Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series) (85 page)

“Is it? Never thought of it but come to that I see yer point. No I’d other plans for your nakedness but if it makes ye unable to lie, I’ll consider it a bonus of sorts. I want to know, no I need to know, the man who died in the fire, was he the man who raped ye?”

She started and knew his body felt the answer before she even voiced it.

“It was him, wasn’t it?” he said in a low and deadly voice, as if the man stood before him now.

“It was.”

“An’ who was he, Pamela?”

She shook her head and pushed away from his body. “He’s dead and gone, it doesn’t matter anymore.”

“It matters to me. Was it the policeman, the one whose neck I cut? Was he the man who raped ye?”

“And what if it was him, what does it matter? He’s dead and it’s over now.”

“Did Pat kill him?”

“No,” she said wearily and knew he didn’t believe her.

“Then it is my fault,” he said and she turned in surprise.

“Your fault? How the hell is any of this your fault?”

“I threatened him, didn’t I? I made him angry an’ he took his vengeance out on yerself an’ Pat. Ye weren’t protectin’ me from him were ye, ye were protectin’ me from knowin’ that I’d done all this? Weren’t ye?”

“And what if I was?” she said angrily, “Would that be so awful?”

“Aye,” he said the anger in his words matching her own, “it would be. D’ye think me such a coward that I cannot face up to my own failures, d’ye think me so small in soul that I couldn’t be a man for ye?”

“You stupid bastard,” she said and hit him hard in the chest, knocking him into the tree behind him, “how dare you! This is not about your stupid pigheaded pride. It wasn’t even about keeping you from running out bent on vengeance.”

“Then what was it about?” he asked, rubbing the back of his head where it had hit the tree behind him.

“Love.”

“Love,” he echoed stupidly, fingers stuck by pitch to his hair.

“Do you know how I love you Casey, do you have any idea?”

“Nooo,” he said slowly, looking at her warily as if he expected her to hit him again.

“I love you for everything you ever were and all the things you’ll become and even the things you won’t ever be and I love you now just for this moment and for all the moments to come, even the ones we won’t have together.”

“Why didn’t ye say so to begin with?” he said and reaching out pulled her back to him before she could evade his hands.

“Don’t,” she said sharply, pushing a knee into his belly, “don’t make light of this.”

He grabbed her leg and in one fast move was over and above her. “I’m not makin’ fun of ye, lie still will ye? It’s only—” he heaved a sigh of frustration and moved his body away from her own, reaching for his shirt and pants.

“It’s only what?” she asked, “Leave your clothes off; I don’t want you to lie to me either.”

“Jewel,” he rubbed his hands over his face, “bare-arsed or not I don’t seem to be able to lie to ye.”

“It’s only what?”

“Yer a pushy woman ye know that?” He gave her a half-hearted smile and then capitulated. “It’ll only be that no one’s ever loved me for all the bits that are missin’ as well as for all the bits that are present. It’ll be a bit frightenin’ to be loved like that.”

“Don’t you love me that way?”

“Ye know I do,” he said softly, “but I’m a working-class boy from the streets of Belfast and you, you’re someone who ought to have known better than to get involved with the likes of me. I see ye wanderin’ the cliffs in the mornin’ an’ I see ye lookin’ out to sea as if yer heart is breakin’. An’ I wonder what it is I can’t give ye, what it is ye see when ye stare out at the water?”

“When I was a little girl I used to play a game,” she said looking down at her hands, “I’d spin the globe and let my finger ride over it to see where I’d live one day. I didn’t really have a home you know until I came here, I never felt safe and I never felt that I really mattered to the fibers of someone else’s life. But then I found you and in you, my home. But I’m afraid that you’ll take that away from me with your own destructiveness. And so when I look out over the sea I’m looking into all those spinning globes of what might or might not be.”

“Do ye want to go back?”

She looked at him, puzzled, “Go back where?”

“To America, d’ye think ye could keep us safe there?”

“I don’t know,” she shrugged her shoulders, “maybe that’s what I do believe. Foolish as it sounds.”

He rolled his fingers slowly over the pine needles, releasing their clear scent sharply.

“If ye had that globe now, Jewel, where would yer finger land?”

