The Dead Yard (26 page)

"What is it?" Kit screamed from her bedroom.

"You’re taking Sean for a walk," Gerry said.

"It’s pouring," Kit protested.

"Get down here," Gerry yelled again and gave me yet another conspiratorial wink. I might be
wrong but it seemed that Gerry had taken a bit of a shine to me, and that Jackie rubbed him the
wrong way. I got the feeling that he wouldn’t have minded if I replaced Jackie in his daughter’s
affections. I wouldn’t have minded that myself.

Kit appeared. Beautiful and sullen in a black tank top, black jeans, and combat boots.

"What now?" she said.

"Go for a walk with Sean, you both need some air," he said.

"I gotta wait for Jackie’s phone call," she said.

"Oh, for goodness sake, he’ll be fine. And I’ll pick him up if necessary. Now get out of here,
the two of you."

Kit looked at me with resentment but she wasn’t going to disobey her father.

"Come on then, let’s get our coats," she said with all the enthusiasm of a trip to the oral
surgeon.

Drizzle. A path without a footprint. Shells crunching under our feet. Her big coat a sail that
wraps me in the lee.

"Where are we going?" I ask her.

"Well, we live on an island, so there’s not many places we can go," she says.

"Don’t tell me then," I say.

And she doesn’t.

The beach is deserted except for a few hardy dog walkers and lunatic beachcombers and we walk
in silence until we come to the very top of Plum Island.

A lighthouse, a Coast Guard station, and a long stone pier that protects the entrance to
Newburyport’s natural harbor.

"Are you up for something?" she says with a conspiratorial grin.

"What sort of something?"

"Come on," she says.

Threat and mischief spill from her face. She walks to the sandy tip of the island, finds a
rowboat, takes off her shoes, and launches the boat into the water.

"What are you doing?"

"Come on," she says, "get in, I’ll row. You just have to sit there as ballast."

"Is this your boat?"

"No."

I get in and she puts the oars in the oarlocks and rows me out into the channel where the
Merrimack River, the Plum Island basin, and the Atlantic meet. It’s not rough today but the
drizzly rain has kept water-borne traffic to a minimum and it looks as if a squall could come up
at any minute.

"Where are we going?" I ask her.

"Over there," she says, pointing to a spit of land on the other side of the Merrimack
River.

"Is that New Hampshire?" I ask.

"No, silly, it’s still Massachusetts."

"You know I’m not the best swimmer in the world," I say, a grin trying to hide my concern.

"We’ll be fine."

She rows against the tide and the river but it’s hard going to prevent us being taken out to
sea.

"I’ll have a go," I suggest.

"Ok," she agrees, and after a precarious exchange of positions I take over. Kit sitting in the
stern, soaked, smiling, her hair plastered over her forehead. A canny wee nature girl and no
mistake. The waves chop water over the gunwales, and a passing Coast Guard cutter rocks us, but
finally we’re in the middle of the channel. It’s as sensible to go on as it is to turn back. I
row and the tide tries to suck us out and I adjust for it, pulling harder on the left-hand
oar.

"You’re doing very well," she says, her cheeks carnation-colored, her eyes today almost a sea
green. In ten minutes, I feel sand under the bottom of the boat and I row us onto the north shore
of the Merrimack. We pull the boat up onto a gravelly spit of land, with high dunes, marram
grass, and scrubby bushes.

"What is this place?" I ask her.

"It’s a state park. It’s totally isolated, you can get here by road but hardly anyone comes. I
used to row over here to smoke pot. It’s a great view."

I can see most of Plum Island and Newburyport and a great swath of the Atlantic that’s more
familiar now that it’s gray and threatening rather than blue and warm.

"I think you can actually see your house," I say.

"You can," she agrees. "It’s that huge one halfway up with all the flags."

"You know, the Stars and Stripes should really be above the others."

"What are you, mister patriot?"

The wind freshens and we huddle together in the dunes, Kit putting her arms together and
moving close to me. Whitecaps on the Merrimack and a swell on the ocean. The breeze bucking over
the sand and making a little seif dune parallel to the wind.

"Do you think we’ll be able to get back?" she asks.

