Last Kiss

by Luanne Rice

  In 1688, four of the five Goodwin children became ill. Witch fever was in full swing, and when a doctor concluded “nothing but a Hellish Witchcraft could be responsible for these Maladies,” they looked to Annie. She was a practicing Catholic—had refused to renounce her religion. And she had recently been accused of stealing laundry from the family, and was therefore suspected of harboring a grudge against them.

  Reverend Cotton Mather interrogated her; Annie spoke in her native Irish, refusing to answer him in English. Reverend Mather—later of the Salem witch trials—condemned her to death by hanging, saying, “The court could have no answer from her but in Irish.” In his Magnalia Christi Americana, he called her “a scandalous old Irishwoman, very poor, a Roman Catholic, and obstinate in idolatry.” And on November 16, 1688, Annie Glover was hanged in Boston. They called her a witch, but her greater crime had been a refusal to give up what mattered most to her: her religion, her language, the things she believed in.

  Sheridan had been so moved by the story, and the way her grandmother told it. She’d always known that magic didn’t come from outside: it came from your heart, from the strongest beliefs, from love. When she was sixteen, she wrote a song from the perspective of Annie’s daughter:

  My mother told the truth, in the language she loved

  Their minds were made up, she was already wrong.

  The men of Boston hanged Annie Glover

  They didn’t understand, so they killed my mother….

  Sheridan’s mother was so proud, she recorded the song on a cheap tape recorder, entered it in the Newport “new talent” folk song competition. Sheridan won. The whole family went to Newport for the day. The festival was held at Fort Adams, a Revolutionary War installation on the edge of Narragansett Bay.

  With the backdrop of Newport Harbor—the water so blue, with boats with white sails skimming in and out, around the headland, with the lights of the long, graceful bridge starting to twinkle in the rose-amber twilight, they saw Sheridan take the stage with her acoustic guitar—a used dreadnought with a ragged hole in the front.

  Sheridan looked so small, nearly overwhelmed by the guitar. Her reddish-blond hair glinted in the dying sunlight, and her blue eyes looked fierce and bright, searching for her family in the large crowd.

  Standing at the microphone, she spoke: “I’d like to dedicate this song to my mother and grandmother, and to Annie and her daughter, and to the misunderstood everywhere.” Her courage came from learning to sing for someone else, one boy back at the beach….

  She began to sing—with passion, straight from her heart—and the crowd didn’t move or breathe until she was finished. Then everyone gathered at Fort Adams broke into a wild cheer. She was only sixteen, but already she understood love down to her bones. A star was born, and she’d never looked back.

  Sheridan’s family supported her. She finished high school, but instead of going to college, she moved to New York to play punk and new wave. Later she signed with a record label and went to Nashville to start recording. Everyone in the family took turns heading south to visit her, keep her grounded in the family—her mother, grandmother, and both sisters. Between recording sessions, she’d always return north, home to Hubbard’s Point.

  When Aphrodite died—a year after her daughter Clio, who’d had a sudden heart attack while, blessedly, listening to Mozart at an afternoon concert—she’d left her magic things to her three granddaughters. Her gardening equipment had all gone to Floribunda, or “Bunny.” Named after a rose, Bunny had the gift of a green thumb; her Black Hall house was the pride of the local garden club, always a favorite on the annual spring house and garden tour.

  Many of the magic books, her white crockery mortars and pestles, and her black iron cauldron had gone to Agatha. Agatha had always loved to cook and bake, and of all the sisters, she had been the most avid about magic. She lived in a cottage behind the Renwick Inn, and she’d hung out a shingle offering Love Spells and Other Magical Thinges. Bunny scolded her, saying there was no such word as “thinges,” but Agatha didn’t care—she did a land-office business every summer.

  With three girls and only one house, arrangements had to be made. Agatha and Bunny both lived in town. But Charlie loved it at the Point, and Sheridan couldn’t stand to let go of her grandmother’s cottage. So she’d bought her sisters’ shares, and now owned the Rosslare cottage and the rest of Aphrodite’s belongings—including her book of spells, a deep and powerful source of inspiration for Sheridan’s songs.

