Lab Girl (28 page)

For weeks after his father's death, Bill's e-mails had stopped and my string of unanswered texts left a void in my life. I worked my usual hours but often caught myself staring unproductively at the wall, questioning for the first time why I was doing this science, and finally realizing that it was pointless to do it alone.

Though I heard nothing from him, I knew Bill well enough to know exactly what he was doing. He was working hard each night from 7:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m., seeing and talking to no one. This was his usual pattern when he was “in a funk,” usually post-migraine, and everyone in the lab knew to leave him alone until it passed.

This funk had dragged on, however, and I couldn't help but imagine what his week of mourning in California had been like. How the coming of the dusk dissolves the laces of the splint that holds you together during the day, and the desperate sadness that follows can be anesthetized only with sleep. The heaviness of opening your eyes the next morning when you realize that you've begun another day of grief, so pervasive that it removes even the taste from the food that you eat. I knew that when someone you love has died, you feel that you have also. And I knew that there was nothing that I, or anybody else, could do to fix it.

I kept texting daily and never received a reply. Finally I sent Bill an e-mail: “Hey, let's you and me go into the field. Ireland. You always love Ireland. I bought you a ticket, it's attached as a PDF. Your dad was a good guy. He was good to your mother, and he was faithful to her. He loved you kids, and he was home with you every night. He didn't drink, and he didn't hit people. That's what he gave you. That's what you got, and it's a lot. That's what we got. It's more than what some people get, and maybe it's more than what most people get. And as of now it has to be enough. You land before I do, but the rental car is in my name, so wait for me.”

There was so much that I wanted to add, but I didn't. I wanted to venture that Bill had been his dad's baby and his favorite, a final son who came to him late in his life, bringing with him one last precious chance to enjoy childhood by proxy. I wanted to tell Bill that he embodied the happy ending of his father's life, that he was the comforting unspoken punch line to the dark genocide jokes that he told, and that his very flesh constituted a triumph over injustice and murder. I wanted to tell Bill that he was his father's heart and prize, a strong, sinewy boy whom the world couldn't maim, smart and lithe even underground. I wanted to reassure him that, like his dad, he would survive, but I didn't know how. I wrote what I wrote, pressed “send,” and packed my gear.

I flew to Ireland and walked off the plane into Shannon Airport to find Bill standing beside three huge duffel bags that had been stuffed full of tools and then strapped with duct tape. “Good God, have you run away from home?” I asked him, smiling. “What exactly did you think we were going to sample on this trip? The ocean floor?”

“I didn't know what the hell to think,” Bill answered. “Your e-mail didn't say a damn thing. I couldn't take chances, seeing as this is a third-world country. So I brought everything.” Bill's manner was somewhat subdued and he looked tired but otherwise fine.
He will survive this,
I thought;
we both will.

I did have a plan, but only sort of. First, we went to the airport shop and I bought two packages of every different kind of candy that they had for sale. “Provisions,” I explained. At the rental car desk, the man behind the counter asked us if we were married. “Maybe,” I hedged. “Will it affect our rate?” He explained that the additional driver fee is waived when it is applied to a spouse. “Well, then, yes, I seem to remember that we are married. Isn't that right, dear?” I prompted Bill with my elbow. I saw Bill's face blanch and he looked to be stifling the urge to vomit. I smiled with satisfaction.

The clerk asked us if we had our own car insurance. “Yes,” I answered. He then asked if I wanted to supplement it with additional insurance, and I automatically answered, “Yes.” He asked if we wanted to fully cover both the car and the—and I cut him off with another “Yes.”

The clerk looked at me quizzically. “It's bleedin' expensive, you know,” he told us, possibly confused by the fact that only moments ago I'd been willing to pretend holy matrimony in order to save five bucks a day.

“It's not as expensive as some other things,” I answered mysteriously as I signed and initialed the stack of papers.

Finally, the clerk described the car and pointed us on our way. “Right, then. The petrol is prepaid; the cleaning is prepaid; the vehicle is insured; the drivers are both insured; any damage to any other vehicle is insured; if anything happens—”

“We walk away.” I finished his sentence for him. “We just walk away.”

