Exit Unicorns

by Cindy Brandner

  Hand in hand they ran down the hill, breathless and laughing like two children without permission to be out in the dark. Against the sky, the pines stood like dark sentinels their scent sharp amber and heady as wine. Inside the stand of pine, the light was fainter, ribbons of it running in and out of the trees against a star-strained sky.

  “Here,” Casey said, stopping in a small ring of trees, the ground underneath springy and fragrant with needles. He lay the blanket he’d brought with him down over the bed of needles then faced her in the moonlit space and cleared his throat, suddenly nervous.

  “A walk, you said,” she smiled, her words accompanied by a slipstream of frosted air.

  “If ye don’t mind, I’d like to make love to ye,” he said with the air of a man who has made up his mind and intends to follow it.

  “And if I do mind?” her voice trembled with either cold or suppressed laughter.

  “Then ye’ll have to close yer eyes an’ think of England or whatever it is good wives do, because yer lookin’ at a desperate man here.”

  “Well,” she said, “we can’t have that, can we?” In one fluid motion, she pulled her sweater up over her head and tossed it to the ground, then unbuttoned her jeans and shimmied out of them. In the dark she stood out like blue-dipped ivory, her edges outlined by the distant hand of the moon.

  “Touch me, Casey,” she whispered.

  He leaned in and their fingertips met in tryst, her mouth warm and sweet under his own. He ran his hands down her back, felt her shiver and the skin that rose in goosebumps under the wake of his fingers. He lowered her to the ground then, safe within the soft couch of pine needles below and the hard shelter of his body above.

  “Are you certain you’re up for this?” she asked, one hand running lightly along the stitches in his upper thigh.

  Casey, with the proof that he was indeed up for it rather plentifully in evidence, merely put his mouth over hers.

  His fingers traveled down her ribcage, bumping along the road of tender flesh and shivering bone, carried light above a whirlpool of blood and then there was the sweet press of rude, blind muscle, a sighing parting of swollen tissues and he was home and gone. Creating madness from movement, a dilation of the senses that was all exquisite agony.

  “I have pitch in my hair,” she said drowsily some time later.

  “Sorry about the roughness of the surroundins’,” he murmured, “but a bit of oil will take it out.”

  “An Thou beside me singing in the wilderness

  And wilderness is Paradise enow.” She replied rather cryptically.

  “Ye want me to sing?” Casey said, cracking open an eye to the night.

  “No,” she laughed softly, “I’m just saying any surroundings are home when I’m with you.”

  “I hope to provide ye with better than stars for a roof an’ leaves for a pillow someday.”

  “You’re my shelter Casey, don’t you know that yet? I don’t need walls and ceilings and pots and pans, I just need you.”

  “Aye, ye say that now but wait ‘til it snows.”

  “You’re a terribly practical man,” she said.

  “I feel anything but practical when ye touch me like that,” he gasped as she took him firmly in hand. “Talk about ice an’ fire, yer hands are frozen.”

  “Isn’t there a poem about that by Dante, something about beyond the ice and the fire?”

  “Mmmnn,” he said, “not Dante, Jack Stuart an’ it’s ‘between heaven an’ hell, betwixt the ice and the fire, you an’ I shall drown in the well of desire.”

  “That man,” said Pamela, “does have a way with words.”

  They awoke to see Vega declining into the western sky, its blue-white fire making the journey down to where summer skies slept.

  “Do you know the story of the Lyre?” Pamela asked, knowing where his gaze had fallen.

  “My Daddy told me long ago, but I can’t remember,” he replied, “will ye tell it to me?”

