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

by Cindy Brandner

  “Let them go,” Jamie said above him, still holding him, bracing him against the flood. And so he did, knowing that, though he would carry them with him for all his days, he had held them too tightly and not given them the grief nor the joy owed to those whom we love and lose.

  His father, his brother who had grown to manhood without him, his own missed youth. The boy who had been the best friend he’d ever known. Deirdre and the baby they’d lost while he was interned. Lawrence, who had been an odd mix of wise friend and son. The trust he and Pamela had known, and a marriage that now stood on shifting sands so that he felt he could not recognize the form of it, nor to whom such a marriage might belong. And, God help him, he even cried for the mother that had left him so long ago.

  He lay for a time after the tears subsided, too weak and exhausted to move. The world came back to him in pieces. His jaw was throbbing where Jamie had hit it and his head still hurt like holy hell. The pain in his chest had receded a bit though, and he drew his first full breath in months. He levered himself up, aching in every joint and muscle. He felt as though he’d been mercilessly beaten.

  He slumped against the bed frame. He felt terribly fragile and yet knew that somehow he had been restored to himself in the last few minutes. That Jamie had unlocked his grief and in doing so had placed the shore of redemption within sight. There was one last thing, however, that he needed to know.

  “How much?” Casey said softly, voice drained of all emotion. “How much money did ye pay to buy my freedom?”

  “Two hundred thousand pounds,” Jamie said. “You were far more expensive than your compatriots.”

  “What?”

  Jamie eyed him dispassionately. “They were only ten thousand a head, you were far more. You wanted to know and now you know. Has it set you properly free?”

  “Why—why would ye do such a thing?”

  “For her. I didn’t think she could bear losing you again, after she got you back. It seemed a small price to give her peace of mind.”

  “To whom did ye give this money?”

  Jamie raised an eyebrow. “It’s not the sort of thing for which they issue receipts.”

  He sighed. It seemed he owed the bastard yet again.

  “You’re going to survive this,” Jamie said gently, “something has already decided that for you. Now you have to decide how to live with it.”

  And there, Casey thought, was the rub.

  Jamie stood and straightened his shirt, then slung his overcoat casually over his forearm. “If you’re inclined,” he said, “to prolong your suffering and stay out here in the wilds, perhaps it will motivate you to think of her living under my roof, eating at my table, spending her mornings, noons and nights in my company.”

  “Sleeping in yer bed?” Casey retorted between gritted teeth.

  “If it comes to that, then yes,” Jamie replied, “sleeping and waking in my bed.”

  “One question before ye go,” Casey said wearily, head throbbing like an anvil.

  “Yes,” Jamie said, green eyes meeting his coolly.

  “Do ye love her enough to give me a day or two to get myself together? Do ye love her enough to wait a bit?”

  “I love her enough,” Jamie said quietly, “to wait forever. But you my good man have until Hallowe’en to make a decision and act upon it.”

  TWO DAYS AFTER JAMIE’S VISIT, Casey looked down the laneway to see Matty’s little car humping its way through the ruts.

  “Jaysus, Mary an’ Joseph,” Casey said aloud to the air. “Will they never leave a body alone?!” He heaved a sigh of frustration, and then pinned a smile of welcome on his face as Matty got out of his car. “I don’t suppose ye just happened to be passin’ through the neighborhood?”

  Matty smiled, looking like nothing more than a cherubic garden gnome, laced in butterflies. “Desmond an’ I talk now an’ again.”

  “Do ye indeed?” Casey said dryly, thinking Dez’s promise not to interfere had lasted about as long as it took for Casey to shut the door behind him. The man had been down to visit and proffer his own advice the week past. When Casey had enquired as to how he knew where to find him, Dez had smiled in an annoying Cheshire manner, which told Casey exactly who had given out the directions to his hideaway.

  “Aye we do, an’ the both of us came to the one conclusion—that the way yer behavin’ isn’t somethin’ yer Daddy would like to see, nor would he want for ye the sort of life yer headin’ for, if ye don’t take stock here.”

