✽✽✽
Rory delivered them back to the school and Ida knighted him with her axe in thanks for taking her for ice cream, which was now smeared across the front of her tutu and her face. She was beaming when Lucy told her that Ms. Brooks had said she was an excellent artist and she seemed to have forgotten about Dean in her enthusiasm to tell Lucy all about driving in the front seat of the police car.
“And Mr. Rory said I could talk into the ‘talky thing and then I pressed the button and it went woo woo woo woo!” Ida danced around like a happy police car.
Dorian hadn’t said much on the drive home, and Lucy tried to convince herself that it was concern about Ida and not something she might have said or done. Or something the teacher had said about her. She knew full well that rumors still floated around the community like toxic gas about the crazy drunk who lived with the goat.
They cleaned Ida up, throwing the tutu in the wash to prevent any comment from Dean, and Lucy made some sandwiches, growing increasingly concerned about Dorian’s preoccupation. He barely looked at her and only spoke in terse one-word answers.
The three of them sat down in the kitchen. Ida only stopped chattering long enough to shove a sandwich in her mouth. Dorian took advantage of the silence to bring out a piece of paper from his pocket.
He smoothed it on the table.
It was another drawing. Lucy recognized the wild hair of the subject of Ida’s artistic expression.
Lucy swallowed, her eyes filling with tears despite her best efforts to rise above the whiplash burn of shame flooding her senses.
“Is this Lucy, Ida?” Dorian asked her quietly.
“Yup,” Ida spoke around a mouthful of bread. “I drawed good hair.”
The figure of Lucy was sitting on a slide, legs stiff and body tilted backward, holding what looked like a glass raised over her open mouth, head tipped back and obviously pouring liquid down her throat.
“Dorian, I never…”
He interrupted her, holding his hand up to silence her. She wondered if the jury was already out.
“What’s she doing, Princess?” he asked. Lucy could tell he was trying to keep his voice light but there was tension in his jaw. She wilted under the pressure of her failures, but she had never… not once… taken a drink in front of Ida. She’d been sober for weeks. She looked at Ida, eyes brimming and heart on fire.
“She’s drinkin’,” Ida said. “Like we do’s every morning.”
Lucy sagged. She shook her head at Dorian as Ida reached for another sandwich.
“I see,” Dorian also seemed to deflate. His eyes held such hurt that Lucy stood up, ready to flee so she wouldn’t have to see him looking at her the same way she looked at herself.
“Loocy has to have coffees before we feeds Goat,” Ida prattled. “Goat don’t like coffees. Coffees is yucky. I like raisins. Loocy says raisins make you poo, but Goat poos all the time and he don’t get raisins.”
Dorian’s face softened like butter in the sun as Lucy dropped back onto her chair. He took a deep breath and put his hand on Ida’s shoulder, looking like he would fall over without her support.
“Lucy’s drinking coffee?” he asked.
Lucy sat in silence.
“Yup, I just tolded you that,” Ida hopped off the chair and dashed off to feed Dog her crusts.
The silence over the table stretched. Dorian didn’t take his eyes off her and she waited patiently, like a wounded soldier just glad to still be breathing.
“Lucy, I had to know,” he said softly.
“I know,” she nodded, hurt battling with reason as she shoved shame back down to sleep.
“I was so upset because I know how hard you have worked to beat it,” he rushed on. “I jumped to a conclusion and I was wrong.”
He got up and pulled her chair around toward him, kneeling down in front of her and taking her hands. She sniffed. Of course, he assumed it was alcohol. Of course, he had to know, he had to protect Ida. She knew all of these things, but it hurt all the same.
“Does my hair really look that bad?” She tried to smile.
“It was probably just really windy, up there on the slide.” He ran his hand through her hair and drew her toward him.
He kissed her deeply and she melted into his warmth.
She had no right to be upset by Dorian’s concern. She didn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt, and she knew she only had herself to blame for creating her history. It just hurt that he could think it wasn’t really over.
Twenty-Four
“She’s scary.”
