The Longest Way Home

by Andrew McCarthy

  I tousle his hair and we sit in silence. There is a pure, still place in me that remains mine alone. It is that place I first encountered as a child in my front yard, under the stars, it is the place from which I move out into the world, the place from which so much that is good in my life has sprung. Over the years my willful isolation and separation, my urge to flee, my feelings of being misunderstood and ultimately alone in the world, all grew from a desire to shield that solitary place. But what I’ve come to see in the past months of travel is that these battlements I’ve erected ultimately ensure the creation of all they are trying to safeguard against. The revelation of my journeying is that so many of my defenses, so many of the protective choices I have lived by, behavior that has dictated so many of my actions and created much of my persona in the world, are both unnecessary and counterproductive. The realization is at once liberating and already deeply familiar.

  The softness of love I have experienced with D has made unnecessary that hard shell of my defensive reaction to the world, and it feels at this moment as if that love has been waiting for me this entire time, just under a silk cloth that took only a gentle breeze to uncover.

  I let my son climb into bed with me and we read the final chapter of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The last of the spoiled children are disposed of, and Charlie, his grandpa Joe, and Willy Wonka step into the Great Glass Elevator and rocket up, breaking through the roof of the factory into the light of day to collect the rest of Charlie’s family.

  The early morning of our (second) wedding day begins bright and clear. But by the time Seve arrives, white clouds have begun to bunch up and push quickly across the sky. Seve doesn’t have much to say this morning, and as I’m putting on my tie, Conor, Louise’s partner, arrives in his old beat-up green Mercedes.

  “Come on, kiddo, Conor’s here,” I call to my son, who is up in his loft, playing with his trolls. “We’ve got to get going.”

  “To where?”

  Seve and I look to each other and laugh. “To get married.”

  “Again?”

  On the ride over, I sit in the back, beside my son. He carries on a running conversation with Conor concerning which Star Wars characters are the best lightsaber fighters. We pass Palmerston Park, a lush green with a small playground. I have often played there with the kids but also remember walking there alone, during less happy times, wondering how D and I would ever get through them and what it would mean for us all if we couldn’t. I concocted elaborate scenarios of transatlantic visitations and hotel stays—these plans would leave me exhausted and despairing and always I decided to walk back in and try again.

  Then we pass D’s cousin’s house, where we all stayed one happy Christmas. When we drive through Ranelagh, a village D and I used to visit often when we first got together, suddenly, and without knowing why, I am choking back tears, on the verge of completely losing it. I look out the window at the Spar market with the stacks of peat bricks piled high out front. We pass the shuttered pizza shop where we used to eat; when did that close? Then we’re under the LUAS tracks that take the commuters into the city center, and when we make a right and a quick left, Dartmouth Square appears in front of us.

  The gazebo has scores of roses woven into the ivy, and two large candles in glass cases flank the place where Shelly will stand. Three huge pillows are laid out for the children to sit on. The musicians, a cello and two violins, are getting themselves organized. A large table is set with food, olives and cheeses and vegetables and sliced meats, and wine is on ice. A truck that will serve hot finger food and dripping chocolate to the children is in position. Half a dozen tables with sun umbrellas and chairs have been scattered around the lawn. The most elegant portable toilets I have ever seen are parked just outside the square. All of D’s twice-changed—fifty-times-changed—plans are falling perfectly into place.

  My son is racing across the open lawn, the way he always does here. I don’t know where Seve has gone. The wind is blowing softly and there’s really nothing for me to do but stand around and wait.

  Then I look up and see a family enter the gate on the east side of the park. They’re all dressed up, and then I realize they are here for the ceremony. I turn around and from another entrance, two more couples, dressed sharply, drift into the park. Then suddenly, from all sides, people begin to appear, as if summoned, and within minutes well over a hundred wedding guests have gathered. My mother and brother arrive. D’s brothers are here. I see some of D’s cousins and uncles and aunts, and other people I don’t recognize, and then our celebrant, Shelly, walks up, looking very self-possessed in a deep blue dress. She greets me with a typically self-aware, “Hello, Andrew.”

