Prologue

Shoot for the moon and even if you miss you’ll land among the stars.

It’s engraved on my husband’s stone at the graveyard. It was a phrase he often used. His optimistic, cheery inflection oozed positive self-help phrases as though they were fuel for life. Positive words of reinforcement like that had no effect on me, not until he died. It was when he spoke them to me from his grave that I really heard them, I felt them, I believed them. I clung to them.

For a full year after his death, my husband Gerry continued his life by giving me the gift of his words in surprise monthly notes. His words were all I had; no more spoken words, but words, written from his thoughts, from his mind, from a brain that controlled a body with a beating heart. Words meant life. And I gripped them, hands clasped tightly around his letters until my knuckles went white and my nails dented my palms. I hung on to them like they were my lifeline.

It’s 7 p.m. on 1 April, and this fool is reveling in the new brightness. The evenings are stretching and the short, shocking, sharp sting of winter’s slap is being nursed by spring. I used to dread this time of year; I favored winter when everywhere was a hiding place. The darkness made me feel that I was concealed behind gauze, that I was out of focus, almost invisible. I reveled in it, celebrating the shortness of the day, the length of the night; the darkening sky my countdown to acceptable hibernation. Now I face the light, I need it to prevent me from being sucked back.

My metamorphosis was similar to the instant shock the body experiences when dipped into cold water. On impact there’s the overwhelming urge to shriek and leap out, but the longer you remain  submerged, the more you acclimatize. The cold, like the darkness, can become a deceptive comfort you never want to leave. But I did; feet kicking and arms sweeping, I pulled myself up to the surface. Emerging with blue lips and chattering teeth, I thawed and re-entered the world.

Transitioning day to night, in transitional winter to spring, in a transitional place. The graveyard, considered a final resting place, is less peaceful beneath the surface than above. Below the soil, hugged by wooden coffins, bodies are altering as nature earnestly breaks down the remains. Even when resting, the body is perpetually transforming. The giddy laughter of children nearby shatters the silence, unaware of or unaffected by the in-between world they stand on. Mourners are silent but their pain is not. The wound may be internal, but you can hear it, you can see it, you can feel it. Heartbreak is carried around bodies like an invisible cloak; it adds a load, it dims eyes, it slows strides.

In the days and months after my husband’s death, I searched  for some elusive transcendental connection to him, desperate to feel whole again, like an insufferable thirst that needed to be quenched. On days when I was functioning, his presence would creep up behind me and tap me on the shoulder, and suddenly I’d feel an unbearable emptiness. A parched heart. Grief is endlessly uncontrollable.

He chose to be cremated. His ashes are in an urn slotted into a niche behind a Columbarium Wall. His parents reserved the space beside his. The empty space in the wall beside his urn is for me.

I feel as though I’m staring death in the face, which is something  I would have embraced when he died. Anything to join him. I would have gladly climbed into that niche, folded myself up like a contortionist and cradled my body around his ashes.

He’s in the wall. But he’s not there, he’s not here. He’s gone. Energy elsewhere. Dissolved, besprinkled particles of matter around me. If I could, I would deploy an army to hunt down his every atom and put him together again, but all the king’s horses and all the king’s men . . . we learn it from the beginning, we only realize what it all means in the end.

We were privileged to have not just one but two goodbyes; a long illness from cancer followed by a year of his letters. He let go secretly knowing that there would be more of him for me to cling to, more than memories; even after his death he found a way to make new memories together. Magic. Goodbye, my love, goodbye again. They should have been enough. I thought that they were. Maybe that’s why people come to graveyards. For more goodbyes. Maybe it’s not about hello at all—it’s the comfort of goodbye, a calm and peaceful, guilt-free parting. We don’t always remember how we met, we often remember how we parted.

It’s surprising to me that I’m back here, both in this location and in this frame of mind. Seven years since his death. Six years since I read his final letter. I had, have moved on, but recent events have unsettled everything, rattled my core. I should move forward, but there’s a hypnotic rhythmic tide, as though his hand is reaching for me and pulling me back.

I examine the stone and read his phrase again.

Shoot for the moon and even if you miss you’ll land among the stars.

So this must be what it’s like then. Because we did, he and I. We shot straight for it. We missed. This right here, all that I have, and all that I am, this new life that I’ve built up over the past seven years, without Gerry, must be what it’s like to land among the stars.

1

Three Months Earlier

“Patient Penelope. The wife of the King of Ithaca, Odysseus. A serious and diligent character, a devoted wife and mother, some critics dismiss her as a symbol of marital fidelity, but Penelope is  a complex woman who weaves her plots as deftly as she weaves a garment.” The tour guide leaves a mysterious pause while his eyes run over his intrigued audience.

