Exile to Érenn - 16. Chapter 16

The heat arrived early, the kind that settled over the hills before breakfast and made the farmhouse kitchen feel close and airless before anyone had finished their coffee. Rowan had opened every window and was standing in front of the Aga with the expression of a man questioning his life choices.

Aiden came downstairs to find the table set with four bowls, four spoons, and a box of Quaker Oat Squares sitting in the center like a centerpiece.

“It’s too hot to cook,” Rowan announced. “We’re having cereal.”

Declan looked at the box. Then at Rowan. “That’s Aiden’s cereal.”

“It’s everyone’s cereal today.”

“It’s American cereal. It’s designed for people who consider corn syrup a food group.”

“It’s designed for people who don’t want to stand over a hot stove in this heat.” Rowan sat down and poured himself a bowl with considerable dignity. “Sit down, Declan.”

Declan sat. He looked at the box again with the expression of a man registering his objection for the record.

Aiden poured himself a bowl and said nothing. He had learned when to stay out of things.

Cianán arrived as usual, staff in hand. He stopped in the doorway and looked at the table, then at the box, with the careful attention he gave to unfamiliar things.

“Sit down,” Rowan said. “Pour some in a bowl. Add milk.”

Cianán sat. He studied the box for a moment, then poured a careful amount, added milk, and took a spoonful. He chewed slowly. His expression moved through several stages, initial assessment, recalibration, revised assessment.

“It is sweet,” he said finally.

“That’s the corn syrup,” Declan said.

“Declan,” Rowan said.

“I’m just agreeing with him.”

Cianán took another spoonful, more certain this time. Then another. By the fourth he was eating with the quiet focus he brought to food he had decided he liked. Aiden watched him work through half the bowl and felt something warm and uncomplicated settle over him that had nothing to do with the temperature.

Rowan looked vindicated. Declan looked at the ceiling.

Aiden had been restless since he woke up, a physical energy in his legs and hands that needed somewhere to go. “I want to find some surf today,” he said. “Is there a decent beach near here? Atlantic coast?”

Rowan looked up. “Strandhill. West of Sligo town. About forty minutes. It’s a proper surf beach, good Atlantic swell most days.”

Declan looked at Rowan. “You have a conference call at eleven.”

“I’ll reschedule it.” Rowan was already pushing back his chair. “It’s thirty degrees, the boy wants surf, and I am not spending another minute standing in front of that Aga. Some things take priority.”

Declan looked at him for a moment, then at the boys, then back at his coffee. “Fine,” he said. “Go.”

Rowan pointed at him. “You’re coming too.”

A pause. Declan closed his notebook. “Fine.”

Aiden was already on his feet. He went upstairs, changed into his board shorts, grabbed the ring from the bedside table and slid it onto his finger, then pulled a spare pair of board shorts from the drawer and headed back downstairs.

He dropped the spare pair on the table in front of Cianán.

Cianán picked them up and looked at them. Then he set them on the table, reached for the hem of his sweatshirt, and started pulling it over his head.

Aiden went very still.

One clear thought arrived in his mind, loud and immediate. He was still working out what to do with his eyes when Cianán’s hands moved to the waistband of his trousers.

Aiden’s face went hot.

Rowan’s voice came from the hallway, sharp and startled. “Miach. Stop. Go and change somewhere else.”

Cianán paused, genuinely puzzled. “I am changing my clothes.”

“Yes. Do it elsewhere.”

Cianán looked around the kitchen as though the distinction between here and elsewhere was not entirely clear to him. Then he looked at Aiden.

Aiden was studying the box of Quaker Oat Squares with intense concentration, his cheeks burning.

Cianán picked up the board shorts and went upstairs.

Rowan appeared in the kitchen doorway and looked at Aiden, who was still staring at the cereal box. Something in Rowan’s expression suggested he understood considerably more about the last thirty seconds than he was going to comment on. He turned back toward the hallway.

Declan looked at Aiden over the rim of his coffee cup. “You all right?”

“Fine,” Aiden said. “Great. Ready to go.”

He put his bowl in the sink and went to find his sunscreen.

They loaded into the Tesla, Rowan at the wheel, Declan in the passenger seat with a book he had accepted the necessity of bringing. The drive west took forty minutes, the landscape changing as they approached the coast, the hills falling away and the sky opening up until the road crested a low rise and the Atlantic appeared.

It was nothing like Lough Arrow.