Ida was hiding behind Lucy in a very non-Ida-like way, and not whispering in a very-Ida-like way and Lucy had to agree with her. Several of the women seated around them smiled because, yes, she was absolutely the cutest six-year-old in the universe but also because they were terrified of the manicurist too and they were hoping someone would save them before she got her hands on them.
It turned out that Louanne, of the twisted gopher-hole-ankle, was Jo’s Great Aunt, and as a wedding gift good old Louanne had hired a woman to meet the beauty needs of Jo’s entourage. A lovely sentiment, and here they all were on the day of the wedding rehearsal, preparing to be manicured and pedicured and exfoliated… by Mad Maddie’s Nailworx. There were a dozen ladies all with their hair in rollers or fingers in bondage as nails were being applied. Jo had both feet on a footstool, each toe separated with a foam torture device as Mad Maddie plied her trade making them all beautiful for the rehearsal that evening, and the wedding the next day. Lucy loved that half the women were dressed in plaid and denim, with a pile of work boots at the door. They were sipping orange juice and champagne, while Lucy had a coffee.
“It’s okay, Ida,” Lucy whispered, drawing Ida out from behind her chair and plonking her onto her lap. She knew it was wrong to use the child as a shield, but there she was. Mad Maddie was easily sixty, and at least as wide around as she was tall. She was draped in shawls and scarves and had a voluminous mane of copper colored hair that looked like mice had built nests in it for the last century.
“Why’s she so squinty?” Ida asked as Mad Maddie lifted her head and squinted at her. The right side of Maddie’s face was scarred from her eye to her chin, the skin puckered and tight so that her eye was frozen in a permanent wink. She also seemed to be missing a tooth. Her fingernails, Lucy noticed, were immaculate crimson daggers, shining like blood on hands that looked like they regularly strangled small animals.
Lucy was beginning to whisper to Ida that sometimes people had scars that made them look scary but it wasn’t polite to… when Mad Maddie smiled her crooked smile and ambled across the room toward her. Maddie’s gait was a seesawing shuffle that set all her scarves to flowing, like she was a giant colorful crab scuttling against the tide.
“Wanna see something, kid?” Maddie’s voice was the rumble of a cement truck mixing bones into mortar. She smelled delicious, though. Something musky and raw.
Ida nodded. Lucy could almost feel how wide Ida’s eyes were, goggling at Maddie as she pressed backward into Lucy’s chest. She wondered what the parenting book said about letting terrifying strangers reveal undisclosed objects to innocent children, but she was curious too.
Maddie thrust out her hand and laid it on Ida’s leg. Ida made a little squeak but then leaned forward over Maddie’s fingers splayed on her knee.
“Them’s what you call the Jolly Roger,” Maddie rumbled. “D’ya like ‘em?”
Each of Maddie’s blood-red fingernails was finely detailed with a skull-and-crossbones, shining with menace yet strangely lovely also. There were tiny jewels in the skulls’ eye sockets. Lucy swallowed, wondering what the parenting book said about nightmares.
Ida reached out hesitantly and touched a nail which was almost as long as her own finger. She looked back at Lucy, beaming like a merry pirate.
“Don’t you be scared of me, little girl,” Maddie said terrifyingly. “My face is just the way I look. It ain’t gonna do nothin’ to you.”
>
“I want my fingers to be a Roger too,” Ida said. “I’m a pirate.” She hopped off Lucy’s lap and jumped up and down, her tutu flouncing in a very piratical way.
“And what about yer Mumma, here?” Maddie grabbed one of Lucy’s hands and turned it over in appraisal.
“I’m not her mother,” Lucy began.
“My mom’s in jail,” Ida said. “Can my Rogers be pink?”
Maddie tilted her head to the side. “That Connie’s kid?” she asked Lucy quietly, as Ida skipped off to see Jo on the other side of the room. Lucy nodded. “Damn shame, that. I know Connie. Not a bad person, just in a bad place, you know? Too much inside her own head.”
Lucy nodded again, not sure what to say. The other ladies in the room talked quietly among themselves.
