Daughter of the Storm

by Tina Callaghan

  Thirteen

  How blessed are some people, whose lives have no fears, no dreads; to whom sleep is a blessing that comes nightly, and brings nothing but sweet dreams.

  Bram Stoker, Dracula, 1897

  Lia leaned on the window and looked out into the fresh morning. Chill air pinched her cheeks. She felt a mixture of disbelief and happiness.

  Although she had argued with Jasmine about going to college, she had known that she would probably go eventually, once she figured out exactly what she wanted to do. There had been a vague image of a boy whose face she couldn’t make out in the back of her mind. She would meet him at college. He would be smart, probably aiming towards a career in law first and then politics. They would eventually marry and their lives would be easy, without an excess of emotion expressed in passion and rows as two opposites clashed out of frustrated love.

  But now that she had met Ed, she was able to see that the misty vision of her future was just a pretty veil – that she was trying to get away from the relationship her parents had.

  Ed was too tall, too odd, too deep and entirely uninterested in a normal career. They had talked for so long yesterday and been so honest that she felt she had known him for years. Unlike the imagined young man, he just wanted to take his photographs. He also wasn’t sure if he could ever leave the island. He couldn’t explain why to her and she could see that it wasn’t just that he couldn’t find the words. He didn’t understand why himself. The island had a grip on his soul in some way.

  After a long delicious time in the cave, they had walked up and down the beach, holding each other close, watching as the light faded from the sky, listening to the sound of the endless waves. There were silences between them that felt profound, broken by shared thoughts and memories, revealed histories and torments. He told her about his mother dying and what it had been like to look on her wax-like face after the life had passed out of her. He cried as she embraced him and the sound of his pain was swept away by the roll and hiss of waves coming towards them on the beach.

  Eventually, they had to leave as the tide came in and climb back up the path with its occasional steps. Ed had taken her hand at every slippery spot and together they made it to the top without incident. Without a word, he had turned her into his arms and hugged her in a way that was not as exciting as his kisses but made her feel like they were melting together. Some part of his heart had knit with hers and later, when she was alone in her room, she began to understand why her parents had stayed together for so long. Despite their differences, they must have felt this same entwining. No matter how they pulled against each other, the bond of love was stronger and impossible to escape.

  Except her father had escaped in his own way, onto the Devil’s Teeth. What Lia was feeling had to be love. She had never experienced it before. It was a wild crashing of sensation, of touch and taste and hunger and a bit of insanity. Her favourite books had described love, but she hadn’t expected the incredible force of it. A few days ago, she hadn’t known Ed. Yesterday, her stomach was a bit flippy when she saw him, her appetite decreased when she thought of him. But someone had thrown a magic cloak over them as they lay on the cold sand and bonded them forever.

  She watched boats in the distance. The sounds of the village reached her in a pleasant jingle-jangle of boats and gulls, carried on the sea breeze. She put her hands to her cheeks and felt heat. Her fingers were cold, but her face was burning. She didn’t feel sick, although she could have caught a cold sitting out so long on the beach. She was burning but not from illness. This fever was born in the heart.

  Her stomach suddenly dropped. What if Ed didn’t feel the same this morning? What if he was sleeping soundly down the corridor, not dreaming about her? She checked her reflection in the mirror. Hot hectic patches of red made it look like she had overdone the blusher.

  She quickly applied tinted moisturiser and a light brush of powder to hide behind. Unable to wait any longer, she tied up her boots and went out into the quiet corridor.

  She stood listening for any sound of life and almost screamed when Ed’s voice came from the stairwell.

  ‘Morning.’

  She saw her feelings shining in his honest face too and seemingly without movement they were in each other’s arms. He pressed kisses into her neck, making her shiver. She clung to him and he lifted her briefly off her feet. The heat in her cheeks travelled all over her body until she felt that she was on fire. His breathing, close to her ear, was laboured. They hadn’t even properly kissed yet. With obvious difficulty, he let her go, pushing her gently back against the wall, while he stepped back to his side of the corridor, putting a couple of feet of air between them.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, barely recognising her own voice.

  He chuckled and the sound was infectious.

  ‘So that’s OK then,’ he said. ‘I was worried that you wouldn’t …’

  ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘Wouldn’t feel so keen on me this morning.’ He made a rueful face.

  ‘I … feel …’ This time she stopped. She couldn’t say the word yet. It was too big.

  He nodded all the same. ‘Me too.’

  She fidgeted a bit and was almost brave enough to take the couple of steps back into his arms.

  ‘Breakfast,’ he said, possibly reading her indecision. ‘Breakfast would be safer.’ He grinned his crooked grin and held out his hand.

  She took it, smiling. His hand was big and warm and the touch of his skin made her shiver again.

  ‘We’ll go out later but bring a coat – the weather is starting to turn,’ he said, glancing out the window at the sky.

  ‘Do you all know what the weather is going to do?’

  ‘We get used to it, I suppose. It affects so much that we have to be ready.’

  Harry greeted them, his eyes dropping to their joined hands.

  ‘What’s this?’ he asked.

  Lia felt heat rise to her cheeks, but Ed got there before she spoke.