The lake was still and silver and ancient, holding its secrets. The ocean was loud and enormous and completely indifferent, a vast gray-green expanse that stretched to the horizon without apology. White water moved across the beach in long rolling lines. Even through the closed windows Aiden could hear it.

Cianán had gone very still beside him.

Aiden looked at him. He was watching the water through the glass with an expression that was complicated in ways Aiden couldn’t fully read. Not wonder exactly. Something older than wonder. Something that had a long memory.

Aiden didn’t ask. He just let it be.

Rowan pulled into the car park above the beach. They climbed out into the salt air and the sound of the surf, the heat still present but the wind off the water cutting through it, sharp and clean.

The beach opened below them, wide and sandy, the waves rolling in long clean lines from the northwest. Aiden stood at the railing and exhaled for what felt like the first time in weeks. The ocean. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed it.

Declan stood beside him. “Good day for it. The swell’s running well.”

Rowan handed Aiden a fold of notes. “Rent a board, get food, have fun. We’ll be at that café.” He pointed up the beach toward Shells, its outdoor tables already filling. “Come find us when you’re done or when you’re hungry. Whichever comes first.”

He gave Aiden a look that communicated trust and mild terror in equal measure, then walked toward the café with Declan.

Aiden looked at Cianán. “Come on.”

The surf school sat at the top of the beach ramp, boards stacked along the outside wall. A young woman with sun-bleached hair was behind the counter. She looked at Aiden’s board shorts and flip flops and smiled.

“Visiting?”

“From California,” Aiden said.

“You surf at home?”

“Santa Cruz, mostly.”

She nodded, already moving toward the rack. “What are you looking for?”

“Seven foot funboard if you have one. The waves are peeling long today.”

She handed him a board without further discussion, the easy transaction of two people who speak the same language. Aiden ran his hand along the deck, checked the fins, tested the leash clip. It felt right. It felt like something he understood completely.

Cianán was watching him from the doorway with an expression Aiden recognized, the one that appeared when he was paying close attention to something new.

“You’re sharing mine,” Aiden said. “I’ll teach you. We’ll start close in.”

They found a clear stretch of sand above the waterline. Aiden laid the board flat and ran Cianán through the basics with the efficient confidence of someone who had been taught the same way on a California beach a long time ago.

“Feet shoulder width. Back foot across the tail. Front foot angled toward the nose. When you pop up you go in one movement, not two. Like this.”

He demonstrated. Up in one fluid motion, knees bent, arms out, weight centered.

Cianán studied this carefully. Then he tried it.

He was terrible.

Not dramatically terrible, just the kind of terrible that came from a body accustomed to an entirely different set of physical demands. Too upright. Feet wrong. He popped up in two distinct movements and nearly stepped off the rail.

“Again,” Aiden said.

Five attempts later something was marginally better. Aiden picked up the board. “Close in only. The whitewater. When I say so, we paddle together and you try to stand when the wave pushes us.”

Cianán looked at the water. “We paddle together?”

“Yeah.” Aiden kept his voice casual. “You lie in front, I’ll be behind you paddling. Just focus on the pop up when I say go.”

The Atlantic hit them at the shins and Cianán made a sound Aiden had never heard from him before, a sharp involuntary intake of breath that was half shock and half something much older.

Aiden turned. “You okay?”

Cianán was standing with the water swirling around his knees, looking out at the break. His face had gone somewhere private, the complicated expression from the car.

“The western sea,” he said softly. “I had forgotten how loud it is.”

Aiden waited.

“I have not stood in it for a very long time,” Cianán said.

Aiden didn’t ask how long. He stood beside him for a moment, the water pulling at their ankles. Then quietly, “Ready?”

Cianán looked at him. Whatever had been in his face settled and cleared. “Yes,” he said. “Ready.”

They waded in to waist depth and Aiden laid the board flat on the water. “Lie down. In front. I’ll get on behind you.”

Cianán lay on the board. Aiden climbed on behind him, settled his weight, and felt the board dip and wobble under them both. He was suddenly very aware of the length of Cianán in front of him, the back of his shoulders, the line of his spine, the borrowed board shorts sitting loose on his hips.

He focused on the horizon.

“Paddle with your hands,” Aiden said. His voice came out steady, which he considered a minor achievement. “Stroke from the shoulder. Don’t splash.”

Cianán began paddling. Aiden paddled behind him, their strokes finding a rhythm, the board moving through the shallows toward the whitewater. A small broken wave rolled toward them, white and foamy and entirely manageable.

