The Firebird

by Susanna Kearsley

  Rob, at the end of the table, said quietly, “Nicola doesn’t like using her gifts. Or discussing them.”

  “Well then,” his mother remarked, “enough said.” And she cheerfully shifted her husband aside on her way to the Rayburn. “Now, who’ll have a biscuit?”

  ***

  I could tell, before another half an hour had passed, just who was at the heart of the McMorran family. For all the affection I’d felt between Rob and his father, I sensed that what bound them together most strongly was Jeannie McMorran herself, with her quick easy laugh and her genuine warmth.

  I’d have had to have been carved of stone not to like her.

  And she made amazing ginger biscuits. Rob ate four of them, but even with all of that sugar and coffee to bolster his system he wasn’t a match for the aftereffects of his time on the lifeboat, and what must have been a long day. When he yawned for a third time, his mother said, “Och, away home with ye, Robbie. You’re dead on your feet.”

  “I am not.”

  “Away home, or I’m fetching the pictures of you as a bairn to show Nicola. I’ve got those good ones of you in the bath…”

  Rob conceded defeat with a grin. “Right, I’ll go.” He stood, stretching, and said to me, “Don’t let them push you around. I’ll be back to collect you at eight.”

  “All right.”

  “Eight in the morning?” his mother asked. “Never. Let her waken when she wishes, and I’ll give you a phone when she’s finished her breakfast.”

  Rob knew better than to argue, from the look of it. Instead he bent his head and took an interest in his wristwatch. I walked with him to the door.

  “You’ll need your coat,” I said, lifting it from the back of my chair to give to him.

  He took it with a question in his eyes. All right?

  His father was watching us. I gave a nod.

  Rob unbuckled his watchstrap and passed me the watch. The alarm’s set for seven. He smiled and stepped out, letting cold in behind him.

  Then Jeannie McMorran was there, spreading warmth. “You must be needing your sleep as well, after your travels. Come, let’s get you settled.”

  The cottage was not large—the kitchen, a sitting-room with a piano, and two bedrooms, one with the door standing open and welcoming. Rob’s mother told me, “The bathroom’s down there, at the end. Take as long as you like. We’ve a lovely deep tub if you’re wanting a bath, and I’ve found you a pair of pajamas.”

  She’d done more than that. In the bathroom, I found a thick stack of soft towels, and new soap and lavender bath salts, a hair-dryer, toothbrush and toothpaste, all laid out with no questions asked, as though having young women show up on the doorstep with only the clothes on their back were an everyday thing here.

  I took the advice of Rob’s mother and ran a hot bath and sank into it gratefully, letting it soothe away some of my swirling, confusing thoughts. Rob was a part of the life I’d deliberately put in my past, and I had the irrational sense that it should have been somehow more difficult, this reconnection.

  It seemed half-surreal to be here in this house he’d grown up in, with his mum and dad drinking tea in the kitchen, and everyone simply accepting my presence as easily as they accepted the things I could do, things my own family virtually never discussed, or acknowledged. It had me off balance, a feeling that lingered long after the bathwater cooled.

  When I finally ventured back along the passageway and into the bedroom that I was to sleep in, I found Rob’s mum setting a water glass down at the bedside. She turned as I came in, and smiled.

  “Those pajamas all right for you, then?”

  I assured her they were. They were navy-blue flannel, a little too large, and too long in the legs and the sleeves, but I’d rolled up the cuffs.

  “They were Robbie’s,” she told me, “when he was a teenager.”

  He must have had the shoulders even then, because they hung from mine with loads of room to spare. I felt a sudden urge to hug the flannel to my skin, but I resisted it and simply said, “They’re comfortable.”

  “Oh aye, they were his favorites,” Jeannie said. “I had a mind to make a quilt of them someday, ye ken, with some of his old T-shirts. Someone did that in a magazine I read once at the doctor’s, that’s what gave me the idea. But I’ve never yet got round to it.”

  A good thing, I decided. They were very warm pajamas.

