I close my eyes as the heady fragrance of the ocean transports me as if in a dream to Gram’s cottage in Donaghadee above the slate Irish Sea. I can see the house in my mind’s eye just as it was when I was young, back when life was simple. I can see Gram making me a cup of sugar tea in her kitchen while a harbor breeze tickles the lace curtains she made from her wedding dress, two days after marrying my Anglican grandfather. On the kitchen table are shortbread cookies arranged on the daisy plate, and still warm from the oven. She is humming an old Gaelic tune. . . .

But no.

I’ve spent too many hours pondering what I wouldn’t do to go back in time to Gram’s kitchen, what I’d be willing to give up. What I’d be willing to give. I open my eyes to behold again the nearness of the San Francisco docks.

Backward glances are of no use to me now.

I move away from the railing to the shelter of an overhang and tuck loose strands of hair back into place. I don’t want to step off the ferry looking like a street urchin. Not today.

I look down at my skirt to see how bad the wrinkles are. Not too noticeable in the day’s diminishing light. My journey from New York to California took place on a second-class seat, not in a private sleeping car, hence the creases. I’d not expected anything different, as Martin Hocking had written that he is in good financial standing, not that he is rich. That he has means of any amount is miracle enough. I would have ridden in the baggage car all the way to get out of the umbrella factory and the tenement, and especially away from young Irishwomen just like me who reminded me too frequently of what I left back home.

If my mother could see me now, she’d no doubt put me on the first train back to New York. But then, Mam doesn’t know how bad it was. I didn’t want to worry her, so she doesn’t know that the room I was subletting with four flatmates was no bigger than a kitchen pantry and that a single spigot in the back alley provided the only water to drink, bathe, and cook with for the entire building. She doesn’t know everyone dumped their chamber pots out their windows because there were no indoor toilets—despite city ordinances requiring them—and that the stink of human waste hung on the air like a drape. The tenement wasn’t a place to come home to at the end of the workday. It was just a shared room with sagging mattresses, a place where dreams for a better life could unravel faster than your threadbare clothes, and where girls like me from Belfast and Armagh and Derry and other Irish towns laid their heads at night.

“I had a neighbor lady in Chicago when I was growing up who was from Ireland,” a woman seated across from me said hours earlier, as our train chuffed through the Nevada desert. “She came to America as a young girl during that terrible time when there was nothing to eat in Ireland and nothing would grow. That was years ago. I wasn’t even born yet, so that was long before you were alive. She told me it was something awful, that time. Whole families starved to death.” The woman shook her head in pity.