A young woman sets out on a journey. It’s a dark late-afternoon in September and the air is damp and cool with the smell of rain on tarmac. Above her, the sky is the broiling bruise black of her father's car. But to the east, over the fields and bog and heads of fir trees, it’s a hopeful shade lighter. A breeze stirs her hair, strokes tenderly her bare shoulder and she shivers. Her chest is swollen with anxious excitement. There’s a jittering deep in her stomach.  

This morning, the young woman (a girl, really – let’s call her a girl) dressed her little sister for school; all whispered arguments over hair brushing and a silent slipping on of shoes so as not to wake their father sleeping on the couch. The girl kissed her fingers and pressed them to her mother’s faded memorial card, tucked into the frame of the Sacred Heart. She walked her sister to school in the village, then continued on to town, where she took a coach to two towns over. It let her off outside the Credit Union. The girl walked again, until buildings gave way to stone walls and hedgerows. Until her feet began to hurt in her cheap new shoes, and fat, cold drops began landing on her goose-fleshed arms, and a woman and her husband pulled over and asked the girl if she wanted a lift.  

In the car, the girl placed silent bets on raindrops racing down the window and avoided the anxious eyes of the woman in the rearview mirror. “Runaway" by Bon Jovi played on the radio. The girl said “I love this song” and smiled softly to herself. She rolled down the window and raised her nose to the fresh air, because she was carsick and the husband smelt like her front room.  

Then the woman pulled over at the side of the road and asked “are you sure you know where you’re going, pet?” and the girl said “Yes” and “Thank you.” The girl got out and the woman drove away. So now the girl is here; at a crossroads in a townland she doesn’t know, on the last stretch of her journey. 

The girl is on this journey to find her True Love. He described to her the road up to his house, so she knows where she is going. He told her as they sat in the back of His Toyota Starlet, skin sticking to the leather edges of its seats. The glow from the back door of the dance hall carved out His features in the dark, and despite the brutal quickness of Him minutes before and the burning ache it left in her, the girl thought she might just die from the gentleness of Him in this aftermath. He doesn’t know she’s coming. 

The girl follows signposts for the Holy Well. They will take her the right way. On either side of her are wide, flat fields, unlike the ones she’d used to. The fields are full of sheep and she wonders if her True Love shears them like He does her father’s. She pictures His hands, long and strong, ploughing shears through the dirty wool, the tensing of His thighs on either side of the animals bodies. She shivers again.  

She’s brought very little with her on this journey. Just a rucksack of her best underwear, two pairs of jeans, her mother’s jumpers and her uniform skirt, because He once told her that He liked it. The girl has chosen her outfit carefully for this journey, a denim skirt and sleeveless blouse. She thinks this is the nicest she has ever looked, the outfit cost her all of last year's birthday money. She left her raincoat on the bus.  

As she rounds a curve in the road (the first of three, her True Love told her), a priest passes by in his brand new car. He slows down, maybe because he’s a cautious driver, or maybe because it’s important to get a good look at strange girls walking the roads alone, for future reference. The girl remembers a story her True Love told her about the priest and the parish secretary. Her father rounded the corner of the shed and interrupted them before He got to finish it. She’ll ask Him how the story ends when she gets to Him, she thinks. The girl imagines the priest intoning vows on her wedding day. It’s important that she and her True Love marry quickly. She’d rather call her father when it’s all said and done, so he’ll have no choice but to forgive her. He might even be a little proud.  

Her True Love hasn’t asked her to marry Him yet, but He will. He told her so as His hands strayed towards the hem of her blouse behind the pub where she waited for her father. The memory is a hot rush and a sluggish irregularity in her heart. He tells her He thinks she’d make a great wife, so mature is she for her age.  

The girl reaches a fork in the road and keeps left. She sees, up ahead, a white farmhouse with black-trimmed windows. She must pass it, then take a right. She’s so close to the end of her journey. She imagines her True Love's face when He sees her at the door. Imagines His kisses, tears of delight in His eyes. The warm embrace of His mother, who He speaks so fondly of. It will be so nice, she thinks, to be held by a mother.  

She pictures the life they will have in His house. His arms around her as she stands at the sink. Walks, hand-in-hand, down the laneways thick with sweet furze in the springtime. She ignores the sick lump in her stomach at the thought of the other things. The pain of him, the shame of the things he asks her to do, the weight of his arm laid across her in bed like a belt pulled tight around her chest. She’s sure she’ll get over these little revulsions. She wants so badly to be a woman for him.  

