Chapter Thirty-five
Your feet will bring you where your heart is.
Irish proverb
Colleen glanced out the airplane window—the clouds were tumbled and gray, appearing impenetrable until the plane burst through and the Emerald Isle appeared below. The plane banked left and dipped; Colleen gasped as the green patchwork-quilted landscape appeared below. In a quick scribble in her open notebook, she wrote, I arrive in a place where all the greens in the world were born.
She hadn’t slept at all on the seven-hour transfer flight from New York’s JFK, where she’d connected from Savannah. Instead, she’d been writing as furiously as she ever had. Her notebook, a small green one she’d bought for the trip, was now one-quarter full with notes and little sketches to remind herself of other times and other trips—a shorthand she’d come to use in her travels. While other passengers slept with their eye masks on, and the flight attendants wandered up and down the aisle talking in subdued tones, Colleen wrote and wrote. While her seatmate—a British woman who wore too much perfume and chewed her food with the noises of a grinding machine—watched movie after movie, Colleen wrote and wrote.
Her work kept the grief at bay until she let down her pen, let down her guard, and it crashed into her as a blindsided punch. But still she kept writing—the work wasn’t profound, she knew that much, but it was honest. It conveyed some small truths. She wrote about how she’d squelched her hurt with travel and adventure; about how she’d avoided intimacy by finding fault in others; she understood slowly and quietly that she could not wait for a man to save her life just as she could not blame a man for ruining it.
After they landed, she moved dreamlike and sleep deprived through the customs line, making small talk with a tall man and his son headed to a golf trip. Colleen felt both untethered and elated as she looked for her bag. Although she hadn’t yet stepped her feet onto the green earth, the mantra I am in Ireland; I am in the land of my birth wound around and around her thoughts like yarn binding her close and safe.
After cashing in her U.S. dollars for euros at the exchange stand, she exited the airport and stood in the soft air of Ireland. It was just another airport, another city, just like the hundreds of others she’d found herself cast upon after a long flight, and yet it was anything but just another city. She stood still for a long while, breathing in and out, wishing she’d slept on the plane, and trying to catalog everything in her sight: sunlight creeping along the grass; the varied accents like musical notes; the soft scents of fresh-cut grass; the gray industrial buildings that might belong to any airport.
“May I help you?” A thin man in a fisherman’s cap startled Colleen and she jumped, dropping her backpack onto the sidewalk as her cast banged against its edges.
“No. I’m good.” She leaned over to pick up her pack and then smiled at the older man with wrinkles on his face like fissures, but pleasant in the creases of his smile. “Just needing a taxi.”
“Well, then you’re in luck.” He tipped his hat and spoke in a brogue so lovely Colleen thought she wanted to record that simple sentence. He pointed at the black taxi directly behind him. “Where would you be needing to go, miss?”
“County Clare.” Colleen rattled off the address of the pub, which she’d already memorized. There was no use in wasting time. If she’d traveled this far to see the place, then she would go straight there.
“Well, that’s grand, let’s be on our way.”
She knew a taxi was extravagant, but she wasn’t ready to drive the windy roads on the wrong side, and she planned on staying in the small town until she decided what to do next. No need for a car . . . yet. Her destination was only an hour away, but by the third curve in the road, Colleen’s head lolled to the side and she was fast asleep. She awoke as the driver lurched to a stop and with a laugh asked, “You’d be liking the pub this early on a Tuesday morning?”
Colleen sat upright and rubbed her eyes, confused for only a moment as she readjusted both her gaze and her thoughts. Outside the window was a view as stunning as any she’d ever seen—Galway Bay glinting in the sun. She opened the door and stepped out, wondering vaguely if she were dreaming.
Here was a land she’d only imagined or seen in photos, a land so green and a sea so blue and a marsh so lush that it seemed to be an animated movie formed of hyper colors and sounds. Gulls cried, a donkey brayed and the bay water splashed and swished on craggy granite boulders that lined a boggy area so bright green it was almost neon. She knew it would take days, maybe weeks, for her eyes to see all there was, to absorb and understand the landscape. This was her geography, a place where she’d been conceived in love and born in trauma. This was the place of herself.
The taxi driver climbed out of the car and stood next to her. “You okay, miss?”
“I don’t know that I’ve ever been better.” She turned to take in the pub behind her, a simple facade next to a restaurant facing the bay.
“Are you sure you’re wanting to be dropped off at O’Shea’s? It doesn’t open until six tonight.”
