Cover

Dedication

For my mother’s sister, Carolyn Matulef,

and my father’s sister, Elizabeth Wrede McCracken

Epigraph

Map of Itself

The idea of travel. The very idea.

—BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY, THE OCTOPUS MUSEUM

The Irish Wedding

Because Jack didn’t drive—not stick, not on the left side of the road, not at all ever—Sadie piloted the rental car from the Dublin airport to the wedding, grinding gears and scraping along the greenery and—for a few miles—creeping behind a tractor on a winding road. It was ten p.m. and raining. If Ireland was emerald she couldn’t say. The tractor was a comfort, lit up with white lights, which she planned to follow as long as she could. Till dawn if necessary.

“Pass him,” said Jack.

“You pass him,” said Sadie.

“I’m not driving.”

“That’s right,” said Sadie.

Not their wedding but Jack’s middle older sister Fiona’s. Sadie would meet the entire family today, simultaneously: Fiona and her Dutch about-to-be-husband, Piet; his youngest older sister, Katie, and his oldest older sister, Eloise, and their families; and, of course, his parents, the significant Mister and Missus, Michael and Irene Valerts. Jack was the youngest of all of them, the only one born in America—not American, he insisted, despite his American accent. Everyone else in his family was English. He was, too, though he couldn’t pass.

Sadie drove as an act of heroism, though at any moment she might swerve off the road, into a ditch or off a cliff: she wasn’t sure, she couldn’t see. In Boston, where they lived, she almost never got a chance to drive, to perform this act of casual generosity. When she did, Jack was full of gratitude and compliments, passed her snacks and drinks, read to her from magazines. They were still in the early days of their lives together. This was their first wedding.

“You’re a little close,” said Jack. “To the side here.”

He didn’t drive, but his body acted as though it knew all about it. It braked and seized up and readied for death. The rental car was small, bright blue, a brand and model Sadie had never heard of, with some sort of winged scaly mythical creature in the middle of the steering wheel. The wedding would be in a large house near the town of Clonmel. The good news was that the house belonged to Fiona and Piet, who’d bought it for a song after its occupant had died in one of its many rooms, and so they would stay there for free. That was also the bad news, all those hours she would have to perform as herself in front of Jack’s family. They had spent the day traveling, flying through the air and through time zones, and now it was the middle of the night.

“We’ll miss supper,” said Jack.

“We’ve missed it.”