The Radiant Road (3 page)

That's the feeling of tunnels. But they did come out; you always do. And once they were on the highway, the green rolling past, it started to rain, steady and swishing. The thunder was soft and far away. Clare slipped into the backseat to lie down, and her father didn't say no. She fell asleep.

Maybe Ireland will remind me of my mother
, Clare thought.
Maybe the water will taste like her. Maybe the wind will feel like a hand in my hair.
She did feel that somehow, somehow, something was waiting for her here.

And she was right.

The Stars Inside It

Clare woke when the car-sound changed from pavement to dirt. They were winding up a soft, green hill. At the top of the hill was a single tree and a pile of stones.

A single tree, a pile of stones, and no house.

Disoriented, she leaned forward to ask where they were. Just then the road twisted around to the left side of the hill and stopped. Clare's father turned off the engine, and they sat in silence, looking out over the Atlantic Ocean.

The sea makes new colors in every new light, but on the day Clare arrived, it was chalkboard green, with greeny-white foam churning against the rough, dark rocks thirty feet below, rocks like a chocolate cake someone's had a handful of. At the foot of the rocks was a small, curving, pebbled beach.

That's our beach.
The oyster. Feet dangling in cold water, safe in Mam's arms: “Send it home now, girl! Ah, good throw!”

“Do you remember this?” her father asked.

“Now I do.” Not only did Clare remember this beach, this sea: she remembered she loved the sea. To see it, and smell it, and feel its great salt body moving slow beneath them—it filled up a part of her heart she hadn't known was empty.

“That's west,” her father said, gesturing to the sea. “The sun sets red and lovely over that sea.” He sat still for a moment, then abruptly opened his door and got out. Clare followed him around to the cliff's edge, feeling wet salt air on her face: she had forgotten that, too. How many things had she forgotten? She was shaken, disoriented, by how familiar and right it was.

The sea wind swept around her, lifted up her hair, and dropped it again. Her hair began to curl in random wisps.

“You do have your mother's hair,” said her father, running a hand through it as he walked back to the trunk.

“But your eyes,” said Clare automatically. It was what they always said.

“As brown as trees,” her father agreed, as he always did. His shoulders were hunched in a little, as if he were warding off a blow.

Protected from the ocean, set into the grassy north side of the hill, was a narrow black door, old and thick. Clare turned back to watch the changing sea as her father opened the trunk and began unloading suitcases.

“Give a working man a hand, here, princess?”

Clare slipped on her backpack and picked up a suitcase, waiting as her father unlocked the narrow door with an old-fashioned iron key, long and toothed. The door opened, smooth and silent.

Right away came the rich, complicated smell of earth and stone, a smell so familiar that Clare's eyes surprised her by blurring wet.
They entered a dim passageway, much narrower than a hall, made of enormous slabs of gray stone beside and above them. The floor was dirt. Clare's father, who was not tall, almost had to duck his head in the passage. They held their suitcases in front of them, edging inward.

More like a cave than a house
, thought Clare. She did not remember this, it was nothing she knew, and for a moment, she had the bad tunnel feeling again.
I won't know this place, and I won't belong here.

But they emerged into a huge round room, airy and cool, with curving walls of gray stone and a high, domed ceiling. To her right, high in the wall, was a small opening, lined with stones—a window, but with no glass. Clare remembered, with shocking clarity, asking why their only window had no glass. Her mother's reply, as she looked up from painting a toenail, smiling: “We leave that window always open for the fairies.”

Fairies
, thought Clare.
Story for a kid.
But she did remember this place, or at least, her bones remembered it, or her blood did. It was unfamiliar, and it was the most familiar place there had ever been. And that was odd, because this place was wreathed in Strange. It was almost as if it were
made
of Strange. All the fairy-makings she had seen all her life, all the patches of Strange she passed through—it's as if they had all been fragments or echoes of this place, this
home
.

She realized something. With only that one small window, it
should be dark inside. And yet soft white light, soft as starlight, filled the room. She looked up and saw, somehow without surprise, that yes, of course: the ceiling was thick with stars.

That's right, I remember: my house has the stars inside it.

But when Clare looked more closely, she saw that the old gray stones of the ceiling were studded not with stars, but with some sort of clear rock that carried the sunlight from the outside to in.

“Very clever, that,” said her father, pointing up, “clever for now, astounding for the ancient times when this place was made. It's fused quartz—somehow they found all these long chunks of quartz that had been heated hot enough to become clear as glass. The pieces hang down to bring the light from outside in. Can you see?”

She did see. The light poured through the lovely quartz like water through a straw. By that sunny starlight, she saw a great stone room, like a cathedral, but older, softer edged. The walls were made of gray rock, piled on each other—huge ones near the bottom, smaller and smaller as they went up, all different shapes and sizes.

Her father was watching her. “They didn't use mortar between the stones,” he said. Clare looked closer. It was true: nothing stuck the stones together. Whoever had built this place had chosen the stones carefully, and laid them just right to fit. Then they buried the whole thing inside a mound of grassy earth, like a pregnant belly.

And then one day
, Clare thought,
I was the baby inside my mother's belly, inside the belly of my house.

Some of the rocks bore faint carvings: spirals, waves, diamonds, eyes. They looked older than old. Clare knelt and traced her finger across one spiral, remembering her three-year-old hand tracing that same spiral. That small tangled-hair girl, fearless and happy, meeting the silent, uncertain, clamped-down person she was today. The cold stone rough under her finger, then and now.

“You know how they built it without mortar?” her father called as he ducked down the passageway. “It's their own weight and closeness that hold the stones together.”

