Blessed Are the Cheesemakers

by Sarah-Kate Lynch

  “I thought you were dead,” he said through lips that felt numb and wooden. “I really thought you were dead.”

  A real smile crawled across Jacey’s beautiful face as she watched her husband’s despair as he pieced together the puzzle of his fractured memories. She reached out and took both his hands in hers. “Don’t think about that now, baby,” she said in a soothing voice. “It’s going to be okay. We’re going to be okay.”

  Jacey was dead. Jacey was dead. Jacey was dead. The mantra bounced back at him from the recent past. Maybe if he said it enough, he remembered thinking in the days after Jacey’s accident—when his wounds were open and raw—it would be true.

  Standing there in that moment staring at his wife, Kit suddenly knew why he had been filling the hole deep inside himself with vodka. He had killed his wife. In his head, he had killed her. He had wished her dead and then he had wrapped himself in a shroud of alcoholic mist to keep the painful truth of her survival at bay.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said, fighting the urge to retch. “Jacey, what have I done?”

  Jacey moved in, snaked her arms around his neck and reached up to kiss him on his jaw below the ear. “Let’s not think about that now, darlin’,” she whispered. “Let’s just go and get your things. I want you to come back to New York with me. I want our life back, honey. You and me, the way it used to be.”

  She slithered away from him and held out one long, delicate arm. Kit stared at her hand. She was wearing her rings. The solitaire diamond engagement ring he had bought her and her wedding band. She was his wife.

  “It was supposed to be for better or for worse, Christopher,” she said, letting her smile be replaced by a tiny quiver as she sensed a pinprick of hesitation on his part. “That’s what you said. I never in a million years dreamed that you would abandon me just when I really, really needed you. I never dreamed you were that sort of a guy.”

  Corrie watched aghast from the upstairs sitting room as the couple walked down to Fee’s cottage, then Kit disappeared inside while Jacey waited impatiently at the door. He and Avis had bumped into a distraught Abbey flying through the kitchen minutes earlier on her way upstairs. Corrie had tried to find out what was wrong but his granddaughter had cried to be left alone and had run, sobbing, to her room. Corrie had wanted to go and find Kit but Avis had stopped him.

  “What will be, will be, Joseph,” she had said. “Leave them. He has to make up his own mind.”

  “Who is she?” Corrie asked as he watched Jacey scanning the courtyard for signs anybody was going to halt Kit’s escape.

  “His wife,” Avis said.

  “The dead one?”

  “Not so dead, as it turns out,” she said. “Though she’s not the first one we know of in that category, now, is she?” They each looked out the window at her, thinking their private thoughts. “She’s got a hold on him, all right,” said Avis, “but Abbey’s the one, Joseph. You have to trust that.”

  “Does Abbey know that?” Corrie asked, worry gnawing at him, making his arms tingle.

  “She has to trust it too.”

  Corrie peered out again at Jacey. She reminded him of Maggie, although he knew Fee would say she had the legs of Mary-Therese. She had danger written all over her and if a seventy-three-year-old man with cataracts could see that, why couldn’t Kit? He couldn’t bear the thought of Abbey’s heart being broken again. He was sure it would be too much for her, as it would be for him. “I wish Joseph would come back,” he said. “When’s Joseph coming back?”

  Avis flicked at the curtain with a derisive “Pshaw. Joseph Corrigan,” she said, “have you ever gotten a straight answer out of yer man when it comes to matters of timing?”

  Corrie, of course, never had.

  “He’ll be back when the time is right and it’s up to us to trust that, too.” She leaned closer to Corrie as Kit emerged from Fee’s cottage with his bag and, seemingly in a daze, lowered himself into the passenger side of the topless yellow sports car. In the roar of an engine and a billow of exhaust, he was gone.

  As the car turned out of the leafy driveway and into the lane, Kit felt the wind ruffle his hair and blow the tears that were threatening to fall back into his eyes, for which he was grateful. The wild rhododendron that had lit up the countryside when he had first walked the lane to Coolarney House days before seemed faded now from the brilliant purple he remembered to a sad, dirty mauve.

