The Edge of Winter

by Luanne Rice

  “Joe?”

  Hearing his name, he looked over at the barn door. Neve Halloran stood there, looking hesitant, even scared. He put a finger to his lips, motioned her over. She hurried, silently, worry in her eyes.

  Joe pointed at the cage. She followed his gaze, saw the two snowy owls sitting together, the female quietly grooming the male, him allowing her solicitations. Sunlight came through the skylight, pouring down on Joe and Neve, on the owls. Joe pretended to be watching the birds, but he was quite conscious of Neve—breathing a little too hard, seeming as stressed as the male snowy owl had been when she’d first brought him to the barn.

  “See what they’re doing?” he asked.

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “You should,” he said. “It’s quite obvious; they’re becoming a pair.”

  “Really?” she asked.

  He nodded, but even such good news didn’t erase the pain from her eyes. Placing a hand on her arm, he gestured for her to follow him into the office. Too much human contact could interrupt the owls’ bonding process, and Joe didn’t want that to happen. Also, he saw that Neve would burst if he didn’t give her the chance to have her say; she was a few years younger than Damien’s oldest daughter.

  “Mr. O’Casey,” she began the instant they stepped inside his office.

  “I thought you called me Joe. Are we going backward?” he asked.

  She looked stunned. “I didn’t think you’d want me to call you Joe, or anything,” she said. “I can understand you not wanting to have anything to do with me.”

  He stood at the counter. There was an old electric teakettle; battered and ancient, it had been rewired more than once. He’d gotten used to tea during the war, never quite given up the habit. Walking over to the sink—piled with water dishes and beakers and pipettes for giving medicine and feeding owl babies—he filled the kettle to the brim.

  “Want tea?” he asked.

  “Joe,” she said. “I just want to—”

  “Earl Grey or Irish breakfast?” he asked.

  “Irish breakfast,” she said.

  “Good choice,” he said, nodding. “Just what I’d expect from a Halloran. Wait, that’s your married name, right? What was your maiden name?”

  “Fallon.”

  “Tipperary, right?”

  “That’s where my grandparents are from, yes,” she said.

  “Ireland is like Rhode Island,” he said. “Everyone knows where people are from, who’s related to whom. The advantage of being from a relatively small island.”

  “Joe, I’m so sorry about what I did,” she said. “For letting the secret out; I didn’t mean to do it, but that’s no excuse.” He had his back to her, fiddling around with teacups. The teakettle worked fast—he plugged it in, and it started hissing right away.

  “My brother had one of these in his Nissen hut,” Joe said, tapping the metal lid. “He got hooked on tea over in England—East Anglia is where he was stationed. Those Brits loved their tea, and Damien knew a good thing when he tasted it. Kept him awake for those long flights, you know? He sent me a bunch of it back, and damn if I didn’t start drinking it myself.”

  Neve didn’t say anything. He could almost feel the emotion pouring off her, enveloping them both. Earlier, whenever she’d stopped by the barn, they’d stood out in the main section; she’d never been in his private office before.

  The walls were covered with his brother’s work. Not just finished paintings, but sketches and studies—the roughest, most rudimentary pencil drawings of herons standing in salt ponds, burrowing owls soaring over fields.

  “This one’s a favorite of mine,” he said, gesturing at a sketch of a barn owl peeking out the vent of a church steeple. “Damien did it when we were supposed to be at mass. We hung out across the street instead. I smoked cigarettes and he drew the owl. We were fifteen and seventeen.”

  “Who was older?” Neve asked quietly.

  “I was,” Joe said.

  “You didn’t tell me,” she said, sounding almost hurt. “I came here with the snowy owl, and I admired that painting you have hanging out in the barn, and I told you I was working on a Berkeley exhibition catalogue, and you never said a word.”

  “No,” Joe said. “I didn’t.”

  “You didn’t want it known at all,” she said. “That’s why I’m so sorry.”

  Her face looked tense and drawn, but there was no dimming the wattage: she was still lovely, with those high cheekbones and intelligent blue eyes, with that high color in her cheeks and lips. No wonder she’d gotten to Tim. Because she had—Joe had no doubt.

