Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series) (103 page)

“I suspect,” Pamela said slowly, “that she would have wanted you to snatch at whatever bit of joy came your way and not waste the opportunity of it.”

“Ye’ve told her a bit then, man?”

Casey nodded. “Aye. I hope ye know I didn’t intend to violate any confidences. It’s only that—” he stopped, as if uncertain how to explain himself.

“It’s only that ye tell her everything that troubles yer soul,” Robin finished for him, eyes less flame than smoke now.

“Aye, I suppose I do at that.” Casey smiled, and it was her turn to squeeze his hand.

“Tell me what she looked like,” Pamela said, thinking it might be the simplest place for him to begin to tell the story of his sister. Robin gave her a grateful glance, cleared his throat, and began to speak of the girl who had been his sister.

“Jo was small for her age; ye know the sort that looks a bit birdlike?”

She nodded. The bones under the dusty velvet showed the outline of someone who’d moved lightly, who’d been meant to dance through life.

“I think she would have always seemed a girl, even when she was full grown, an’ yet when ye looked in her eyes there was an old woman there, even when she was no more than ankle kin to a grasshopper. She loved dancin’, used to spend hours with a bit of an old scarf of our mam’s pinned to her hair, pretendin’ she danced with the Russian ballet,” he smiled, as though he saw, there on the stage of his mind, his sister again dancing. “She said the Russians were the greatest dancers in the world. Had a wee box that she kept pictures of her favorites in, Nijinsky an’ Nureyev, Pavlova an’ Balanchine, she’d say the names like they were prayer, somethin’ sacred ye know?”

She nodded, not wanting to disrupt the flow of his memories.

“But only girls from the good neighborhoods went to dance class an’ even if we could have found a place for her, our parents couldn’t have paid for lessons. So she took books out from the library an’ Casey’s da’ found her an old recording of
Swan Lake,
an’ she taught herself to dance. I don’t know anythin’ about ballet, but I think maybe she was good at it.”

Pamela, seeing the pure, fragile grain and arch of the bones on the table, thought he was likely right. Knowing the difference between a good dancer and a bad one was more a matter of the heart and not the head.

‘’Twasn’t enough for her, though, after a bit an’ she took to standin’ outside this one dance place, was an’ old converted house, an’ it was girls from Malone Road an’ Knockdean Park an’ the like that danced there, not girls from shabby, little knock-ups off the Shankill. She’d go an’ stand there in rain or sun, peerin’ through the windows, watchin’ these girls in their pretty little leotards, gazin’ at themselves in the mirrors like ‘twas a form of worship. Jo could make herself shrink into a corner, so’s no one would notice her, it was how she’d survived as long as she had. She did this for weeks an’ no one had noticed, she’d stand there for the entire class an’ then come home an’ repeat the moves she’d learned. She never even told me. The only reason I came to know was I followed her one day, wonderin’ what she’d been up to. She was small an’ quick as a butterfly, didn’t so much walk as dart, an’ I’d a hard time keepin’ up an’ stayin’ hid from her at the same time.’

‘I lost her at one point an’ had to poke my head down several laneways before I found her. An’ then I saw her,” his voice, quiet now, had the consistency of dispersing smoke, “an’ almost wished I hadn’t. She was there, outside that window where she’d peered in day after day, dancin’ in the rocks below the window, followin’ instructions she couldn’t hear, through stone walls she’d never be allowed inside.

‘I just stood there an’ watched her, feelin’ as if my heart were crackin’ right down the middle an’ yet...” He smiled softly to himself. “There was a magic about her when she danced that wasn’t there normally, as if somethin’ else came over her, almost as if someone else inhabited her soul as soon as the music began. Do I sound mad?”

“No, not at all,” Pamela reassured him. The feeling often came to her when she held a camera in her hands, as if she were merely the instrument through which some other force operated, a force that pulled things out in her subject that she didn’t remember seeing during the actual shoot.

“I thought to just leave, I knew she’d be angry to find me there, but then I realized there were girls up by the window an’ they were mimickin’ her, makin’ fun of this little ragamuffin from the streets who was darin’ to put so much as a foot near the threshold of their world. An’ I just got angry an’ outraged that they should think themselves better than her just because they’d been born into more fortunate circumstances. I couldn’t bear to see her humiliated in such a way, so I went an’ grabbed her, said we were goin’ home an’ she wasn’t to come to this place anymore.

