Patti Callahan Henry

by When Light Breaks (v5)

  I’d dreamt about Jack’s touch during that summer, that summer of waiting. Now I knew the rush and release of all I’d held in some locked place in my middle. I have since come to believe this was why I had no patience in my adult life—the patient waiting I’d done for Jack when I believed I had all the time in the world was wasted.

  The moving man slammed the rear door of the van, then backed out of the driveway. I held fast to Jack. “Where are you going?” I asked, the words mumbled into his shirt. He didn’t answer, but stroked the back of my head, ran his fingers around and through my sleep-tangled hair.

  “Mama won’t tell us.” His voice came choked, full of pain.

  “What?” I pulled back from him, looked up at his face.

  “Kara, Father hit her for the last time. . . . I know we’ve never talked about what he does. Yesterday was a very bad day. She’s done with it and so are we. He’s gone, but we don’t know for how long. Mama packed everything she could. We’re leaving . . . now.”

  “Why didn’t you . . . tell me?”

  “I didn’t know until last night . . . when Mama started making us all pack up.”

  “You weren’t going to tell me?” A sob tore its way up my throat.

  “I knew you’d hear us in the morning. I knew you’d come. You always come at the right time. If you’d come before now you’d have made it . . . worse than it already is.”

  “You can stay. You can stay here with us . . . your mama and Jimmy can leave. You can stay. You can.” I grabbed on to his arm, squeezed as though that would keep him there.

  “You know I can’t leave her. There is no way. But I will call you as soon as I know where we are . . . as soon as I can. I promise I’ll come find you. . . .”

  “If you don’t, I’ll find you,” I said, small and fading.

  “I know you will. I know.” He touched my face, leaned in and kissed me. All the yearning was mixed with the pain of his leaving, with the dread of farewells. His lips touched mine and I understood the word “one.”

  A screeching of tires erupted down the road, a ripping sound. Mr. Sullivan’s car careened into the driveway. Jack released me. “One more minute, we only needed one more minute,” he muttered.

  Jack ran to his mother, who was shutting the trunk of the car, and stood in front of her as Mr. Sullivan staggered toward them.

  Time and space stood still, like in the Bible story where God tilted the earth and paused time for a moment.

  “Son.” Mr. Sullivan grabbed Jack’s shoulders, his voice level and low. “Get out of my way now. This ain’t none of your business.”

  “Don’t touch her, Dad. Don’t touch her again.” Jack’s voice was older, deeper, not the voice of the boy I knew: a man.

  “You have no idea who you’re messing with, son. You think you’re protecting your precious mother, don’t you? Do you know who she’s been sleeping with? Who she’s been messing around with while she pretends it’s all about the art, the painting?”

  “Stop,” Jack said.

  “You want me to stop? Maybe you should’ve told your mother that when she was—”

  Now it was my turn. “Stop!” I hollered, and ran toward them. “Stop.” Then I turned toward my house and, using all that was left within me, screamed as loud as I knew how. “Daddy, Daddy!” My voice and face were raised to my home next door.

  Mr. Sullivan reached his hand into the air, opened his mouth and released a gnarled sound of anger. The thick smell of bourbon came from deep within him, where it must live. I thought to duck, bend down away from his hand, but my astonishment at what he was about to do stopped me—a paralyzing disbelief.

  When his hand came down and across my face, I was still screaming for Daddy. The sting of pain was shrouded by incredulity, shock. I fell to the ground, not from the pain, which I barely felt, but from the force. My knees buckled and my palms stopped my fall. I felt the sting of pavement more than the slap that had forced me to the ground.

  Jack’s howl was animalistic, raw against my open heart. He lunged toward his father and pummeled his face with clenched fists just as my daddy came running full speed toward us. His feet were bare, his striped pajama bottoms tied at the waist, his mouth moving with words I had never heard him say, ones I did not know were within his cultured expressions.

  Daddy pulled Jack from his dazed father, who was now on the ground. I jumped up, ran toward the confusion, toward Daddy and Jack. Jack lifted his left foot, reached it back and kicked his father in the ribs. A loud crunching sound made nausea rise to the back of my throat, just as the pain from the slap ascended to my face, to my cheek. I turned and bent over.

