If Only You People Could Follow Directions: A Memoir by Jessica Hendry Nelson Page B

rakish hostel—a quiet affair that quickly digresses into a scene from a “quality American dance club,” our guide and his Korean students doing the Macarena on the kitchen floor. I’ll slip outside and smoke cigarettes and sip amber whiskey from a safe distance on the other side of the window, hips thrusting involuntarily to a hard beat on an empty island under a dusky hollow sky.
    But first, the gray bus must wind its way down the shoreline highway, through fog thick as fingers and sudden bursts of rain that pound ferociously on the windshield for several minutes before retiring back into the clouds, low and grumbling. Graeme drives steadily and tells stories into a microphone, Scottish fables of kings and fairies and promiscuous women. Saucy Mary who bared her breasts to passing sailors as they entered island waters, collecting tariffs in the bib of her dress. And then one day Mary leaps into the sea, raging and screaming until finally she sinks, silent, still, weighted with gold.
    As we turn inland and begin to slide between the mountain range, the blackface ewe makes her way to the crest of a jagged ridge. She has lost sight of her flock but is driven by instinct up and into the wind, as sheep often are. She has chewed her way along a path of wilted heather, the purple flowers whipping against her ankles as she staggers over loose stones and black mud and slips toward a white and opal sky.
    Cynthia retires to her bed and Jon slowly gets up from a wooden attic floor. Vodka storms his bloodstream and, for the moment, he is calm. The lightbulb blinks inside the unfinished bathroom and he resolves to fix this first thing in the morning. Tomorrow his children will arrive—two teenagers now, a boy and a girl—and he will be sure to tell them this new plan: an electronics degree from Concordia Community College and an apartment across the street from their high school. He will tell them and tell them and tell them until he is sure that they understand. Then they will go for a spaghetti dinner in his mother’s new car.
    For now, Jon tucks his suitcase under the extra bed and folds down the blanket. He tightens the cap back onto an empty vodka bottle and stashes it in a dresser drawer. He looks through a window and watches the moon undress in the front yard. He remembers nights like this while camping in the Poconos with his brothers or sailing through the Chesapeake Bay, the moon naked over St. Michael’s. Fiery anchor. Steadfast woman . He wants water and then sleep and so he heads to the stairs and fumbles for the railing in the semi-dark.
    Here, at the crest of the mountain, the ewe can see a black swath of sea and beyond that, the ripened green swell of mainland. She has never left this island. Indeed, she has never left this particular mountainside. The neon-pink tag that dangles from her left ear marks her for this territory alone—which is every day new and terrifying and fixed just right in the vast stream of consciousness she has come to know. And this is just fine. And so it is also fine when the wind begins to taste thick and the heather on her tongue blows like hurricanes and the slim fissure between land and air dissolves and the sound of bleating sheep is just a cloud like any other. She whips her body right and left and, unblinking, lets the rain collect in the two black pockets of her eyes. When she falls she reaches her nose toward the soft gray space between this land and the next. She falls, and the taste of gray is acrid like dew on a familiar metal fence.
    On the bus, I sit next to a curious man named Lin who wants to show me his very elaborate cell phone, which I cannot understand even after several demonstrations. He wants to know why I am on this bus with them—Why am I here? Where am I going?—and I try to tell him about the summer program at a British university and the rail pass that lets me wander the United Kingdom at will, and we try so hard to communicate that by the time the bus lurches