  Casey sighed, a breath of frustration that seemed to work its way up from his very toes. “An’ what do ye suppose the man wanted for me?”

  “I imagine that he wanted for ye what most parents want for their children. That ye find happiness and someone to love. Might not seem much in the grand scheme of things, but it’s all that really matters when the day is done.”

  “Mmphhm,” Casey said, in what might be grudging agreement, or outright irritation.

  “Ye may think I’m meddlin’ where I’m not concerned,” Matty avoided Casey’s gaze as he said this. “But I was there after that bastard opened yer back up for ye, an’ we didn’t know for a good bit whether ye’d live or die.”

  “Yer point, Matty,” Casey said impatiently.

  “My point is when a man’s brought so low as that—well that’s when he knows what matters in his life, gives ye a clarity that canna be achieved in other ways. An’ my point is that ye yelled her name, even while ye were unconscious. Ye kept callin’ her over an’ over until ye were hoarse—fair drove Declan mad, ye did. I’d always heard as ye’d made a love match, but I knew what it meant after those three days. Maybe lad,” Matty fumbled with his knit cap, “ye’ll not know that doesn’t happen for everyone, in fact I’d wager it only happens to a very lucky few.”

  “I do know that,” Casey said quietly, “but somehow, Matty, it only makes what she’s done that much worse. I feel like she’s gutted me.”

  “I don’t know what she’s done, but I’ll ask ye—does she still love ye?”

  “Aye, she does.”

  “An’ do you still love her?”

  “Aye, I do.”

  “Then I think ye can forgive it, whatever it might be.”

  “Matty, I appreciate ye takin’ the time to—”

  Matty cut him off with a raised hand. “I’ve said my bit, an’ ye can take it or leave it. Now, would ye have a drink about the place, man?”

  Casey laughed. “No, the bloody bastard that sent ye here—an’ I think we both know I’m not speakin’ of Desmond—poured every drop of it down the sink. I can make ye a cup of tea if ye’d like, though.”

  Matty smiled. “That’d be grand, lad.”

  When Casey returned with the tea, Matty was still sitting on the stone wall, face turned toward the sun, which was bright but held little warmth this late in the autumn. His wispy hair lifted in the breeze, heightening his gnome-like countenance. It struck Casey that the man was starting to look old. He wondered with a sudden tightness in his throat what his own daddy would have looked like had he lived to this age.

  “Here’s yer tea then,” Casey said gruffly, handing Matty a mug that steamed in the cool air.

  “Yer da’ gave me a bit of advice once that I’m goin’ to pass on to yerself today.”

  “Aye?”

  “He told me to go home an’ save my marriage before I found I didn’t have one. I didn’t listen, an’ I’ve had a lifetime to regret it. I’d not see ye make the same mistake. I felt I owed ye that much.”

  “Ye don’t owe me anything, man.”

  “Aye, that’s as may be or no, but I owed yer da’. Were he here, he’d tell ye much as I have today.”

  “An’ likely cuff me upside the head just to be sure the point had gotten across.”

  “Aye, well a man might see the temptation. Yer a stubborn laddie.”

  “I suppose I am at that,” he admitted ruefully.

  “There’s stubborn an’ then there’s just plain stupid, make certai
n ye know the difference, son.”

  “I’m trying,Matty.”

  Matty reached across and patted his hand. “I know ye are laddie, just don’t be too long about it, though.”

  Chapter Eighty-seven

  Good Night Moon

  SEPTEMBER BECAME OCTOBER and the days slipped from soft fog and slow sun to chill frost and early nights. And still there was no word from Casey, and still Jamie would say to her sleepless eyes and overstrained nerves, ‘He’ll come.’ But as the days of October melted off the calendar and drew themselves down toward November, her doubts took over and she began to believe Casey had made his decision and by not coming was telling her just what that decision was. So when the bell rang in the early evening of a late October night she thought very little of it.

