Candlemoth

by R.J. Ellory

  And Linny Goldbourne hadn't offered up any explanation herself.

  If I'd realized then that she was the messenger, the carrier of our destiny, I would have locked the doors, bolted the windows, and convinced Nathan we should both hide in the basement until she lost interest.

  But I did not. I was still enchanted by her.

  Nathan Verney - a man possessed of his own loneliness and longing - was, I think, enchanted too.

  How much, I didn't know, and how far this thing would eventually travel I had no idea. And so I watched her leave, even walked to the front window and saw her make her way down to the sidewalk and turn away. She glanced back, and I was glad of that, for it told me that this was not the same departure as before.

  Perhaps I'd felt I'd lost too much already: my folks, Caroline Lanafeuille, Eve Chantry. Like life had been a chain of losses with some vague and forgettable interruptions in between.

  Hell of a way to think of your life, but I felt that Linny Goldbourne's return had served to begin a redress of wrongs, a correction of the universal balance that had so precariously tipped away from me.

  And Nathan was excited too, he spoke of her endlessly after her departure. He asked me for every detail of the time she and I had spent together that summer.

  Seemed Linny Goldbourne was the last important thing that had occurred prior to our departure, and the first on our return. How important we would soon know.

  For now, I was content to lose myself in some vague and drunken bliss of remembering, and Nathan was content to listen.

  She would come the following day, she would come every day, and the more she came the more I seemed to lose myself. We slept together, we laughed and got drunk, we smoked weed, and then we fucked again. Nathan seemed oblivious to any degree of exclusion, and I suppose I saw myself as the one who deserved this association. I had been the follower, the one who had compromised what I wanted, what I believed, and now it was my turn to have something exclusively for myself.

  Or so I believed.

  'You believed?' Father John asked. 'What d'you mean?'

  'I sensed that she started to lose interest in me.'

  Father John raised his eyebrows.

  'Little things. At first I didn't notice… but they were there.'

  'Like what?'

  'The way she said his name. The way she would look at him a little too long… things like that.'

  'And it wasn't your imagination?'

  I smiled and shook my head. 'No, it wasn't my imagination.'

  'You felt you were losing her?'

  'Yes, I felt I was losing her… she'd been with us a week, perhaps ten days, and already she was fading.'

  'What did Nathan say to you about her… about her father?'

  'Nathan said he didn't care who her father was or what he might do. I let him think whatever he wanted. It was his life, not mine, and he didn't owe me anything.'

  'And you felt that he was taking her away from you?'

  I shook my head. 'Not at first. I felt like she was taking him away from me… and then I felt that she'd used me, and then that she was using both of us. I got confused. All I knew was that she'd come down almost every day, and when she came it was to see me and me alone… and then she started spending time with Nathan, telling me she felt bad because he was on his own downstairs.'

  'Was it jealousy?'

  I looked at Father John. Sometimes I was surprised at the directness and detail of his questions.

  Sometimes I felt he was interrogating me.

  'Jealousy? Hell yes, it was jealousy. I think it had more to do with the fact that she did not grant any substance to what we had shared before Nathan and I had left, before she drove away that afternoon. And then she'd come back and I had been the center of her attention for a week or so, and then that attention faded… it just grew narrower and narrower until there seemed to be nothing left at all.'

  I paused; I had not considered these events in such detail for a very long time.

  I cleared my throat.

  'If she'd said something… like she knew she'd left suddenly, that she'd not given any reason for leaving, that she was sorry even, I might have felt different. Maybe if she'd been completely straight with me, told me that what we had the summer before was really nothing at all, a bit of fun, a distraction, and now we were back she was happy to see me, to spend some time with me…'

  I leaned back and sighed. 'I loved her, loved her once, loved her twice, but the way it happened made me feel like… like…'

  'Like you'd been betrayed by her again?'

  I nodded. 'Yes, like I'd been betrayed again.'

  'What did you want her to say?'

  I shook my head. 'I don't know… perhaps that what I'd thought was love was merely an infatuation, a crush or something. Maybe that she felt good with me, but it was just a sex thing, a physical thing… and now she'd had enough of that and she really wanted to spend some time with Nathan. Maybe if she'd said that I would have felt differently.'

  'Or maybe not,' Father John said.

  'Or maybe not,' I replied. 'Hard to know how you'd feel about something that could have been different.'

  'So tell me how you did feel when you realized what had happened between them.'

  'Angry, confused, hurt… all those things. Betrayed by her, and by Nathan too.'

  'In detail… tell me exactly how it came about.'

  I shook my head. 'Hell, this is some pile of tapes they're gonna have when we're through.'

