The senator’s smile faded. “You all right, miss?” He asked gently. Alice nodded slightly. “You’ve been a great help. Can I ask your name?”
“Alice. Alice Grace Kyles,” Alice whispered, not letting go of his hand. “Sir, I want to say thank you, and… ” Alice lost the words. There was nothing she could say that would change his path; she didn’t know when or where, or even how. She stuttered slightly. “I just hope it all has a reason, all the things that happen. I need to believe that sometimes.”
He reached his other hand forward and enclosed hers. “I think I know what you’re trying to say. Thank you for your condolences; my brother touched more lives than he could possibly know. I hope to live up to his dream.”
“Thank you, Mr. Kennedy,” Alice said softly, her voice quavering slightly.
He winked at her, his dark blue eyes catching the early summer light, and with a final shake, the senator from New York thanked her once again and jogged back to the open door of the waiting car. The three long black cars pulled around in a U-turn back to the road and headed up the highway toward the Garden of the Gods. Alice watched until they were no longer visible. Her eyes were dry and her throat was raw, the weight of knowing hanging on the edge of every cell in her body. She would see the young senator again from the back of a crowd of people in a bit over a year’s time. He would decide to run for the presidency, and the nation would celebrate, sure of his win. Alice would stand at the back of the crowd, her eyes dry and throat raw, the futility of knowing slowly building a callus over her heart.
THE DAUGHTER OF CAILLEACH slowly discovered her sway over men. She discovered she could stop them from talking with a wave of her hand and force them to forget by fixing a gaze. She took a cabin long abandoned on the rocky cliffs that overlooked the sea. Using the magic she had forgotten for far too many years, she ringed her house in lamb’s blood and spoke words that had not left her lips since she was a girl. No one could enter this space without her permission; no one could even see it, and if they did, they would quickly forget. She moved the cabin out of the reality of man and just off to the side. She enjoyed watching the men and women come and go in the little fishing town on the shore. She loomed over them like a great black bird, not intending harm but not protecting them from ill will either.
One night she witnessed a shipwreck off the coast. The screams of the men filled her ears and fixed her to a spot overlooking the sea. Dozens of tiny boats, men rowing madly, made their way to the sinking vessel, but most were too late. A handful of dying men were plucked from the water; the rest drowned, their bloated bodies bobbing back to shore with the tide.
The daughter of Cailleach felt no duty either way to help these creatures that had shown her no mercy so many years ago. She was as young now as she had been then; time had ceased aging her body and mind on the day she remembered. She could stay like this forever if she chose, half in and half out of the world, watching the slow progression of time and the little men and women who inhabited it run from here to there so busy with their lives.
For a great stretch of years she did just that. She watched the children of the seaside town grow to be women and men; she watched them die surrounded by newly formed versions of themselves, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the sailors who had survived the sinking ship so far back in the town’s memory that they told it as a folk story now. She remembered the feel of her babys’ skin on hers. She smelled the sweet, clean scent of their hair, and when she closed her eyes, they fixed their gaze on her in perfect love. She had no idea what had come of them; she had run and never gone back. The whole of the country had been taken out by cholera or plague, and she supposed that little village that had been her home was no exception.
The daughter of Cailleach knew the price of what she wanted. She knew that like her own mother, the Lethe ran deep and strong around her cabin. She knew that a day would come when a child born in this place would cross the invisible waters and forget, and all she could do was hope they remembered who they were one day. She knew she would never see them again, and still the urge was building up in her like a drumbeat. She also knew that the promise of Ingwaz, the certainty of a conclusion, and the peace it would bring would manifest itself in one of their line; the pinpoint drop of indigo ink was working its way through the clean squares of muslin cloth, and the daughter of Cailleach knew it would pass through her and on and on.
One day at the end of the Eoster festival, she walked the path down to the village and out onto the docks. A particular man caught her eye. His hair was the color of a burning ember, a hint of fire hidden in his beard and eyes. She watched him go about his work, and as the sun went down, she watched as the other men went home to their lives and children. But not this man; he stayed behind, alone. He was young—too young to have married and had children of his own. The daughter of Cailleach approached him slowly; it had been a great number of years since she had spoken to any living person. Later, as he crossed the ring of lamb’s blood, he said he felt as though there was a stabbing sensation in his chest but also a lightness, and the daughter of Cailleach knew it was a death of sorts and she ought to feel remorse, but she did not.
Their daughter was born on the longest night of the year, when darkness overtook the land and the winter winds howled in with the frozen sea. The daughter of Cailleach sent the man back to his village on the same day she felt the life within her. Everyone thought he’d fallen overboard, maybe hit his head; he didn’t remember a thing about where he had been, but he couldn’t stop staring at the cliffs overlooking the town. Many years later, after he had married a girl in the village, when his own children were old enough to go exploring, he would warn them away from the spot. They wouldn’t listen, but as they approached the overhanging cliffs, one would swear he saw a little cabin, and another a witch, and another still a great black bird in the trees above. They would run home with wild stories about the sea cliffs.
