Fog Heart

by Thomas Tessier

  ‘Wo ist dein Vater?’

  ‘Tot.’

  ‘You looked at me.’ Nothing. ‘You looked at me while I was on the phone.’ Still nothing. ‘Didn’t you, Hündin?’

  A tiny nod. He slapped her once. He allowed her to savour the sting for a few seconds. Then he held the back of his hand close to her face. Marthe rubbed her cheek against it. She kissed and licked it, sucked his knuckles. Never taking her eyes from his now.

  ‘Und wer ist der Sklave hier?’ he said softly.

  She smiled, and then began to laugh.

  * * *

  It had been a mistake to shut everything up. Carrie opened the curtains and pulled up the blinds. That’s better. Sunlight on a gorgeous Saturday morning in May, things to do, an apartment to clean. Oliver would be home later.

  Carrie put on some music, loud, and went to work. It wasn’t as if the place were a mess. Conchita had been in on Tuesday, as usual, and all that was required now was a light dusting. A trip to Zabar’s. Then a bath and shampoo, fresh sheets, pillowcases. Stop – before the list gets any longer.

  Oliver had been quite concerned on the phone yesterday. He didn’t entirely believe her, but that was to be expected. He was one of the last people in the world who’d believe in such a thing happening. He had picked up on it right away and made her tell him about it. Carrie had intended to wait until after he got home, after sex, after dinner and after a few drinks, when they were both lazy and utterly relaxed.

  But now she was glad that he had pushed her. It was out in the open, her spooky little incident, and by the time he got home the Big Deal would be no big deal at all. Oliver took things in his stride, he was quick to adjust. Calm, cool, sensible. He would try to convince her that it had just been her imagination. She wasn’t buying that, and she hoped they wouldn’t argue about it.

  Carrie came to the shelf where her opal sat. Her father had found it on one of his excursions into the Australian interior. It was a stunning piece, the size of a dinner dish and roughly the same shape. A thin layer of dazzling blue opal in the middle of barren brown rock. She called it the Lake on the Moon.

  A good man. Once in a great while, when he was pleased about something and feeling mellow, he might have a cigar with a glass of fine brandy. Otherwise, he didn’t drink or smoke. But his heart had given out when he was a spry fifty-five. God, it still hurt to remember. Michael Brewster, her father.

  Growing up, Carrie had glimpsed snatches of Kuala Lumpur, New Delhi, Karachi, Dublin and (smelling of another low political move) Lagos. And then Harare, Zimbabwe. And finally, London. But by then Carrie was an adult. And along came Oliver.

  It amazed her how quickly she had adjusted to that ghostly incident. When Carrie had walked through the door the next morning, she felt a tremor of fearful anticipation, but she was determined not to surrender to it. She was back home. It was her home, and everything would be all right. Somehow.

  And it wasn’t a minute later when she suddenly found herself visualizing the image of her father again, and she could see in her mind one of the words he had spoken. Oliver.

  Carrie dusted the opal carefully, Lake on the Moon. She did the rest of the living room, threw some clothes in the hamper and neatened up the kitchen. She put on the kettle to make a cup of tea, and scanned the Times while waiting for the water to boil. Nothing grabbed her attention.

  It was so tantalizing, to think of communicating with someone who was dead. Reason told her it was so unlikely. Where was the other side, anyway? Even as a child Carrie had found unconvincing the idea of heaven and hell. It was equally difficult to believe in limbo where certain unhappy spirits were trapped after death, appearing at times to the living. Was she supposed to think that her father had been languishing somewhere out there, for the last six years, before suddenly visiting her?

  She made a small pot of Palm Court tea and placed it on the table in the nook, letting it steep. Carrie had been brought up nominally as a Catholic, but her parents had never been diligent practitioners. She had been taught the basics, received all the childhood sacraments, and had absorbed a little Church lore. It was something of a hit-or-miss education; she had never had the faith crammed into her head. And that was perhaps unfortunate. Carrie might now have a much clearer understanding of the – mythology concerning death and an afterlife.