She weighed her answer for a moment, not entirely certain of the truth herself. Was it superstition to believe that safety lay across the ocean, that she could keep him alive and whole in another land? He had waited so long to come home, did she—did anyone have the right to take the joy of that away from him now?

“Here and now, this is where I’d stop the world. This is where I’d stay forever if I could,” she said, “with you.”

“Come here to me,” he extended a hand in truce, drawing her along his length until they lay skin to skin, bone to bone, hardness to softness. He reached up and cupped her face between his hands, holding her eyes softly with the force of his own. “This is where I’d stop it, here, with ye next to my heart, safe an’ warm.”

Beyond them, the horizon tremored softly like a blind eye opening in the dark. The smell of pine overridden suddenly by the heavy exotic brush of cinnamon mixed to dubious advantage with the scent of frying ham.

“Maggie’s making breakfast,” she said yawning against the broad expanse of his chest.

“I’m of the certain opinion that woman,” Casey sighed, “is tryin’ to fatten me up for the fall slaughterin’.”

“You don’t know how happy it makes her to feed a man who can eat in such volume.”

“Aye well, I’m glad to be of service but I’ll start lookin’ like one of her honeyed hams if I have to eat much more.”

“We’d best head back,” she said rolling off him and reaching for her clothes.

“One last bit of truth before ye get dressed, darlin’,” Casey said.

“Hm,” she eyed him over the top of the sweater which she’d yanked up both arms.

His face was relaxed with exhaustion, stubble a deep shadow, but the line of his body and the directness of his gaze implied an urgency that unsettled her.

“If ye need me to take ye home, ye only have to say it darlin’ an I’ll take ye.”

She shrugged into the sweater, her hair a tousled mass of static electricity, rising like a cloud in the air.

“Have you heard nothing I’ve said in the last half hour?”

“Aye, I heard ye, I only want ye to know—”

She cut him off with a finger to his lips, laying her other hand on his chest.

“I do know Casey,” her hand pressed firmly over his heart, fingertips reassured by its steady thrum, “but here, now, I am home,” she smiled, “safe and warm.”

He watched her sleep, sweetly at peace. It did his heart good to see her so; she was so rarely peaceful in her waking hours now. And who could blame her? Since January, it had all become a nightmare that there was no waking from.

He kissed her softly in the hollow of her shoulder, where the pale light from the garden paths pooled, stilled and became glowing ivory. He found his clothes, donning them as quietly as he could then making his way out, closing the door with a barely audible click.

His feet knew the path he meant to take before he even became consciously aware of it. They’d taken it often enough in childhood. Every Sunday in fact, his daddy had insisted on it. “Can’t prevent ye from bein’ a heathen every other day of the week but ye’ll behave and get some goodness into ye on Sundays,” he used to say.

He hadn’t been inside a church since his father’s funeral, had long ago stopped finding comfort in the rules and regulations of organized religion. He’d been bitter about the Church, angry at God for not saving his Daddy’s life.

He dipped his fingers in the font, genuflecting automatically, bowing his head as he’d been taught since he was old enough to obey commands. He remembered the Christmas masses of his childhood, the gleaming altars cloaked in white, the ring of small white candles surrounding the larger central one that symbolized Christ, the Light of the World. Thronged in greenery and scarlet flowers, it had been pure poetry, the kind that touched you on a level deeper than words ever could.

He knelt before the altar rail and lit a candle, borrowing the flame from another and wondered whose memory, whose pain he was taking from. Here flame and memory were one, divine and prescient, burning you with their truths when you least expected it.

In his childhood, God had been a permanent fixture, a tree with long roots and innumerable rings, solid, there, always. Now He seemed more distant, a spark of fire in the heart of a storm. When his child’s heart had begun to grow and ask for deeper answers to the great unknowns his father had tried to give him an answer that would quiet the fever, even if only for a little while. He’d taken his wedding ring off and placed it in Casey’s palm.

‘What do ye see?’ he asked.

‘A ring.’ Casey replied, going for the obvious.

‘Deeper than that, what do ye see?’

He thought for a moment, furrowing his brow in concentration.

‘Yer overthinkin’ it, don’t think just tell me what it is.’

‘A circle.’

‘Aye, and a circle is?’

He began to get a glimpse of what his father was trying to say.

‘Unending.’

