He had taken up the dreadful carpet in the third floor tower room and found a floor of beautiful yellow pine. All it required was sanding and staining to be brought back to a lovely sheen. The original plaster was in good enough shape in the room that all he had to do was patch and paint it the pale buttercream which Bridget had picked out. It gave the room the appearance of being lit with sunlight even when it was grey outside. Sometimes he slept there when he’d worked late on the house and was too tired to make the trip back into the city. He had no real home there anyway, just a room at Molly’s. Here he could sleep with the windows open and spare himself the sense of claustrophobia which he often had inside buildings. The eight-sided tower was fronted by trees and the rustle of the wind through them at night was soothing and gave him the sense of being outdoors.
He was lying in it now, having spent a long day stripping the newel posts of the hideous black paint with which someone had coated them. He’d been sore all day; he’d fought the night before and the fight had gone long—forty minutes of brutal slugging it out. His opponent had been one of those thick browed sorts that didn’t have a lot of grace in the ring but did have a rock-solid center of gravity and a native stubbornness that made it hard to knock him down or even move him around the pit a little in order to buy time to catch his own breath.
He had a bed here in the tower room, just blankets on a bit of foam but comfortable enough most nights. He was trying to read by the light of a candle, as the electricity wasn’t hooked up in this room yet. Three moths hovered around the flame, causing it to flutter and dance in the warm August night. Bridget had given him a copy of The Frenzy of Sweeney by one J.G. O’Keefe which she’d found in a bookstore in the Haight.
“It’s an Irish epic about a man driven mad by violence who lives in the trees,” she’d said. He’d merely said thank you and taken the book from her. He was pretty sure she was giving him a rather direct message with the book. He was reading it through for the second time now and found himself struck by a few lines in particular.
‘I am haggard, womanless, and cut off from music… . Ronan has brought me low, God has exiled me from myself…’
And that, thought Mick, was cutting it a little too close to the bone. He put the book down and sat up. The night was warm and the windows were open. A small bat flitted about in the beams above his head and the scent of oleander drifting in was like a distillation of moonlight, silver-white and aching in its smell. He was both tired and restless at the same time. He often felt this way after a fight. He couldn’t help but wonder if his luck was going to run out some time soon. He was 18-0 right now and it made him a little edgy. A run of luck like that was bound to make a man nervous.
He got up from the floor and went to the window and leaned out into the night. The moon was just a sliver off full and it lit the yard below silver. He ached and not just from the fight. The ache was more of an interior one. It had been such a long time since he had been touched in tenderness. He pushed his fists into the window frame; he was frustrated and longing for a woman’s touch, a woman’s warmth to take away this need in him. There was only one woman he wanted, though, a phantom who might exist only in his mind. The doctors had told him it was possible his mind could manufacture trace memories of people and events which had never actually existed or taken place. The mind strained to make a story even if it had no material with which to write it.
The night breeze against his chest was like a caress from the hand of that ghostly woman. He wished his porous mind could summon her up and begin to fill the spaces where she had once been in his life. He sighed and leaned his forehead into the wooden frame. He hadn’t replaced it yet and splinters of old paint drifted down to the floor around his feet. He pushed his head into the rough wood hoping a bit of pain would lessen his longing.
The top stair to the tower squeaked and though he could have replaced the board he preferred to give himself the warning the noise provided. He took a breath feeling more than a little frustrated. Bridget had let him be for a few weeks, apparently that time was up. He didn’t turn at once but he heard the soft pad of her bare feet cross the floor and felt the disturbance of her body as it neared his.
She touched his back and he shivered, the feel of another’s skin against his own without violence was electric. He moved away from her hand, and turned around only to be confronted with her completely naked body. The shock of it went through him, his body responding accordingly to the first naked woman he had seen in some time. He swallowed and closed his eyes seeking strength even though the scent of her was both sharp and hot in his nose. It was the smell of female desire and the male animal rose up in him demanding its due.
“I can’t, Bridget, we’ve had this discussion. Ye know I cannot do this with ye.”
“I don’t see why you make such a thing of it. It doesn’t have to be, you know,” she said softly.
He shook his head. “Desire is a thing of little space an’ then the mornin’ comes an’ with it regret.”
“How can you be so certain we’d regret it?”
“Because I can give ye my body, but I can’t give ye my heart an’ I think, in the end, that’s the thing ye really want.”
He touched her face. There was no telling her what he truly felt because it wasn’t kind to say it. She was the sort of person who was always going to try to fill the hole in her life with outside forces—men, drugs, wandering—and none of it would ever be enough. He was afraid of falling into the vacuum she held at her core. He felt a sadness for her because she could not help who she was any more than he could.
He looked down at her, his hand still cupping the edge of her jaw. Her hair was a soft, dull copper glow in the moonlight and her skin was as white as the oleander petals that glowed outside the window. She moved her face against the palm of his hand and he could feel the strain in her. She was a lost girl and he was a lost boy; they just weren’t fated to be lost together.
“It doesn’t have to be forever; I’m not really that kind of girl anyway and you, Irish, you are most definitely not that kind of guy. But for now, let me be your shelter, just until the storm passes.” Her hands were on his chest, warm and soft. He put his own hands on her forearms to still her movement.
