Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series) (14 page)

There were other things separating them, he knew, the words they were not saying being foremost at present. Secrets that pilfered from the all too brief hours they had together. It made him restless and it was obviously doing the same to her.

She lay in the sand, the waves first rushing over her naked form and then pulling back with cold frothy fingers, leaving her skin only to rush back again, swimming over length of leg, reaching with splayed white fingers around her thighs, surging into the heated core of her. Foam skimmed like lace across her belly to encircle her breasts and curled with a sigh through the heavy lines of her hair, which glistened in the odd light like gelid streams of kelp.

Another flash and he saw that her eyes were closed and knew she was fathoms deep, gone into that far kingdom where valleys ran a hundred miles wide and mountains would seemingly reach the moon if they were not rooted to the ocean floor. Born to the sea, she was—a mermaid in a bowl of tears. And he with his feet planted firmly in the earth.

The Atlantic that his wife loved so well had been called
‘the bowl of tears’
by the Irish poet John Boyle O’Reilly, and for good reason. Two million Irish, in a desperate bid to outrace death, had taken to the sea upon vessels so decrepit and un-seaworthy that they were known as ‘Coffin Ships’. Ships with rotten rigging, un-caulked timbers, leaking hulls. Ships without provision, nor berths, nor adequate water. Ships that would become fetid prisons of starvation, thirst and black fever. Still, the Irish, often unaware of the perils of ocean travel, preferred to take their chances upon the cold, unforgiving waters of the North Atlantic rather than face certain death in the land they’d been born to.

Casey saw them clear in his mind at times—the poor, the destitute, those abandoned by God and Man, forced to flee the only security they’d known in a life that had been desperate at best. And he saw those too weak in spirit or flesh, too poor or enfeebled by their labors to take flight from a doomed land.

The scent of them lay thick along the shore. So many had come and so many had not survived, but they’d left their legacy in strong backs and stubborn minds. He could smell them everywhere, the smell of dispossession and displacement, of longing and fear. He knew the smell well, it was on his own skin, the fragrance of a man without a country. His own ancestors had come here once, and then returned to Ireland. The father-in-law he’d never known had come and stayed.

He wondered what Pamela’s father had thought of this—this raw country that could break a man if he wasn’t born knowing how to bend. She’d told him the basics—how her father had landed at Ellis Island, a thirteen year old orphan from the rough end of Limerick, without a dime to his name and only the clothes he carried on his back. Forty years later he’d been one of the wealthiest Irish Americans in the United States. She might have been telling the story about anyone, though, and that told him far more than her words ever could. He’d never pushed her about her past, had always backed off when she shied away from his questions, knowing too well there were some things that could not be said, things for which there weren’t words in any language. But it bothered him to realize that somewhere inside her was a core of loneliness that he could not penetrate, a loss that was shrouded but not healed. Bothered him that the sea somehow gave her a relief that he could not. His wife, and yet there was always some element of her that eluded him.

It wasn’t that he didn’t understand what it was to have such a core. He’d his own, after all, like a lead-lined box harnessing the pain of his years in prison, a wee box to be certain but locked tight against the interference of outside eyes.

Another flash of light and movement caught his eye, snapping him abruptly from his reverie. Beyond Pamela, something had moved in the dark. Casey blinked, moving forward instinctively, panic lighting his nerve endings and burning quickly in toward his core. Who the hell would be out on a night such as this one? He cursed the sand as it slogged his steps, seeming to enlarge the distance between he and Pamela. The rain was coming harder now, blurring his vision, making him doubt the amorphous shape that he could have sworn had emerged from the dark only seconds before.

He began to run, feet sinking into the loose icy sand. He shifted his path down closer to the tidemark where the drenched sand provided firmer purchase. Pamela had once told him that the shore was an edge place, where two separate and spinning planes met, providing some sort of crack in the fabric of reality. It was why seabirds always uttered such desolate cries as they neared shore, she said, they saw the rip in the fabric of time and space, sensed it as humans could not, creatures of air that they were. He remembered the goose bumps rising on his skin as she’d told him this, green eyes as uncanny as a witch’s, as though she too had seen into this abyss and was lured by its siren call.

