Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (98 page)

“Aye, but d’ye think ye’ll be able to keep Casey here for long?”

Her voice was grim when she answered. “Oh, he’s going to stay whether he bloody likes it or not. I refuse to go back there until
I’m
ready.”

“And what if,” there was a deep sympathy in the dark eyes, “yer never ready?”

“Would that be so terrible, Pat? To live out here? Surely there are buildings that need repair and houses to be built? I can still work for Jamie. I don’t need to be in his house to sign papers and conduct meetings.”

He looked at her face for a long moment and nodded. “Of course I’ll bring the wee laddie here to ye.” He forbore to say anything else and she thought, not for the first time, that he possessed a quiet wisdom that his brother sometimes did not.

After Pat left, with assurances he would be back
the next day with Conor and Finbar, she felt suddenly afraid, as though she did not know what to do, how to deal with the shattered body on the bed, a body that she knew better than her own in many ways, and yet frightening to her now with all its injuries. This sudden feeling of fragility had come upon her more than once during this pregnancy and she felt herself wanting to wrap herself around this person in her body and just hide away from the world that seemed ever more chaotic and frightening to her with each event that whirled out of the maelstrom of Northern Ireland’s politics and violence.

She set about tidying the cottage, washing up the few dishes from the meal she had managed to convince Pat he needed before setting off back toward Belfast. Then she swept the floors and contemplated washing them, though without a mop and with her stomach the size it was, it seemed unlikely that she could manage it. It was all in the cause of avoiding her husband, she knew, of staying busy enough with mindless tasks that she didn’t have to absorb what had happened to him, to them. Because it terrified the hell out of her.

She looked around the small room, taking in its corners and shadows, the cream colored dishes with their garland of blackberries and ivy, the deep stone sink and the ancient dripping tap. They had spent their first week as a married couple here, both euphoric and frightened by the bold, sudden step they had taken.Yet in many ways it had not seemed sudden at all, rather inevitable, for she had once told Casey she had been married to him from the minute she saw him. The ceremony had only made it a legal arrangement, for it had always been binding.

Outside, twilight had taken hold, softening the outlines of trees and plants, painting long watercolor blues and purples across the horizon. On a distant hill, she saw a man walking, the space between cottage and man rendering him small and still like a figure in a painting. Beyond was the sea. She could hear the shush and roar of it in her inner ear, feel it along her skin, a pricking awareness that called to her despite her worry.

“Ye’ve washed that countertop five times now, Jewel. Ye’ll wear it out if yer not careful.”

She started slightly, for she hadn’t realized he was awake. She could feel him watching her and knew that her tension was telegraphing itself to him despite the fog of the painkillers.

“Pamela, stop. Just quit bustlin’ about. I know what yer doin’, but it won’t help.”

She turned to find him braced in the doorway of the bedroom, bruises not as prominent in the dim light but the lines of his body speaking eloquently in the language of pain.

“I think I’m afraid to stop moving,” she said quietly, “afraid that I’ll fly into a thousand pieces if I stop to think, or breathe deep or truly look at you. I feel like I’m made of glass, very thin glass, that’s been blown beyond the limits of its strength.”

“Then come here an’ let me be yer strength,” he said.

She shook her head. “Look at the state of you, man. I don’t need you to be strong for me right now. I just need you to heal and be well.”

“I’m workin’ on that love, but in the meantime, d’ye think ye might come and lie with me? The pain eases when ye touch me.”

She helped him back to the bed, not an easy task as he shouldn’t have been up at all, and it took every bit of his strength to make his way back to a prone position. She knelt on the bed, still feeling as though she were porous material, something through which every wind and storm might easily pass, shattering her internal landscape beyond her control. Casey raised his right hand, thankfully the least damaged of the two, and touched her jawline, fingers tender despite the splints and bandages.

“Will ye do somethin’ for me?”

“Of course.”

“Take yer clothes off—an’ ye needn’t give me that look,” he said in response to her raised eyebrow. “I only want to look at you an’ the babe.”

She took her clothes off and put them on the chair beside the bed, then lay down beside him.

He did just look at her for a few moments, silent, his field of vision restricted to his left eye, and that only a slit through which he could peer. But flesh had a sight of its own, and so he touched the round of her breast, soft as a whisper, his hand coming to rest on the swell of belly under which their child stirred and turned, a small fist making contact with the bruised and broken bones of its father.

“Hello, wee love,” Casey said and bent his head to kiss the taut skin that lay between him and his child. “Daddy has missed ye.”

She cupped the back of his head, careful where she touched, hoping to impart through her hands some form of healing to counteract the hatred that had been inflicted on his body.

Beneath Casey’s lips the baby, butterfly-winged, fluttered softly and then stretched until it seemed the flesh that separated child from father must dissolve. She realized with shock that Casey was crying, the tears running hot and salty down the slope of her belly.

She reached down and laid her hand carefully over his, wishing she could grasp him tight to her body and keep him there, safe. But knowing also that she could not do that, and realizing it was this in part that made their love a thing of both painful fragility and overwhelming strength, like a butterfly that a light touch could damage, yet was strong enough to cross continents and oceans in order to find its way home.

“I thought I had died, Pamela.”

“What?”

“When I went down in the water, I blacked out an’ was certain I was dead. Only there wasn’t light the way people say, just all these stars, billions of them, rushing past me an’ a great wind, cold an’ streamin’. But none of that mattered because I could only think of you an’ the babies an’ that I was leavin’ ye all alone. An’ I swear, mad as it sounds, I could feel the pain ye felt because I was gone, or maybe it was my own pain at losin’ all of ye. I only know I was as alone as I have ever been in this world, an’ I  was afraid.”