“I just can’t,” he said. He no longer cared how it seemed to her or if he appeared entirely crazy. His body had some decided opinions on the state of his sanity just now and none of them were flattering.
“You’re an unusual man,” she said, seemingly not angry at his latest rejection of her charms. “I find it interesting.”
“Interesting?” he echoed, irritated.
“Yes. I don’t know too many men who wouldn’t have sex when it’s offered, when they have no ties elsewhere, at least not ones they can remember. I don’t see why you’re so certain she exists.”
“I just feel her,” he said, knowing it sounded flimsy compared to the feeling he carried inside.
“If you don’t know who she is, does it really matter?”
“Does it matter? Aye, it matters to me.”
“Do you think she’s waiting for you? Do you think she’s staying faithful to a man who has been gone so long?”
“I don’t know,” he said softly. “It’s not really about what she’s doing, she may well think I’m dead.” She most likely, he amended inside his head, did think him dead, if she existed. Always the damned if which haunted his entire existence. If she existed, if he’d had a life worth remembering, if he was a father —if, if, if!
“D’ye think maybe ye might have pity on me an’ cover up?” he asked, because his body did want her to a terrifying degree and he didn’t think he could stick with his morals if she didn’t put some clothes on. Bridget laughed and shrugged into the shirt he had abandoned on the stepladder before he’d gotten into bed. It was covered in paint splotches and smelled of turpentine and sawdust, but it provided some relief to his overstrained principles.
She looked up at him as she buttoned the shirt, her blue eye
s almost black in the candlelight. Without her usual costume of bangles, rings, makeup and gypsy skirt and blouse, she looked terribly young and terribly vulnerable.
“Can I stay up here with you tonight, Irish? I promise not to touch you. I’m just lonely and the house feels so empty downstairs.”
He sighed. “No funny business, all right?”
“Cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye.”
He startled a little at her quoting of the old playground rhyme. It had always struck him as a little gruesome but that wasn’t what bothered him tonight. It was that for a second it set off an echo in his head, one that floated out getting fainter and fainter but something he strained to hear all the same. She lay down on his simple foam mattress not bothering to cover herself with a blanket. It was too warm for covers, he felt the clammy prickle of sweat on his chest and saw the soft sheen of it on her upper lip. He lay down beside her and turned to blow out the candle by which he’d been attempting to read.
The moths were still fluttering about the flame. He watched them for a moment, mesmerized by their dance. They flew in tighter and tighter revolutions, one so close he thought it must surely ignite and fall into the heart of the fire. He didn’t wonder why they took the risk, it was, he thought because fire was warm and beautiful, and he knew sometimes that was more than enough to risk immolation of either wings or self. And then one did fly too close and catch fire and for a second flame took wing, and just as swiftly there was nothing to know it by but a tracery of smoke curled upon the air. It was like his life before—a chimera of smoke and ash, there and then gone.
He licked his forefinger and thumb and then snuffed the candle not wanting the other moths to succumb to the lure of the fire. Outside were the usual night noises—the distant screech of a swift, the much closer and cacophonous call of tree frogs, and the occasional hiss of a car passing on the distant road.
The dark made it easier to talk as if all things could be asked and answered and then forgotten with the arrival of morning’s light. He could still smell Bridget, the heat and invitation of her, but he knew she was like the flame and he was no more than the moth.
“Can I ask ye a question?” He could feel a moth fly over his face—one of the survivors, just a tiny displacement of air and space as it sought heat and light.
“Ask me anything you’d like, Irish. For you, I’m an open book.”
“It seems odd, I suppose for a woman to be on her own as ye are. Isn’t there a family somewhere that misses ye? Brothers or sisters?”
He could feel her shrug across the expanse of the damp and creased sheet on which they lay. “I left them behind a long time ago. It’s better for me and them if I just don’t go home. I was always the piece that didn’t fit. I’ve been some bad places, Irish, and don’t nobody back home want to know about that. You see stuff, you do stuff and you aren’t the same person. You can’t go home again, it’s a mistake to even try, it just shows exactly how far you’ve traveled away from who you were. People change and they move on, their lives keep going. But when you’re the one who left, it’s like some part of you stays in stasis. You think the world is going to roll back for you, and then you realize it’s like water ‘round rocks in a river, for a little bit their lives parted and there’s that space where you used to be, and then it keeps moving, closes back together and there ain’t a place for you anymore.”
“Are ye sayin’ ye can’t go home again?” The statement didn’t sit well with him. He didn’t like that idea. He supposed it was because he hoped that someday if he figured out where home was, he could go back and that someone there would be happy for his return.
“Not all families love in the right way, Irish, not all mommas and daddies want their babies to come home. Some babies just gotta make their own way in the world.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
They were quiet for a time then and he thought she had fallen asleep when she spoke, her voice as soft as the dark that enfolded them.
“Irish?”
“Aye?”
“I feel less alone when you’re around.”
“Why do ye suppose that is?” he asked, though he feared he knew.
“Maybe it’s because you seem even lonelier than I do.”
