves comfortable and well hidden under some trees, and I doze in the warmth.
After lunch, the sun is on our backs, and for a while the going feels easier. Once, late in the afternoon, I don’t pay enough attention and trip over my own feet, going flying, skinning my knees. Maeve stops and turns to watch me pick myself up, and after that we stop more often for water and to eat a little and to sit. I am young and strong; I can feel the strength in myself, waiting to be proven. And Maeve is old now, and a small bit sick, and still and all, it is she who slows herself to wait for me.
That’s what I remember most about all of that. The brief period I was happy, in between my mother dying and Maeve dying. A few hours on the mainland when I felt safe, when I felt like we had escaped something, and knew we were a family despite everything.