Landing (9 page)

If ye will still abide in this land,
then will I build you,
and not pull you down,
and I will plant you,
and not pluck you up.

—JEREMIAH 42:10

Síle was parked illegally, helping Marcus pack all his worldly goods into a borrowed van. She picked up a box of glass fisherman's floats and slid it under an antique sewing-machine table. "I thought you said Eoghan and Paul and Tom were coming too?"

"Mm," said Marcus, "then I realized there wouldn't be enough room in the van for all of us. But I trust your muscles. Since I left the airline, my arms have turned to goo."

Síle deposited an armchair upside down on a small sofa. "It'll be worse now you're moving hundreds of miles from civilization. Country bumpkins drive everywhere and get fat."

Marcus laughed. "I'll risk it: It's time to put my roots down. That awful Basingstoke boarding school never felt like home, and my dad had so many postings I never knew whether I'd be spending the summer in Prague or Mexico City or Jo'burg."

"Pity about you. It's not like you stopped moving the minute you grew up."

"Oh, travel's a bad habit, an itch. An unnatural lifestyle," he pronounced with priestly relish.

"Didn't you see
Winged Migration?
" She was crawling to the back of the van with a nodding asparagus fern.

"The birdie thing? I prefer my film stars human."

"They spend most of their lives on the wing, back and forth; it's like this secret pulse throbbing through the planet."

"They have brains the size of peanuts," Marcus pointed out.

"It's even written into our language.
Uplifted
—" She searched for more examples. "
Moved, transported, carried away
... Doesn't
ecstasy
mean something like 'out of place'?" she wondered.

"Dunno, but Eoghan and Tom are bringing some down tomorrow to celebrate my move."

She laughed.

There was barely room for the two of them in the front of the van, with their seat backs very upright. "Just as well we're used to confined spaces," said Marcus, pulling out into traffic. "Remember that time in the forty-seater, stuck on the tarmac at Shannon, waiting for them to change a bulb?"

Síle groaned. "Two hours of apologizing, creeping up and down that aisle like Quasimodo. I thought my neck would never straighten again."

"See? You're not going to lose me as a friend, not after times like that."

They edged through the capital's westward sprawl, and it began to drizzle. They discussed Marcus's work doing exquisite drawings of improbable inventions people wanted to patent, his dying sister in Bath—"liver disease, and the poor girl never had more than the odd sherry"—and Síle's nephews. "The irony is, Orla had two boys and was desperate for a girl, so she and William tried again and had twins, John and Paul—named for the Pope."

"That'll be Our Lord's famous sense of humour."

"Here's Kieran making his first Holy Communion, in a cummerbund," said Síle, holding up the photo. "Isn't that the cutest pair of trousers you've ever seen?"

"And I've seen some cute trousers in my time."

"Speaking of which, isn't it going to reduce your social prospects, holing up in the wilds?"

"Well, the thing is," said Marcus, rubbing his shaved head, "I've already slept with all the Dublin guys I'd ever have any interest in."

"What, all of them, you slag?"

"It's not that big a city." He turned off the wipers as the sun struggled through the clouds.

Síle stared at some unkempt horses grazing along the verge of the motorway. On the green horizon, a ruined tower kept appearing in glimpses. "You sound so world-weary."

"Do you remember your first love?" Marcus asked suddenly.

"Of course: Trish the unemployed activist."

"No, not who. Do you really remember what it was like?"

Puzzled, Síle weighed her memories. "Only some of it," she admitted. "The surprise. The glee."

Marcus nodded. "You're such a goggle-eyed baby the first time, aren't you? Having your big adventure, making landfall on a mysterious island. But then the fruit turns out to be sour or a storm blows up, and you paddle off again on your raft. Only now you're getting to be a seasoned island-hopper, and no matter how beautiful the next is, you can't forget that it's just one of many, the sea's littered with islands."

"Jaysus wept," said Síle under her breath.

"Sorry, I'll shut up and put on the radio, will I?"

A Mozart concert took them through Meath, Westmeath, Longford ... The midlands of Ireland had once been a lake, and as far as Síle was concerned they should have stayed that way. After soup and scones in Carrick-on-Shannon, Marcus turned off the N4 onto a series of little winding roads, cutting north to the Iron Mountains.

"Last week, I flew to L.A. and back twice with that fluffhead Noreen Cassidy," Síle was telling him, "and by the time the shuttle dropped me home I was ready to stick a plastic fork in her Botoxed cheek."

"Is she the one with an obsession with Christmas?" asked Marcus.

