Eternally Yours (27 page)

“I was planning to come out,” I said vaguely. “Time just got away from me.”

Several years earlier, Incy and I had stopped off in New York City before catching a cruise ship to Greece. New York had always been one of my favorite cities, and it was where we’d first met, back in the 1880s. But in the early 1970s, New York City was a pit. America was in a recession, and NYC had been hard-hit. The city was dirty, run-down, with lots of crime. Hundreds of thousands of people had moved to the suburbs or to other cities with slightly healthier economies. Whole blocks of the Upper West Side were abandoned, with brownstone after brownstone boarded up, graffitied, used as squats by homeless people or drug dealers.

It was awful seeing it like that, and to help take our minds off it, we drank a bottle of champagne and then went to the Metropolitan Museum, on Fifth Avenue. Even the Met seemed lackluster, stuffy. Of course we went to see the Old Masters, many of whom I’d seen when they were current: the New Masters. Or even: the Shocking Upstarts.

I sat for a while in front of a couple of Vermeers—the light in his paintings always brought me back to the north with a nostalgic recognition. I’d lived in all of the Scandinavian countries over many lifetimes. There’s a unique quality of light there, and Vermeer caught it as if by magick and imbued his luminous paintings with it. It made my heart feel heavy and leaden.

We decided to quickly dash through the Impressionists
and then get an early dinner before seeing some Broadway play or something. Impressionism sometimes seems the most accessible of all the art periods, the most cheerful. Maybe it’s all the colors. I don’t know. But compared to, say, the German Expressionists, the Impressionists are a bright, humming skip through the park.

But I digress.

The whole point is, that day we’d seen several paintings by Gauguin. Who was, you know, very into Tahiti. The way he painted it made it seem lush, wild, and primitive; bursting with life and juice and sunshine.

So we went to Polynesia instead of Greece, and we stayed there for years.

Leaning against the rock, bits of seaweed strewn close to his handmade Italian sandals, Incy sighed. “I sent you how many wires? You should have come out. I met some great people. Boz was there for a while—we stayed in his fabulous townhouse in Whitehead Crescent. You said you would.”

“I meant to.” I gave up on the day’s hunting—Incy needed appeasement. “I can’t believe you’re back already. I was going to come out in a week or two.” We scrambled up the rocks to the narrow path that led down to this secluded beach. I was one-handed, but Incy, watching me climb up after him, didn’t offer help.

“I’m sorry,” I said as we headed toward the road. “I really did mean to. You know I love being in London with you, April or no. I guess island living has made me fuzzy-headed.”
Incy didn’t say anything. “But man, I’m so glad you’re back!” I put extra enthusiasm into my voice. He glanced at me. “I missed you so much,” I said, feeling a twinge of guilt, because I guessed I hadn’t missed him quite as much as he’d missed me.

In Tahiti my name was Sea Caraway. After we’d first come and bopped around the islands for a while—Bora Bora, Tahiti, the Marquesas—we’d settled on Moorea, the island closest to the big island of Tahiti. To Incy’s amusement and then concern, I had fallen in love with a little hut on a beach. Pineapple fields came up practically to the back of my house, and for ten months of the year the air was heavy with the sweet fragrance of pineapples ripening under an untamed sun.

Incy thought I was nuts, living there—he had the biggest room at the hotel right down the beach, where he could order room service and get drinks at his reserved lounge chair.

But I loved my hut. Living there was like a fantasy, like a dream.

Incy had already had enough. He’d only stayed this long because I wouldn’t leave. After the fifties and sixties, where I’d lived kind of big lives in the middle of society, I’d needed a break. I hadn’t even aged and killed off my Hope Rinaldi self of the sixties—just had her disappear.

“Miss me? I doubt it,” said Incy, pulling a big yellow hibiscus off a tree by the side of the road. He started shredding it with his fingers, leaving bright yellow shards of flower behind him like songbird feathers.

