The Radiant Road Read Free Page A

locked. She was her own protector and her own jailer.
    It didn’t matter much. Combined with her placeless, homeless accent, her silence in class that day was not a good start. She spent her Texas year, like most of her other years, alone.

    The morning after she saw the terrible mask made of fireflies and stars, Clare sat in a crowded airplane, still haunted by that gaping mouth and chaos-eye. Her father sat beside her, haunted by a box of ashes he had not seen in nine years, for ashes will pursue you, wherever you go, until you put them to rest. That’s why they sat on this plane, not talking, those two lonely beans, flying over a cold dark sea, returning home.
    They did not know—but I know—that Clare was a magic bean, sprouting soon, the seed of a great story and the winning or the losing of a great battle. She sat still and silent, but she flew through air and space, and her life was turning as the green globe turned beneath her.

    When the plane arrived in Ireland, time seemed to stumble. Was it early morning? Late at night? Clare herself stumbled behind her father through customs. A man in a uniform looked at her passport and said, “Welcome home then, miss.”
    It’s not my home, no place is , thought Clare.
    â€œHow long did it take to get here?” Clare asked while they waited for their rental car. “I can’t find the right feeling about what time it is.”
    He rubbed her shoulder gently with one hand. “The flight was nine hours, but we also lost six hours in the time change. The flightis longer going back,” he added, “because coming here we flew with the wind, and going back the plane will fly with its nose pushing hard against the way the wind wishes to go.”
    Clare stopped listening as her father talked on. She felt irritable and afraid.
    Soon they were on their way, driving through a tangle of freeways that looked like any country at all, nothing special, nothing that said “home.” Then the road dipped, and their car entered a tunnel, a long, dark one, darker and longer than any tunnel Clare had ever known. She thought: I don’t know where I’m going, and I will never come out to the light again.
    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.

2
    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!”
    â€œDo you remember this?” her father asked.
    â€œNow 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