  Jack grabbed me, pulled me to him, and the sting of the slap, the emptiness waiting just past me with a vortex of loneliness, faded. He reached into his pocket, withdrew his hand in a fist, then held his hand out to me and opened it. On his palm lay a round gold ring—one I distinctly knew was a Claddagh ring. “I meant to give this to you for your birthday next week, but now is as good a time as any. Not the way I meant it to be.”

  Mr. Sullivan groaned behind us, words garbled and empty of meaning. Jack looked down at him. “Not the way I meant it to be at all.”

  I lifted the ring—words gone, emotions churning. Jack took the ring from me, then slipped it onto my right ring finger. “I’ll call you when we get . . . somewhere.”

  Then I heard Mrs. Sullivan screaming, “Get in the car. Get in the car. Get in the car.” It sounded like a mantra from a deranged lunatic.

  Mr. Sullivan stood up then, his fists clenched at his side, blood leaking from his mouth. “You son of a bitch, I’m going to kill you.” He lunged toward my daddy, who sidestepped him. Mr. Sullivan fell to the ground with the momentum of his delirious anger.

  Sirens screeched across the road. Flashing lights joined the rising sun, and dizziness enveloped me as I heard my daddy tell Mrs. Sullivan to get in the car and go, go now, he’d take care of the rest.

  Jack turned from me, then back again. He touched my cheek, kissed me one more time, a long, beautiful kiss.

  “I’ll find you,” I said as the dizziness became complete and I let go—released the control to stand.

  When I awoke, I was in my bed with Aunt Martha-Lynn standing over me, clucking, holding ice to my cheek. I looked up at her, swiped at the ice pack, which hurt more than the leftover ache of the slap.

  “Are they gone?” I meant to say, but no sound, no voice came out.

  “Shhh. Shhh. You’re fine.” She leaned toward me, a tear falling down her cheek. “You’ve lost your voice from screaming for your daddy. He probably saved poor Mrs. Sullivan’s life.”

  I shook my head. “Jack did.” I mouthed the words.

  “Yes, child, so did Jack. You both did. Now Mr. Sullivan is in jail . . . and they’re gone.”

  “Gone,” I mouthed again, then rolled over and let the sleep take me where I needed to go: oblivion.

  In those young years I doubted if anyone else had ever experienced such an amazing memory of joy mixed with such staggering pain. How could both be present in the same moment, exist together in the same space and time? I wrote about it: poems and letters. When Mama had died there had been grief without joy. But when Jack had kissed me good-bye, there’d been both.

  I still didn’t understand it, but I didn’t know anyone who did. And, truly, I’d stopped thinking about it.

  I swung my feet over the dock, and water licked my toes. The tide had come in during my remembering. It was incredible to me that I could still, after all these years of forgetting, bring up details. Or maybe I had changed some of them, colored over parts. I didn’t know. The only way to know would be to ask Jack.

  No. I cracked my neck, stood. This was insanity. I needed to stop by the florists and double-check the flower order, call the dressmaker and check on the progress of the bridesmaids’ dresses, call in the menus for the golf event, and, of course, find a band.

  A band: the Unknown Souls.

  CHAPTER NINE
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  I avoided all thoughts of Maeve’s myth of the Claddagh ring, of a good-bye on a dawn Lowcountry morning, and plowed through my work for the remainder of the day. When I settled into the library that night to read over the list of things left to do for the tournament, the bruised fatigue of the flu pulled at my eyelids. I lay my head back on the leather chair, took a deep breath of Daddy’s pipe tobacco.

  The warm, yearning feeling for Jack that had once sat directly in my middle awakened. Sweet Jack. He, his mother, and Jimmy went to Arizona. He finally sent me a letter, which arrived a month after he left. This was an interminable length of time for a girl in love, twisting her Claddagh ring around and around until a raw spot appeared on her finger.

