“The shape of grief changes, but it never goes away. You know this, you learn to live with it in a variety of ways, until eventually it is almost like an old friend, one who understands everything about you without you having to explain.”
She nodded. Jamie had gone through more than his share of grief and so she listened when he spoke of such things. Below them a school of fish, incandescent, rippled through in a shimmering trail as though the Milky Way was both above and below them, a river of light within the sea and the sky. Beauty was becoming bearable once again, and part of her was sad to know it. She knew her grief would likely be with her all her life but she also knew that Jamie was right, the shape of it was slowly changing.
Chapter Fifty-eight
The One Searched For…
THE DAYS OF THAT SUMMER mounted one upon the next, each one a separate gem strung on the strands of water and long walks, of lobster stew and the scent of sun-warmed skin and peaches and sand each nightfall, of Vanya’s novels and Jamie’s stories and the children’s delight in the unfettered freedom of this old shore.
Pamela wasn’t certain just when it had happened, but at some point during these sea and sun-filled days, a bit of normalcy had begun to creep in around the edges of her soul. She found she had an appetite again and could eat without feeling sick, and breathe without feeling like she had glass slivers all along her airway. She thought maybe it was the proximity of the sea, of the days that were as clear as glass and the air that was thick with salt and summer wind.
Jamie stood on the deck above her just now, elbows resting on the rail, looking down to where she had been helping Conor and Vanya with an elaborate sand castle. He had changed out of this morning’s sailing gear, swapping his unraveling sweater and worn jeans for a crisp blue cotton shirt and a pair of chinos. His hair was damp from the shower and it struck her suddenly what a strange intimacy this summer had given them—like a family, almost.
He held the truck keys in his left hand and he shook them at her as if in invitation.
“Where are you off to?” she asked, shielding her eyes from the sun to look up at him.
“Visiting a friend,” he said. “Would you like to come with me?”
Both Isabelle and Kolya were napping, exhausted from a morning of playing in the cove and Conor and Vanya were still happily engrossed in castle construction.
She turned back to Vanya, who waved a hand at her before she could even speak. “Go, moy podrooga, we will be fine. I will listen for the babies.”
“I’d love to,” she said looking back up at Jamie, “but I ought to tidy up a bit. My hair’s a fright and my clothes are sandy.”
He looked at her and smiled. “The person I’m taking you to meet won’t mind your hair nor a bit of sand. Come along before a child awakens.”
She looked down dubiously at her cutoff denim shorts and the embroidered gypsy shirt made from patchwork squares which had taken her fancy in a tiny shop that had smelled rather strongly of pot. In fact, she thought she could still smell a whiff of it, despite the shirt having been washed twice.
“You look like the world’s most ridiculously beautiful bohemian,” he said, as if he’d read her mind. “So come along, you’ll do fine.”
She walked up on the deck, a sooty brow arched in his direction. “Is that your polite way of calling me a hippie, Jamie?”
“It’s my polite way of calling you beautiful,” he said and she faltered under his gaze. She felt flustered and so merely walked past him into the house. Despite Jamie’s reassurance, she took a few moments to wash her face, and put on a bit of lipstick and mascara. Her hair had grown out to the point of a fine mesh of curls which were completely wild, so she tied them back with a scarlet ribbon that had adorned Isabelle’s mad mop of hair earlier in the day. She glanced in the mirror to see if she was presentable. She looked tanned, healthy and slightly otherworldly, like a naiad who had found land for a day, but had no notion of earthly mores and customs.
Jamie was waiting for her outside, his hands busy with the wiring of an old radio he and Conor were rebuilding. He smiled as she came out and followed her down the stairs to the truck.
They drove north along the old coastal roads. The day was fine and the sea beyond dazzlingly bright, dancing with diamond wavelets. On the horizon lay Deer Isle, a green oasis afloat on the blue haze of the Atlantic. She took a deep breath and relaxed into the leather seat, happy to just be in Jamie’s company with the coast slowly unfurling in wooded islets and small fishing villages with their clapboard houses brightly painted, and boats for both fishing and sailing skimming along the rim of the world.
