I asked, “What’s your degree in? What are you studying?”
He looked relaxed again. “History.”
“Like, world history, all of it? The entire progression of human existence?” I let myself smile at him, let the tension go a little, and a big grin cracked his face.
“Yeah. I’ve got a ways to go now. I’ll be an oul’ fella by the time I’ve finished.”
“So, what is it? Mesopotamia? Modern Turkey?”
He grinned again, then held his hands out at his sides. “Not that interesting. Here. Ireland. Twentieth century.”
“Ah.”
There was an awkward pause and then he said, “It’s funny now. You look so much like her, but your … I don’t know, your energy is really different.”
“How would you describe Erin’s energy?” The café was very quiet. All I could hear was an appliance humming somewhere in the back, radio classical music on the other side of a wall.
He ran a hand through his hair, looked away. Then he said, “I was raised in Clare, in the country, like, where there are oul’ ones who go to mass every day but still put out offerings for the fairies, and one of my aunties believes that people have colors. Auras, I guess you’d say, but she just says ‘colors.’”
He studied me for a minute. “Erin is yellow and orange. I know it sounds mad…”
“No, I get it. She is.” I breathed in slowly. “What am I?”
He met my eyes. His were brown, but flecked with amber and green. He looked amused. “You’re blue, but a sorta greeny blue.”
“Yeah? Is it like, emanating from the top of my head? Or kind of a blue light all around me?”
“Neither.” He grinned. “It’s more intangible than that. You wouldn’t understand. Not being a mad witch like my auntie.”
I waited a minute, gathering my courage. “What color are you?” I asked him.
He looked serious again.
“Blue,” he said. “Greeny blue. Like you. So she says, anyway.” I liked his face. His eyes were suddenly alive with something. I could see him thinking.
The bell on the door jingled and we both looked up. A big group of students came in, smelling of cigarette smoke and the cold. “Sorry. I should…” he said.
“No problem. Thanks for your help.”
“Give us a shout,” he said. “I hope you find out … I hope you find her.”
4
1993
Emer said she’d drive me down to Glenmalure.
Daisy’s brother had a little Ford hatchback that he kept behind his flat in somewhere called Dolphin’s Barn and he let them use it once in a while to drive home to see their families or to visit a school friend of theirs who was going to university in Limerick. Daisy had work the next day but Emer didn’t so we drove down in the morning, the Dublin suburbs quickly giving way to countryside. The sky was a clear, chilled blue, and the air, when we stopped for gas in a little town called Roundwood, smelled different from the air in Dublin, like trees and mountains rather than sea. As we headed south and then west, the land opened and rolled, turning into the Ireland in my mind, green fields, little cottages tucked into the folds of the hills.
“This will be Laragh, now,” Emer said as we came to a junction where there was a hotel and a little craft shop. I was holding the road map Daisy’s brother kept in the glove compartment and I told her to take a left toward Glenmalure. The road started to climb after a bit, cottages and farms nestled into the wooded hillside. In five minutes we’d come out on top of a series of rolling hills, the fields broken into patchwork, white sheep clotting together against fences, the roofs of cottages bright against the brownish-green grass. A stone wall traced the road on one side, wild hedges on the other, a few last yellow flowers hanging on here and there.
“It’s lovely, isn’t it?” Emer said. I was tired; I hadn’t slept well the night before in Erin’s bed, and even as a passenger, I was having trouble getting used to the traffic being on the other side. Cars seemed to come out of nowhere, from the wrong place, and it felt strange to have the hedges and trees up against my left side.
We came to the crest of the hill and started down the other side. It seemed suddenly darker, the road now surrounded by orderly rows of dark green conifers. There were sections where all the trees had been cut down, exposing brown, wet-looking ground, and others where the trees seemed to crowd in around the road.
“That’s the state forestry service,” Emer told me, pointing to the thick forest to our right. It opened up a bit as we drove down, with different kinds of trees along the road. “We must be nearly there. What does the map say?”
I checked the map. “We’ll come to an intersection up here and you should go through it. Stay on the Military Road and the barracks should be just there.”
We descended through the trees to the intersection, just a tiny crossroads, a long whitewashed hotel hard against the hillside to our left, and went straight through. I took out Erin’s pictures and compared them to the scene in front of me. I was pretty sure one of the pictures showed the view right in front of me, but in springtime: the narrow country road, bright green fields, the yellow bushes blooming along the road the same but brighter and washed with sunlight.
“There it is,” Emer said. “Up there.” She pulled the car over onto the left shoulder and turned the key. The barracks rose up from the ground, a slim, tall, gray barrier. There was something ghostly about the building, the way it was so obviously of another era, the walled-up windows and the fence around it. We stood at the fence for a minute, looking at the building. If Emer hadn’t been there, I might have yelled, “Erin!” but it was so silent, so still, I didn’t say a word.
“What do you…?” Emer asked, watching me. “Do you think she’s here?”
The wind came down the valley and whistled around the old structures. The clouds had covered the sun and Emer and I both pulled our jackets more tightly around us. When I looked over at her, her eyes were worried, her forehead set in concentration. “No,” I said finally. “There’s no one here. Let’s go ask at the hotel.”
* * *
The lower level of the hotel was a pub, empty at eleven a.m., but warm and welcoming just the same thanks to the blazing fire and the wood paneling and stone hearth inside. A young woman—our age or even younger—was drying plates behind the bar, and she gave a big smile when she saw us, and called out, “Hiya. You’re back again, then!”
I stopped where I stood. Next to me I felt Emer stop, too. The room seemed to close in on us, the heat from the fire washing over me in a wave.
“Erin’s my cousin,” I said. I could already see confusion crossing her face. She was seeing the differences. “Was she here recently? I’m looking for her.”
The woman looked shocked. She put the plates down on the bar with a clatter and stared at us. “She’s not … Is she all right, then?”
“I don’t know.” I forced myself to cross the room to the bar. “She left Dublin a week or so ago and we don’t think she came back. Was she here recently?”