  And this room that she’d prepared for me was obviously Rob’s old room. Not kept the way it would have been when he was living here, of course. They’d used one corner of the room for storage—there were boxes neatly piled along the wall, and stacks of clothes that wanted sorting. And a sewing machine, bright and purposeful, held court across from the bed on a large sturdy table with patterns and fabric scraps tidily organized down its long surface.

  The bed, though, was still a boy’s bed, with a bookcase built into the headboard and brown-and-white ships sailing over the coverlet. He would have taken all his treasures with him when he left, but there were still a few framed photographs of Rob at different ages smiling from the bookcase shelf. One was a formal police portrait of him in uniform, smart in his jacket and cap, deadly serious but for his eyes. There was one showing him and his father in front of a red-painted fishing boat, standing near its moorings in the full sun of the harbor.

  “That’s the Fleetwing,” said Jeannie, when she saw me looking. “That was Brian’s boat. And that,” she added, nodding at the photograph beside it, “is what Robbie looked like as a lad.”

  He’d have been about eight, when the picture was taken. All elbows and knees, with a bright smile and freckles and big blue inquisitive eyes, kneeling down with his arm round a black-and-white collie with one ear flopped over.

  I leaned in more closely. “That looks just like Jings.”

  “Aye, that’s Kip. Jings’s great-granddad. He was like Robbie’s wee shadow, was Kip, always followed him everywhere. They couldn’t bear to be parted. We buried him out in the field, when he passed. Robbie thought he’d be company for—”

  She had caught the words, glancing at me as though wondering how much I knew, so I finished the thought for her.

  “Rob’s Roman ghost?”

  “Aye, the Sentinel. He’s introduced you, then?”

  “Well, in a way.” To her curious look I explained, “I can’t see ghosts. I feel them sometimes, but I don’t see or hear them. I’m not quite as… gifted as Rob.”

  Jeannie smiled at me. “Neither,” she said, “is my Brian, so whatever mischief he got up to earlier, likely that’s all he can do. If he tries it again, you’ve my blessing to belt him with something, all right?” Looking round, she inspected the room one last time and asked, “Now, d’ye have all you need? Right, then give me your clothes and I’ll just bung them into the washer.”

  Like Rob, I could tell there’d be no point in protesting, so I complied. But I rescued Rob’s watch from my jeans pocket first, and when Jeannie had left me I propped the watch up like a clock on the shelf of the headboard so that I would hear the alarm in the morning.

  I hadn’t really looked at it too closely until now, that watch, but suddenly it struck me that it looked just like the watch that I had given him two years ago—only that watch had just been a joke gift, a throwaway, bought off the counter at Boots when he’d turned up late one time too often. I’d said to him, “There, now you have no excuse,” and he’d laughed as he put it on.

  Surely he wouldn’t have kept it, a cheap watch like that? He’d have chucked it away when the battery died, when the plastic strap broke. But it did look the same.

  I picked it up, feeling the weight of the watchstrap of durable leather, and folding my fingers around it I closed my eyes, seeking not a vision, but a memory.

  Chapter 6

  I remembered it was early in the evening. I’d been standing at the counter of the Boots on Princes Street, with my collection of small purchases: some nail varnish remover pads, a hair-slide and a toothbrush, and
the watch. I’d found it last of all, that watch, reduced to £4.99, and with a smile I’d picked it up.

  He didn’t own a watch. He used his mobile to tell time with when he thought of it, and since he rarely thought of it he usually was late. He was late now—that was why I’d come in here to kill some time while I was waiting. In the weeks that I’d been seeing Rob, I’d learned there was no need to wait in full view on the pavement. He would find me when he did arrive, and I would know the moment that he did. I’d feel that sudden tingle of awareness, as I felt it now.

  I turned, and thought again that I would never tire of watching him approach like this: his easy stride, his boyish smile, his blue eyes warm and seeming to see only me. His voice as well, that deep Scots lilt, was something that I’d happily have listened to all day. He said, “I’m sorry to be late.”

  “What was it this time?”

  “Inattention. I was reading.”

  “Well, there,” I said, and handed him the newly purchased watch. “Now you have no excuse. It has an alarm you can set, see the button?”