“This one,” Aiden said. “When it hits us, pop up. One movement. Go.”

The wave reached them. The board surged. Cianán pushed up and got one foot under him before the board shot sideways and they both went into the water in a tangle of arms and white foam.

They came up sputtering.

Cianán looked at the board floating nearby. Then at Aiden. Then he laughed, the bright startled sound that arrived before he could compose himself, pure and unguarded.

Aiden laughed too, loudly, the kind that started in his stomach. “Again,” he said. “Same thing.”

They tried again. The result was marginally less chaotic. Cianán got both feet under him this time before the wobble became a fall. On the third attempt he stood for perhaps two seconds, arms windmilling wildly, before the board slid out from under him.

On the fourth attempt he stood.

It wasn’t elegant. His arms were too far out, his knees too bent, his expression one of fierce concentrated effort. But the wave carried him three or four meters through the whitewater and he was standing for all of it, upright and real.

He stepped off in the shallows and turned to look at Aiden with an expression of pure uncomplicated triumph.

Aiden was already on his feet in the water, one fist raised. “Yes. That’s it. That’s exactly it.”

Cianán looked down at the board, then back at Aiden, and the triumph became something warmer and more expressive. “I stood,” he said. As though confirming it to himself.

“You stood,” Aiden said. “On a wave. In the Atlantic.”

Cianán looked at the water around him, the white foam receding, the next small wave already building. Something in his face in that moment was ancient and young at the same time, a being who had existed since before the written word discovering the specific joy of standing on a piece of fiberglass in the Irish sea.

“Again,” he said.

They spent another twenty minutes in the whitewater. Cianán caught several more waves with varying degrees of success. On his best ride he stayed up for what felt like a long time, wobbling but refusing to fall, and Aiden found himself shouting from a few feet away in a way that made other beachgoers turn and look.

Eventually Aiden tucked the board under his arm. “I’m going out to the proper break. You okay here?”

Cianán waded to the shallows and stood at the waterline, the water curling around his ankles. “I will watch,” he said.

Aiden looked at him for a moment, the sun on his face, the Atlantic behind him. “Okay,” he said. “Watch this then.”

He paddled out.

The waves here were nothing like Santa Cruz, longer, slower, more forgiving, the kind that gave you time to think. Back home the Pacific hit fast and cold and didn’t wait for you to decide. This felt different. Gentler, maybe. Like the ocean was in a better mood.

He caught the first wave alone, paddling hard as the swell lifted him, feeling the board surge and then the familiar weightless moment before gravity took hold. He rode it clean to the inside, the long peel giving him more time than he was used to, his body remembering everything.

He came in grinning.

He paddled back out and sat beyond the break, reading the sets coming in from the northwest. The sun was warm on his back. His legs hung in the cold water. This was the thing he had missed without knowing how much he had missed it.

He glanced toward the shore. Cianán stood at the waterline exactly where he had left him, watching. Even from this distance Aiden could see the stillness in him, the attention he brought to things that mattered.

He turned back to the horizon and waited for the next set.

He had been out there perhaps ten minutes when he became aware of someone paddling up beside him.

He knew before he looked.

Shaved head Bresnahan sat up on his board ten feet away, water running down his face, pale eyes flat and watchful. He was a strong paddler. He’d grown up in this water.

Aiden kept his eyes on the horizon.

“Yank,” he said.

“Bresnahan,” Aiden said.

A set was building on the outside. Aiden could see the dark line of it lifting against the sky.

“Didn’t expect to see you here,” he said.

“It’s a public beach.”

A pause. The smaller waves passed beneath them. “You’re on our break.”

“There’s no your break,” Aiden said. “You know how it works.”

He paddled forward a few strokes, positioning himself for the approaching set. Aiden watched him do it and understood immediately. He was sitting on his wave. The unspoken territorial logic of the lineup, applied without words.

The first wave of the set came through. He paddled for it. So did Aiden.

It was Aiden’s wave by position. He was deeper, better placed, had the right of way by every convention of the water. He knew it and paddled anyway.

Aiden took off. He felt the wave lift him, popped up clean, and was already finding his line when the shaved head dropped in directly in front of him, cutting across his path.

Aiden pulled off, kicking out over the back of the wave.

He paddled back out. The shaved head soon joined him, watching him intently.

“Nice wave,” he said.

