Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series Book 2)

by Cindy Brandner

  He looked at her long, dark eyes inscrutable. “Do ye love me, Pamela?”

  “You know I do,” she said softly.

  “Aye, well, as long as that’s true, I think we might manage until ye decide ye’ve the words to tell me what it is I sense in ye.”

  “Oh,” she said faintly.

  He took a deep breath. “I’m glad to have that settled.”

  He sat up and reached for his crumpled shirt. “Now, woman, I’ve only the one question left to ask.”

  She met his eyes there above the dry grass and the scent of desire, and saw that he too was afraid.

  “Ask it.”

  “Do ye think I might come home?”

  Chapter Seventy-six

  The Stardust Sea

  THE REMAINDER OF THE SUMMER was peaceful. Away from Belfast, one could pretend that Ulster wasn’t in a state of undeclared war. And here amongst the fields and sheep and the quiet company of the trees, it was easy to turn one’s face from the trouble that plagued the city by the Lagan at every turning of the political and historical wheel.

  Here one also felt the rhythm of the natural world, both birth and death and the unmistakable change of the seasons. It was a cycle that Pamela had always taken great comfort in, finding the eternal pattern gave her a sense of well-being and order within her own life. She felt a part of things, a small link in an endless chain, at one with the world around her, even if it was only the extent of the world around Coomnablath. For she could feel the land begin its slow drawing inward that signalled the shift from summer to autumn. She could hear it in the papery rustle of leaves and feel it in the brittle stalks of the herbs, could sense that the sap of green things was withdrawing, slowly returning to the roots, conserving lifeblood for the cold sleep of winter. She herself felt the same—that slow inward turning of the spirit toward the dark and contemplative half of the year.

  They were slowly gathering in the vegetables and fruit of the garden and fields. Just this afternoon she had put up a dozen jars of strawberry jam and could smell the sticky sweetness still on her hands, along with the starchy green smell of peas. She had shelled ten pounds of the things before dinner.

  Soon she would have to take out the extra quilts and heavier coats, and Lawrence would need a new pair of gloves and a scarf to replace the one he’d lost last winter. Casey had culled the dead pine from the woods, and a comfortingly large pile of wood was growing beside the shed. He’d also been crawling about the house, checking for a draft he claimed he’d felt the previous winter.

  The day had been one of flawless blue skies and a pleasant heat that was strong enough still to penetrate down to the bones, and place a store of sunshine within the marrow, to be drawn upon during the long winter months.

  Dinner had been salmon that Casey had roasted in the firepit. Along with the last of the small new potatoes and fresh carrots basted with butter and dill.

  The night was clear, and so Casey and Lawrence had gone outside to attend to a few chores before night fell, leaving her to bake the bread she’d had rising during dinner. She was determined this would be the batch that was a triumph. Gert had patiently taught her over the last few weeks how to make bread that rose in high, snowy mounds and baked to a golden finish.

  She eyed the small oblongs of dough dubiously. They looked a little battered, and not at all like the perfect yeasty rounds that Gert made day in, day out with apparently little effort. She sighed, wondering if she would ever develop any talent within the culinary field, beyond the ability to make a good strong cup of tea.

  It was dark by the time she finished the bread, and though it didn’t look like Gert’s nor smell quite as ambrosial, it didn’t look altogether inedible either. It was a triumph of sorts.

  Since Casey’s return home, she no longer had the sense of being watched. She chalked it up to nervousness on her own part, though she knew it didn’t explain the sound of the back door closing that day. Still, the feeling had disappeared and she wasn’t going to cause her husband undue worry on account of it.

  She looked up at the clock, suddenly realizing how late it was. She wiped her hands on the floury tea towel and stepped out on the back stair. She breathed in the cool night air gratefully, filling her lungs and stretching her back, which was achy and tired from a busy day.

  A tracery of movement down towards the stream caught her eye. It was the glimmer of Lawrence’s hair against the trunk of an oak tree. Casey sat beside him, his dark coloring rendering him no more than shadow.