“How long ago?”

Her father put his head back in the room. “At least many hundreds of years,” he said, “but more likely a thousand or more. You should know about this house, sweet,” he added gently. “It will be yours one day.”

Clare turned to the house with new eyes. As she tested that thought—
mine one day—
her eyes fell on the tree. In that instant, she knew that this home was right, and every other home she'd ever lived in had been wrong. And it would not be hers
one day.
It was hers now.

The tree's fat trunk seemed part of the stone, knotty and hard as it was; and yet it was also alive, the bark a pink-patched brown, like peeling skin against the gray stone. It was ancient and innocent, deep rooted and wise, but as vulnerable and childlike as a skinned
knee. It was
her
tree—how could she ever have forgotten her tree? Clare walked toward it, not fast, but feeling fast inside.

“It may be a thousand years old, that tree,” she remembered her mother saying one cold morning. “Do you know how many a thousand is? How many?” For a moment Clare could almost see herself that day, runny nose making her upper lip cold, a giant wool sweater dragging down to her feet, staring up at the tree, listening to her mother.

“That old you,” Clare's father said as he entered with the last bag, and she thought for a moment he had read her mind. Sometimes she had wondered if he could, the way he always seemed to know what she was feeling.

But no: it turned out he had said “old yew.” The tree was a yew tree, one of the oldest tree species, her father said. Yews had roots in the oldest world, when dinosaurs brushed beneath their leaves. During the Ice Age their roots held tighter, turned gnarled and hard.

Her father told her all this as he unpacked. He didn't ask her to help—
princess
—as he normally would, perhaps because he saw all she was feeling. There was little enough to unpack anyway, besides suitcases and a few shipped-in-advance boxes stacked neatly against the wall. Most of their possessions, especially the books, had been packed by movers that the mining company had paid for, and were still on their way from Texas.

“Do you remember that they're poisonous?” he said. “I tried to drive that into your head when you were a toddler, because they're quite poisonous, yews—wood and needles and seed and all. I worried over my small teething girl. But your mother never worried, and she was right.”

Clare walked back to the center of the room and closed her eyes. It wasn't just the Strange so thick in the air, it was something else as well: something that was kindness, and sweet clear light, and above all was
Mother
,
Mother, Mother
, so strong that she almost wept. Like the aromas of two savory pots on the same stove,
Strange
and
Mother
wove together to make a new scent, a fragrance she had forgotten could exist: the fragrance of
Home
.

Her father came up beside her, his hands in his pockets. “When we first married, I thought we couldn't really live here, with a dirt floor and an open window and no rooms but this one big one. I thought we might camp out for a week or two until we sorted proper digs. And your mother didn't argue, she never pointed out, as well she might have, that people have lived here quite happily for many a century. But that first week passed, and another, and I . . . It was easy here. It was easy to live here. It wanted us here. And so we stayed.” He nudged her elbow lightly with his own. “I think you'll like it, too. Now: come with me, because I need you for this.”

They walked to the fireplace, where a fire was already burning, warming the room (
But who lit the fire?
Clare wondered, then forgot
to wonder). Above the fire, on a long stone mantel, sat a wooden box, all alone. Her father took it down and held it between himself and his daughter. His hand, strong and lean, traced the carvings on the box, and her hand, smaller, paler, did so, too, tracing the same spirals and stars and diamonds as on the walls.

“So these are her ashes,” he said, soft.

Clare nodded. She felt her arm tremble, so she put her hand down.

“And I'm sorry I left them here alone all these years,” he said, and was he talking to Clare, or to the ashes, neither of them knew. “There is always one girl born in this house, only a girl, and only one, or that's the story. And as far as the records go, that's what it shows. One girl is born here, one in every generation, as you were, and your mother, and her mother. When we married, she said we'd have a girl born in this house, and she was right. And she always said you'd come back here, if you left.” His voice went wrong for a minute. “She always said you'd come home,” he continued, “and so you have. I made sure that was right. You have come home.” He was silent a long time, his head turned so Clare could not see his face. Then he cleared his throat.

“We'll do something right by those ashes soon, shall we? Give them over to the ocean or what may be. We'll decide together. All right?”

Clare nodded again.

Her father placed the box on the mantelpiece and put an arm around her shoulders. They stood looking at it for a while. “We're all together now, back in your house,” he said, and now Clare was almost sure that he wasn't speaking to her. “So that's all right, then,” he concluded. Then he gave Clare's shoulders an extra squeeze, and returned to the unpacking.

Clare looked around. She saw chairs for sprawling beside the fire. Saw the boxes they had shipped, stacked neatly against one wall. Saw a cooking area, with sink and stove, which, though older than any sink or stove she had ever seen, looked new and alien here. She saw—oh, and she
recognized
—the long wooden table with five chairs around it, and the wardrobes and cupboards, and the rumpled, dark green couch. Clare ran to the couch and pressed her face into that remembered scent of sweet and smoky wood.

And even with the furniture and kitchen, the great domed room still felt spacious and free, as if you were outside under the stars. She remembered that, too.

The memories came faster—yes, that old wooden screen, painted all over with spirals and diamonds like the walls, but also with stranger things, like three legs bent into a wheel, or triple bird heads all looking at one another, or a man whose body turned into a rope that then tied itself in complicated knots.
That man, those crazy birds, I forgot about them, but I remember now.
Behind the screen was her parents' big bed, where they all used to sleep together.

Well, her father's now. And she saw no other bed.

“So . . . but where do I sleep?” she asked.