  We’re ready to begin but the bride’s mother has not arrived. Since D’s father will walk her over from Shelly’s house beside the park, he has been here for some time. I thought D’s brother Tom was supposed to pick up Margot, but I see him and his children across the park.

  “George.” I walk up to D’s younger brother. “Any idea where your mother is?”

  His eyes grow as big as saucers. Quickly, he pulls out his phone.

  I see D’s other brother. “Hey, Colm, any idea who was bringing your mother?”

  His face goes white. “Oh, Jay-sus, was I supposed to pick her up?”

  D’s brother Tom comes over. “Where’s Mum?”

  “There’s no answer at the house,” George says.

  “She probably can’t find the phone,” Colm says. “Look, I’ll go and get her, I’ll be back in ten minutes. Just sit tight.” And he races off toward his jeep.

  A call comes down from Ronan, who is with D. “What are we waiting for? We’re getting a little anxious up here. Let’s go.”

  “Just tell them we’re getting the musicians set. Don’t mention anything about her mother,” I say.

  People are starting to look at their watches.

  And then, marching regally through the gate to the park comes Margot, in a long and flowing black and cream kimono, with dashes of silver and red. The kimono, a gift from D, got stuck in the door as she was leaving home. She didn’t have a key with her, a giggling fit ensued, and she spent twenty minutes slowly inching the dress out the door so as not to rip it.

  “But we’re all set now, Andrew, my love.” She grins and strides to her seat.

  The musicians begin to play, then a procession is coming up the street and turning in to the park, led by our daughter, in a delicate silk chiffon sheath blowing in the breeze. She is shivering but beaming and walking proud, carrying a small bouquet of lavender, eucalyptus, and sweet pea, leading her mother to be married. Following her are D’s bridesmaids, tossing rose petals as they come, and then D, in an elegant full-length, cream-colored silk low-cut dress, also carrying a bouquet of lavender and eucalyptus, enters on her father’s arm. She meets me in front of Shelly.

  The guests are in a circle around us, some seated on the benches, most standing. My daughter hops up on Margot’s lap and settles in; my son is still racing around the park. At several key intervals during the ceremony—twice when his name is invoked, and another time when the ribbons are laid across our hands and the vows spoken—he appears, standing just behind Shelly, and each time when I catch his eye, he grins, spins, and races off, his energy too much to contain.

  The sun dapples down on D through the vines from above. In the first ceremony her attention was tightly focused on us, while today she is somehow both intimate with me and accessible to the entire gathering. One of the stones on her simple necklace is twisted and I reach out and set it right. The first ceremony was surprising for the unexpected emotional power it evoked; this time I find myself comfortable in the public nature of the proceedings. I can feel some of D’s more religious relatives’ silent judgment of our unconventional ceremony, as well as some of D’s friends’ surprise at Shelly’s graceful and eloquent performance. All the varied responses to the love that surrounds us are palpable—and all of them welcome. None of this makes me want to run.<
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  The afternoon is long and loose and exactly what D had said she hoped it would be. All the food is devoured. The wine is drunk. Kids and parents play soccer. A kite is flown. The face painter has created a giant blue butterfly on my daughter’s cheek. My son, who loves doing long strings of cartwheels, has learned to do them one handed, his heavy cast on the other arm. Music that comes out over speakers I hadn’t noticed has D and her bridesmaids dancing on the lawn. In the course of the afternoon, a few brief and light rain showers roll through. Each time, the Americans rush under the gazebo.

  “Oh, what a shame,” some say.

  The Irish remain out in the rain, which always passes quickly, and proclaim it a “glorious afternoon—gives the grass a little glisten.”

  When things eventually wind down, we head home for an hour before moving over to the family-run twelve-room hotel beside D’s parents’ home for the ceili.

  For months now, D has been telling me I am going to dance, and for months I’ve been equivocating—“We’ll see how my knee is doing,” I’d say, or would simply ignore the topic when she brought it up. But there is no avoiding it any longer.