"No, you're thinking of Tara Dempsey. Tara bakes her Christmas cakes in August, gets her shopping done in September," cooed Síle. "Noreen's the one—remember, we were all in a Persian restaurant in Chicago once, and I'd just had a manicure, and you insisted on explaining to the group why women of my persuasion don't tend to have long nails?"

He hooted. "When she finally got it—she was
scarlet,
" he recalled in his best faux-Dublin accent. "Seriously, Síle, how do you stick it? They're not in your league."

"By what measure?" she asked.

"Brain-cell count, politics, sense of humour, ability to tell Almodóvar from Alessi..."

She shrugged. "Nuala's a decent sort, and Catherine, and Justin. And nobody gives me a hard time for being queer, not since that one pilot who moved to Qantas."

"That's the law, not a basis for gratitude," snapped Marcus. "My point is, with your talents, you should be..."

"What? If you know of the ideal job—"

He puffed out a breath. "Sparkling companion to technical artist?"

She laughed. "Buy a penthouse in Manhattan and we'll talk."

They'd been on the road more than four hours when the van rattled across two cattle grids and turned sharply right up a muddy lane. Marcus braked in the yard beside what looked like a derelict barn. "Ta-da!"

The barn had windows, Síle noticed as she walked up to it, which meant it was actually the house.

Marcus slung his arm over her shoulder. "I warned you I couldn't afford anything fit for human habitation. I'm going to turn into one of those grotesque, decaying bachelors out of a Molly Keane novel."

"It's big," she managed. "Lots of room for, for improvement."

Marcus laughed and sniffed the moist March air. "The soil's peaty but the drainage isn't bad at all, for Leitrim. See the corner where the slates have come off? That's going to be my office; it gets the morning light. All I have to do is persuade them to put in a land line, so I can get broadband Internet."

"It doesn't even have a phone?"

"C'mon, let's have a cuppa, that's the thing for shock. The kitchen's got glass in the windows," he assured her.

On her third cup of tea, Síle stared out the window at the lone sheep munching the grass. All she could hear was her heartbeat and the occasional squeak of a bird. "Well, if you don't die of pleurisy by the summer..."

Marcus threw another log into the new yellow Aga. "You're such an urbanite, you wouldn't be able to sleep without the constant shriek of car alarms. James, he's the neighbour I was telling you about, he and Sorcha run this organic farm that abuts my land—"

"Listen to you with your new country vocabulary—abutting,
mar dhea!
"

"Well, James thinks this place could be three hundred years old."

She peered up at the cobwebs. "I suppose it takes a few centuries for something to fall apart as thoroughly as this."

"Say what you like, I'm going to be blissful here," said Marcus, taking another of his homemade lemon biscuits. "Now come out and look at the best thing."

"It's raining again."

"Barely a drop." He led her across the nettle-choked yard, around several hedges, into a field that sloped away down the mountain.

Síle could see nothing but gray cloud. "The sheep?"

"No, you twit, the stones."

She stared at the nearest rock, which had a few tufts of wool caught on it. Marcus pointed to another, and then to a grass-covered lump, and another behind a blackthorn ... and suddenly she could see it. "A circle!"

"I know they're not literally standing stones anymore, because half are lying down and the other half have been carted away by the locals to build pigsties. But it's still magic, isn't it?"

She slid her arm around her friend's waist. His gray Aran cardigan smelled of wood smoke. "Colonist! You Brits swan over here with your fortunes and your fancy vans, you buy up our timeless Celtic heritage—"

He let out a rip of laughter and pointed down. "On a clear day, you can see all the way to Lough Allen."

They headed back to the house with dripping fistfuls of coltsfoot, barren strawberry, and herb robert (or so Marcus claimed; it was all greenery to Síle). "So I've been e-mailing this Canadian," she said out of nowhere.

"Which Canadian?"

"The one I'm about to tell you about." She produced a stiff little summary of Jude Turner.

"Is she gorgeous?"

She gave him a hard look. Then, "Yes, actually." She let herself picture the narrow shoulders, the chaste face. "But she lives five time zones away, so that's irrelevant."

"It's always relevant."

"She writes interesting e-mails," Síle snapped. They walked on, skirting a huge stretch of nettles. "Forget I said anything," she said, to keep the conversation from ending.

Marcus tucked his arm into hers. "What's going on, Síle?"

"Nothing, virtually. I don't know," she added after a minute.

"Are you and Kathleen having trouble?"

"No," she said bleakly. "Everything's fine. As always."

"Are you bored, or what?"

