The Longest Way Home

by Andrew McCarthy

  “Shit.”

  “Dad, you said the S-word.”

  Once my son is asleep beside me—before this week he hadn’t slept in bed with me for several years—I try to take stock of the situation. I consider the various permutations and possibilities for the next week and what they might mean, both for the immediate future and down the line. After an hour of this my nerves are so on edge I get out of bed and take my first bath in memory.

  In the morning, I call the doctor’s office, but he’s taking Fridays off during the summer.

  “Well, maybe it’s not that wet,” I say to the receptionist. “We can wait till Monday.”

  “Hold on,” the receptionist says, and then a minute later she comes back on the line. “No. If he got it wet, then it has to be changed. The nurse is here, she’ll change it, then the doctor can look at it again on Monday.”

  We go down and Judy, the same attractive blond nurse, slices open the cast; the interior gauze is matted and soaked through.

  “You had to get this changed, no question.” Judy turns to me, her green eyes glowing. “See how the skin is already beginning to be affected?” She shakes her head. “This is not good.” She gets to work on the arm. Her long, loose blond hair falls over my son’s shoulder as she manipulates his arm; her thin and well-manicured fingers squeeze just below his wrist. And then my son’s arm gets another X-ray.

  When Judy compares the X-ray from a few days ago to the new one, the bone looks more off kilter than before. Even my son notices.

  “The new X-ray looked worse,” he says in the cab on our way back home. “Didn’t it, Dad?”

  “No.” I lie to us both. “They looked exactly the same. We’ll be fine.”

  On Saturday, four days before D and I are supposed to be married, my apostilled birth certificate arrives in the mail. What would we have done for paperwork if my son hadn’t broken his arm and needed to stay in New York?

  I call D to let her know.

  “Has mine come?” D’s birth certificate is more complicated. Since she was born in Vienna, it is in German and needs to be translated, reissued, and then apostilled, which adds another step to the already convoluted process.

  “We don’t have that yet?”

  “I told you about it. Did you call that guy?”

  “What guy?”

  “I have a guy expediting it, it should have been delivered by messenger.”

  “Oh.”

  D gives me a name and number and I call.

  “Who?” the heavily accented voice on the phone shouts.

  I spell the name.

  “Oh, yeah. That should be back in a week to ten days,” he says.

  “No, no, no. We fly in two days, I need it now,” I explain.

  “Oh, no one told me it was urgent, let me make a call. They’re closed today, but I’ll call on Monday.”

  “I really need it, we fly Monday night,” I insist.

  “I’ll do my best,” he tells me.

  On Sunday, three days before we are scheduled to get married, and a week before the wedding party, D tells me, “My parents want to have the ceili at their house.”

  “I thought it was going to be at the hotel. It was all set.”

  “Well, they’ve ordered a second Dumpster, to throw out stuff. They have the room now,” she explains.

  “It’s still on Sunday, after the ceremony, right?”

  “Well, we’re meeting to discuss that, at my parents’ house tonight. There’s some thinking that it might be nice to have it after my parents’ dinner, keep it all in one setting, at one time.”

  “Oh.”

  “You just get on the plane.”

  On Monday morning, two days before D and I are scheduled to get married in Dublin, my son and I head back to the doctor in midtown Manhattan. Yet another X-ray is taken. The doctor slaps it up into the light board. He silently squints at the giant negative. He compares it to the original film, taking one down and replacing it with the other, then again, and again, back and forth, then he sits down beside my son.

  “Lie down,” he orders.

  My son lies back on the doctor’s table.

  The doctor wraps his large hands around my son’s small arm. He closes his eyes and tilts his head forward, his ear very close to the arm, as if he’s listening. He begins to squeeze. My son giggles until he yelps, “Oww!”

  “Don’t move,” the doctor barks. He manipulates the arm some more; my son shoots me a look. When the doctor releases the arm, he sits back and looks up at me. “Let’s put a new cast on this arm and get you two on a plane.”

  “Where is it?” I shout into the phone.