  ‘This is my girlfriend Lia.’

  Her stomach fluttered at the word, and the pride in his voice.

  ‘OK then,’ Harry said. ‘I think someone should make me a cup of tea. Some of us have been working half the day already.’

  Lia laughed and both she and Ed set about making tea and toast. They brushed against each other as they did, and Lia suddenly found everything ridiculously funny. Her chest was full of champagne bubbles that wanted to escape. Ed waggled his dark eyebrows at her and she tried to return the gesture but her eyebrows weren’t as expressive as his. He laughed good-naturedly at the faces she made trying to do it and she grinned at him, pleased.

  With tea and toast inside her, Lia looked around at the table and her companions with a sense of happiness that she realised she had been missing for a long time.

  Her eyes met Harry’s. He was watching her, his face still, his eyes dark. Her champagne bubbles went flat at the look in those eyes. They were flat pools of unknown depth, hiding who knew what.

  She glanced at Ed, more to take her eyes away from Harry than to attract his attention, but he was already watching her.

  She looked back at Harry.

  ‘Harry,’ she said, ‘what’s wrong?’

  Her uncle ran a hand over his face before leaning forward and resting an elbow on the table, looking from one to the other.

  ‘Ed, your dad hasn’t come back.’

  Ed shrugged. ‘I don’t know where he would be, except some pub somewhere.’

  ‘They’ll be bringing Frank’s body back later.’ He looked at Ed. ‘As the head of one of the old families, Dan should be here to help carry the coffin. If he’s not here, it should be you.’

  Lia frowned.

  ‘I’m not the head though,’ Ed said.

  ‘Aren’t you?’ Harry asked. ‘Think about it.’

  Ed was about to say something, but Lia saw him hesitate. He went still as though listening. After a moment, he nodded slowly.

  ‘You feel it, don’t you?�
�� Harry said.

  Ed nodded again. To Lia’s surprise, his eyes filled with tears. He swiped them away with his sleeve before they could fall.

  ‘Ed, what’s wrong? Harry?’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong, Lia,’ Harry said. ‘It’s an island thing. Nothing to worry about.’

  ‘It doesn’t look that way,’ she replied, turning to Ed.

  He took a deep breath and gave her a watery smile before asking Harry, ‘What time will he be over?’

  ‘Around one.’

  ‘OK,’ Ed said. ‘Lia, could we go for a walk for a while?’

  She nodded and got to her feet, leaving the used dishes on the table.

  They fetched their coats in silence and went outside.

  They set off along the cliff. The breeze was stiff and biting on Lia’s face. She pulled a woolly hat from her coat pocket and pulled it down over her ears. Ed hadn’t closed his jacket all the way up, but he didn’t seem to be feeling the chill. He held her hand tightly but didn’t speak – or couldn’t.

  Eventually, Lia couldn’t stand it and asked, ‘What happened, Ed? You realised something. Is it about your dad?’

  ‘No. Sort of.’ He shivered.

  Lia stopped and pulled the zip of his jacket up, covering his chest. He wrapped his arms around her and rested his head on her shoulder, bending to do it. She rubbed his back, beginning to feel really frightened.

  ‘Ed?’

  She felt him sigh before he straightened up, taking her hands. The breeze was blowing his hair the wrong way, making him look oddly vulnerable.

  ‘You know the way Harry said it was an island thing?’

  She nodded.

  ‘I never really thought about it before. Then, all at once, right there at the table, I felt … different. It was like I suddenly knew that Dan was gone. Dad, I mean. There’s no one else. I’m the last of my family.’

  ‘But your dad will probably come back in a few days, won’t he? Besides, you might have kids and they’ll carry on the family name.’ She blushed and felt annoyance at herself. She wasn’t usually a blusher.

  ‘It’s more than that. I thought …’ He stopped again and looked around.

  He let her hands go and turned around, his arms out.

  ‘Look at it!’ he said, raising his voice against the sharp breeze sheeting into their faces off the edge of the cliff, tasting of salt. ‘It’s beautiful and wicked and wild!’

  He pinwheeled, taking in a 360° view of the sea and the island.

  ‘I always thought that I’d escape it. I had to wait until I was old enough, then Mam got sick, so I had to stay. Then, somehow, the old man made me stay. I was sorry for him, even when I hated him.’

  He came back to her and put his arm around her waist.

  ‘What happened in there was that Harry made me realise that I’m never going to escape. I don’t think Dan will come back. I think he’s dead. I got this feeling in my chest, like … like someone just put a cement block on it.’

  ‘Ed, no one can make you stay here if you don’t want to. Look, come back to New York with me. You can take photographs of the city. There are lots of birds, I promise.’

  He shook his head. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said, not unkindly. ‘It’s not that anyone is going to make me stay. They don’t have to. Like Harry said, it’s an island thing.’

  He gave her a sad smile and bent to kiss her. It tasted like goodbye.

  Rose walked down the ramp of the ferry, vaguely aware that AJ was holding her elbow. She said thank you as he let her go and turned to go back up the ramp. This late in the year, she had been his only passenger and she was glad. She hadn’t told anyone she was coming back and there was no one to meet her. The undertaker was bringing the coffin later and she was expected to arrive with it, in a car provided by the funeral home. She hadn’t wanted that. She wanted to be back on the island before her dead husband was returned. She wanted just a few hours before it became the place where her husband was buried.

