The crooked tree was ahead of me. When my dad first pointed it out, he’d said it could be a wayfinder, that Indians had bent the tree at a time in its sapling life when the tree was flexible and could withstand the strain. I wondered if, in tree age, I was past my sapling time. I waited for Sage in her brother’s Lone Ranger sleeping bag, and must have fallen asleep because I woke in the dark. She hadn’t come.

I walked back home. The crickets were out, and the lights of my house blinked through the trees as I came off the trail. Ellen or Thomas had turned on the outdoor lamppost, and I could see that the grass was nearly knee-high again. I thought about what we had been since that day on the azalea path, how we had each tried to measure the world, order it in our own way, naming or drawing it, making lists, trying to stave off its disorder by mapping its galaxies, plotting its paths. I wanted to order my section of that world, to keep it and look after it.

Inside, Ellen was sitting at the kitchen table. I went to the drawer under the stovetop and took out the kitchen scissors.

“Sage called,” she said. “She’s at her mom’s. She said to tell you her brother read the card over the phone. She said to write this down for you. It’s weird.” Ellen handed me a piece of folded paper.

I sat on the bottom step in the hallway and opened it.

“Wild, wild horses, we’ll ride them some day.” Not tomorrow but soon.

I went back outside to the end of the driveway with the scissors and in the circle of light from the lamppost, I knelt on the ground and started to cut the grass.

Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to so many, but my first debt is always to my seven sisters and brothers who are my wolf pack, my country. Grainne, Maeve, Brian, Kieran, Deirdre, Aideen, and Siobhan, thank you.

To my mother, courageous and always unconventional, I am grateful that you always blazed your own way. You left gifts in the wake. To my band of nieces and nephews, you are the coolest people I know. All of you. To my cousin Mary Devins Felton for showing me that the glass is full, I am grateful.

It was in The Sandy Field Writers Group in Sligo that some of the scenes in this book were first put to paper and shared with the most generous group of readers and writers especially Nora McGillen, Rose Jordan, Niamh MacCabe, Julianna Holland, and Mairead McCann.

To Mike McCormack, who encouraged me to start a novel, and to Sinéad Gleeson, whose generosity set me on this journey, I am so thankful.