“Thank you. I’ve never seen anything more beautiful.”
“We’re alone on this island, Kate.”
“I know.”
“I want to marry you here and now. Will you marry me, Kate?”
I turned in his arms to face him.
“You’re not serious,” I said.
“I am.”
“Here? This minute?”
“We will marry here. We will know it in our hearts. We can have a ceremony if you like some other day, but today, here in this holy place, I want to marry you.”
I searched his eyes. I began to shiver, but it was not the cold. I put my cheek against his chest. He was correct: we were as alone as two humans could be. A glance to sea told me no one had been alerted to our presence on the island. No one came toward us. I looked into his eyes again. Who was this man, anyway? And why did he want to marry me? For that matter, why did he want to marry anyone? What pulled him toward me and what could I give him in exchange?
Those thoughts raced through my head and they did not find their way to my lips.
“Yes,” I said simply. “I’ll marry you here.”
“Thank you, Kate. I love you more than I thought it possible to love. I pledge myself to you. I ask for your pledge in return.”
“I pledge myself to you, Ozzie.”
He reached inside his Carhartt jacket and brought out a scarlet handkerchief. He unfolded it carefully.
“This is Gran’s mother’s ring. And now it is yours.”
He knelt and kissed my hand. Then he slipped the ring onto my finger. He stood and took me in his arms.
“Nothing can remove this moment from us, Kate. Nothing will ever stand beside it and lessen it. Whatever the world brings to us, I am yours and you are mine. From this day forward.”
He kissed me. Wind surrounded us and pulled at our hair. I clung to him and kissed him deeper and deeper, nothing sufficient, nothing strong enough to bond us as I wanted to be bonded to him. He picked me up and carried me to the rocky wall and we made love against the hard ground, the sea calling to us, the ancient rocks unyielding. We spent ourselves against one another until nothing seemed separate, nothing seemed mine or his. We forged a third body, a body we shared, and we urged and urged and urged together, sex and love and wind and ocean all tied together around us. I called out when I climaxed and he followed me down, down, until our bodies had reached a peace as calm and perfect and joyous as I had ever known.
Part 2
WHERE MY BROKEN IS
18
For our honeymoon, Ozzie proposed a journey to circumnavigate Ireland.
“I’ve thought about doing it forever, Kate. We can outfit the boat and sleep in the coves when we need to. We won’t go out to sea very far. It’s rougher up north, but we’ll be mindful. We’ll be safe, I promise. I’ve thought it all out.”
We had finished making love. It was the afternoon and light came into the yurt, filtered by the mist of the winter sea. We had tossed the blankets off, but now the air felt chilly against our damp heat. I gathered them up and tucked against him.
“I used to have a career before I met you, Ozzie. I have work to do. A little project called a dissertation.”
“I know you do. I’ll leave you alone in the afternoons so you can work. I promise. We’ll travel in the morning when the winds let us. It’s a journey, but it’s not like traveling to China or going across the open sea. We can come in to port whenever we like. We’ll have a good meal or two, clean up, then keep going.”
We were married now. Married even in the eyes of the law. We had had a small civil ceremony with Gran and Seamus and the Bicycle Society women in attendance. Daijeet and his boyfriend, Andy, attended, too. My mother did not come, but she sent her best wishes and Skyped in the night before. She was in Hawaii with Ben, looking at real estate, and the flight was too far to make comfortably.
It didn’t matter. I was now married to an Irish citizen. And I was hopelessly, madly in love with my husband.
“Around the entire island? Are you sure this isn’t a crackpot idea?”
“Of course it is, but that’s the joy of it. We’ll start in spring and finish by late summer. We’ll go as far as we can. As I said, it’s something I always wanted to attempt. I’ll put some work into the Ferriter to make her right. We can fish for our meals and get any kind of lobster or seafood we want in the ports. I’ve thought about it for a long time. We’ll be explorers.”