She turned to look at Jamie while he drove. He was always a man comfortable in his skin, but she thought this summer had been good for him too. She was suddenly exquisitely aware of him. The sun and water had glazed him a golden brown, his hair bleached to platinum and a sparkling gold that turned the green of his eyes a brilliant jade. He looked healthy and relaxed and more beautiful than ever. He was, she realized, a man in the very prime of his life. It was with no small shock that she saw this and understood that while her mind may have been unaware of it, her body most certainly was not. She had long understood the effect Jamie’s beauty had on those around him, she had long felt the effects herself, but this was something different. This was the heightened awareness, like a layer of skin had been removed, of a very desirable man, not just her dearest friend and protector.
Just as quickly as she felt the tug of desire, a quiver of guilt split it down the middle and left her feeling slightly sick with herself. How could she feel desire? She took a sharp breath and put a hand to her stomach, causing Jamie to cast a glance her way. She smiled in reassurance and then looked out her side of the truck at the sea and the land which was changing swiftly from the thickly-wooded dreaming sea isles to a starker broken landscape. As swiftly as the desire had warmed her blood, it fled, leaving her cold and shaken.
“Who is it we’re going to visit?” she asked, when she was certain her voice wouldn’t shake and betray her state.
“An old friend, her name is Pauline. She is someone I think you’ll like which is why I asked you to come along.”
“Well, you’ve got me curious now,” she said lightly, though she had an odd feeling about the visit, as if there was more to it than a simple meeting of one of Jamie’s friends with another.
They passed the rest of the drive in their normal daily chatter—the children, the novel Vanya had insisted all adults in the house must read this week—in this case, Harold Robbin’s The Adventurers. She and Jamie had a fun evening taking turns reading the more lurid passages out loud, Jamie doing his in a stage voice worthy of Olivier which had left her and Vanya in stitches.
The house was reached by a long and winding green lane at the end of which was a weathered gate with a ‘No Trespassers’ sign affixed to it. They parked the truck and walked in to where the house sat in a small wilderness of maidenly white birches and long grasses sprinkled with forget-me-nots and crimson anemones.
A tiny garden fronted the small house. It was steeped in fragrance this hot afternoon, the scent of roses thick and heady, their canes netting the stone and beam house in a cascade of white and red and yellow. Geraniums bloomed profusely in tidy cedar window boxes and Virginia creeper clambered up the north side of the house all the way to the chimney.
Jamie knocked on the door, which was decorated with a wreath of sea holly wound about with a silver ribbon.
“Not home?” Pamela asked, half wishing the mysterious Pauline would be out.
“She’ll be nearby, she’s expecting us.” He looked down toward the bobbing wharf where a sailboat sat, trim and well maintained. A look of something akin to lust crossed his face. She laughed and he turned toward her, a question in his eyes.
“Jamie Kirkpatrick, I swear you have seawater in your veins, instead of blood. Boats to you are like beautiful women are to other men, you’ve never met one you could resist.”
“S
aid the pot to the kettle,” he said, and then grinned, a heart-stopping flash of white in his browned face. “But for the record, I appreciate beautiful women too, some even more than sail boats.”
And there it was again, that breathless awareness of him, the hot flush of desire moving through her like a jolt of quicksilver, bright and devastating. She turned toward the woods, dappled in the afternoon sunlight, so that Jamie would not see the telltale flush flooding up from her neckline. She saw the woman then. She emerged from a stand of young birch trees, though Pamela had the sense she had been there for a little while, as a deer might do, standing unnoticed while it observed and took a person’s measure. She moved as gracefully as a deer, too, when she stepped toward them, a smile of welcome on her face.