Colleen glanced back at the driver, and his smile was concerned. “I’m staying only a couple doors down from here. I’ll walk when I’m ready. I just wanted to see it straightaway.”
He pointed at her cast. “You’re sure now? You don’t need help?”
She grinned. “Fit as a fiddle.” She knocked on the cast with the knuckles of her free hand. She quickly paid the man and he drove off.
Colleen’s backpack was flung over her shoulder and her small suitcase sat at her feet like an obedient dog. She didn’t move, but cataloged the details of the pub as though she intended to paint it, needed to memorize it. It was just like the photo she’d seen in the historical office back in Watersend.
It was as though the old photo had shimmered and shaken itself, and then come to life. The side windows and dark green door; the gold lettering above the door stating the name in proud letters; the pots brimming with multicolored flowers of anemone and foxglove; and the window displaying various kinds of whiskey and photos of local townspeople. The structure was simpler and smaller than the Lark—a double door in the middle and windows on either side in perfect symmetry. Colleen felt that if she opened the door she would find the décor to be similar to the Lark, all dark wood and low lanterns, sparkling glassware and taps poking above the lacquered bar. She might find old friends sharing a pint, sharing their lives in the intimate way of pub life.
Sauntering down the sidewalk, an older man approached Colleen. He carried a bag and he walked deliberately toward the bay. He was short and a cigarette dangled from his lips, his face hidden under a cap. As he neared her, she saw that he was even older than he’d appeared, and had a kind face. He stopped and smiled. “Hello, ma’am, are you lost?”
“Not at all,” she said. “Just enjoying the view.”
He nodded at her suitcase and then dropped the cigarette, crushing it beneath his leather boot. She noticed that the bag he carried was in fact a guitar case. “You arriving or leaving our fair town?” he asked.
“Arriving,” she said. “And just now.” She pointed at his case. “A guitar there?”
He glanced down as if he’d forgotten he was carrying it. “Ah, yes. Practice with the band.” He nodded toward the pub.
“You’re going into the pub? I thought it wasn’t open.”
“It isn’t except for setup. You needing a drink?” He laughed and glanced at his wrist, which didn’t have a watch but she got the point.
“Not quite yet. I just want to meet the owners, or the family who owns it.”
He stared at Colleen for a moment, the silence stretching toward the bay and back again to the pub.
She smiled at him. “It’s a lovely place. My dad used to work here . . . a long time ago.”
The man stood still and placed his guitar case next to her suitcase so it appeared that they’d been traveling together. “Your da?”
“Yes. Well, I was hoping someone might remember him, although I know it’s a long shot.”
“Well, you’ll be coming back tonight then.” It was not a question.
“I will.”
“That’ll be grand. You’ll find all the stories you’ll be wanting to hear.”
Colleen brushed the hair from her eyes as the man picked up his case. “Do you know any O’Sheas?”
“I do indeed. I’d be one.”
Colleen stared at him then with new eyes. The fine smile, the pale skin and the jaunty pose. “So am I,” she said. “I’m an O’Shea.”
She hadn’t, until that moment, thought this truth in words. She was, though. She was an O’Shea.
“Well, that is grand.” He smiled and slapped his hand on his thigh. “You’ll be finding quite a number of us here. Too many to count. Have you been doing that ancestry tree all the Americans are doing to find your ancestors?”
“No. My mother, well, I thought the family didn’t own the pub anymore. I thought . . .” Although this stranger might be somehow related by blood, Colleen would not yet share her full story with him. Dare she mention her mother’s name? “I thought Colleen O’Shea was the last one of the family to own it and when she passed . . .”
“God rest her beautiful soul.” The man crossed himself and closed his eyes for a moment before gazing again at Colleen. “Aye, you’d be right about that. She was the last direct descendant, but her second cousin Shawn swooped in to save it after she passed on. And God bless him for that.” The man smiled. “My name is Sully.”
“Nice to meet you, Sully.” She held out her hand. “Colleen.”
The man shook her hand and held to it, his fingers entwined in hers. “Well, well, you are Colleen, aren’t you?”
“You mean . . . ?” She clung to his hand and he to hers.
“Well, here you are now. This is the land where stories come alive. And you, Colleen O’Shea, have always been part of a love story.” He released her hand and picked up his guitar case with a smile so wide Colleen wondered if it hurt his cheeks.
“A love story?”
“Well, yes, you are. Welcome home. Tonight shall be grand.” And with that, he was gone, disappearing around the back of the pub.
