“Jenny was troubled from a very early age. She was what my people called a ‘lost one’. She would follow any wind no matter which direction it blew or how ill it might be. By the time she was in her teens we couldn’t control her anymore, she had restless feet and she wouldn’t stay put. I would search for her endlessly; I spent more time looking for her than I did anything else. She hitchhiked, too, which horrified her father and me. Her soul wasn’t of the earth and so it drifted from here to there and back again. And while I know some say that all who wander are not lost, my girl was lost and like many of the lost she found bad company. There are always those who can smell the lost ones, and who slither forth from their lairs to wrap their slick coils about them. For her, it was heroin and then heroin’s seemingly inevitable companion for a woman—prostitution.
“She didn’t know her worth. It didn’t matter that her father and I had tried to give her a view to another world, a different reality, to imbue her life with dignity and purpose. She was just lost. It was the hardest lesson of my life, finding out that you can’t save some people no matter how much you want to, no matter how often you call on the gods it cannot be done. You never expect the soul you can’t save to be your own child though. I spent years and a lot of money trying to track her down. It seemed like there was always a trace here, a scent there, some vapor trail that was just substantial enough to lead me down the next dead end road. The police were very little help, she was a known prostitute and an Indian woman, both facts which put her at the bottom of law enforcement’s list of priorities.”
She looked down into her cup, like it was a mirror that ran through time and could give her back a glimpse of the child she loved. Pamela knew what it was to long for such a scrying glass, but there was neither glass nor magic that gave back your heart once it was lost.
“It took us a long time to realize just how fragile she was and how deep her trouble had become. My husband and I were part of a grassroots movement that eventually became the American Indian Movement, or AIM as it was known. He was a lawyer and I was a journalist with aspirations to one day write the great Native American novel. We got caught up in the movement and we were more focused on the injustice that in the end we could not change. Meanwhile we did not see, until it was too late, how far our daughter had drifted.
“The last time I saw her was one September when she came home for her birthday. She seemed a little better, in one of those small spaces in time where heroin retracts its claws just a little and allows the person to breathe again. It let us believe for a minute that there might be a way out, might be a life ahead that wasn’t lived in an underbelly of darkness and addiction.
“We had a house out on Long Island Sound then and she would often go out on the shore in the mornings to watch the sun rise. That was where I found her, just as the dawn edged out in a narrow line between sea and sky. There was no wind that morning, so everything was still. It was one of those perfect days where everything is held in an autumn glass with its hues of crimson and gold and the deep blue you only see that time of year—a time that holds something sacred in its core. She looked so frail, she didn’t weigh much at that point and she had always been tiny. That morning she looked translucent with the rising sun shining right through her bones. There was a weariness in her, too, just this terrible weight that someone as young as she was should never feel. I’ve only ever found it in combat veterans and prostitutes and children that are terribly abused.
“I went and stood by her and we watched the sun come in over the sea, setting fire to the land as it stole ashore. Then all that great stillness was broken by a single leaf whirling down in circles. It was scarlet with brown spots, already decaying. The rising sun caught the edge of it, rendering it translucent just before Jenny caught it. I still see her little nail-bitten hand cupping that leaf. She gazed at it for the longest time, that fragile leaf with its ghostly veins lying there in her palm.
“She said, ‘This leaf is me, Mama, just drifting on the wind and waiting to land, but if I ever do land, someone will crush me.’
“She folded her fingers over the leaf and then opened them back up letting the morning air take the fragments, scattering them to the four winds. She left later that same morning, said she was going to head out to California to see her Cousin Eddy. She never arrived. Eddy had been waiting for her for a few days before he called me. I didn’t worry too much at first, and neither did Eddy. Jenny was that way, always late, not showing up when or where she was meant to. So we didn’t worry when we should have. I don’t know that it would have made any difference in the end, still I feel such guilt over not being alarmed sooner.”
She put her mug on the table, and when she spoke again the long line of her throat trembled.
“I never saw her again and I never heard that little girl voice on the other end of the phone again either. She always called on Christmas, it was the one thing I could count on. I lived for Christmas Day back then, because I could relax for a bit, knowing Jenny was still out there somewhere, even if it wasn’t a good place, still it was somewhere. And somewhere is always better than nowhere.”
“Yes, it is,” Pamela said quietly. “Do you—” she faltered slightly, “have you ever found peace with it?”
“Peace?” Pauline looked startled, as if such a suggestion had never occurred to her. “No, I wouldn’t call it peace, nor even acceptance. Resignation might come close and in resignation there is sometimes a strange sort of peace. It’s not the sort of peace you would choose but life does not always give us choice.”
She appreciated the woman’s honesty, for she understood how dearly it was bought. She didn’t want it, but she appreciated it, which was a conundrum all too common in her emotions these days.
“Your husband?”
Pauline shook her head, fine lines around her mouth suddenly visible. “He died a few years back. The official cause was a pulmonary embolism, in truth he died of a broken heart. The endless searching, the scouring every place she might have been and questioning every person who might have seen her, heard from her, calling the police every day and then once a week and then once a month. It took a terrible toll on us both, but it killed him.”