  He laughed as he took it and put it on, buckling the cheap plastic strap with one hand. “Thanks. That may be the best gift a girl’s ever given me.”

  “Get them a lot do you, presents from girls?”

  With a serious face he assured me, “Oh aye. It’s continual.” But those incredible eyes told me differently. He glanced at the items I held in my hands. “D’ye have everything you need, then?”

  I had everything I needed in the fullest sense, but all I did was nod and Rob said, “Right, we should be on our way. We don’t want to keep Dr. Fulton-Wallace waiting.”

  I rolled my eyes at him. “So it’s all right to keep me waiting, is it, but not her?”

  “I’ve no idea what you’re on about.” He raised his wrist and turned it so that I could read the digital display. “Can you not see the time?”

  I called him something rude then, and he grinned and caught my hand in his and out we went together to the street where the day’s rain had finally dwindled to a windblown spray that made the pavement gleam beneath the lights just coming on against the gloom of a mid-January evening.

  My hand in Rob’s felt warm. I’d been so hesitant at first to let him touch me. I’d been nervous, given how intensely we’d connected without any touch at all the first time we’d been thrown together; without even being in the same room, for all that.

  I’d been nervous then, as well. My very first week in the study at the Emerson Institute, and I’d been sitting in a soundproof room, reclining in a soft upholstered chair while Dr. Fulton-Wallace gently taped halved Ping-Pong balls across my open eyes to mask my normal sense of sight.

  The test, she’d reassured me, was a simple one. The “ganzfeld,” she had called it, was a traditional procedure meant to test whether my mind could “see” an image sent to me remotely by a person in another room. That person, whom I’d never met, was sitting somewhere else within the Institute and similarly soundproofed, though with eyes and ears left open and aware.

  The test’s design was basic. In that other room, the isolated “sender” would be shown a video clip that a computer had chosen at random, and for half an hour he or she would sit and concentrate on watching that, while in my own room I remained immersed in my state of partial sensory deprivation, with headphones playing me filtered white noise—known as pink noise—and a red light shining down at my face to produce an unvarying glow through the translucent Ping-Pong balls. All I needed to do, in that time, was to talk—make a running report of whatever I felt, and whatever I saw. At the end, I’d be given four video clips to watch, and I’d be asked to rate and rank each on how closely it matched what I’d “seen” in the ganzfeld procedure.

  Dr. Fulton-Wallace, ready with my headphones, had said, “There’s no need to worry. You’ll do fine. We’re not testing you, really. This study is meant to explore what the sender does. There’s been a lot of debate and discussion within the field about the role of the sender, and whether a sender is needed at all, so we’re hoping our study will add something useful to that. Are you comfortable?”

  Surprisingly, I was, despite the nervousness.

  “All right, then,” she had told me. “I’ll leave you to it. You’ll hear some taped suggestions on the headphones first, to help you to relax, and then the white noise will begin. Just try to verbalize whatever you’re experiencing.”

  My grandfather’s warnings had swirled in my thoughts only briefly before I had pushed them aside as I’d settled myself in the chair and deliberately opened my mind to whatever might come.

  The image had, in the end, risen as clear as a painting: a view of a bench by a pond in a park, with a pair of swans sailing serenely along in the shallows beneath a great willow whose branches wept down in a gentle cascade of pale green.

  I did as instructed, and talked about what I was seeing, describing the park and the swans. When a young boy appeared with a toy boat in hand, I described him as well, and said what he was doing.

  This went on for some time. The boy was just setting his sailboat adrift on the pond when a curious thing began happening all round the image’s edges. They started to shrink inward, as though I’d taken a step back, and they went on shrinking until I saw not just the image, but the screen it was appearing on, and behind that a wall much like the wall of the room I was now in myself. As my view tilted slightly, a few strands of hair blocked the edge of my eye and a hand that was not my own hand brushed them back and a voice—a male voice that I’d never heard—greeted me.

  Hi.

  I felt his awareness, his trace of amusement, but having never found myself in anybody’s head before I wasn’t sure of the correct response.

  I’m Rob, he said. You’re new here?

  This time I replied, a little hesitant, and told him, Yes.

