Spellbound

by Jeanette Baker

  “Easy, lass,” he warned her, settling her on his lap. “You want your aunt to invite you back, don’t you?” He looked around. “Where’s Luke?”

  “Right here.” Emma walked into the room holding the baby. His cheeks were pink. He cooed when he saw Sean.

  Sean held out his arms. “I’ll take him, Emma.”

  She hesitated. “You’ve already got quite a lapful. Mollie’s nearly finished in the kitchen. She doesn’t need me.”

  She was reluctant to give up the baby, but so was Sean. He needed Luke’s chubby softness close to his chest. His writing had absorbed him. He’d seen too little of Kerry’s children the last few weeks, especially Luke who slept for long hours at a time. “That would be grand,” Sean said smoothly. “Let me have him for a minute while you find a chair.”

  “Play with me, Grandma,” Marni said. “I need a partner.”

  Bless Marni. The child was uncanny. Somehow she seemed to know exactly where to apply the salve.

  Emma brightened, handed over the baby, and sat down on the floor, crossing her legs like a girl. “Will you be black or red?” she asked.

  Marni grinned. “Black.”

  “I’m a very good player,” Emma warned her.

  A tiny smile tugged at the corners of Marni’s mouth. “I hope so, Grandma.”

  Patrick laughed. “Marni’s not so bad, either, Emma. You’ll need your wits about you or the game will be a short one.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Sean stared at them. They were actually teasing each other, the years of hurt wiped away by the healing presence of the grandchildren they shared. He felt lighter, as if something heavy and dark had been lifted from his shoulders. Because of Mollie and the way she’d pulled them all together, this might turn out to be a family after all.

  Luke had tired of his uncle’s lap and was seriously fussing when Sean heard the clink of glasses and silver coming from the dining room. Handing the baby to Emma, he excused himself and walked into the eating area. Mollie was laying out the table. “May I help?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said, smiling with her usual confidence, as if the scene between them in the storm room had never happened. “You can finish setting the table while I bring in the food.”

  The meal was as delicious as it was unusual. Roast turkey wasn’t unheard of on the island but never accompanied by the array of pumpkin, sweet potato, and cranberry dishes she’d prepared.

  “Thanksgiving always was Mollie’s favorite holiday,” her mother observed. “Even as a little girl she could hardly wait to come home from school the day before and help me start dinner.”

  “Is that what it is, Thanksgiving?” Patrick asked.

  “Close enough,” said Mollie. “We’re a few days late, but I don’t think it matters.”

  Caili looked up from her cranberries. “What’s Thanksgiving?”

  Emma and Mollie looked at each other. “You’re the teacher,” Emma said. “You tell her.”

  Mollie dabbed at her mouth with her napkin, sipped at her water, and began. “Every year in November families gather together and eat certain foods, turkey, cranberries—”

  “Pumpkin pie,” interrupted Emma. Like Mollie, she was partial to pumpkin pie.

  Mollie smiled. “And whatever else they like. We do this in memory of the first Thanksgiving, several hundred years ago, when the American Indians and the first European settlers gathered to celebrate their harvest after the long, hard winter the year before. It was a very difficult time. They were grateful to be alive, so they had a feast, invited all their friends, and gave thanks to God.”

  “That’s a nice story.”

  Sean couldn’t help himself. “Everyone wasn’t so friendly a few years later,” he muttered under his breath.

  “Sean,” his mother reproved him.

  “Excuse me?” The color was high in Mollie’s cheeks.

  He could have bitten his tongue off. “Never mind.”

  “No, I want to hear what you said.”

  This wasn’t the place. He shouldn’t have brought it up. But if she insisted, he did know something of American history. As in Ireland, the English had conquered, then exterminated the native tribes. “You only told half the story. In less than two hundred years the Native American population was reduced by millions due to war, starvation, disease, and outright annihilation.”

  “I’m not disputing that,” she said reasonably, “but Caili asked me about Thanksgiving.”

  Sean was ashamed of himself. “So she did. I apologize.”