‘
Perhaps
,’ she’d said dreamily, ‘
perhaps it’s where monsters hide. The ones you’re so certain of as a child, the ones you know are just waiting in the shadows with jaws held wide to snap you up. The ones your subconscious remembers as an adult. The ones that snatch away the innocent and the afraid, whose very innocence or fear was the thing that allowed them to stray too close to the edge of that spinning plane in the first place.’

He ran faster, insides icy with fear, seized by the certainty that his wife was about to fall into one of those nightmare rifts if he didn’t reach her in time. But the sand kept giving beneath his feet, the lightning distorting the atmosphere into an alien sphere, as though he were trying to scale an arc that remained resolutely flat beneath his feet.

He yelled her name, feeling the wind and rain spit the frail syllables back into his face. There was no way she could have heard him within the howling wind, and yet her head turned toward him and he saw her hand come up in invitation and demand.

“Come back to the house!” he yelled, close enough now to see something wild in her face, something reckless. He shouted at her once more even as he dropped to his knees beside her, pulled by a need that emanated like fire through the air and water.

She shook her head; his words were lost in the wind in the bare foot between them. Her own intent was clear, though, as she grasped him behind the neck, pulling him over on top of her, arching against him in a passion that was nine parts desperation, matched only by his own to have and possess—to leave this shore with the scent of her heavy on his body, the touch of her molded to his skin, the heat of her lingering upon him.

She looked like a sea creature in the strange storm light, eyes as enigmatic as the ocean itself. He had a sudden fear that he would drown in them and never belong to himself again. Would wake to find himself imprisoned in a soul cage at the bottom of the sea.

Even through the rain, he could smell the tang of seaweed in her hair, and taste the salt in her mouth. He was dizzy with her, as though the world moved with them, rushed over them, took away and gave back. She was as fully open to him as the gates between worlds this night and thus he could see her dark side and know it the twin of his own.

“Harder,” she whispered, urging him against her with body and words, “I want to be able to feel you after you’re gone.”

He groaned, lost already in the heat that only needed a look, a bare touch, to spring into a blaze that threatened to consume them both. How many times had he made love to this woman? And yet he never tired of it, never slaked the thirst for her that gripped his very innards. He’d been afraid those first few times they made love that such a fire would have to peak quickly, leaving only ashes in its wake. But it hadn’t happened. He still came hungry and needing to her every time and occasionally left her in the same condition. It frightened him, the force of such a passion. It was as elemental as breathing, and as necessary to life for him now.

After she held him tightly through the aftershocks of the flesh, the world lit an eerie blue all about them.

They half walked, half ran back in silence, only partly clothed, the world wild about them and the rain falling hard against their skins.

Casey looked back only once, but behind him, the shore was empty. Still, he shivered, primal brain alerting the spine of some danger that couldn’t be seen, but was no less real for its invisibility.

Nor could he rid of himself of the idea that his wife had been trying, between himself and the sea, to exorcise something—some intangible demon, from her very soul.

OUTSIDE THE WIND HOWLED, shrieking round the boughs of stunted trees and the salt-licked corners of the cottage. Inside all was snug, the chimney drawing well despite the clamor, firelight reflecting warmly off the polished pine boards. Regardless of the cozy surroundings, Casey shivered, unable to rid himself of the feeling that he
had
seen something on the beach—the form and shape of a man—and yet when he’d reached out—nothing. He eyed the tightly shut curtains, knowing there were no cracks through which they could be seen, and yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that someone—
something,
was watching them still.

Pamela had made a fire in the grate, boiled the kettle, ordered him under the blankets and brought him a cup of hot chocolate to ward off his chills.

“Christ, are ye not human, woman?” he asked, as another shiver struck out from his spine, shaking him to the ends of his fingertips. “Ye’ve not so much as a goose bump on ye, an’ here I am blue to the gills.”

“Landlubber,” she said unsympathetically, adding another two logs to the fire now that it was well caught, poking it up into a blaze that scorched the fine hair on his arms, and began to thaw his skin.

