In the Country of Shadows (Exit Unicorns Series Book 4)

by Cindy Brandner

  At Pamela’s request the storytelling extended one night after the children had gone to sleep and Vanya had retreated to the cottage by the shore. She had left the large living room to make certain Conor had put his comics down and gone to sleep, and that Isabelle and Kolya still had their blankets on for the sea air was cool tonight and she did not want them catching a chill. When she returned, she found Jamie with his hands steepled under his chin, his eyes gazing out the windows to the swiftly approaching dark. The last of the day’s light was caught in his hair and limned his profile so that he was bound in both gold and dusk, the emerald on his left hand flaring with green fire as it caught a last stray beam of sun. The planes of his face were in repose, for he was lost in thought, his lashes half spangle, half shadow, his mouth lined fine as though with an artist’s brush. She stood for a moment, still, for to catch him unaware was a rare treat. He heard her though and turned and smiled at her, his face still caught in the web of that faraway place, the beauty of it imprinted in his expression, even as it flowed into something else, like sand running from one end of a glass to another—from enchantment to ease, from chimera to corporeality.

  “Tell me a story, Jamie, something to chase the cold night away.”

  There was a quality to her voice, which caused him to look up and meet her eyes.

  “Shall I spin you a dream?” he asked. “Shall I spin you a dream of stars and silks and Samarkand, or one of salted seas and talking walruses and a white-haired empress sitting atop a throne of ice?”

  “Tell me a story about us,” she said and sat down across from him, tucking her feet up under her.

  He gave her a long look, which wasn’t entirely comfortable and then he began, as if he had merely wandered down a hall in the storehouse of his mind and opened a door and found a story there to be told. “Once upon a time, there was a deck of tarot cards that belonged to a very old gypsy woman who had come from the darkest part of the deepest Russian forest. Now these tarot cards were no ordinary sort, for the backs of the cards were decorated most elaborately with vines and flowers and small wicked faces peeking out here and there and writing that was neither Latin, nor Greek, nor Russian but something far older. When the cards were turned over, though, the faces were entirely blank…”

  It was the beginning of a ritual for them. On nights when the children slept and the sea murmured outside the windows, or when they sat late around a fire just the two of them. Vanya was a night owl who either read into the wee hours or disappeared on some adventure of which only he knew the particulars. There was an old deck of tarot cards which sat upon one of the driftwood shelves. Jamie would shuffle it and hold it out to her and bid her to pick a card. The card dictated which story he told that night. Each one was like a separate bead on a golden chain and yet they all linked together to create something more, something achingly lovely which could only have been created by Jamie’s imagination. It was something for her to hold fast to as she made her way along this journey that had no map by which to guide herself.

  It was also during these times alone with her that he began to speak of Russia, and of the people he had known and loved there. He told her of Nikolai and his Katya, of a small clerk named Volodya and how he had, in one last act of defiance, brought the angel of death to their camp. He spoke, too, of Vanya and Shura and their long trek with him out of Russia. He told her a little of Gregor, the vor, and the unlikely friendship which had grown between them. But he did not speak of Andrei or Violet and she, understanding, did not ask.

  She saw that with the gift of this summer he had presented her with something more—a reminder of the thread that stretched back through all the summers of her childhood, the stars and lost beaches, the stories told by fires and the love found and lost. That strand stretched forward too though, through the fierce love for her children and her friendship with this man who had given her golden days which gathered like orbs of honey, one upon the next. Stars might shift and vanish, and earth might crumble before the onslaught of the sea, but the thread remained both gossamer and iron, for it was the glistening and tenuous fiber of life itself.

  Chapter Fifty-seven

  The Shape of Grief

  A SUDDEN SQUALL BLEW up the coast for two days in early August. Shut in, they had resorted to games, books, puzzles and toasting bread and cheese over the fire and making blanket forts in the big main room. The children found it to be grand fun, and quite frankly, thought Pamela, so did the adults.

  On the second afternoon when the little ones were napping and Conor was well occupied with his building blocks, she took out the photographs she’d brought with her to Maine in the hopes that she would find time to sort them into some semblance of order. She set them out on the kitchen table and began to arrange them by year and then by session.

  Jamie came and looked over her shoulder. “What are you thinking of doing with these?” he asked.

  “Doing?” she asked. “Nothing really, I just want to get them in some sort of order.”

  He pointed to the scrapbook she had placed in one corner of the table by itself. “That looks like more than sorting. Do you mind if I have a look?”

  “No, go ahead,” she said, though she felt suddenly nervous. The scrapbook had become a kind of project for her, something she worked on at night when she couldn’t sleep and, as it turned out, something that she truly enjoyed. Jamie took it over to the windows where he could see better and spent a good half hour paging through it, chuckling here and there.