‘But she just planted her feet—she was stubborn, my Jo—an’ said she wasn’t done her lesson an’ wouldn’t be goin’ anywhere until she did.

‘I asked her why she did it, how she could stand them makin’ fun of her, an’ she looks at me real solemn, just a wee white face with too much hair an’ says, ‘because when I’m dancin’, Robin, I know God loves me, the rest of the time I’m not so sure.’ Well, what could I say to that? So I let her go an’ do her dancin’ in the shadow of that window, knowin’ she’d never be allowed inside to dance with the other girls. After all,” his voice was as hollow as the bones beneath the cloth, “’twas all she had left that brought her joy. An’ I could hardly deny her that.”

Robin smoothed a bit of the grimy velvet over the skull, as if he could now protect and cherish his sister as he’d not been allowed to while she lived. “After I got the letter, I was glad I’d left her be. It was the last happiness for her.”

“What happened?”

“The letter said they’d not fed her while I was away, she’d gotten smart with him about somethin’, though with him that could mean somethin’ as simple as her stickin’ up for mam. He’d told her she wasn’t to have a bite until she came to him on her knees askin’ for forgiveness. Well he must have known Jo’d starve to death before she’d do any such thing. They locked her up, he knew she’d run away otherwise. There was a bit of a crawl space beneath the house, it was wide but not high, she’d not have been able to stand up. Chained her to the foundation like an animal.” Robin’s fist clenched involuntarily, the lines around his mouth going a stark white. “I get sick with rage when I think of how it must have been for her alone in the dark, hungry, thirsty an’ afraid, wonderin’ why I didn’t come back an’ save her.”

“Oh Robin,” Pamela said, throat thick with tears, “you’d no way of knowing.”

“But I did,” he said dully, “I knew better than any what the bastard was capable of. I knew, an’ I left her to him. No food, no water, an’ nothin’ but darkness for days, they didn’t even let her up to relieve herself, just left her to lie in it. Jo was afraid of the dark from the time she was a baby, she’d a powerful imagination an’ sometimes it would run off on her an’ she’d actually think she saw monsters in the dark. An’ I was runnin’ about Wicklow, playin’ rugby an’ havin’ a grand time of it altogether.” His hand was moving again and again over the velvet. “I dream of her an’ I hear her callin’ me, an’ her voice is so desperate but I never can find her. It’s as though she’s always a step ahead, somewhere in the darkness that she was so afraid of.”

“How,” Pamela asked, feeling as though the word was scraping her throat, “how—”

“How did it end?” Robin said, as though he wished to spare her the speaking of the words.

She nodded, knowing he’d waited all these years to tell someone, and that they must allow him to tell it, and also dreading the utterance of the words, for she knew they would not leave her, nor would the spirits of the tortured children he and his sister had been.

“Ten days they left her down there, ten days with neither food nor drink nor light, an’ the world movin’ past the door laughin’, runnin’ to work an’ the pub, passin’ the time of day, an’ none the wiser. Then on that last night he dragged her up out of the hole, drunk an’ determined to make her do his will. But my Jo, she wouldn’t, an’ it cost her her life.”

Robin’s hand hovered over the box, and then he laid it trembling upon the bones of the foot. Pamela could see them form under his hand, as though the un-fleshed foot had risen upon the air in the arches and planes that signified movement and breath. The phalanxes—distal, middle, and proximal, the longer slender bones of the metatarsils, the hollow core encircled by the navicular, talus and cubiform, all roughly the size and shape of small rocks. Here the branching bones of the foot gathered in a bundle and fed upward to the larger joints and bones of ankle and leg. Life was such a fragile and chancy thing, a bit of bone cloaked in racing blood and fleeting emotion. Weeping and dancing one day, silent and still the next.

“He hit her in the chest. She was so thin even before they’d chained her up, she must have been terrible frail by then, an’ in the letter he said she made a funny noise, like a whoop, an’ then they put her back down in that damp, miserable hole. It took them all of the next day to realize it was too quiet in the hole, an’ when they checked they found her covered in her own blood, clots as big as a man’s fist he said, as
his
fist he said,” Robin’s fingers had curled tightly into the velvet, turning the pink white with tension. “She’d vomited blood, hemorrhagin’ to death. I’ve done some readin’ since, medical textbooks an’ such, even asked a doctor what sort of injury would result in those symptoms an’ he said severe blunt trauma to the chest. Then I asked him if it was a painful way to die,” Robin’s voice faltered for a moment. “I wanted him to say such a death was peaceful, but I knew that wasn’t what he was goin’ to tell me. Sometimes ye look into a person’s eyes an’ ye know what they’re about to say is goin’ to be terrible, but that ye have to hear it anyway.