  Eventually high school started, but my heart didn’t. We wrote back and forth, back and forth until life sped up, until high school and dates and dances and cheerleading filled the emptier moments of missing Jack, and the picture of our good-bye became tattered and faded.

  Mr. Sullivan eventually disappeared into a pit of alcoholism and unemployment. The last I heard of him was when I was in tenth grade, and he was found asleep on Main Street. He’d lost his house, his wife, and his family. Although people murmured clucks of regret and said, “Poor Mr. Sullivan, his cheating wife up and left him with nothing,” I had no sympathy for him. I felt nothing but contempt for the man who took Jack away from me and slapped me to the ground.

  Daddy didn’t let us talk about what had happened that early morning, and there began the slow process of denial. He’d deemed the Sullivan family trashy and was relieved when they’d left.

  A thump startled me as my files fell to the floor. I opened my eyes. “Shit,” I said, and leaned down to pick up the papers, then lifted my gaze to see Charlotte standing in the library doorway.

  “Hello, girlfriend,” she said. “You look like hell.”

  “Thanks.” I threw a pillow at her and sat up.

  “No, really, you do. Not just like you’ve been sick, but like you’ve . . . been really sick.”

  “Very long day.”

  “Thought the doc told you to take it easy.”

  I shrugged. “I tried. I went to see Mrs. Mahoney today, and I’ve got to get through these files tonight.”

  “Oh, that’s just what you needed to be doing—visiting Mrs. Mahoney.”

  “I just sort of . . . ended up there.”

  “Well, you never ended up at Mom’s and she asked me to drop these drawings off for you.”

  I groaned. “Oh . . . I remembered, and then I guess I forgot.”

  “What in the world are you so preoccupied with?” Charlotte sat on the edge of the ottoman in front of my chair.

  “If you don’t remember, I’ve been in bed, sick for days on end.”

  “I just came by to check on you. Every time I’ve come the last few days you’ve been sound asleep.”

  “Hey . . .” I hesitated, then continued, “do you remember when Jack left?”

  Charlotte rolled her eyes, then lay all the way back on the ottoman, her legs dangling off the end. She stared at the plaster ceiling, where a cut-glass chandelier had hung since before I was born. “How could I not? Terrible day . . . and you didn’t snap out of it for what? A year, maybe two? Thought I’d lost you forever.”

  “Hmmm.”

  Charlotte leaned across the chair and grabbed my hand. “You’re getting married in a few weeks. Now is absolutely not the time to wonder what happened to Jack Sullivan. Things work out the way they should. He’s probably married with seven children and living in Seattle.”

  “No,” I said, and swung my legs to the floor and stood.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Follow me.” I motioned for her to come to the computer, clicked open the Internet and pulled up the Unknown Souls Band.

  Charlotte took a deep breath as I clicked on Jack’s face and biography. “You Googled him?” she asked. “You have just opened up an entire can of . . . problems if you don’t leave this alone. But now that we’re here . . . what’s he doing?”

  “Best I can tell, he and his brother, Jimmy, formed a band, Unknown Souls. They did it at first to raise money for an orphanage, but they had such a great response, they kept on playing. Now they’re getting popular and actually have a recording contract. Peyton’s heard of them.”

  “You asked Peyton about Jack?”

  “No.” I punched the side of her arm. “He found me looking at the Internet.”

  “And...”

  “He thought I was looking for a band for the golf tournament. He told me they’ve gotten too big to play benefits, but that he heard them play a couple years ago and they were really good. They somehow combine Celtic, rock and bluegrass, or something like that.”

  “Wow. Wouldn’t you just love to hear them?” Charlotte tapped the computer screen.

  I nodded.

  She leaned down. “Probably not a very good idea.”

  “Just to make this all a little crazier . . . I’m thinking of asking them if they’d play the tournament fund-raiser.”

  “I love crazier.” Charlotte leaned back on her heels.

  “I’ve been hanging out with you for way too long if I’m even considering contacting them.”

  “No way,” she said. “You’re not blaming me. I will take no responsibility for what comes after this. But”—she grinned—“I will participate in any way you wish—only at your urging, of course.”

