Exit Unicorns

by Cindy Brandner

  “And his son after him?” she asked not really knowing if she cared for him to answer.

  He rolled to his side and turned her face up to his own, “ I never intended to marry that’s true, I was born with my destiny there inside,” he touched his hand over her heart, “there was never any real doubt what path I would eventually follow and my Da’s death only hastened my journey, but then I never planned on you and I could no more stop the inevitability of loving you than I could stop a train with my bare hands. Life hands ye gifts when ye least expect it an’ sometimes there’s no choice but to simply take it with both hands and be thankful for it. I think my father and grandfather would both understand that.”

  “Doesn’t it ever frighten you, the sheer weight of all that history bearing down on you from the moment you’re born?”

  “I’d be a fool if it didn’t but, darlin’, haven’t ye learned yet that there is not much more we Irish have to pass on to the next generation, our history, our resistance to oppression, the fight to live free as a man should be born, to call our land our own, to make the rules and have the freedom to break them and make better ones from the foundations of the old. Sometimes it’s as simple as wantin’ the dignity of a job and the ability to provide for one’s own family. It isn’t just about me and my Da’ and Grandda an’ all the Riordans that came before him, it’s for Pat and any number of Pats that I will never know, so that they might have somethin’ better and not have to leave their own land to do so.”

  “And would you pay for the freedom of strangers with your own life?” she asked, trying and failing to keep the anger from skewing her voice.

  He looked long into her eyes with a tenderness and sadness melding there that bewildered and frightened her.

  “Aye I would,” he answered simply. And she knew then with a finality that her youth could hardly bear that in those three simple words was an enormity of belief and despair that she could never hope to fight. Eight hundred years of weight and blood filled those words, his very DNA twisted into strands that marked him out for this, this intangible thing, and forced him to live in a world where hope was a luxury and a word could kill a man. Yet to use his own words she could no more stop the loving of him than she could halt a train with her bare hands. And for now he lay within her own sights and this night was for their making alone, the world outside with all its cries of need and pain could go hang.

  She turned to him this time making her need known with a ferocity she had never before displayed and he responded in kind as though if this baptism were fiery enough and shed enough heat and light it would keep them safe and warm even if only for this one night.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Peg

  Margaret MacBride, more commonly known as Peg, was having the very devil of a time trying to sleep and had, after tossing and turning and cursing at sheets, bed, room and finally in utter frustration, the moon, had given up and rose from her tangle of abused linen to make herself a cup of chocolate. It was hardly a guaranteed sleep aid but it was pleasant and passed the time. Waiting for dawn to come had ceased to be an exercise in angst years ago and had quite simply, she supposed, now become the affliction of the old, a simple inability to sleep.

  In the tiny kitchen with its north and west-facing windows, she had not bothered to turn the lights on, but boiled the kettle and mixed the chocolate and cream by the fitful light of the moon. There wasn’t much gumption left in the wind anymore, it’d be a soft day of it tomorrow. She hoped the sun would make its appearance again, the chill, mist-laden days that had once seemed like so much manna to her romantic soul now seeped insidiously into her bones and stiffened her joints and there was simply nothing romantic about that. It rather reminded one far too sharply of one’s age, she thought, taking her chocolate and walking painfully into the sunporch she’d had built, (in some fit of lunacy as the sun was rather a rare player in these climes) five years ago. Arthur had left her a great deal of money though, rather a shocking amount really for a man who had lived such a simple, uncomplicated life, and she’d really nothing to spend it on. Siddy and his uptight wife, Clarice, had been well shot of her years ago and hardly needed her assistance in matters financial. So when she had taken a hankering for a posh car, she’d had a second hand Bentley shipped over from England and when she’d wanted to see Paris once more she had simply put cash on the barrelhead and gone and when she had, one particularly glittery day, thought a sunporch would be just the thing she had called the contractor the next day and two months later there had been her sunporch. She’d felt a bit foolish about it at first, but then Terry had declared it perfectly grand and they’d taken to having their tea in it and she to sitting in it on sleepless nights, like tonight.

  Overhead there was a great tangled snarl of stars, like the string of a child’s kite caught hopelessly in the branches of an unforgiving tree. The night sky was comforting at times and at others so remote as to seem Godless. It took a moment or two to settle herself in her chair; an act that had once seemed so perfunctory now took a merciless toll on her body. But at last she was settled, if not comfortably, then at least bearably. One learned to live with what small graces life extended and was thankful for them. She sniffed the dark perfume of her chocolate and enjoyed the warmth the steam of it provided for the tip of her nose. She took a large swallow and sighed gratefully as the heat spread outward from her stomach to the extremities of her anatomy. Then she sighed again and set the chocolate on the small table beside her. This sigh contained no satisfaction and certainly no relief to the heavy weight straddling her chest. She had lied to Terry, Terry who just happened to have another life as a priest. She could not altogether shed the trappings of her Catholic childhood and supposed this would require attendance at mass at least twice and a substantial offering to the poorbox. Would that all sins, she thought wearily, be cast off so easily. Some sins were unforgivable though and she had lived long enough to know it for truth. And she had committed hers long ago, though she still could not feel a true regret for it. Perhaps regret would come when she felt the fires of hell at her feet but she had burned on earth, burned for fifty years for a man who’d turned to dust more than thirty years ago. Perhaps that would count, that earthly torture or perhaps, and this was not a new thought to her, maybe this was hell, right here, and humans just didn’t know it.

