“This is my husband, Desmond,” Gemma tells the driving instructor. “He wants to sit in the back.” 

“Des!” Desmond jousts forward with his pale hand.

The driving instructor—a man in his late seventies, of a chimney sweeper’s build that makes Gemma envious—accepts the hand as he might a cup of milky tea when he’d asked for it black, and waits for the situation to explain itself. 

It’s a Sunday, at 8 A.M., and the three of them are stood around a white line in the almost-empty Lidl car park in Newbridge beside the replacement vehicle. Before it was totaled, their car had been a baby blue second-generation Fiat Panda with an Italian registration and a bumper sticker of Michelangelo’s David gesturing “Ma che cazzo?!”

When they repatriated to Ireland after a decade together in Rome, Gemma and Des had kept their Panda, partly because of Ireland’s nutcracking expensiveness and partly because having a left-hand drive in a right-hand-drive country cast them as tourists in the country of their birth: true to how Gemma felt, and in keeping with Desmond’s being constantly peckish, his surveying the place with squinting bemusement. But having a wrong-sided vehicle also meant that the only way to navigate the country roads, with all their ditherments, was to have a passenger in the car always, pressing their cheek to the side window, telling the driver, Yeah, you’re fine, or, Plunge into the thicket for the love of jeeezus. 

“I have a license and everything,” Gemma tells the instructor. “It’s just …” She glances at her husband, who is scanning Lidl’s advertisements for radically discounted gourds and green chocolate witches. “We were in a crash. I think I mentioned on the voicemail?” She’d blathered until the beep cut short her hushed account. A few days later, she received a confirmatory text with strange punctuation and no clue as to how much of the message he’d heard.

The instructor lowers his head, and Gemma can’t but notice his coverage—there are probably three hairs coming out of each follicle, if not four. This is a man who cooks porridge on the stove and not in the microwave. He’d been recommended by Gemma’s physio, as a “retired driving instructor who still does special cases.” 

“Our Panda was totaled,” she says. 

It wasn’t on a bendy boreen but on the M7 to Dublin that they’d taken a pounding, at the end of their first month in Ireland. They’d been on their way back from visiting Desmond’s father, whose Alzheimer’s diagnosis had prompted the move. Des pulled into the emergency lane because smoke was discharging from their bonnet—very faint, less a cigarette’s worth than a vape’s. Ignoring Gemma’s pleas to wait until the next exit to pull over, Desmond determined to act. He knew what needed to be done. He was under the hood—with the same gusto, to be fair, that he often brought to the bedroom—for several minutes before returning to his seat with a frown. “I’m sure it just needs lube!” Gemma said, as he went for his seat belt. They were the last words she spoke at volume for weeks. Desmond hadn’t waited long enough to pull back out into the traffic; he hadn’t given the truck that was indicating enough time to change lanes. Unlike Desmond, she hadn’t seen the truck louring over her, the material of the car exploding around her like a wave. Her memory, after a moment of darkness, is of a bright and airy scene … no windows left in the car, airbag lint snow-globing around them. The scent was of pasta water left in the pot. “Our car, I mean,” Gemma says. “It was a write-off.”

“Fiat?” the instructor asks. This is the first thing he’s said since shaking their hands. 

“We brought it over from Italy,” she says. “It was a left-hand drive.”

 The instructor raises his hand in the air and looks behind them, but when Gemma and Desmond turn to the shop entrance to see who he’s greeting, no one is there and the automatic doors are shut. “They’re popular cars down that way,” he says.

Before the crash, they’d had different ideas about their own resilience, and each other’s. Gemma would have self-assessed as constitutionally flimsy. She expected that any day and out of nowhere an infection would enter her bloodstream—from a painless abscess or cutty sandals—or that a rare and rapid condition might kick in, her Hegarty-Morelli Irish-Italian cells having at one another, and that would be that. A stray thought would snag on her sanity one dismal afternoon, unspooling her to the psychological equivalent of a flat line. To have survived the crash at all smacked of a cosmic accident. 

Whereas Desmond had notions about his own fortitude. Without a whiff of self-doubt, he’d approached her at a manuscript exhibit at La Biblioteca Accademica—having ascertained by her open-toe shoes in March and the “Made in Ireland” tattoo on her heel that she was Irish, and, by the way her breath fogged up the display cabinets, that she understood Italian—and asked, in that warm flat pint of a Westmeath brogue, “What brings you all the way over here, then? Right next to me?” Despite having no siblings, he identified as an “eldest child,” as opposed to anything “only,” and went at things with a sense of easy, natural-order leader-ship. After the accident, he’d carried her unfinished translations to her bedside, sure they would hasten her recovery. At first, she used the excuse of her ribs. Later, she confessed that she hadn’t been able to shake a feeling of arbitrariness about everything she’d been in the middle of and was supposed to take back up—all the book deadlines were suddenly at a vast remove. Nothing seemed to belong to her, nor she to anything. Without a hint of alarm, Des assured her that she’d feel differently soon. “Just you wait,” he’d said, “until someone offers you considerable honor and great exposure in lieu of payment. You’ll be itching to get back to it.” 

Gemma is standing on one side of the white line, the driving instructor is on the other, and Desmond has one foot on either side of it, his stance ridiculously wide. They all have on sensible shoes and the optimistic layered clothing of late autumn. There is a light mist, which won’t build up into anything—Desmond had studied the rain radar this morning, between chewing his knuckles and his honey nut cornflakes. 

Gemma makes eyes at her husband to pass her the keys, so they can get started. He is normally raring to see her learning, especially revising! Revising is normally an erogenous activity. When she’d suggested taking this lesson, he’d slid his hand across her lower back, his pinkie brushing the top of her crack as he complimented her initiative. But when she added that he, too, should be in the car, “for moral support,” the hand retracted—confirming a suspicion she’s been trying to keep at bay. 

“Yeah,” Des says. “The aul Panda. You never see the like of them here. The nouveau riche don’t go in for them boxy cars,” he says, switching to a grammar he thinks of as native.

The driving instructor, perhaps wondering if there’d been a head injury, returns his gaze to Gemma: “And were ye hurt?”