And that, thought Mick for the second time that night, was cutting it too close to the bone. Unfortunately, it was no less true for the discomfort it caused. He turned over and put his arm around her. He didn’t love her, but here in the dark, with the scent of oleander, silver and aching coming through the windows, it didn’t matter. She needed someone and he was the only one here to hold the loneliness at bay.
He lay awake for a long time after Bridget fell asleep, both thinking and not thinking in the way that night thoughts were—a stream that meandered and rippled and the shape of which would disappear before morning. His last conscious thought before sleep came for him was that he could still smell the smoke of the dying moth.
He awoke in a shaft of sunlight, the scent of frying ham having tickled his senses into consciousness. He got up and pulled on his jeans and a fresh t-shirt. He felt groggy this morning though he’d slept so deeply he had neither dreamed nor moved much, judging by the stiffness in his body.
There was a narrow set of back stairs that led from the top of the tower down to the kitchen. He had managed to strip them but had yet to finish them, and the stairs were soft and powdery with wood dust under his bare feet. Sunlight filled the kitchen, touching the birch table and sideboard and gleaming off the tin backsplash he had installed behind the sink a few days before.
“I guess you didn’t get much sleep last night,” Bridget said and there was a curious tension to her voice. She was scrambling eggs on the camp stove he’d been using to boil water and make his meals. Her back was to him so he couldn’t read her expression but he knew he hadn’t imagined the tension.
“No, I slept well in the end,” he said, pouring himself a cup of tea and sitting down at the table. He did feel a little bleary-headed still, despite the heavy sleep.
“Really? Because I would have thought that drawing took a few hours.”
“What drawing?” he asked blankly. He was confused as to what she was talking about and even more so by why she seemed upset.
“The drawing on the table. I didn’t draw it, so you must have.”
He looked over the table and saw a large sheet of paper. It was from the pad he’d been using to rough out his plans for the house. He reached out his hand and pulled the paper toward him and then felt the bottom of his stomach drop out. “I…I don’t remember drawin’ that,” he said, wishing she would quit looking at him so oddly, like he’d grown an extra head during the night.
“Well, you did,” she said, stating the obvious. He saw his hand in the drawing, he knew the sort of lines he used, the pressure he put behind the pencil, the curves he used to indicate depth and perspective.
It was a lovely house. Two stories, with a well thatched roof that would keep out the rain no matter how hard it drummed upon the rushes. It looked solid, meant to weather the years and keep secure its occupants. It sat snug in a wee dell of trees and flowers, and had a stout door and deep windowsills. It was his ghost house, the one he had always felt beneath the bones of this one, the one that had always been just beyond his reach, here now, lined bold yet lovely upon the paper. An Irish house. The house was surrounded with greenery—a wee garden, roses clambering up the walls, bramble thick upon the low stone wall and a little wooden gate, and flowers everywhere. Bridget was right, this drawing must have taken hours.
He felt the familiar thump of pain on the right side of his head. The pain he always got when it seemed that a memory was trying to surface.
“She liked plants, all sorts,” he said, and the pain in his head was like a knife cutting thin and sharp now.
“Who liked plants?” Bridget asked, her words wary as if she understood intuitively that they were on strange ground here.
“The woman w
ho lived there, or maybe she still lives there for all I know.”
“This woman—did you live with her?”
“I think so, once upon a time.”
“Like in a fairy tale?”
“No,” he said, feeling terribly bleak suddenly, “not like in a fairy tale, just a life, a real one.”
Chapter Fifty
Stars Falling All Around
December 1976
HE HAD COME TO the church to pray. He’d been drawn here tonight like an iron filing to a magnet, needing to speak to something; that greater presence he sensed from time to time. He had come to ask that power to give him back some small corner of his old life, a hint, anything that would tell him who he had been, and where he belonged. By his reckoning, as much as he could figure, he had been gone from the world before for more than a year now.
The church was quiet. It was late on a Sunday night and Christmas was only a week away. He had plans to spend the day with Father Jan and Eddy, helping out at a soup kitchen. He had no desire to celebrate the holiday; and even if he had, there was no family with which to spend it.
He picked up the box of matches that had been left by the small white candles and struck one. The flame sprang warm against the hushed dark of the church. He touched the flame to a candle and watched as the warmth caught and flickered, then held, swaying only a little where a draft from the body of the church caressed it. A prayer that was not words but merely longing, moved through his body, a rhythm of need and yearning flowing along with his blood. Suddenly the flame touched his fingers and he dropped the match, sticking the singed ends of his thumb and forefinger into his mouth to stop the worst of the burning.
He’d lit seven candles. He stared at them. He hadn’t counted—he’d lit a bunch and then stopped. He wondered if the number had a significance. A woman and six children? He felt slightly dizzy at the thought. But no, surely he’d had a mother and a father and maybe even siblings in that life in the world before. And a wife. A wife, a child or two, two parents and maybe a brother and a sister. He shook his head; he had no bloody way to know why he’d lit all those candles or if they were people still alive or long passed from him.
In the Country of Shadows (Exit Unicorns Series Book 4) Page 53