  “Well it’s said that after Orpheus’ wife died he grieved terribly. He wandered about lost, unable to play his music any longer, denied the one solace he might have found. The Thracian maids saw him and wanted him, desired his beauty for themselves and tried to lure him with their charms. He rejected them, though, and this made them very angry, they shrieked and howled abuse and threw their weapons at him. But Orpheus had found his music again and their weapons were as dust before the sweetness of it. This enraged the maidens further so that their howling increased and rose and rose until the darkness of it drowned out even Orpheus’ music and the weapons mortally wounded him. The maidens dragged him back to their lair and tore him limb from limb, casting his head and his lyre into the river. Orpheus, torn apart, floated down, down the river until the muses gathered all the parts of him together and buried him at Libertra. And Jupiter, sorely grieved, took the lyre and knowing it was Orpheus’ soul cast it into the face of heaven, where it could shine forever.”

  “Bit of a bloodthirsty tale, isn’t it?”

  “I think what it’s really about,” she said, sitting up and hugging her knees to her, “is eternity.”

  “Eternity?” Casey said, running a leaf idly down the groove of her spine, “I’m not certain I see that, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned an’ all that, but eternity?”

  “Think about it. No matter what happens to us, the tragedy, the pain, the uglinesses of life, when that all falls away we’re left with what’s true and beautiful, even after we’re gone.”

  “That sounds like somethin’ my father would have said, he’d have thought ye a wise woman ye know. Vega was his star. When I was in Parkhurst, I’d try to find it through the bars of my window at night an’ when I could I’d pretend it was him watchin’ over me. An’ I knew I could survive another day because he’d watch my back for me. In the winter I felt so alone because without his star he was gone for another season.”

  “What do you remember of your mother?” she asked softly and turned to look at him. His eyes shied away from her, down to the leaf he held between his fingers.

  “Not so much really; she wasn’t like the other mums, I suppose that’s the one thing I knew clearly even then. She didn’t bake bread or make chat about the menfolk while scrubbin’ down the pavin’ stones, she didn’t leave the door open to the rest of the street the way everyone else did. She was quiet an’ pretty, dark-eyed an’ fine skinned. Ye’d never know Devlin was her brother to look at the two of them. She’d grown up soft compared to my Da’, there was only her an’ Dev. Her parents had money, they weren’t rich, but they always had a car an’ holidays in the summer. I remember that she smelled good, like somethin’ expensive. An’when she left, there was a hole in my Daddy an’ he never learned how to fill it. Pat an’ I tried to putty it up the way children will, ‘cause ye don’t know any better.” He took a deep breath, “We couldn’t know that a woman leaves a loneliness behind that nothin’ cures.” He sat up beside her, “But I understand that now.” He took her hand, turned it palm up and kissed it. “Because ye hold my soul right there in the palm of yer little white hand.”

  “I’m not leaving though.”

  “A day could come when ye might see it as the only sensible option.”

  “Never,” she said vehemently.

  “When I thought ye’d died in the fire,” he said quietly, “I wanted to walk into it myself, to be consumed by flame an’ have my ashes join yer own. Nothin’ seemed to matter then for how was I to care about anythin’ properly again without ye there. An’ I remembered somethin’ a wee wise man in a bar had said, he said ‘a man must go where the road takes him,’ an’ it seems to me now that perhaps my road has changed, without my fully knowin’ it.”

  “And where does this new road lead?”

  “I don’t entirely know,” he said ruefully, “I only know I’m standin’ at a crossroads an’ the sign isn’t
clear just yet. My Daddy used to say that the decisions ye made at the forks in the road were the ones that defined ye as a man an’ ye had to weigh yer options carefully in such moments so as not to regret the choice later.”

  “Well as long as you take me along with you when you decide which way you’re turning,” she said and shivered, reaching for her sweater.

  “Don’t,” Casey said, “not yet. I just want to see ye so for a few more minutes.”

  “But I’m freezing,” she protested.

  “Then I’ll warm ye,” he put his arms around her from behind, wrapping the blanket about the both of them. “Better then?”

  “Better,” she agreed relaxing back into his warmth, feeling the rasp of his whiskers against her neck.

  “If I ask ye a question will ye answer me honestly?”

  “Is that why you wanted me naked? Because it’s harder to lie when you’re naked?”

