But why did I have that particular delusion? Why not, say, a sea lion sex orgy on the beach? Better yet, why not a bus full of lost Playboy models? Why didn’t I end up down the rabbit hole like Alice in Wonderland?
“You think I should go back to the hospital and talk to the doctor about it?”
“I think you should wait,” Judie said. “They’re just going to give you more pills. Maybe antipsychotics or even something stronger. Poison to dull your mind. Give it a few days. Maybe it’ll go away. In the meantime, if it happens again . . .” She got up and went to her desk. She came back with a notebook and a pen attached. “Try writing them down. They say it helps.”
The Frames CD playing on the old stereo had ended a while ago. Judie placed the joint in the ashtray and said to wait for her while she went out to run a quick errand. “I want you to stay here tonight, Pete. I don’t have any guests, and I don’t think you should spend the night at home alone after everything that’s happened.”
I HAD FALLEN ASLEEP on the sofa, and when I woke up, it was almost eight. A series of rings woke me. I heard Judie speaking to someone at the door. She returned to find me awake on her couch.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’d hoped to have the place all to ourselves tonight. But I’ve just had some unexpected guests.”
It was the musicians from Belfast who’d come into town to play at Fagan’s this weekend, and they needed a room. The musicians (five guys and their girlfriends) would take up every bed. I told Judie not to worry about it.
“It’s okay, I’ll go back to Tremore. No big deal.”
“Oh, no you don’t. I’m telling them to go find a hotel in Dungloe.”
I told her not to. I knew she needed the money, although she’d never admit it. Even with the store sales, the yoga classes, and the hostel rentals, some months she barely covered her expenses. Sometimes, you’d open her fridge and find bread, milk, and a single apple. But she was too proud to accept a handout.
“We still have the couch, don’t we?” I said.
“It’s too narrow. And you know you always complain that it makes your butt sore to sleep on it.”
“Okay, I have an idea. Let’s go get drunk and by the time I get home, I won’t care that my ass hurts.”
So that’s exactly what we did.
WHEN I WALKED into Fagan’s, Chester came up to shake my hand and pretended to get electrocuted. Adrian Cahill, the kid from the shoe store (which sometimes turned into an impromptu watering hole), wanted to screw a pair of lightbulbs into my ears to see if they’d light up. I’d endure months of Peter Sparks jokes. It’s the kind of thing that was inevitable in a small town where nothing ever happened.
Donovan the fisherman and his friends were a bit more serious when they talked about my scars—they were fading fast—and asked if I was feeling better. I told them about the headaches. Donovan diagnosed me right away. “What you need, Mr. Harper, is a pint of the black stuff. A Guinness a day keeps the doctor away.”
Indeed. The doctor had said to stay away from alcohol, and this was the second time I was thumbing my nose at her orders. But I really needed that drink. To feel the beer’s silky smoothness against my lips, to smoke a Gauloises by the front door and chat with everyone walking by. The traveling musicians arrived a little later and sat at a table near the fireplace. Soon, music filled the pub.
Leo and Marie showed up around ten and it was packed by then. There was no such thing as closing time in Clenhburran on Friday nights. The only rule was you drank until the wood-burning fireplace burned to embers or the last keg of black gold kicked.
Leo bought a round and brought it to the small corner table where they joined Judie and me. Marie toasted my health.
“Mental health,” I added, and we all laughed. I guess we all needed it.
Surrounded by all that body heat, and with the musicians feverishly leaning into their flutes and violins, a sweet drunkenness soon fell over me like a spell. I hadn’t eaten much so the alcohol quickly went to my head, where the dull pain persisted, ticking away like a tightly wound watch. People danced in step in the center of the pub, and we swayed in rhythm with our drinks in hand.
Marie came over to snap me out of it. She grabbed my hand and pulled me onto the dance floor.
“Come on, Mr. Harper. Let’s see what you can do with those two wobbly legs.”
I made the mistake of taking her up on her offer. The second I staggered to my feet, the guitar player played the first few chords of “Cotton Eyed Joe,” and I was soon surrounded by a crowd that started whirling around me. I somehow survived the initial chaos and Marie’s merciful hands were there to hold me up and spin me like a top. But the inertia was too much and so was my drunken stupor. I slipped out of her hands, tumbled into a nearby table, and spilled several beautiful pints onto three young men. I landed flat on my ass and the entire pub broke out into one collective burst of laughter.
It was around three or four in the morning when Judie and I stumbled out of Fagan’s.
We returned to the dreaded couch and the recalcitrant springs dug into my ass, as I knew they would. We kissed and caressed one another passionately, but I was too tired and fell asleep before it got any further.
In the middle of the night, I felt a shudder next to me. It was Judie. Again.
“No, please . . .” she muttered. “No . . . no . . . no . . .” she said, and she moved her hands beneath the covers. She was trying to defend herself against something. Against someone.
I held her and waited for it to pass. Sometimes, it took her a minute to calm down.
It hurt to see her like this, but she herself had told me, “Let it pass. They’re panic attacks. Anxiety. It’ll pass. It always does.”