  “Someone tried to deliver it at one thirty, there was no one home,” the man with the heavily accented voice says.

  “We were here at one thirty.”

  My son grabs my arm. “Dad, the buzzer doesn’t work, remember?”

  “Oh, shit,” I say.

  “Dad, you said the S-wo—”

  “Please,” I hiss at him.

  “Would you like me to try and redeliver it?” the man on the phone asks.

  “Yes, now. I have to leave for the airport in half an hour, I need that birth certificate.”

  “I’ll call them and see.”

  “No! Not call them and see. Tell them to get here now! I’m late. Please!” I’m aware that I’m screeching.

  In two minutes the phone rings. “I have the messenger on the other line, he’s waiting to hear—”

  “Why is he waiting, get him here now! Now!”

  “He can get there by three, not two forty-five.”

  “Just get him here now!”

  My son and I go downstairs and pile up our bags on the sidewalk. The car service arrives.

  “I have to wait a few minutes, something is being delivered,” I tell the driver.

  “I’m not waiting. Pickup is two forty-five. I have other jobs,” the driver replies. He starts the car. I hand him a ten-dollar bill through the window. “It’ll just be a few minutes.”

  “I’ll wait ten minutes,” he says.

  “You should have gotten the good car service, Dad,” my son complains. “This one always smells funny.”

  At 2:59, from around the corner, a short, daydreamy guy in a white messenger T-shirt is strolling slow and easy up the street with a rolling gait. I rush at him. “Are you here for McCarthy?”

  “Huh?”

  “Are you here for McCarthy?”

  He looks down at the envelope. I look and see that my future wife’s name is on it. “Nope.” He shakes his head.

  “That’s me,” I grab the envelope out of his hand, dive into the car, and we’re gone.

  At the airport ticket counter I tell my son to pull his sleeve down over his cast and wait by the wall, away from me, because I’ve forgotten both the letter from the doctor saying that the cast has been bivalved and poses no medical threat to the patient and that he is approved to fly, and also the letter from my son’s mother allowing him to be taken out of the country by only one of his parents. Both these letters are still sitting beside the phone where I was screaming to the man with the heavy accent trying to get the translated and apostilled birth certificate. Luckily, no one at the airport seems to care about such formalities, and after I watch my son play a few of the normally forbidden video games, we’re in the air for an overnight flight.

  My relationship with Ireland has been long and complex. I first arrived in Dublin, with Seve, in the mid-eighties. We were young and free. Ireland was on its knees, in the throes of a deep and protracted recession. We came over from London for a weekend and stayed three weeks. We rented a car and drove, without a plan, moving from one village to the next, meeting welcoming people, playing terrible golf on beautiful courses, drinking too much in the local pubs (enough to occasionally get up and sing), and eventually ending up on the western coast, just outside the village of Doolin, at a small, family-run hotel. It became our spot.

  The O’Callaghans welcomed us back
like family every year. Seve’s and my annual pilgrimage was a stabilizing and rejuvenating ritual. And then one year we were too busy to go, and then another year passed, and then it had been a decade since I’d been back.

  Then came the trip when D and I first met. In my absence, the Celtic Tiger had made Ireland rich. I had become a husband and then a father. I was more wary, and weary, than I had been the last time I visited.

  Now, because of D, I was traveling to Dublin several times a year. I took her out to the O’Callaghans’ in Doolin, but mostly we stayed in Dublin, close to her family and friends. I got to know the city by simply going places as part of daily life. Then we bought a home, a few blocks from D’s parents. My relationship with Ireland became more complex, including familial relationships, obligations, and bills.

  At times I’ve resented the incessant pull Dublin has exerted over us, and D’s determination to keep Ireland an active part of her life—and consequently our life—has been a source of tension.

  “We can’t live in two places,” I eventually said to her.

  “Well, I can,” was her response.

  The children, like D, have no complex feelings about Ireland. They love being spoiled by Granny and Granddad and relish the feeling of freedom and independence they have here.

