by A. L. Knorr
"Nothing to do now but wait and see," Jasher said. He sat on the threshold of the greenhouse and parlor where there was no danger of getting wet. I parked myself in a chair near the sliding door. I tried to relax and enjoy the rain, but excitement thrummed through me and I chewed my thumbnail - a nervous tic I'd had since I was kid. Liz would have slapped my hand away.
Jasher laughed and I looked over. "What?"
"Your spine is ramrod straight. Try and relax. Most likely, nothing will happen."
But within a few minutes we were both pacing.
The rain lasted about an hour but it felt like days. By the time the driving pellets had eased, Jasher was sprawled on the sofa and I sat with my legs draped over the side of a chair reading a gardening book I'd grabbed from the shelf. I say reading when I really mean looking at pictures. Jasher lifted his head, fast. My head snapped up too. We were like a couple of hunting dogs hearing a twig snap in the woods.
He cocked his head. "I think it's stopping."
"So far so good, right? Look at all the raindrops." Every plant and leaf dripped with rainwater. The rain had now let up to a light sprinkle. Jasher stepped over the threshold and I followed. We peered up through the open dome. A few drops spattered my face. Gray clouds thickly blanketed the sky.
"Those have to break, now," Jasher said.
We watched as the rain slowed and then stopped. Leaves dripped rainwater into the soil, darkening it nearly to black. Jasher and I stood on the rubber mats so we didn't stir up mud. The light changed, brightened. A seam ripped through the clouds and the sun tried to poke through.
Jasher turned his gaze on me and gave me that heart-stopping grin. "It's perfect. We couldn't ask for better conditions than this." The clouds continued to break and beams of sunlight penetrated, finding their way to the earth.
Jasher commentated as we hovered like nervous parents. "The trick is that the drops have to not fall so fast," he lowered his voice nearly to a whisper. "They have to cling to a leaf for long enough for a beam of sunlight to penetrate them. I think, and this is just my guess, the light has to be the right temperature," Jasher said. "They don't happen on cold days. The combination has to be warm light and pure water. Think of the droplets as the egg and the sunlight as the sperm."
I couldn't help but laugh.
Jasher shot me a lopsided grin. "It's true," he said in mock defense. "It's nature's way, isn't it? Look now at how quickly the plants are dripping. In a few minutes there will be less water running off the leaves. Keep your eyes..."
He didn't have a chance to finish. A tiny sparkle like sunlight glinting off a lake flashed in the corner of my eye. "There!" I pointed.
A droplet had frozen over and turned pastel green. My pulse sped up. Another flash caught my eye as a second one formed on the same plant, only this one was pink.
"There," both Jasher and I said at the same time and then laughed. My heart felt light as a feather and I had a surreal thought flash through my mind. This is happiness.
Jasher clapped a hand to his forehead comically. "Two!"
"There," I gasped, pointing. A sparkle hanging from the top leaves of a potted basil plant glazed over to yellow.
"Janey Mack!" Jasher's voice was loaded with awe.
I laughed. “What does that mean?” But I could guess.
The greenhouse filled with twinkles, flashing like fireflies among the plants. The visual was pure magic. We fell silent, stunned. Colored cocoons were forming all over the greenhouse, on every plant. Jasher's mouth sagged open. This wasn't a bumper crop, it was a fully stocked terrarium. The hair on my arms stood up. The energy in the greenhouse was changing. I tuned in to the soles of my feet in my flip flops. A subtle hum of power had begun to thrum underneath me and the air crackled with energy.
"Do you feel that?" I put a hand on Jasher's arm.
"What?" he whispered.
"That vibration. The energy."
He gave a small headshake. "What vibration?"
"I don't know." I didn't know how to describe it.
The sun crawled behind the clouds and the cocoons slowed and then stopped forming as the light faded. I let go of his arm as Jasher stepped under the open dome and began a slow walk around. I followed in a daze. With every step, I could feel the energy beneath my feet, thrumming under my shoes. The sight of plants loaded with cocoons was fantastical. The air felt humid and clean and rich with natural perfume. Every plant dripped with transparent colored raindrops, frozen in time right before they were to fall.