  In her widowhood, Carrie’s mother had become more involved with the Church. She was a regular attender for the first time in ages. No doubt there was comfort in it, for those in need, along with social contact. But Carrie would never discuss it with her mother. Religion, death, Daddy. It wouldn’t be comfortable, and it probably wouldn’t do either of them any good. Carrie did have a brother, Jim, a few years younger, but he was a Marine, away on embassy duty in Buenos Aires. They weren’t that close.

  The music finished, but she couldn’t be bothered to get up and put something else on. The tea was ready. She sipped it and set the cup back in the saucer. As Carrie looked up, and sat back against the bench-seat, she saw her father sitting directly across the table from her, three feet away.

  She clapped a hand over her mouth, smothering a ragged noise that was partly a scream and partly a cry of anguish. She shrank back as far as she could, as if she wanted to sink right into the woodwork and the wall. Her whole body trembled violently.

  The look of pain and sadness in his face was unbearable. He opened his mouth, starting to speak, but then faltered – seeming to lack the strength. One hand reached towards her. The cup fell over with a thin clatter.

  ‘No,’ Carrie wailed. It was wrong, somehow. She slid along the seat into the corner of the nook. It was a bad decision, she realized dimly, and now she had nowhere to go. This was her own father, he wouldn’t hurt her, and yet it seemed all wrong for him to be there. She didn’t want to feel his hand on hers.

  He couldn’t, anyway. His arm stretched across the table and covered the thin ribbon of spilled tea, but fell short. And then it disappeared. He was gone. A gasp of relief. But Carrie felt bewildered with shame and guilt, as if in some way she had failed him. Tears ran freely down her face.

  It was real, it actually happened. Her father was trying to communicate with her. The second time now, in a matter of just a few days. And she couldn’t handle it. Carrie had reacted to him with fear and abject weakness. She felt pathetic, so inadequate, and she couldn’t stop crying.

  The spilled tea was smeared along the table.

  Daddy.

  5

  It wasn’t the greatest apartment in the world but, God knows, he’d lived in far worse. It occupied the upper floor of an older building just off Orange Street, barely within reasonable walking distance of Yale.

  The second bedroom served as his office/study, but his books spilled over and took up space throughout the apartment. He had accumulated thousands of volumes, including many valuable firsts of Anglo-Irish pedigree. The hardest part of this tinker’s life was packing and transporting books. But they were indispensable. They couldn’t be locked away in storage somewhere. The secret of mental balance for Charley was to be found in a houseful of good books – and a decent drink now and then.

  Jan looked in at him, gave a nod of no apparent meaning, and wandered off. Well, she was like that. Quiet, you might say. A woman who kept to herself but could socialize if it was required. The girl next door manquée. They first met while undergraduates at Northwestern. They had an affair of the heart, if not of the groin, and then were apart during the first year of his post-graduate work in Dublin. With his MA in hand, Charley returned to the States long enough to marry Jan, pack up their things and bring her back to Ireland. He got a part-time lecturer’s post at University College Galway, and spent the rest of his time working on the Dunsany thesis for his Ph.D. Rented a lovely little house outside the city. Ravenswood, by name.

  Jan had never done anything with her BA in English. Liked to read those windy historical novels but never wanted to teach. She had picked up some basic computer skills along the way, an
d usually managed to land a clerical job wherever they were living, like the one she currently had at a mail-order firm dealing in computer parts. It offered a middling wage, always handy, and where there was no challenge there was no stress.

  Just as well. Jan was a different person after Fiona’s death, and she never quite came all the way back from it. He had recovered, in time, gathered himself and carried on – still essentially the same Charley O’Donnell. But Jan, not quite. Something in her was permanently lost, a sense of confidence, perhaps, her faith in life itself. She became less a participant, and more a passenger seeing out the ride.

  It didn’t help that they couldn’t have any more children. A final twist of the knife. Perhaps they could, but simply didn’t manage the trick. The biology of it was inconclusive: either her eggs grew more resistant or his sperm had lost some of its vigour. Arcana like that, with hints of psychological causes.