  Jerry, who will shout out instructions as we dance, is a small, frail-looking man with wispy gray hair shooting off in all directions. He stands beside four musicians—there’s a fiddle, a bodhran drum, a concertina accordion, and a flute. The musicians are seated in front of the fireplace in the restaurant that’s been cleared of tables. Chairs line the walls. Windows of stained, leaded glass look out onto the parking lot. The ceiling is low.

  Irish ceili dancing is not dissimilar to American square dancing, except with better music and an urgency backing it, often fueled by large quantities of alcohol. Jerry lines us up in rows of four and begins to explain the moves and how each line will shift and stomp and twirl and spin and shuffle and move on, swapping partners all the while. His lengthy and complex directions are impossible to follow. Everyone looks at each other and shrugs and shakes their heads. I begin to feel embarrassed. This is a terrible idea. It will be a disaster.

  “This one is called ‘The Siege of Ennis,’ ” Jerry calls out. And then the music starts. The bodhran rat-a-tats out an incessant beat we can never compete with, the fiddle rips into a searing pace, the accordion swells below it, while the flute dances above.

  Jerry shouts out, “One-two-three-four,” and suddenly we are shifting and stomping and twirling and spinning and shuffling and moving on, switching partners, and repeating the process, shifting and stomping and twirling and spinning and shuffling and moving on. Now Margot is in my arms, and then someone I don’t know at all, and then Colm steps on my toe, or did I crash into him? Then D is back in my arms and then Seve goes roaring past. Everyone is both focused and laughing. The music is ripping and we’re swirling and switching partners again and the music is building and we’re spinning and swapping again and again and again and then, impossibly, the music gets even faster and then it comes to a climax and it all stops and everyone is left gasping for air and laughing, hanging all over each other.

  “Let’s do it again!” I hear myself shout.

  Breathing hard, D turns to me with a look of thrilled surprise. She grabs my face in her hands and kisses me hard on the mouth. In this instant, I am all of myself—that shy kid playing in the woods near my home, the guy who snuck into college, and then made those movies, and then found his way around the world. I’m a father and a son. And a husband. In this instant, I am all of it, and I’m happier, and freer, than I ever recall being.

  “Now you’re Irish,” she shouts to me over the laughter.

  “This one is called ‘Shoe the Donkey,’ ” Jerry sings out, and begins another set of elaborately impossible directions. Jackets are peeled and ties ripped off. My daughter appears and jumps up into my arms and the band kicks into a jig. I’m holding her and we’re swinging and twirling and stomping. Her thin arms are wrapped around my neck and we’re laughing. My arm feels as if it will break under her weight as we swing and twirl and stomp, but I won’t put her down and I hope she’ll remember this for her entire life, because I will.

  After “The Walls of Limerick” and “The Easy Brush Dance” and a few more, the band takes a break.

  Up at the bar, I try to get the bashful Americans to come dancing. D’s friend Bibb and her husband, Sean, are reluctant.

  “Come on, you’ll love it,” I shout, inches from their faces.

  I’m either spitting all over them or my sweat is flying onto their faces—either way, they take a step back. When D walks by, Bibb grabs on to her.

  “Your husband has turned into Mr. Riverdance,” she says.

  When I go back downstairs, the band has started again. And there is my son, on the dance floor. He is holding D’s father’s hand. My son’s old friend and new cousin Tristan is holding Colm’s other hand. The three are high-stepping and laughing so hard I’m certain they will all tumble to the ground. Eventually Colm has to stop and my son goes off on his own. He is deep in the mix on the dance floor, twirling, kicking, stomping, and jumping, the only child in the sea of pulsing adults. He is without a care.

  Much, much later, I try to get him to sleep in one of the small rooms of the hotel. I lie down next to him on the single bed. The music can still be heard through the closed door. He seems so grown-up and still so young. He has never been up this late.

  “What time is it, Dad?”

  “Almost two,” I say.

  “Wow.”

  We lie still in the dark; we’re both breathing fast, just from excitement.

  “How am I ever going to get to sleep with that music playing?”