"Unbelievable," Jasher whispered.
I felt very deeply that we were present, no, had somehow facilitated even, an event that may only happen once in a century. I was wrong about that.
Late that night, the sound of a pounding of a hammer ripped me from my sleep. My heart vaulted into my throat and I gasped, nearly choking on my own tongue. I had been dead asleep and dreamless.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
It wasn't a hammer - there was knocking at my door. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and looked at the clock. Two forty-three a.m. The full moon cast bright dappled shadows across the carpet. As the sleep fog cleared, I registered the sound of light rain and wind. A few raindrops spattered against the windows. I threw the covers back and padded to the door just as I heard two more taps.
"Georjie?"
I opened the door. Jasher's eyes were wide and bright like he was surfing a tidal wave of freshly brewed coffee.
"What's wrong?" I stifled a face-splitting yawn and covered my mouth. Both of my eyes sprang a leak.
"Sorry to wake you, but I thought you wouldn't want to miss this. Can you come down?" He didn't wait for my response, and vanished down the stairs.
I foraged on the floor with my toes for my slippers and spotted the faint white blobs peeking out from under my bed. After finding my robe, I wrapped it around me and left the room, raking the tangles from my hair. Rounding the corner at the bottom of the stairs, I paused and listened. Faint footsteps led to the greenhouse, so I followed Jasher there.
He sat on the threshold with the sliding doors open, his chin in his hands. I sat down beside him. There were no lights on and he didn't say anything.
"What's happen... Ohhhhh." A glimmer caught my eye, and then another. The clouds moved across the moon and its bright cool light illuminated the scene before us. More cocoons were forming, not as quickly as they had formed during the day, but they were still appearing faster than I could track them with my eyes. The foliage twinkled with what looked like colored fire flies.
"They can form in moonlight?" I whispered, amazed. "You never told me."
"I didn't know!" he whispered back, shrugging his shoulders up to his ears. "Georjayna," He put a hand on my forearm and peered into my eyes. "Moon fae," he said, drawing out the word 'moon.' A big grin split across his face.
"Moon fae." I grinned back.
We watched in silence for the next ten minutes as the little cocoons dropped. They soon slowed, and the twinkling lights stopped. The greenhouse became just a greenhouse on a moonlit night, the light changing as clouds slid across the moon's face. So, the event that I had thought would only happen once in a century, happened twice within a matter of hours.
Chapter 17
"You're really lucky, Georjie." Jasher's voice broke the stillness. I loved the sound of my nickname coming out of his mouth.
"Why?"
"This is your family's legacy," he said. "How many other families have this kind of connection with nature?"
“It's yours too, Jasher. You're part of this family."
He shrugged. "Yes and no. I know Faith wouldn't want me to feel anything other than part of this family, but I know where I came from and what I am."
"What do you mean 'what you are'? What are you, besides a Sheehan?" I turned to examine him in the dim light. There it was - the deep sadness I'd seen before in the photographs of him when he was young. It wasn't gone after all.
"Cursed."
"No Jasher, you're not cursed.
You're blessed," I protested. But the memory of the party returned like a monster just under the surface of a black lake, and I knew I didn’t really believe that.
He gave a humorless laugh. "I appreciate you trying to look at the bright side, but it's not a blessing when your mother dies while you're still inside her."
I blinked at his bluntness. He'd just opened the door wide and beckoned me to come in.
"I should be dead," he was saying. "Whatever force kept my mother's body going to birth me was not good. It wasn't a miracle. It branded me. It's not a blessing to be able to see and talk to the dead. The dead should be at peace, not wandering around harassing the living. And I should be among them."
My skin grew clammy. He believed his words wholeheartedly.