She took a careful, quiet breath, fighting the tears that surged behind her eyes.

“They held a gun to my head for a good bit, even pulled the trigger, but the chamber was empty. I’m not sure why the man didn’t pull it again.”

“Oh, Casey… I wish I had been here right away. Pat said you made him wait the night.”

“I was afraid, Jewel, of what it would do to the baby, that maybe the shock would cause ye to lose her.”

“Her?”

“Aye, that’s my wee girl in there. I know it sure as I know the sky is blue.”

She closed her eyes for a moment, swallowing hard. Seeing him, normally so strong, broken down both physically and emotionally like this was almost more than she could bear. She wished she could cradle him in her body, keep him safe from the world the way she did their child.

“Just forgive me in advance, Jewel, because I’m goin’ to say all sorts of silly, sentimental things to both you an’ the babe. I’m still half off my head with painkillers an’ it’s all wantin’ to pour out of me, an’ I don’t think I’m able to stop it.”

“Say what you need to, man. You’re safe here.”

The night had risen up from the deeps of the earth and closed in around the cottage, soft and protective, as if the dark were a sea of safety and refuge and they here secure on an island of linen and pillows and woolen quilts. Pamela felt her anxiety ebb with the loss of the light and relaxed, breathing in Casey’s scent, a thing that always calmed her body, even now with its coppery salt notes of blood.

He did say a great many sentimental things to both her and to the shifting mound of her belly, but none of them seemed the least bit silly. She stroked his back softly while he did so, watching the play of firelight on his body, the bruises and the weals of blood, and thought, not for the first time, that love was a strange and mysterious force and that the weight of it could feel like salvation or damnation, changing from minute to minute.

His voice became increasingly drowsy, the gaps between words longer with each half-phrase or sweetly mumbled tenderness. Outside was the world with all its troubles and violence, its heartache and loss, and the gut-wrenching fear she knew every time this man was gone from her for too long. But for now the firelight held them softly in its heat, gilding the bruises and hiding the worst of Casey’s pain as well as her own tears.

“Go to sleep,” she said softly. “I’ll watch over you. The troubles will keep for tomorrow.”

Chapter Seventy
July 1975
The Force That Through the Green Fuse…

The summer passed quietly, with a strange peace
settling over their household. Sometimes Pamela felt as though they were in a state of suspension, a warm bath of happiness and ease.

Casey was healing up far quicker than she had expected when she first surveyed the severity of his injuries. His bruises were still visible but fading quickly under the ministrations of the sun. Two of his fingers were still splinted but with far less bandaging now. His ribs still caught him if he moved too swiftly or turned too sharply. Most importantly though, his spirit was intact and when she looked into his eyes he no longer looked away as he often had those first few days, when he had not wanted her to see the fear there. In typical fashion, he had found work restoring an old cottage three miles from their own for an American couple who planned to retire to Ireland.

She wondered if Pat had had a word with Casey, for when he had brought Conor to them he had gone into the bedroom with his brother and not come out for a good half hour. She had heard their two voices raised in anger and Pat reappeared looking things not lawful to be uttered. But after that Casey had agreed to stay the summer. She had not questioned it for fear he would change his mind.

The summer weather, in most un-Irish fashion, had been sublime and they had all turned nut brown in the sun, returning each night to the cottage, sandy, salty, sleepy and perfectly happy. Conor had taken to the sea with a vengeance, squealing in utter delight each time it hove into view. Casey, watching with a wry smile, had quirked a brow at her and said in a dry tone, “If he wasn’t the spit of me, I would think ye’d been consortin’ with a merrow, the way he loves the water.”

One night after her men were asleep she had slipped quietly out of the house and down to the strand, lit by rippling shadows, as small clouds chased across the face of the moon. She waded into the water as far as she dared—her swimming abilities not quite what they normally were—and stood letting the salt water flow and ebb around her. Her body caught the rhythm of the sea and surged with it in tides of amniotic fluid. The entire planet this night seemed neither more nor less than a mother itself, a great womb, its tides akin to the blood that sluiced through her swollen veins, its salt the exact ratio of her own tears. It lapped against her skin, tracing the places her husband had left evidence of himself, the salt and musk of his body still lingering, making her body flush in remembrance and stretch with a satiety that felt utterly in tune with the night and the surge of the tide.

She felt sheltered, enfolded in the mystery of this oldest mother of all, the one that never abandoned her children, though she could treat them with the disdain of ten thousand furies. The concept of Earth as mother was not new, but it was the first time she had felt the bone-deep truth of it with every breath and each hot salt shimmer of blood that rushed in and out with the tide.

There were times she thought she caught a glimpse of this woman, an image caught deep in dreams but living always at the root of the female memory, held there in the cells and the spine, the heart and the womb, of the mother that cradled all and made of life a sacred, if difficult, thing. There was a rhythm to the earth, to the rain and the sun, that seemed purely female, a rhythm of fertility and rest, of the force that drove the green fuse through the flower, to paraphrase Dylan Thomas. It was a rhythm she felt herself when the baby moved or stretched in one of those watery balletic turns that made her body feel every bit of its oceanic makeup.

She had awakened this morning with a great restlessness in her limbs, remembering from the pregnancy with Conor that though it heralded the imminence of birth, it could also last several weeks. Nevertheless, she had craved movement and freedom, so when Peg came by offering to take Conor for the afternoon she jumped at the opportunity to leave the environs of the house and yard.