In the Country of Shadows (Exit Unicorns Series Book 4)

by Cindy Brandner

  “Why do you sit all on my grave

  And will not let me sleep?”

  ‘Tis I, ’tis I, thine own true love

  That sits all on your grave

  I ask one kiss from your sweet lips

  And that is all that I crave.

  My breast is cold as the clay;

  My breath is earthly strong.

  And if you kiss my cold, clay lips,

  Your days will not be long.

  She couldn’t breathe, she was choking and thought she might get sick. She got up, nearly tripping in her haste to get away from the music. The place was packed and it was hard to get through the throng of people. When at last she made it to the door and stumbled out into the night, she had to bend over, clutching her knees and striving to get air into her lungs.

  The fair day had turned and evening had brought a bank of fog with it. Her legs were still trembling as she walked over to one of the concrete blocks that edged the gravel parking lot. The cars were only glimpses of color and shape—a red-winged mirror here, a green-humped fender there. She dragged in a breath, feeling like a wheezy old man who had smoked two packs of cigarettes a day for the last forty years.

  She could still hear the dark-haired singer. His voice was a bit like Casey’s—a pure Irish voice, able to impart both agony and joy in equal measure to a song.

  How oft on yonder grave, sweetheart

  Where we were wont to walk—

  The fairest flower that I e’re saw

  Has withered to a stalk.

  She didn’t even have the cold comfort of a grave to sit beside she thought with a small spurt of bitterness. And it might be that she never would.

  When shall we meet again, sweetheart?

  When shall we meet again?

  When the oaken leaves that fall from the trees

  Are green and spring up again.

  And the answer to that final painful verse was, she knew, knowledge which she had fought now for almost two years.

  Jamie, wise man that he was, gave her a few minutes to collect herself before he came out of the pub door.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, his voice as soft as the fog that enclosed them here on this cold block of concrete.

  “It’s that song, I…it just hit a little too close to home.” He sat there beside her until the breath returned fully to her lungs and she could stand without shaking.

  As they walked toward the truck, he turned and the fog swirled around him, tendrils wreathing the bright glow of his hair.

  “I’d like to go sailing tomorrow, just the two of us. Do you think you’re up for that?” he asked.

  “Yes, I’m up for it,” she said. She had the oddest feeling, though, that what had just been asked and answered was far more complex than either of them realized.

  “Do you believe that, Jamie? In the song that man sang last night—that the dead can’t rest if we don’t allow them to?”

  Jamie looked over at her from his position by the bow of the sailboat, where he was running out the anchor chain. “I don’t think there’s an end date on mourning, Pamela. Perhaps that applies even more when you don’t know if you’re really mourning or not.”

  “Oh, I think we both know I’ve been mourning. I worry sometimes that I am holding him back. What if it’s like the church teaches and we stay in purgatory until we do penance, or until whatever it is that still holds us to the earth finally lets us go?”

  “I don’t know, sweetheart,” he said. “I truly don’t. But I don’t believe your longing for him is keeping him stuck fast anywhere, unable to move. It’s you who is in purgatory, Pamela, caught in waiting and not knowing what happened to him.”

  “I know I have to move on. I’m just not sure how to do that and I know when I do, whatever it looks like, whatever that first step is, I will feel like I am betraying him.”

  He came over to where she sat and offered her a hand up. She didn’t need him to respond. She had spoken the truth and they both knew it.

  Despite being so far out on the water, it was still a hot day and she felt grimy with sweat and the effort of sailing so when Jamie had offered to anchor the boat so that they could swim, she happily took him up on the suggestion.