  Over the somber green of the rolling hills he could see the ocean, but even that had lost its sparkle, still now and slightly listless-looking. A filter of gloom seemed to dull everything he looked at and add to his confusion. He didn’t know what he was doing, what he had been doing. Not an hour ago it had all seemed so clear and hopeful, and now here he was desperately bewildered again and going home with his wife. His wife. He looked across at Jacey and her beauty took his breath away. A little smile tripped across her glossy lips as she sensed his gaze, then turned to flash the smile even wider.

  That smile. The doctor. The memories were trying to flood back.

  Suddenly he remembered standing next to Jacey’s hospital bed and telling her it was over, she was not the woman he married, she was dead to him, gone, forever. Then he remembered leaving the hospital and going to the nearest bar where he had gotten so drunk that when he finally crawled home he didn’t know what day it was, he didn’t know anything except that he wanted to pretend his wife had never existed.

  And in the weeks that followed, that was just what he had done. He had pretended that Jacey never existed, pretended that she had died, until he didn’t need to pretend anymore because his anesthetized mind told him that she was gone, that he had lost her, that she was dead. Kit gripped the dashboard in front of him and sucked back a sob as real life hit him in the face. What sort of a monster was he that he could kill off his wife like that and not even know that’s what he had done?

  Jacey leaned over and put a hand on his knee. “Don’t beat yourself up, baby,” she said. “Most other guys probably would have done the same.”

  The wiring in Kit’s brain was shorting. He felt as though all the details of his life had been cast high into the air on a windy day, then had landed on the ground too spread out and in the wrong order to ever come together again. Grappling to collect the scattered pieces, his memory took him back to the phone call he had got that awful, awful morning from Sasha Peterson, telling him that the super was trying to break down his apartment door because Sasha thought something had happened to Jacey inside.

  As it transpired, Sasha had been wanting to talk to Jacey about smoking pot in the elevator in front of her daughters. After seeing her neighbor come in about eleven in the morning, she had had a cup of coffee to steel her nerves then gone and rapped on Jacey’s door. As she’d done so, she’d heard a crash from inside the apartment, like someone falling and furniture moving, she told Kit, and sensing something was wrong, had called for help. When Kit reeled breathless and sweating into his own apartment twenty minutes after the phone call, Sasha and Benny were already inside and Jacey was lying on the blond polished floorboards between the coffee table and the sofa, looking as beautiful as she ever had, but for all the world dead. She was wearing a white spandex halter-neck top and white capri pants that were still slowly turning red from the groin outward. On the coffee table was a clear plastic bag of white powder and a small silver-backed mirror dusted with the same powder. Jacey, despite her narcotic coma, was still holding a rolled-up $100 note. The picture spoke a thousand words, every one of them dripping with tragedy.

  Kit stood in his own doorway, stunned and unable to move until seconds—he supposed it was seconds—later, the paramedics arrived and pushed him out of their way as they attempted to revive Jacey with a ventilator and establish the severity of her condition.

  Next thing Kit could remember was standing in the hospital corridor with a bald doctor wearing what looked like joke spectacles, who was telling him that his wife had snorted heroin and overdosed—mostly because of th
e amounts of Valium and alcohol already in her system—and had subsequently lost the eleven-week-old fetus she’d been carrying.

  Heroin? Fetus? Kit had known nothing of either.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “Trust me. If you do everything right like I’ve told you, you’ll eventually get your cheese.”

  JOSEPH FEEHAN, from The Cheese Diaries, RTE Radio Archives

  In the bowels of Coolarney House, Lucy was discovering the woeful side of motherhood. In the bowels of Baby Jesus, Jesus’s offspring, something had gone horribly wrong and was responsible for this discovery. The kitten, who in all other respects seemed to be enjoying perfectly good health, had been running amok for more than an hour, skittering from floor to floor, hallway to hallway, room to room, leaving foul-smelling piles that Lucy was trying to clean up before anybody caught him in the act and banished him.

  On the third floor of the house, the kitten came to an exhausted halt and collapsed against a door.