  “Is it? Never thought of it but come to that I see yer point. No I’d other plans for your nakedness but if it makes ye unable to lie, I’ll consider it a bonus of sorts. I want to know, no I need to know, the man who died in the fire, was he the man who raped ye?”

  She started and knew his body felt the answer before she even voiced it.

  “It was him, wasn’t it?” he said in a low and deadly voice, as if the man stood before him now.

  “It was.”

  “An’ who was he, Pamela?”

  She shook her head and pushed away from his body. “He’s dead and gone, it doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “It matters to me. Was it the policeman, the one whose neck I cut? Was he the man who raped ye?”

  “And what if it was him, what does it matter? He’s dead and it’s over now.”

  “Did Pat kill him?”

  “No,” she said wearily and knew he didn’t believe her.

  “Then it is my fault,” he said and she turned in surprise.

  “Your fault? How the hell is any of this your fault?”

  “I threatened him, didn’t I? I made him angry an’ he took his vengeance out on yerself an’ Pat. Ye weren’t protectin’ me from him were ye, ye were protectin’ me from knowin’ that I’d done all this? Weren’t ye?”

  “And what if I was?” she said angrily, “Would that be so awful?”

  “Aye,” he said the anger in his words matching her own, “it would be. D’ye think me such a coward that I cannot face up to my own failures, d’ye think me so small in soul that I couldn’t be a man for ye?”

  “You stupid bastard,” she said and hit him hard in the chest, knocking him into the tree behind him, “how dare you! This is not about your stupid pigheaded pride. It wasn’t even about keeping you from running out bent on vengeance.”

  “Then what was it about?” he asked, rubbing the back of his head where it had hit the tree behind him.

  “Love.”

  “Love,” he echoed stupidly, fingers stuck by pitch to his hair.

  “Do you know how I love you Casey, do you have any idea?”

  “Nooo,” he said slowly, looking at her warily as if he expected her to hit him again.

  “I love you for everything you ever were and all the things you’ll become and even the things you won’t ever be and I love you now just for this moment and for all the moments to come, even the ones we won’t have together.”

  “Why didn’t ye say so to begin with?” he said and reaching out pulled her back to him before she could evade his hands.

  “Don’t,” she said sharply, pushing a knee into his belly, “don’t make light of this.”

  He grabbed her leg and in one fast move was over and above her. “I’m not makin’ fun of ye, lie still will ye? It’s only—” he heaved a sigh of frustration and moved his body away from her own, reaching for his shirt and pants.

  “It’s only what?” she asked, “Leave your clothes off; I don’t want you to lie to me either.”

  “Jewel,” he rubbed his hands over his face, “bare-arsed or not I don’t seem to be able to lie to ye.”

  “It’s only what?”

  “Yer a pushy woman ye know that?” He gave her a half-hearted smile and then capitulated. “It’ll only be that no one’s ever loved me for all the bits that are missin’ as well as for all the bits that are present. It’ll be a bit frightenin’ to be loved like that.”

  “Don’t you love me that way?”

  “Ye know I do,” he said softly, “but I’m a working-class boy from the streets of Belfast and you, you’re someone who ought to have known better than to get involved with the likes of me. I see ye wanderin’ the cliffs in the mornin’ an’ I see ye lookin’ out to sea as if yer heart is breakin’. An’ I wonder what it is I can’t give ye, what it is ye see when ye stare out at the water?”

  “When I was a little girl I used to play a game,” she said looking down at her hands, “I’d spin the globe and let my finger ride over it to see where I’d live one day. I didn’t really have a home you know until I came here, I never felt safe and I never felt that I really mattered to the fibers of someone else’s life. But then I found you and in you, my home. But I’m afraid that you’ll take that away from me with your own destructiveness. And so when I look out over the sea I’m looking into all those spinning globes of what might or might not be.”

  “Do ye want to go back?”

  She looked at him, puzzled, “Go back where?”

