Casting Off

by Nicole R Dickson

  “Sometimes a new place takes a bit of getting used to.”

  “Fionn says the box on the dresser is from Sharon. He says she bought candles and embers so it would smell nicer.”

  On the dresser, Rebecca found a package the size of a shoe box, wrapped in paper with California poppies on it. She brought the box over to the bed and, with Rowan’s help, opened it. Inside they found three candles and a plastic bag with hundreds of incense sticks. A box of wooden matches was tucked beneath the candles, along with a small incense burner.

  “Want an ember?”

  “Yeah!” Rowan declared, lying back in bed.

  Pulling out a stick of incense, Rebecca struck a match and lit the brown ember. It burst to flame and began crackling.

  “Shit!” she yelled, dropping the popping stick on the covers.

  “Mama!” Rowan called, kicking the covers to keep the sparks from hitting her.

  “Sorry, sorry. Shoot!” Rebecca corrected, grabbing the stick once more and racing to the bathroom. She dropped it into the sink and turned on the faucet. The stick sputtered in the water and sizzled out with a hiss and a puff of smoke. She hurried back into the bedroom.

  “Are the covers okay?” Even as the words came from her mouth, she could see there was no charred spot on the blue bedspread.

  “Sharon bought sparklers!” Rowan exclaimed as she laughed with surprise.

  “Apparently. She thinks she’s funny.”

  “She is funny!” Rowan laughed again. “She made pretend the sparklers were incense.”

  “Ha-ha,” Rebecca replied, patting the covers. “Help me see if she put any real incense in the bag.”

  Shaking the contents of the bag onto the blankets, Rowan and Rebecca rummaged through the sparklers.

  “I’ll miss the fireworks this year,” Rowan sighed, holding a sparkler to her nose and sniffing.

  “I think Sharon realized that.” Now that the danger was past, Rebecca smiled. “She’s a good friend.”

  “I’ll miss going to Redding, too. We always go there for July Fourth.”

  Rebecca’s throat tightened. Redding was where she had grown up. Her father had loved the Fourth of July, and he always threw a big party for the whole neighborhood. Though her parents were gone now—they had died in a car accident ten years earlier—all the families that lived in their cul-de-sac still carried on Rebecca’s father’s Independence Day tradition. She always took Rowan to Redding for the Fourth of July to share that part of her parents with her little girl.

  “I know. Well, we have sparklers. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Rowan whispered.

  In all, there were only three sticks of incense among the sparklers. Rebecca lit one, placed it on the burner, and set it on the dresser. Sifting through the suitcases, she located her pajamas and toothbrush and headed back to the bathroom.

  “He’s nice, huh, Mama?” Rowan’s voice reached her easily from the other room.

  “Who?

  “Fionn.”

  “He’s”—Rebecca searched for a positive word as she scowled in the mirror—“considerate.”

  “And he has red hair.”

  “That he does,” she agreed, squeezing out some toothpaste.

  “I asked him if he played the fiddle.”

  “What?” Rebecca went back into the bedroom as she started to brush her teeth.

  “Well, you said the man you marry will have red hair and play the Irish fiddle.”

  “You didn’t tell him that, did you?” she exclaimed. Rebecca had made that comment to Rowan only once. It was last year and Rowan had kept asking if she was ever going to have a dad. In a moment of inspiration, Rebecca said she’d like to marry a man with red hair who played the Irish fiddle. Red-haired men are not common and finding one who played the Irish fiddle in Los Angeles or Virginia or whatever state they would live in was most improbable. The comment had the desired outcome: Rowan stopped asking. Rebecca had had no idea that her daughter had remembered the conversation.

  “No,” Rowan answered with a frown. She rolled over.

  “Sorry, Rowan. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

  “Okay, Mama.”

  Returning to the bathroom, Rebecca finished brushing her teeth and slipped into her pajamas. As she came back into the bedroom, she heard snoring. Rowan was in bed with her eyes wide-open.

  “Who’s snoring?” she inquired.

  “Trace.”

  “What’s he still doing here?”

  “Fionn said he’s good at catching fairies.” Rowan giggled.