She gazed toward the water and realized that if she were to put in one of the sailboats moored to the concrete dock a few hundred yards away, and steer it west and slightly south, she could eventually land at her own dock in Watersend. She would find herself again at the water’s edge in her backyard with the tilting tree house and the one-story home where her sister and nieces now lived, where her childhood had unfolded and where a man named Beckett had told her that he just might be falling in love, if he allowed himself, or if she allowed him to do so.
Colleen gripped the suitcase handle and began to walk the few blocks to her rented cottage, the wheels popping on the cobblestones and uneven sidewalk.
The pub crowd pressed in on Colleen as she stripped off her raincoat. It was nine at night and the place was packed to the walls. During the day she’d walked around the town, napped for hours and wrote her first impressions of the town. She found a place for fish and chips and gobbled as though she hadn’t eaten in weeks. Now she stood near the entranceway taking it all in, cataloging it as she would any place she’d be writing about. The hoppy aroma of beer mixed with the scents of rain and warm bodies. The wooden bar was dark and formed an L shape at the end of the room. Men and women were bellied up, placing orders in their thick accents and slapping one another on the back. It seemed everyone knew everyone else and Colleen wondered if this was how a stranger might feel entering the Lark. The room looked and felt as she’d thought, but also deeper and richer, just as though she’d imagined it in three dimensions and found instead four.
The dark wood-paneled walls were nearly covered with framed photos of men in uniform, men in groups, women at the bar or the bay, families and parties, priests and bartenders. And just as in Watersend, there were posters for bands and musicians.
With her raincoat draped over her arm, Colleen moved through the room, not looking at those around her but at the photos. Was her dad here? Her mom? As she wiggled and wound her way to the back of the room, she saw it—a photo of her dad as a much younger man, exactly as he’d appeared in the photo back in Watersend, the one where he was sitting on a stone wall, dressed in a suit with a flower pinned to his lapel. Here, though, there was a woman at his side. She wore a simple white dress with lace sleeves and a short lace veil pinned to her wild curly hair, both of which seemed alive in the wind. She clung to Gavin, both her arms looped through one of his as she leaned against his shoulder. He gazed at her and she at him, and it was clear they were both laughing. All was right with the world for this couple—they had no idea what was coming. Does anyone ever?
Colleen backed up and bumped into an older man. His shock of white hair sprouted in all directions and his Guinness was half-empty. He smiled kindly and stepped out of the way.
“I’m sorry. Did I make you move from your spot at the bar?”
“Aye, no, you didn’t. But I’m afraid if I stay here I’ll be falling in love with you.” He bowed his head and laughed, then ambled off to join another white-haired gentleman at the far end.
Colleen grinned at the flirtation and backed up to take his vacated spot, still gazing at the photo. Her mom, or the woman who had given her life. The laughing woman in the white dress on her dad’s arm looked like her. Curly dark hair, large wide-set eyes, a smile that reached high onto her cheekbones. Yet, this Colleen had a face full of freckles, a smattering across her nose and cheekbones like sprinkled stars.
“You know those people?” a voice asked behind Colleen and she turned, her hand reflexively coming over her heart. She faced a gentleman, most likely her dad’s age, holding a tray teetering with beer and whiskey glasses.
“Partly, yes.”
He nodded his head toward the wall. “This is the wall of O’Sheas.”
Colleen took in the man’s kind blue eyes and furrowed forehead. “That’s my dad.” She pointed at the photo.
The man set the tray on the bar and threw his hands in the air. “Sully told me you might be coming tonight. You’re Colleen.”
She blushed, feeling the heat of it in her face and under her arms. “Yes.”
“Welcome.” He took her right hand in both of his wide callused palms and pumped her arm up and down. “Let me take your coat.” Which he did, and hung it on a hook behind the bar. “Expect you’ll be staying awhile?”
“I think so, yes.”
“Sit.” He pulled out a bar stool and then placed two fingers in his mouth to emit a loud whistle. The bar crowd was silenced and he hollered out, “We have Colleen O’Shea with us here tonight. Now you make her feel welcome.”
The remainder of the night was loud and blurred and she felt as if she were in a lucid dream. The accents, deep and rich, carried her along. She sipped whiskey and met second cousins and a slew of townspeople who had all adored her mom, and a few who remembered and loved her dad. Colleen O’Shea had been an only child, they said, and look now, they exclaimed, her only daughter here at last. “We knew you’d come back one day,” almost all of them said. “This land draws people home.”
