The Last Bride in Ballymuir (18 page)

“
Fine. Well, actually tired,
quite tired, now that you ask,” she said, piling one word on top of
the next. “It was a long day at work. A cold’s going ‘round the
classroom and it was a chorus of sniffles.” Michael smiled as she
drew in a breath. Vi would have little to overhear if Kylie kept
chattering like a magpie too long deprived of its
company.

“
Anyway, I was glad to be
home and have a quiet dinner, but now I’m feeling sort of... well,
lonely, and I was wondering if you’d meet me at O’Connor’s Pub this
evening?” she finished in a great rush.

His hand tightened involuntarily on the
phone. A vision of Evie Nolan, sharp, nasty-tongued, and
vindictive, loomed in front of him. He’d promised to treasure
Kylie, to keep her safe. As far as he was concerned that included
protecting her from gossip.

“
Michael, are you still
there?”

He cleared his throat. “I am. I was just
thinking that a night of noise and too much smoke doesn’t sound
quite the cure for loneliness. And besides, O’Connor’s not very
fond of me.” If not the pub, then where? A visit to her house? He
wouldn’t survive the night without touching her, and that was
another promise he’d made—not to, till she asked. “Why don’t you
come here, to Vi’s house? We can, uh, play cards... or
something.”

His offer was met by a howl of laughter from
in front of the hearth and a momentary silence on the phone.

“
Cards?” Kylie eventually
echoed.

He leaned his forehead into
the door frame with a solid
thunk.
“Or something. I’ll come around and get you if you
like.”

“
No... no, I can drive
myself.”

He imagined her little car with its
distinctive rust patterns—junkyard camouflage—sitting square in
front of Vi’s house. So much for cutting off the talk. Michael
considered telling her to park down the road a way but he knew that
she’d take it as a slight. He’d hope for a dark night and quiet
streets.

“
Fine then,” he said, “I’ll
see you in half an hour?”

“
Shall I bring
anything?”

“
Cards” he answered, and
smiled at the laughter in Kylie’s voice as she said
good-bye.

After he’d hung up, Vi came to give him a
loving smack on the head. “You’re set on running me out of my own
home, aren’t you? No great matter, though. I’ll just pop over to
O’Connor’s for a pint and some company.”

Michael reached out his hand and stopped her
from moving off. “No. Stay, please.”

Vi grinned. “Are you afraid of that bit of a
girl?”

“
I’m trying to maintain
proprieties.”

“
And proprieties are
worrying you after spending last night at her house?”

“
Since her nearest neighbor
is almost a mile off, and your neighbors snoop through the curtains
morning and night, yes, I’m worrying.”

Vi paused, her brow arched at an inquisitive
angle, and a smile playing about her mouth. “I don’t think it’s
just proprieties we’re talking about. I think you’re feeling
nervous. Nature hasn’t precisely taken its course between you two,
has it?”

“
Whatever course it’s taken
is none of your damned business. I’m asking you, as my sister, to
stay here tonight and be nice to Kylie. No prying questions, and
get that smug look off your face!” he finished, pounding his last
order with heavy emphasis.

She reached up and patted
him on the cheek. “If you’re going to be so skittish about a matter
as natu
ral as sex, you’d be just as well
off entering the priest
hood.”

She’d tease him until he was as maddened as a
bull, if he let her. But he wouldn’t. “Only if I get to hear your
confession, sweet Violet,” he said with an answering tweak of her
nose. “I’m willing to bet it would be a ripe one.”

“
That you’ll never know.
I’ll play chaperone to you and your young miss for as long as you
wish. You already have enough to unload on Father Cready the next
time you see him.”

“
I’ll save it for my meeting
with the Almighty, Himself, if you don’t mind.”

“
Actually, I do. But I’ll
hold that harping for another time, when you’re not so besotted.
Now I’ll put on some tea for our guest, and you go see if you can
make yourself look civilized. You’ve enough sawdust clinging to you
to be declared a fire hazard.”

