Bloody Fabulous (8 page)

“How will I know you?”

“I’ll be the only one with a silver comb in my hair,” I say.

Seven hours later, after a shamefully small amount of sleep, I put on black slacks and a reasonably feminine dark red blouse. This is the only blouse I own. Actually, Monnie owns it, but she let me borrow it. All personal vows aside, it’s probably best to blend in when I meet O’Neill. Hair as short as mine is easy to recognize, so I conjure a simple glamour to make it seem long and curly. I don’t have a coat but the cab ride is mercifully short and the pub is warm. It’s the kind of place long past its glory, if it ever had a glory to begin with, but the ale is good and the patrons mind their own business.

John O’Neill arrives at four o’clock sharp, wearing new black jeans, a blue sweater from Nautica, black boots and a vintage black leather coat. He’s even more handsome than I remember. In the brief moment it takes for him to scan the pub and spy me, I can pretend that he’s here for me, Colleen, and not some supernatural creature he heard on a midnight flight over the ocean.

I like men for more than just their clothes, after all.

As promised I’m wearing a silver comb in my hair. Traditional calling card of all banshees. He approaches my table carefully.

“You’re here,” he says.

“As agreed,” I say. “Sit down.”

He slides off his coat before he sits. Nice square shoulders, long arms, fingers that look deft enough to both fire a weapon and cradle a baby. He smells like woodsmoke.

“What do I call you?” John asks.

I want to tell him just to hear the syllables roll off his tongue. But some things are best unsaid. “It doesn’t matter, Mr. O’Neill. We won’t be meeting again.”

He’s staring at me in a way that’s bordering on rude. I hope the glamour isn’t flickering, or that I haven’t somehow messed it up.

“How did you know my father was dying? We were over the middle of the ocean and he was here, at Mass General. Heart attack.”

“That doesn’t matter either.” It’s not as if Maeve told me to spill any banshee secrets, after all. “It’s what we do. Sing a lament.”

A muscle twitches along his jaw. “I’ve lost men in battle and you’ve never sung for them.”

“They weren’t your blood, and I wasn’t in the neighborhood.” I drink from the coffee in front of me. Straight coffee, nothing with a kick, because I’m flying in four hours. “I’m sorry for your father.”

“Don’t be. He wasn’t—well, he was old. He was from here, Boston. My mother came from Galway. They married late and they had me late and now it’s too late to say most of what I wanted—” Abruptly he stands up again. “Will you wait here while I get a drink?”

It’s no hardship to watch him go to the bar and order a Guinness. Those jeans fit his backside quite well. He isn’t wearing a wedding ring but surely he has a girlfriend somewhere, a woman who’d be wise not to let him out of her sight for too long. When he sits down again he says, “My mother told me all banshees are haggard old crones, toothless and gray haired. I’m glad she’s wrong.”

“Trick of the light,” I say lightly. “I’m as cronish and ugly as they come.”

“No, you’re beautiful,” he says, and then ducks his gaze. “I haven’t been able to get your song out of my head.”

Banshees don’t enchant men. It’s not our job. For a moment I worry that somehow I cast a spell or built the glamour too strongly.

Maeve will not be happy if I accidentally use fey magic to snare a human lover.

“Mr. O’Neill, why is it you had to speak to me so urgently?” I ask.

He lifts his head and eyes me squarely. “To find out if I was losing my mind. I’m on emergency leave from Iraq. I tried to get here before he died, but it was too late. When I go back, I have to know that my brain’s not cracked or fried. Not that it matters to the U.S. Army . . . ”

Despite myself, I touch his hand. His skin is warm but there’s Sorrow inside him, swollen and raw. His father might have been a good man, or maybe not, but it’s a rare son who can bury his father without cost.

“Your brain is fine, Mr. O’Neill. You won’t hear me again.”

“Never?” he asks.

I steel my resolve. “Our paths aren’t likely to cross again. Honest truth, no denying it. I’m leaving tonight and won’t be back this way soon. You’re going back to Iraq. “

“Is there a way I can reach you? A cell phone, a post office box?”