She was tall, with the sort of bone structure that would leave her beautiful even when she was a very old woman. Her eyes were dark above high cheekbones, set off by a pair of silver bangle earrings and a cascade of snow-white hair that reached to her waist in a thick plait.
She held out her hands and Jamie took them. “Well, my friend it has been a long time.”
“It has indeed,” he agreed, gesturing to Pamela to come forward. She stepped up beside him, feeling a touch intimidated by the regal woman. She had the presence of a warrior queen, strong and straight-backed with an air of no-nonsense intelligence. She turned her dark gaze on Pamela and gave her a long assessing look before reaching out a hand to her. Her grasp was cool and dry, and her scent was green—something warm like sage.
“Welcome to my humble abode,” she said. “I’ve been after Jamie to bring you to visit since I knew he was in Maine for the summer.”
Pamela arched a brow at Jamie and he shrugged.
“Pauline this is Pamela Riordan, and Pamela this is Pauline Nighttraveller.”
“It’s lovely to meet you,” she said. “How do you two know each other?” It was an innocent enough query, but the truth was Jamie did seem to have a plethora of striking female friends scattered around the globe.
Pauline smiled fondly at Jamie. “This one taught me how to sail one summer. He saw me gazing out to sea every day, looking longingly at all the pretty boats out there and he asked if I’d like to learn how to sail. It has been a long time since he has come to visit, or to sail for that matter, though.”
“I haven’t been to Maine in several summers,” Jamie said, leaning forward to kiss the woman’s cheek, “otherwise you know I would have come.”
“Yes, I heard you had some troubles with an extended stay in Russia.” She leaned back a little to better observe him. She brushed one hand along his jawline. “You are well again?”
“I am well again,” he agreed quietly. “I survived after all, and that is no small thing in Russia these days.”
“Surviving is no small thing, indeed,” she said, but she looked at Pamela as she said it. Pamela felt the strange tingling along her skin, as she often did when first meeting a kindred spirit. It happened rarely in a life, but one felt it unmistakably when it did.
“Jamie, I replaced the cleat on my boat last week and the mainsail isn’t running up as smoothly as it ought to. Could you run the boat out a little way and check it over for me?”
“Of course,” Jamie said. Pamela gave him a narrow-eyed glance; he merely smiled and turned to head down to the sailboat that bobbed bright against the sunlit water and the weathered grey dock.
The woman gestured to her with one long-fingered hand. “Come inside, we’ll get to know one another over a drink of some sort. He’ll be occupied for a bit; I’ve been having trouble with the sails for a few weeks, so I’m grateful he’s come to visit. I don’t know anyone who understands sailboats as well as Jamie.”
The house was lovely inside, spare in its lines, with well-chosen objects that spoke, Pamela thought, of a life lived in depth. The furniture was sparse and there were plants everywhere, many of them herbs which she recognized by the shape of their leaves.
There was a large picture window in the sitting room that looked out over the sea. It was a very private location, not quite as wild in aspect as Jamie’s house and its environs, but lovely nonetheless. The main feature of the living room was the built-in bookshelves that lined two full walls and were chock-a-block with books placed higgledy-piggledy wherever they might fit. Pamela immediately felt more comfortable; shelves of books were an anodyne to her, and made her more apt to place an initial, if wary, trust in a person. Pauline saw the direction of her gaze and said, “I collect stories from the various nations of my people and then I put them together in anthologies. They’ve proven fairly popular with the general reading public as well, enough so I can afford to live out here all year round and not need another job.”
“You stay out here all year? The winters must be a little fierce.”
Pauline nodded. “They are, but it’s part of what I love about them. I had the house insulated and a big woodstove put in when I bought the place so that I could stay if I wanted to. About five years ago, I did just that. I make certain to have emergency supplies at all times in case I get snowed in or the weather makes it impossible to get to town for several days.”
She looked at the bookshelves while Pauline made tea. The woman had been modest when she claimed she merely put her peoples’ tales into anthologies. She had several books of her own on Native American myths and legends, as well as medicine, religion and rituals.