  In recent years sex had become largely symbolic. They made love once or twice a month and there was nothing much to it. In all fairness, he’d always been a little too quick and inattentive at it. But it could also be fairly said that Jan had never shown any interest in becoming a skilled, exciting lover. She’d always preferred the affectionate aftermath to the mechanics of the main event. And that’s what they had come to, skipping the sex most of the time, and cuddling each other for the soothing warmth and comfort as they fell asleep.

  Jan must know that he satisfied his sexual needs elsewhere, but if she did she didn’t let on, much less make an issue of it. Charley tried to be careful and discreet. The age of Aids and an increasing awareness of women’s rights forced new considerations but didn’t significantly reduce the range of opportunity. People were people, and college campuses would always be highly charged with sexual intensity.

  And so, this marriage. There was still something good in it, he believed. He could have given up and left her long ago, and she could have done the same, but they clung together. It was far from a model marriage, but a thread of purpose and devotion ran through it. There were moments of genuine affection, fondness.

  He longed to tell Jan about Malcolm’s strange story. But how could he? She had been there when Fiona died, and the merest mention of the subject might be enough to unravel her. She never brought it up.

  Maybe they should have sought more psychological counselling, although it seemed like they had had plenty at the time. Everybody from the parish priest to the county social worker offered their well-intentioned advice, and there had been sympathy and support from family and friends. Charley and Jan had had a hard time absorbing half of it, the rest washed on by. But there are some things you can never talk away.

  Now this terrible story. Had it come from anybody else who knew him, Charley would have regarded it as a cruel joke. But Malcolm would never have considered doing such a thing, and his discomfort when he had mentioned it to Charley had been plain to see. There was no doubt that the psychic incident, or whatever it had been, had struck Malcolm as very near the real thing. Improbable as that seemed.

  But was it? Charley was aware of a certain irony. He had devoted a good portion of his adult life to the work of Dunsany, whose books were saturated with the fantastic, the improbable and the supernatural. Charley had no doubt that if this had happened to Dunsany, the old boy wouldn’t have batted an eyelash. He would have seen it as a glimpse of secret truth, as an intrusion of the higher reality into our drab everyday world.

  Could Charley simply dismiss it, chuck it all aside as sheer nonsense? He wanted to, but it wasn’t that easy. If, as Malcolm had said, there was one chance in a million that the incident was real, not a contrivance, then he couldn’t ignore it.

  At the moment, a more likely explanation suggested itself to him. This woman, the putative psychic, had most likely picked up on the residual accent in Malcolm’s voice and tossed off a random bunch of names and phrases associated with Ireland. Fiona was a common Irish name. Even Ravenswood was not so remarkable; there were Ravens-this and Ravens-that throughout Ireland. The country had entirely too many ravens by far, alas.

  That was how they worked, he thought. They threw out dozens of verbal titbits, hoping that at least one would trigger an association in the mind of the gullible customer. They watched carefully, and when something scored a hit they added a bit more to it, feeling their way, building on whatever the poor hapless soul unwittingly provided.

  But. Charley had futzed about this for a couple of days and still didn’t know quite what to do. Finally, he reached for the telephone and punched in Malcolm’s number.

  ‘Listen, mate, any chance you and your good lady wife could spare me a few minutes at short notice?’

  * * *

  Bethany, where the hills begin. Malcolm and Maggie owned an old farmhouse that had been fully renovated and redecorated. The kids, two or three, could be seen and heard from time to time out in the yard or thundering on the stairs inside. He really ought to make a point of learning their number and names one of these days. But he’d gone off other people’s children long ago.

  They sat outside the kitchen, on a patio made of old brick. There were pots and planters full of herbs and spring blossoms, a trellis half covered with a new growth of ivy. Malcolm brought wine glasses and two open bottles of Margaux to the wrought-iron table. Maggie looked altogether too good for a repeat mother, in snug jeans that showed off a fine backside and a man’s shirt that was not so loose it didn’t hint at certain delightful motions and features occurring on the inside.