The door opens to let in three men in the middle of a sports argument. They’re loud, boisterous types, good-humored until they drink too much, bad-humored afterward. Just like many of my passengers. They remind me that I have to get back to the hotel, get myself in uniform, eat dinner, catch the van, and fly back across the Atlantic tonight.

“It’s not in our best interests,” I tell him.

“I think you’re wrong,” he said, again with that direct stare. “I think it would be completely in my interest to see you again.”

It’s been awhile since anyone flirted with me. But it’s not me he’s flirting with. It’s a woman with long hair in a red blouse.

“I have to go,” I tell him. “My condolences, again, on your father.”

Out on the sidewalk, I see that he rode here on a motorcycle. If ever Sorrow had reason to wail, it’s because of men and their motorcycles. “Can I give you a ride somewhere?” he asks.

Banshees can lie just like anyone else. “No, my ride is coming.”

He passes me his leather coat. “You’ll freeze to death in the meantime. Take this.”

His hands brush my shoulders as he helps pull it on. I think, under slightly different circumstances, he might try to kiss my cheek. And I’d let him. But the rawness is still in him, and it stings.

He goes his way and I go mine.

At the hotel I realized I don’t have any way to return his jacket. Worse, still, he left his cell phone in the inside pocket. A nice silver gadget, one with all the latest apps. I call the number from the Craigslist ad but it goes to voicemail. I can’t just leave it, so I take it with me on the flight and back in Dublin leave it in a kitchen drawer. The leather jacket, I wear to market. It smells like an American soldier and it looks good on me.

It’s my luck to work on Thanksgiving. It’s also my luck to catch the flu and spend the week afterward sick in bed, because being a banshee doesn’t save you from tiny little bacteria of doom. And it’s my luck that I’m just getting out of the shower, barely feeling well again, when my neighbor Mr. Hubbard comes knocking to borrow sugar again.

Except that the man on my door is not Mr. Hubbard at all.

“Sorry.” John O’Neill eyes my oversized men’s bathrobe and spiky wet hair. “Bad time?”

Dark circles stain the skin under his eyes, and he’s got the sour smell of a man who’s been cooped up recently on an airplane. He’s wearing rumpled civilian clothes.

“How did you find me?” I ask.

“You have my phone. It has a GPS function.”

“Did you plan that?” I ask angrily. “Lend me your jacket just so you could track it across the world?”

“No. I didn’t plan it. But it was lucky for me that you turned it on while you were here,” he says. “You cut your hair. It looks good.”

Surely he’s kidding. Very few men like short hair on a woman. They think we’re lesbians or man-haters. But he seems sincere.

“Can I come in?” He holds up a paper bag. “I brought bagels. With nutella. I don’t like nutella, but I thought maybe you would.”

So, yes, I’m angry he came looking for me, but let’s be frank. My doorstep hasn’t seen this fine a man since the bathroom flooded and the landlord sent Thomas the plumber. Shabby clothes but a chiseled jaw and lovely biceps, that Thomas.

“It’s a mess inside,” I warn him.

“I live in a barracks with a dozen unwashed men. When they throw their underwear aside, sometimes it sticks to the wall.”

I grimace. He grimaces, too, and says, “Sorry, I’ve been awake for twenty hours.”

“Just to come see me?”

“It’s my mother,” he says. “She’s dying.”

Once inside, seated at my breakfast table, he tells the whole tale. He’d barely been settled back with his unit in Iraq before the Red Cross delivered another message. His mother has fallen ill and is not expected to survive much longer. He’s the only child, no close relatives to speak of, and she needs him. Also, she asked for him to bring home the “girl who sang” for his father.

“I know it’s an imposition,” he says. “But it’s a dying woman’s wish and I’d be in your debt.”