"Who cares if we get back?"

The wind really howling, folding space about us in sandy logarithms, her hair dislodged and
messed and blowing in her eyes. She looks at me and sneaks under my shoulder. I put my arm around
her.

She doesn’t know what to make of me. What to do, or say. The wheel of her hand is flat on the
arm of my leather jacket and tapping it. I take off the jacket and put it over us.

Suddenly, from nowhere, she’s about to cry. She fights it.

"Do you think everything’s going to be ok?" she asks.

"What are you talking about?"

"With my dad and with Jackie and everything?" she says, tears running down her face.

It’s only a couple of frigging stitches, love, I just about resist saying.

"Everything’s going to be ok. Do you mean last night? That was nothing. It’s all gonna be
fine. I promise."

"I hope so," she says and a grimace comes over her face. She wanted to be stronger and now
she’s blown it. She sobs a little.

"Are you ok? What are you worried about?" I ask her.

"I’m not worried, honest, I, I just want to get it over with. We’ve been happy here, I’ve been
happy here, and, you know, I understand that Dad has a bigger duty, something he has to do, but,
well, I don’t want to lose him," she says.

"You won’t."

"How do you know?"

"I know things," I tell her reassuringly.

She smiles and holds me. We listen to the wind cutting the water and blowing over the dunes.
It’s wild and lovely and she starts doing a little better.

"It’s Touched, you know, it’s all because of him," she says angrily.

"Aye, he’s a bad one," I tell her, sensing an angle.

She looks at me. She wants to open up further, but she doesn’t.

"My mom would have been happy here, up by the ocean, she was crazy about the sea, would have
loved it," she says.

"Where was she from?"

"She was from Long Island originally. Near the sound, I think. Then Boston."

"Where you grew up."

"Yeah, we lived in the city. Dad said he was always going to move up here to be near the sea.
Not the Cape, Dad hates the Cape, but up here on the North Shore, where it’s more down-to-earth.
And we were planning it, but she got this degenerative lymphoma, and, and we had to be near the
hospital. We didn’t move here until after she…"

I know, Kit, I know.

I pull her close as a huge black cloud erases the view of her house and soon the other side of
the Merrimack.

She shivers.

Bodies are dialogues and we tell each other things without a word. Her look into my eyes is
trust and, perhaps, a seed of something else.

"I suppose that’s why she didn’t want any kids of her own, it was a genetic disorder. That’s
why they adopted me. I guess I should be thankful in a weird way."

I don’t say anything.

"Your parents are dead, aren’t they?" she asks.

"Yeah, my mom when I was little and my dad a few years ago," I say automatically from Sean’s
biography. "It sounds terrible, Kit, but I wasn’t really close to them," I add from mine.

"It’s not terrible, it happens like that sometimes," she says.

"Aye," I reply gloomily. Gloomy because she is opening up to me and I’m giving back nothing
but lies.

"He’s a loafer. He doesn’t do any work. Jackie worked hard for my dad and he goes in whenever
Dad needs an extra body, and he’s got interests, he surfs and everything, he’s cool, but Touched
doesn’t do anything," Kit says, harping back.

"Well, I don’t like to cast a stone, but I’ve heard some ugly rumors about him," I tell
her.

"What rumors?"

Before I can respond, the wind wafts up the arm on my T-shirt and Kit pulls it down again.

"Was that from your motorcycle accident as well?" she asks.

"What?"

"You have a little scar on your shoulder. I noticed it when you were dressed as a gladiator,
too."

And I look at her to see how far I can go. This is a real opportunity. The professional, cool,
clear-thinking Michael Forsythe would say "Yeah, from the motorbike accident," but I know I’m not
going to. I’m going to jump across that river and give her a piece of the truth. I’m going to
give her a wee bit of the real me and see what she does with it. Will it be reciprocated with
trust and silence?

"I had a tattoo removed," I say.

"What was it?"

"Can you keep a secret?"

"Sure," she says, much too breezily for my liking.

"You can’t tell Touched. You can’t tell anybody. They’ll get the wrong idea."

"I promise," she says, getting serious now.