  Sheridan sat in the living room now. The shades were drawn; the setting sun’s light hurt her eyes, and the luminosity of twilight was almost too much to bear. She heard crickets in the garden, birds calling from the trees. Her eyes fell on her Gibson acoustic, on the mother-of-pearl inlay along the fret board. A line of light came through a crack in the shades, making the inlay glint. Her fingers twitched, but she couldn’t pick up the guitar.

  This was where she had written that first song, “Annie Glover.” The air of Hubbard’s Point was filled with beautiful noise. She remembered sitting here with her grandmother, Aphrodite teaching her to quiet down and listen. The waves rolled in perfect rhythm, more steady than any metronome. Bees would swarm the honeysuckle vine growing out front, their electric hum coming through the screens.

  Sheridan and her grandmother would sing, sometimes soft like a lullaby and sometimes exuberant and loud. Aphrodite would let Sheridan look through the magic books for spells, and she’d turn them into lyrics about love and loss and hope and dreams. They’d sing the songs she wrote, harmonizing with each other’s voices.

  They’d sing for each other, for Sheridan’s mother and sisters, and for everyone they’d loved who had died. Aphrodite told her that the more beautiful the music, the higher it could reach toward heaven. Sheridan had written with one boy in mind: some of her language came from the book, but all of her feelings came from him. That was so long ago; he had long since been gone from her life.

  Now a brass clock ticking on the mantel was the only sound. The air felt still and warm, the dark shades blocking the sea breeze. Sheridan sat on the loveseat with her eyes closed, an almost-empty glass of Wild Turkey in her hand. In a few minutes, when the sun was officially down, she’d refill her glass. But it bothered her, drinking in the near-dark, wondering what her grandmother would think to see her now.

  The light faded slowly, the sharpness of lines coming through the cracks dimming and softening until finally the whole room was in shadow. The sun-faded coral and teal slipcovers were now gray; the bright hooked rugs were as dull as sand; the colorful book spines were just one solid wall of muddy nothing.

  Sheridan sat in the darkness. She reached onto the shelf beside her, pulled a framed photo close, held it against herself, glass side pressed to her chest. She couldn’t bear looking at the actual picture—couldn’t take seeing Charlie’s eyes.

  She thought about lighting a candle. She sometimes did at this time of day. Growing up, there had always been candles burning, not for the light they gave, but for remembrance. Her grandmother used to say the flame honored a person’s spirit, reminded the living that the dead were never really gone.

  But they were; Charlie was gone. Sheridan wished her grandmother were still alive so the two of them could sing to Charlie. They could harmonize, sing the most beautiful song there was, send the notes up to heaven for Charlie. But that was crazy, and she knew it. Charlie was gone, and he’d never hear her sing for him again.

  Holding the picture, Sheridan refilled her glass. Bourbon warmed her and made her thoughts fuzzy. She savored the smoky taste; it brought back feelings of being in the South, driving on back roads in a pickup truck, singing songs—writing them as she drove, words and lyrics straight from her feelings. The landscape was gentle, bluegrass and knobs and limestone quarries, smoke drifting up from chimneys in the hills. When it rained in Tennessee and Kentucky, the mud was full of chalk, swirly and white, runoff from the limestone.

  When Charlie was little,
she’d have him with her in his car seat. Well, most of the time. When she wasn’t recording or touring…Sometimes, not often, he’d stay with one of her sisters or her mother and grandmother, right here in this very house. The tour bus of a Nashville almost-star had been a tough place for a little boy. Taking him on the road had been difficult, but she’d needed him near her. She’d had to overcome the fact his father had never been a part of his life.

  But he’d had a grandmother, and a great-grandmother, and aunts, and near-aunts who’d loved him. Sheridan’s friends at the beach—Stevie, Maddie, Rumer, Dana, Bay, Tara—they’d all pitched in with one another’s kids. That’s the kind of place Hubbard’s Point was, Sheridan thought, taking another sip. A place so full of love and care it could almost make up for other emptiness…

  She thought of Charlie’s last year. They’d spent it right here in this house; Sheridan had taken the time off from recording. She’d needed something she wasn’t getting—from the studio, the road, her fans. New York didn’t have it, and neither did Nashville—so she’d come home. Enrolled Charlie in Black Hall High for his senior year; he hadn’t minded being uprooted from his friends in Nashville because it had meant him being closer to Nell. They’d been best summer friends, with romance gaining intensity once they’d hit sixteen. After that, no one could keep them apart.