  Marni, who’d tensed at the first sign of conflict, relaxed. “What’s annihi-, anni—”

  “Annihilation,” Sean finished for her. “It means to destroy something completely.”

  Satisfied, she gave it up and applied herself to her candied yams. “This is good, Aunt Mollie. It tastes like dessert.”

  “It’s Grandma Emma’s recipe,” Mollie said. “Save room for some pumpkin pie. There’s nothing she makes that can top that.”

  Emma demurred. “I’m not nearly the cook that Patrick is. Do you still like to cook, Patrick?”

  “I can put together a fair stew,” he admitted, “but I haven’t attempted anything more in a long time.”

  Surprised, Sean glanced at Patrick. Kerry had never mentioned her father-in-law’s culinary talents. Perhaps all that ended when Emma left him. He felt a pang of remorse. Danny Tierney’s childhood had been a difficult one, and his children had suffered for it. Kerry, a nurturing mother, had been the nucleus of the family. She had asked remarkably little of her husband, understanding and accepting his shortcomings.

  Sean looked across the table at the girl who had it all. No wonder she appeared so collected, so capable, compared to her brother. While Mollie was eagerly anticipating her mother’s Thanksgiving dinner, Danny had frantically worked to hide all signs of his drunken father, waiting outside in the freezing cold until the pubs closed to bring him home, getting his own meals, hiding bottles, washing, cleaning, squeezing in the minimal amount of schoolwork required to earn his leaving certificate. Why, Sean wondered, hadn’t he gone to California with Emma?

  Sean was conscious of Mollie’s eyes on his face, watchful, anxious. Once again he was ashamed. What had Mollie Tìerney ever done but love Kerry’s children, invite him to dinner, and comfort him when there was no other comfort in all the world? She couldn’t be blamed for her life of privilege any more than Danny could help the deck he had been dealt or Kerry’s untimely death. Neither was Emma the culprit. No one had the right to condemn a woman for leaving a loveless marriage. He saw that now. It was harder to forgive Patrick. He had insisted on keeping Danny on the island and at the same time fallen down in his duties as a parent.

  Caili sat beside him. Sean nudged her shoulder and held out his glass of milk. Then he drank it down. She did the same. They smiled conspiratorially at each other. For the first time since Kerry’s death, Sean was happy, not the giddy kind of happiness he’d once felt when he was young and all of life was before him. This was a contented kind of pleasure, the kind a man felt when his priorities were set and his world in order. He would make it. The children would make it. They would all go on.

  Across the table, Mollie smiled at him. He smiled back. Next year she would be gone, but what she’d accomplished would stay with them, with Patrick and the children and with him. Sean would always be grateful to her for that.

  The next moment all thoughts of happiness disappeared. He heard it first and knew it for what it was, a shrill, ominous, wailing siren heralding an island disaster. It pierced the comfortable clamor of dinner-table conversation, a sound that would paralyze the fishing community of Inishmore.

  All except Mollie froze in their seats.

  “What is it?” she asked, bewildered. “What does it mean?”

  Sean’s eyes met Patrick’s. Both men pushed their chairs away from the table and stood. Sean’s voice was grim, controlled. “Something’s happened, Mollie, something serious.
When I know, I’ll call you.” He looked at the girls’ rosy-cheeked, worried faces and smiled encouragingly. “Chin up, lassies. There’s always a solution. I’ll be back soon.”

  Both Caili and Mollie managed a smile that disappeared as soon as the men left the room.

  CHAPTER 14

  Klaus Vandenbrock opened the door of his cabin and sat down heavily on the bed. He pulled out the flask that was his mainstay, swigged down enough to chase away the cold that hounded him, and replaced it in his jacket pocket. Then he stretched out on the narrow bunk, crossed his arms behind his head, and closed his eyes. Sleep. He needed sleep. Why couldn’t he sleep? Maybe when the ship reached Liverpool this damned insomnia would leave him.

  Robert Staples’s voice crackled over the radio. “We’re closing in on something, Captain.”

  Vandenbrock didn’t bother to sit up. Reaching for the radio on his desk, he pushed the transmit button and spoke to his third mate. “What does it look like?”

