by Melanie Rawn
Defiance and shame and guilt in equal, self-bewildering measure squared his bony shoulders, and his face was solemn and constrained as he stood beside the priest after conformation of his faith.
The faith he no longer had.
The faith this very priest had shattered.
AT AROUND TEN SHE CAME into the office, dressed in a white nightgown that went from her throat to the floor and would’ve made her look like a nun if the material hadn’t been so flimsy. Over it she had thrown a blue crocheted shawl. His gaze ran over her, taking inventory from clean-scrubbed face to bare feet and pale pink toenail polish. He had done this from the first minute he set eyes on her: catalog what she wore, appreciate how good it looked, and estimate how quickly he could get it off her. But as instinctive as the once-over was, it seemed removed from reality.
He’d finished reading the story long since, shut down the machine, and had been staring at the swirls of the amber Witch sphere in the window. Now he stared at her instead, without an idea in the world of what he could say.
What was past was past. The only reality that could stand between him and it was standing right in front of him.
“How did you know?” he demanded suddenly. “How’d you know what it was like—when I saw them—” He bit back the rest, revulsion roiling in his belly just as it had then.
“I didn’t know,” she replied, so calmly that his temper flashed. “I phoned Susannah and she told me the basics. It’s my job to imagine—”
He glared, a spark away from full fury. “My life just became part of your job?” “I was angry. When I get that way, I write. It’s how I work things out.”
“You’re not publishing this,” he warned.
“Of course not!” she exclaimed. “What do you take me for?”
“Okay, then.” He relaxed a little.
“Don’t you want to know why I was so angry?” she asked softly.
He knew. “I didn’t tell you about it because—”
“If you say it wasn’t important, I’ll shove the words right back down your throat.” She was looking at him as if he was lower on the evolutionary scale than something that deserved to go splat on the windshield of her BMW.
“So I didn’t tell you,” he said, shrugging. “So fuckin’ what?”
“And to think you nearly dumped me for not tellingyou what I do for a living.”
“This is different.”
“Educate me.”
With ice to match hers, he said, “I’m not sorry I didn’t tell you. You weren’t even here to talk to—” He shoved aside the memory of wanting her beside him so bad, he could hardly think. She had her work, it wasn’t fair for him to interfere in it because he couldn’t handle what was going on with his work—But he heard himself repeat the accusation: “You weren’t even here.”
“For which I am sorry,” she said, her voice softening a little. “I just need to understand how you hid it from me so well. Why you felt you had to hide it.” Only then did he see pain in her eyes. “I need to know,” she finished in a whisper, “how I can love you this much and not know this was going on inside you.”
He wanted to get angry. Yell at her. Demand to know why the hell she’d been gone when he—when he needed her? Needed her?
No, that wasn’t it. What he wanted was to stop talking about this and walk out. But he couldn’t. Lachlan drew in a deep breath and spoke to his hands. “Everything you wrote in that story—I still don’t see how you could know so much. Right after it happened I worked so damned hard not to think about it—to forget what I saw—just like you wrote. I got real good at keepin’ it from myself. Doesn’t surprise me that I could hide it from you.” He shrugged that off. “Every time she wore the dress she’d been wearin’ that day I wanted to throw up. Maggie and I picked it out for her birthday that April. It had purple flowers, and green leaves and stems—I never saw her face that day, but I knew that dress. She was still wearing it that evening when my dad came home from work.”
“He never knew.”
“Never. My mother was a saint, y’know,” he continued acidly. “Mass three times a week, six parish committees—the perfect wife and mother. How could I tell my dad? He had enough to carry, without that added to it.”
“So you carried it for him. All these years.”
“She’s dead. What does it matter?” Then: “And what if I hadn’t found the story? Would you have told me what you know?”
“No,” she answered bluntly. “And that’s not right, Evan. Telling you what I am—that was an accident. I’ve kept it to myself for so long—but I guess that deep down I trusted you, so I made the slip. Accidentally on purpose. If we’re going to have any kind of life with each other, the trust has to be out in the open.”