  Just then she heard a creak—someone walking on the porch. Boards groaning under human weight—not a ghost, that’s for sure. Even so, she felt spooked. No one visited her—she’d let people know that visitors were not welcome. Not that she didn’t love her friends, she always would, but she just didn’t want to see them anymore. The days of hanging around with friends were over.

  Three things:

  First, she saw the silhouette of someone tall and broad standing at the door. He was backlit by the fading light of the summer day, and she saw his shape through the thin cotton curtain hanging on the small square window of the back door.

  Second, he knocked. Actually, he tapped. Just the lightest pressure of knuckles against glass. Staring at his outline, she watched how tentative he was. She had the feeling he didn’t want to disturb her; even more, she had the sense he knew that she couldn’t take noise. Anything loud, a harsh rap or a real knock, would make her jump out of her skin. So whoever the stranger was, he was considerate.

  Third, he wasn’t a stranger. She knew him instantly. Even though she couldn’t see his face, couldn’t get a clear look at his hair or eyes or mouth or anything, and although she hadn’t seen him in nearly twenty years, she knew it was Gavin. She just knew.

  He knocked again, no louder than the first time. Sheridan pushed herself off the loveseat, drifted toward the door. She didn’t make a sound, didn’t want him to know she was home. She stood in the middle of the room, not even breathing.

  “Sheridan?” His voice came through the glass.

  She didn’t move. She didn’t want to see or talk to him. But if she had, she’d probably want to ask him what had taken him so long. Where had the twenty years gone, where had he been all this time?

  “Sheridan?” he asked, knocking again.

  Standing still, Sheridan felt his presence through the door. It was a current passing through wood and glass, into her skin and bones, as if she’d bumped into an electric fence. She leaned into it, feeling as if it were holding her up.

  One last knock, and then he walked away. She heard his footsteps on the porch. After they faded, she walked to the door, drew back the curtain and gazed out. Her knees were shaking. The sky was dark blue, filling with hot stars. Her yard needed mowing, and the tall grass was alive with fireflies, their liquid gold-green neon lighting up the night.

  The big man stood on the rock ledge. At first she thought he was gazing down the hill, toward the beach. But then she realized he was bent over from the waist, picking something up. Glass glinted—the jar of Stevie’s preserves that Sheridan had smashed on the rocks. Gavin was gathering up the bits of broken glass.

  When he was finished, he walked down the hill to the garbage can behind the garage. She heard the tinkling of glass as he dumped it in. Peering out the window, she figured he’d walked away.

  But no—he came back up the hill, went to the rock ledge, and sat down. And just sat there in the darkness, surrounded by fireflies. She stood mesmerized, the aftereffects of electric shock, staring.

  She leaned against the kitchen door, separated from Gavin by an inch of wood and a pane of glass, and closed her eyes and felt her heart trying to break out of its cage.

  GAVIN KNEW SHE WAS INSIDE. Not that he saw or heard her—he just knew. Her spooky blind Irish grandmother had supposedly had some weird sixth sense, but so did Gavin. His came in the form of superfine instincts, valuable for detection and crime solving. He had eyes in the back of his head. He had the vision of a hawk and the hearing of a panther. Did panthers have good hearing?

  The problem was, his instincts had failed him just now. So attuned to Sheridan hiding in the dark, inside her closed-up house, he’d missed the fact a goddamn broken jar was lying right on the rocks. He stepped smack on the upraised jagged edge, and it had cut clear through his goddamn deck shoes. The sole of his right foot was bleeding like crazy.

  Sitting on the rock, he pulled off his ruined shoe and inspected the damage. Bugs were buzzing around his head, damn fireflies. He swatted one but good, got glow juice on his fingers. He tried to see his foot in the dark—the cut looked deep, but he’d been sliced up worse. He was glad for the chance to sit down, have an excuse to stay in Sheridan’s yard a little longer. If she came out to yell at him, he’d tell her it was the least she could do, considering he’d sliced his foot open on her smashed jelly jar.