  Heaney’s latest collection was moved reverently to one side as Malcolm poured the wine. Heaney was right on track for Oslo, and Malcolm was just about the top Heaney man in the world. Look at him, will you? Maggie, Heaney, Yale – when had Malcolm ever made a bad choice? The likely lad.

  ‘All right, now,’ Charley said, after they had touched their glasses. ‘About your woman. I want to know more.’

  ‘I’ve met a lot of these people and attended a lot of their sessions,’ Maggie said promptly, as if she had been waiting for a chance to discuss it with him. ‘And she’s as close as they come to the real thing. In fact, I’d say there’s no comparison at all. I’ve never seen anyone as good as she is.’

  ‘So you believe it, then?’

  Maggie hesitated. ‘I believe there’s something going on but nobody has a clear idea what it is. For all the studies and investigations that have been done, going back to the turn of the century, our understanding of psychic phenomena is limited. The history is largely anecdotal.’

  ‘You don’t think it’s just a case of fraud?’

  ‘It is in most cases,’ Maggie agreed, with a nod. ‘But then you find the one case in a thousand, and it’s so convincing that the only explanation seems to be you’ve witnessed a real paranormal event.’

  ‘So you think these folks, the few real ones, are tuning in to actual messages from the dead?’

  ‘No, not necessarily,’ Maggie said. ‘It may be that certain individuals have a vastly greater sensitivity to other people and situations. And their subconscious minds can pick up and process information that’s there all along but which the rest of us fail to notice.’

  Uh-huh. ‘The grape squash is very tasty, squire.’

  ‘Help yourself to more,’ Malcolm said, with a smile.

  Charley refilled his glass. Maggie had lovely teeth, small and pearly and very slightly uneven. Bless her for never having had them straightened. They were desperately sexy.

  ‘That all sounds very reasonable,’ Charley said. ‘But what if she noticed your hubby’s lingering Irish accent and decided to drop some names and phrases with Irish associations, thinking one might ring a bell in his mind?’

  ‘That’s possible,’ Maggie said. ‘It’s a common technique. What you have to do then is follow it and see where it goes. If you’re careful not to give out any solid information, it usually leads nowhere because the psychic quickly runs out of material to recycle.’

  ‘They’re the fakes.’


  ‘Some, yes,’ Maggie conceded reluctantly. ‘But, even then, I think that most of the ones with no real ability are still trying to help people. They’re sincere in their efforts. But there are those who are simply out to make money.’

  ‘You think this woman is real?’

  ‘Oona. Yes, she may well be.’

  ‘Oona?’

  ‘That’s her name, yes.’

  ‘Is she Irish?’

  ‘Scottish.’

  ‘Aha.’ Close enough, Charley thought. ‘Did she ever happen to live in Ireland?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘You don’t think she might have heard about your daughter,’ Malcolm said. ‘Surely that’s a stretch.’

  ‘Why not? It was big news in a small country.’

  ‘That’s possible too, I guess.’ But Maggie seemed doubtful. ‘Though I still don’t see why she would bring it up.’

  ‘Because she noticed that Mal’s Irish.’

  ‘But she wasn’t aware of any connection.’

  Charley didn’t want to argue; that wasn’t the point of the exercise. ‘How did you hear about her in the first place? Does she advertise, or what?’

  Maggie smiled. ‘No. Some do, but they’re not the ones worth seeing. It was word-of-mouth. I get a newsletter from a group that studies psychic phenomena, and it mentioned rumours of a woman in the New Haven area who was said to hold remarkable sittings. It took a while for me to find her, and then persuade her to let me take part in one.’

  ‘You had to persuade her?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Maggie said. ‘The first time we met, she told me she didn’t think she could help me because I had come to her out of curiosity, not need, and that was true enough. She’s rather exclusive. She will only agree to work with certain people, and she won’t have anything to do with those who want help or advice in business and financial matters, for instance.’