He nodded slowly. “Yeah. I see what you mean. But I still don’t understand how you could know so much. It’s almost as if you’d been there, watched it all happen—”
She pursed her lips, head tilting slightly to one side. “I never knew the boy you were, but I know the man you’ve become. I traced things back. And I’ve seen the pictures, remember. I’ve always seen things in that boy’s eyes. How he changed. That’s why I used the device of the photographs to structure the story.”
“It’s good work,” he admitted, “even if it’s about me. Why can’t I find the words, like you do? Talkin’ to my old man today—nothing came out right, I couldn’t explain so he’d believe me—not that I said anything about Mom—but he just kept shakin’ his head—” He snorted. “You’d think that after all that child abuse all over the goddamned country, he’d get the idea that a halo doesn’t automatically come with the collar. But he kept sayin’ that no priest of the Holy Roman Catholic Church—” He choked on it, but made himself go on. “He wanted to know why I didn’t say anything back then. As if he woulda believed me! Not then, and not now—”
“I know, love,” she said softly. “There was no one, then.”
“What could he have done? Nothin’.” He heard himself make the old excuse, and for the first time knew it was an excuse. “Oh, God, why didn’t I tell somebody? Anybody—all the women after my mother, and that girl chained up in that cabin—none of it would’ve happened—”
Holly wrapped him in her arms, and he hid his face between her breasts and held on for all he was worth. Real. She was real—
“There was no one, Evan. You were a child. All the power was on the priest’s side.”
He felt the cobwebby fineness of the shawl against his face, and the warmth of Holly beneath, and the strong steady beating of her heart. He managed a couple of unshaken breaths. She was here. She was real. He’d been wrong not to come to her with this—but he was so used to there being no one. He couldn’t remember ever having sat like this, with loving arms around him and gentle hands soothing him, surrounded by warmth and tenderness and the scents of clean skin and subtle perfume. Patricia Lachlan had smelled of cheap gin and stale cigarette smoke, and when she held on to him it had only been to get a better grip that left bruises—
He shied back, for those memories had no right to exist here, not in this place that Holly had somehow created for him.
“Tell me the rest, love,” Holly murmured.
He didn’t question how she knew there was more. But it seemed her gift for words had rubbed off a little. He found some of the right ones, anyway, to explain what Patricia Lachlan had done to her children. Holly made no sound, didn’t move at all—she was barely breathing that he could tell. It was as if he’d put her into an iron box with his words, and he hated that what he said imprisoned her like this—but he had to say it.
“I was firstborn. She spent years tryin’ to make me into her idea of perfection and it wasn’t working—obviously—not even when she put me into private school. They put a regulation blazer on me and taught me French verbs, but they couldn’t change a damned thing about who I really am. The mistake sittin’ at the dinner table. I was, y’know. I’m the reason she and Dad had to get married.
>
“One day—I musta been about twelve—I got back from softball and Mom was passed out on the couch. Maggie was hiding in the hall closet. She stank of gin—Mom had thrown a bottle at her and it broke—I told Dad when he got home, and he drove us over to Granna Maureen’s for the weekend. She never knew—Mom didn’t like her, thought she was low-class with her Irish accent—and they lived in Jersey, so we never saw them much when I was little. It wasn’t until I was old enough to take the train by myself that I could go visit as much as I wanted.
“Anyway, when he came to take us home he said it was an accident, and that was that.” He paused, shaking his head. “She knew I’d told on her and first chance she had, she took it out of my hide.” He felt Holly flinch, and hurriedly said, “It only happened that once. I was growin’ real fast, and before long I was taller than she was. Skinny, though—” He gave a little shrug and tried to smile. “If you can believe it.”
