Sarah Hoenicke

Mills College, Oakland, California

 

It’s cold, windy—the opposite of London, where we had our layover the day

before. There, I’d been sweaty and quiet, subdued by the humidity, the heat. Here, in Ireland, I feel as though I’m going to burst—the shivering filling me with a nervous, jittery energy.

I jog to catch up to Chris, who’s walked ahead. He’s reached the truck and stands under the metal awning, talking to the man behind the counter. The man’s alone back there, in the darkness of his portable shop. Signs on the wall behind him advertise prices and the different flavors of the ice cream he sells. It seems odd, selling ice cream in such terrible weather, but I wonder how often the Irish would get to eat it if they waited for the sun?

The man behind the counter wears a white apron over a brown jacket over a gray flannel shirt. On his head sits a wool cap.

“We’re trying to get to Giant’s Causeway,” Chris says. He squints up at the ice cream man and shields his eyes with the directions I printed out back home.

The wind flaps the papers in Chris’s hand and he folds them, puts them in the back pocket of his black skinny-jeans. Out of uniform, he looks so relaxed, so boyish, like the skinny 19-year-old he was when I met him six years ago.

Last minute, I’d organized everything for our trip in a purple folder:

printed directions to Giant’s Causeway, to Glenveagh National Park, and the

other places we intended to see; our hotel reservation confirmation, our rental car papers, our passports, our plane tickets. After the bombing, everything had to be changed. No more tickets to tour the Chapel of the Holy Cross. No

meandering through Old Town. No more plans to walk and see the multicolored buildings with their orange roofs, to see the river or browse the street market stalls. I’d wanted to see everything again that I’d seen when I lived in the city briefly during college.

“You’re pretty far from the Causeway,” the man says and smiles at us. The lines around his mouth parenthesize the expression of kindness, and his eyes quiver a little. I return his smile and let it sit on my face too long; too long we’re looking at each other. I feel like he can see under my skin; his blue eyes are sharp in contrast to the wrinkles that surround them.

“Really?” Chris asks, retrieving the papers from his pocket and putting his hand to his temple. When he realizes he doesn’t have his glasses, he hands the papers to me. He’s concerned; I can see it in his face—suspicious of information that he doesn’t feel matches what he knows to be true. “We’ve been driving for an hour.”

I take off my gloves so I’ll be less clumsy.

I laugh a derisive sound, and a bubble of resentment settles in my chest. Chris’s jaw is clenched. I try to smooth over my irritation, reorder my expression. I hold the directions out to him as the old man watches us.

“We’ve been using the route I printed for Glenveagh National Park,” I say, pointing to the words.

The ice cream man chuckles, his mouth, open a little, lets out a puff of steam. One hand rests on his hip, the other leans on the counter between us.

“That happened to me once,” he says.

I laugh again and feel the tension between Chris and I ebb a little.

“Really?” I ask the man. There’s a loosening in my muscles, in my jaw, in the way I’m holding my mouth.

Chris’s face relaxes and he looks at the stranger.

“It was just me and a few of my friends. We were on a road trip we

decided to take across America.” He rubs his eyebrows with his thumb and

pointer finger, smoothing out the memory for retelling, and his voice shrinks, gets smaller. “Must’ve been thirty years ago now.”

He pauses, goes on: “We flew into California, ‘cause that was where the movies were coming from, and a lot of good music too. We were only supposed to be in the country for three days—” he titters under his breath and looks up

toward the ceiling of his food truck. “But we ended up staying a week and a half. Money went pretty far then, and we were able to rent a car and just throw our stuff in and we had this big idea of seeing all the states, or at least half of them, before we left.”

His face pulls toward its center in a question; he looks from me to Chris.

“Where’re you two from?”

Chris pulls me into his side. He’s warm; I put my arm around his waist and stick my hand in the pocket of his jacket.

I answer: “We’re from the U.S.—Virginia. But we’ve been living in Germany for the last month—Chris is in the military. We were supposed to go to Prague for our honeymoon.” My voice changes as I utter the final words of the

explanation; it gets higher.

I want to say more, to tell him how I’m not horrified by the attacks. I’m not surprised, even; they’ve become so prevalent. The sadness I feel is deep and misplaced—I only lived there for such a short time—but it’s there, and I feel an urgency to be alive and a weighty awareness that no place, really, is safe.

“We had plans to go to Prague for our honeymoon, and I lived there when I was 20. I wanted to go back.” This last pronouncement sounds so selfish that I redden and look down at my leather boots. It’s ridiculous, really, to feel this level of emotion for a place where I used to walk off my little 20-year-old demons. I’m not fluent in the language. I’m not a native to the city. Why, then, am I so crushed by the sealing of the borders, the defilement of a place that’s not my home?