  “Okay—enough. I’ve got to get some sleep.” I pushed print on the tour dates. “I’m wiped. Thanks for checking on me. I’m going to sleep and maybe, just maybe tomorrow I’ll be back on top of my game. Please apologize to your mom and thank her for sending the drawings.”

  “She’s worried about you.”

  “She’s been worried about me since Mama died.”

  “True, but she is more so now. Says you’ve got too much on your plate.”

  I nodded. “Tell her I’m fine. I’ll stop by tomorrow, okay?”

  Charlotte hugged me. “I actually have a date tonight. I’m off.”

  “Who?”

  “This guy I met at your shower . . . some friend of Peyton’s. Tom Schneider—you know him?”

  I shook my head. “Golfer?”

  “Yep. And I guess they leave for a tournament tomorrow . . . so we’re going out tonight.”

  “Peyton already left for the tournament—some PR thing this evening.”

  Charlotte hugged me and left. When I opened the door to my bedroom, I faced over three days’ worth of dirty laundry, papers, and strewn clothing. I wanted Mama. I wanted to curl up in her lap, let her pick up the clothes, let her stroke my forehead. This need didn’t come from a recollection of her ever having done such things for me—or maybe it did. My memories were mixed up and scattered now.

  I walked over to my dresser, pulled out the top drawer. I’d lived in this room for my entire life, except for the four years at college. I knew where everything was stashed. I pulled out the white marble jewelry box Aunt Martha-Lynn had given me the Christmas after Mama died. A row of padded ring holders was on the left side, a compartment for earrings and necklaces on the right.

  I opened the top and stared inside at a tarnished chain with a dolphin pendant; a leather bracelet with Kara engraved on the flat side, braided at the edges; a mood ring permanently stuck on black; and a Claddagh ring slanted sideways in the frayed lavender silk. I lifted the ring from the box and slipped it on my pinkie finger.

  I closed my eyes. Tomorrow I would do everything I could to get Maeve to tell me the end of her story—even if it was a legend. I could not afford to be patient; I would not waste time, because I never knew, as with Jack at dawn, when I’d run out of it.

  CHAPTER TEN

  A week came and went; the moon rose full, and the tides reached higher than normal, running over the seawalls at the end of Palmetto Pointe. Maeve wasn’t lucid enough during this time to even know I was present at her bedside, much less to resume a story she hadn’t finis
hed. I continued to leave my wingless angel in her room in the hope that she’d remember what she’d begun.

  I had researched the legend of the Claddagh ring and found that there were a couple of theories regarding its design and appearance on the shores of Galway Bay, and that yes, Richard Joyce’s was one of those legends. This meant that I did know the end of the story. I did know what happened to him and to their love. So why did I keep returning, hoping and waiting for Maeve to reveal the ending?

  Was it because I didn’t have the ending to Jack’s story? I didn’t really know what had happened to him?

  I sat in my car at a red light with my window open to breathe in the scent everyone else said you couldn’t smell, but I swore I could: high tide. I reached into my briefcase for the list of Unknown Souls tour dates. They were playing in Savannah the next night. I’d known this for a week and had watched and waited—not for an excuse to go, but for an excuse not to go: an event, party, or appointment. But tomorrow loomed with empty spaces on my Palm Pilot, and Savannah was only an hour and a half away.

  A honk pulled me from my reverie, and I turned left onto my street and then into my driveway, where Peyton’s Jaguar was parked. He was leaning against the hood talking on his cell phone. I jumped from the car and gave him a silent hug as he continued his conversation. He hugged me back and patted my bottom, held up his finger, and mouthed, “Hold on.”

  “Yes, Mom. No problem. See you in a few.” He dropped the phone into his back pocket and hugged me again. “Hey, darling.”

  “What are you doing here? I thought your tournament went until tomorrow. . . .”

  “Yeah, it does if you qualified.”

  “What happened?” The last time Peyton hadn’t qualified for the final round, I’d had to half carry him out of a bar in Boston back to his hotel room, then listen to him throw up for hours. The start of a beautiful relationship, indeed.