  “I should hope so too, you ungrateful little fecker,” Lucy said, lunging at him before he could escape and do any more damage. As she picked the little creature up, though, she was distracted by a noise coming from the other side of the door. A crying sort of a noise. Without stopping to think, she opened the door and peered in. The room was very yellow and full of the sound of someone having a very miserable time, a sound to which Lucy was no stranger. She guessed that the lump lying with its back to her on the overstuffed bed was Abbey, and as she watched from the doorway she felt puzzled by an overwhelming sensation to make the back stop shuddering. She felt a warmth toward the back with which she was most unfamiliar. She felt sorry for it. She wanted to make it better.

  She cleared her throat. “Baby Jesus has the squitters,” she announced, stepping into the room. “He’s after restaining the floors, the poor dote.”

  The back froze midshudder. “Go away,” Abbey gurgled, her voice glutinous with crying.

  “What’s the matter?” Lucy asked, taking no notice of the order as she stepped closer toward the bed.

  “I said go away,” Abbey repeated thickly. “Leave me alone.”

  Lucy edged forward and after standing uselessly beside the bed for a moment or two, sprung up and perched on the side of it.

  “Go away,” Abbey said again.

  Lucy took no notice; she was thinking. The unconnected jigsaw of the afternoon was starting to form a picture. She’d seen the yellow sports car arrive earlier but hadn’t thought much of it. People came to visit the factory all the time, after all. Then Jamie had told her he’d seen a gorgeous supermodel stepping out of the car, but she’d assumed he was just saying that to make her jealous because he was so desperate for her. Now the car with the gorgeous supermodel was gone and Abbey was very, very sad. Her heart gave a jolt. It could mean only one thing. Well, it could mean a few things but she thought she knew which one.

  “Where’s Kit?” she asked boldly.

  The back gave another big shudder.

  “Did Kit leave? Did Kit bloody bollocking bastard leave?”

  The back shuddered some more and Lucy let rip a string of expletives so heartfelt and disgusting she had to hiccup to get her breath back at the end of them. Her enthusiasm wrenched Abbey out of her snivel-fest. She cautiously turned over, then leaned up on her elbows. Her eyes were red and raw from crying and her tears had been soaked up by her hair, which was now stuck close to her face and neck.

  As Lucy looked at her, the horror she felt at Kit’s disappearance was swallowed by the same sensation she’d felt before. She truly, madly, deeply wanted Abbey to stop being sad. She knew exactly how it felt and it was too horrible to wish on anybody else.

  “It was his wife,” Abbey offered, fresh tears springing to her eyes and pouring wetly onto her cheeks. “His wife came and got him.”

  Lucy laughed. “But his wife is dead,” she disputed matter-of-factly.

  “Apparently not,” Abbey answered, a catch in her voice. “At least she looked pretty bloody alive to me.”

  “That was her?” Lucy breathed. “The gorgeous supermodel?”

  Abbey nodded.

  “Back from the grave?”

  “She was never in the grave,” wailed Abbey, “she was in rehab. And she looked at me as though I were dirt. Kit just stood there, Lucy. He didn’t do anything, he just stood there.”

  “That bastard,” exhaled Lucy. “That complete and utter arsehole. How could he?”

  “He just jumped in his car and took off with her,” Abbey said, sitting up more, her forehead crumpled in uncomprehending misery, “without saying good-bye to anyone. Can you believe it?”

  Lucy couldn’t. “But I thought he was in love with you,” she said bluntly.

  “You did?” Abbey sniffed, recognizing the pathetic tinge to her voice too late to remove it.

  “Only me and everyone else,” Lucy said. “It wasn’t half fecking obvious. And Avis said it was meant to be. And he could’ve had me,” she added with the confidence only a pretty nineteen-year-old possesses, “but he didn’t want to.”

  Abbey thought about this as she dried her eyes. “Then why has he gone back to his wife?” she questioned. “The wife he told us had died?”

  Lucy didn’t have an answer to that, but after thinking on it for a while, her face unexpectedly brightened. “Well, look at it this way,” she said, “it would’ve been rude to have shagged him just after his wife popped her clogs, wouldn’t it? At least you didn’t do that.” Abbey managed a weak smile. “Of course,” Lucy added, “I suppose that means he was cheating on her with you.”