“Incy, of course I missed you.” I linked my free arm through his. “I just got lazy and preoccupied, that’s all. But now you’re back! What say we celebrate at the Blue Dolphin?” Which was a semifancy restaurant at one of the diving resorts. “Just let me dump this stuff and change. I want to hear all about London, everything you did, everyone you saw, every bit of gossip.” In truth, I would have loved to go back to my hut, sort my finds, light a lantern when it got dark, and maybe eat some fish and rice when I got hungry. But this was Incy, and I’d hurt his feelings, and it would be good for me to get out and mingle.

“Are you sure you’re not too busy?” A bit snidely.

“How could I be too busy for someone in a gorgeous suit like this?” I gestured to his blue linen. “You got that on Savile Row. I’m thinking… Josiah Underwood?” I named a bespoke tailor whom I remembered Incy liking.

Incy grinned at me, and I relaxed. “Good eye,” he said. “How long will it take you to get ready?”

“Two minutes,” I promised. And so we went to dinner at the Blue Dolphin, and Incy told me everything he had done, and how much he had missed me, and how I needed to come next time, and so on. It was just—the rest of the world seemed so bleak right then. Vietnam, and the recession, and petrol prices. After the joyous, shocking creativity and bursting life of the sixties, the seventies seemed like a cheap movie, grinding down. I wanted to be away from it.

On Moorea the only constraint I had was Incy, but he
was also my only friend, the only person who really knew me, and for the most part he was fun and funny and my main source of excitement. While he occasionally needed extra tending, there was no suggestion, back then, that he would ever become the monster who had killed two people in front of me just months ago. Or that I would, on an otherwise ordinary day, open a box to find his head inside.

I came out of my reverie to find myself shivering on a bench in the barn. Moorea seemed so, so long ago. Sea Caraway had been calm and content, and tan—basically the opposite of me now. I breathed out heavily, wishing I could inhale wild salt air instead of this warm, horse- and hay-scented stillness.

Oh, Innocencio.
He’d been so full of life. That’s such a cliché, but it was true. Somehow Incy had managed to pack lots of extra living into this one life. My chest ached. I got up, feeling every one of my 459 years, and mindlessly climbed the ladder into the hayloft.

It was dark up there and warmer than below. Bales of Timothy hay were stacked up neatly. The piles were getting low—soon the horses and cows would be eating regular grass, outside. In the meantime, there was enough loose hay to mound into a nest and flop down into.

Innocencio was dead.
Every nerve I had was raw, and I
cursed myself for not snagging a bottle of wine on my way out of the house. Something stronger would have been even better. Maybe I should go to town and—

I didn’t want to go to town. But I didn’t want to
feel
this, to
know
this. I wanted to be able to pretend that Incy was fine, not formerly a homicidal maniac and then dead. Actually
dead
. My brain kept shoving that information away, as if it was too big to get through the info ports.

We had gone through a lot together. And even after Boston, that horror, I’d still been able to look back and remember good times with him. Or at least better times.

When we were in Tahiti, he’d made me tie him to a big palm tree on the beach so he could experience a hurricane to the utmost. The wind and rain had lashed him for hours. He’d been scratched, bruised, and exhausted afterward. And exhilarated. Thrilled.

During Prohibition we’d been in a speakeasy in Chicago. I was wearing a gorgeous bias-cut gown by Vionnet. The place got raided, not by cops, but by gangsters stealing the already stolen liquor. There was shooting, bullets piercing wooden benches, making plaster chips fly. Incy and I had to duck under a table and crawl beneath an acre of benches and tables to reach the hidden trapdoor that not many people knew about. I’d been so furious about ruining my dress, but Innocencio had been laughing, excited. “This will be such a good story!” he whispered. I cut my knee on broken glass and swore.

We’d had lovely meals together, been in jail together, and went through the worst storm ever on a cruise ship off the coast of Australia. I was with him on safari when he accidentally shot himself in the foot. He’d been on crutches for a month. I teased him about it for twenty years.