“You been digging graves with these, or what?” Maddie asked, tugging on Lucy’s fingers which were cracked and dry with distinct brown stains from the work she had been doing to prepare the Community Garden. Her nails were rubble, worn to the quick and rough. “Connie getting out any time soon?”
“Three months,” Lucy said. “It was her second offence, so.”
“Damn shame,” Maddie said again. “I hate to say it, but that little girl is a lot better off with you than with her own mother.”
“Dorian is her uncle…” Lucy began.
“That cop? Yeah, he’s a good one. Not all cops are, but yeah. He’s fair.” She glanced up at Lucy, her eyes like bright marbles in the carnage of her face. “You and him got a thing?”
“A thing?”
“You know, you a couple?”
“I… um… maybe? I think so?” Lucy didn’t want to say yes. Saying yes meant the ‘thing’ could go away, and she really didn’t it want it to.
“Jesus, girl, you ain’t in junior high, ya know,” Maddie laughed. It sounded like stones rolling down a hill. “Y’either are or ya ain’t. But I tell ya, you ain’t if this is the way you’re gonna treat your hands.”
Maddie tsk tsked like an elderly aunt and plunged Lucy’s fingers into some delightful smelling moisturizer before teetering off to her next victim. Lucy sat back and thought about what she had said about Connie.
Too much in her own head.
Lucy could relate. When you were fighting personal demons, they liked to set up camp between your ears and allow none to enter. She had spent two years fighting inside her own mind, and it was Dorian who had breached the walls and allowed some light to seep through. It was up to her to dismantle the rest of the war zone and live again.
She smiled at Ida who climbed up on Maddie’s lap at the far side of the room, giggling as Maddie began working on her tiny fingernails. As much as she was dreading the wedding, she was proud of the work they had done with the gardens, transforming the school yard into raised beds for vegetables and neatly trimmed flower gardens. She’d even managed to keep Goat out of the newly sprouted plants.
Maybe she could survive outside of her own head, after all.
✽✽✽
“Is it wrong that I find this so hard?” She gestured toward the wedding rehearsal party in full swing on the soccer field. They were sitting on the top of the playground slide that wasn’t really built to seat two grown adults. Dorian had his arm around her, with her left leg draped over his right as they sat squeezed between the railings that kept them from toppling off.
“Is it wrong to have feelings, like any normal human being?” he answered, squeezing her slightly. The soccer field was glowing with lanterns and twinkle lights that danced like fireflies in the darkening evening shadows. Lucy felt a warm swell of pride when she looked at the raised garden beds lining the edge of the field, delicate with the sprouts of new plants.
The rehearsal was over and the young people were dancing. Someone was playing a fiddle, and there was a guitar and a softly crooning voice.
Dorian could see Ida spinning merrily in a circle of people, overseen by Mumsy who seemed to be almost festive the way her hand was tapping to the music. Ruby and Sven were dancing like lovers dance, as if there was no one else in the room. Jo and Tom were swaying side by side, quietly drinking in the comfort of friends and music and wine.
No wine for Lucy.
“Is it the not drinking that’s hard?” he asked.
“No!” she said, shoving against him, but then softening. “It really isn’t. It’s hard to be here, thinking about a wedding. A couple getting married with all their loved ones around them. It’s really selfish, I know.”
“It’s not,” he said. “Everyone has reasons to feel alone. It doesn’t make you a bad person.”
Lucy shifted against him and he wanted very badly to show her that she was not alone. That she never needed to be alone again.
“Why don’t you have a girlfriend, Do-wian?” she asked, using Ida’s funny accent like she was afraid of him taking her seriously. “A romantic guy like you, with the muscles and the badge?’
“Never had much luck with the ladies,” he said. “Usually get all awkward and goofy, and … you probably haven’t noticed, but I have this weird thing with my eye.”
“I hadn’t noticed,” she said, smiling at him. She looked him in the eyes and held his gaze while the twinkle lights danced in hers.
She was the only woman he had ever felt comfortable with. Like she had unzipped his soul and crawled inside, wearing him like a cloak.