  Casey was pointing up to the sky, hand moving back and forth in an arcing motion. She could see the pale silhouette of Lawrence’s head tilted back on his thin neck. He was motionless, held rapt by whatever it was Casey was saying to him.

  She eased herself down on the steps silently. She’d no wish to intrude, only wanted to watch, for a quiet moment, these two men she so dearly loved.

  Near the ground the air was still, higher up, though, the leaves rustled softly to and fro in their sleep. Overhead the sky was ablaze, thick with stars in all their shades of blue and gold, red and silver. She could smell freshly turned earth; Casey had hoed the lazy beds after supper.

  “Sometimes,” Lawrence was saying, “it makes me dizzy, an’ I wonder how I can matter at all when the universe is so big? An’ then I get scared an’ a wee bit sick inside.”

  “Aye, I’ve felt that way a time or two myself, I’ll admit,” Casey replied. “But mostly I find it comfortin’, the sky changin’ with the seasons, an’ knowin’ that people have been able to tell for thousands an’ thousands of years where they were an’ the time of the year by the stars that appeared each season.”

  “Comfortin’?” Lawrence said. “I feel like I’m fallin’, an’ if what ye say is true, I really am, what with everything whirlin’ an’ spinnin’, never stoppin’ for a minute. Gives me that awful feelin’ like my head’s swellin’ up and my stomach has dropped to me toes. What did ye call it?”

  “Vertigo,” Casey said. “Perhaps if ye were to think of it as swimmin’ through a great endless ocean, rather than fallin’ through space, ye might not find it so disconcertin’.”

  Lawrence snorted. “If that’s yer view, I’m surprised ye’ve the will to get up in the mornin’ then, considerin’ yer views on water.”

  Casey chose to ignore this statement. He pointed upward, almost directly overhead and Pamela looked up as well. “Which is that star?” he asked. He’d been teaching Lawrence the constellations, as well as which stars were the guiding posts of each season.

  “’Tis Vega,” Lawrence said, a small note of pride in his tone, for despite his fear of the vast ocean that was the night sky, he took pride in his ability to discern the different colors of the stars, a talent he hadn’t realized not everyone possessed.

  “Good lad. Now the Arabs do call Vega by the name Al Nasr Al Waki, which means ‘the swooping eagle’. The odd thing there is that Vega really is flyin’ or perhaps it’s that we’re flyin’ toward it. It’s near the place in the sky that we call the solar apex, an’ that is the spot in the galaxy that the sun is movin’ toward, an’ where our sun goes, so go we.”

  Vega winked smokily with blue-white fire. It was the epicenter of the northern summer skies and seemed the gateway out into the very universe, as if one might fall through it into eternal night, into the end of all things, or the beginning of something so wondrous it would beggar the imagination. Pamela clutched the doorstep, vertigo spinning her head and dislocating her body from its place in space and time. She felt a sudden sympathy for Lawrence’s fears. It took her a minute to regain her equilibrium and attune her ear back to Casey and Lawrence’s conversation.

  “... a theory I read of once that there’s an infinite number of universes arranged in a hierarchical structure, so that if ye could see inside somethin’ so small as an electron, ye’d find within it an entire closed universe, an’ within it galaxies and worlds all the way down to wee particles that are universes within themselves, an’ so on down in
finitely, universes within universes. An’ upward as well, so that our own universe is really no more than a wee particle, a bubble on the wind, if ye will, within someone else’s universe. And so ye see we are all merely a part of a greater an’ lesser whole.”

  Casey paused to take a drink of his lemonade. “An’ if ye think of that starlight as part of yerself, as sweepin’ through ye, that entire universes live within the palm of yer hand an’ that you yourself live within the larger structure of yet another universe, then it seems to me we will always be alive in some way, that we always have been alive. That everything,” Casey gestured to the water, the trees, the hills and the great dome of the night above, “is a part of us, and we of it, an’ so we matter in the greater scheme of things, an’ yet maybe the things that happen to us day by day need not be so big nor matter to us quite so much.”