“Did Leif Erickson circumnavigate Ireland?”
“Well, he should have if he didn’t. Will you come with me? Could we have that adventure together?”
I said yes. I couldn’t resist. In that perfect moment with him, I would have said yes to anything. It had never entered my mind that I was a seafaring wife, a person who left solid land for any length of time. But the chance to circumnavigate Ireland would never come again; that was a certainty. And maybe, I thought in bed next to him, we could devise a plan that would permit me to work. I could take my books and write when I needed to, and in the afternoons we would pull into a hidden cove and bath in the water and sun. I trusted him on the sea.
“What about Gottfried?” I asked.
“I’m afraid we’ll have to leave him with Seamus. He loves Seamus.”
“He loves us more.”
“It wouldn’t be fair to take him, Kate.”
“I know. I hate to leave him behind, though.”
He nodded. He waited to let me understand that he would never take leaving Gottfried lightly. Then he went on.
“Let’s leave May first. We’ll leave here and go round to the eastern coast, then swing around the northern coast in high summer, then head down the western coast and arrive back in plenty of time for you to return to your teaching.”
“Do people do this sort of thing? Is this something other people have done?”
“We’ll find out. And if it ends up taking too long, you can hop off and get back for the start of classes. I’ll bring the Ferriter back myself. Or I can pull it up onto land and get it trailered back to Dingle.”
“You want me to abandon ship?”
“No, but I know you have to teach in the fall. I get that.”
It was already late November. I tried to do the calculation in my mind, but I found myself giving it up as the numbers grew and twisted. Too many variables had to be factored into the equation. Nautical miles, knots, tidal changes, currents, wind, our endurance. I Googled the distance: seven hundred miles, roughly. It might not have been a trip to China, but it was long enough. Although I had done the usual activities growing up in America—skating, skiing, swimming, soccer—I had a short résumé when it came to outdoor adventuring. I liked the idea of circumnavigating Ireland, but it existed, when he first proposed it, as a purely theoretical plan. I couldn’t tell, even in bed that day, how serious he was. People propose things all the time, daydream about what they could do in their lives, and in my experience they seldom follow through. But Ozzie did. And as I watched him prepare the Ferriter, pulling her onto dry dock and scraping the bottom then repainting it, as he renovated the small sleeping quarters below, and had Donny, the local mechanic, come in and retool the engine, I wondered if he was running to or from something. He drank with Donny, or anyone else who came by to see him, and I realized, as winter spread over Ireland and took the green grass down to a darker hue, that the trip was more than a sightseeing spree. All trips are internal, as someone once said, and I was not sure we were heading off on the same trip, or if we had ever been as joined as I had imagined.
December arrived. We had snow. We lived through Christmas in the yurt. I wondered what would become of the cottage. He seemed to have lost interest in it now that he had the boat to occupy him. If we went for an entire spring and summer around the island, construction would stall. Whatever progress had been made on the cottage would be compromised by a long summer of abandonment. The trip to circumnavigate Ireland was impractical; at the same time, it was romantic and adventuro
us and I felt I could not bring up any of my worries without sounding overly cautious, the scolding wife. Ozzie detected my hesitation, my questioning, and twice we got into heated discussion about what kind of life we saw ourselves living. The discussions usually came after he had been drinking. His line of reasoning skipped like a stone skimming across water, landing sometimes with a bigger splash, something with nothing but a light imprint that pushed the weight of the rock away. The trip was important to him, but I couldn’t help thinking about what came afterward. Where did we go from there?
“He has wanted to do this since he was a boy,” Nora told me when I visited her for lunch in late December. We sat in her solarium, eating grapes and cheese and Irish bread. Seamus puttered nearby, pruning the profusion of houseplants that clung to every inch of sunlight that came through the leaded windows. “It’s grown in him. I’m not sure why. He used to read books about Arctic exploration when he was a boy.”
“I worry that he’s risking something so that he can defeat it. I’m not against it, really, just wondering how it fits into what our lives might be.”