  She had known Brian, for a brief time granted, but he’d never been ‘just Marie’s son’ to her though it was hardly something she could tell Terry. Brian had come to see her in England, a long time past now, must have been ’37 just before war broke across Europe. He had been sitting on her front stairs one morning when she arrived home from doing the marketing. He’d risen up in one long fluid line, the grace of his father present in his movement and taken her bags from her wordlessly.

  ‘Ye’ll know who I am then?” he asked quietly as she fumbled with the key.

  ‘Aye, I’ll know,” she replied finding her Irish slipping back into her speech, thick and clotting, a sure sign of nervousness. “Though what yer doin’ here is something I’ll be less certain about.”

  He didn’t answer at once but brought her bags into the house and set them down in the kitchen. She offered him tea but he replied that a cool glass of water would do him just fine. She settled for the same and then faced him across the kitchen.

  “Well Brian, what have ye come for?” She nervously lit herself a cigarette and offered him one, which he politely declined.

  “Don’t usually indulge myself,” she said, “Arthur doesn’t like the smell of it about.”

  Brian nodded and she could see him appraising her across the cheery, sunlit room, the shadow of a willow rippling and rustling on the floor.

  She knew she was still a fine looking woman, men’s eyes being the mirror of affirmation. Closing in on forty-five and the wrinkles only just beginning. Her waist still no more than a large man’s handspan, her hair, with help from a hairdresser in London
, still fiery red, deepening into auburn glints. Arthur, she knew, still had his moments of disbelief that she had ever agreed to be his wife. Poor Arthur. Yes, still a woman who could turn heads in the street, but how, she wondered, did she look to this boy sitting in her kitchen? Old, most likely, old and ridiculous and hardly the flame-haired temptress that had lured his father away from his marital bed.

  “I just wanted to see ye,” Brian said, “I wanted to see the woman my Da’ spent years agonizin’ over. I wanted to know what it was that pulled him like a madman to ye.”

  “Bit disappointed, aren’t ye?” she said angrily and ground her cigarette out in the sink. She busied herself with the groceries then, tossing things into cupboards willy-nilly, so that she’d find apples in the potato bin and nutmeg in the fridge the next day.

  “No,” he said, “yer fine as any woman I’ve ever seen, but if my Daddy loved ye it had little to do with what he saw on the outside.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said and collapsed into a chair. “What is it that ye want from me then?”

  Brian didn’t answer for a moment, he looked down at his hands loosely clasped on the table in front of him and when he replied his answer was so quiet she had to lean forward to hear.

  “I want te know my Daddy, all of him an’ Terry always leaves out the bits about ye. I want to know my father through yer eyes.”

  There was a long silence then, during which Peg studied Brian’s hands, long and broad and blunted at the ends with a strength that was formidable. His father’s hands, his father’s gentleness and his own quiet need to rebuild the past brick by brick until the wall gave him the protection he sought.

  “Are ye certain that ye want to know it all,” she asked in a much softer tone of voice, “d’ye know what it is ye’re askin’?”

  “Aye, I know,” he replied simply.

  He left shortly after that but he’d come back, seeming to know instinctually when Arthur was home, when Siddy was likely to drift in and out. Though Arthur, to be certain, wasn’t hard to pin down. Arthur was as constant and as regular as the sun, up in the morning, down in the evening, wore a tie Monday to Friday and short sleeves on the weekend. You could set your clock by him or your life and never be late or off balance. It was what she loved and hated about him. Arthur was the quintessential English country barrister. Whitfield, Grey and Whitfield, Arthur being the Grey in the middle. Arthur who had loved her with the devotion of an old and blind dog and she supposed she had treated him as such for years, like a beloved pet, faithful and dependable. Banishing him to other rooms, houses and women when his need became too distinct. She hadn’t understood, even in the beginning, what it was that so attracted him to her. She’d been half dead with grief and certainly not in the market for an eligible, if somewhat stodgy, young British lawyer. But Arthur, like the proverbial dog with a bone, had not let go and eventually his persistence had worn her down. His proposal had been like the rest of their life, not quite what it should have been.

  “I’ll never love ye the way a wife should,” she’d said bluntly, “and I’ll never be the sort of wife a man like you should have.”

  “I can love enough for two, Margaret,” he’d replied in that soft, yet solid way he had, “and as for the rest, we’ll manage.”