She brushed the hair from his forehead. Her voice was soft, even, calm. “I’ve seen the pictures—all big eyes and raw bones. Who would’ve guessed you’d grow up beautiful?”
“Not too long after, she raised her hand to Maggie and I grabbed her arm and told her that if she even looked like she was gonna hit her again, I’d show her what it felt like.” He stopped, staring into Holly’s eyes as if he’d suddenly glimpsed an answer there. “She never hit us again. We both got out as soon as we could.”
“And it was over,” Holly murmured. “Except it wasn’t over.”
“No. My dad—he about fell apart when she died. He always believed her—how could he not believe her? But how could he not have seen?” It burst out of him for the first time, without warning—everything that had been festering for years, the horror and the betrayal and the hatred. And the ugliness inside him, the cowardice. He raised his head, and she looked down into his eyes. “I missed you,” he said, his voice raw, trembling a little. “You’ll never know how much.”
One finger stroked his brows. “I’m here now, a chuisle, I always will be.”
He couldn’t talk any more then, not for a long time. Holly held him, giving him a place to rest. There was comfort in trusting her; peace in knowing she loved him; safety in the sureness that she would be here whenever he needed her.
It was her fault that all the old poison had welled up. Those words in the story were hers. Yet as she’d taken him through the story of himself, yet not completely himself, it was like reading her other work: she got you inside a person’s skin, made you feel and understand and come out the other side along with the character. Separate from that person, no matter how similar your lives were; but connected to that person, too, no matter how different your lives were.
At last Holly spoke again, very softly. “Your father didn’t want to see. Nobody could force him to open his eyes. You couldn’t—you were so young—Evan, what if you’d told him and he hadn’t done anything to stop it? You would’ve lost him, too, the love you felt for him. You couldn’t risk it.”
“Coward—,” he managed, and tried to pull away, but she held him fast.
“Never. You can’t blame yourself. It wasn’t your fault, not any of it. Do you see that?”
He nodded slowly, too exhausted to speak. He waited for his heartbeats to calm down before drawing back a little. This time she let him go.
“Holly, I know I gotta stop blamin’ myself—” He clamped his jaw shut around the rest of the words, things he’d learned to say when anyone got too close to his truths. Holly didn’t deserve the kind of glib lies he told other people.
“You don’t believe that. You never have and I doubt you ever will.” Her fingers touched his face, stroking away tears he hadn’t known were there.
And then he saw it. “My God—when I stood up to her—it was only a few days after I saw her with Father Matthew—I thought I shouted her down because I was scared—that I just couldn’t take any more—”
“Evan, look back at that boy. He told her no, and stared her down, and—look at yourself! See who you are, the man you’ve become. There’s not a cowardly bone in your body—not then, not now. Not ever.”
In her eyes was everything he’d ever wanted to see in a woman’s eyes—and even more, things he’d never known how to want. Most astonishing of all was her fierce willingness to do battle with any demons that might threaten him. No one had ever fought for him before.
She hesitated, then told him, “This ring you’re giving me—it had better not be your mother’s.”
He didn’t know why, but somehow it was the perfect thing to say. He felt a smile touch a corner of his mouth—it felt like forever since he’d smiled. “Granna Maureen’s.”
Holly nodded. Then: “Evan, would you do something for me?”
“Sure. What?”
He followed her into her bedroom. From the little corner table she brought out a gold cord and nine small votive candles, and a vial of fragrant oil. This she used to anoint the candles, one drop on each. A long fireplace match was lit and handed to him. He knelt beside her.
“Cousin Jesse taught me this when I was about twelve,” she said. “Light one of the candles after I make each knot.”
First begins, Second proclaims;
Third casts, Fourth tamed;
Fifth refines, Sixth strengthens;
Seventh anneals, Eighth lengthens;
Ninth seals.
Holly coiled the cord around the grouped candles, which now gave off a scent of apples. “Magic,” she murmured.
“For me,” he said softly.
“Only for you.”