  She felt tears of gratitude sting her eyes. She understood what he was saying, what he was attempting to do for the boy. To make him feel as if his past could be wiped clean, and that he might only retain what joy he had known, and thus move forward into his future, whole and unmarked.

  The two of them were quiet after that, and she realized that Lawrence had fallen asleep there under the shelter of night and the protection of the one person he had given the gift of his trust to from the first. Casey sat, his hand on the boy’s shoulder, for a long time.

  She merely stayed sitting, not wanting to disturb the spell of the summer night, with the echo of Casey’s words still warm and reassuring in her ear. It was a moment of grace, and she knew well enough to embrace it as it passed.

  Some time later Casey folded the blanket over Lawrence’s long frame. Then he stood and turned toward where she sat, still caught in the web of stardust woven over the summer hills and swaying trees.

  “Come here,” he said, voice hushed, as though he did not wish to disturb the great slumbering night about him. She started slightly, realizing he had known she was there the entire time.

  She walked to where he stood on the edge of the water, the earthy smell of ferns and moss springing up beneath her footsteps.

  “Look just there,” he pointed to the east, beyond the ring of trees where their property ended, and the gray stones of Mr. Guderson’s fields were a pale ribbon against the long grass and vines that grew against and over them.

  A strange light was moving across the fields, coming toward the embankment of trees. It darted back and forth, and then would glide for long stretches high in the air.

  “What on earth is that?”

  “Ye’ll see, should he come closer,” Casey said, eyes fixed on the quixotic object. It glowed a soft yellow, like the headlamp of a bicycle bobbing down a country lane. The brightness increased as it approached, lighting the area around for some small circumference.

  The light flew lower as it approached the trees, and then it was above their heads, the air moving in great rhythmic susurrations with the beat of large airy wings.

  “It’s an owl,” she exclaimed, for the feathered body was just discernible within the heart of the light. “But why on earth is it glowing like that?”

  “No one knows for certain,” he said quietly, “some say it’s a luminescent fungus that grows on them when they’re weak or sickly. Some think they’ve simply got the gift of light. I’ve always thought ‘twas them that have been called Will o’the Wisp, and that they might be the truth behind the old tales of fetch candles hoverin’ about the house of those that are going to die.”

  He put his arms around her from behind, his face against the side of her head. They stood in comfortable silence, savoring this moment with the quiet of night about them. The bird had lit on a branch above the brook, and glowed there like a fixed lantern.

  The wind was still high in the trees, the tops of the pines bending slightly under the pressure. Pamela had a sense of endless movement, of the ground beneath her feet and the fast wind rush of the stars above her head. And in the midst of it all, the time-stopped beauty of a dying bird, shedding light as it flew along invisible pathways through the air.

  “Tis a sort of gift, really,” Casey said, “to radiate light as they die, to have that beauty even as your life ebbs away. I think it’s God’s way of makin’ poetry.”

  The light soared away out of the branches, reflecting in the water like a small drowned moon. And then it blinked once, twice against the backdrop of the low hills and winked out in the distance.

  Part Eight

  How Fragile is the Heart

  Chapter Seventy-seven

  The Lost Boy

  LATER, SHE WOULD THINK how blind humans were about fear. That most often as a species we are terrified of the unknowable—the future, the bend in the road, the next rise of the hill. But it is the past we should fear; the past that trails like the grotesquely angled shadow of a winter tree behind each of us. Gathering within its crevices, its hollows, its crookednesses, a mulitiplication of damage, of pain and disaster. The things that frighten us most have always crept up from behind. The primal brain, sitting low within the fragile skull, knows this, has always known this. It is the past we should fear, it is the past that haunts us.

  And it is the past that we cannot escape.

  SHE WAS DREAMING OF TREES when Casey shook her awake. Of running in a forest full of falling leaves—the colors a glory of crimson and gold. She could smell the smoke and mellow light and knew, though she could not see him, that a man ran before her, for his footprints were visible in the frost. Ahead was water, she could smell it, could sense the way air was always thicker and purer near water.