  AJ had done her a favour coming over early with just her aboard. He was a softer man than his father. Andrew might be descended from one of the original families, but AJ had his mother’s mainland blood in him. The ferry was the perfect job for him, travelling between both worlds.

  She wiped her face with a tissue. Despite herself, tears rolled down her cheeks. She didn’t even feel like she was crying. The tears just rolled from some interior reservoir like the sea, without command or obstruction.

  The men on the island thought they controlled everything. Rose didn’t know the full story but she knew enough, especially after seeing Frank. Maybe the other wives didn’t but Rose had spent enough time in the bar, serving drink to men who thought they were whispering, to have picked up some words here and there. Unlike some, she also knew how to keep her mouth shut.

  The baby changed everything. Rose hoped she would have time to mourn Frank properly but, right now, all that mattered was Becky and her infant son. In the long hours of waiting while her daughter was getting blood and recovering, Rose had had plenty of time to think.

  She didn’t have a plan so much as a mission. She was going to put an end to this before her family came back here, or they weren’t coming back. In the middle of the night, she had made Becky tell her what had happened, even though she didn’t want to.

  There had been something wrong with Frank the night she had come home from visiting Becky. She had known it at the time and Becky had known it when she met him at the bench the next day. Neither of them believed that Frank was still the person they had known. She supposed the men would take care of things as they had in the past. They would all be there to take charge of the coffin. Brendan, Jim and Evan would already have dug the hole and Harry would have made the rest of the arrangements. All the family would have to do is stand there and watch the ground close over the coffin and that would be the end of Frank. But Rose knew in her blood that there was something more. There were no words for it, but the whisper of her island blood as it ran through her veins, pumped by a mother’s heart, knew that there was danger beyond words. Someone or something had killed her husband and made him as he was now. And there was only one place on the island where that something could be.

  Fourteen

  Loneliness will sit over our roofs with brooding wings.

  Bram Stoker, Dracula, 1897

  Jasmine snapped awake, feeling someone shaking her. She sat up and put on the light, wide-eyed, confused. She was alone. Ash had wanted to stay over. He always did, but she wouldn’t allow it. When they spent the night together, it was always at his apartment, never the house she had shared with Will. Yet when she woke, she expected to see someone. If not Ash, then who?

  ‘Will,’ she said aloud into the empty bedroom.

  The sound seemed to echo through the room, out into the hall, down the stairs, around the kitchen, his study, the living room, searching through the empty silent house for someone who was not there and would never be there again.

  ‘Will,’ she said again, her voice feeling like a knot in her throat.

  She had cried since her husband had died, had cried when he left and many times over their topsy-turvy marriage. These tears were different. They tore loose from whatever mooring she had constructed in her heart and swept over her, a tempest of agony and despair. She wept until the bed cover across her knees was wet, until her sobs had become gasps and her heartbeat sounded in her head, a relentless, painful thump.

  Oh, if she could have him back, she would tell him … what? What would she say? Sorry, yes. I love you, yes, but it wasn’t enough. She had given up because he was too hard, and now there could be no forgiveness. Sorry was not enough to reverse the loss of a man such as him, to take back the hurt, the sharp words, even the passion of love that had hurt both of them.

  And what was left now? She was alone in a house too big for one. Her husband was in the ground, her child three thousand miles away on a cold island with winter coming, and the man who wanted to be with her was p
robably sleeping, dreaming of charts and figures. Jasmine shook her head. Ash was a good man. He hadn’t liked being the other man, but now that Will was gone he had settled into being a lovely boyfriend, sensible, kind, stable. It was unfair of her to imagine that his dreams were dull. He wasn’t dull.

  He just wasn’t Will. Too late, Jasmine realised that her husband had been irreplaceable. Emotional, lost, quick to anger, restless, passionate and utterly, uniquely himself. She had been hiding a gaping hole in her heart and, now that she had found it, it seemed as though it would never heal. She stayed awake, rubbing salt in her wounds, thinking of all the good and bad times, looking through photographs, diaries, mementos, tormenting herself to finally discover the full pain and love that had been there all along, masquerading as polite grief, acceptable mourning and moving on. It had been a beast, hiding, and it was out now. God help her, it was out.

  When dawn finally lifted the cloak of night, Jasmine took a long hot shower, scrubbing herself hard. She presented herself for inspection in front of the mirror that was usually kind to her. Red eyes, skin scrubbed almost raw, wet hair combed severely back from her face. She deserved to see herself just as she was. With all of her tricks and products removed, she looked like what she was. A lonely middle-aged woman trying to avoid her past while clinging to it like a shipwreck survivor.

  She took a deep breath and sighed, making herself a little dizzy. Tying her hair back in a wet ponytail, she dressed in yoga pants, a T-shirt and one of Will’s hoodies. Shoving her feet into sneakers, she grabbed her keys and ran from the house. Instead of getting a cab, she walked to Ash’s apartment down town and was waiting for him on the street when he emerged from the building.