The Glittering World (2 page)

“I left out the fact that we’re staying in Starling Cove proper,” Blue said. “She told me not to mention to anyone what we’re doing up here, so . . .”

“Well, seeing the house is the right thing to do,” Jason said from the driver’s seat. “How do you sell a house without taking a look at it?” Jason was ten years older than Blue and Elisa, and thus the reigning voice of reason and maturity; it was reassuring to have his explicit approval.

“It’s not about the house.” Elisa took a leftover iced coffee from the cup holder and used the straw to fish inside for ice. “Yvonne hated her mother. She doesn’t want anything to do with her. Even dead.”

“Is that true?” Gabe asked. “What happened?”

“I really don’t know,” Blue said. “She won’t talk about it. Never would, except to say that my grandmother was crazy. My
mom and I left for the States when I was five. All I know is we moved so many times that after a while my grandmother couldn’t find us anymore. Which I’m pretty sure was the plan all along.” Grandma Flora’s lawyer had found him, though, hadn’t he? Three months since Blue had received word of her death and the house she’d bequeathed him. It had taken some time to pull the trip together.

Blue shrugged and dug inside his bag for his cigarettes. “Anyone mind if I smoke?”

“Actually, yes,” Elisa said. “I’m feeling kind of carsick. Sorry.”

“That’s okay. We’ll be there soon enough.” He sat back, slid down so his knees were against the back of Jason’s seat, and beat a slow tattoo on his jeans. Sure, there was the business with the house, but he chose to focus on the pleasures that awaited them. They were in store for a full week of leisure time he hadn’t dreamed of since opening Cyan two years ago: cooking for fun only and board games, whisky and beer, fires to build in the wood-burning stove highlighted in the rental-property listing. It was Elisa who convinced him that he was going to burn out if he didn’t take a breather, and Jason who forced his hand by booking the plane tickets. All in all, a welcome reprieve from the oppressive humidity of New York in August. It was the only time of year he’d consider closing down the restaurant.

Across the Canso Causeway and the swing bridge over the canal and they were on the island of Cape Breton. Blue thought about how long it had been since he’d last crossed the bridge, covering the same territory but in reverse, like an unraveled roll of film wound back inside its spool. As highway gave way to green mountain vistas of trees rooted upon jagged rock, a slowly simmering sense of familiarity began to sink in. Not so much as
memory, more like he’d carried the landscape inside him, on a cellular level. He started to tingle.

Soon they were deep in the Highlands. Four lanes thinned to two, the road bracketed by balsam firs as well as the occasional hardwood tree, stick straight against the afternoon sky. According to the directions, they needed to circle half of Starling Cove, an inlet of St. Veronica’s Bay, before they found an access road that crept up the side of Kelly’s Mountain, the quarter-mile-high summit that towered over the cove and the surrounding areas.

The branches parted to make way for an unmarked, leaf-canopied drive, the mountain’s peak high above. The Cadillac’s square nose pitched up as it left the asphalt, then dropped with a startling thud before the car righted and wound its way around the mountain’s base. A hundred yards later, the surrounding trees gradually telescoped until feathery pine bristles began to massage the car’s exterior. They rolled into an open field, lush emerald grass bubbled up in mounds. A short side road ambled past overgrown hedges, through which weather-beaten cabins in an assortment of sizes and shapes could be glimpsed; Elisa lowered her window to take a passing shot.

A gaily painted two-story house appeared from the trees, yellow and trimmed with elaborate hatched latticework and wedding-cake eaves, Victorian in inspiration if not origin. Barely visible above the treetops was the slanted roof of another house, a little farther up the hill. This second house had a birch white face, its upper windows a slatted pair of dark and narrowed eyes, watchful. Blue recognized the teeth of its wide summer porch from the rental listing. He sat up and looked out the back window, a cotton padding of fog cast over what he presumed to be the water, the mist draping the bay below with
the sun already lowering behind the mountain’s distant peak. The overcast sky flared with an abrupt and oppressive brightness like light off a mirror, and Blue, blinded, squeezed his eyes shut, shielding them with his hand.