  The scrapbook was different from any other work she had ever done. It owed its genesis to an afternoon when she had been taking pictures at a wedding and had gone outside for a bit of air. There was a group of young people out back of the hall playing football and she’d sat down on a keg to watch them. Finally she had asked them if she could take some pictures of them. They’d shrugged and agreed readily enough. Then one, curious about her camera, had come to sit down with her. His name was Finian Gold. He’d told her a bit about himself—mum single, he was the oldest of four, father fecked off to Liverpool to work years ago, and they’d never heard from him again ‘an’ sure as bleedin’ Jaysus’ had never had a pay packet from the man. Then there was the tiny but utterly fierce Bernie, a redhead of decided opinions and suspicions who looked like a being escaped from the borders of fairyland after a rather rough night of revels. And studious Ambrose with his big ears which were almost translucent when the light hit him from behind, and his three older sisters and his love of T.S Eliot’s poetry. She had made a habit after that when she had work in Belfast to stop by the spots she knew they haunted and had met more of their friends, and taken their pictures too. After these hours of time spent with the raggle-taggle group of adolescents she would jot down notes about their lives and small anecdotes about their personalities. Sometimes she would sketch their portrait and put it in the scrapbook along with their photos and the notes. Bernie had an older brother in the Kesh, and another brother who’d been killed. Finian, the Pied Piper of the group, knew how to make Molotov cocktails and what routes were best to avoid soldiers, and how to hide from the local IRA when you’d managed to piss them off.

  “Pamela, this is extraordinary. Have you thought about putting a book together? Publishers are interested in this kind of material.”

  “It’s just some pictures and stories,” she said, feeling suddenly embarrassed by the cobbled-together scrapbook.

  “It’s more than that. You’ve given these children a voice.”

  “Oh, believe me,” she laughed, “they all have voices and aren’t afraid to use them.”

  “Well, that’s part of the beauty of this, you’ve allowed them to simply tell their stories in their own words. The sketches too—I didn’t know you could draw like this.”

  She shrugged. “I didn’t either. I’d forgotten how comforting it is—getting lost in the process of line and shadow.”

  She’d drawn Bernie as a fairy with flames for wings and tiny shoes made from tiger lilies. Finian, she
’d cast as the Artful Dodger in checkered pants and a waistcoat from the Victorian era. Ambrose with his ears, she’d drawn as an owl, high in a tree surrounded by piles of toppling books and a pot of tea. There were more pages, more children, their stories, their losses, and the price which war, even an unofficial one, extracted from its smallest citizens.

  “I know a publisher in New York who might be interested in this. Would you be willing for him to have a look?” he asked.

  “I…yes, I suppose that would be all right,” she said, flustered by the idea. “I would need permission from the children and their parents, if someone did want to publish it.”

  The next day Jamie, though it was still storming, drove into town, ostensibly for bread and milk. When he returned, however, it was with a clutch of books for Vanya and three pads of very good art paper, a box of charcoal pencils and watercolor paints for her.

  “Keep drawing,” he said, “you owe it to yourself.”

  And so that night while Jamie unfurled the latest installment of the Barsoom tales, she drew the words he spoke, sketching the characters he’d breathed into life. Over the weeks that followed she drew and drew in every spare moment when she wasn’t out on the water or building sandcastles with the babies, or beachcombing with Conor. She drew all of them in the guises Jamie had given them within his stories: Vanya as a beautiful faun; Conor as the brave little warrior, Fledge; Isabelle as a fairy with missing teeth and a propensity to fall asleep in any convenient spot—tree branches, lily pads, or in the shade of toadstools; Kolya as a small Cossack, who was also half wood sprite and drew his strength from the vast northern forests of his ancestors. She never drew the Sea Princess though and nor did she draw the Wastrel. She couldn’t capture Jamie on paper, some element of him always eluded her regardless of how long she studied his profile or attempted to pin down the shifting expressions of his face.

  As she filled sheet after sheet of paper, she realized there was a small seed of contentment in her heart, which given time and nourishment might bloom into something that looked a lot like happiness.

  Two days later the morning dawned fair and bright and stayed that way all the day through. Jamie and Conor took full advantage of the weather and went straight out to sea on Jamie’s beautiful old sailboat, Protophos. Greek for ‘first light’ the name suited a vessel that belonged to Jamie as it suited the summer that unfolded around them.

  Pamela and Vanya had spent the day ambling the cove with the little ones and running into town for the fresh milk and eggs and the bread Jamie had forgotten on his last trip. Jamie and Conor hadn’t returned until the sun was well on its way down the yardarm and Conor had been so tired that he had fallen asleep at the dinner table, his hair stiff with salt wind and spray. She stood for a moment after putting him in his bed, just to watch his sleeping face. He was changing and it hurt her heart to see it at times. Time went so swiftly, regardless of grief and anxiety. Conor had lost the last of his baby pudginess a long time ago, but here he’d stretched out even more. This summer had given him firmer ground upon which to stand, and it was in no small part because of the man who had brought them all here. The sea had worked its magic on her little boy and she was utterly grateful to Jamie for what he had done.