  “I don’t know,” I tell him, “but you have to.” We’re quiet a little while longer.

  “I love you so much, Dad.”

  “I love you so much, kiddo.”

  “Dad?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m glad you got married.”

  “You are?” I can feel tears burning behind my closed eyelids. “That means so much to me.”

  “Yeah,” my son says, “I got to drink six Cokes tonight.”

  Shortly before three I find D huddled in a corner with several of her girlfriends. “I don’t want to interrupt this coven, but I’m going to bed,” I say.

  D rises and kisses me. “You all right, luv?”

  “I’m good, I just have a little headache. And it’s three in the morning.”

  “I’ll be in soon.”

  I join my daughter, who is in the bedroom next to my son’s room. She’s asleep in a large bed and I slip in beside her and wrap her up in my arms until she squirms away in her sleep. Soon the door is opened and light floods across the white covers as D enters with a large pint glass filled with ice and water. She shimmies out of her dress and gets into bed on the other side of our daughter. We sigh and reach across our sleeping child and hold hands for an instant in the night.

  “I brought you some water for your headache.”

  She lifts the glass off the side table. I reach over to receive it. Our hands collide in the dark and the full glass falls and spills all over the bed. Quickly I slide our daughter to one side.

  “Towels, luv,” D says.

  I rush to the bathroom and take the two towels and lay them across the bed, trying to soak up as much water as possible, but the bed is sopping. There’s nothing we can do. We laugh quietly in the dark.

  We climb back into bed. I’m hanging off the edge, rolled onto my side, the wet towel beneath me. D is wedged over on the far side of the bed; our daughter is lying across her chest so as not to get wet. It’s three thirty in the morning. We need to get up at eight to catch a plane to Africa.

  “Everything you ever dreamed of for your wedding night?” I ask in the dark.

  “Perfect, luv,” D says.

  EPILOGUE

  The following morning, D and I left for Mozambique. We regretted having to leave so soon. “We’ll miss the postmortem,” D lamented. We wouldn’t be around her family tabl
e when the highlights and lowlights were relived and retold, but as was the case with most of our plans, they were made on the fly and were affected by countless other changes that led to a domino effect, resulting in an early departure we couldn’t change.

  We flew first to London; then overnight to Johannesburg, South Africa; then on to Vilanculos in southern Mozambique. We spent a day recovering and then we went into the bush. The wildlife in Gorongosa National Park had been all but obliterated by the sixteen-year civil war that ravaged most of the country. Over the past few years, large efforts had been made to revitalize the park and reintroduce game, but things had a long way to go. Still the place was raw and wild and remote. What Gorongosa lacked in overdevelopment it also lacked in effective service, which is how we ended up with a flat tire and no spare by the side of a dirt road at dawn with jungle drums pounding in our ears.

  Eventually another van arrived and took us the rest of the way to the airport in Beira, which, like nearly all African airports, was hopelessly outdated and inspired little confidence. Our flight had left long ago, and there wouldn’t be another until the following day. I consulted my guidebook and discovered that Beira was “the easiest and best place to catch malaria in all of Mozambique, perhaps the best place in all of Africa.” I didn’t share this news with D.

  Beira had been a stronghold of the resistance during the civil war and it had yet to show any real signs of recovery; it remained a war-torn hive of African chaos. The next morning we returned to the airport.

  It took sixteen hours, three flights, and two more bone-jangling rides to travel four hundred miles and reach the small island off the northern coast in the Quirimbas archipelago in the Indian Ocean. The sun had set long before we arrived.

  The next morning revealed a tropical paradise—blinding-white, buttery-soft sand; turquoise water rippling up to the shore; a huge blue sky; and palms gently blowing in a soft breeze that took the heat out of the air. For breakfast we had thin crepes and fresh mango. We watched yellow dhows sail across the horizon. We swam in the Indian Ocean. The next day we did it again. We made love in the afternoons and took long naps. We showered outdoors under the purple sky of fading sunsets and had dinner by candlelight on the beach. Stars shot across the sky. We went to bed early and rose late.