Michael brushed his hand through his hair and
winced at the shower of wood shavings that came free. “Nothing
wrong with a little mess after hard work.”

“
And there’s nothing wrong
with presenting your
self like a proper
suitor. Upstairs with you, Romeo.”

And upstairs he went before Vi could land
another dart. Being called “boy” and “Romeo” had been quite enough
for one evening.

“
Primping in front of the
mirror, who’d have ever thought it?” Michael muttered a few minutes
later, showing a self-disgust he more thought he should feel than
actually did. In truth, caring about his appearance and whether his
manners were intact made him feel a step closer to being
alive.

A promise shimmered out there, one that was
fragile and giving. He felt slow and clumsy as he reached out to
grasp it. This waking up was a difficult business, but one he meant
to accomplish with as much speed and grace as a man his sort
could.

“
Showered, teeth brushed,
shaved,” he ticked off the items on his hygiene list. The doorbell
chimed. “And nowhere damn near ready,” he admitted, then made his
way down the stairs to see if he could survive an evening without
further mucking up things with Kylie O’Shea.

An irresistible attraction. Even under Vi
Kilbride’s amused eyes, Kylie found herself moving nearer to
Michael, closing the gap of electric-blue sofa between them. And
Michael, he was an immovable object. Though he sat close enough
that she could reach out and trace the slight bump on the bridge of
his nose, or that curve to his mouth that set her heart dancing, he
was as distant as the stars.

She could hardly blame him after last night.
This was no time to explain that it had been an aberration, some
mysterious, cosmic folding-over of time she was quite certain would
never happen again. At least, not while she had a breath left in
her body to fight it. No, now was decidedly not the time, though Vi
looked to be an avid audience.

Instead, talk lazily
meandered its way through Vi
and Kylie’s
progress on the Gaelscoil arts project and
the children’s recent renderings of the mythic hero Fionn
MacCumhaill and his bold hounds, Bran and Sceolang, then on to the
coming promise of spring. From there, the ritual was completed with
chat about common friends.

After a moment’s companionable quiet, Vi
popped in with, “And your father, Kylie, is he well?”

“
Well enough.” She paused,
then added, “He’ll be released in several weeks,” wondering why
she’d even volunteered such information.

“
That must be a difficult
thing for you.”

Kylie focused on her hands clenched in her
lap. “I’d imagine that it will be more difficult for my
father.”

“
I’m afraid my sympathy lies
more with you,” Vi said in the softest of voices.

“
Thank you, but I don’t need
your sympathy,” she replied, knowing it for the lie it
was.

“
Well, Nan always
said...”

Nan.
Kylie flinched at the echo of her morning’s conversation with
Michael. So much alike, these siblings, yet so different, too. Both
with a bolder spark of life than most souls carried. But even then,
one so world-weary, so without hope. She glanced at Michael and saw
the last shadow of discomfort ease from his features. So
Nan
held resonance for
him, too. He shifted restlessly, and Kylie let her heart guide her
words.

“
Would you like to take a
walk, stretch your legs a
bit?” she asked
him, knowing that it was like asking the sea if it would like to
return to its shore.

“
I would,” he said, rising
at the same time.

Stretching like a cat waking from a long nap,
Vi lazily asked her brother, “Would you like me to join you?”

“
Not bloody likely.” Michael
hurried Kylie toward her jacket and the door. “Keep the fire
burning for us, Violet. We won’t be gone long.”

The chill bite of wind, the
distant sound of a dog barking, the clasp of a hand large and warm.
Some of life’s moments crystallized so vividly, so vitally that
they lived forever. For Kylie, this would be one of
them. She wished she could close this magical
sphere
around the two of them for eternity.
Since she couldn’t, she gripped tighter to Michael’s hand,
satisfying herself with that, at least. They walked to the very
fringe of town. The moon, golden ripe, shone low in the sky. At the
edge of the drive to one of the grander houses sat two large
stones. One leaned against the back of the
other, creating a place to dally. A place to talk.
Kylie stopped.