There were the few, a pair of sisters who’d been Colleen’s best friends, who blamed Gavin for the loss of Colleen. And they told her so. “If your da had just stayed where he was meant to be, and married the woman he was meant to marry, none of this would have happened.” After all of the backslapping and hugs, Colleen was speechless at the sudden turn of tide, at the implications cast as quickly as a slap across the face.
“But,” she said to the one sister, Maury, her hair feathered with gray and piled high in a bun that was springing loose from its bounds. “But there would have been no great love and there would have been no me.”
“Well,” said the second sister, Elana, younger but wearing the same hairstyle, her lipstick too orange and too thick, “that very well might be true, but we’d have our best friend and we’d have never known about you at all.”
Colleen gripped the edges of the bar and nodded at the sisters, feeling the sink of despair, of the irreversible despair, of death. “My dad is gone now, too,” she said. “And I’m so sorry you lost your best friend, my mom.”
They seemed to soften but not enough to answer. They turned in unison and bowed their heads close together as if discussing a plan of action. Colleen turned away and took the few steps toward the left side of the L-shaped bar, where she could see the sisters’ faces as they looked at only each other. Loss and time dug long trenches in every life, and memories, regrets and pain filled in the deep furrows. The sisters had filled their troughs with bitterness, and Colleen felt, quickly, out of the corner of her heart, that she had a choice, that they all had a choice of how to fill those long empty places—with forgiveness, with bitterness, with rage or with, above all, love. She’d made some wrong choices and some right, if there was any right or wrong about it all. She would choose differently if she had the chance to rewind, but she was here now, in a land across the sea where she could begin again. Choose again.
The pub was overflowing with life, and every life its own universe of joy and pain, of love and loss. This was a mirror to South Carolina. This was the same and it was different and it was her dad and mom’s pub, and it was where she began.
Soon, Colleen showed off her prowess at the Guinness tap and bowed at the applause. When the owner, a second cousin named Millie Walsh, closed the bar hours later, Colleen was met at the front door by Sully, who offered to walk with her to her rented room.
As they ambled side by side in the darkness, a sliver of moon blurry beneath the cloud cover, he asked, “Was that to your liking?”
“If it wasn’t, there would be something wrong with me, I believe.” Colleen laughed. Jet lag, whiskey and beer made her feel as though she were half floating above the sidewalk.
He, too, laughed and then stopped so that Colleen did also, turning to face him a block from her cottage. The streetlight lit his face, the furrows of his wrinkles casting shadows across his smile. “May I tell you a story about your mum?”
“I’d like that.” Colleen’s heart raced and she took a step closer.
“When your mum was a little girl, she wanted to travel the world. She kept a globe in her bedroom and when I’d come to see her da, my uncle, she would bring it out to me. She would spin it and spin it, pointing to the places she meant to one day visit. When her parents died together in that accident, she knew that those plans were to be put aside, that she must run the pub, possibly for a long while. And then she met your da. We here in town weren’t so happy at first, thinking she’d run off to the States with this American. But she didn’t. Your da, he became one of us quick as a wink. He did his best to learn some Gaelic and most of all he honored and loved your mum. When she discovered she was to have you, she told me, ‘This is the one who will see the world.’”
Colleen’s breath caught in her chest and her hands flew to cover her mouth as a cry threatened to erupt. Light rain began again, misting them both.
“Did I go making you upset? I didn’t mean to now.” Sully took her good hand in his and kissed her cheek. “That story was meant to make you happy.”
“Sometimes I cry when I’m happy,” Colleen said and squeezed his hand.
Sully nodded. “Aye, I think the Irish know a thing or two about that.”
Colleen allowed the misty rain to settle on her face, on her hair and hands. “She never left here, though. This was her home. It was where she was born, and where she died.”
“It was.” Sully nodded. “Which means that in many ways it is also your home. Although you must find your own place to settle and live because we all know that home must be a place that shelters your life.”
“A place that shelters your life.” Colleen repeated the words and stared at the man for a long while with the bay behind him, the soft rain and the whitewashed thatch-roof cottages surrounding them.
“I will see you tomorrow, then?” Colleen asked. “I think I’d like to stay awhile in this place and hear some more stories about my mom.”
“Indeed.” Sully bowed and began to amble along the sidewalk for the last block to Colleen’s cottage.
The clouds above Galway Bay puckered, tumbling toward each other and away. The whip and whistle of the wind gathered at the edges of the night and blew Colleen’s hair around her face, into her eyes and the corner of her lips, carrying the past and the future all together.