Síle dropped his arm. "Kathleen's not boring. I know you and Jael have never quite clicked with her, but that's partly because she doesn't want to intrude—"

"I didn't say she was boring," he cut in gently. "I asked if you were bored."

Síle didn't answer. She could have said "no," or "yes," or "no more than I've been for years." She kicked a tree branch out of her path. She spoke under her breath: "It's not about boredom. It's not about ... I wasn't out looking for anything, you know."

"I know you weren't." He waited. "Is it getting serious, with this Jude character?"

"It can't be," said Síle through her teeth. "And if you look at it objectively, she and I have feck-all in common. She's so young, she's ensconced over there in Nowhere, Ontario, and her idea of a wild night out is a slide show on Ojibway arrowheads." She felt like a traitor for giving this example.

Marcus said nothing.

"And while it's great fun sending dispatches between our two planets, it'll fizzle out in the end. It's in the nature of things."

Your nearest exit may be behind you.

—passenger briefing

As Jude walked back from the museum on Sunday, the pink light drained out of the western sky. The ice shifted and slid under her boots; trees dripped loudly; squirrels hurried about their business. It was only a temporary thaw, of course, but still.

Every time she came home, these days, she had to steel herself. Not so much against the ache of grief as a sense of disorientation. When she read at the dining room table or played her guitar on the living room rug, her ears kept pricking for the front door opening, her mother's step in the hall. To be living alone in Number 9, Main Street, felt strangely surreptitious; it was as if Jude were a burglar, or no, a glue-sniffing runaway. (And the funny thing was, Jude knew she just might have gone that way, if her yen for history hadn't given her something to hold onto; after her parents split up hadn't she tried truancy, drink, and whatever toxic substances she could get hold of?) These days the house was too big for her, too dense with memory, too serious a responsibility—and yet it wasn't as if she wanted to live anywhere else.

Rizla's tangerine pickup was parked out front, and he was stretched out on the porch swing. She put her hand on his red bandana to wake him. "What are you doing, sleeping outside?"

"I like that," he said blearily. "I tell my cousins you need my help moving your shit around, then you stand me up, leave me laying here for an hour..."

"Oh Riz, I'm so sorry! It went right out of my head."

He let out a phlegmy cough.

"Which cousins?"

"Dan and Wiggie. Where've you been, anyway? Is there some fun going on downtown and nobody told me?" he asked, rolling his eyes ironically toward the Silent crossroads.

"I was in the museum."

Rizla shaded his eyes from the low sun. "On a Sunday? Does somebody need some history, like, ASAP?"

"Just e-mail," she muttered, pushing the stiff front door.

"Aha, the trolley dolly!" He stepped into the hall and kicked off his boots. "You two doing this a lot?"

Jude didn't answer at first, and then she said, "Couple times a day."

"Get outta here," crowed Rizla.

"Well, except if we're really run off our feet," she qualified. "But then on a quiet day we might send five or six."

He whistled. "You talk on the phone too?"

Jude shook her head. "Stop jumping to conclusions. She's got a partner. "
Kathleen (my girlfriend). Girlfriend = partner.

"Uh-huh..."

"No, seriously. Five years," she made herself add.

"It's not a score."

Jude headed into the kitchen to put some coffee on. "I'm really sorry I forgot about the big clear-out. Nothing's ready."

"Better this way," he told her. "Don't think about it, just keep or chuck. Let the purge begin!" Thumping his chest like a gorilla.

Rachel had had a weakness for estate sales—well, it was a sociable way to spend winter Saturdays—and strangely broad tastes. "That ottoman can definitely go," Jude decided. "And the easel. Do you think we can manage the La-Z-Boy between us?"

"Just open the double doors and stand aside, girlie," said Rizla, picking up the recliner in a bear hug.

"Don't slip a disc, now."

He staggered into the hall, where he knocked a small fern to the floor as he put the recliner down.

"Do you have to lean it on your bad foot?" she asked. Years ago, a car Rizla had been working on had slipped its brakes and rolled over his toes; there was talk of compensation, but he'd never seen a cent.

"Where's all this stuff going?"

"The Goodwill in Goderich, if you wouldn't mind driving it over tomorrow?"

"I could do with one of these," he panted, heaving the La-Z-Boy into the air again.

"Really? It makes me feel like I'm disabled, to crank my legs into the air. Where's it going to fit in your trailer?"

"Beside the couch," he said, a vein in his throat standing out. "Though Ma Turner's gonna spin in her grave the first time I spill pop on the velour!"