Pauline rose from her chair and Pamela rose too, thinking perhaps they would go outside now and wait for Jamie to bring the boat back in. Instead the woman put up a hand and said, “Just wait a moment if you will, I have something for you.”
She waited by the window. The sailboat was a speck but it was moving toward the shore. Jamie had timed things nicely, she thought wryly. Bastard.
When Pauline returned she held a necklace in her hands. Pamela recognized it as a Navajo design called ‘Squash Blossom’ for the silver flowers that lined the necklace from nape to drop. She had seen such necklaces before but not one quite like this, this one was barbarically beautiful, the coral near blood-red and the turquoise an oceanic and shimmering blue. What lent it the barbaric note was the bear claws that were spaced between the bottom three squash blossoms on each side.
“My nephew sent this to me. He told me that a woman gave it to a friend of his and she said it was for ‘the woman with the ocean in her eyes’. The woman told the friend to give it to Eddy and that he should send it on to ‘the woman who lives by the far coast’ and I would know to whom it belonged when I met her. As soon as you walked in today, I knew it was your necklace. The coral is for protection and signifies long life and health. The turquoise, the Navajo say, is a piece of sky fallen to earth. It seems fitting that a woman with the ocean in her eyes should wear a bit of sky around her neck for balance.”
Pauline fastened it around Pamela’s neck and the weight of it lay like a fold of sun-warmed silk on her skin. She put a hand up to touch it, the stones smooth beneath her fingers. The necklace gave her an odd feeling, there was something unsettling about it and the silver had a strange heat to it that sent small shivers from her neck to her toes. It was unnerving but she didn’t want to take the necklace off in front of Pauli
ne, lest she hurt her feelings. The weight of the necklace and its strange warmth gave her the strength to speak.
“I tell myself stories sometimes,” she said softly. “I think of him as ‘away’ in the Irish sense of the word, which gives me comfort. I weave tales in which he is safe and will return home one day. The more time that passes, the more I know my tales are futile, but in the dark of night, alone in bed, it’s a comfort to imagine those stories.” It was a huge admittance on her part, and one she knew she could not have made to anyone other than this woman who understood too well the pain of the smallest retreat or surrender to reality.
“You tell yourself the stories you need to, in order to allow yourself to move on and not feel guilty every time you’re happy, every time you laugh or forget for a minute that part of your soul left a long time ago. We all tell stories to ourselves, those of us with the vanished in our lives. Stories are the first magic we know and we believe that if something is told often enough it takes on a truth of its own. In a way this is right, after all, you had a life with this man, you have his children which are all any of us leave behind on this earth in the end. So even if he does not come back to you in physical form, he is with you forever.”
“I’m afraid that isn’t quite the comfort it ought to be,” Pamela said quietly. She heard the bitter note in her voice. It was like that always, even the clearest day and the cleanest water held a drop of bitter that rippled out in unexpected ways, particularly at moments when it seemed she might approach an understanding of the truth the rest of her life would hold.
Pauline reached over and took Pamela’s hand in her own and there was something reassuring in the cool dry warmth of the woman’s grasp. Beyond the window the sea was a great and fathomless blue under the early evening light. Far out the dark waited below the horizon, ever patient, ever there.
“There is an old tale from the Onondaga people,” Pauline began quietly, “about how the Pleiades were formed. A group of children would gather to dance each day by a beautiful lake. One day while they danced an old man appeared to them in the chill autumn air. He was dressed in white feathers and his hair shone as silver as the stars in the night sky. He gathered the children about him and warned them that they must stop their dance, for they had attracted eyes high above that were very dangerous to them. Children are much the same in every time and every place and they were intent on their fun and continued to dance despite the old man coming to them again and again to warn them they must cease or suffer the consequences.
“One day one of the children decided they ought to have a feast after their dancing, and so each child asked their parents if they might take food—corn or beans, or the fat wild turkeys that roamed the forest that time of year. But the parents said no, saying the children could eat at home as they should, and not on the shore of the lake where they might waste the food that was so necessary for survival through the winter that even then was nibbling at the edges of autumn’s gold.
“Regardless though, the children continued to dance and dance by the shores of that silver lake as the autumn progressed and the leaves turned from crimson and gold to dust. And then one day just before the first snow fell the children found themselves growing lighter and lighter, as light as the cotton from a dandelion in the early months of summer. They rose upon the air, higher and higher. A woman passing that way who had seen the children floating up toward the sky ran back to the village and then all the parents ran hoping to save their children, crying piteously and offering them food of all kinds and plenty of it, if only they would return home. But the children, excepting one, would not look back and continued to rise until the twilight came and they set upon the velvet darkness of the sky as a group of stars. The single child who looked back fell as a star through the sky, streaking the heavens silver and gold, but lost to his family and his people just the same. Those dancing children are the Pleiades and they will dance forever, or at least until man is no more.