I’d wanted to stand in front of the astronomical clock tower and take it in again—the gold wheels, the age of it. I remember the images from the TV: the tower reduced to a smoking heap, the ancient wheels and stone figures blackened, laying amongst the smoke-charred bricks like the tourists who were strewn, laid to a fiery rest about the street. The attackers had set the bomb off in the old town hall right before the astronomical clock struck noon—they’d known that, at that time, there would be a great crowd of international people gathered, their cameras poised to take in the 600-year-old technology that enabled the clock to move its statues and show the time. They’d known it would look apocalyptic.

Chris looks down into my face and hugs me closer, maybe in apology. He doesn’t understand my reaction to the bombing. There’ve been bombings all over the world, bombings in places he’s been sent. So, we had to change our plans. Big deal! We’ve always wanted to go to Ireland together. He does understand the fear I feel about him being sent out—sent wherever Congress decides he and hundreds of others like him, who’ve signed up for this unpredictable life, need to go.

“He even had to bring a bag with us, on our honeymoon here,” I say

lamely.

“Ah” the man says, and leans forward, placing both of his forearms on the counter. “I was wondering why you’d come here, to Ireland. If I lived in the United States, I’d never want to come here. You mean you brought a bag in case you get shipped out somewhere?”

Chris nods. “Why?” he asks, and then clarifies: “Why is it strange that we’d want to come here?”

I try to focus on them, on my husband. He seems blurry, like an

abstraction, but the man behind the counter is clear. I feel like he’s my friend, from some other time I don’t remember.

The old man shrugs, both his hands in his pockets.

“Ask anyone here. They’ll tell you the same thing,” he says.

“So, what happened?” I ask, feeling myself reenter the present

conversation.

“With what?” The man asks, stepping back from the counter, folding his arms across his chest.

“With the road trip. What happened? Did you see a lot of the States?”

He scoffs. “We got to New Mexico, and that was about it for us. We spent so long at the Grand Canyon—New Mexico was as far as we would get before

having to turn around to make our flight. We’d already rescheduled once and couldn’t afford to do it again.”

His eyes leave ours, and he picks at something on the counter with his nail. Looking up and out over our shoulders at the green hills obscured by mist, he continues:

“Once we got to New Mexico, we were pretty tired of driving.”

He searches our faces—his eyes narrowed, his lips pressed together.

“Where are you staying? I think I’m going to pack up for the day.” He looks around at the empty parking lot, and then at the sky. “Looks like the sun that was forecasted isn’t going to make an appearance after all. I’ll have no

customers today.”

I look at Chris; his face is relaxed, and he doesn’t seem concerned at the questioning. “We’re staying in Londonderry,” I answer.

“Ah, so you’re a ways away. I usually go for a beer at the end of the day.” He looks at the watch he wears on his left wrist. “Can I buy you a beer? To congratulate you on the wedding?” He cocks his mouth in a dry-lipped, right-tilted smile, and I feel an edge in the air, a sensitivity in my gut, a kind of fluttering.

He nods toward the car we’d parked a few hundred feet off when we pulled over to gain our bearings.

“That your rental?”

Chris nods.

“Can I buy you two a drink as Congratulations and tell you the rest of my story?”

We get in the car and look at each other. Chris has a face that’s hard to stay mad at. His eyes are brown with straight eyelashes a few shades darker than his blonde hair. His mouth—a straight line when his face is relaxed—is pushed down at the corners, wrinkling his chin. His face spells reluctance.

“He hasn’t even told us his name, and we’re going to follow him somewhere?” he asks.

“This is how I like to travel. I like to meet people. We’re not going to make it to Giant’s Causeway today anyway.” Conscious that my tone sounds more bruised than it should, I put my hand on his arm and go in to kiss him. His mouth is cold from being outside, but he kisses me back and we both open our eyes.

“He’s an ice cream man. What’s he going to do?” I say.

“Hah! Those are the guys your parents tell you to watch out for growing up—the ones with sweets!” Chris says, but he’s settling into his seat and buckling his seatbelt.

“We have our car, and our maps, and we saved money for this trip,” I say, trying to convince him still, though I know he’s already decided we’ll go. “If we get to somewhere that makes us uncomfortable, we’ll simply turn around and find another hotel or find our way back to Londonderry, ok?”