  She skimmed out of her shorts and t-shirt, for she always wore a swimsuit beneath her clothes this summer lest the opportunity to swim presented itself. When she was little her father had called her his water-baby, and it was still true. The water was home and root to her, the place in which her body and soul felt most connected and at peace. She noticed Jamie looking at her and felt a flush of self-consciousness. He glanced away and she noted the fine tension along the line of his jaw. He got up then, pulled his shirt off and dove into the water. She forgot sometimes that Jamie was a man like other men because in so many ways he wasn’t. She had so long been used to thinking of him as a being apart; special with his various talents, his beauty, his intuitiveness. But he was a man, one who had feelings and desires and she needed to have a care for that.

  The water was a shock, so cold it was like needles all along her skin. She dove down and then flipped over, coming up with a gasp. She looked around, seeking Jamie’s sleek golden head against the dazzling blue of the water. An incredibly strong swimmer, and even more at home in the sea than she was, he was already a fair distance away.

  She dove down again and again, feeling clean and buoyant like she was a young dolphin. The water was freedom for her. The salt upon her skin, the slick slide of the water past her face and neck and breasts and thighs and toes released something in her. She felt strong again even as her muscles burned in the cold water, strong and buoyant as though the sea took the weight of her soul for those precious few moments while she swam. She felt nothing sometimes too, just gliding, not thinking, not feeling and grateful for the release of it.

  The sense seized her suddenly that she could drift down soft as a primeval skeleton, here on the shelf of her own country, become weightless, drift with the tides and float soft toward the moon when it was full and turned the sea to a blaze of mercury. And feel nothing and ache for no one ever again. Maybe, maybe if she drifted down and away far enough, she would find her missing husband, somewhere in the depths waiting for her. She gave herself a mental shake, she needed to break for the surface and quit entertaining such morbid thoughts. She pushed in the direction she thought was up and then realized with utter terror that she was no longer certain which way was up and which way was down. It had happened before to her, once when she was a child and once in her teens. She had never forgotten the pure terror of either experience. The water was cloudy, and there was nothing to hint the right direction to her, no telltale gleams of sun pointing ‘this way up’.

  Don’t panic, she told herself sternly, even as she felt her heart pounding wildly against her ribs. It was then she felt the first trickle of water in her lungs. She didn’t remember breathing in and the panic hit her full force with just the thought of her babies orphaned because she had stupidly stayed under water too long. She started to frantically churn the water, trying to seal off her nose and mouth even though her lungs felt like they were on fire and might burst out of her chest.

  And then Jamie was there, grasping her arm so hard it hurt, drawing blood to mix with the salt of the sea, dragging her relentlessly up toward the light, toward the pain. It felt like a terrible bubble inside her, a bubble that if burst, would flood her body with the poison it held inside. She could feel more water going into her lungs, threatening to drag her back in the opposite direction.

  They broke the surface then and she gasped for air but her lungs felt both sodden and fiery at the same time and she couldn’t breathe. Jamie dragged her to the boat and then pushed her up the ladder and onto the deck with no small force. She hit the boards with a thump that slapped her hard in the chest. Water sprayed out of her mouth, and she could feel Jamie pull himself up onto the deck behind her.

  “What the fuck were you doing?”

  She shook her head,
lungs still heavy with water, unable to breathe, her chest on fire with the lack of oxygen and with pain dammed far too long. Jamie hit her on the back, flat-handed and hard. It hurt like holy hell and brought tears to her eyes. Then suddenly she was gasping, retching water, choking on it as it streamed from her nose and mouth, the salt stinging painfully. Suddenly she realized it wasn’t just the sea, but tears pouring in an unceasing torrent out of her. Tears choking her, twisting up her windpipe, making her chest so tight that she couldn’t get even a wisp of air. The panic had her in its claws and it was going to push her off the edge into the abyss. She put her head to the deck and felt the sobs tear open her throat, a high and horrible keening that felt like it might go on forever.

  Jamie suddenly grabbed her and shook her, hard enough that her teeth clattered together. He was furious, green eyes incandescent with anger.

  “You don’t get to check out like that, do you understand? You don’t get to leave your children, you don’t get to leave me, do you hear me, woman!”