Ten
LACHLAN CAUGHT UP WITH HOLLY in the foyer just as she was reaching to open the front door. “Showtime,” he told her, then winked.
The doorbell sounded again just as she turned the knob. A moment later an overabundance of yellow roses appeared above two pairs of legs in Levi’s.
“I never sing for my supper,” said Bradshaw from somewhere behind the roses.
“For which we are all profoundly grateful,” Susannah added at his side.
“They’re beautiful!” Holly wrapped both arms around the bouquet and buried her face in the flowers. “Thank you!”
“I told him white are your favorites,” Susannah said. “But he insisted on yellow.”
“My grandfather had a credo,” he explained. “Yellow for redheads, white for blondes, pink for brunettes. Red only for extremely special occasions.”
Susannah blushed becomingly. Holly grinned. Lachlan wondered what the joke was, then shrugged it off.
“My father,” Bradshaw went on, “had another excellent piece of advice when it came to women. Whenever you give her something, tell her you chose it because it would look good on her. Never that she would look good in it. Always imply that the item is singularly improved by being in her possession.” He smiled at Holly. “So—yellow for redheads, but this shade of yellow because it looks great on you.”
Lachlan tipped him a salute. “I’ll remember that, Your Honor,” he said, thinking that a dozen roses would’ve been a polite guest-gift, but two dozen could be considered excessive. I’ve never given her flowers, even on her birthday. Didn’t even know she likes white roses. Okay, another note for the engagement dinner: great restaurant, candlelight, romance, ring, white roses. The whole formal thing.
Tonight was casual. Thank God. It was his first time playing host, and he’d told Holly that the dress code had better be Levi’s or else. Susannah had topped her jeans with a short-sleeved pink print blouse; Elias wore a Harvard baseball jersey; Holly had chosen a green tank top. Lachlan was actually the most formal of them all in a crisp blue shirt—though open at the neck and with the sleeves rolled up.
“We have something for the host, too, Evan,” Susannah said, presenting him with a plain blue bag exuding silver tissue paper.
He gave a start, then frowned at her. “It bites, right?”
“Just open it.”
Gingerly he stuck a hand into the bag, and pulled out s
omething made of heavy cloth. Unfolded, it proved to be a spotless white chef’s apron with words on it in bright red:
Women want me
Martha Stewart fears me
“And you don’t even work for the SEC,” Susannah drawled.
“Whatever happened to ‘Kiss the Chef’?” Lachlan complained.
“Oh, I can do that, too,” Susannah told him, and brushed his cheek with her lips.
“Down, girl,” Bradshaw admonished. “He’s took.”
“Shows, huh?” Lachlan asked ruefully.
“Four-color neon, right across your forehead.”
Holly snorted. “If it was about three feet lower down, it might do some good. Evan, pour us something to drink while I put these in water.” And she vanished down the hall into the kitchen.
He kicked himself mentally. Some host. As they went into the living room, he tried not to act as nervous as he felt and asked, “Scotch and tequila, right?”
“Thanks, Evan.” Susannah perched on a bar stool and beamed at him. For a minute, as he poured liquor and added ice—these weren’t Alec’s special glasses—he wondered if she knew. But Holly had told no one, not even Aunt Lulah. Neither had Lachlan. He was stubborn about wanting to wait until he’d given her the ring.
“I like the apron,” he told Susannah. “Really.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Beautiful place,” Bradshaw remarked, wandering around the living room. “But I thought all these co-ops had balconies.”
Susannah shook her head. “Holly’s afraid of heights. She can’t even climb a ladder.”
“I can’t even stand on a stepstool,” Holly added, coming into the room with a huge crystal vase overflowing with roses. She set it on the coffee table, came to sit beside Susannah at the bar, and smiled at Lachlan. “Where’s my Stoli, bartender?”
“Comin’ right up.” He poured, and Bradshaw joined them, and they lifted their glasses in a silent toast.