  His fingers were sticky from the jelly and from his blood. He wiped them on the granite and instantly cut his finger on a tiny shard of glass left behind. This was not his night…

  Or maybe it was. He hadn’t been this close to Sheridan in over eighteen years. He felt rocked; their last meeting had been right here—in her grandmother’s yard, on this very boulder. The evening had been freezing cold, snow starting to fall, and they’d sat huddled together. She’d had something to tell him, and he’d had something to tell her right back.

  He’d wanted to put his arm around her, to keep her warm, but she wouldn’t let him. She was pregnant, and had broken up with him already—what had made him think she would change her mind?

  Tonight was warm, but he felt frozen in place. He couldn’t have moved if he wanted to. The sound of waves hitting the beach drifted up the hill. He stared down at his boat, moored out by the breakwater. Hard to believe it was just hours earlier he’d talked to Nell Kilvert.

  He wondered whether Sheridan had somehow found out—maybe she’d spotted his fine Chris-Craft and been inspired to pick up binocs to check it out, seen him conferring with her son’s girlfriend.

  Or maybe she had no idea he was in the area. Either way, it didn’t much matter—he wasn’t going anywhere. He heard a door creak open behind him. The fabric of a long dress swished through the tall grass, sounding just like the breeze. She stood behind him, and he heard her breathing.

  “What happened to your foot?” she asked.

  “Cut it on broken glass,” he said. “Maybe you shouldn’t go throwing jars at the rocks.”

  “That’s what you get for trespassing in the dark.”

  “You got me there,” he acknowledged.

  He still hadn’t turned around, and he couldn’t. He wasn’t afraid of much, but he was afraid to look into her eyes. She handed him a wet cloth; he took it without looking over his shoulder.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “Could you please not sit on that rock?” she asked.

  “This—”

  “I don’t like seeing you on that rock.”

  He nodded; so she was remembering that winter day, too. They had sat right here, with snow falling on them and the rock…. He stood, and it hurt to put weight on his foot, but he wasn’t going to let
her see that. When he turned around, she was standing right there.

  Small, slim, with the same thick mane of hair she’d always had. In his memory, and on the covers of her CDs, her long hair was auburn, touched with glints of gold. But here, even in the dark, he could see that it was now pure white.

  “I went gray overnight,” she said, seeing the shock in his eyes. “It’s not an old wives’ tale; it really does happen.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “That I have white hair?”

  “No,” he said. “About Charlie…”

  She shook her head and put her hands over her ears. “Shh, shh. Don’t say his name,” she said. “Not after dark, not with blood on the rock.”

  He stared at her, wanting to take her thin wrists in his hands, pull her to him and hold her and rock her and not say his name.

  When they were young, he’d sometimes laughed at her grandmother’s old-world ways, at her superstitions and magic, at the way she’d tell them to never step over a broom, to never pick a rose in the fog, to never speak a name of the dead between twilight and midnight. He’d always known that Sheridan believed in her grandmother’s powers.

  Sheridan lowered her hands, bent from the waist to look at Gavin’s foot. Without facing him, she started leading him toward the house.

  “You’d better come inside and wash that off,” she said. “I wouldn’t want you to get an infection and blame me.”

  “No,” he said. “We wouldn’t want that.” He hobbled and hopped his way through her yard. She walked ahead, not helping him.

  When they got to the porch, she stopped and turned, looked him in the eye for the first time. He smelled bourbon, but she didn’t seem the least bit unsteady. Her expression was wild, though; he thought she was about to scream. Their eyes locked for ten, fifteen seconds, the words trapped in her throat. He thought she was about to break in half. But then she calmed herself.

  “After I wash the blood off, you’ll have to go,” she said.

  “Whatever you say,” he said.

  She led him to a kitchen chair. He looked around; he was in a time machine, back to their youth. Everything looked the same: the cracked linoleum floor, the wooden table and chairs painted with so many different coats of paint he could see a lifetime of Rosslare décor in the layers; bouquets of herbs upside-down and drying from the rafters; shelves filled with jars of dried and powdered herbs, seashells, channeled-whelk egg cases, mice skulls, owl pellets, birds’ eggs, goldfinch and blue jay feathers.