It’s taken me a week. A full week of my life has gone into making a five-year-old look like a rejected character fromThe Little MermaidmeetsCats, and I regret nothing.
It’s Emma’s first birthday without her mom, which is something Leo hasn’t said out loud but I can see it in the careful way he’s been planning today, like if the cake is high enough and the balloons are bright enough, the giant, mom-shaped hole in the room might stay in the shadows.
I can’t fix that. But I can make sure she has the best damn fins on the Upper West Side.
I also got her another disposable camera and a bracelet-making kit I found at Pearl Paint that came with about seven thousand tiny beads in every color imaginable. The teenager at the register had looked at me like I was purchasing supplies for a nightmare, but Emma’s going to be in bead-stringing heaven.
The apartment door opens and Marcus walks in, sorting through a small stack of mail. He’s wearing his gallery clothes—black on black on black, naturally—and has paint under his fingernails that he probably doesn’t realize is there.
“This is for you,” he says, handing me an envelope without looking up.
I take it and my heart does a clumsy little skip. It’s a postcard with a glossy photo on one side, and there’s an envelope behind it with Eileen’s handwriting across the front. We’ve been writing back and forth since September because calling Ireland means I have to choose between talking to her and eating for a week. Letters are cheaper—a stamp to Ireland costs fifty cents, which is manageable even on my salary.
Finding Eileen after we’d both left California had been a little bit of a scavenger hunt, but still easier than I’d expected, mostly because I’d known exactly where she was going. Back to Kinvara, the little town in County Galway where she’d grown up, where her daughters still lived. I’d been there twice as a kid—once when I was ten and once when I was fourteen, trips my parents had allowed because it meant I’d be out of their hair for two weeks and Eileen had promised to keep me “out of trouble.” I’d spent those visits running around with her kids, learning to fish in Galway Bay, eating soda bread that tasted better than anything we had in California.
I’d written to her the day after I got to New York, but I’d had to track down the actual address first. I remembered the blue door and the garden that always smelled like roses and rain. I remembered the view of Galway Bay from the kitchen window, but I’d been fourteen the last time I was there and couldn’t remember the house number to save my life. I’d spent two hours at the library with a very patient reference librarian and a directory the size of a microwave until we found it: 77 Seaview Terrace in Kinvara, County Galway. There was only one E. Murphy listed. I’d written to that address, hoping it was right. Eileen had written back within two weeks and we’ve been writing to each other ever since.
Marcus looks over my shoulder at the costume spread across my lap. “What isthatmonstrosity?”
I swat at his arm. “It’s for a five-year-old, you snob. It’s art.”
“That child is going to glow in the dark. You know that, right? She’s going to be visible from the moon.”
“That’s the point.”
“Is it though?”
I turn my attention back to the envelope, trying not to seem too eager, but I can’t help it. I always love Eileen’s letters. They smell like her—like Dove soap and lavender sachets and chamomile tea.
I rip open the envelope. Inside there’s a postcard from Scotland—Edinburgh Castle at sunset, all dramatic and gothic against a purple sky—and tucked behind it, a photograph.
It’s Eileen with her three daughters, all five grandsons, and her granddaughter standing in front of what looks like a lake with mountains in the background. The Scottish Highlands, maybe. Almost all of them have Eileen’s flaming red hair except for two of the boys who are towhead blond, probably from their father’s side. The kids range in age from what looks like sixteen down to a baby perched on Eileen’s hip. She’s laughing in the photo, her head thrown back, one hand on the baby and the other reaching toward one of the teenagers who’s clearly just said something funny.
She looks happy. Deep-down-in-the-marrow happy. It makes my chest ache with a weird mix of relief and homesickness.
“She’s doing okay then?” Marcus asks, his voice losing the teasing edge. He leans in just enough to see the photo.
“Better than okay,” I whisper, running my finger over the photo’s edge.