Gabriel and I are at an exhibition in the National Museum. We’re in the back row of the gathered crowd, standing slightly away from the others as though we don’t belong, or don’t want to be a part of their gang, but aren’t too cool to risk missing what’s being said. I’m listening to the tour guide while Gabriel leafs through the brochure beside me. He will be able to repeat what the guide has said later, word for word. He loves this stuff. I love that he loves this stuff more than the stuff itself. He’s somebody who knows how to fill time, and when I met him that was one of his most desirable traits because I had a date with destiny. In sixty years, max, I had a date with someone on the other side.

“Penelope’s husband Odysseus goes to fight in the Trojan War, which is fought for ten years and it takes him a further ten years to return. Penelope is in a very dangerous situation when one hundred and eight suitors in total begin demanding her hand in marriage. Penelope is clever, and concocts ways to delay her suitors, leading on each man with the promise of possibility but never submitting to anyone.”

I suddenly feel self-conscious. Gabriel’s arm draped loosely over my shoulder feels too heavy.

“The story of Penelope’s loom, which we see here, symbolizes one of the queen’s cunning tricks. Penelope worked at weaving a shroud for the eventual funeral of her father-in-law Laertes, claiming she would choose a husband as soon as the shroud was completed. By day, she worked on a great loom in the royal halls, at night she secretly unraveled what she had done. She persisted for three years, waiting for her husband to return, deceiving her suitors until they were reunited.”

It grates on me. “Did he wait for her?” I call out.

“Excuse me?” the tour guide asks, eyes darting to find the owner of the voice. The crowd parts and turns to look at me.

“Penelope is the epitome of conjugal fidelity, but what about her husband? Did he save himself for her, out there in the war, for twenty years?”

Gabriel chuckles.

The tour guide smiles and talks briefly about the nine other children Odysseus had with five other women, and his long journey to return to Ithaca from the Trojan War.

“So, no then,” I mumble to Gabriel as the group move on. “Silly Penelope.”

“It was an excellent question,” he says, and I hear the amusement in his voice.

I turn again to the painting of Penelope while Gabriel flicks through the brochure. Am I Patient Penelope? Am I weaving by day,  unraveling by night, deceiving this loyal and beautiful suitor while I wait to be reunited with my husband? I look up at Gabriel. Gabriel’s blue eyes are playful, not reading into my thoughts. Amazingly deceived.

“She could have just slept with them all while she was waiting,” he says. “Not much fun, Prudish Penelope.”

I laugh, rest my head on his chest. He wraps his arm around me, holds me tight and kisses the top of my head. He’s built like a house and I could live inside his hug; big, broad and strong, he spends his days outdoors climbing trees as a tree surgeon, or arborist, to use the title he prefers. He’s used to being up at a height, loves the wind and rain, all elements, an adventurer, an explorer, and if not at the top of a tree, he can be found beneath one, with his head in a book. In the evening after work, he smells of peppery watercress.

We met two years ago at a chicken wing festival in Bray; he was beside me at the counter, holding up the line behind him while he ordered a cheeseburger. He caught me at a good moment. I liked the humor, which was his intention; he’d been trying to get my attention. His chat-up line I suppose.

Me mate wants to know if you’ll go out with him. I’ll have a cheeseburger, please.

I’m a sucker for a bad chat-up line, but I’ve good taste in men.

Good men, great men.

He starts to move one way and I pull him in the opposite direction, away from Patient Penelope’s gaze. She’s been watching me and she thinks she recognizes her type when she sees one. But I’m not her type, I’m not her and I don’t want to be her. I will not pause my life as she did to wait for an uncertain future.

“Gabriel.”

“Holly.” He matches my serious tone. “About your proposition.”

“To march on the government to prevent premature Christmas decorations? We’ve just taken them down, surely they’ll go up again soon.”

I have to arch my back and crane my neck to look up at him,  he’s so tall. His eyes are smiling.

“No, the other one. The moving in with you one.” “Ah.”

“Let’s do it.”

He punches the air and makes a quiet stadium-sized-crowd- cheering sound.

“If you promise me that we’ll get a TV, and that every day when I wake up you will look like this.” I stand on tiptoe to get closer to his face. I place my hands on his cheeks, feel his smile beneath the Balbo beard he grows, trims and maintains like a pro; the tree man who cultivates his own face.

“That is a prerequisite of being my roommate.” “Fuck-mate,” I say and we laugh, childishly.

“Were you always so romantic?” he asks, wrapping his arms around me.

I used to be. I used to be very different. Naïve, perhaps. But I’m not anymore. I hug him tightly and rest my head on his chest. I catch Penelope’s judgmental eye. I lift my chin haughtily. She thinks she knows me. She doesn’t.