He’d been with me in India when the train we were on crashed. Almost everyone in the first three cars had died. And yes, I took rings off fingers, wallets from jackets. I don’t know what I was thinking—that person, Britta, seems foreign to me now. But at the time it was like, Oh, I can have
more
. More jewels, more gold, more whatever. Incy had made fun of me, poor little rich girl. But he hadn’t stopped me. He accepted just about everything I did.

The hay tickled my neck as I blinked away tears. I didn’t want to cry about this. I’d cried so much here in the last five months. When would I be cried out?

But it was, like, poor Incy. He’d laughed, partied, done more than anyone I knew. Grabbed every situation and wrung the life out of it. Had he ever been happy? Had anything ever been enough?

Since I got back from Boston, I’d been looking over my shoulder. I’d been saying ward-evil spells all day long. I was scared of him. Especially after he’d disappeared from Louisette’s and we thought he’d killed her. Which maybe he had, still. I’d been so afraid that he was going to come for me again, that he would truly never let me go. Now he was dead, and I never had to fear him again. He existed nowhere,
not on another continent, in another country, town. He existed no more, forever.

The tears began running then, leaking out of my eyes and trailing down the sides of my face. I turned onto my side and curled up, wishing I had brought a pillow.

Incy was dead, and I would never, ever see him again, see him smile, laugh. I would never feel his arms around me, smell the distinctive Italian cologne he always wore. I cried, feeling disloyal because I was relieved—not only because I no longer had to fear Evil Incy, but also because I would never again have to endure the weight of Lovely Incy, always there, always in my life, always by my side. It had been exhausting and stifling at the same time as fun and exciting. My whole life felt lighter with the sure knowledge that he would never be back, never need me again. That felt terrible; despite the unforgivable crimes he’d committed in Boston, my relief still felt like a betrayal.

This wasn’t one of those gasping, almost barfing, wretched sobbings that feels like it’s being ripped up from your stomach. This was quieter, a deep sadness that colored my soul blue. And unlike other crying jags, when it feels like time has stopped, I was aware of each passing minute, and every minute took me further away from him. Both good and bad.

Something cold and wet touched my forehead, and I gasped, my eyes flying open. A white face, broader now across the cheekbones, lacking the snub nose of a very young puppy, leaned over me.

“You’ve got to quit climbing ladders, girl,” I told Dúfa brokenly. “It’s just so weird.”

She bent down and licked the tears off my cheeks. My first thought was, Ew, and then I realized her soft tongue felt comforting, and then I thought, Ew that I’d even thought that.

Reyn’s tall figure blocked the faint light from the bare bulb at the end of the barn.

“I just heard,” Reyn said. “Figured you’d be here.” He nudged Dúfa closer. She licked my face one last time, then settled down next to me, her narrow spine pressing against my stomach. It felt comforting, like a furry hot-water bottle. I patted her tummy, and she squirmed closer to me. Then Reyn lay down in back of me, draping one arm over me. We were like a nautilus, with larger curves moving down to smallest.

It felt so good. My eyes were wide open—this felt so good, which meant it would feel so bad when I didn’t have it. Which meant I should ditch it now, before I get used to it, so I can avoid the whole pain thing.

I lay there stiffly, imagining a future with no Reyn. I knew the day would come when we no longer had Dúfa, and that thought alone was awful. But no Reyn? Would there ever really not be a Reyn? Like there was no Incy now?

I swallowed, feeling how stuffed up my nose was. “At least now I don’t have to worry about my sword skills.”

“There will always be someone else,” Reyn said quietly against my hair. “You will continue your sword lessons.”

Yes, my life would continue even with no Incy anywhere in the world. It was bizarre.

“I’m so glad he’s dead, that son of a bitch, after what he did,” I said, tears leaking down onto Dúfa’s white fur. “Bastard!”

“I know.” Reyn’s hand rubbed my stomach the way I had rubbed Dúfa’s.

“I’m going to miss him so much.” My voice broke, and I started crying in earnest. “I loved him so much.”