His flippancy made things easier, oddly enough. She followed him out to the pickup with boxes of china stacked up to her chin. "Hey, careful of my music system."

"This piece of crapola?" Rizla shoved it aside with his foot. "Come round some night and listen to Duke Ellington on
my
speakers."

"If you didn't spend all your cash on guy toys," Jude remarked, "you might have the down payment on a house by now."

"You are so middle-class." He grinned broadly, then doubled over with a wet cough.

As they went back inside, Jude rubbed him between the shoulder blades. "Why don't you go see Dr. Percy?"

"Last time, he read me the riot act about sugar—"

"Possibly because two of your uncles have lost toes to diabetes?"

"—then he tried to put his hand up my hole! Freaking perv."

Jude's laugh rang strangely through the building. The acoustics were different already; the house was becoming sparer, more her own.

Rizla lifted a peacock-backed wicker chair in one hand and tossed it toward her. When she lunged forward and caught it, he grinned. "Don't ever forget who taught you how to catch."

"You nearly broke this lamp."

"Sorry I missed. Put it out of its misery?"

Jude considered it, a vaguely Deco naked dancer in yellow and brown glass. With a wink, Rizla shoved over a large box full of canned vegetables past their sell-by dates. Jude's hands shook slightly as she picked up the lamp.
Sorry, Mom, but it's the ugliest thing in the world.
She let it fall into the box with a smash.

He flopped down on the old plaid couch. "So with you and this Irish chick—has the L-word been mentioned?"

Jude stared at him. "You mean lesbian?"

"I mean
luuuuuve,
" crooned Rizla in his best Elvis voice.

"No," she said, her face heating up.

"So you're what, buds?"

"I suppose." On impulse, Jude pulled out her wallet and tugged a cut-down snapshot from behind her driver's license. "Síle sent me this last week, with a packet of soda bread. You need glasses," she pointed out, as he examined the picture at arm's length.

"Yadda yadda yadda. I hate to tell you, buds don't send each other pictures. Doesn't look forty," he added when Jude didn't answer. "Or Irish."

"Her mother was from India. And she's thirty-nine: a year younger than you."

"Yeah, but gals age faster. She's pretty all right, but not my type," said Rizla. "All that gold and lipstick, kinda scary."

Jude sat down beside him and took the photo back. "The thing is, Riz, the brush-cut tomboys you like tend not to sleep with guys, which means you may never find another girlfriend."

"Fine by me. Trailer to myself, popcorn at three A.M., nobody changing the channel or bugging me to get a mortgage..."

"You're going to wind up as a headline: 'Ireland Ont. Loner Found Frozen in Trailer, Partially Eaten by Dog.'"

"Siouxsie wouldn't partially eat me," he protested. "If she went to the trouble of starting, she'd leave nothing but buttons and boots."

"She needs a new flea collar, by the way."

"Why do you keep thinking up way-out ways for me to die, anyway? I've made it through forty years in one piece—more or less," he qualified, glancing at the fingertip he'd lost to a fishing knife—"and I only had you cooking me your health-food shit for one of them." His tone had a rare touch of hardness. "And I've got family, which is more than you can say: There's thirty different doors I could knock on and they'd take me in."

Jude stared at the floor.

"I guess that was kind of a low blow," he said after a minute. "I wasn't thinking."

"Hey, you've gotten this far, why start now?"

"I take it back."

She tried to smile. "Me too. You're going to live long and prosper."

"Make it so," he answered in a
Star Trek
voice.

The guy did her favour after favour, and she acted like a cross between a petulant sibling and a scolding mother. It was so hard to climb out of ruts. Old habits, old jokes, old arguments, tease, nag, tease, nag, push, pull.

Whereas in her e-mails to Síle, Jude felt brand new. Where was Síle today—Dubrovnik, was it? Or Tenerife? Had she gone out for a raucous happy hour with the rest of the crew, or was she sleeping effortlessly between starched hotel sheets? Or home in Dublin, of course; Jude reminded herself of that possibility. In bed with
my partner Kathleen.

The ground was almost clear of snow, but the evening was turning sharp; the small burlapped trees in front yards stood like goblins turned to stone. When the two of them had finally squeezed the La-Z-Boy into Rizla's trailer, they shared a pot of Jude's venison stew. His cousins had headed back to the rez. Jude rolled a joint, then another, then they wound up in bed.

She stared up at the ceiling, where the cracks seemed to form a map of the rivers of the Huron Tract, in the era when they were the only lines carved into the wilderness. "I think maybe that was the last time."