  But they hadn’t, not really. Certainly Arthur had made partner in the firm at a very young age, but even at fifty it seemed that he had never ceased to be the junior partner. She hadn’t wanted children, but had found herself quite miserably pregnant in the second year of their relationship. Arthur, strangely triumphant, had declared marriage unavoidable then. Tired, heartsick and uncaring, she’d agreed. Siddy had been a carbon copy of his father, it was as if he’d known her rejection of him and refused her genes, had not wanted any part of his mother. His wild Irish mammy, as Arthur used to call her with affection and a certain unquenched longing in his eyes that turned her cold. Siddy had been bothered by her wildness and particularly her Irishness from a very young age. In Siddy’s little, gray soul the only longing that persisted was to be a proper British gentleman and an Irish mother who said and did outrageous things didn’t have a place in that picture. He’d retained a solemn tolerant fondness for her though until the spring that Brian came into her life, then she had committed an outrageousness that no one could forgive.

  Brian had been her secret for months, a sweet half-boy, half-man who made the past a little more livable and brought back the joy of it instead of the horror and pain. They met quite often in the mornings and he’d help her with the marketing, doing various chores and bringing small delights that he thought she might enjoy. It was for the first time in many years truly spring for her, spring in her own soul, where she’d thought nothing would ever grow again. And on their various journeys, she would tell him about his father, a bit here, a story there, an adventure they’d had, a conversation shared and remembered like diamonds mined.

  She changed her hair, bought new clothes, listened again to music that had been too painful to even contemplate before, when nothing could be allowed to thaw or even chip at the ice she’d hidden behind in her heart. She drank wine and laughed and one evening as dusk fell and she felt an utterly terrifying restlessness seize her, Arthur said, “I like the way you are wearing your hair these days, it suits you.” It had been that simple. But with Arthur, you learned to hear the words behind those actually uttered. It meant he had noticed, he had noticed and knew that the balance of their lives, always precarious and dependent on her grief, had shifted and would not be regained.

  “I needed a change,” she said but shook with the enormous lie of the words. Brian was the change.

  It was the dress that would prove to be her undoing. She wondered, later, if she’d known that as she picked it out. It was the color of first spring lilacs, pale and silken lavender. It was a color that Brendan had loved on her and she had not worn it since his death. She should have known better than to ever wear it again. It hung in her closet for several weeks and each time she saw it there she felt like an old fool. But one evening when she was alone and far more restless than was good for her, she succumbed to the temptation of putting it on. It slid like pure water over her body and its swish as it settled about her hips felt like the caress of a young man’s hands. Giddiness seized her and she had run down to the kitchen to pour herself a glass of pale gold wine. Back in her bedroom, she had surveyed herself in the mirror and seen reflected back a woman who looked and suddenly felt far younger than her years. It was twilight, that hour that is much kinder to women of a certain age and she turned and twirled and flirted with her reflection until she was dizzy and laughing. Then she’d stopped abruptly, her heart pounding and head whirling. In the shadows stood a man, a tall man with such a very sad face, for one brief moment she thought it was Brendan, or rather Brendan’s ghost but it was only Arthur, her middle-aged eyes and the failing light had deceived her into seeing the desired phantom.

  “Have you met someone?” he asked, dispelling, like so many smoke-hurled stars, the illusion of youth.

  “No,” she replied too quickly, too crossly.

  That had been all he said at the time, but he wanted to make love that night and her guilt had stopped her from turning away, she merely closed her eyes and conjured a ghost the way she had a thousand times before, but this time it was not the spectral touch of Brendan she felt, it was his son.

  His son, whom she asked to dinner a week later, when Arthur went up to London on overnight business. She understood what his business was and had never objected; she’d never had a right to and hadn’t ever really cared.

  Brian was going back to Ireland in a few days and she wanted to take him somewhere nice, telling herself it was a bit like a proud mother wanting to dine with her son. She knew it for a lie even as she spoke it to herself.

  She had worn the dress, with pearls in her ears and at her throat, warmed and wrapped with the scent of her favorite perfume
, not the English country garden scent that Arthur preferred but the million roses and one jasmine note of ‘Joy’ that she used to comb through her hair even, in the days of abandon and excess that were her youth. Because that was what she had felt with Brendan, pure joy and terror, and fury and love so tender that it seemed a breath might break it in half and yet she’d known not even an ocean could move it.

  She took him to a very expensive restaurant with a lush decor, and even there in a roomful of excessively groomed, bored rich women she stood out like a jewel on white velvet. She drank too much wine and laughed too much and told him things about herself that made him smile and even blush a little. She was completely reckless with the awareness of how soon he was to exit her life. Not much else, she was to later think, could explain the scene in the garden.

  But before that, at the end of their meal, she’d presented him with a little blue-bound book.

  ‘Leaves of Grass, it was—’ he began

  ‘Your father’s favorite, I know, he gave it to me,” she’d finished. “He could recite ‘Song of Myself’ you know, from the first word to the last. I remember once,” she laughed, “after we’d made love, he stood by an open window, naked and—” she flushed scarlet as she realized what she’d said. “Oh Jaysus, Brian I’m sorry, my tongue’s gotten ahead of my brain as usual.”

  He looked at her for a long moment, such a strange look that she had found it hard to breathe. Then he’d said—

  “Hands I have taken, face I have kiss’d,

  mortal I have ever touched, it shall be you.”

  “I suppose he would have said that to you at some point, only he didn’t mean it for himself as Whitman did, he meant it for you, didn’t he? Everything in his life he meant for you.”