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for a short hop to Alexandria, where I switched to an RAF Sunderland Flying Boat to Malta, where it refueled, made another stop at Gibraltar, then began the long flight over the Atlantic, arcing out as far as possible from the German fighter bases along the coast of France.
    The Sunderland was like a flying house. It had a wardroom, a small stove, bunks, and even a washroom. I drank, I read, I slept, but mostly I wondered. What was Diana doing now? Had she come to her senses and given up on the SOE mission? Or was she on a ship or a plane somewhere, launched with doubtful chances of survival?
    I held an empty mug cupped in my hand, the sweet tea warming my stomach, as I watched the sun rise over the North Atlantic. Gray clouds brightened and I looked for the first sight of land. The sea below was dark and choppy, and I realized this was the stretch of water my grandfather must have steamed across on his way to America, heading west with Ireland at his young back. He’d come to America alone at the age of eleven, the last survivor in his family of the Great Hunger. His uncle, also alone after the death of his entire family, had saved enough to send Granddad Liam off in steerage with a loaf of bread, a few coins in his pocket, and a note pinned to the inside of his jacket.
    Did he regret anything he left behind? Did he worry as he watched the waves beneath him, unable to fathom what America might be like? I felt the pull of the familiar as I waited for the unknown to reveal itself. And I missed Diana. It was a pure longing, separate from the fight we’d had, but tangled up in it nonetheless. What I felt was desire for her and an unselfish wish for everything good for her. What I thought, instead of felt, stirred up angry notions of how she’d ruined everything. Did Granddad weep or feel joy, I wondered, as Ireland fell away and the unknown land drew closer?
    “Watch off to starboard, Lieutenant,” the navigator said as he opened the wardroom door. “We’ll make the cliffs of Donegal in a few minutes.”
    “Thanks,” I said, pressing my face against the window as streaks of moisture raced across it. We were descending, beneath the clouds now, where the sunlight shone brightly on the crests of rolling waves. I wondered how my grandfather, crammed into the hold of an old wooden ship, had endured the voyage in steerage, and how many times he’d read that note.
    I knew it by heart. When he was alive, he would take it out and read it on his birthday. My dad kept up the tradition, with all the family gathered around. He would remove the paper from the family Bible, where he kept it folded in the book of Exodus. He handled it carefully, afraid that smoothing it out too much would brush away the lines traced by a pencil stub in the middle of the last century. Then he would clear his throat, take a sip of whiskey, and read.

    Never forget your name is Liam O’Baoighill, and you were born in County Roscommon. Your father, my dear brother, was named Patrick, your mother Cliona. Never forget the English took our farms and let your parents, brothers, and sisters starve. I know this. I earned your passage working at the Galway docks, loading freighters with sacks of grain, firkins of butter, barrels of barley, sacks of lard, ham, and bacon. British soldiers guarded the ships until they set sail. Such are the men who rule our land. Grow strong in America. You or your sons, or their sons, must one day return to smite them. God indeed gave us the potato blight, but the English gave us this famine.

    His accusation and admonition had struck deep in our hearts, and as a child I learned to hate the red-coated British soldiers I conjured up in my mind, bayonets at the ready, guarding food being shipped to England while poor Cliona and her children starved to death.
    By the time my father and his two brothers, Frank and Daniel, went off to fight in France in 1917, Granddad was dead. And a good thing too, Uncle Dan always said, that he did