  The sailboat was still drifting on the screen, but my view angled sharply down instead, away from it, and I found myself looking the length of a plain black shirt buttoned across a flat male stomach, a simple black belt and, stretched casually out in the chair below that, lean athletic legs covered in snug-fitting denim, and the scuffed and rounded toes of black Doc Martens.

  His hands were laced, relaxed, across his stomach, and I saw the gold glint of a signet ring, a small one, on his right hand’s little finger. They were nice hands, square and capable. Nice legs, too, come to that.

  My view came up again and focused on the little sailboat and the willow and the swans. He told me, You be sure now to tell Dr. Fulton-Wallace what I’m wearing.

  And with that, he very gently pushed me out again.

  I don’t know what I looked like when they finished with the test, untaped my eyes and took the headphones off, but Dr. Fulton-Wallace seemed concerned. “I thought you might have felt unwell,” she said, “when you stopped talking.”

  I reassured her I was fine. A little stunned, perhaps, and strangely tired from such a minor effort, but I dutifully told her, “I’m supposed to tell you what he’s wearing.”

  She paused in the middle of tidily winding the cords of the headphones. “I’m sorry? What who’s wearing?”

  “Rob. The man in the other room.”

  Setting the headphones down, she exchanged a quick glance with her assistant before giving me her full attention, warily. “What is he wearing?”

  I described the clothes I’d seen and finished with the signet ring. She jotted all the details down, then taking out her mobile dialed a number. “George? It’s Keary here. Who are you using at your end today? Oh, right. And what’s he wearing?” Here she paused, and briefly smiled at her associate’s reply. “Yes, that’s very funny, but my interest is professional. Just tell me what he’s wearing.”

  As she listened, I could see her smile give way to incredulity. She said, “Do me a favor, take a picture of him, will you? Yes, again, very funny. Just please take the picture? Thanks.”

  Shaking her head she rang off, but the tone in her voice wa
s admiring. “The devil,” she said.

  It would be two more weeks before I met Rob face-to-face, both of us in the same room. I’d been heading down south for a weekend at home, and not ten minutes after we’d pulled out of Waverly Station my train unexpectedly stopped.

  In the midst of the murmured confusion that followed, the elderly woman who’d taken the window seat next to me glanced out the window and said, “Oh, I do hope there’s not been an accident.”

  I’d reassured her, “It’s probably nothing.”

  “Debris on the line,” said the young man just over the aisle from us, his quiet voice certain. “We’ll not be here long.”

  It surprised me that I hadn’t noticed him earlier. I usually didn’t miss noticing good-looking men. And on top of it all, he’d been reading a book, and a man doing that didn’t often escape my attention.

  He sent us a friendly look, lifted his book, and went on reading. The Dead Zone by Stephen King. I felt my mouth curve. The story of a man who has the curse of seeing visions of the future life of anyone he touches. Rather the reverse of my own curse, but I could sympathize.

  The young man reading seemed to like it well enough. He looked absorbed, his dark head bent so that one wave of hair fell just beside his eye, his jeans-clad legs stretched out as much as possible in that cramped space, one foot edged slightly out into the aisle. He was wearing black Doc Martens, and on seeing them my first unguarded thought was, Oh God, wouldn’t it be great if he was Rob.

  The thought just hung there for a moment, then incredibly he raised his head and looked at me and grinned, and I turned twenty shades of red.

  “I’m Rob McMorran,” he said, lowering the book again and holding his place with his thumb while he held out his right hand, the hand with the narrow gold signet ring on the last finger.

  I slammed my defenses in place before braving the handshake, and kept it brief. “Nicola Marter.”

  And that was the start of it. By the time the train got underway again I’d learned that he was a police constable, coming up on six years in the force, and that he didn’t live in Edinburgh but journeyed up from Eyemouth in the Borders; that he drove most times, except his car had broken down two days ago so he’d been forced to use the train, a minor hassle since the train didn’t actually stop in Eyemouth. “The nearest stop’s Berwick,” he’d told me, “in England, and then you get into a taxi, turn round and come over the border again.”