  “He wouldn’t have told you if he didn’t want you to know,” he said as the water boiled.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Tim told you, right? That Berkeley is—was—Damien?”

  She hesitated; Joe saw her trying to protect his son, and it made him smile. He turned his back, poured the hot water into the brown china teapot, so she wouldn’t see.

  “It’s almost funny,” he said.

  She didn’t reply, still holding it all inside.

  “Look at all the trouble we’re both in. I’ve spent the last sixty years protecting my brother; now you’re protecting Tim. You know—I think they’re both big enough to take care of themselves. Let me guess now: Tim’s shut himself off again, this time because you spilled the beans about Damien.”

  “He’ll never speak to me again,” she said.

  Joe shook his head, staring at the teapot. “That’s ridiculous,” he said. “What did you do that was so bad?”

  “I told my boss, and he called Channel 10. You know—Beth called you. I was with Tim when she called him.”

  “Beth,” he said. His heart filled with tenderness mixed with irritation for his troubled ex-daughter-in-law. She’d called him all right—full of something like malicious glee. “She and Tim had a very unpleasant divorce. I’ll never speak ill of her—she was like a daughter to me—but I’ll just tell you that she doesn’t mind being the bearer of bad news when it comes to Tim.”

  “It wasn’t her fault,” Neve said. “It was mine.”

  “Neve,” Joe said, “if you really want to put the blame somewhere, why not give it to Tim? He’s the one with the big mouth. If you’re thinking in terms of family secrets, that is. Because that was the whole motivation for keeping the Berkeley stuff to ourselves. Old, sad, bitter grief…That’s what most family secrets are made of, don’t you know?”

  “I know,” Neve whispered.

  “So you’ve actually done us a favor,” Joe said, pouring the tea, handing her a cup. “You’ve turned on the lights, so there’s nowhere left to hide.”

  “Tim was afraid the story would become about Frank,” Neve said.

  Joe tensed up at that. But he sipped his tea, and he instantly felt better. Damien had known what he was doing with this stuff—better than the whiskey he’d preferred after the war.

  “Well, the Berkeley story broke over a week ago,” Joe said. “And yes, reporters have been coming around. But tell me, how bad would it be if a story ran about Frank O’Casey? You know what I think Tim was really upset about?”

  “What?” Neve asked.

  “That they wouldn’t be asking about Frank. He’s gone, and the silence just makes it worse,” Joe said. “It’s not the questions people ask, it’s not the stories they tell—it’s the questions they don’t ask, the stories they don’t tell that makes the hollowness worse, makes us miss them even more, makes us start to wonder if we ever had them at all.”

  “Do you really think that’s it?” she asked, her voice so thin he could hardly hear it over the birds calling out in the barn.

  “Yes. I do,” Joe said. He opened his desk drawer, pulled out all the clippings he’d cut from the Providence Journal, Boston Globe, and New York Times in recent days. “Look at all these stories about Damien. This is the art-world story of the year, the fact that my brother was Berkeley. Everyone wants to hear how he started painting,
why he loved birds so much, why he wore a cape, all of it. And they want to hear about the war, too. The timing, everything happening with U-823, is stirring them all up.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” Neve said. “It must bring up horrible memories for you.”

  “They’re painful, yes,” Joe agreed, spreading the newspapers out on his desk. There were photos of Damien in his bomber’s jacket, crouching with his crew by their B-24, of Joe standing on the bridge of the USS James, wearing sunglasses, scowling at the camera. “We look pretty tough, don’t we?”

  “You do.”

  “A couple of nature-loving kids from Rhode Island,” he said. “One with a God-given talent.”

  “You both have a great talent,” Neve said quietly. “Look at what you’ve done here, with the raptors. Your brother would be very proud.”

  “I’d like to think that,” Joe said. “It makes me feel close to him, doing this work. I imagine the pictures he’d paint of all these owls and hawks. And I look at what Tim’s doing down at the beach, keeping that sanctuary open and thriving.”