Aiden said nothing. He sat up on his board, looked at the horizon, and waited.

The next set came sooner than expected, a better set, a proper one. Aiden was in perfect position. He paddled early, felt the wave grab him, and this time he didn’t pull off. He went hard and committed and when the shaved head paddled across his path again Aiden held his line and his voice came out flat and certain.

“Off my wave.”

He pulled back at the last second. Aiden took the wave clean, the long peel opening up in front of him, and he rode it all the way to the inside, working every section, not showing off but not holding back either.

He paddled straight back out.

When he reached the lineup the shaved head was still there. But something had shifted in his posture. A fraction less certain. A fraction more careful.

They sat without speaking. Another wave came through and Aiden took it cleanly. No challenge this time.

He returned to the lineup. After a moment the shaved head turned and began paddling toward the inside. He paused after a few strokes, not looking back.

“Your friend,” he said. “The weird one. Always up at those cairns.” A beat. “Something’s going to happen up there. My father’s done asking nicely.”

Then he kept paddling and didn’t look back.

Aiden sat on his board for a long moment, the Atlantic moving beneath him, and breathed.

He came in to find Cianán standing exactly where he had left him, at the waterline, the water pulling at his ankles. He had not moved. His eyes were on Aiden.

Aiden came out of the water and stood beside him. Neither spoke for a moment. The waves kept coming in, indifferent and steady.

Cianán put a hand briefly on Aiden’s arm. Not a word. Just the contact, warm and certain.

“I’m okay,” Aiden said.

“I know,” Cianán said. “I watched.”

They stood for a moment longer, the water moving around their feet. Then Aiden looked at him. “You want one more wave before we go in?”

Cianán looked at the water, at the long lines of swell rolling in from the northwest. A small smile crossed his face. “Yes,” he said. “One more.”

Shells café sat above the beach, its outdoor tables full of people in swimwear and sunglasses. The smell of coffee and toasted bread reached them before they’d returned the board. Rowan and Declan were at a table near the railing, two empty coffee cups already in front of Rowan and Declan’s book face down beside him.

Rowan looked up as they approached, took in their salt-dried skin and easy expressions, and waved them over. “Sit. You both look like you need food.”

Aiden dropped into a chair. The adrenaline was gone now, leaving something steadier underneath, wrung out and oddly clear.

Declan looked at him over the top of his book. Something in Aiden’s face apparently told him enough. He said nothing but his gaze moved briefly to Cianán, who gave the smallest nod.

Declan returned to his book.

The food came. Aiden ordered a toasted sandwich and a bowl of chowder and ate both without pausing. Cianán studied the menu with care, pointed at the brown bread with smoked salmon, and ate three slices with the quiet focus of someone who had decided this was important.

Rowan watched them. “Good swim?”

“Good surf,” Aiden said.

“Cianán surfed?”

Cianán looked up. “I stood on the board,” he said, with considerable pride. “Several times.”

Rowan grinned. “That counts.”

The conversation drifted, easy and warm. Rowan talked about a walk he and Declan had taken along the beach. Declan made a dry observation about Atlantic coastal geology that nobody fully followed but everyone nodded at politely. Aiden ate his chowder and felt the sun on his face and thought about his father.

His dad had taken him to Santa Cruz for the first time when he was seven. He’d been terrified of the water and his dad had stood waist-deep in the Pacific holding the nose of the board, steady and patient, until Aiden stopped being afraid. He’d thought about that a lot this summer. About patience. About someone holding steady until you were ready.

He looked at the ring on his finger. Then at Cianán beside him, brown bread in hand, listening to Rowan with complete attention.

He didn’t say what he was thinking. He didn’t need to.

They drove home in the late afternoon, the sun dropping toward the Bricklieve ridge as they came back inland. Aiden watched it from the back seat, tracking the specific point where it would touch the horizon.

Still a few evenings left. Not many.

Cianán was quiet beside him, looking out his own window at the passing fields. His hand rested on the seat between them. Aiden put his own hand over it without looking away from the ridge.

The farmhouse appeared on the rise ahead, whitewashed and warm in the late light. Rowan pulled into the lane. The hills closed around them, familiar and old and patient.

Aiden got out of the car and stood for a moment looking up at the ridge. The sun had moved again. Just a little. Just enough to notice.

He went inside.

This chapter marks about two thirds of the story. If you enjoy the narrative, please recommend it, leave a comment and give it a reaction. Thank you.