“If not bein’ a landlubber means splashin’ about naked in the ocean on such a night, I’ll take the title an’ wear it proudly.” He shivered again, teeth chattering against each other. “Woman, come warm me. That’ll wait ‘til mornin’, will it not?” He nodded his head toward the pile of wet clothes from which she was shaking sand.

She nodded. “I suppose they will, though they’ll smell awful.”

“I’ve reeked of fish guts for weeks now, a pile of wet clothes isn’t likely to offend my senses. Please come to bed.” There was something odd in his tone—a note of fear that made her turn sharply, wet clothes forgotten.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, brows drawn down in fine inked lines.

“Pamela, please,” he said, a hand emerging from the blankets to pull her down into the makeshift pile of quilts and pillows.

She took the hand, allowing herself to be drawn into his embrace. He held her tightly and she could feel the tremors that shook him from head to toe, though his skin emitted a healthy warmth. He smelled of wood chips and brine and the co-mingled scents of their recent lovemaking. She breathed deeply, wishing she could stay here with him, by the fire, indefinitely.

“Talk, man, you’re warm as toast and shaking like a leaf,” she said as the worst of his tremors seemed to have passed.

“Well...” he drew the word out uneasily, “it’s only that I could have sworn I saw someone out there with ye.”

“What?” she said, hoping he didn’t notice the sudden tension in her body.

“Wasn’t so much someone as some
thing
,” he said, tone heavy.

“Some
thing
?” She glanced up to see him looking positively sheepish. “Casey, what on earth do you think you saw?”

“Don’t look at me that way, woman, I’ve not taken drink,” he said, a tint of indignation coloring his tone.

“I haven’t accused you of drunkenness,” she said, arching an eyebrow at him, “now just tell me.”

“A ghost,” he said.

Both of her eyebrows shot up as she leaned up on one elbow, to better see the expression on his face. She put a hand to his forehead, which he swatted away irritably.

“’Tis no joke, I’m serious,” he said, meeting her incredulous look with a black glare.

“
You
believe in ghosts?” she said in disbelief.

“Mmphmm, well,” he began, uncomfortably, making one of those indecipherable Celtic noises that said he wasn’t thrilled with the direction the conversation was taking.

“Do you?” she insisted, noting that he was now studying the edging on the worn quilt with great interest.

“Well,” he frowned visibly in the firelight, “I’ll not say as I do, but I’ll not say as I don’t.”

She eyed him narrowly and he capitulated with the deep sigh of an Irishman who knows himself backed into a corner. “It’s only that a man will have experiences that can’t be explained in the normal run of things, aye? An’ mayhap it’s only somethin’ that cannot be understood as yet, an’ mayhap it’s beyond explanation altogether.”

She raised her eyebrows at him and he sighed again. “Alright then, I’ll try to explain what I mean, but I’ll need a cigarette to get my thoughts together.”

She watched him as he reached for the crumpled pack, pulled a cigarette out, and lit it with an unusually elaborate set of motions. For some reason the mention of ghosts had made him uneasy in the extreme.

“Well, as I see it, it all comes down to subatomic particles,” Casey said, after taking a long drag off his cigarette.

“What?” she asked, momentarily confused by the jump from ghouls to the netherworld of quantum physics.

“Bear with me, darlin’, I’ve given this matter some real thought.”

He shifted in the blankets, propping a pillow up against the armchair behind him, then leaned back against it and tucked her in the curve of his free arm.

“Now there is an actual ghost behind this, or at least I think there is, but I’ll get to that later. See, I’d an experience in prison that I could never find a reason for, an’ I’d pretty much given up on explainin’ it to myself. Until one day when I was browsin’ through one of them scientific journals Pat is so fond of readin’, an’ I stumbled across somethin’ that seemed like a possible explanation.”

“An explanation of what?” she asked.

“Patience, woman,” he said, “I promised ye a ghostie, an’ I’ll deliver. I bet ye couldn’t wait for dessert when ye were a wee one either, could ye?”