"I don't know what it's like to see and talk to the dead, Jasher," I began. "But anytime there is life where there could have been death, it seems like a miracle to me. If you have been marked because you came close to the veil between the living and the dead, then you are special."
"No, Georjie. What little good my ability does, is far too feeble for the price that I've had to pay for it. You don't know what it's like to have more interactions with dead people than living. I have a much less rosy view of humanity because of what the dead have admitted to me. They have no qualms about telling you everything they did while they were alive. They're all looking for redemption. When they find an ear, they won't leave you alone. Living people keep their secrets and take them to the grave, but once they're in the grave it’s like they realize that the only way they'll feel better is by making sure they have no secrets left."
"You mean they tell you their life stories?"
"No, not their life story, if it was only that maybe I could bear it. They want to tell you their sins, ask you to do weird things for them. The ones like Conor are the nice ones who led good lives, and they're interested in being helpful. But most of them are not like that," he went on. "Most of them are the leavings of wretched humans who have nothing to offer the living except horror stories."
I understood why Jasher felt like he was cursed. I opened my mouth to thank him for telling me when he said, "And another thing. I'm not even so sure that most of the ghosts I've spoken with really are the ghosts of people."
"What else would they be?"
"Sometimes...sometimes it seems like no human being could ever be so wicked. They've done things that are beyond inhumane. The very word 'inhumane' means a lack of humanity."
"Can you give me an example?"
His mouth went flat and hard. "I don't want to put awful things in your head. But some of the things the dead admit to, with full detail and rich description, seem more like the acts of demons, not people."
"Do you mean they were possessed?" I asked.
"What else would you call it when a human being commits acts that are against humanity? Why would a human being ever do something evil, something that gains him nothing, if he hadn't lost control somehow of his own humanity?"
My mind went back to a horrific event that had happened in Canada when I was still in junior high school. "There was a man on a train once who attacked an innocent kid who was just listening to music. The man killed the kid...in front of everyone." I shuddered. "He showed no emotion while he was doing it, or so the witnesses said." I swallowed hard. Bile churned in my belly. It was an event that I could never forget. Kids had cried in the hallways at school after it hit the news. Some of them had been so disturbed they went home for the rest of the day.
"Exactly," said Jasher, quietly. "Things exactly like that. Do you think if that man had been in his right mind, he would have done that? He destroyed the life of that boy, the lives of everyone who witnessed it, the boy's family, and his own life. Why would any human in charge of all his faculties do that?"
"No, I think he was very, very sick," I agreed. "But I don't know about possessed."
"What is illness but a type of possession? Something unwelcome and unwanted that has a hold or a power over your body, no?" He cocked a dark eyebrow.
I began to see how he was looking at it, but I didn't know if I agreed. "You could put it that way." I have never been a philosophical person, and the stuff he was hitting me with was firing neurons that had never been fired before.
"Then what else is a demon but something that has more hold over you than you do? Anything from alcoholism to pneumonia to depression to mental illness."
"But are you saying that the people who are afflicted with these horrible things are faultless for their behaviors?"
"I don't know if I would use the word faultless," he said, frowning. "I think my experience with the dead makes me realize that human beings are not always responsible for what happens to them, but they are accountable for it. They are the ones who pay, whether they were under the influence of some other force or not."
I had never met anyone who thought the way Jasher did. I felt my understanding of the world being challenged, stretched. My perceptions of the nature of good and evil were widening but it wasn't without strain.
"My curse is why I'll never travel, never leave home." Jasher's voice was laced with bitterness, something I hadn't heard in his voice before.
This was what I was most interested in. I turned toward him. "Faith makes it sound like you prefer to be a homebody, like what makes you the happiest is working in the greenhouse or the backyard all by yourself."
"That's what you would do, too, if every time you went to a town or a city, the dead found you." He turned and looked me in the eye.
"So, what would you do with your life if you didn't have this curse?"