  When she returned to the living area of the cottage, she found Vanya curled up in a chair reading. Vanya loved the escape of a good novel, more he told her, than he loved almost anything else on earth. He was four books into the Barsetshire Chronicles and was utterly taken with the idylls of English country life as it unfurled in Trollope’s imaginary county. He looked up as she walked past him, flashing her a quick smile before returning to the page. She and Vanya had solidified the foundation of their friendship this summer, until she realized that he had become so dear to her that she could not countenance the idea that he might well up and leave one day, just as Shura had done.

  She spotted Jamie standing out on the verandah. The windows were open to the night air and he turned as he heard her step behind him.

  “Come look,” he said, voice filled with a quiet wonder. She stepped out onto the verandah, and gasped. The sea below was lit to a glowing blue haze under a sky so silted with stars that it looked like a casket of living jewels had been upturned and scattered thickly all across the horizon with an extravagant hand. Despite spending many of her summers by the sea she had rarely experienced the wonder of phosphorescence like this.

  “Come,” he said and put out his hand.

  She glanced back at the still house, its dark gull wings spread large under the night sky. Only one small light burned steady, where Vanya sat by the picture windows reading.

  “I’ve already spoken to Vanya, he will listen for the children. We’re going out in the row boat.”

  The sea was entirely calm, though it appeared to dance with all the tiny lights sparkling within its depths and the boat slid out upon it with ease, like a fairy tale boat upon on a moonbeam sea.

  “Oh, Jamie,” she breathed as they moved out into deeper waters, and the light seemed to rise up and surround them with its unearthly glow. The water rippled silver then gold, cascading down the lip of each oar, lit from within with a pale green glow. Her father used to tell her it was mermaid lanterns deep below the sea that caused the phosphorescence. It was an idea which she still loved the romance of, even if she knew the facts. Jamie pulled on the oars again, and she had the feeling of skimming through light, the water dancing and alive beneath them.

  She turned her face up toward the sky, though it was still hard sometimes to look at the stars without Casey, those still burning fires deep in the velvet reaches of the universe—all the great clouds of birthing stars, and the homely comfort of their own neighborhood, the Milky Way. She wanted to believe that her own pain could not amount to much under a dome of stars burning and dying, but that did not lessen its intensity.

  “Making a wish?” Jamie asked. She looked at him; his question was light enough in tone, but she knew Jamie never asked anything if he didn’t want an answer to it. So, because it was easy to be honest with him, she told the truth.

  “I wish I could lose my memory sometimes,” she said, trailing a hand in the water and watching the light limn her fingers, making them ghostly and beautiful at the same time. “I wish I could wake up one morning and know the children and all the other parts of my life, but that I could forget that my husband is gone.”

  “You might have a bit of difficulty in understanding just how the children had materialized into your life,” Jamie said drily.

  “I could have woken up pregnant because I’d eaten nettles or something, the way fair maids do in fairy tales.”

  He laughed softly. “Indeed, you could have. But I don’t think you would truly want that.”

  “I don’t know, Jamie, I might… for a while at least.”

  “I know,” he said, and then was silent, for Jamie more than anyone in her life, understood when there weren’t any words with which to comfort.

  “I did make a wish on a shore near this one, long ago,” she said, uncertain why she was telling him this. “I was only a child at the time, and didn’t realize that the universe hears such wishes and shapes destiny from the words of a child’s heart. I didn’t know that there was a price to be paid for granted wishes.”

  “What did you wish for?” he asked.

  “I wished that you would come back to me. I wished that somehow, in some way you would always be a part of my life. I’ve cost us both very dearly with that wish, Jamie.”

  “I would not wish you away from my life. If it saved you grief then yes, but for myself it has been a blessing—your friendship, the children, these weeks here.”

  He began to row again, skimming them along the light bridge of water; the only sound that of the oars dipping in and out and the soft lap of the water against the boat’s hull.

  “I owe you a thank you,” he said suddenly.

  “For what?”

  “For saving my life while I was in Russia.”
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br />   That silenced her. They had never spoken of that strange night, that night where they had been thousands of miles apart and yet had lain with one another in some other realm which she could not, to this day, explain.

  “You saved your own life, Jamie,” she finally said. “You had to choose that night, and you chose to live.”

  “It was you that led me to the place where I could decide,” he said, “surely you know that.”

  “I don’t know what I did, it was all very surreal and yet…” she paused, not certain how to explain her feelings around the events of that night.

  “And yet, it happened. I don’t know what exactly you felt at your end; I don’t even know how I was so certain it was you.”

  “I knew because I felt you,” she said quietly and then turned away toward the sea, unable to manage his gaze any longer.

  “How did you know it was me?”

  “Because I knew very well how Casey’s body felt and it wasn’t him,” she said, “I knew it was you. Long ago you told me, Jamie, that it would be no ordinary thing if we were to touch in that way, and it wasn’t, was it?”

  “No,” he replied. “No, it wasn’t.”

  They rowed on some little way further, quiet and comfortable.

  “It will get easier someday, Pamela. I know it’s a cliché to even say it, but it’s a cliché for a reason.”

  She looked up to find him gazing directly at her. He wasn’t moving and the sea was so still that the boat barely rocked.

  “I never forget but some days I can breathe without it hurting.”