‘In every ending there is a beginning an’ in every beginning the shadow of an ending. All of life is a circle. D’ye think it’s a mistake that the universe is constructed in circles? That in all creatures there is such symmetry? Look at the perfection in a bird’s wing; it’s a feat of engineering that’s pure genius. Every artist leaves his signature somewhere in his work, even if it’s not at once apparent. God’s signature is in a bird’s wing or a baby’s tiny fingers. It’s everywhere if ye’ll only have the sight to see it.’

‘An’ if I need more Daddy?’

His father had clasped the back of his neck, hugged him in the awkward manner of two grown men and said,

‘Then look up son, an’ see His face. It’s there in the light of the stars.’

He put his hands together, bowed his head onto them and began to pray, “Our Father who art in Heaven, Hallow’ed be thy name...” he sighed, it was no good, he couldn’t feel the words anywhere other than in his throat. “Ye’ll excuse me God, but it’s my own Daddy I want to talk to an’ this seems as good a place as any other to do it in.” He cleared his throat feeling oddly nervous, “Well, Daddy, I hardly know where to begin. It’s been an eventful few months, aye? Makes it a little hard for a man to think clearly. We always thought when the revolution came it would be glorious, but it isn’t, it’s just confusin’ as hell. The house burned down an’ I thought I’d lost my wife in the fire, an’ for the hours I believed her dead nothin’ mattered anymore, nothin’ I’d ever believed true, not even freedom. There’s a man dead an’ I wished him so, I committed murder in my heart a thousand times an’ then it happened an’ I was relieved, though I felt cheated because I wanted to do it myself. What does that make me, Daddy? I don’t know what’s wrong an’ what’s right anymore. An’ I miss ye, there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t wish I could come to ye an’ have ye tell me what to do. I still don’t understand why ye had to leave, Daddy, ‘cause ye never said ye know, ye took our burdens but ye never shared yers. I wanted to know ye as a man, I wanted to see ye eye to eye an’ watch ye hold yer first grandchild, I wanted to make ye proud. I wish ye could know my wife, ye’d like her, she’s lovely in so many ways, she’s like a dream I never want to wake from. An’ she’s afraid an’ unhappy an’ she wants to leave Ireland, but I don’t know if I can Da’, I just don’t know if I can. Who am I away from here?”

He waited in the silence, felt the flickering heat of the candles waver under his breath and opened his eyes to the flame. “It makes no sense Da’, for he’s a grown man but how do I leave Pat here? How can I keep an eye on him from across an ocean? But how do I stay an’ watch my wife become a shadow of herself? Why can’t ye be here to answer my questions? Why? Oh please,” his clasped hands had become clenched fists against the altar rail, “please can ye answer me.”

He could hear the soft hiss and bubble of wax as it succumbed to fire, could feel his heart slow itself as if it too awaited something, sensed the silence and the weight of expectation held in it. He looked into the candle flame, right down to the blue heart of it and wondered if it would serve his memory always and if it would bring back seasons and holidays, people and moments. For even without him spring would come, fine and misted on the heels of winter. The bogs would open in furrowed cuts and bleed black under the tender sun and the ground would yield up its must, a sighing breath of ages to the sweet blue above. And if he were not here to see it? To smell and feel the itch of it in his hands and feet. Would his memories survive, pocketed and sealed like a young grape? Or when he opened them carefully in chosen hours, would they give only a bitter wine, scented with dust and disuse? And who would remember him? Would he just become another boy who went over there and never came back?

And then the memory came, quiet, light-footed, his father and himself on a lonely, moonlit path, walking, talking. A summer night, a ribbon of road, the smell of hawthorn, soapy and sharp, the sound of the sea in the distance murmuring soft, summer things to the moon, full-bellied and tinged slightly gold with autumn’s approach. He’d reached the same height as his father early in the summer and showed signs in his large hands and feet of becoming larger and broader. It had been odd and not entirely comfortable at first to find himself looking directly at his Daddy and not up into his face. Uncomfortable and frightening. But that night he’d felt comfort in his father’s voice, in the warm smell of him. They’d gone fishing, the three of them and after Pat had fallen asleep, facedown in a book, they’d left their places by the fire and walked, a man and his son as they would never walk again. And Casey had found, in the quiet of the night and the burn of moonlight the courage to ask his father about his mother.