He laughed. "What wouldn't I do? I would go to University, probably study architecture. I would travel the world. Visit the Chinese temples in Paru and Panakha, go to Rome, Prague, Budapest, Angkor Wat. There's nothing that I wouldn't like to see with my own eyes. But the prospect of what would haunt me if I ventured out into the world is enough to make me want to crawl under my bed and never come out."
So there it was. He harbored much greater ambitions and desires than he had the courage to go after, because of a sight he didn't want to have.
I took his hand. "I'm sorry, Jasher. I didn't know."
He squeezed my fingers fiercely, hard enough to hurt. I could now see him as someone with real vulnerabilities and needs. We sat there, just holding hands. I felt a glowing warmth building in my belly like a breath blowing gently over hot embers.
"I've not shared that before," said Jasher. "I didn't mean to burden you."
I shook my head. "There is no true friendship without honesty." I shrugged nonchalantly. ”Or so I’ve read.”
He chuckled and turned my hand over, stroking my palm with the pad of his thumb. He looked into my eyes. He lifted his other hand, and traced my cheekbone with the finger. My pulse quickened at his touch. "And what about you, Georjie. What is it that you want? What did you come here for?"
I had a quick intake of breath. I hadn't expected to be asked that so bluntly. "Coming to Ireland happened by accident," I answered. My eyes dropped from his eyes to his lips. "But it doesn't feel like an accident anymore."
"No," he said. "It wasn't an accident." He kissed my temple, and put his arm around me. I lay my head on his shoulder and twined my fingers through his. The sounds of the night closed in around us, insects chirruping, the hoot of an owl. We shared a secret that, as far as we knew, couldn't be shared with anyone else. You might think that it was the perfect time and place for a kiss. Faith was away, we were alone in the house with a moonlit greenhouse full of fae cocoons spread out before us. But we didn't. Not then. It was more than romantic, it was spiritual. I never thought so before, but in that moment I realized - some moments didn't need a kiss to make them better.
Chapter 18
It was dusk. The day had been damp and hazy, the hottest since my arrival. Supper had been had, dishes washed, and the house was getting that feeling of evening stillness. I had just stepped out of the shower and wrapped my hair up
in a towel when a couple of faerie names tinkled in my mind. I shook my head, thinking I'd imagined them.
I heard rapid footsteps on the stairs. "Georjie, you up here?" Jasher called.
I poked my head out the door. "In the bathroom. What's up?" More fae names snuck in through the back door of my consciousness.
I clued in to why I might be hearing fae names just as he said, "It's starting."
"I'll be right down!" I dressed frantically, pulling clothing over still wet skin, then ran down the stairs as quickly as Jasher had run up them. The fae names were whispering themselves into my mind and coming faster now. I was missing it.
Jasher was sitting in the same place as he had been when we had watched the moon fae form, with his legs out the patio door, on the top step.
"You're not going to go closer?" I plopped down beside him.
He shook his head. "Once they start, the best view will be from back here."
He was right. At first it was merely a twinkling, little flashes of white light. As the sun went down, the twinkling lights grew bright, and the soft pastel colors were detectable. The darkening greenhouse became our own personal solar system. It started slowly, but soon the sparkles were happening faster than we could spot them. The names chiming off quietly in my head became an endless stream of whispers as the fae introduced themselves to me.
"Can you hear them?" I asked Jasher.
He shook his head. "You can?"
I nodded. But I was too astounded for conversation and didn't say any more. The sight of the fae hatching was a laser-light show. Colors blinked and bright streaks shot around the greenhouse like tiny shooting stars.
"I wonder why they aren't leaving," Jasher said. "They always leave."
I got up and walked into the greenhouse, wanting to be closer to them. I walked slowly, tuning in to that inexplicable vibration humming under my feet. I stopped under the dome, open to the summer night sky. All around me twinkling lights zipped this way and that, blinking on and then going dark. Jasher joined me and the two of us stood under the open dome, silent. When the flashing, blinking, zipping lights stopped, we looked at each other in surprise.