  “To America, d’ye think ye could keep us safe there?”

  “I don’t know,” she shrugged her shoulders, “maybe that’s what I do believe. Foolish as it sounds.”

  He rolled his fingers slowly over the pine needles, releasing their clear scent sharply.

  “If ye had that globe now, Jewel, where would yer finger land?”

  She weighed her answer for a moment, not entirely certain of the truth herself. Was it superstition to believe that safety lay across the ocean, that she could keep him alive and whole in another land? He had waited so long to come home, did she—did anyone have the right to take the joy of that away from him now?

  “Here and now, this is where I’d stop the world. This is where I’d stay forever if I could,” she said, “with you.”

  “Come here to me,” he extended a hand in truce, drawing her along his length until they lay skin to skin, bone to bone, hardness to softness. He reached up and cupped her face between his hands, holding her eyes softly with the force of his own. “This is where I’d stop it, here, with ye next to my heart, safe an’ warm.”

  Beyond them, the horizon tremored softly like a blind eye opening in the dark. The smell of pine overridden suddenly by the heavy exotic brush of cinnamon mixed to dubious advantage with the scent of frying ham.

  “Maggie’s making breakfast,” she said yawning against the broad expanse of his chest.

  “I’m of the certain opinion that woman,” Casey sighed, “is tryin’ to fatten me up for the fall slaughterin’.”

  “You don’t know how happy it makes her to feed a man who can eat in such volume.”

  “Aye well, I’m glad to be of service but I’ll start lookin’ like one of her honeyed hams if I have to eat much more.”

  “We’d best head back,” she said rolling off him and reaching for her clothes.

  “One last bit of truth before ye get dressed, darlin’,” Casey said.

  “Hm,” she eyed him over the top of the sweater which she’d yanked up both arms.

  His face was relaxed with exhaustion, stubble a deep shadow, but the line of his body and the directness of his gaze implied an urgency that unsettled her.

  “If ye need me to take ye home, ye only have to say it darlin’ an I’ll take ye.”

  She shrugged into the sweater, her hair a tousled mass of static electricity, rising like a cloud in the air.

  “Have you heard nothing
I’ve said in the last half hour?”

  “Aye, I heard ye, I only want ye to know—”

  She cut him off with a finger to his lips, laying her other hand on his chest.

  “I do know Casey,” her hand pressed firmly over his heart, fingertips reassured by its steady thrum, “but here, now, I am home,” she smiled, “safe and warm.”

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  In the Light of the Stars

  He watched her sleep, sweetly at peace. It did his heart good to see her so; she was so rarely peaceful in her waking hours now. And who could blame her? Since January, it had all become a nightmare that there was no waking from.

  He kissed her softly in the hollow of her shoulder, where the pale light from the garden paths pooled, stilled and became glowing ivory. He found his clothes, donning them as quietly as he could then making his way out, closing the door with a barely audible click.

  His feet knew the path he meant to take before he even became consciously aware of it. They’d taken it often enough in childhood. Every Sunday in fact, his daddy had insisted on it. “Can’t prevent ye from bein’ a heathen every other day of the week but ye’ll behave and get some goodness into ye on Sundays,” he used to say.

  He hadn’t been inside a church since his father’s funeral, had long ago stopped finding comfort in the rules and regulations of organized religion. He’d been bitter about the Church, angry at God for not saving his Daddy’s life.

  He dipped his fingers in the font, genuflecting automatically, bowing his head as he’d been taught since he was old enough to obey commands. He remembered the Christmas masses of his childhood, the gleaming altars cloaked in white, the ring of small white candles surrounding the larger central one that symbolized Christ, the Light of the World. Thronged in greenery and scarlet flowers, it had been pure poetry, the kind that touched you on a level deeper than words ever could.

  He knelt before the altar rail and lit a candle, borrowing the flame from another and wondered whose memory, whose pain he was taking from. Here flame and memory were one, divine and prescient, burning you with their truths when you least expected it.