“Is he drinking?”
I studied her. How much did she know about his drinking? How much did any of them know? And how deep was my ignorance around the issue? We had hinted at the subject before, but never addressed it directly.
“How much does he drink, Gran?”
“It’s hard to know. He holds it well for the most part. Seamus would know better.”
She called him over. He wore a navy apron over his white shirt and gray trousers. A pair of scissors stayed nocked against his fingers. She put the question to him.
“It’s impossible to say how much a man drinks,” Seamus said, clearly uneasy with the question. “Who can gauge that, in truth?”
I thought: This is unfair to Ozzie. To interview his closest relatives about his drinking, to cast doubt on his motivation for circumnavigating the island, was bad behavior. I closed the subject down and diverted them with a story about Gottfried. They let the topic go. But something had entered our relationship—Ozzie’s and mine—that I could not control or properly combat. It contained no substance that I could point to and say, Here, look at this. We were out of step in some way that I failed to understand. I couldn’t even say for sure if Ozzie felt it, too.
“What about the cottage?” I asked Ozzie one night early in February. “Will it be destroyed if we leave it all summer?”
It was a wild, wet night. Rain came through portions of the yurt, dampening the bed. We had the wood stove going, and it flickered and fought to stave off the coldness. I had never minded the rain before, or the wild weather, but now the yurt felt small and impermanent. An encampment. He had been drinking again with Donny, and I smelled the spirits on him as he sat and tried to read. I wasn’t the first bride to wonder what came at the bottom of a bottle that he could not find at home with me. I knew there was something, but I couldn’t put a name to it.
“The cottage will be fine,” he said, his gaze locked to the page. “I’ll cover it with cloths. Seamus will keep an eye on it for me. I’m sick of working on it anyway.”
“I thought you liked working on it.”
He looked up over the lip of the novel he was reading. It was Brideshead Revisited. He had read it once before, I knew. I lay on the bed and tried to stay dry. A white mist penetrated the yurt whenever the wind blew at full gale.
“I’d rather go to sea than lay bricks. Any man would.”
“You’re not laying bricks. There’s not a brick in the entire cottage.”
He looked at me. Then he put his eyes back on his novel.
“The cottage will be fine,” he said, dismissively. “I’ll get it done when I do.”
How had this prying apart begun? And how did we stop it?
A reporter named David Robinson arrived one day in early March and asked about our proposed trip. He was a large, walrus-like man, with a moustache that twirled up in two curls on either side of his red lips. He drove a ridiculously small car, something like a French Citroën, and when he climbed out, I had first thought it was a joke. He came forward with his shoulder bag strung over his neck, his steps high to be careful of boards and stones and re-rod. Ozzie was down at the beach, bathing, and I sat on our tiny front porch, reading. It was a cool day, with a steel-colored light that took the grayness of the sea and spread it over the land. I was accustomed to Gottfried signaling any kind of visitors with a series of cheery barks, but he had followed Ozzie down to the sea, his bushy tail disappearing on the trail ten minutes before.
“Hello,” David Robinson called when he was still some distance away. “Does Ozzie Ferriter live here?”
I stood and called back that he did.
The strangest moment occurred then. As he came forward, carefully to avoid the debris of construction, I saw our habitation from a different set of eyes. It was romantic, unquestionably, but it was also painfully unfinished. I watched him triangulate, checking before him, glancing at the yurt, peeking out to survey the ocean. We had beaten a path down, certainly, but it was not gracious or welcoming; it was like walking onto a construction site, and I wondered, as I tried to place him, how we had let it become so unruly. True, it was March, and the season remained more winter than spring, but I couldn’t avoid feeling that I had lost sight of a basic level of orderliness. It sent a prickle of understanding into my thinking that I tried at first to deny.
“I’m from over in Dublin,” David Robinson said, finally reaching me and holding out his hand, “and I came to talk to you about your trip.”