“I guess we should hear the rest of his story,” he says and puts his hand on my thigh and squeezes it. I feel the tension drop that’s been popping up between us throughout the trip.

He looks over his shoulder in the direction of the food truck and sees that the old man has everything closed up and is getting into the cab. Chris waits for him to switch on his headlights before turning on our car.

We follow the ice cream truck out of the lot and up a winding road, through a tiny town that feels like Christmas with the mist and the people

huddled together walking under street lamps turned on early, and beneath

hanging wooden signs.

We continue on through that town, though we pass several good-enough-looking pubs. As we follow him onto another stretch of road, winding between cow pastures and farmland obscured by low-lying clouds, Chris looks over his glasses at me, smirking.

“Oh, stop it. He’s probably just taking us to his favorite place,” I say.

We soon come to another town and as we park in the street alongside a corner bar, raindrops the size of quarters begin to plop onto the windshield. Walking inside reveals a full, warm room of early drinkers: mostly men who look to be in their 40s and 50s. There’s a TV hung on the wall behind the bar top

showing a soccer match and the bottles of alcohol shine atop mirrored shelves.

We follow the ice cream man to a corner table next to the bar. Green and gold and brown and black—everything looks so Irish: the rich dark colors, the gold covering the edges of the counter and gilding the arches along the walls. It’s so much like what I expected, very warm. The chairs are burgundy leather and tall. Mine wobbles as I get into it.

The ice cream man gestures to the barkeep, and I put my hand on his arm. “What’s your name?”

He laughs, an eyes-closed, head tilted motion. “Oh I kind of forgot that part, didn’t I? It’s Jacob. I know he’s Chris—” he nods his head to Chris, “but what’re you called?”

“That’s a good way to ask it,” Chris says. “Her name is Wilhelmina, but she’s called Billy—both after her grandmother.” He finishes, nudging my shoulder with his, “Her parents were mean.”

Jacob smiles and says, “Ok, Billy,” as the bartender walks up. I redden and warm at Chris’s flirtation, and the spot where his shoulder touched mine

tingles and feels more alive than the rest of my arm. He and I have had so little time with each other because of how much he’s been gone, that every time we’re thrust back together again it feels as though I’m experiencing him for the first time. Our interactions are rough around the edges; I feel open to him, and scared that my openness will be spurned, left unfilled, empty.

The bartender seems to know Jacob. He’s younger than him; his hair still has some brown in it, and his skin isn’t as slack as the older man’s. He wears a button-down shirt, with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and a vest.

Jacob orders us beers. He leans in close to us; a group of musicians has just walked in, and I can smell smoke on his breath. Though I want to be present, in the bar with my husband and Jacob reminiscing, my mind keeps bringing up the images I saw on TV and it’s as though I can’t believe in them. For every image of destruction, there’s a memory of wholeness. I remember the way the horses’ hooves sounded on the streets, pulling tourists and carriages behind them. The smell of bread, the way my nose dripped constantly and was raw in the frigid winter. I’d imagined doing this very thing—having drinks in a warm, festive place, in a refuge away from the cold—but not in Ireland. But we’re alive, I remind myself, and feel guilty and stupid at the thought.

“So, what had I been saying?” Jacob rubs his jaw with his hand. “I was telling you we stopped in New Mexico. I know that’s where I was going at least, ‘cause that’s the important part of the story.”

The barman brings three foamy beers darker than black coffee and sets one in front of each of us. Jacob nods his thanks to the bartender, then the three of us clink our glasses and take a drink.

“So, we were in New Mexico. We’d been through so much of nothing and were pretty overwhelmed by the size of the nothingness.” He drinks again. “California alone is more than three times the size of our country,” he says, stretching his arms out behind him.

“We pulled off the highway at this rest stop. It was the first place we’d seen for a long time. After the man behind the counter gave us the bathroom keys and we got that taken care of, we came back to the front of the shop for things to eat and smokes and got to talking with the old feller. God,” he pauses, looking at the table and laughing without sound, shaking his head: “He must have been as old then as I am now.” He presses his fingertips to the table,

looking at his hand, at the nails turning white and pink. “He’s probably gone now.”

He thinks, his forehead drawn together. He takes his hat off and runs his hand through his sparse, clipped-short hair. White, mostly, with black and gray streaking through it; it stands up after he combs it back.

He raises his beer to ours again and we clink glasses, take drinks. Chris looks at me over the rim of his glass and raises his eyebrows a little like, not crazy, huh?

“Well. I don’t want to get sentimental about it,” Jacob continues. “He was a weird old guy. His shop had all the usual stuff that shops on the road do—magnets and candy, and we got gas there, thinking we might continue on.