“Yes,” affirmed the clerk, but he looked troubled as he handed me the keys.

“ ‘Bleedin' expensive, you know,' ” Bill mimicked as we walked out, looking for the car. “Why is everything so bloody-bleeding over here?”

I launched into a discourse on the gradual contraction of medieval oaths invoking the Virgin Mother Mary's menstrual blood and the seepage of Christ's wounds, astounded to find any use for my college study of medieval literature. I was driving, and eventually we settled into a comfortable silence, watching a foreign world go by from the wrong side of the road. We'd been to Ireland many times before: the massive layered cliffs of coal along its western coast are a wonderful place to teach students how to identify and map fossil-bearing rocks. On this trip, I was doing the driving—for a change, I was going to be the strong one, taking care of everything.

“Let's go through Limerick and not around it, what do you think?” I asked Bill. He shrugged to signify that he didn't care. I took the roundabout off of the N18 and eased onto Ennis Road, then headed south toward the Shannon Bridge.

“Ughhhuh!” Bill suddenly made a retching noise and spit a huge wad of tar out the window and into the River Shannon. “Whatever that was, it just threw up in my mouth.” He pointed to a package of black candies that had turned out to be pungent gelatinous licorice rolled in salt and not sugar. “Zounds!” he added, referencing our recent conversation.

“It's an acquired taste,” I remarked, giggling at his discomfort. Bill didn't laugh, but his eyes lightened and I thought I saw his misery leave him for a moment. “Do you want me to throw the rest of it at this policeman, or bobby, or whatever he is?” I offered, rolling down my window.

“Naw.” Bill slumped in his seat. “I'll probably eat the rest of it later.” We turned north on O'Connell Avenue and headed for the Milk Market district. “What are we doing here?” asked Bill, rather philosophically, I thought.

“We're looking for leprechauns,” I answered pensively. “Keep your damn eyes open.” I was getting lost, confused by streets with names like “Sráid Eibhlín” and “Seansráid and Chláir,” but I didn't care. I wasn't trying to find anything; I was waiting for something to happen.

The roads narrowed and I drove on, taking whichever claustrophobic turn looked to lead down the most obscure alleyway. I turned my head toward Bill and was about to wonder aloud what an “Arms” was anyway, having passed by the Johnsgate Arms, the Palmerstown Arms, and several others, when I heard
“Bam!”
and felt a bone-rattling crack go through the car.

I slammed on the brakes, wondering why anyone in this tame neighborhood would try to bash our car window in with a baseball bat. My hands were still shaking on the wheel when I looked to the right and saw only the silhouette of Bill's head, lit from behind with a glowing halo made by the spider-web pattern in his passenger's-side window. We scrambled numbly out of the car on my side, and Bill lumbered around to the other side of the car in order to see what had happened. I sat down on the curb and tried to still my nerves.

“God, these car accidents are a lot less fun than they used to be,” I told Bill, and he agreed.

Unable to accurately judge the position of the vehicle from the right side of the road, I had been driving too close to the curbside. This had gotten worse until I passed near enough to a streetlight such that it snapped the passenger's-side mirror clean off and smashed it into Bill's window.

“Well, you've made a holy show of yourselves,” remarked a man in an apron, coming out of a nearby pub with a few other people who had heard the glass shatter. He whistled at the car. “Now, that will be dear to put right.”

Bill saw an opportunity for diplomacy in action. “We're Americans,” he clarified. “Our plan is to just walk away.”

“And what in the heavens would you be after in County Clare?” asked a rather short, jovial, and particularly Irish-looking bystander.

Bill looked the guy up and down and answered, “I think we were looking for you.” Bill then turned, picked up the broken mirror, and unceremoniously tossed it into the trunk of our car. He rummaged through one of the duffel bags and pulled out a big roll of clear strapping tape.

An elderly gentleman from the pub addressed Bill. “If it'd had five degree warmer, down with the windows and off would have been your head!” He laughed at his observation, as did his companions. “She'd be trying to kill you, by the look of it…,” he added, shaking his head and motioning toward me.