“We’re still talking about it ourselves.”
“You intend to go around the island? That’s what I heard.”
“That’s the plan,” I said. “Can I offer you anything? I have tea water on.”
“I’d love a cup. You have a magnificent view here. Breathtaking, really.”
He put his hand to his forehead like an old mariner and scanned the horizon. I saw that view through his eyes, too. It was breathtaking. And we had let it become somewhat slovenly. And the cottage, I knew, was not going to get built anytime soon. That knowledge, highlighted by David Robinson’s sudden appearance, made me unsettled. How had I lived here and not seen it as his eyes saw it?
I gave him my chair and went inside to fix tea. Stepping into the yurt, I saw the confusion there, too. Everything was scrambled. We had no proper dressers or armoires, so everything was tossed randomly from one corner of the yurt to the other. Only the yurt had no corners. It struck me as adolescent, suddenly, two kids on a campout, or two young people sharing a college dorm. I knew as I formed the thought that I wasn’t being fair to either of us, but the impression wouldn’t fade away. How had I failed to see it before?
I heard Ozzie return and begin talking to David Robinson. Ozzie would be cold from his swim and would want to come inside to warm up, and I felt an annoying embarrassment that I had let the place become so hopelessly cluttered. It did no good to tell myself that it was both our responsibility to keep the place clean; I was enough of my mother’s daughter, enough of an enculturated woman to take on the responsibility of a clean house for myself. It was maddening and it made me cross. Forget being a scholar or a PhD candidate. In some nagging part of my mind, I was a wife of the Blasket Islands, neglectful about sweeping out the cottage when the village priest arrived for a visit.
Ozzie pushed into the yurt a moment later with David Robinson behind him.
“I’ve always wanted to see inside of one of these. Ah, they’re larger than I imagined. Yes, I see,” he said as he stepped through the doorway.
“You’ll have to excuse the mess,” I said, “it’s a hard place to keep in order.”
“Oh, you should see my flat,” David Robinson said kindly. “You wouldn’t know it from a bomb shelter.”
I gave him a mug of tea, then went back out to read. I didn’t know why I felt so ill at ease. I heard their heavy male voices talking back and forth, their confident patter about which
coast would be more difficult, which currents the more taxing, and I put down my book and called Gottfried for a walk. He gladly followed me. Rudely, I did not tell them I was going or bother to say goodbye to David Robinson. I simply followed our usual trail down to the sea, but instead of continuing to our strand, I turned south and went down a trail I had taken a hundred times before. Gottfried trotted ahead of me, scouting the lumpy soil for voles. Wind covered the men’s voices and soon the land obstructed my view back to the yurt.
* * *
I told Ozzie I had to get some things in order, speak to my dissertation supervisor, do laundry, clean up, answer emails, pay bills, a hundred things. He dropped me at my tiny apartment in Limerick. He didn’t ask if I wanted him to stay with me; I didn’t invite him. The relief I felt when at last he left, waving from the truck as he backed up, Gottfried’s head bobbing a little at the motion, was remarkably piercing. I couldn’t wait to recover a missing portion of my life. I couldn’t wait to take a long, warm bath.
I felt strange without Ozzie near, but also supremely at peace. How easy life was, I admitted, if one had only to take care of oneself. I found an open bottle of wine on my countertop, sniffed it to check it, then poured out a glass and carried it with me to the bath. I ran the bath as hot as I could stand it and climbed in, sitting on the side until I could gradually feed myself into the warm, waiting water.
I locked my mind down. I told myself not to think of Ozzie or the boat trip or anything else. I pushed myself deeper into the water and sipped at the wine. The wine was horrid, but not quite turned, and I didn’t care anyway. I got out of the bath and tiptoed into the kitchen, dripping, and poured a second glass full to the brim. I carried it back and submerged in the bath again, relieved beyond measure to have the warmth of the apartment, the four solid walls around me.
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