  She nodded as best as she could, and he let her go. She collapsed back onto the deck, lungs burning, water still stinging her nasal passages and her eyes.

  “I…I wasn’t trying to drown,” she said, in between pain-filled breaths.

  “You weren’t trying not to drown either,” Jamie said grimly. He was white beneath his tan, the lines around his mouth and eyes sharp with distress.

  The silence grew vast and deep, and Jamie’s anger was palpable in the air around her. The tears still leaked out, silent now, but no less painful for that. When she finally spoke her voice was like ether, drifting out along the wires of tension between them.

  “Oh God, Jamie—he’s gone, he’s really and truly gone, isn’t he?”

  He didn’t answer, because it was not necessary, he merely touched her, gently now, because she needed something to anchor her in the midst of the storm.

  She reached a hand back, and he took it, pulling her to him, understanding that right now she felt like little more than a scatter of atoms about to be blown apart permanently by the winds of pain. He understood that she needed someone who loved her to just hold her and not to tell her it would be all right because it never would be again.

  He held her for a long time; rocking her there on the deck of the boat. Held her as she cried all of it out, the months and months of uncertainty, of staving off the idea of Casey’s death, of wondering if he had been terrified, if he had thought of her, if he had called for her and she had not heard him. If he had needed her and she had failed him.

  “I should have felt it, Jamie—I should feel that he’s gone. I should have known the instant it happened, but I didn’t. I still don’t know it, but maybe—maybe the truth is I just cannot accept it.”

  “You’ll accept when you can, sweetheart, or you won’t. Only time can decide that for you.”

  She turned her face into his chest, too exhausted to move. They sat so for a long time, as the boat was carried on the wind and water, the day going down in a pearl-blue calm.

  They were silent on the trip back to shore. Jamie knew better than to speak; he knew Pamela wouldn’t be able to bear small talk just now. He watched her as he steered the boat in toward land. She looked hollowed out and exhausted but she also had a glimmer of something else about her—peace. Just a glimmer but it was a start. He had known if anything could grant her the release she so desperately needed, it was the ocean.

  When they reached the shore and he was tying up the boat she turned to him. Her face was bleached of color, but was still starkly beautiful against its bones.

  “Jamie, thank you.”

  He nodded, because there weren’t words that fit, there might never be words for it, for them. But he had, he knew, helped her toward something she desperately needed.

  He stood still, there on the shore, the soft lap of the sea behind him, the salt of it still drying upon his skin, and watched her walk up toward the house, her steps slow, but maybe stronger now.

  Chapter Sixty

  On the Far Side of Barsoom

  IT WAS THE SCENT of ripe apples on the air that told her summer was almost over. That and the soft breath of cooler air that haunted the evenings. All their stories were told with a fire flickering in the background, and though the days were warm and brightly lit the nights required a thin sweater against the chill. No one of them wanted to be the first to admit that their time was over, and so they lived their days and dreamed their nights in a state of suspended animation, as if this summer could be held and kept permanently if only they handled it carefully enough, and spoke no word about it ending.

  She knew Jamie felt it too and knew they all had to return to Ireland soon to resume their workaday lives, though she little understood what that meant anymore. The summer had become a sort of dividing line in her life, from the numb grief-stricken wife who yearned toward every sound at the door and every ring of the telephone only to be dashed with cold water when neither venue offered any glimpse of her missing husband, to this woman she was now, caught in a limbo where she could not go back, yet had no idea of how to move forward.

  The tales of Barsoom had given Conor a firm grounding. Each tale, carefully constructed had, in itself, been a guide that brought her son back to himself, and given him the security to stand in a world where his father was no longer present. That and the sailing, which Conor had taken to the way wind itself rode upon the furled landscape of the ocean.

  She stared into the flames as she listened to Jamie’s voice weaving softly through what remained of the present night’s installment. What he had given Conor this summer was a gift beyond measure and she would be eternally grateful to him for it. It did not surprise her. Jamie always gave of himself in ways that restored others, gave them back to themselves, and rarely did the man count the cost of it to himself.