My dearest Annie,
I’m writing to you from Robyn’s kitchen table, which has become my unofficial office now that I’ve moved in with her and Tom. The view from here is straight out to the bay, and thismorning the water was so still it looked like glass. I watched a heron stand in the shallows for twenty minutes without moving. I’ve decided that’s what I want to be in my next life—a heron. Patient and unbothered with excellent posture.
We’ve just come back from Scotland, which is why you’re getting the Edinburgh postcard. Keira’s been wanting to take the boys to see the Highlands for ages, and Shauna convinced us all to make a week of it. We rented a cottage near Loch Lomond—far too small for ten people, but that was half the fun. Conor, who’s fifteen now and thinks he’s too old for family trips, spent the entire time pretending to be miserable until we took him to a rugby match in Glasgow. Then he was insufferable in an entirely different way. He’s on the county team now, did I tell you?
The younger boys—Christopher, Jamie, and Simon—spent most of the trip trying to catch fish with their bare hands in the loch. They didn’t catch a single thing, but they scared off every fish in a two-mile radius. Noel, who’s only three, kept trying to follow them into the water until Shauna threatened to tie him to a tree. Bella, the baby, slept through most of it on my hip, which is where she’s happiest. She’s got my hair, poor thing. She looks like a little lit match!
I’ve been keeping busy here. More busy than I probably should be at sixty-two, but I don’t know how to sit still. I help Robyn with the B&B she runs—making breakfasts, frying eggs, changing linens, chatting with the guests who always want to know the best pub in town. I’ve started a small garden behind the house. Tomatoes, herbs, flowers that shouldn’t grow this close to the sea but do anyway because they’re stubborn, like me.
On Thursdays I mind the boys while Shauna works at the surgery. We go down to the beach and they build elaborate sandcastles that get destroyed by the tide before we leave, andthey’re always shocked, every single time. I love it. All of it. The noise, the sand in the carpet, the way my days are never my own but finally feel like they belong to me in a way they didn’t before.
You asked in your last letter if I ever feel lost, now that I’m back here. And the answer is yes, sometimes. But I’ve learned something about being lost, Annie love—it’s not always a bad thing. Sometimes being lost just means you’re between one version of yourself and the next. That space is sacred. It’s where you get to be nobody and everybody all at once. You’re allowed to be nowhere for a while. You’re allowed to not know what comes next.
I think about what I would do if I could go back to twenty-five. If I could stand where you’re standing now, in a new city with a whole life stretched out in front of me. I spent so much of my youth trying to be a woman who was approved of, making sure that I never caused a scene. What a terrible waste of time.
Now, I’d be a total riot. I’d tell myself to be ridiculous. I’d stay out until the sky turned lilac and the only people left are the poets and the lunatics and the trash collectors. I’d kiss people I had no business kissing, just for the story of it. I’d eat breakfast at midnight in a diner. I’d wear the dress that’s too short and I’d dance until my feet bled because being young is temporary and you shouldn’t waste any of it on being sensible. I’d laugh too loud and read books that made me cry on park benches and I wouldn’t care who saw. I’d get my heart broken and probably break a few hearts myself—not on purpose, but because I didn’t know yet that you could want someone and still be wrong for them, that loving someone doesn’t mean you get to keep them. I’d make spectacular, wonderful, loud mistakes, and then I’d wake up and make ten more, because that’s what your twenties are for. They’re for being wrong about things. They’re for changing your mind. They’re for wantingsomething desperately one week and forgetting why the next. They are the most intimate, honest, beautiful nothingness you’ll ever have.
So don’t you dare be sensible, Annie love. Go be a disaster. Go be electric. Go find out exactly how much trouble you can get into before the sun comes up. Be the girl who cries at movies and laughs at funerals and doesn’t know the difference between being in love and being in love with the idea of being in love. Be the girl who doesn’t have it figured out yet, because the girls who have it figured out at twenty-five are lying, and where’s the fun in that?