  My son also loves talking to Irish taxi drivers. And on this morning, after neither of us slept on the flight over, he is chattering away to the driver about all the different places he lives, and why it’s still so dark out, and does the driver know that they sell Pringles on the plane and that he had three full tins on the flight over?

  We pull up to an ivy-covered wall down a small lane and knock on a heavy wooden door. It’s a small hotel not far from where the wedding will take place. That we’re not staying in our house is yet another result of our loose planning.

  As with most second homes, the purchase was an emotional decision, not a practical one. We stay at our small cottage—originally used to house the workers on the Rathmines tramway line—just a few times a year, though D sneaks home more regularly. But often, when the house sits empty, we rent it out.

  When we set our wedding date for August 28, we assumed that we would do the legal ceremony on the Friday the twenty-sixth. When we finally checked, we discovered that the registrar was booked. The closest day we could get married on was Wednesday the twenty-fourth. By then we had rented out the house to a Canadian couple until the twenty-fifth. So we will all be piled into one hotel room on the morning D and I will finally be legally married.

  As my son and I enter room six, the heavy curtains are drawn against the dim light of a slate-gray Irish dawn. The unfamiliar room is in complete darkness and my son bumps hard against something.

  “Ow!”

  “Shh,” I whisper.

  My eyes adjust to the darkness. D and our daughter are asleep in the large bed that my son has just slammed against. The rollaway cot by the bathroom is empty, the blankets turned down, waiting. Quickly, I get my exhausted son undressed and into the cot. Within minutes he’s asleep and I crawl into the large bed beside D. She rolls over and her eyes, puffy with sleep, open. She smiles and moves closer to me, her body luscious with the heat of sleep. She always looks so young when I first see her, and glimpsing her face now, in this shadowy light of dawn, is no exception. Then our daughter’s head pops over her shoulder.

  “Daddy!”

  Six hours later, D wakes me with a shake. The curtains are open and the hotel room is flooded with light.

  “Come on, luv. We need to get going. We have a meeting with Patricia in an hour.”

  We hurry over to Joyce House, to the Civil Registration Office of Births, Marriages, and Deaths, on Lombard Street East. It’s a part of town I don’t know; the buildings are low and brick, and with the dirty gray sky, it feels like it could be 1930, the way certain streets of Dublin still feel. Past a battered security desk, through a lobby that smells of stale smoke, up a flight of stairs, in the corner of a dingy beige room with worn blue carpet, behind a metal desk by a dirty window overlooking the local authority housing project across the street, Patricia Traynor, a small, middle-aged woman with a charming face, sensibly cut blond hair, and blue eyes behind thick glasses, rises from a metal chair and strides across the room to greet us like we’re old friends.

  “After all our e-mails, I feel like I know you,” she says in a Cavan accent softened by twenty years in the big city. We shake hands and settle into the two plastic chairs across the desk from her.

  For all the apparent disregard for detail and organization that D displays, I have never known her to be late for an event, miss a deadline, or forget an appointment. I once asked her why she didn’t write things down. “Maybe make a list,” I suggested.

  “Then I’d have to remember to look at it,” she said, “just one more thing I’d have to keep in my head.”

  Out of a file she slips from her handbag, D produces all of our necessary paperwork. “Sign here,” she tells me, pointing to a form I’ve never seen. “And here.” I have no idea what I just signed. D hands the file over to Patricia.

  Patricia looks through all our paperwork. “Perfect,” she says. “Now I just need to ask you a few questions, and you need to look over the list of possible impediments to marriage.”

  She hands us a two-sided sheet of paper. There is the predictable warning against marrying if one of the parties is already married or if there is a mental impairment. And then there is a long list of connections between the two parties that cannot exist in order for the wedding to take place. A man may not marry his grandmother, his wife’s grandmother, his mother’s sister, or his mother’s brother’s sister or daughter, brother’s son’s wife, wife’s brother’s daughter, daughter’s son’s wife, wife’s son’s daughter, wife’s father’s sister, and so on.

  The list of impediments to who a woman can marry is similarly restricted.

  “I’m not sure, but I think we’re clear,” I say.