  “He left the dog?” Rebecca growled.

  “So we can feel safe in a new house. That’s what he said.”

  Rebecca rubbed her face, a long sigh escaping her lips.

  “You okay, Mama?”

  “Yes,” Rebecca replied, flipping off the light. “Can you see the ember?”

  “Yeah.”

  Crawling into bed, Rebecca pulled Rowan next to her like a little spoon.

  “Oh, you’re toasty,” she told her daughter.

  The quiet of the house was broken only by the sound of the surf like the great boom of a giant drum against the walls of the cottage.

  “I hear the ocean,” Rowan whispered.

  “Isn’t it wonderful?”

  “Can we go to the beach tomorrow?”

  “We’ll see. There may be no beach at all near this house. There’re a lot of cliffs on Sharon’s island, very few beaches. So she says.”

  “Can we look tomorrow?”

  “You bet.”

  The ocean roared, and in the darkness Rebecca thought about how tiny this house was, how little this island. A shudder rolled down her spine, seizing her ribs. She was suffocating. Then, at the moment when she thought she was going to faint, she remembered Fionn’s words, the words of the whole town: no safer place than here.

  “You’re squeezing me too tight,” Rowan said, wiggling to loosen her mother’s hold.

  “Sorry.” She took a deep breath and tried to think of something other than being alone with Rowan in the middle of the giant ocean. Her thoughts turned to Fionn’s beautiful red curls.

  “Rowan?”

  “Yeah, Mama?”

  “What did he say—about the fiddle?”

  “He didn’t answer me.”

  “He didn’t say anything?”

  “He laughed.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Bobble

  Bobble. 1. A stitch that looks like a ball. Bobbles vary in size based on the number of rows into which they are knitted. This stitch is very important, as it adds texture to the sweater or jumper, by either placing it singly within a pattern or grouping several bobbles together to form a pattern of their own. 2. Living things, like animals or trees. 3. People.

  —R. Dirane, A Binding Love

  Rebecca lay close to Rowan, listening to the crash of waves. The pink-red on her eyelids told her it was morning, but she had no reason to open them or get up from her warm covers, for her sweet dreams of the night before still lingered. They were filled with flying and houses and water softly rolling upon some far shore. At least she thought it was a far shore. Perhaps it was very close. Either way, there had been no Dennis dream—no falling, no white sweater or desperate voice calling for help, and because of that Rebecca smiled.

  Lying still, she listened to Rowan’s breathing and the ocean and rolled over to sleep again until she heard three taps on the bedroom window. Her eyes popped open and she quickly glanced over to the little window on the wall opposite the door. The white cotton curtains were drawn together with just a sliver of an opening between them, and through it Rebecca spied a beady black eye staring at her. She sat up. Next to the bed, Trace was standing at attention, his gaze fixed on the window with his ears pulled forward and his hackles raised between his shoulders.

  “Easy, boy,” Rebecca whispered as she slid out of bed. She brushed his head gently as she took two steps across the cold stone floor to the window. Slowly parting the curtains,
she found a small bird standing on the windowsill. It had gray-feathered wings and a black-and-white-spotted breast.

  It winked at her as it ruffled its feathers, looking as if it was smiling in the morning sun. Then it hopped off the ledge and landed on a limb of the bramble that grew outside the window. It cocked its head back toward Rebecca and carefully picked its way through the dusty, shadowed interior of the bush.

  On her tiptoes, Rebecca could just make out a small brown nest with four little eggs tucked tightly together, warmed by one another and the dappled light of the sun.

  “Ah, you have a family.”

  The bird bent its head and poked at a small twig that had dislodged from the nest.

  “Awfully tight fit there. You sure that nest is going to hold all those babies?”

  As the bird tucked the rogue twig back into place, another popped out on the opposite side. Skipping over the eggs, the bird grabbed the escaping twig and tore it from the nest.

  Rebecca giggled. “Houses are frustrating, aren’t they?”

  Shivering, she suddenly realized how cold her room was.

  “Well, thanks for showing me your nest. I have to go find the heater.”

