The Radiant Road (2 page)

Clare was always writing things down. It was the last remnant of her making childhood. “Dad, see my making on the refrideragor,” she would say of a blobby watercolor, which was perhaps a hairy cow on hind legs. Or “Mam, look at my making, look what I MADE,” of a cardboard windmill that almost really worked.

Clare's making continued even in sleep, in her glorious, exultant dreams, where she modeled pink shoes before a crowd of interested birds; where huge golden animals moved toward her at dusk, because she was their queen; where she sat at a campfire, looking through the flames at a dark boy wearing a long scarf like a Candy Land rainbow, looped around and around his neck. In her dreams, she often played with smiling people who could sprout wings or beaks or elephant trunks, who made her laugh, whom she called
the fairies.

And back then, in waking life, fairy-makings abounded. Her world was the broad refrigerator door where the Strange posted their art, just like she posted hers at home.

Once on a stony beach, she found an oyster encrusted with
pearls, pearls on the
outside
, a cluster of tiny summer moons, and the oyster still tucked inside. Her mother admired it, then waded out into the water, carrying Clare, so that they could throw it safely home.

Another time, under a lake's thick ice, Clare saw a hawk frozen in mid-flight, wings back, talons outstretched, reaching for the fish frozen just out of reach.

In those days, Clare dreamed, and Clare made, and the Strange made, too, and left their makings everywhere for her to see.

But that was before her mother died, before she was a fledgling fallen from the nest too soon, downy and vulnerable and hiding.

Maybe it was the hiding that made her making-wells dry up. Or perhaps they clogged with grief. Or perhaps it was only growing up. Certainly, as she grew older, she learned from others that she was strange, and her makings were strange, and not to be shared on pain of mockery or worse. In time, the wells of making became a bare trickle. Clare even forgot to remember her glorious dreams.

But the fairy-makings never left her; those followed even as she and her father moved and moved again.

She soon learned to keep those to herself as well. One day, on a Michigan grade school playground, nine-year-old Clare saw the wind whirl a pile of autumn leaves into a ruby-colored spout, from
which exploded a small flock of sparrows. Unthinking, she cried, “Ah, look, a fairy-making!”

There was silence. No one else had noticed. Then a girl said, “Do you actually, like,
believe
in fairies?”

Clare didn't know what to say. Everyone started laughing, and after that they always asked her about the fairy-makings—in a mean way, not a nice one, as if it were a baby thing.

That evening, Clare asked her father straight out: “Are fairies real?”

He was putting dishes away in the kitchen, and didn't turn to look at her. “Oh now, fairies,” he said. “Many stories of them in your mother's country. And Skye was great with stories of the Good People, too, when I was a boy. You're a Macleod—the Macleod castle on Skye still has a fairy flag, you know, given to my many-greats-grandfather by his wife, who was a fairy herself, they say. When the Macleods needed extra help in battle, they'd raise that flag. I've seen it. It's a bit shredded now. In fact . . .” He turned to her, looking pleased, said, “Wait,” and went off to his room.

He returned with a tiny shred of dirty, graying cloth, and laid it on the palm of her hand.

“That's a bit of the flag itself,” he said. “Or so my granda swore. He swiped a scrap for luck in the war. And he came out of some bloody battles without a scratch. So perhaps it works.”

Now he looked up, saw her troubled face. “It's just stories, my girl,” he said gently. “Don't let it weigh on your heart.”

So Clare put fairy-makings into a special category in her thoughts. Of course they were not actually made by fairies (
fairies
, god, that word), not made by the Strange, obviously she knew that. She
knew
that: but she never stopped believing in them.

Meanwhile the fairies left her dreams, and were replaced by dreams of I-forgot-to-study, or gross bathrooms, or teeth falling out, the same dreams everyone has—though Clare's dream classrooms and bathrooms were haunted by the heavy tread and snuffling breath of some ever-unseen monster.

As for her making, by almost-fifteen, Clare had closed up nearly as tight as a green bud.

Nearly, but not quite. She always carried a small notebook with her, one that had been her mother's, one she had found two years earlier while irritably searching the backs of closets for a missing pair of gloves. The notebook was pocket-sized, bound in a faded gray-green, rather institutional cloth.
Áine Quinn,
Fifth
Class
, said the first page. Áine Quinn was Clare's mother's name before she was married. Áine was pronounced “Ahn-ya.”
Fifth
was crossed out in a different ink color, and
Sixth
written above it.
Commonplace Book
, it said below that.

This was my mother's.
It felt warm in her hand.

She questioned her father, without telling him the reason, and learned that
class
meant “grade” in Ireland (“In Scotland we call it ‘form.'” Okay, Dad, whatever). She also learned that commonplace book didn't mean “ordinary book” or “you-could-find-it-anywhere book.”

“It's where you write down things you've read that you want to remember,” he said, “or draw or paste pictures you want to save, like that. Thinking of starting one?”

Clare shrugged.

“Ah well, you needn't tell me, you stubborn child,” he said cheerfully, and left it at that.

Clare kept that notebook always with her. When she saw a fairy-making, she wrote it down. When she read a scrap of poetry or prose she loved (which was almost as good as a fairy-making, to her), she wrote that down as well.

And sometimes Clare turned the notebook upside down, and in the back, in her tiniest handwriting, she wrote poems of her own.

Hiding her poems upside down in the back made her feel as if they weren't really there.
Anyway they aren't real poems
, she told herself.
They're notes for poems I might write some day.

Although she was almost too embarrassed to reread them, and would never have told anyone about them, ever—still, privately, and never aloud—she called those tiny scraps of poetry “my makings.”

During the year before this story begins, Clare and her father lived in Texas. It was as if they had come around the world to the exact opposite of Ireland: a hot sun blaring from squint-bright sky, ground flat and dry with patches of prickly grass. Her father would say, “It has its own great beauty here, and the winters are kind,” but Clare thought he secretly missed wet and green.

In Texas, no one knew about Clare and her fairy-makings, or knew to laugh at her. But by now she was so Strange-haunted and solitary that no one talked to her at all, except to say, after a long stare, “You talk funny,” and walk away.

Clare knew it was true, about how she talked. She sounded neither Irish, like her mother, nor Scottish, like her father. But she didn't sound American, either. Clare didn't sound right for anywhere in the world, but especially not for Midland, Texas.

On the first day of school in Midland, the teacher had asked them each to stand up and say what made them special. Clare made a small list on a page of her notebook as she waited her turn.

1. Dead mam.

2. I used to play with fairies in my dreams, ha-ha.

3. And all the fairy-makings.

God.
She started to crumple the paper, but stopped. That second line felt like . . . something.

She chewed for a moment on her chewed-up pen.

Before my mother died
, she wrote,

I used to play with fairies in my dreams.

She paused.

And fairy-makings
wound through every day
drifted through our days

Like curious boats, whose pilots were unseen.

But now—

“Clare Macleod?” called the teacher.

Clare's pen skidded, startled.

“Do you have something to share with us, Clare?”

Hastily, Clare crumpled the paper into a hard, damp ball and shoved it in her pocket, her face on fire. She didn't answer.

My strangeness is all I have
, she vowed at that moment—meaning all I have left of Ireland, of childhood, of home, though she never said it to herself that way.
I have to keep it to myself, so no one knows, or they'll try to take it away from me. They'll try to make me like everyone else.

So Clare kept her strangeness to herself. She kept herself safe; and she kept herself tightly 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.

“How 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 flight
is 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.