Shining Sea (12 page)

Kenny whistles, a little-boy whistle without much sound. “Groovy!”

On the way home, no one speaks. The boys are hungry, but she doesn't stop. There are still the steaks and some potatoes in the fridge for dinner. Maybe she'll go to the shop one more time before she leaves, buy some more meat, some more iceberg lettuce. Or maybe she'll just have to give Patty Ann some money—though how can she be sure it'll go for groceries?

Patty Ann and the baby are sitting on the living room floor, surrounded by cord and shells and large beads. It's difficult to tell which are finished and which are still works in progress. The baby is sucking on a scrap of blanket. Patty Ann is smoking a cigarette. How she'd love to smoke a cigarette herself! She sends the boys to the bathroom to wash their hands and busies herself in the kitchen, putting the potatoes in the oven, tenderizing the steak with the back of a spoon, rubbing it with salt and pepper, then pouring a little splash of the vodka mixed with Aunt Jemima syrup over it. There doesn't seem to be any other type of seasoning in the kitchen. She sets tall glasses of milk on the kitchen table for the boys to have while they are waiting for dinner. Then she picks the baby up from the living room floor beside Patty Ann and settles into the old armchair Michael favored, passed on when Ronnie moved in. She fingers the scars in its fabric: this is where Luke spilled cola; this is where Luke left a pen on the seat. She cradles the baby and kisses his head.

“How about Lee?” she says.

“Lee's gone.”

“I see that. Until when?”

Patty Ann stubs out her smoke. “Until never.”

She sighs. “But seriously. Until when?”

“But seriously. Until
never
. I'm going to get a divorce.”

She stands back up, shifting the baby onto her hip. “Come on, boys,” she calls. “I've set glasses of milk out for you.”

The boys rush through, the heat of their young bodies pressing past her. She follows them into the kitchen. The potatoes in the oven bring the smell of hominess with them. She prods them with a fork.

Patty Ann comes in and stands by her.

“He's your husband, Patty Ann,” she says, setting the fork on a piece of paper towel so as not to dirty the counter. “For good or for bad. You married him.”

“Mom,” Patty Ann says, leaning in close, as though waiting for her to fix a hair barrette before church on Sundays, as she used to do when Patty Ann was little. “Mom, I want to ask you something.”

She doesn't want Patty Ann married to Lee, but marriage is not like a house you outgrow and put on the market. Doesn't Patty Ann know how difficult it is to erase the touch of a first husband? Ronnie has never tried to replace Michael, and she doesn't want him to. Part of the reason she agreed to marry Ronnie was she knew he never would.

“Mom,” Patty Ann says, very, very softly. “I'm all alone here now. Entirely alone. Lee is gone. I'm not having him back. And Francis is gone. He's not coming back.”

Francis is not coming back? How can Patty Ann know this?

But, of course, Francis is not coming back. He's been waiting to leave since the day his father died. With Eugene gone, what would there be to hold him?

“Mom,” Patty Ann says, “I want you to take Kenny.”

And, now, she understands. This time it is Patty Ann who has called
her
bluff.

H
E PULLS ON HIS
jacket, already forgetting the woman he's just left behind. They've begun to blur, the two on Iona, nice women but with the same infrequent hearty laugh, prematurely worn skin, and strong torsos. Even their names slip haphazardly around in his mouth: Moira and Muira. He's taken to calling both of them Lady.

You cannae call me Lady,
Moira or maybe Muira said.
The most title I have is Postmistress.

I'm American, and yes, I can,
he said, unbuckling his belt. And he does.

A five-pound note lies under a wineglass on the kitchen table. He shoves it into his front jeans pocket: a meal at the restaurant, a pint of bitter he can pay for himself. The women are only being friendly; it's not as though they are a job. By the time he's outdoors, he'll have forgotten the little gift. At thirty-one, he's never had a bank account. He couldn't even say how much cash he has in his wallet.

He can make it another day. By how much doesn't matter. There are benefits to being no one and nowhere.

The North Atlantic morning air is damp, bracing, but sharp June sunlight is chasing the night's dew. Today makes five weeks on the tiny isle of Iona, longer than he would have expected to stay if he'd made a plan before arriving. Iona's a good place, an oasis among the battling gray, aqua, white, and green waves of the open ocean off the western coast of Scotland, buffeted interchangeably by untempered wind, lashing rain, misty still, and blunt sunshine. There's an uncanny peace in being naked in the eye of nature. He's parked his pack in a lot of places since leaving America. But nowhere has felt quite so separate, so otherworldly. On Iona, he feels closer to having escaped than anywhere else he's been in ten years of traipsing around Europe. Not just from crazy, needy Georgina. From all the ghosts chasing him.

He pulls up the collar on his jacket and starts down the road past Martyr's Bay toward the harbor. He's missed the first thread of locals heading out to check on their sheep or fishing boats or to the neighboring isle of Mull. The next ferry doesn't reach the dock until 8:55 a.m.