But on that Winter Solstice night, the daughter of Cailleach was alone with her fire-haired daughter and the howling wind. She would raise her to hear the voices of the mer-creatures deep below the surface of the water. She would teach her how to raise the wind and drive the waves away from the shore. At night she would sing her the lullabies that soothed the fussiest baby, and they would pick the herbs from which you could relieve any fever. She knew, as the girl grew older and her eyes wandered more and more often to the town and life below, that she would leave. She had fire in her eyes like her father, and she would not stay any more than the daughter of Cailleach had. As the girl grew to be a young woman, the daughter of Cailleach stroked her child’s soft hands and inked the symbol of Ingwaz on her left wrist. The girl cried and asked why she had to forget, and the daughter of Cailleach soothed her tears. “It is our way, mo sto’r,” she whispered as the tiny pinpricks of ink seeped into her skin. It was the only thing she could give her before she crossed the Lethe and entered the world of man.
THE GIRL WITH THE fire hair looked back at the little cabin on the edge of the cliff. A beautiful woman stood in the doorway, her raven hair rippling around her face, and she stared at her as though she were familiar. The girl waved a bit and kept walking on the path to town. With each step it became more and more clear that she knew neither where nor why she was going. Suddenly panicked, she looked back to the cabin only to see nothing there. The girl rubbed her temples; a stinging pain was setting in, and a desperate fear that she had made a terrible error. On her left wrist she saw the marking: two jagged lines intersecting. It was familiar, but she did not know why, and the sight of it made her want to cry. Still, she walked down the hill to the village.
With no money and no understanding of what was happening around her, she sat by a fish market looking around uneasily. It was a man with dark fire-colored hair and matching eyes that first took notice of her.
“Do you know where you are, darlin’?” he asked gently.
“I can’t remember a thing. I was up on the cliffs, and now…” s
he murmured.
The man let this sink in. He took her to his cottage and introduced her to his wife and brood of fire-haired children.
“Your eyes are like sea stones that wash up from the deep,” the woman had said kindly. “You look as though you could be related,” she said, frowning, looking from her husband to the girl.
They called her Coira after the colored sea stones, and the little ones took to her immediately. She sang songs that calmed them in their fussiest moments and knew how to mix a compote of herbs to soothe their coughs and fevers. The melodies were familiar to the man, but he could not place where he might have heard them. Every once in a while, the two of them would fix their eyes to the sea cliffs and share a faint memory of a flash of raven hair and the soft hum of long-forgotten melodies.
PAUL HAD BEEN ARRESTED AGAIN. This time, he got smash-faced at a pub in Colorado Springs and tried to walk home. “At least I didn’t drive,” he kept telling her, and Alice’s resentment was not a bit abated. He walked to the row of houses where he rented a back room with the meager earnings he claimed from his multitude of part-time jobs. But this time, he hadn’t found the correct back door. When the knob refused his key, he put his fist through the window, reaching around to undo the lock. The neighbors had found him passed out at their kitchen table the next morning, the blood from his sliced hand pooling on the tiled floor. They called the police, and he was taken first to the hospital and then to a cell where he was allowed to ride out the raging hangover brought on by whiskey and cheap beer. Alice was the first phone call he made, and she promptly hung up on him. The month prior, he had been let go with a warning from the Colorado Springs police after a bar fight that had resulted in a sprained wrist for Paul and a broken nose for the other participant. Alice had sworn that she would never speak to him again if he kept up this nonsense. He had promised, his rust hair cut short now but still long enough to catch the ruddy accents in his hazel eyes.
He was going to turn it all around, he said; this was it, no more, no more. He was leaving for boot camp in the Air Force the next month, and this was it. Alice hadn’t waited to hear more, just slammed the phone down and stomped down to the stone tea table and buried her head in her hands. Mum had joined her after a time, bringing two mugs of steaming lavender tea.
“I figured you might want some refreshments for your party,” she said with the utmost seriousness.
Alice looked up, her eyes dry. She already felt as though the parts of her life that set it apart from the mundane were past.
“He’s a young man, love. Young men are far too often eejits who act more bairn than man. Is this really what’s got you ragin’?” Mum said kindly.
Alice accepted the tea and shook her head. Mum didn’t talk about the paths, although she didn’t discount the spirits. She left a small dish of salt in the windows when the winter moon was full and left a plate of sweetmeats and honey in the kitchen window every All Hallow’s Eve. Dornoch Dreams had been Arthur’s favorite, and although they never spoke of it, Alice wondered if she blamed her in some way, even if for knowing before the others, for seeing the path.
“It’s not Paul, Mum—well, maybe it is a bit. What guarantee do I have that it will ever be any different?” Alice clutched the tea, letting the warmth seep into her cold-tinged fingers.