  “He never did anything with me,” Abbey said after the smile departed. “We always seemed to get interrupted.”

  “Jaysus,” gulped Lucy. “Sorry about that.”

  “Well, it wasn’t so much you as the dead wife that really put a spanner in the works,” reasoned Abbey. There was a momentary silence, and then she and Lucy looked each other in the eye and burst out laughing. It was nervous laughter, the sort that just as easily could have been crying, but it was laughter all the same.

  “It’s not funny,” insisted Abbey between near-hysterical giggles. “It’s really not funny.”

  “I know,” Lucy kept saying. “I know, I know, I know.”

  “The man I’m madly in love with has left me forever,” Abbey gasped between belly laughs.

  “And I’m having a baby I don’t want and haven’t a clue who’s the father,” laughed Lucy, curled up on the bed now and clutching her own stomach.

  “What a pair!” Abbey hooted.

  “Twins!” roared Lucy.

  They clutched each other and rolled around the bed, laughing uncontrollably, knowing that nothing about their separate situations was funny in the slightest.

  “He might come back, you know,” Lucy finally offered, wiping her eyes as her laughter subsided.

  “I don’t think so,” said Abbey. “But I suppose you never know.” She sighed and looked at Lucy. “What about you? Do you think you’ll change your mind about the baby and keep it?”

  “I don’t think so,” Lucy answered. “But I suppose you never know.”

  Distracted abruptly by a monumentally foul stench, Abbey lifted her nose up into the air and sniffed at it. “Phwoar,” she said, grimacing. “What the hell is that?”

  Lucy’s blue eyes bulged in horror. “Baby Jesus!” she cried. “I forgot!”

  Thirty miles away, contemplating the curves of the Irish countryside, Jacey was growing wary of Kit’s silence. She’d had no inkling that luring him away with her would be so easy; she’d expected anger and recrimination and an embarrassing scene, but her husband had just seemed to collapse at the sight of her. It couldn’t have gone more smoothly. He’d always been putty in her hands, powerless in her presence; most men were, but Kit especially so. And now it seemed that even after everything that had happened, she still had the same magnetic hold over him that she’d had since the moment they’d met. She was starting to feel uneasy about the
silence though. He’d been in a world of his own since they left the farm.

  Jacey leaned across and put her hand on his knee, ignoring his involuntary flinch, and with one eye on the road, she walked her fingers down his leg until she found the strap of her Prada shoulder bag, nestled at his feet. She scrabbled around inside until she found what she was looking for and pulled out a silver flask. Unscrewing it at the steering wheel, she flipped the lid and threw back her head, gulping at the contents before handing the flask to her husband, who looked at it dumbly.

  “Go on.” She smiled, looking at him and urging him to take it. “Have some. You know you want to. Besides, you could afford to loosen up a little, sugar. We’re going to get back on top, Kit. We’re going to start having fun again.” She flicked her hair back over her bare shoulders and raised her face to the sun.

  Kit took the flask and fingered it, relishing the cool smooth surface. He wanted a drink, of course he did. Now more than ever. Anything to calm the rising panic that was claiming him. Jacey had lost their baby after overdosing on heroin. He remembered every sad, sordid detail now, and her betrayal sickened him almost as much as his own weakness. He knew that the contents of the flask, vodka most likely, would help erase the repulsive truth the way vodka had done a thousand times before, but everything seemed different now, now that he’d had time to think.

  He still couldn’t quite fit all the pieces together and it was slowly occurring to him that perhaps the truth shouldn’t be erased. Perhaps he should be feeling revulsion and shame. Maybe these sensations were trying to tell him something. The farther he got from Coolarney House, he realized, the more he liked the way he had felt there: vodka-free, clearheaded and connected to his thoughts. He didn’t want to be sucked back down into the murkiness of drinking, despite its allure at this second. He fought his urge and screwed the top back on the flask.

  “So, I see the rehab really took, huh, Jacey?” he said sadly, feeling half-disgusted, half-jealous of the buzz she was enjoying.