I felt her slender body trembling in my arms. Who trembles like this over a panic attack? What about that scar, Judie? She had a long scar that started on her hip and snaked its way up to her spine. I’d noticed it while stroking her side on one of our first nights together. “Wow . . . this is some scar,” I’d said, and she quickly turned around in bed and said, “It was a motorcycle accident. I don’t like to talk about it.” She immediately got up to make breakfast, and I learned something that day about Judie: She had a deep dark secret she would never feel comfortable discussing.
Judie started to calm down, and I stroked her face and kissed her sweetly until she stopped shivering. She relaxed her hands. Her body was still again. She muttered an unintelligible phrase and finally drifted off into a deep sleep.
It took me longer to fall back to sleep. The image of Marie, standing at my door like a phantom, wouldn’t let me rest. I remembered the dream where Leo was covered in blood. I remembered the voice that urged me, “Don’t leave the house” the night of the storm. And now Judie and her terrible nightmares . . . For a moment, it occurred to me that all these things might be connected. But I dismissed the idea.
THAT WEEKEND, Leo and I finished sanding down the fence and started painting it. The weather was ideal for it. It hadn’t rained in days, and there was very little wind, so we were determined to lay down at least one coat before the weather changed. Sunday afternoon, Marie showed up with a quiche she’d cooked the day before, and we ate lunch in the yard, chatting quietly. They must have noticed me rubbing my head and eyes.
I confessed that the headaches were beginning to worry me. I took the pills religiously after breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but the pain never subsided for more than a few hours. I woke up with vertigo at night, and it took me a long time to get back to sleep. The doctor had wanted to see me in two weeks, but Leo and Marie insisted that I see her sooner. I decided to take their advice, and the following Tuesday, I visited Dungloe Community Hospital.
Dr. Anita Ryan greeted me with a glowing smile playing across bright, red lips and she asked me to take a seat.
“So, Mr. Harper, how are we feeling?”
“The pain is still there,” I said, “deep inside my head.”
The doctor read over my chart while
I told her about my episodes. When I’d finished, she folded her hands, which had perfectly manicured, gold-painted nails.
“Did you suffer from migraines before the accident?”
“No,” I said, “other than your run-of-the-mill headache after a long day at work. But they always went away the next day. I’ve also gotten kinks in my neck, thanks to my profession.”
“Ah, yes, your profession,” she said, rifling through her papers, “which is . . .”
“Musician. Composer.”
She looked at me differently this time with those green eyes. It was a look I’d grown accustomed to.
“Oh, how interesting. What type of music do you compose?”
“Contemporary scores. Film soundtracks. Musicals, sometimes.”
For a moment, Dr. Ryan forgot about her paperwork. Her eyes widened, her lush red lips curved into a smile.
“Anything I’d recognize? I’m a bit of a music buff.”
I went for the answer people usually recognized. I asked her if she’d seen The Cure, with Helen Beaumont and Mark Hammond. It was the biggest hit on the BBC a few years ago, a TV series about nurses and soldiers during World War I. It was on its third season.
“Don’t tell me that’s your music. I love the melody of the opening credits. The one that starts with that piano. I didn’t know you lived around here.”
“Just here for a few months. Finishing a project.”
“Well, that makes sense. Quite typical for a musician, isn’t it?” She turned back to my chart. “Well, let’s see here. Yours is a pretty unique case. The throbbing headaches you’re describing are typical of migraines. But migraines aren’t very common to cerebral necrosis injuries, like the one you suffered in the lightning strike. More common is a persistent pain that grows until it keeps you from sleeping or something similar. But a headache that comes and goes, that disappears during the day . . . that’s strange. I think we’re going to have to take another peek at what’s going on in there.”
She started by examining my eyes with a light, and followed with more questions about the pain (to which she got the same answers as just after the accident). And then it was back to my favorite piece of hospital torture equipment: the giant MRI donut. More noise and claustrophobia. I felt like a pizza inside a microwave.
Dr. Ryan said she’d study the results and call me in a few days. Until then, more pills. This time it was a beta-blocker three times a day to stave off the headaches and anti-migraine medication to dull the pain.
While she was writing the prescriptions, I took the opportunity to tell her about the visions and the sleepwalking episode I’d had a few days ago. I didn’t get into all the details, but just told her about what I thought had happened.
Dr. Ryan looked more serious now.
“Nightmares and hallucinations are pretty common after a lightning strike. Though I’ve never heard of a case of sleepwalking quite like this one. But it could be a result of shock.”
“I don’t think you get it . . .” I said before realizing how arrogant I must sound.
But she took the critique with an easy smile.
“It’s not all simple equations when you’re dealing with the human brain, Mr. Harper. But I do understand your concern. If you like, you can get a second opinion.”
“No, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to insinuate . . .”
“I understand, don’t worry. No doctor could say with one hundred percent certainty she knows exactly what’s going on with this case. Hold on just a second . . .”
She walked over to a bookshelf, pulled out a small date book, and started flipping through.
“There’s a doctor in Belfast, a renowned sleep expert. His name is Kauffman. He has published extensively on the treatment of sleepwalking and other sleep disorders through hypnosis. He’s the foremost authority on the subject. Maybe it’d be worth a visit.”