  “Will you get that or shall I?” she asked, stretching lazily, the print of the book in her lap beginning to swim in front of her eyes.

  “I believe it’s for you,” Jamie said, calmly turning the page in his own book.

  “How do you know—” she began and then stopped just as suddenly, a constriction in her throat. There was only one way he could be certain. She stood, the book falling to the floor unheeded, her pulse suddenly throbbing in her ears. Her legs felt as insubstantial as blown glass, as if they could not possibly make the short trip to the hall, and yet they did so, moving of their own accord across the polished floor and along the Turkish runner. The door seemed a mile away and far too close at the same time. She put her hand upon the great carved knob and taking a deep breath, opened it.

  He stood on the doorstep, hands rammed in his pockets, nerves apparent in every line of him. She stood wordless. Confronted with his physical presence, common sense took its leave gracefully and small talk seemed utterly beyond her abilities.

  “The night is fine,” he said softly, “will ye walk with me?”

  Silence gripped her throat in a painful vise. This was the moment she had wanted and yet now that it was here it terrified her.

  “Please,” he added, and it was the uncertainty in his voice that broke the spell for her.

  “Yes,” she nodded, hand gripping the doorknob tightly still, afraid her legs would not support her if she let go.

  “Ye’ll want a coat, it’s cold,” he said, the proof of his words displaying itself in small puffing clouds of breath.

  “I’ll just be a minute,” she said, awkward in the face of the man who knew her better than any other, who’d seen her at her finest and at her very worst.

  “I’ll wait,” he replied, and she understood that the words extended far past their immediate implication.

  She headed towards the stairs, meaning to fly up them, only to halt, uncertain, in the doorway of the study, knowing there weren’t any words to properly express the jumble of violent emotion that had her shivering and burning all at once.

  Jamie looked up, green eyes bemused, the recently lit fire sparking gold off his hair and the ring on his finger. “Take a sweater,” he said gently, “it’s chilly in the evenings now.”

  “Jamie I—thank you.”

  He gave a wry smile. “That, as they say, is what friends are for. Now go, don’t keep the poor man waiting any longer.”

  Casey, as he’d promised, waited just beyond the stairs where the garden lights made shallow ivoried pools in the hollows between fallen leaves and dew-iced grass.

  “It’s good to see ye,” he said as she drew near, his tone that of a hesitant half-stranger.

  “It’s good to see you too.” His awkwardness had translated itself to her and she found her hands flapping uselessly at her sides, then realized it was because she was used to slipping one automatically into his. And now did not know if she could, or should.

  “I’ve a place in mind that I’d like to take ye, if ye’ll allow it.” She understood the words that lay unspoken between them, ‘trust me this little,’ he was saying.

  “That would be grand,” she said softly.

  He’d left the car at the bottom of the drive, near the cypress gate. The gate where he’d waited for her in the early days of their courtship. He gave her a hand into the car and she could feel the burn of his touch. She was awash with the need to touch him suddenly, to be able to bridge the abyss that had widened to an impasse on the night Robin had told him about Love Hagerty. She knew, though, the move would have to be his.

  The ride was quiet, both painfully aware they were far beyond the point in their relationship where small talk was an option for smoothing ruffled nerves. Casey drove quickly, eyes on the road, face set in the lines that meant he was deep inside his own mind. Soon they left the lights of Belfast far behind, to turn down a country lane that was heavily overhung with ragged hedgerows and brown, wilted fuchsia. The lane was so constricted that the trees bent back against the sides of the car and after a few minutes of this, Casey stopped the car and turned off the engine.

  “We’ll have to walk, the car can’t go any further,” he said and squeezed out his side into the pitch-black tunnel of leaves.

  She joined him in front of the car, still rubbing at a stinging spot on her scalp where a particularly vindictive branch had tried to extract a generous patch of hair.

  The silence was absolute, the night creatures burrowed down against the chill of winter. Under her feet, the ground was hard as tempered steel.

  “Are ye alright, then?” Casey asked, his voice almost a shock in the dark.