  “Land, sir, on either side of us.”

  The man was mad. The coordinates were far wide of any land mass this far north. Staples was an American, young, enthusiastic, but overly cautious. It was time he got his feet wet. “Can you handle it?”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “Good man,” said Vandenbrock. Replacing the radio, he closed his eyes and willed the alcohol to do its job.

  He had no idea how long he slept. But there was no mistaking the exact moment he regained consciousness. The shudder woke him, a long roll that threw him from the bunk, followed by the harsh grating sound of metal giving way to rock. Instinctively he looked at the clock. Ten minutes after midnight. Terror chilled his brain. He could neither think nor act.

  He sat on the floor in frozen impotence, staring stupidly at the porthole, struggling to push the cobwebs from his mind. Twenty years of experience wiped away in a tidal wave of horror. He knew what it was. No one who’d captained oil tankers for as many years as he had would confuse it for anything other than a tear in the hold. Given the sound and impact, the hit was large enough to release thousands of damaged barrels of oil into the ocean.

  Rising too quickly for a man who’d passed out in an alcoholic haze, he banged his head on the cabinet. He swore fluently, damning Staples and the rest of his crew to watery graves. Rubbing his head, he climbed awkwardly to his feet and tried to think, his only hope that the ship had struck something adrift in the water, an abandoned boat or a lost buoy. God help him if his coordinates were wrong and Staples really had seen land on both sides.

  Eight hours later, with the blinking red lights of the Irish harbor pilot pounding a stiletto-sharp rhythm against his alcohol-sensitive pupils, hope was no longer a realistic term relevant to the disaster in which Vandenbrock found himself. Against his will, he’d been forced to submit to a blood test His alcohol level was .061 percent. Maximum permissible levels for the operation of a commercial vessel did not go beyond .040 percent.

  So far he hadn’t been arrested. Transom hadn’t responded. Most likely they were consulting their lawyers. Not that it mattered. His career was over. The irony of it struck him. Staples would move on with a slap on the wrist, while he would be fired, more than likely never work a commercial vessel again.

  More hours passed. Dawn lit the sky, bit by bit, first darkly blue, then pearl gray, and finally silver. Pale fingers of light pierced the clouds and separated, bathing the ocean in a wash of gentle gold, a beautiful day off the coast of western Ireland. Staring out his porthole at the black slick of crude coating the water, Vandenbrock felt his stomach churn. Already birds dove through the rainbow-colored sheen, rising from the water coated with oil.

  Lurching from his bunk, Vandenbrock found the door to the bathroom, flipped the light switch, and barely managed to make it to the toilet before heaving up the contents of his stomach.

  Two days later Sean stood on the deck of the harbor pilot’s boat and stared at the nine-hundred-eighty-seven-foot Transom tanker listing at an unnatural angle amidst a circle of buoys. Response teams had been slow to reach the disaster, and so far only skimmers and conveyer belts to lift the oil off the surface were evident. The technique, widely used because it was least destructive, was also the least effective. Sorbents, removing the oil with sponges made from diaper like substances, would come next, followed by burning and high-pressure hosing, which, in Sean’s opinion, did more harm than good. Areas left alone to be weathered by winter storms ended up with more life than those cleaned by high-pressure hosing. “How many barrels so far?” he asked.

  Graham Greene, the harbor master, narrowed his eyes. “Two hundred forty barrels so far and still counting. I would say the largest slick has spread to nearly thirty square kilometers inside a two-hundred-square-kilometer area of smaller slicks. Another million barrels of oil are still on the ship. They’ll be siphoned off to another vessel.”

  “Why is it taking so long?”

  Greene shrugged. “No one’s worried. The seas are calm. Transom is claiming responsibility. The captain’s been fired. Who knows?”

  “The ship has shifted,” Sean observed. “It looks bad. If we don’t step in, the rest of the oil will be lost into the sound.”

  Greene looked at the sky. “We’ve a few days yet, if the weather holds. Then we’ll need all the help we can get.” He looked at Sean. “Are you in?”

  Sean nodded. “We’re all in, Graham. We’ve no choice.”