Dr. Ryan wrote down his name and telephone number and handed it to me along with the prescriptions.
“Although, honestly, I think your headaches will disappear by themselves in a matter of time.”
I nodded in agreement, trying to make up for my lapse in manners. I left her office and remembered what Judie had told me earlier: They’re just going to give you more pills. And I decided I’d probably wait before taking any more pills or calling that doctor in Belfast. Maybe Dr. Ryan was right, and it’d all go away on its own.
I DIDN’T WANT to be alone that afternoon, but Judie was busy at the hostel, and when I reached the crossroads at Bill’s Peak, I thought about heading to Leo and Marie’s. But at the last minute, I turned the wheel in the other direction.
When I pulled up to my house, the ocean was lapping gently onto the beach, and a pair of clouds floated over the horizon. I took off my shoes and walked barefoot over the grass. I’d just mowed the lawn two days ago, but maybe I’d give it another trim. I had no desire to be inside with the piano. I knew there was no point in risking another bout of anxiety.
I ended up standing in front of the wood fence. Leo and I had managed to give about half the slats one coat of white paint, which stood out against the verdant lawn.
I kneeled down and felt the ground around the bottom of the fence; it was flat and solid. The grass was thick and lush. Not a single sign of being disturbed or dug up. I grabbed the fence and tried to shake it, but it was solid as an oak.
I recalled how I’d seen it a few nights ago, knocked to the ground, split in two. The dirt all around it had been dug up as if something had knocked it clean out of the ground. I sat on the grass and stayed there a long time, thinking. What had happened that night? Something inside me told me it was a sign. A message.
After sitting there awhile, I had an idea. I went inside and rifled through my files and magazines until I found my address book.
I called my friend Imogen Fitzgerald, who worked for the property management company. She was busy at work. Her voice was bright and cheerful.
“How’s it going, Pete?”
I’d been meaning to call her for two weeks about the issue with the septic tank grate, so I used that as the excuse for my call. I told her about the problem, and she said they’d send someone out ASAP (which I know would mean a month). In the meantime, she suggested covering it up so I wouldn’t wreck my lawn mower again. After that, I ran out of things to say.
“So, how’s everything over there? Adjusting well to your new life?”
I didn’t know how put my question to her, so in the end I just had to come out with it. I asked her how long her company had been managing my property and whether anything “strange” or noteworthy had ever happened there.
“We’ve been managing the property for about five years. It belongs to an American family from Chicago. You know, Irish descendants. They visited the motherland one summer, fell in love, bought a house, but never came back. It’s been rented only three times since then. An American family three summers ago. Two years ago, a German student spent a spring and summer there studying migratory birds. And I know it was also occupied in February of 2007. Weird though, I don’t have a lot of details about that one. Why, is there something wrong, Pete? You didn’t find a body in the attic did, you? Buried treasure in the yard?”
“The person who rented the house in February. Was it a woman?”
“The paperwork I have doesn’t say. Sorry. It could’ve been someone within the company. They do that sometimes. It was paid for in advance by wire transfer. I could look into it. But only if you tell me what the hell is going on.”
“It’s stupid, Imogen. You’re going to laugh, actually. The other day a friend came by and said she felt some kind of . . . ‘presence’ in the house. We’d been drinking a little bit. She said she’s always had a sixth sense for these kinds of things and she felt the presence of a woman.”
“What, a ghost, Pete? Don’t tell me . . .”
“I didn’t take it seriously,” I said, stopping her, “but I’m curious whether there might be something to it.”
“Fair enough. Thanks, Imogen.”
I hung up feeling a bit like an idiot. There was a note of sarcasm in her voice and why not? It was a ridiculous request. I tried to put it out of my mind by going into the shed, starting up the lawn mower, and giving the yard a once over. The engine noise rattled the quiet afternoon like thunder.
PART TWO
ONE
JIP AND BEATRICE had to fly into Dublin so that we could visit my father, who hadn’t seen his grandchildren in nearly a year.
I Skyped with Clem a week before the trip and she was on-board with the idea. She offered to pay for half the airfare, but I insisted on taking care of all their expenses for their stay in Ireland. Sure, it was a stupid pride thing, and God knows my finances weren’t as stable as I’d like them to be. But I hated the idea of Niels—Clem’s new boyfriend—and his money having an iota of influence on our idyllic vacation time together.
I could see her perfectly on the video chat. She wore her hair short and wavy now—it looked good on her—and she looked to have gotten some sun. I imagined she and Niels had recently taken one of their trips to yet another exotic location. She was the same smart and attractive woman she’d always been, except now our conversations were more strained. I tried to make the old jokes to get her to laugh, maybe even to flirt with her a little. But all my best intentions bumped up against a cold, hard reality: She was with someone else now. And she was no longer in love with me.
She mentioned Niels would be traveling to Turkey on a business trip during the kids’ vacation with me, and she was thinking of joining him. A trip through Cappadocia and the interior of the country. I said it sounded very impressive, with a note of sarcasm and poorly hidden jealousy.
The Last Night at Tremore Beach Page 6