  “You passed it on,” Neve said. “Your love of nature. Tim has it now, and so did Frank.”

  Joe nodded. He tried to drink his tea, but he suddenly felt too choked up. Like Tim, he couldn’t bear to think about Frank. He gestured toward the barn, and Neve followed him. He wanted to tell her what it had been like, to come back from war and know that everything in Rhode Island had changed; not that the landscape was altered, or the birds had stopped migrating, or that Narragansett Bay had gone dry, or that the Arcade had moved from its spot between Weybosset and Westminster streets in downtown Providence. No, everything had changed because Joe and Damien had come back different.

  “We wanted to be good fathers,” Joe heard himself say, stopping in front of the snowy owl’s cage.

  “Who, Joe?”

  “Damien and I,” he said. “It meant everything to us, because we’d had such a good one ourselves. He showed us how to do things right. Talk to us, throw a ball back and forth, be there for the big things and the small things—didn’t matter, just be there. Most of all—he talked to us.”

  Neve nodded, waiting.

  “We didn’t do that,” Joe said quietly, staring at the male owl. “Couldn’t, I guess. The stuff we’d seen in the war. Damien—my sweet, artist brother…he firebombed Dresden.”

  Neve let those words hang in the air, even as the birds squawked and called. Joe closed his eyes, picturing fire raining down from the sky. He had a pretty good idea of what it might have been like, because he’d seen the sea blazing—those men burning alive as they’d tried to swim away from the Fenwick, the ship torpedoed by U-823.

  “Made my brother stop painting, start drinking,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “It was a way of hiding out—from the people who loved him, from himself. I hated seeing him like that. Maybe I used my brother’s desperation as an excuse for my own drinking. We did it together—we’d meet at the bar, just sit there, not talking. I told myself I was looking after him.”

  “Maybe you were,” she said.

  Joe shook his head. “Nah. I was just making excuses.”

  “Excuses?”

  “Yes. I was scared. Scared of how I felt inside, of all the things I’d seen and done. And scared of losing my brother. He stopped taking care of himself—had pain in his side and ignored it. Didn’t even go to the doctor until it was too late. I think he felt so guilty, he didn’t think he deserved to get help.”

  “What was wrong with him?”

  “Cancer,” Joe said. “It ate him up. By the time he had surgery and radiation, it was much too late.”

  “What did his family do?”

  Joe sat quietly, remembering Damien’s last days. There had been love and forgiveness between him and Genevieve, but it had come too late. “They loved him,” Joe said. “We all did—we always had.”

  “And what about you?” she asked.

  “What about me?”

  “Did you take care of yourself?”

  He gave her a grateful look; from her tone of voice, he honestly believed she cared. “I started to. Watching Damien slip away, I knew I didn’t want to end up like that. I knew I had to…well, I stopped drinking.”

  “Tim must have been happy.”

  Joe shrugged. “I’d spent so much time turning to birds instead of my son, I’m not so sure he even noticed.”

  “I think he did,” Neve said quietly.

  Joe turned toward her. She had such wisdom in her eyes—she seemed so young to him, but in another way she seemed his own age. He had the feeling she’d been through some wars of her own. Battle scars, he thought. They didn’t make her any less delicate, though.

  “You’re nice to say that,” he said.

  “Your son turned out well,” she said.

  Joe bowed his head. “But not happy.” He couldn’t look up. “He’s honest, honorable, kind, and trustworthy. But he’s not happy.”

  “Joe…”

  “That’s the thing a parent wants most for their child,” he said. “You try to instill goodness, but basically that happens on its own. I don’t take any credit for how fine a man Tim has turned out to be.”

  “Then you shouldn’t take the blame for any of it either,” Neve said.

  “I thought…” Joe said, raising his eyes—not to look at her, but to gaze into the cage at the two snowy owls, sitting side by side. It was time for them to sleep, and that’s what they were doing. Shoulders touching, two catastrophically wounded birds a thousand miles from home.

  “What did you think, Joe?” she asked.

  “I thought that you were a miracle,” he said.