“I know,” agreed Bill, “and the sad thing is, we only just got married this morning.”

Shaken and embarrassed, I declined the spectators' cheerful urging that we should come in and have a pint or two. Bill set about to secure the broken window, carefully layering tape all over the outside and then layering it all over the inside as well, and I helped him by unrolling the lengths that he specified. Gradually I began to feel normal again, and it seemed that Bill had found yet more of his old self. James and John in a boat with their father, I thought, mending the nets and waiting to be called. We would make everything hold together, even if it was never to be the same.

“You want to drive?” I asked Bill sheepishly as we put on the final touches.

“Naw,” he said, “you're doing an excellent job.” He slid into the car deftly, stabilizing our jerry-rigged window with one hand. “But let's get the hell out of the city,” he suggested. “I need some green.”

Traveling southwest on the N21, we lived anew our very first impression of Ireland from five years earlier: the greenest place in the world. Ireland is so saturated with green that it is the things that are not green that catch one's eye. The roads, walls, shorelines, and even sheep seem to have been placed as contrast, strategically positioned to organize a vast expanse of green into its billion distinct subshades of light green, dark green, yellow-green, green-yellow, blue-green, gray-green, and green-green. In Ireland, you can bask in the fact that you are benevolently outnumbered by these first and better life forms. Standing within a peat bog in Dingle, you can't help wondering what Ireland was like before you and the other primates scrambled up upon its shores. When viewed from space, did it glow like a furry emerald within a sea of blue, the terrestrial equivalent of a massive marine plankton bloom?

We arrived at the Phoenix—a B-and-B/organic farm where we usually camped—and its proprietors, Lorna and Billy, greeted us warmly, as usual. When they shook their heads over “langers acting the maggot” in Limerick, we weren't sure that they didn't mean us.

“Will you take any tea?” Lorna asked us. “I know youse hate to get hiking until it's fairly good and pouring out.” We sat down, drank a pot of tea, slathered a loaf of soda bread with butter and currant jam, and ate it. After that, we sat and looked out the window, waiting for a productive restlessness to set in.

“Well,” said Bill at length, “my boots aren't wet.”

“That's fixable,” I said, taking his cue. We geared up to go out for the day. By that time, every field trip began with our now-unspoken habit of driving to high ground and then parking and hiking up to the highest point we can find. Once there, we stand and look as far as the eye can see and wait for an idea to come to us. Because all the best-laid plans in the world can be rewritten into something better from the right perch, we've stopped making detailed plans in advance, trusting instead that only from the top can we really see the way.

Bill stared at the horizon, but not in the serene and contented way that he usually did when freed within wide-open spaces. Instead, he wore a heaviness, worn out from having carried his grief halfway around the world. We stood side by side and looked out.

At length I spoke. “It's hard to believe your dad is gone,” I observed simply; this had been my first reaction to his loss.

“Yeah, I know,” he agreed. “It was a surprise,” he admitted. “I mean, who the hell would have expected a ninety-seven-year-old man to just up and die?” Bill's dad had indeed been only three years from his one-hundredth birthday when he shocked everyone by waking up dead one morning.

“We never suspected it, but it turns out that he was just old as shit,” he added. I remarked that after a man reaches ninety-five and hasn't died yet, the people around him become lulled into believing that he never will. Right up to the end, Bill's dad had continued to work in his home studio, doggedly editing the massive pile of footage that represented his sixty-year career as a filmmaker.

“Yeah, but was it a stroke, or a heart attack, or what?” I prodded gently.

“Who knows? Who cares?” Bill answered listlessly. “They don't do autopsies on ninety-seven-year-old bodies.”

“I just picture him barging into Heaven,” I offered, “pushing right past the place where you get all the answers to the big questions, learn why there is so much suffering in the world and why we are here and all that, he just beelines to some corner, unrolls a length of rusty chicken wire, and stakes it down with old coat hangers so that he can start planting tomatoes.”