  “I’m fine,” she murmured, tucking her hands into her pockets and following as he set off purposefully up the narrow rutted pathway.

  He walked a little ahead of her, visible only in flashes where the moon’s light, chill and thick as hoarfrost, penetrated the murk of the surrounding flora. His time away had changed him. So attuned was she to his variety of nuances that she could sense it even in the way he held his shoulders, the way the deep groove of his backbone was apparent through his shirt. She remembered the last time she’d run her fingertips in that hollow, each vertebrae round and smooth beneath her hands, the odd silkiness of old scars, pale against the brown of his skin. She remembered the heat and damp of their two bodies and felt the familiar rush of weakness that always came with the thought of what that body could do to her, had done to her.

  She stumbled slightly, a loose stone in the pathway catching her unawares. He reached back a hand and caught her, giving her his hand to guide her through the tangle of frostbitten broom and gorse that cluttered the path in front of them. The feel of his palm, smooth and hard with calluses, was like coming home after a particularly long absence, slightly unfamiliar and yet entirely comforting.

  They came upon the cottage suddenly, around a bend in the narrow track. Here the moonlight was dense, delineating the smallest blade of grass and the finest whisper of breath, the white so stark that all it touched seemed without weight or depth. The cottage appeared to be floating on top of a slight knoll, half-hidden by the bare bones of the trees that emerged from the whitened landscape like rheumatic bones. The little house seemed to hunch in on itself, as if trying to elude the grasp of the curving tree branches.

  That it was abandoned was at once apparent, it had the oddly blind look of a house with its windows broken out. The ancient reeds of the roof were rotted, and gaping holes like untended wounds, perforated the little building.

  She looked at him, the question clearly written upon her face.

  He responded as though she had spoken aloud. “It’s neither your territory nor mine, it belongs only to ghosts. I thought neutral ground was only fair. Come,” he gestured towards the door, his voice no more than a whisper, as if he felt the need not to disturb any spirits that might be lingering.

  Inside the cottage, moonlight poured through the rotten reeds of the roof—molten and lambent, it lay thickly over every surface. The white light bent around dust-shrouded shelves, a table that still held a bowl and cup and a stub of a candle. The strange stillness was here as well, only heavier, as if this sad, abandoned home were the source of its
emanation. She moved carefully, hardly daring to breathe, to take that strange, still light into her lungs.

  “You’d think no one had been here in a hundred years,” she whispered, and even that low tone sounded like a shout to her ears. Dust stirred in a delicate eddy under her fingertips as she passed them above the table. The light was such that each mote was limned as though it danced its spiral dance in broad rays of sunlight.

  “It’s like that no one has been,” Casey said, voice somber. “There’s houses like this all about the country, Jewel, families that just up an’ left an’ wee houses that wait forever for their people to come back.”

  “Just left, with food still on the table?” She gestured towards the bowl and cup, thickly shrouded in cobweb.

  “Aye, at times. Not that there was likely much food to be had.”

  “But what could drive a family so quickly from their home?”

  “Despair,” he said simply, “do ye not feel it? Yer usually extra sensitive to it. The wee house feels it, aye?”

  She was silent for a moment, allowing thought and feeling to flow in rather than out. Her eyes absorbed each object, its angles and shades, the way the cobweb lay in fragile sheets, overlaid by years of grime, glimmering like fairy dust in the moonlight. She took a deep breath, smelling the disuse, the mildew, the rot. It was almost palpable, the little house had felt disappointment which over the days, months and years had become despair. The pain was very nearly physical, a deep empty void just below her ribcage.

  “Why did they go, do you think?”

  Casey shook his head, moonlight painting him in silver and black. “The Famine maybe, so many left then an’ so many after because they could not feed their children, nor themselves. Can ye imagine what it was to look into yer child’s face an’ know ye’d not a bite to feed them, while grain lay rotting in the harbors? There’s a poem by Jack Stuart aye, perhaps ye’ll know it? It’s called An Gorta Mor an’ it lists the things that were sent to England in one year—