  Quietly, Rebecca rummaged through the luggage, looking for her robe. As she lifted a pair of Rowan’s overalls, she found her old scarf folded beneath, its edges frayed and ends tattered. Pulling it out, she touched the irregular stocking pattern, some stitches tight, some loose. It had been her first effort at knitting and her first lesson with Sharon.

  “Ya need a little help there?”

  Rebecca glanced up from her needles to find a girl with black hair and black eyes standing in the doorway of her dorm room. She sighed in exasperation.

  “I can mathematically spin a circle around an axis and make a torus. I can tell you that when electrons are excited, they jump to higher orbitals. I can even tell you that the reason cars move forward at lights before the light turns green is an example of the anticipatory goal response. I can tell you all this, so why in the world can I not get these stitches to add up to thirty each time I knit a row?”

  The girl laughed, slipping into the room and plopping onto the bed next to Rebecca.

  “I’ll help you with knitting if you help me with chemistry,” she said, her Irish accent sparkling like the reflection of daylight in her black eyes.

  “You in chem?”

  “Aye. I’m in your class.”

  Rebecca smiled weakly. She hadn’t noticed.

  “Did ya not notice?” The girl giggled and gently took the needles from Rebecca’s hands. Rebecca looked at her sideways, stunned that the girl seemed to have read her mind.

  “I come from an island of knitters,” she explained, holding the needles up to the light.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Ireland.”

  “I guessed that much,” Rebecca said with a smile.

  “Did ya now?” The girl stared into Rebecca’s eyes, and slowly a crooked smile grew across her face.

  “Aye,” Rebecca replied, lifting her eyebrows as she stared back.

  They grinned.

  “I’m Sharon O’Connelly of the western islands.”

  “I’m Rebecca Moray of—of—from the land o’ Redding.”

  They burst into laughter.

  “Redding is north of here, isn’t it?” Sharon asked, pulling the stitches off the needle.

  “North of here. And east. My family comes from central California.”

  “Are they all chemists?” Gently, Sharon tugged at the yarn, pulling out one stitch at a time.

  “My dad’s a fireman and my mom is from a family of farmers. Almonds mostly. I suppose farmers are kinda like chemists. Your family are knitters?”

  “Fishermen. Nothin’ worth saving here. We’ll have to rip back.”

  “That sounds terrible.” Rebecca winced.

  “Ah, just pulling it all out and starting over. I’ll pull the yarn. You roll it back into the ball.”

  With wide eyes, Rebecca stared at the bumpy edges of the scarf. She could hardly claim that her knitting had improved since this first attempt. But it had been so long since she’d thought of that day, the first day she’d met Sharon. All of Rebecca’s memories with Sharon had stopped on Thanksgiving Day six years before. That moment off Highway 1 on a cold, dark night with Sharon’s arms wrapped around Rebecca’s waist had burned all the memories of their earlier years together to ashes. It was her last night with Dennis.

  Since that night, Sharon and she had stayed as close as ever, but Rebecca had rarely been able to speak to Sharon of anything but the weather and work. She always avoided discussing that Thanksgiving night—the memory she could not face and from which she constantly fled. Sharon, nevertheless, had remained there for her, ever patient. Now, as Rebecca ran her fingers across her irregular stitches, her mind filled with images of Sharon’s black hair drifting over a pair of needles as she taught Rebecca how to knit. She smiled at the memory of their first tentative but warm moments of friendship, and tucking the scarf gently back beneath Rowan’s overalls, she extricated a pair of socks and a bathrobe from the suitcase.

  “I thought it was summer,” she muttered through chattering teeth. She searched the walls of the cottage for the thermostat but found none. Then she heard a soft knock on the front door. She froze. What if it was Fionn? What would she say?

  “Becky?” It was a woman’s voice.

  Crossing the living room, Rebecca turned the knob and cracked open the door. There, on the other side, was a middle-aged woman with a salt-and-pepper ponytail and sparkling hazel eyes.

  “Good morning, Becky. I’m Sheila—Sheila O’Flaherty. Fionn’s mum.”