  She felt Conor suddenly tense by her side, and pricked her ears accordingly to the words that Jamie was saying.

  “…and so Fledge took the key and raised it to the lock, the weight of it almost bearing him into the floor—”

  “No,” Conor said suddenly, voice rough with emotion, “Fledge wouldn’t do that, Fledge would give the Wastrel the key. He has to unlock the door.”

  “Why?” Jamie asked softly, while Pamela froze to the spot, fearing that she knew what Conor was about to say.

  “Because he loves the Sea Princess,” Conor replied, as if it ought to be obvious to anyone who had listened to the tales.

  “He hasn’t even seen her yet.” Jamie’s face was a perfect blank.

  “That doesn’t matter, he knows her here,” Conor thumped his chest, roughly over the area of his heart. He turned, dark eyes meeting his mother’s head-on, “Right, Mama?”

  She took a breath, and told the truth for the sake of her son and how desperately these tales mattered to him. “Yes Conor, he loves her.”

  “He should unlock the door, right? Tell him, Mom—the Wastrel has to be the one to unlock the door.”

  “Yes, you’re right, the Wastrel has to unlock the door.”

  She did not dare look up at Jamie while she said this, nor after. It was far too dangerous, for the tales were no longer safely away in Barsoom, but had landed, without warning, right here in the midst of them. She ought to have known better, for Jamie, despite the raw tension in his eyes, still held to his nature, which was, and always would be, supple with grace.

  “I think I got too much sun today, Conor-lad, because of course you are right—the Wastrel does love her and so it is right that he unlocks the door of her prison.”

  Because she too understood when grace was required, she rose and took Isabelle from her position on Jamie’s lap carrying her to her small bed with its railing and laying a warm blanket over her, for the night was cool and Isabelle’s fine skin was chilled. She returned for Kolya, who was curled, like a gloriously red-gold shrimp, on the rug at Jamie’s feet. Both children were redolent of the scents of that summer; strawberries and peaches, jam and mint, t
he sharp tang of the firs, the brine of the ocean and the warm honey of sunshine on small compact bodies. She laid Kolya at the opposite end of the bed, and covered him, too. It was a vain effort, she knew, for he would gravitate like a satellite to its chosen sun over the course of the night, until the two of them were curled together, like tiny opposing quotation marks, head to small sticky feet. The thought of trying to separate them on the return to Ireland, didn’t bear thinking about. She suspected both she and Jamie were in for an ugly week of it as they returned to their respective abodes.

  She watched over the two of them for a few minutes, inhaling their peaceful dreaming aura, but tonight even Isabelle and Kolya could not soothe her pain for the man out there now, who spoke so patiently to the little boy who had just exposed his love in a very painful manner.

  She walked to the window, welcoming the cool breeze that streamed through it. Somehow she knew that this would be the final installment in the tales of Barsoom. The summer was over, the enchantment was done, and reality had returned.

  She heard Conor’s voice raised in question a few times and Jamie’s patient answers. Over these many weeks they had begun to behave as an organic unit, with its particular rhythms and peccadilloes, traditions and habits and yet amidst this rather cacophonous symphony of life, there was a discordant note. And she knew all too well who was responsible for the disharmony.

  Suddenly Jamie was standing at the bed behind her, checking on Kolya as he did each night before leaving to walk alone the pathway to the cottage. He ran a finger over the round of Kolya’s rosy cheek, and gently moved a curl which was tangled in Isabelle’s long lashes.

  Normally this was a peaceful time of night and they would often have a cup of tea in the kitchen after storytelling, before Jamie left. But tonight she knew there would be no lingering over tea, no chatting into the wee hours.

  “You will excuse me, I’m tired tonight,” he said, meeting her eyes as courtesy required, but obviously wanting nothing more than to be out of her presence.