Rizla let out a cough of laughter. "Dang, if I'd known, I'd have pulled out all the stops." His bare chest gave off a cloud of heat. The blue snake tattoo stood out on his wrist where his hand trailed over the edge of the mattress onto the black fake fur rug. Siouxsie came over and licked it; he scratched her hard behind one crooked ear.

Jude turned on her side, and felt her exposed hip bump the floor through the thin futon. She laid one palm against Rizla's hairless chest; she heard a thumping, and couldn't tell whether it was his pulse or her own. "The thing is, I'm lying here thinking about somebody else."

"I know that."

She shouldn't ever waste her time trying to keep the truth from him, Jude decided. Or from herself.

"You realize you'll probably never see this chick again as long as you both shall live?"

"Fuck you," said Jude, turning her back. Suddenly shivery, she wrenched up the comforter. Her eyes found that dent where Rizla had punched right through the drywall, in one of his occasional rages; she couldn't remember what that fight had been about. She stared at the beer bottle on the floor beside an old moccasin his sister had made him, and the pizza crust that Siouxsie was gnawing. "This place is a hovel."

"Oh, so now it's the décor that's a turn-off?" His breath was hot on the nape of her neck.

She curved her feet around his. "And if you don't cut these toenails sometime, they'll curl round and grow back in." She was memorizing the feel of him. Then she sat up, goose-pimpled, and reached for her red flannel shirt.

"But hey, you know," said Rizla, head back on his joined hands, "you're welcome to lie here and dream about your sweet colleen anytime; no skin off my dick."

"Síle's not mine," said Jude between her teeth. "She's taken. I wouldn't—I don't mess with couples."

"Oh yeah?"

She concentrated on doing her buttons.

"What do you call e-mailing somebody six times a day?"

Her fingers stopped moving. "I don't know," she said, her voice small. "I've got no clue what's going on." After a minute, she added, "I guess it seemed safe at first because she's so far away."

A warm, rough hand slid round her hips. "Don't worry about it. C'mere.

Jude shook her head. "We've got to break this habit, Riz. It feels ... off."

"Off?"

"Peculiar. Wrong."

"Like, morally?" he asked, sardonic.

Wrong in every neuron in her brain, every cell of her body. "Just take my word for it."

"Okay."

Half-dressed, she twisted around to read his face in the orange glow of the lava lamp. "Really?"

"Hey, it's not like we're married, you know?" Rizla let out a croak of laughter.

She giggled too. Dope did that.

"If you want to be faithful to some lady you've never got to first base with—be my guest."

Jude felt anger rise like a wave, then subside. "Good night." She poked him in the armpit with one foot, then went to lace up her boots by the door.

The paths were glassy with ice; she slipped at the corner and wrenched her knee slightly, the one she'd injured last summer. She let herself in the front door.

The phone started ringing when she was halfway up the stairs. "Turner residence," she answered; she couldn't seem to shed her mother's old phrase.

"Hello at last!"

"Hi?" said Jude, then "Sorry—"

"Jude, is that you?"

She waited, afraid of interrupting again.

"It's me, it's Síle."

Jude nearly dropped the phone. This wasn't the voice she'd been remembering. Her head was still spinning; she wished she hadn't had that joint. "Síle? Are you there?"

"Absolutely," came the squawk. "Sorry it's so late. How are you?"

"Fine," said Jude formally. "How about—"

But their voices clashed again. A long pause.

"It's a bad connection," roared Jude.

"I'm on my mobile, having a nasty breakfast in Dubrovnik; I just thought I'd see if you were still up," came the tinny voice.

"I am." And Jude couldn't think of a single solitary thing to say.

"This is a bit weird."

"Sure is."

"I just suddenly thought it was time we spoke live. So you're well?" asked Síle.

"Yeah." Jude thought she could smell Rizla on herself; she wished she'd had a shower.

The pause stretched like glue.

"You've been on my mind," said Síle, as if mentioning the weather.

Jude's pulse went
bam.
"You too."

"Oh shit, I have to go, my gate's just been called," said Síle shrilly.

Jude couldn't tell whether to believe her. "Another time?"

"Sure. Take care. Bye!"

"Bye." Jude put the phone down.
Well, so much for the wonders of modern communication.

She leaned against the hall table, her hands shaking. Her father's grandfather had made it out of an old door, back in Lincolnshire. A small square of streetlight lay on the bannisters. She thought she could do with a long walk, but the streets were treacherous; she might really break her knee this time. Guilt, confusion, excitement, grief, even, were like rockets going off in her head.