  “Oh!” Rebecca replied, opening the door wider. “Thanks so much for supper last night.”

  “You’re welcome. Fionn said he didn’t get a chance to show you how to bank the fire.”

  “Bank the fire?”

  “Aye. The cottage is heated only by the fireplace. You need to bank the fire at night so you have heat in the morning. Is it very cold in there?”

  “Not so bad,” Rebecca lied.

  “May I come in to start the fire?”

  “Oh. Sorry,” Rebecca replied, stepping aside. “Please.”

  “We’ve waited so long to meet you,” said Sheila, stepping through the doorway and heading to the fireplace.

  “It seems everybody knows me.”

  “Sharon went the farthest from here of anyone. When she came back, we sat around and listened to her stories. You were always in them.”

  “We did everything together.”

  “She missed you when she came home.”

  “I’ve missed her, too.”

  After arranging several brown mud bricks in a tepee upon the gray ash and tucking a small wad of grass beneath, Sheila struck a match and held it to the grass. It began to smolder.

  “Is that peat?” Rebecca asked.

  “Aye. We’ve brought running water out here and heat for it, but my husband can’t part with the peat fire. He says it smells like home. I made him put heat in our house up the road, though, so if he wants to smell home, as he calls it, he has to come out here by himself.” Sheila laughed. The peat smoked as little flames lapped its edges.

  “We’ll keep it going today and I’ll show you how to bank it tonight. Let me make breakfast. It’ll give you time to settle in and I can watch the fire. I suppose you have unpacking to do.”

  Truth to say, Rebecca did have unpacking to do.

  “Are you sure it’s not too much trouble?” Rebecca asked, following Sheila into the kitchen.

  “No trouble at all. Tea or coffee?”

  “Tea, please.”

  Sheila smiled and nodded.

  Quietly Rebecca opened the bedroom door. On the other side she found Trace wagging his tail desperately.

  “Oh,” Rebecca whispered. “Come on.”

  Trace followed Rebecca into the front room and stopped at the kitchen to study Sheila.


  “There you are,” Sheila announced, looking over her shoulder as Trace passed the kitchen. The dog halted in his tracks.

  “H-he stayed here last night.”

  “He likes the smell of peat, too.” Sheila chuckled again. “When we rent the place out to the tourists, it’s quite an adventure. Can ya let him out the door?”

  “Come on, Trace,” Rebecca called. She opened the front door and the dog barreled out into the morning sun. The air was light, and a gentle, cold wind picked up the ends of Rebecca’s brown hair and brushed them back over her shoulders. She smiled and shut the door.

  “It smells green out there,” she said. “I’ve never smelled a color before.”

  “Late-spring mornings are my favorite,” Sheila commented as she cracked an egg in the white bowl before her.

  Again Rebecca quietly opened the bedroom door to fetch her clothes, trying not to wake Rowan. The little girl giggled.

  “Ah—you’re awake. Funny dream?”

  “Na-uh. That little bird.”

  Rebecca looked over at the window and saw the bird there, peeking through the curtains again.

  “It said good morning to me, too. We’ll eat breakfast and then we’ll go outside. Fionn’s mom’s in the kitchen.”

  Rowan bolted from bed as Rebecca dug through her suitcase.

  “Is Fionn coming for breakfast?” she heard her little girl ask of Sheila.

  “No, he went home this morning,” Sheila replied. “They probably won’t be back till Christmas. You must be Rowan.”

  “I am,” Rowan said.

  Rebecca pulled on her jeans and a sweater from her suitcase and headed for the bathroom. She was quite relieved that Fionn was gone, and the fact that he wouldn’t be back until after she left for the States at the end of the summer was even better. Though he had raced off with her daughter the night before, Rebecca had a heavy feeling in the pit of her stomach about the fact that she had slammed the door in his face.

  As she stepped out of the bathroom, there was a banging knock at the front door. Sheila looked over her shoulder to Rebecca, who now stood in the kitchen doorway.

  “That’ll be my husband. His name’s Fionn, too,” Sheila said, poking at the frying pan. “He’s smelled the bacon and eggs.”