“He said it would be a frightenin’ way to die, even in a hospital surrounded by medical help. That ye’d have stabbin’ pains in the chest an’ a feelin’ as if ye were suffocatin’ particularly if the ribs had been broken and tore a hole into the lungs. That it’d be like drownin’, only it’s blood, not water, that’s killin’ ye. Yer own blood. It likely took hours for her to die, though eventually she’d have gone unconscious from losin’ all that blood.

“They left her down there for a couple of days, panickin’ about what to do. Mind ye, no one other than myself was likely to miss her for awhile. She’d missed so much school due to injuries an’ nursin’ mam through hangovers that the nuns had pretty much given her up as a lost cause.” He choked slightly as though there were a gag on his next words.

“I have this picture in my head of her lyin’ there like a broken doll that no child wants, like a bit of refuse ye’d step over in the street but pay little mind to. It keeps me awake at night, that picture. Sometimes I try to drink it away, or walk it off in the streets, but in the back of my mind I know it’s never goin’ away.”

“How did he get her out of the house with no one noticing?” Casey asked, hand stroking the top of Finbar’s silky rough head, his face the color of ashes.

“He took her out like refuse too, wrapped her in a dirty old blanket an’ carted her out in the middle of the night when there’d not likely be anyone about.”

“And then,” Pamela carefully touched the delicate arch of a metatarsal, half the thickness of a pencil, that would have run along the outer edge of the right foot. A soft dust rose from the bone, shimmered in the air for a half-second and then disappeared, “he burned her remains.”

Robin started in surprise, eyes flaring hot as a welding arc. “How in hell d’ye know that?”

“I’ve seen burned bones before; they looked similar to these, white and calcined. The thinner bones take on this checkerboard pattern, and the thicker bones like the thigh crack in a crescent moon shape from the heat. Do you know why he didn’t put the skull in the furnace with the rest?” she asked, seeing clearly in memory the dim white glow of those other bones, with the miasma of incinerated violets thick about them.

“No, he was a sick bastard my father, I never could understand his motives an’ I don’t suppose I ever will now. He knew a man that worked at the foundry in the shipyard, that’s where he took her body. Man never even asked what he was burnin’, if ye can imagine it. Or at least that’s what he says in the letter.”

“How did you survive?”

Robin shrugged. “Ye just keep movin’. Even when ye think ye can’t take a step ye force yerself to do it. Even when it feels as if there’s a thousand pounds of brick on yer back, ye just keep movin’. Sometimes ye drink, an’ for a minute or two ye forget, an’ then mornin’ comes an’ the thousand pounds is there again strapped firmly in place. Then one day ye realize it’s never goin’ away an’ ye accept it, ye’d miss it if it were gone because then ye’d feel as if ye weren’t rememberin’ properly.”

“Ye don’t have to pay penance forever, Robin,” Casey said softly.

“Don’t I?” Robin glanced at him sharply, eyes once again incandescent with heat. “I wasn’t there an’ my sister died because of it. It’s that simple.”

“You were a child,” Casey said.

“No.” He shook his head. “I was a child in body, but never in spirit. The mind is a funny thing, aye? It just keeps on when the rest of ye is broke, like some old boxer that doesn’t know the bell’s rung an’ the fight is over.” His voice was adrift, as transient as snow or mist. “I’m awful tired, but my mind can’t seem to hear the bell, even though it keeps ringin’.”

“Ye owe it to her to go on with your life Robin, yer what remains of her. For her sake ye need to find some peace.”

He nodded, head down, eyes closed, hand convulsed in the folds of velvet. “I know the sense of what ye say,” he said hoarsely. “But damned if I know where to look for peace.”

Pamela reached across the table and put her own hand over his, feeling the terrible tension that lived beneath his skin.

“You made a good start by telling us about her. One step at a time, it’s all you can do.”

Under her hand, the tension gave slightly, like a singing wire pausing for breath.

“An’ if what remains is not enough?” he whispered.