Jason slowed the car and lowered his window as he came to a stop. A woman in her fifties, compact and robust in blue jeans and a purple hempen shirt, emerged from the doorway of a small shack separated from the yellow house by a vegetable garden. She was First Nation by appearances, her face sun-kissed and framed by gray hair tied back in a knot with stray shoots spilling wild behind her ears.

“Welcome to the cove,” she said, smiling. “Head on up the hill. I’ll meet you in a minute.”

By the time they pulled into the small dirt lot behind the white house and hauled their luggage from the trunk, she had made her way up to them.

“Hi there. I’m Maureen.” She shook Blue’s hand, her face flushed as she greeted them. “Now, which one of you is Michael?”

“That’s me. But everyone calls me Blue.”

“Oh! Like Blue Edwards?”

“Sure. I guess?”

“Never mind,” she said, and waved him off. The others introduced themselves and they all followed her up the rear deck and into the house. “This is what is known around here as the MacLeod House. Built and burnt in 1826, built back up in 1852, and restored and burnt and restored again a couple more times, with a full addition in 1973. I redid it as a guest house a few years ago.”

The kitchen was pure charm, small but open. The farmhouse sink, counters, and refrigerator all glowed a subtle shade
of mint, which matched the forested wallpaper, its patterned green boughs an extension of the trees on the far side of the windows. The glass was beveled in a chalet style and skirted with pleated red tartan curtains; the effect bordered on country kitsch, but somehow it all worked.

Maureen showed them the quirks of the various appliances and where the garbage and recycling bins were, how the downstairs shower had to be run for a minute or two before the hot water kicked in. A black wood-burning stove squatted stoically at the edge of the living room, past it a farmhouse table, two couches, and an impressive library surrounded by windows that framed the front porch overlooking Kelly’s Mountain and the fog beyond. Up a short flight of solid oak stairs hand painted with fleurs-de-lis were three bedrooms: one bright and pink with a view of the cove, another done up in darker plaid tartans, the third narrow and yellow with a steepled ceiling. The frame of the last room, according to Maureen, was original to the dwelling, and was where they all dropped their bags beside an antique pine crib allegedly crafted by William MacLeod, the man who had built the house. The crib was the only fully intact remnant from the first fire.

“Please, make yourselves at home,” she said. “I’m just down the hill if you have any questions. And if you see an older gentleman wandering the lawn with a book and a pair of shears, don’t be alarmed—that’s my husband, Donald. Wave and he’ll wave back, but he’ll probably keep minding what he’s doing.”

Maureen told them about the hiking trails behind the house, the canoes at the dock down the hill, which way to go from the main road to get to the supermarkets, large and small. She was polite and thorough, though she often turned to look down the hill, as if she had somewhere else to be.

“By the way,” she added as she opened the front door to leave, “if you all aren’t too tired, we’re having a little shindig down the hill tonight if you feel like stopping by. Just some food and drink with a few friends, nothing special.”

The others got to unpacking, while Blue went out onto the side porch and sat at a picnic table to smoke a cigarette. He listened to the faint sounds of the others inside, the wind soughing through the trees, the chirrup of insects and birds. Along with the cigarette smoke, he breathed in great big lungfuls of air; it was clean and sweetly flavorful, as if it had only just been raining.

Before they started down the hill, it was already clear that their hostess’s idea of a little shindig was in fact a full-blown rager, the sound of live music an eerie thrum off the water long past the dusking of foggy Starling Cove. “Holy shit,” Elisa said over the skirl of a fiddle as she zagged across the gravel drive, camera in hand and tottering behind the others on stilettos she’d stubbornly insisted on wearing. “They don’t mess around here, do they?”

“I could tell Maureen partied,” Gabe said. “Something about her screams high spirits.”

A dozen revelers had spilled out onto the lawn, where an auxiliary troupe of musicians tuned their instruments as they waited their turn. A few dozen more were packed inside Maureen’s crowded living room, along with a band consisting of a fiddler and an accordionist flanked by two guitarists, as well as a drummer rocking out on a djembe. The candlelit room was loud with laughter and drink. Young children ran loose, and as they flitted about in a game of tag, Blue had a ragged flash of memory:
a moonfaced little girl chasing after him as a fiddle played, the celebratory yet somehow menacing stomp of feet and clapping of hands all around . . . He closed his eyes and strained to hold tight to the thread, but the recollection was gone.