When he arrived on that ferry five weeks ago, pushing his way against the wind, past the crumbling rosy-gray stone of a long-ago nunnery, wondering where the hell he'd ended up, he fell in step with a short, stocky man with a white beard, a heavy Celtic cross swinging around his neck.

The man glanced at him sideways, lingering over his guitar and worn cowboy boots.
Are you looking for a place to sleep? We need a young set of arms up at the Community and could make you up a bed somewhere.

The strange calm of the island drew an honest answer from him.
I don't mind hard work, but I'm not among the faithful
.

Do you believe in the existence of God?

It wasn't an issue of whether or not to lie. He wasn't sure of the truth. How could he feel so let down by something if it didn't exist?

I guess so
.

That's enough, then.

They gave him a solitary cot in a small office inside a thousand-year-old stone shed by the water that once served as the abbey's infirmary and offered him a regular seat at the communal dining table. In exchange, he does the odd job around the abbey: rebuilding a wall ravaged by winter snow, patching a roof, turning the half-frozen May soil for the kitchen garden, lending a hand to the ongoing reconstruction. Now a beacon for believers all over the world, the abbey was founded by an exiled Irish monk named Columba back in the sixth century. There's plenty of upkeep to be done. Yesterday he cleared spring weeds from around the graveyard and Saint Oran's Chapel, final resting places for a gallery of early Scottish kings, among them Macbeth of Shakespeare fame. Luke would have liked that.

The Community doesn't give him cash, though. He has to get that however he might if he's going to purchase a ferry ticket back off the island. Or just to buy this morning's cup of coffee at the general store, down by the dock. Thus, the gifts of the ladies. The generosity of its women has been the one familiarity on Iona.

He pushes open the general store's door. The ginger-haired girl who runs the shop looks very young, fourteen or fifteen, but the coffee she brews is as black as the most starless night and as stern as the stiffest island wind. Maybe the best coffee he's ever had, even better than any he drank during the months he spent picking olives in Italy or the spring he passed busking on the Karlsplatz in Vienna. The girl's father must be gone to work on the mainland, and the mother must be sick or tending a newborn. She's dropped out of school to pull on her mother's apron, a girl who is fifteen going on forty.

But that doesn't make her not jailbait. He had a couple of run-ins of that sort early on in Europe; young girls still have hopeful imaginations. They blur the lines. They romanticize the lives of wanderers like him.

He nods at her curtly, careful not to appear too friendly.

The coffeepot on the shop counter feels heavy, like it's just been filled. He pours a cup and takes a sip. Not a twinge on the end of the girl's long nose, not a blink of her ginger-lashed eyelids. It's like a dance they are doing together. He throws some coins on the counter, more brusquely than he intended.

There's that old feeling of being watched, of being followed, like the way he started to feel even with Georgina. It's not that he didn't like Georgina. That was, in a way, the problem. From the first time they spoke it was as though they'd known each other always. Georgina once remarked,
The thing about Francis and me is we're both so serious we can't take anything seriously.
It felt, when she said that, as though she'd seared a hole right into his heart.

She got under his skin. She made him feel too much. Georgina, stretched flat on a chaise longue in a black leather miniskirt and black lace shirt with no bra under it, her delicate chin tipped back, her caramel-colored hair sprayed out over the cushions, laughing and adjusting a leg to let him see that she had no panties on, either.

A track mark in the crook of her knee catching his eye instead.

He doesn't have the stuff to help someone like Georgina. And he doesn't need another lost life on his conscience.

The general-store girl drops the coins in a small chipped cup with a couple of lonely clinks.

He tries not to feel ashamed of himself for being so rude to her, throwing those coins down like that. As though it were her fault he's been stupid enough in the past to sleep with too-young girls like her. The people on Iona are nice. They deserve better than a person like him on their little island.

He was at a bar in Manchester, a scatter of empty beers in front of him, no idea where to go next or how he'd get there except that it had to be someplace where Georgina wouldn't find him and try to drag him back into their sick life together in London. The idea of making it east to India and Nepal had come up over the years, but all that love and lies, dregs from a decade earlier—the very thought depressed him. Anyhow, the hippie trail pretty much closed down with the Soviets in Afghanistan and the shah out of Iran.

Up to Oban the morra,
the guy on the neighboring bar stool said.
My sister makes cheese there, sells it to a wee island, Iona. Crazy wee place. Hae to tae the ferry fae the mainland to the island of Mull, cross all of Mull, and then tae a second ferry just to get to it. A dot in the middle of nowhere.

Hey, man,
he said.
Can I hitch a ride with you?

In the middle of nowhere, and yet
there
. Not in the middle at all: the end of the earth, or maybe the beginning. Iona is solid. Iona is timeless. If he stayed longer, he might even find that elusive holy trinity or at least get closer to it: Peace. Freedom. Absolution.

With summer coming, though, other young men and women will start stepping off the ferry with strong arms and backs and considerably more commitment to the Community's mission of seeking new ways of “living the Gospel in today's world.” Locals say the island swells with visitors over the warmer months, the population exploding along with purple-blossoming wild thyme. The Community won't need to turn to a prodigal son for its heavy work.