“I suppose you don’t have any at all, love. What about him makes you give him the time of day anyhow? He’s not nearly as handsome as the poor boy you were fixing to marry all those years ago. You remember him, surely. Saw him at the grocer just last week. Still single, that one, back from Vietnam. From what his mother tells me, he’s taking it pretty hard, living back at home, not working. He asked after you. He heard of your Latin man, think he was more than a bit jealous. Hell, I think we’re all a bit jealous of that one.” Mum chuckled a bit, and Alice caught her smile, feeling the misery in her chest unclench a bit.
“That poor boy was wretched slow, Mum,” Alice groaned. “You know I had to tutor him through most of his classes even though I was two years behind him, right? He once asked me why FDR didn’t just cheer everyone up if they were so depressed, and I think he was actually serious.”
Mum giggled, a magical sound that floated through the air, a rare sound from a woman who rarely wore a casual smile.
“Your Latin man hasn’t written in a bit,” Mum observed.
Alice shook her head. It had been about six months, and she knew better than to tell Mum what had led to the silence: a letter from a woman in Barbados with a grainy photograph of three skinny children who had her Tiburon’s apple-green eyes and copper skin. A plea to take them to the USA; she didn’t care about the affair, she wanted them to go to school, to eat a regular meal each night. If Alice married her husband, he could move to Colorado, USA, and take the children with him. Alice had perhaps been able to see this ugly truth during her time in Caracas, but something inside her had always warned her against looking too closely into Tiburon’s heart. She rubbed her ear that still held the trace of a scar and locked her gaze with Mum’s. It was hard to say if she knew or not; Mum always seemed to know without being told, and Alice was quite accustomed to her quiet acceptance of things, which would leave most gob-smacked and shaken.
Alice had written to Tiburon, telling him it was over, that she couldn’t keep doing this; she couldn’t keep living the lie of a promised future together. She couldn’t take him and his children to Colorado, USA. He had responded with an envelope containing a single photograph. A photo of Alice standing against a pale wall. She was wearing a white sleeveless top and black skirt, her hair piled high on her head, her face turned slightly to the camera, dark eyes unreadable. A smile played on her lips. A single phrase had been written on the back.
“No su su, love, come back tomorrow-day.”
Written in Bajan slang, it was most likely the end result of a night of dark rum, and it didn’t entirely make any sense, but Alice hadn’t minded much. It was enough for her to say goodbye, but she kept his photographs carefully tucked in the album, no matter the path that had been laid for her. So Alice just gave Mum a melancholy smile.
“Come on, Mum, can you imagine the looks on the neighbors’ faces as you introduce them to your new Latin son-in law? They’re already scandalized to pieces by you as it is.” She added a teasing note to the last bit, and Mum smiled back.
“Let them talk,” Mum said simply, standing and collecting the empty tea mugs. “Come, you best go collect your young man. You know his mother will let him rot in that cell, and sleeping on a neighbor’s table isn’t exactly a felony. The Welsh simply aren’t like us, you know.”
Alice frowned. Sleeping on a neighbor’s table wasn’t a felony, but it wasn’t a good omen either. Mum was right about one thing: Paul’s strict-as-nails mother, a Colorado transplant from a Kansas farm and a long Welsh line—which was, to Mum, possibly the worst thing to be—was unlikely to show any mercy. That would be Alice’s job from here on out.
ALICE IS GETTING MARRIED, and this time doesn’t feel any more real than it did with the poor, stupid boy back in school. It had started with Paul sitting on the stiff, scratchy sofa in the living room, which was strictly reserved for guests and not at all the same as the deep-pocketed soft furniture in the alcove off the kitchen. No, the living room was for formal talks and serious business. Paul was back from boot camp, his rust-colored hair shorn close to his head, making her realize that the shy, sweet boy who had brushed his flop of hair out of his eyes as he stood on her doorstep and handed her an old hat was ages away. He was leaving for Vietnam in two weeks; his poor vision and flat feet meant he would be spared active combat, so he was to be trained as an air traffic controller, helping the military planes to land at a base set deep in the countryside of Vietnam.
“We should just go ahead and get married,” he had said.
Alice had laughed. They were hardly even dating; she had bailed him out of jail for his petty transgressions twice now, and the rest of the time she had spent trying to conv
ince herself that he was worth the effort. There was something else, though, that kept her listening when she knew she should close the door, a deep-seated urge that rose from her heart and spread out to the tips of her fingers. She found herself watching women with their babies and could almost imagine the smell of their skin and feel their tiny fingers intertwined in her hair. She could see herself lying at night curled around a sleeping infant, pushing her in a stroller as the fall leaves fell from the trees. It was an oddly primal urge that overpowered all her other senses. It caused her to look past the obvious and see Paul as a whole. He was smart, frighteningly so. For all his surface irresponsibility, he remembered every single thing that he read or was said to him. Later, Alice would regret seeing this as a benefit when he threw back long-ago spoken words in anger, his lips curled back in cruelty.
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