  “Me?” she asked, her eyes widening. “What do you mean?”

  “You and your daughter,” he said. “You found Tim, and you gave him something to live for. He’s been hiding out in that cabin on the beach for so long. Guarding that grave—that U-boat I bombed, those men I killed. Bones wash up on the beach now and then, did you know that? And Tim alerts the Navy each time. He makes sure those bones get a proper burial. He does that for Frank, you see.”

  “Because Frank drowned?”

  Joe nodded; the sadness made the smallest movement feel almost impossibly difficult. “Yes. But he does it for me, too.”

  “For you?”

  “Yes,” Joe said. “We don’t talk about it, because Tim and I still don’t talk about much. But he knows how I feel. See, Neve—we go into battle for duty and honor, and we kill or are killed. But it doesn’t end there. Marines, soldiers, airmen, and sailors are responsible for the lives we take. And Tim knows that.”

  “That’s why he cares so much about the U-boat,” Neve said.

  “Yes,” Joe said. “And for a while, when you first entered his life, I thought there was some hope.”

  “Hope for what?” she whispered.

  “That you would bring some light to my son’s calamitous life,” Joe said as the two snowy owls rustled, edging closer, their white feathers merging in the quiet darkness of the cage. “And that he could be happy.”

  21

  The silver Lexus was parked outside South County High, and if the repo man didn’t come by during the next fifteen minutes, things would probably turn out okay. Well, not really okay—the situation otherwise known as “life” was an unmitigated disaster. But at least he’d still have wheels.

  Wheels were paramount at the moment. Richard was a moving target. He was behind on child support, he hadn’t paid the mortgages, he had bar tabs all over the state, Alyssa was a wreck, Neve was dragging him through court, and his leasing company had had enough. Richard had kept up the car payments as long as he could, knowing that if all else went to hell—which it seemed in the process of doing—he could always sleep in the Lexus.

  Being a deadbeat was hard work. It took effort to send your life crumbling around your ears. Really, it did. He had a top-ten list of “Worst Moments.” They rotated in and out wi
th each other, depending on circumstances, but right now, the number one worst moment had to be that phone call with Alyssa, hearing her voice screaming in his ear, saying the sheriff had just been to the door looking for him.

  “You’re wanted!” she’d shrieked. “Wanted, like a common criminal! You haven’t paid child support for Mickey? For your own daughter? How do you think she feels? Is this what it’s going to be like for me and the baby? Chasing you around the countryside while you piss everything away in those tacky, disgusting bars you love so much? That you love more than me?!”

  Love so much? Is that what she thought?

  Those bars were his foxholes. That’s all—nothing more, nothing less. Who in their right mind loved a foxhole? They were barren dugouts, fortifications against the hundreds, thousands of ways the world was cruel. September’s was a foxhole against his money problems; the Hitching Post was where he hid to avoid the disappointment of love; Mike’s Sports Bar was a last-stand kind of place, where he went to forget what a world-class shitty father he was.

  He sat in the car now, shivering as his body went through detox. Hadn’t had a drink in nearly twenty-four hours. Long time ago, Neve had gotten brochures from Edgehill, a rehab just over the way in Newport. That’s where Kitty Dukakis had gone to quit drinking. Lots of people had—she was just the most famous. The rehab wasn’t there anymore—the big brick mansion had a new use. A resort or something.

  Richard knew there were other places he could check out. Hazelden, in Minnesota. The Betty Ford Center, out in California. The Caron Foundation in Pennsylvania. Those were fine rehabs; celebrities went there to get their lives in order, and although he wasn’t famous, Richard F. Halloran Jr., went first class or he didn’t go at all.

  The trouble was, he didn’t have any money to pay for it. His insurance had lapsed as well—just ask Neve, who’d left him messages and sent registered letters to his lawyer informing him that Mickey hadn’t been covered for her broken wrist. Richard had felt like a million bucks, hearing that—his little girl had needed medical help, and her time in the ER had had to come right out of her mother’s pocket. Congratulations, Halloran—why not have a double vodka to celebrate?