  “Now, Andrew”—Patricia looks at me over her glasses—“I need for you to be absolutely sure.”

  D jumps in. “He’s just jet-lagged,” she says, patting my knee a little harder than necessary.

  “I’m joking, we’re safe,” I say. I decide not to mention that D’s mother’s maiden name is also McCarthy and that our ancestors are from the same region of Cork.

  We chat a bit more, then Patricia says, “This isn’t a highly exhaustive interview, but you seem at first glance to be of sound mind”—she gives me a look—“if a bit sleepy. I prescribe a good night’s rest before the ceremony tomorrow.”

  I feel like I’m in grade school and have just handed in a sloppy book report.

  Patricia tells us that she’ll be the one conducting the civil ceremony in the morning. Both D and I are pleased by this news. I had neglected to consider who might be marrying us in this legal portion of our two-part, multiday nuptials, worrying only about D’s friend Shelly, who will be conducting the service on Sunday.

  “And unless you have music, or someone is reading poetry or something, it should last about ten minutes.”

  “That’s all?” I ask.

  “That’s it,” Patricia answers. “Oh, do you have rings?”

  “Maybe,” D says. “No,” I say, overlapping.

  “Well.” Patricia looks back and forth between the two of us—her face reveals nothing. “You can decide and let me know before the ceremony.”

  Out on the street, the Dublin August feels like a New York autumn. The wind is blowing, the sky is low, and there’s a chill in the air.

  “Rings?” I ask.

  “Do you not want to wear rings?”

  “No, I’m good to wear a ring,” I say. “It’s just that you said you didn’t want a ring, remember? That we didn’t need them. We did talk about this.”

  “Well, I remembered a jeweler I know, she could make us nice ones.”

  “By tomorrow?”

  D calls her friend the jeweler, who tells D that some of her w
ork is on display over at the Kilkenny shop on Nassau Street. We head over. This part of town is always humming. Trinity College, with the Book of Kells, is across the street. A few blocks away, the Grafton Street pedestrian mall buzzes at all hours with shoppers, street performers, flower salesmen, people watchers. The twenty-two-acre St. Stephen’s Green, the soul of south Dublin, is a few blocks away.

  D quickly finds a ring she likes, but it is slightly large on her.

  “We could have that fitted for you,” the salesgirl behind the counter says. “When’s the wedding?”

  “Tomorrow morning,” D says, as her phone rings.

  “Tomorrow morning?” The young salesgirl is horrified.

  But D isn’t paying attention; she’s on the phone, ordering our wedding cake for the Sunday ceremony. “I’m kind of busy tomorrow morning—” I hear her say.

  “Kind of busy?” I interrupt.

  D waves me off. “—but maybe I could swing by and take a look at them late in the day, or is there a photo of the cakes on your website?”

  The salesgirl watches this exchange, turns her back, and simply walks away from us. I lead D out the door and back onto the street. The idea of rings is discarded without further discussion.

  We go around the corner to the Shelbourne Hotel on St. Stephen’s Green and head to the bar. There’s an elegant, happy chaos to the room. While D sips a glass of wine and I chug a club soda, she says, “Maybe we should switch back the Friday night ‘welcome cocktails’ to here, instead of the Merrion. There’s more atmosphere here. It’ll be more fun for the Americans.”

  “Isn’t it all set? Booked and everything?”

  But D is already leaning over the bar, asking to speak with the manager.

  The girls are sound asleep. My son and I are sitting in the hallway, outside our hotel room, reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, under a dim lamp. It’s one thirty in the morning. We’re reading about Augustus Gloop, who falls into the chocolate river and is sucked down a drain. We’re both exhausted, but neither of us can sleep. Jet lag has us in its grip. Eventually we go to bed and pass out.

  But by eight A.M. we are all up and moving—there is a lot to do, like get married. I rummage through my bag and can’t find my razor blades. I have a clear recollection of packing them in New York, but they are nowhere in my suitcase, which is crammed up under the window, on top of my son’s and daughter’s bags, the contents of which have exploded all over the room.