Maureen parted the crowd with a drink held high in her hand. “Glad you all could make it! What’s your poison?”

“What do you have?” Gabe asked.

“Not a whole lot. Only some beer, and some wine. And some lethal sangria my cousin made. I’d be wary of that. Oh, and some fine old whisky a friend brought. A jug of it. There’s some fustier options as well, like schnapps. And possibly sherry somewhere . . .”

Within an hour Blue was merrily drunk, having met what he imagined to be every resident of Starling Cove. Maureen herself was a potter who sold ceramics out of a nearby shop she shared with an abstract sculptor, while her friends included a woodworker specializing in driftwood art that featured in local galleries, as well as a glassblower who lived and peddled his pieces out of a converted century-old barn on the far side of the cove. Starling Cove seemed an ideal spot for artisans to sell their wares, situated as it was on a stray branch of the heavily touristed Cabot Trail. Blue wondered how many of them were castoffs from the former artists’ colony, and how many might have known his grandmother, or his mother, or even him. No one mentioned the old commune outright, only that the cove was known for its diversity, a place people gravitated toward from both near and far.

A diminutive and heavily bearded man named Fred Cronin, an ironsmith and publisher of a local newsletter, waited alongside Blue for the bathroom. Though standoffish at first, he soon warmed under the heat lamp of Blue’s attention, and
spoke of how he had moved to Cape Breton from Detroit as a draft dodger in the early seventies, never to set foot in America again. By all appearances, this self-imposed exile was fine by him.

“This your first ceilidh?” Fred said in a career smoker’s rasp, stroking his silver-flecked beard as he leaned against the stone mantelpiece in the living room.

“My first what?” Blue was distracted by the objects scattered across the mantel: a framed watercolor of a white lotus-leafed hexagonal mandala, a pewter tray containing a half-burned bundle of sage, an exquisitely rendered praying mantis crafted from green Bakelite that stared back at him through compound eyes, dark brown bordering on black.

“Ceilidh,” Fred repeated. “It’s like a Gaelic hootenanny. Could be a barn dance, or even just a house party like this. Basically, a get-together to get drunk and dance around to some old-country-type Scottish music. Lots of old country culture here, even today. They don’t call this place Nova Scotia for nothing.”

“I was actually born here, so you’d think I’d know that.”

“Oh yeah?” The man produced an antique-looking camera from somewhere beneath his beard and took a lightning-fast shot of him, the flash blinding.
This guy should meet Elisa
, Blue thought. “Whereabouts are you from?”

“I’m not sure exactly,” Blue hedged, honoring his mother’s plea for discretion. “Sydney, I think? Anyway, I’ve been gone ever since, just about. It’s nice to be back.”

And it was. Who knew where this would take him? Maybe fortune was intervening, and he was destined to come across some long-lost relative. Hell, maybe this man Fred was actually his father, and Blue had unwittingly stumbled into an unlikely family reunion, right here in the Cape Breton Highlands.

This final thought a bit too close to home, Blue excused himself to refill his sangria, caution to the wind.

On the other side of the room, the informal circle of dancers spun with increasing zeal. Some paired off to execute elaborate steps, while others held hands and simply twirled one another, a few more with their arms linked around the perimeter in a kind of drunken hora. Elisa, her camera and heels long since cast aside, moved effortlessly from group to group. She clapped her hands, swung her hips, partner danced in remarkable approximation, using steps it would have taken anyone else days to learn. Her mimicry appeared effortless, the way someone with absolute pitch could reproduce tone. But Blue knew how hard it had really come, how much dance had consumed her before her body finally said
no more
. Two decades’ worth of self-sacrifice and perfectionism, countless failed auditions and the pain of recurring injuries . . . Inside and out, the sheer accumulation of setbacks had taken their toll.