The Searcher

by Tana French

Landscape is one of the few things he knows of where the reality doesn’t let you down. The West of Ireland looked beautiful on the internet; from right smack in the middle of it, it looks even better. The air is rich as fruitcake, like you should do more with it than just breathe it; bite off a big mouthful, maybe, or rub handfuls of it over your face.

He feels that nineteen-year-olds, almost all of them, don’t have their feet on the ground. They’re turning loose from their families and they haven’t found anything else to moor themselves to; they blow like tumbleweed. They’re unknowns, to the people who used to know them inside out and to themselves.

“You’re gonna find him,” Trey says. “Right?” Cal says, “I’m aiming to.” He doesn’t want to find Brendan Reddy any more.

“Are you getting homesick on me, bucko?” Mart inquires, eyeing him sharply. “I’ve twenty quid on you, down at Seán Óg’s, to stick it out here at least a year. Don’t let me down.”

By firelight the room is all warm gold flickers and pulses of shadow. It makes the situation bloom with a seductive, ephemeral intimacy, like they’re the last people left awake at a house party, caught up in a conversation that won’t count tomorrow morning.

To quiet her, he starts to sing, so low it’s half a hum, hoping Lena won’t hear through the wind. The song that comes out is “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” same as he used to sing for Alyssa when she was little and couldn’t sleep. Gradually Trey relaxes. Her breathing slows and deepens, and the shine of that eye fades among the shadows. Cal keeps on singing. He used to fix up the words a little bit for Alyssa, change the cigarette trees to candy-cane trees and the lake of whiskey to one of soda. There doesn’t seem to be much point in doing that for Trey, but he does it anyway.

He wonders, without necessarily believing in ghosts, whether their ghosts wander. It comes to him that even if they do, even if he were to take up his coat now and go walking the back roads and the mountainsides, he wouldn’t meet them. Their lives and their deaths grew out of a land that Cal isn’t made from and hasn’t sown or harvested, and they’ve soaked back into that land. He could walk right through those ghosts and never feel their urgent prickle. He wonders if Trey ever meets them, on her long walks homewards under the dimming sky.

Every time, Lena is sitting still in the armchair, her hands resting on the Henry laid across her lap, her profile upturned as she watches the sky.

“I reckon you’d have better luck trying to train one of the rabbits outa the freezer,” Cal says.