“I think I know why you don’t have a boyfriend,” he said, his voice like tiptoes in a dark room. Cautious and gentle. “You want to tell me the whole story?”
She sighed.
The night was so lovely. Stars in the sky, love in the air. But he knew they had to talk about this. This, her story, was the invisible wall between them and it was time he breached it.
“This is what I thought it would be like for me and Jeff,” she said softly. “But now I think I was fooling myself. Jeff and I were a party couple, not a romantic couple. That’s probably why we fought so much, and definitely why we drank so much.”
“You were young,” he said, giving her room to accept the excuse if she needed to.
“I was self-centered and tragic,” she sniffed, wriggling closer under his arm. “I liked being tragic, it made me feel important. You know, difficult childhood, sassy attitude. I thought I could drink anyone under the table and do it all over again the next night without consequences.”
“And then there was a consequence,” he said.
She was quiet. He waited, patiently letting the music from the field fill in the space between her thoughts.
“We’d been at a party and we were drunk and we had a fight about some guy flirting with me. It was so stupid,” she sighed. “I told him to leave. I screamed at him to get out, get out!”
Her breath caught in her throat and her words tumbled fast, like a dam had just been broken and the torrent was carrying her away.
“I threw the car keys at him and I told him I never wanted to see him again,” she said. “I shoved him out of the apartment and locked the door behind him and he pounded on the door, and I screamed at him over and over… get out, just get away from me… I think the neighbors came out and yelled at us. I don’t know. Some things about that night are crystal clear and others are blurry.” She wiped her nose on her sleeve. “I remember screaming at him. I was supposed to be in love with him. What kind of person tells the man they love to get out and never come back?”
She sniffled quietly for a moment. Dorian sat in silence, afraid to break the train of her thoughts. She was telling the story as if he wasn’t there at all, even though her fingers were tightly tangled in his.
“The cops came to the door a few hours later. I was still drunk, still staggering around feeling justified in whatever drunken rage I had worked myself into,” she whispered. “They said he went off the road a few miles outside of town, going too fast and under the influence. And it was me that made him. I told him to go. I let him drive, even when he was so drunk.”
He waited. She had to finish the
story to the very end.
“And he died. He just… died.” she said. “He was twenty-six, and so alive and vibrant… I told him to never come back. And he never did.”
Dorian took a breath to speak, but she held up her hand.
“I know, I didn’t put him behind the wheel, I didn’t hold a gun to his head, I know,” she said. “I’m beginning to see that, but even knowing sometimes bad things just happen… because they do… even knowing that doesn’t change the fact that he’s dead.”
Dorian nodded. Sometimes bad things do just happen and someone always has to be there to pick up the pieces. He looked over the field to see Ida dancing with Sven, standing on his big feet as he waltzed her in circles.
“And then I just drank. I drank and drank, and I went to work drunk and I got fired, and had to come home because I couldn’t afford to live in our apartment, and I made an impulsive decision to buy this place, with the misguided notion that I could fix it up and try to rebuild a life where I didn’t feel like I was going to kill anyone I loved.” She tried to laugh, but it turned into a sob. “And that’s why I don’t have a boyfriend,” she hiccupped, pressing away from him as if she was about to run off into the night.
“Lucy,” he said her name, calling her back to him. “Loooocy.”
Dorian shifted himself forward and grabbed her hands until they both slid sideways down the slide, landing in a pile in the gravel at the bottom. She pressed her hands against his chest to stand up and he pulled her down on top of him. Her hair brushed his face as she leaned above him, and a tear fell warm onto his cheek. He brushed his hand down the line of her jaw and smiled. Twinkle lights reflected in her eyes and he wished he could fall into them forever.
“There is always a happily ever after, lovely woman,” he whispered. “Always.”
And he pulled her down to him and kissed her.
Twenty-Five
Lucy belted Ida into the middle of the truck seat, squeezed snugly between Dorian driving and Dog lolling, as they drove to Grim’s for another load of chairs for the wedding that afternoon.
Love on the Rocks: A Heartswell Harbour Romance Page 14