Pauline returned a few minutes later with a steaming tea tray, which held a knobby pottery teapot and mugs, a pot of honey in the shape of a beehive and chocolate chip cookies on a plate. Once the tea was poured out and distributed, Pauline sat across from her, curling her long legs up under her and smiling reassuringly.
“I’m going to be blunt with you, because there is a reason I asked Jamie to bring you for a visit.”
“Oh, is there?” Pamela said, her tone slightly tart. She took a sip of her tea to steady herself. It was rosehip and had the bittersweet taste of the buds.
The woman gave a half-smile at her tone, but chose to overlook it.
“My daughter went missing a long time ago,” she said, “and Jamie told me about your husband.”
Pamela nodded, the bird in her chest which had been dormant for weeks suddenly giving a flap or two of its dark wings. She wanted to say something, but there were no words that stood in measure against that one hard sentence and no comfort to be found for that black hole in the middle of your universe. She did not have the sense that this was a woman who needed words of comfort, however. A small surge of anger flitted through her. Jamie might have told her why he was bringing her here, though if he had she wouldn’t have accompanied him and the bastard knew it, which is exactly why he had sprung it on her in this fashion.
The woman was watching her and no doubt reading her like black print on white paper, Pamela thought, chagrined.
“Don’t be too upset with him, he brought you here at my insistence,” Pauline said. “You and I live in a world that few people, thank God, will ever understand. We live in a community that is formed by a terrible tragedy. And it is rare, and I say that with gratitude, to run into another member of this particular community. I wanted Jamie to bring you here so that you know there is someone who understands and will listen should you wish to talk.”
“Thank you, but right now I don’t think I want to talk about it—about him.” She put her mug on the low table which was placed between the couch she sat on and the armchair Pauline was in. She clasped her hands together, the way she sometimes did when thinking about Casey, for there was the feeling that she might fly apart if she didn’t hold tightly to something, even if it was only her own two hands. Somehow her awareness of Jamie earlier made it difficult to speak of Casey. She could never adequately convey him to a stranger—the big dark man who had been the safe place in her world.
“I understand, but if you change your mind, I’m a good listener.”
“How long ago did your daughter go missing?” Pamela asked. It was oddly c
omforting to speak to someone who did understand the agony. At the same time she dreaded the story of this woman’s child, because it clearly had not ended with her daughter returning. The hollow behind the heart was present here; she could feel it, as one did when one had the matching hollow in one’s own chest.
Pauline took a swallow of her drink and looked out the window toward the sea. “You don’t have to be polite about this, Pamela. I can tell you, or we can chat of other things—if there is one thing I understand, it’s how hard it can be to either talk or listen on this subject.”
“No, I would like you to tell me. I can listen, I just can’t speak about Casey very often, even though I ache to most of the time. I see the looks on people’s faces who know and I see the pity and I find that hard to bear. It makes me angry that they feel sorry for me, because they are so smugly certain they know his fate.”
“I do understand that, I spent a long time being angry, rebelling against other people’s certainty. In my case, the look I saw on other faces was that somehow she had gotten what was expected and that while it was sad, it shouldn’t have been a surprise to her father and myself.”
“I understand that,” Pamela said, “my husband is—was a part of the PIRA for a bit.”
Pauline nodded. “Then you know. My daughter was a prostitute, and though people will not often say it, they believe that women in that profession risk their lives and should know that they do. The truth is, Jenny was always missing in a way, it was only a matter of time before she went away forever. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes,” Pamela said. She did understand for she had spent a few hard years living in New York without money and it had only been by the grace of God and Hugh Mulligan that she hadn’t wound up on the streets selling herself to men old enough to be her father. As it was she had done things to survive which she did not like to recall. She knew what it was to feel like you were not tethered to the earth, as if you could dissipate into the ether, and to fear that not a soul would notice.
In the Country of Shadows (Exit Unicorns Series Book 4) Page 65