“And that is the story I tell myself, that Jenny is one of those dancing stars. Her soul was the sort that would allow her to fly up there into the face of the moon and those big blazing fires that are only dancing twinkles from here. Because the stars dwell in a place apart, a place of no time and all time. A place where people are just a blink of the eye—stardust here and gone. And so, our lives do not signify greatly in such a place. It is,” she finished wryly, “as I said, the story I tell myself.”
They stood quiet for a time, watching as Jamie brought the sailboat into the dock and fastened it to its mooring. The evening light was advancing, heralding the night which would steal softly up from beyond the sea and swallow the world in an embrace of stars and a sliver thin new moon.
“Do you have a name other than Pauline?”
“An Indian name, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“I do, it’s Orenda, it’s an Iroquois name. It means magic power. What a joke that is, for if I had any magic I would have used it all long ago to bring my daughter back to me.”
“And Jenny?”
“Her name? Her name is the greatest irony of all. It took a long time for me to conceive. So long that her father and I had almost despaired of ever having a child. So when she arrived we called her Onida.” There was a pause as she drew a breath that seemed to come from that place where the dark waited below the horizon. “It means the one searched for.”
Chapter Fifty-nine
Heart’s Truth
THE PUB WAS A SMALL ONE, old and intimate and rather down-at-the-heels. It reminded Pamela of many of the pubs back home. Ancient and scruffy, with regulars at the bar and wear marks where their elbows had rested for decades.
Jamie came back with a pint for himself and a shandy for her. The pub seemed to be a popular place for it was slowly filling up with laughing women and men with faces weathered by earning a living from the sea. There were summer people too, like themselves, accepted as part of a world that ebbed and flowed more than most with the seasons. Many of the locals earned the majority of their living from summer people and so had long ago learned to accept the change in their communities every year. Jamie had a different level of ease with many of them because some had known him as a young boy when he would frequently spend summers here with his grandfather.
They had stopped on their way back from Portland where they had met with the publisher from New York about her potential book on the children of the Troubles. The meeting had gone well and she was cautiously excited about the notion of publishing her book. The children had stayed back with Vanya and a local girl named Pru, who was of the sort that even at seventeen could make a grown woman feel wildly incompetent. The children adored her and Pamela had no worries about leaving them in her care for the day.
She took a sip of her drink and relaxed into the wooden back of the bench on which they sat. Jamie took a long swallow of his stout and sighed in repletion. She smiled at him, feeling happy. There was no longer any of the strain between them which had been so evident in the spring. It was a relief to her, though she wasn’t inclined to be naïve about it either.
There was a shuffle and a stir and people stepped back to make way for the two musicians now wending their way through the crowd toward a makeshift stage, one carrying a penny whistle and a set of uilleann pipes, the other with a bodhran. Her heart began to beat a little harder and the bird in her chest stretched out its dark wings in warning.
The man with the bodhran had dark hair and somehow she knew he was Irish. He had the look of it about him. The black hair and the blue eyes ‘put in wid a sooty thumb’ as her old nanny Rose used to say about those thickly-lashed deep blue eyes.
Her throat grew suddenly tight as the first man drew a long note on the pipes, warming them for his performance. And then the man with the bodhran began to warm up, flicking the tipper back and forth, setting a rhythm, turning to say something to his fellow musician. The bodhran was the very heartbeat of Irish music. It had been Casey’s instrument—the one he’d played mo
st often when he’d been on the road with Robin, performing in pubs up and down the west coast. She had gone to see him one night in a pub on the coast of Donegal. They had conceived Conor that very night, in a field with the sound of a fiddle washing over them.
The duo played a few of the songs they knew would be familiar to most—Whiskey in the Jar, Rocky Road to Dublin, Mo Ghile Mear and The Rising of the Moon. A few rebel tunes of the sort that got everyone clapping and their blood thumping and then the inevitable laments meant to tug on heart strings and make the women swoon. Generally speaking it worked, it had always worked bloody well for Casey, even when she had known exactly what he was up to. That was when the dark-haired man with the bodhran looked straight at her, his drum at rest now upon his knee and began to sing. It was just what singers did—find a face in the crowd and play to it. It made the performance more intimate for everyone in the room and made the chosen audience member feel special. He couldn’t possibly know that this song felt like a shard of ice to her heart. He couldn’t possibly know that he reminded her of another dark-haired man who used to sing to her and make her feel like she was the only woman in the room and the only woman, for him, in the world.
Cold blows the wind to my true love,
And gently falls the rain.
I never had but one true love,
And in greenwood he lies slain.
I’ll do as much for my true love
As any a young girl may.
I’ll sit and mourn all on his grave
For twelve months and a day.
She could feel Jamie’s gaze upon her face, but she didn’t dare look back at him. The singer continued with only the soft ribbon of the penny whistle to accompany him.
And when twelve months and a day had passed,
The ghost did rise and speak,
In the Country of Shadows (Exit Unicorns Series Book 4) Page 66