  That night Luke woke with a howl. Exhausted from worry and too little sleep, Sean changed the baby, climbed back into his own bed, and tucked his nephew in beside him. Luke’s chubby fingers curled around his thumb, and soon he was asleep, a small bundle of delicious warmth on a cold winter night. Sean molded his body around Luke’s baby shape and tried to sleep over the whistle of the wind. It was a sound he’d heard all his life. Ordinarily he would have drifted off immediately, but heavy winds meant high seas. The Transom ship with its million barrels of oil still hovered perilously nearby, and those in charge waited helplessly for cleaning crews, hoping for clear weather.

  At nine A.M. it was dark as midnight. Pounding rain and seventy-mile-an-hour winds kept everyone inside. Shops and schools stayed closed. Residents turned up their radios, banked their fires with enough turf to last the day, and settled in to outlast the storm.

  Sean stirred the oatmeal one last time before ladling it into bowls for the children. Sensing his preoccupation, Marni and Caili were silent, dutifully lapping up their cereal as if it were ice cream.

  The shrill ring of the telephone jarred Sean into action. Handing Luke’s spoon to Marni, he reached for the phone. It was Graham Greene. Dispensing with his usual preliminaries, the harbor master delivered the bad news in a clipped voice. “We need you, Sean. Winds hit the tanker last night, shifting it even more. Containment buoys were ripped apart. We can’t use a chemical cleaning agent on the oil.”

  “Where’s Transom in all of this?”

  “Campbell, their chief executive officer, concedes it’s impossible to contain the spill with the equipment they have. Frankly,” Greene added, “the opportunity to recover much oil passed with the onset of the winds.”

  “In other words, it’s up to us.”

  “Aye, and anyone else with a boat. We need to move the booms as far out as fifty miles to save valuable salmon hatcheries. When can you be here?”

  He glanced at the table around which his small family had gathered. The girls, pink-cheeked, staring at him with round eyes, were still in their pajamas. Luke waved his arms from his baby seat. Sean sighed. “As soon as I can get someone here. Keep me informed.”

  There wasn’t a prayer of finding anyone for the children, not on a day like this. He looked at the phone and hesitated. School had been canceled. Mollie would be home with Emma. Still he hesitated. She would want him to call. He knew that. But pride and an honest desire not to take advantage of a woman who was in a vulnerable state held him back. Mollie was a giver, and he was very close to the edge of taking what she of
fered and damning the consequences. Gritting his teeth, he turned back to the children. “What shall we do today?”

  Before they could answer, the phone rang again. He sighed and reached for it. There would be no respite today from the worried fishermen whose livelihoods were on the line. “Hello,” he said tersely.

  “Sean? Are you all right?”

  It was Mollie. He relaxed. “Aye. We’re fine.”

  “Do you need me?”

  Did he need her? Four simple syllables with a world of meaning in them. “We’re managing.”

  Her voice deepened with amusement as if she knew his thoughts. “I meant today, for the children. Would you like me to stay with them?” Mollie Tierney would be no man’s victim. He should have known that.

  “You’re saving me again, Mollie.”

  “I’ll expect you to be properly grateful.”

  He smiled into the phone. “Would dinner and a play in Galway be enough?”

  He heard her breath catch and the slight, nearly imperceptible tremor in her answer that no one who didn’t know her would notice. “I think that would do it,” she said.

  “When will you be sure?”

  “When it’s over.”

  He laughed. “It’s a bargain, then.”

  “A bargain?” Again her voice was low, amused, a woman comfortable with the dance of courtship. “I thought it was a date.”

  His grin faded. “It had better not be a date, Mollie.”

  The silence was thick between them. She broke it. “What will it be, Sean?”

  “A night in Galway.” She didn’t answer. “Perhaps a beginning,” he offered.

  He could feel her thinking. “A beginning would be nice,” she said at last. “I’ll be over in an hour.”

  Sean hung up the phone, shaken, his bravado completely gone.

  Marni spoke up. “Is Aunt Mollie coming over?”

  “Aye,” he said, preoccupied.