“We hadn’t been back in the shop for five minutes when the old guy asked us to stay for dinner. He said he had rabbit that he was planning to cook, and that he hadn’t seen anyone for a couple of weeks—imagine, not seeing another human being for a couple of weeks! He said that the stretch of road we were on had been closed down because of a storm or something, and that no one had come out his way.

“We said no, at first, thinking we’d be better off getting back on the road. Eventually, he wore us down and we followed him to a little house about a hundred yards off, behind the shop. He made some soup with the rabbits—told us he’d caught ‘em himself—and we ate around an ugly little table that could fold up.” He goes quiet, thinking, and motions to the bartender for another beer.

I take Chris’s hand in mine beneath the table and put my other hand on top of his. A dimple comes into his right cheek, high near the cheekbone, as he smiles at me. I trace the bones of his fingers into the bones of his hand with my nails. My love for him is a weighty storm inside my chest.

“He was telling us that he’d lived in that house alone, since his wife had gotten hit by a car and died,” Jacob continues. “The nearest town was fifty miles off, and the only people he usually saw were travelers and the big tanker trucks that came to refill the petrol for his station.

“I remember how dark the house was inside. The guy had foil up on all the windows, and over that he had shades pulled down, I guess to keep out the sun. When he took us inside before we ate, we all kinda looked at each other wondering what we’d gotten into. When he took the rabbits out of a bag in a cooler and skinned them in the sink, I thought we’d walked into a horror film.” He laughs, looking into his beer and then up at us, and I have to look away from his eyes. “Turned out, the old man just wanted some company,” he finishes.

He takes a drink and wipes his lips with the back of his hand.

“The whole time we ate, he sat there quietly. As soon as the food was done with, though, he got to talking and wouldn’t stop with the questions. He kept calling Ireland the Motherland, saying how his grandparents had come from here and how he wished he could move back. He asked us why we were there and how long we were staying. Our ages, about our women—he wanted to know

everything.”

The bar grows louder. The musicians have begun to play, and I need to pee. Jacob points to the corner where the music’s coming from and I notice a doorway behind the ensemble. I get down from my stool a little too fast and nearly knock it over. I catch it, and Chris puts his hand on my upper arm after I’ve steadied the chair and myself. My heart races. “You ok?” he asks.

I nod and turn to walk across the room too quickly; I slow myself down.

I duck through the raucous of the musicians and into a small wood-paneled room. All the noise from the pub is instantly muted and only comes through like sound does when you’re under water: lengthened and billowy. Here, I feel like I can breathe.

The room has benches along its walls. A man sits in a worn suit with his back against the wall, one leg up on the bench, smoking a fat cigar. He nods his head at me, and I nod back, before going through the door marked “WC.”

As I pee, I look at the window set high in the wall. It’s getting dark and we don’t know where we are.

I realize once I’m alone that I want to get Chris and leave. We’ve exposed too much of ourselves to this stranger, I think, but then—no, we haven’t. He’s told us much more than we’ve told him. He needs something, but I don’t know what—just more company? To finish his story? I realize, looking at the darkness of the window, that it’s beginning to feel like his story may never end, like we’ll be sucked into it, like we’ll never be able to leave.

I want to be back in our hotel feeling safe; though—where is it safe, really? Chris could be called out as soon as we get off the plane in Germany, when we return in two days. There’s even the possibility, if things get really dire, that he could be called while we’re away, while we’re here. This has been our life, both before and in the short time since we got married. He’s been sent all over, and I’ve had to carry on with life for the weeks and months that he’s been gone. We’ve been together for nearly seven years, yet we’ve spent less than half of that time living under the same roof if you add up all the training, the deployments, the out-of-state required classes for promotions.

I have to get him and be alone with him. No one could tell me how long we might have together.

I’ve long been done peeing. I finish and wash my hands, notice how tired I look in the bathroom mirror. I adjust my hair, wipe underneath my eyes with my index fingers to clear my rain-smudged mascara, and pinch my cheeks to make some color come into them. I need a bed, I need my husband, I need to be naked and washed of all the frustration and tension of the last weeks, to be between sheets and under Chris and warm.

Back through the smoking room, into the noise—I take my seat at the table and set to work on the half of my beer still remaining. Chris and Jacob are talking about taxes, and then fishing, and then taxes again. I can tell that Chris is bored, but he’s too polite to let the old man know. He’s playing with his napkin and keeps looking around the room, almost losing what Jacob’s saying, bringing himself back to the present at the crucial moments so he can answer or respond.