In the driveway of the white farmhouse, a man in wellingtons raises his hand in greeting to the girl, then hesitates and drops it, unsure. The girl waves “Hello!” her grin wide in excitement at first contact with her new neighbour. The man’s reluctance is lost on her. From the window upstairs, the man's wife looks on and scowls at the trouble brewing. 

The girl turns right, then crests a hill. There, before her, is her True Love’s house. It is dusk on this September evening and the light from the downstairs windows is golden and warm. Smoke rises from its chimney. The woody, rich smell of it is the smell of home. Her heart swells till she almost can’t stand it, a lump in her throat and a heat behind her eyes at the thought that she’s finally here. She presses a hand to her stomach, growing round and hard with life. It begins to rain again. Beyond the house, at the low edge of the dark autumn clouds, the sun is setting and the sight of it is so beautiful to her. She thinks she will spend the rest of her life here, in this house, watching the sunset.  

The girl’s journey has come to an end.  

The girl is right. She will spend the rest of her life in this house.  

From that point on the road where we leave her, she can’t see the window of the back bedroom where she will die five months from now. Where she will bleed out beneath the portrait of the Blessed Virgin that she stared at every day she was locked in the room. Her screams will be hard to ignore at first, but they’ll quieten to whimpers eventually, as her life soaks into the mattress, leaving her cold. She will be, by then, so thin and frail that it will be easy for her True Love to gather her up in the bedsheet and take her down to the garden at night to be buried beneath the ash tree with the bones of old sheepdogs. He will bury their tiny blue baby in her arms.  

Because He wasn’t her True Love. But we knew that, didn’t we? He was just a grown man good at charming little girls. And His mother, well, she was no better. The locked room was her idea. No hussy would bring trouble to her front door.  

But what about the others? The people the girl met on her journey? We know, though, don’t we, that the neighbour will ignore the girl's pale face at the window, begging him with her eyes to look up. That his wife, over dinner, will warn him, “Leave well enough alone,” thus freeing him from his guilt.  

That the priest will call down to the house, and the girl will hear him through the floor saying, “If there’s trouble, Maureen, I’m just making sure it’s being handled.” and the mother, Maureen, saying, “you’ve no trouble to be worrying about here, Father,” and the kettle whistling for tea.  

Now the woman in the car, she’s different. She’ll spend her life, now and then, remembering the girl's face in the rear view mirror and feeling a twist of guilt for all the things she should have said. She’ll wonder what became of the girl, hoping she’s all right; trying to wrench herself free from under the weight of the dread she felt that day watching the girl's hopeful smile as Bon Jovi played on the radio. The woman, in a rare show of self kindness, will remind herself that at the time she was swollen with her sixth child, breathing through the bruises her husband had left on her ribs. She will think, fuck it, you can’t be saving everyone. Surely there were parents out there looking. So we can forgive the woman, maybe, can we? 

But it took three days for the girl's father to become hungry enough to realise that there’d been no dinner handed up to him for a while. He called for the girl and instead her sister answered, saying “I haven’t seen her since Tuesday.” So, in need of a dinner, her father pulled his vest down over a wiry slab of belly and drove around to the houses of friends the girl hadn’t had since she was eight to ask if anyone'd seen her. In the backseat of the car, the girl's sister held the birthday card she’d made for the girl, but hadn’t yet been able to give her, because the day the girl left was her birthday. The sister stroked the edge of the card, believing as hard as she could that if she just kept it with her, the girl would emerge from behind the disapproving parents in the doorways of the houses they visited and be sorry for being gone so long. On the front the card said “14 TODAY”, on the inside “I LOVE YOO MIRIAM”.  

But you know all that, don’t you? 

And, years from now, when the sister is grown, she will drive her own children through the townland where Miriam concluded her journey. She will pass the fields and round the bend, go by the farmhouse and turn, completely accidentally, right. Then, realising she is lost, she will pull over at the first house she comes to and ask the old man in the garden for directions. She will admire the ash tree in His garden, take in the evidence of His bachelor life and the stoop of His shoulders over the shovel and think, how sad that this gentle old man lives alone. She will drive away, never knowing.  

But you know, don’t you? You’ve always known.