  Father John Rousseau smiled but said nothing.

  'You wanna know in detail everything that happened then?'

  'Seems to be the most important point, Danny, don't you think?'

  'Maybe,' I said. 'You're gonna have to be the judge of that.'

  'So let me judge,' Father John said.

  'Overstepping the bounds of your jurisdiction?' I asked, and I glanced upwards as he had done, up towards the ceiling, to Father John's boss.

  Father John smiled. 'The secret of maintaining authority is the ability to delegate down.'

  'Okay,' I said. 'You be the judge.'

  * * *

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I remember waking one day with a headache the size of Mount Rushmore. I had not smoked weed or drunk so much since Florida. And just as that first night after Atlanta when Linny took me out and taught me the evils of tequila, and then arrived the following morning to drive me to the coast, she appeared in my room that morning with the same enthusiasm and boundless energy that seemed to be her trademark.

  She told me to drag my useless carcass out of bed, and then she laughed and went back downstairs.

  As I surfaced I could hear Linny and Nathan talking downstairs. They were making breakfast, the radio was playing, and between the other sounds I could hear laughter, the sort of laughter that people share when they have connected.

  I went down quietly and stood there in the hallway listening to those voices.

  You want eggs, Naaa-than?

  Sure.

  Anything else you want?

  What you offering?

  Anything you see, baby.

  Nathan laughing.

  What I see is a whole heap of trouble.

  Kinda trouble you like though, ain't it?

  You're a bad girl, Linny Goldbourne.

  When I'm good I'm good… when I'm bad I'm better…

  Silence for a moment.

  Danny awake yet?

  Don't you worry about Danny.

  He knows, you know?

  He'd be blind not to know, Naaa-than.

  Don't seem altogether right.

  Ah, to hell with what's right and what's not. You want something, you take it baby.

  And what do you want, Linny?

  I think you know what I want, Mister Verney.

  I closed my eyes and breathed deeply. I should not have been standing there listening, but I couldn't help myself. There was something magnetic about the way she bound everyone into her spirit
ed passion for life. She cast spells, and we of weak minds and weaker hearts didn't stand a chance.

  Had I not loved her, had I not given her everything of me, I don't believe I would have felt anything more than a fleeting interest in what was occurring between them, but it was in that moment that I felt I'd lost her. There was something about her that defied description, something that made me feel transparent in her presence. Her attention was transitory and impermanent; she held your gaze unflinchingly for a moment, you really felt you were getting through, and then it was gone. Like a breeze that lifts the leaves of a tree, just for a moment, and then they are again still.

  Nathan knew little of how she was, he was caught up in the whirlwind of life and light and laughter, and when I paused there at the bottom of the stairwell and watched them in the kitchen I could see how easily she enchanted him. She would smile a little too long. She would laugh and touch his arm, his shoulder, his hand. I even believed she waited until he reached for something and then she'd reach in the same moment so their hands connected, and these things would prompt further eye contact, further smiles and laughter.

  I believe I had the right to be envious. Though there had been no spoken agreement, no contract, no tacit consent, I still felt that the depth of emotion I had felt for Linny had been reciprocated. She had known that, must have known that, but in that second it appeared that she possessed no memory at all of such things.

  I crept back up the stairs, walking on eggshells, and then I turned at the top and came thundering down like a freight train. I announced my arrival in order to give them a moment to collect themselves.

  I walked into the kitchen as if nothing had happened, and there they were, at either end of the counter-top, she cracking eggs into a bowl, he frying mushrooms in a pan at the stove. They had so obviously been standing next to one another, and in hearing me had moved apart.

  They knew, all too well they knew how such a connection might hurt me.

  'Hey,' Linny greeted me.

  I smiled and nodded.

  'Smells good,' I said.

  'You want eggs, Danny?' she asked.

  I glanced at Nathan. 'Sure thing.'

  Anything else you're offering? I thought.

  Linny busied herself.

  'Sleep good?' Nathan asked.

  'Good enough,' I replied, and took a seat at the table. I did not offer to help. They were in collusion against me. They could at least make the fucking breakfast.

  'And you?' I asked.

  Did he glance at Linny then? Did she glance back at him? Did a slight knowing smile flicker across her cherry-red, pouting, selfish-bitch lips?

  I closed down my thoughts. Such thoughts would get me nowhere.

  'I slept fine,' Nathan said.

  Linny carried plates to the table and set them down.

  She leaned closer to me. I could smell her perfume, the natural scent of her body. Smelled like that day on the beach, and with that thought I could see her stretching her arms above her head, the way her form so elegantly defined each curve and swell and dip. I wanted to reach up and touch her face, to run my fingers through her hair, to kiss her, to taste the salt-sweet tang of her lips…

  'Coffee?' she asked.