Men will be returning, too, from winter jobs on the mainland. Back to their women.

Time to move on.

“You know, miss,” he says to the girl, “you make a killer cup of coffee.”

An ugly wash of red creeps across the girl's round face.

He carries his mug down to the dock. The morning sky is clear enough for him, with his prodigious eyesight, to see the captain stepping in and out of the small cabana on top of the ferry, the mile away to Mull. Of course, the correct word can't be
cabana
. The bridge? Wheelhouse? Boats never have held any appeal for him.

Three last passengers stride onto the ferry, all wearing red jackets. Two men, one taller than the other, and a woman. Already the island's population of ninety has begun to grow in number daily, along with the meadowsweet and Scottish bluebells bursting forth in the fallow fields. Some of the new arrivals come toting heavy duffels or suitcases and letters of introduction to the island hotel or the Community, ready to settle in for the summer. Some come, as he had, just for a day and find themselves unable to leave. The peace of Iona.

Georgina, spilling her pill case onto her naked lap, a cascade of light blue and pink and yellow polka dots against her pale pubic hair.
Francis, darling, I had a looooong talk today with Daddy.

Are you really going to take that shit?

Her laughter, hiccuping up through her lank hair as she bent over, picking the pills out of herself.
Well, I'm not going to fuck it.

You know, Georgina. You go alone. We'll dance another night.

Her pale fingers, waving this away, then selecting a light blue pill.
Oh, don't be such a bore. It'll be a loooovely party. It'll be an
ecstatic
party.
She popped the pill on her tongue and stuck it out at him.
The point is, Daddy says we can get married.

He stopped strumming his guitar.
Married?

He quite fancies the idea. He says it'll be good to add some fresh American blood to the
family. He says you're sure to give him attractive grandchildren.

Down went the pill, her lovely swanlike throat rippling slightly.

As wasted and useless as his life might be, he doesn't have a death wish. He doesn't need to be around anyone else who might, either. Done that. Not doing that again.

The ferry separates from the pier, lurching its way into deep water. Once clear of the dock, it moves slowly but smoothly through the water toward him. It will take ten minutes to cross, the wind warming and sweetening.

Time to get a start on his day also.

Back in the store, he sets his cup on the counter and flashes the girl a smile. Red rushes again across her smooth young face, spilling into the roots of her carroty hair. She hurriedly begins counting up the change in the register, and he looks away. It's been good on Iona; he doesn't want to leave anything bad behind him. At least Georgina was twenty-two, or almost twenty-two, old enough to be held responsible for bringing him to the British Isles and settling him into her fancy Belgravia apartment.

Who'd ever have guessed her father would decide they should get married, him a shiftless, penniless SOB from America? What kind of parenting was that? Fuck, Georgina must have been in even more desperate shape than he thought.

People are out in the village now, a few tending gardens beside their low-roofed, whitewashed stone homes, a woman bicycling down the road lined with golden yarrow. He nods at each islander as he passes. Some greet him by name; five weeks now, and it is such a small island.

Around back of the abbey, his makeshift bedroom is still chilly from the night. He lifts his guitar case onto his cot and pops it open, checking the instrument for damage from the cold. He adjusts the tuning, then picks out a few bars of “Roxanne” by the Police. “Roxanne” was playing the first time he saw Georgina, in a club in Palma de Mallorca, leggy in a pair of yellow silk shorts, dancing with three Spanish boys wearing sorbet-colored Lacoste shirts with the collars turned up. Smooth, handsome, dark boys, a striking contrast to fair-haired Georgina, creating a tableau watched by everyone around them.

Don't put on that red light,
she mouthed in his direction, abandoning her dance partners to pull him onto the floor.

Someone had brought him over to Palma from Barcelona on a long white yacht with two levels and teak trim, although who it was and how it came to pass he can't remember. He had his own room for the week they floated around on that boat, with its own little bar and a double-size bed that he wasn't alone in for long, then they docked on Mallorca and everyone on the yacht spilled out into the breezy Mediterranean night. He took up with Georgina and, once he'd fetched his guitar and pack from the yacht, never saw those people again. Instead he and Georgina spent a couple of sangria-soaked weeks hopscotching around the clubs of Palma, fucking like rabbits and laughing. Suddenly, she had bought him a ticket to come back to London with her. They were still having fun, and winter was coming. There was no reason to say no. The minute they disembarked at Heathrow, however, rain slapping down around them, Georgina wasted from downing four Bloody Marys during the two-hour flight, everything felt different. Everything felt rotten. He should have split right then.

I don't normally live like this,
he told her after she'd thrown open the door to her posh apartment.

She dumped her ankle-length leather coat on the floor and sank onto a massive chintz-covered sofa.
I don't imagine you do, darling
.

Georgina's father had bought the flat, and her mother had gotten it put together, lavishing it with flowery prints in silk. Georgina joked that the only thing she did herself was change the locks, so they couldn't sneak in and lift her stash.