  Suddenly between two pale-skinned birches she caught a glimpse of the man—lithe and swift upon his feet as thistledown, dodging in and out amongst the trees, his head crowned in scarlet oak leaves, his body smooth as water over dark stone.

  She was breathing heavily, slipstreams of fog crystallizing in the air ahead of her. Her heart was beating so hard that it echoed like a drum through the woods and she could smell the hot salt of blood as she ran. She glanced down and saw that the blood lay upon the ground, in hardened drops, like fire opals scattered upon snow with a careless hand. But whether it was the man’s or her own, she did not know.

  Was she prey or predator? She couldn’t tell, only knew that fear filled her, electrifying her nerve endings, making her run on in pursuit of the man, though it felt as if her heart would burst with the effort.

  And then, in the odd time slip way of dreams, she was at the water’s edge. The man she pursued stood thigh-deep in the cold stream, blood on his legs and back, pooling in ribbons around his thighs. Closer to, she could see his smooth skin was really a pelt of fine, fawn-colored hair and that he was neither man nor beast, but rather something else that only existed in the netherland of dream. She could see how his body heaved with the effort of breath, and knew he was badly wounded, was dying here where the water froze in delicate geometry against the black earth. She called to him, but could not say what name fell from her tongue, nor how she knew what word would summon him.

  And then he turned and she screamed, for he had no face.

  She came awake with a start, the dream still pounding in her blood, making her skin feel thin and fragile, and the bones beneath aching as though she really had been running all night.

  “Where’s Lawrence?” she asked immediately, eyes not focused yet, so that it seemed she still saw the faceless man in front of her, overlaying the dim glow of the peat fire in the hearth.

  “I don’t know, that’s why I woke ye. I felt uneasy about the lad an’ so I called Pat. Lawrence was supposed to go there, aye? But Pat didn’t know anything about it; he said Lawrence hadn’t made arrangements with him.”

  She was all the way awake now. Tree branches were scraping against the window and the wind was moaning about the corners of the house. “We have to find him,” she said, fumbling to get out of the bed, limbs still stiff with sleep.

  “Aye we do, but I think it’d be best did ye stay here.”


  “No,” she shook her head, “I’m coming with you, and that’s an end to it.”

  Casey gave her a look of taxed patience and she braced herself for an argument. “Jewel, be reasonable, if the boy comes back here an’ the place is empty he might pull another runner on us. Ye need to stay here an’ keep watch. I won’t be long.” He leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead.

  “No. Casey, I have to come with you.”

  He gave her a searching look, his own face white with worry. Then he nodded slowly. “Alright then, I’ll meet ye downstairs once yer dressed.”

  Outside, the rain was sweeping in great horizontal draughts, the wind blowing hard enough to steal the breath from her lungs. The car was cold, but Casey did not wait for it to warm, but rather leaned forward wiping the windshield periodically, as they drove down the narrow, dark laneways toward Belfast.

  They did not speak, each caught up in the thoughts of what scenario awaited them. It had been months since Lawrence had missed his curfew.

  The dream still lingered about Pamela, laying an icy touch upon her skin. And she remembered too clearly the night Lawrence had told her his dream about the faceless man in the woods.

  “I’ve a feelin’ that if he ever turns around an’ I do see his face, somethin’ truly awful will happen in the daylight.” The words echoed in her head with the force of prophecy. How had the dream found its way unbidden into the recesses of her own subconscious?

  A memory came to her suddenly, of being lost herself. When she was found, her father had first hugged her and then just as swiftly yelled at her, an anger in his face she’d never seen before. It had frightened her—that lightning swift change in him, and she’d burst into tears, and he had hugged her again until the tears stopped. She could still smell him, the warm scent of Bay Rum cologne, and the under note of green things he always seemed to exude from his person. She felt a surge of longing for him, for the reassurance of a father’s presence. The arms around you that kept you shielded from the world.