  I could feel myself blushing.

  'Ye-yes,' I said.

  And then she touched me, and her fingers on my cheek were like small stabs of soft electricity, and I could feel that electricity pulsating through my skin, and I wanted so much to reach back. But I couldn't. Dared not to.

  'You're okay, right?' she asked.

  I feigned a moment of perplexity. 'Okay? Sure I'm okay. Why'd you ask?'

  She smiled, withdrew her hand. 'Just checkin',' she said, and turned once more towards the counter-top.

  Checking if you've hurt me? I thought. Checking if I'm going to be okay with the fact that you have cast me aside for someone else? Checking to see if there's something I might want to say about how effortlessly you seem to flit from one person to the next?

  I closed my eyes for a moment. I breathed deeply once more. I let it go. I had to let it go.

  They finished preparing breakfast and we ate together, almost in silence.

  They sat beside one another facing me.

  I wanted to move, wanted to do something, anything. But I said nothing, as always the one who was led, not the leader. For despite the things that Nathan had said to the Devereau sisters in Florida, his belief that we had left because of me, I believed otherwise. I felt that recent events had strengthened me - the death of my mother, my return to Greenleaf - and emotions I once would have suppressed were now simmering beneath the surface. I felt like fighting back, like marking my territory. This was my home, these people were my guests, they were here by the grace of me. They were owed no right of possession, no law of jurisdiction over my feelings and thoughts, and yet here they were, playing with things of far greater substance and significance than they were granting. Resentment, unexpressed or otherwise, set in. It came slowly at first, and then those flickering uncertainties about my own importance in these matters gathered speed, rolling up together like a thunder- head across the horizon. Lightning would strike I believed, not now, not yet, but it would, and I wondered what I would do to redress the balance.

  For the time being I was quiet. I watched, I waited, I listened and made mental notes. Later I would refer to them in trying to reconstruct this chapter of my past.

  And thus it was not my idea that we go out, but Linny's. That we wait until dark, leave in her car, with Nathan lying across the back seat covered with a blanket, and go somewhere, somewhere across the state line, Savannah perhaps, or Augusta.

  'Fucking crazy,' I remember telling them.

  Nathan was excited - by Linny, by the prospect of leaving the house for the first time since his arrival, even excited by the risk. Linny possessed sufficient enthusiasm to make even armed robbery sound like a swell idea.

  'It'll be okay, Danny, it really will be okay. We'll just go out, just for a few hours.'

  Again it was that same persistence of Nathan's that wore me down.

  I agreed, but there was a condition.

  'No playing pool, right Danny, no playing pool… whatever you say.'

  Linny asked about it, Nathan told her: that the two times we'd played pool were the two times we'd had ten shades of shit kicked out of us.

  Linny found this hysterical, either that or the weed she was smoking.

  'Hurled the lid of a trash can into the back of some guy's head,' Nathan told her. 'Danny came up out of the alleyway like a freakin' tornado. Had he not been there, had he not done that, I think those motherfuckers would have kicked me to death.'

  Linny looked at me. There was no smile, no expression of surprise, just this cool and measured sense of being impressed. I felt for a second I had turned her thoughts back, that now I was the one who would hold her interest, and then she looked back at Nathan. And there it was again, that flow of emotional and physical energy that passed between them. Almost tangible. She was thanking me, I later felt. Thanking me perhaps for saving Nathan's life. Thanking me for ensuring that he came home safely to Greenleaf so she could own him for a while. Maybe my imagination. Jealousy is a powerfully narcotic drug. I was addicted, for in each such moment I read everything there was to read, and when there was nothing to read I made it up as I went along.

  Later, so much later, when they took her, when they finally closed down her life, I would ask myself if she hadn't deserved it. Deserved everything she got. Perhaps it was who she was, perhaps she couldn't help but be that way. I watched her then, I thought of her later, and I asked myself if I could forgive her for being that way. I could not. Perhaps would not. Wanted to believe that she had engineered everything in some subtle Machiavellian fashion to gain everything she wanted, whatever the cost. She paid for her sins, as I did, and forgiveness was not something I felt was a natural right for anyone. I had not been forgiven, and thus everyone else involved was as guilty as I.
/>   Nathan told his stories, and every other word he mentioned my name, what Danny had done, what Danny had said, almost as if he was forcing her to think of me. Like he knew how I felt and was making an effort to balance things backwards. He had taken her, he must have known that, but by speaking of me, by telling her how resolute and courageous I had been, he was paying his dues. Perhaps. Perhaps not.