"It was a winged harp, which was my old regimental insignia. I was in the British Army for
about eleven months. The Royal Irish Rangers. They don’t exist anymore, they got merged into
another regiment."

"You were in the British Army?" Kit asks, to confirm it.

"That’s right. I was unemployed, had nothing else going for me. It seemed the right idea at
the time, but we didn’t gel, the army and me, they kicked me out with a dishonorable
discharge."

"I can see why you don’t want Touched to know," Kit says without inflection.

"You’ll keep it a secret?"

"Of course," she says indignantly. "It doesn’t bother me in the least."

"Thanks. It’s the only secret I’ve got, I promise," I tell her.

"Well, I can think of a million worse ones than joining the army when you were young and
dumb," she says, pleasing me with the answer.

"Me, too."

She manages a little grin and then I grab the moment and kiss her lightly on the forehead.

"Do that again," she says, those big azure eyes closing in anticipation.

I kiss her on the mouth.

"I liked that," she says. "I shouldn’t, but I do."

"I liked it too," I tell her and I’m glad now that I told her that little piece of truth. For
although I’m a liar, this, between her and me, isn’t part of the lie. I’m not using her to get
that million dollars. She’s a different part of this completely.

And what is it about her exactly?

She’s beautiful. But that’s not it. And she’s mixed up, but that’s not it either.

There’s something else.

It’s that feeling of regret I get when I look at her. It’s that ache of memory.

Again she reminds me of Bridget, that other lost girl, in a place and time that seem centuries
ago.

I couldn’t save Bridget. I couldn’t stop her following my path, the road to horror and war and
vengeance. I couldn’t stop Bridget forgetting her old self and becoming this cold and terrible
machine of death. I couldn’t stop her because it was me that pushed her down that road in the
first place. It was me that killed her fiancé. And if Dan Connolly is right, that story isn’t
finished yet.

But there’s nothing I can do about that now. History can’t be unwritten.

Kit, though. I can save Kit.

I can stop her descent into hell.

I can eliminate the influence of those two evil stars.

And when it’s their time, I’ll figure out a way to get her out. Away from these people and
this situation. When it goes down, I’ll fix it, so she won’t go sink too.

"Kit, I…" I try, but I don’t know what to say.

She finds the words.

"Sean, I know it’s wrong, but I want you to touch me," she says in a whisper.

I slip my hand under her sweater and I touch the cool skin of her belly and her small breasts
and I hold her back and I pull her close and kiss her.

"Slowly," she says.

And I kiss and I hold her, and run my hands down her spine and up her thighs and between her
legs. And she tenses and I ease her away and let her go and it is so painful that in a moment of
candor I can no longer deny what I’ve been fighting against.

"I need you," I tell her.

She shakes her head.

"You don’t," she says.

I kiss her and, my God, I want her. Here on this beach under this dark sky. It will do
everything for me. It will heal me. It will make me whole. It will unmake from me the murder in
my blood and fingertips. I need to give myself completely to her. I need to hold and be inside
her and be one with her. And I know she needs me, too.

I lift her shirt and kiss her belly.

"Yes," she says.

She pulls me on top of her and her hands run over my back and they’re so cold. I kiss her and
lift up her shirt and kiss her underneath her breasts and her nipples and gently I begin to undo
the buttons on her jeans.

"Stop," she whispers.

I kiss her belly button and her shoulder tattoo and undo the last button and begin to pull
down her trousers.

"No," she says. "Stop."

And I shake my head and moisten her lips and kiss her freezing arms and—

"I said stop," she says angrily and pushes me off.

"Ok, I’ll stop," I tell her, hurt.

"You’re all the fucking same, aren’t you? Fucking all alike. And I thought you were
different," she says, crying.

"Kit, what are you talking about?"

But she’s standing now, buttoning up her jeans. Furious; at me, but mostly at herself. She’s
confused, guilty, unsure. Her hands form themselves into fists.

"I’m not going to have sex with you," she says.

"What?"

She starts marching away from me down the dune.

"I don’t have to have sex with you. I just want to be with you. Come back here, please. Kit,
please, we don’t have to do anything. We’ll talk or not talk, anything. Just stay here."