“
Do you mind if we rest a
minute?”

“
I’m sorry, have I been
moving too fast for you?”

“
Well, your legs are a great
deal longer than mine and you move with such a sense of—” She
searched for the proper word. “—purpose. But, really, I just wanted
to stop here.” She gestured at nature’s bench with her free hand.
“Lovely, isn’t it, under the moonlight.”

Michael agreed, but Kylie noticed he didn’t
look away from her face as he said it.

“
Come sit with me,” she
offered, tugging him toward the stones. “There’s something I should
have told you last night, and I don’t want another day to pass
without doing it.”

“
Out here,
though?”

“
There are some things your
sister doesn’t need to know.” She paused, then chuckled. “Though
looking
at her, I get the sense that she
knows most everything in the world already.” She sat on the lower
of the two
rocks, patting
its hard
surface with her
hand. “Just a few minutes and we’ll be on our way.”

Michael sat, then drew in a hissing breath.
“You’d best be quick or we’ll both be numb.”

The cold beneath her was fine incentive to
hurry the truth along. “Last night, when I—I panicked, it wasn’t
your fault. I knew what you were thinking—that it was—and I let you
think it. It was easier, you see, than telling you about something
that once happened to me.”

“
Kylie,” he began, and she
knew he was going to try to cut her off.

“
Let me do this. If I don’t,
we’ll never see our way clear of it.” She drew in a breath and gave
him the words with no prettiness about them, for there was no
prettiness in what had happened to her. “The summer I turned
eighteen—the summer my father got in trouble—I was
raped.”

She could feel Michael tighten next to her.
His hand over hers was as hard and inflexible as the rock they sat
upon.

“
You don’t need to dredge
this up.”

“
Yes, I do. And I’ve dealt
with it already. Mostly, at
least,” she
added, feeling the fingers of last night’s fear curl around her.
“I’ve spent enough hours being counseled that it should be behind
me.”

She waited until her eyes and Michael’s had
met and held. “What I’d like to have is an exorcism of sorts. I
want to tell you the whole thing, so you’ll know, then I want it to
go away. Will you listen?”

He nodded, a slow and deliberate
movement.

Kylie grasped both his hands
in hers, forging a
physical link to get her
through this. “My father came
up with a
scheme for a resort on a parcel of low coast
line not far from Dingle. He wanted it to be the next
Wexford, a seaside resort with hotels and cottages
for
families to come and vacation for a
summer fortnight.
He sought financing,
negotiated with landowners, brought in people from town as
partners. Everyone
was so excited, it was
going to be brilliant.

“
One problem, though. Da was
more fond of living
the grand life than
following through on plans. The first thing he did was build
himself an enormous home on the one parcel he’d managed to acquire.
He told everyone that it was to be operated as a country guest
house once the project was up and running. He took more and more
money, and nothing but that house ever materialized.”

Taking the comfort she needed, she shifted on
the cold surface, moving closer to Michael. “Oh, I think he meant
to follow through. At first, at least. But it was like everything
else since my mother died. Nights out with his friends were more
important. Traveling and the drink were more important…. On my
eighteenth birthday, he took me out to dinner and told me that
times were going to be troubled, but I wasn’t to worry because he
had a plan.” She shook her head. “Da always had a plan.”

“
The next day, a business
associate stopped over at the house for a meeting. This man was no
one I’d ever seen before. From London, Da said, and he was very
smooth looking, expensive suit, shiny shoes, and just so polished.
He caught me staring at him—I couldn’t help myself. I was eighteen
and hadn’t been further away from home than Killarney and he was so
... different looking, like someone out of those glossy magazines.
Anyway, they left for lunch and didn’t come back for
hours.”