The bartender comes over and collects the four empty glasses from the table—two from in front of each man. He asks if I want another, though I still haven’t finished my first. I wave him off with a smile and feel angry that Chris hasn’t ended this ridiculous story. I was the one originally interested, I realize, but I need him to end this, to take me back to the room.

Chris doesn’t understand the urgency—he’ll leave again soon and be with his military family. Yes, he’ll miss me, but I’ll be the one stuck in a foreign place alone. I’m struck by my own selfishness and feel like I might cry from the

mixture of anger and loneliness and frustration I feel. Instead, I sit quietly, sipping and surveying the room. I realize that my foot is tapping the bar on my chair and stop. My hands are shaking, and if I sit too still my teeth begin to chatter. I’m not cold—it’s just the nervous energy that fills me when Chris is liable to be sent somewhere dangerous. During his last deployment, I ground through four expensive mouth guards, my nervousness following me into sleep.

The ceilings are high enough that, though the bar’s full, it shouldn’t feel crowded. But it feels hot, and the voices are too loud. Most of the people drinking are men, and almost all of them wear hats. They laugh and put their arms around each other and I want to go up to them and ask if they know about all of the terrible things that are always happening all over the world. I stay in my seat. Some of them join in the singing, others sit in their corners talking to their companions without taking their eyes off the room.

“Billy,” Chris says, and my eyes snap up to meet his gaze.

He’s a little tipsy. His eyes aren’t focusing on mine.

“Do you need your glasses?” I ask near his ear since the pub has gotten so loud.

He shakes his head, patting his pocket. “Jacob offered to walk us back to the hotel and tell us the rest of the story.”

“Walk? How?” I ask, wary.

He pulls me close to his mouth, his hand on my shoulder, and explains that we’re in Londonderry; we’d simply come into the city from a different side and hadn’t realized where we were. His breath is warm on my ear; goosebumps rise on the back of my neck.

Jacob leads us out of the pub. The cold air in the street wraps around me. Chris wipes condensation from his glasses, puts them on, and takes them off again; the mist is inescapable. It frosts our hair in tiny droplets and sits lightly on the shoulders of our jackets—not getting us wet, just coexisting with the wool and polyester and cotton.

We follow Jacob up the sidewalk, along the stone-cobbled street, and past the rental car. He tells us that the old man in the gas station took him aside as he and his friends were leaving to drive back to California, to fly back to Ireland. He had pulled Jacob’s shirtsleeve and patted his shoulder and asked whether he would stay a while? The man had money; he would fly Jacob home.

Jacob tells us the man squeezed his arm so tight he left a mark.

“I don’t think he meant anything weird by it, but in that moment I felt vulnerable like I was with a woman, like he wanted me to stay because he needed that companionship or intimacy or just someone to sit with. It made me so uncomfortable I wanted to leave right that second, and I was glad we were already on our way out.”

We stop in front of the door to our hotel. Jacob looks down at the

weatherproof welcome mat and then at us. He sways a little in his shoes. He looks small, though he’s taller than me.

“Ever since I flew back home, I think I’ve been fighting that existence. He was old, and so alone, and I never wanted to be that way,” Jacob says and goes quiet, then laughs a self-deprecating laugh and shakes his head.

“Oh boy, now you two have a story, too, don’t you? The crazy old Irish guy that took you to a pub and got sentimental about his week in your country. I guess traveling does that, doesn’t it? Makes you think about the nothingness and the people that make the nothingness go away?” He laughs again, and I notice the stars that the clouds have left behind. He nudges Chris’s boot with the tip of his shoe, like he wants to say something more to Chris than to me.

Then he straightens, breathes deep, lets his breath out loudly and shoves his hands into his pockets. He looks younger, and like he’s remembered that he doesn’t know us.

“I’m glad you came back with me here,” he says, inclining his head in my direction and then Chris’s as he turns to leave. I feel so sad in that moment, and so relieved. We watch as he walks up the street, under the cones of swirling misty light beneath the lamps, and he turns to wave.

We move quickly to retreat inside to bed, and I slow us down with a hand on Chris’s arm. We’re standing in the doorway to the hotel, under the porch lamp. I kiss him, my hand on the side of his face. His lips are dry, his tongue warm, and his mouth smells like beer. The air is cold on our faces, the rain is starting up again, and I know Chris’s combat readiness bag is by our bed, up the stairs. Our existence sits on an edge awaiting far-off decisions. For now, we have our mouths and our hands and a warm hotel shower.