“That for us?” she asks.

Us. I like the way the word groups us in together and holds us there. I nod at her and we sit.

“Back in Ireland I used to sit outside at night with my sister, Beth. We’d try to count the stars, but we never could. I guess that was the point. We always had a reason to come back out and try again.”

“She still in Ireland?”

“No,” I say. “She died.” The pain of that memory rests under my skin. She spent her last days groaning in agony in the hold of a stinking ship. Coughing until she puked and shat herself from the force of it. And me holding her, willing her to get better, not just for her sake but for mine, scared to lose the only family I had left. “You would have liked her, I think. And she would have liked you back.”

I feel the heat from her hand resting close to mine on the blanket and I shift my fingers so that I’m touching her. She doesn’t move.

“I used to watch them with my brother, Isaac,” she says. “You’d have liked him too.”

I know by now that there’s no Isaac on this plantation and her sad smile keeps me from asking about him. Whatever happened to Isaac, he’s just as lost to her as Beth is to me.

I slide my fingers over hers and take her hand.

At first, feeling her hand in mine is all I can think about, but the longer we sit together, the more natural it feels, till it’s like we’ve been holding hands since always, and her hand in mine is the only place it feels right to be.

She asks me what Ireland was like, and I tell her about the low stone walls and the ocean as far as you can see, and the lush green that’s greener than anything in America. But I also tell her about the work and the famine, and about Dermot wasting away from the hunger, and Emily from disease. I tell her about the last harvest that failed and snatched the fight right out of Ma and Da. And how, soon as they were in the ground, me and my sisters left for a better life that killed Beth and Maggie before they could start living it. She leans into me, and it’s like I’ve passed a kind of a test.

I trace circles on her hand with my thumb as we stare into the sky, and she tells me that she used to have a doll named Star.

“Isaac named it,” she says. “I called it Doll for the longest time and he said it needed a name, so when we were out looking at the stars he named it Star. Momma sewed it with burlap from a cotton sack and stuffed it with pilfered cotton. It had two mismatched buttons for eyes sewn into its head. I took that doll with me everywhere.”