It’s hard to look him in the eye. “I’m sorry about your mother, but I’m not allowed. I’m not properly qualified. It’s a special thing that requires a special person. But I can find you one . . . ”

“I don’t need anyone else,” he says. “You’re qualified enough. You sang for him and you can sing for her. For me, when she goes. I won’t have anyone left.”

“I’m not licensed, Mr. O’Neill. I don’t have permission. I didn’t pass the exam. I didn’t even take it.”

He looks puzzled. “Why not?”

Some things are better shown than told. “Come this way, and please ignore my terrible housekeeping.”

On the mantel in my living room wall is a portrait of my mother in her official garb. Her black gown flows like liquid off her shoulders. Her hair blows backward in the wind. A vintage photo of my grandmother, taken on the moors, is propped next to it. Her wool gown is steel gray, and she wears a frilly shawl.

“To be a banshee you have to look the part,” I tell him. “I don’t even own a single dress.”

John scratches his head. “They don’t pay you enough at the airline?”

“It’s not about money.” I drag him into my bedroom. “There. That’s my closet. That’s what I like and that’s what I wear.”

For a long moment he stares at the pleated trousers and pants, the pinstripe shirts and wool sports coats, the half-zip sweaters and sweater vests. Boxes of men’s shoes and boots are stacked on the shelves and ties hang neatly on a rack.

“You wear your boyfriend’s clothes?” he asks.

I cross my arms over my chest. “They’re mine. Next, ask me if I’m a lesbian. Because that’s what they call women who don’t like to wear frills and lace and dresses barely to the thigh, right?”

John reaches out and runs his fingers along a linen jacket.

I wait for him to make some scathing comment.

He says, “You have great taste. Now, what will it take to get you packed and on a plane for Boston?”

“You said I can’t say no to an O’Neill,” I tell Maeve. “So here we are.”

Maeve’s standing at her office door, which is barely cracked open. Through it, she’s eyeing John O’Neill sitting by the coat rack. I left him with Loman, who squeaked like a mouse when I brought a human through the front door. Maeve says, “Handsome one, isn’t he?”

This is not what I want to hear. “Will you please tell him you forbid me from going to America and singing for his dying mother?”

Maeve swings open the door. “Mr. O’Neill! Such a pleasure to meet you in person.”

John quickly stands up. “Thank you. Miss . . . ”

“Call me Maeve.” She shakes his hand robustly. “Your mother is from Galway, is she? What of her mother before her, and your great-grandmother?”

“I think they were all from Galway, too.”

“It suffered terrible damage during the Oídhche na Gaoıthe Móıre,” Maeve said.

He looks perplexed. “I don’t speak Gaelic, ma’am.”

“Night of the Big Wind,” I put in. “It was a big storm. Damaged a lot of the country.”

Historians and meteorologists know it as a devastating windstorm that wrecked houses, sank fishing boats, and brought a large storm surge to many low-lying villages. It also just happened to be the culmination of a century-long Fairy War that scattered the survivors and left a bitter taste for decades. It’s not like Maeve to drop casual refeences to it in conversation, regardless of where John’s great-grandmother might come from.

“I’m sadly uneducated in Irish history or customs,” John tells Maeve. I don’t think he’s used to looking up to a woman taller than he is. “All I know is that Colleen says she needs your permission to attend to my mother’s passing.”

“Nonsense!” Maeve exclaims, to my utter shock. “I’m merely a consultant. I would never interfere with such a decision. Our Colleen is her own person, quite independent. As you can tell from her choice of attire.”

His gaze focuses on me. “I think she looks great.”

I blush.

“Go with my blessing,” Maeve says, patting my head. “Send us a message to let us know you arrived safely. And my deepest sympathy to you, Mr. O’Neill, on your losses.”

Which is how John and I end up as passengers on a British Airways flight to Boston three hours later. Nothing was available in First Class or Business, so we’re jammed in Economy. John generously gives me the window and sits in the aisle next to a college student who sticks ear buds into his ears and plays computer games for six solid hours.

“Tell me about your clothes,” John says, just as it seems like we’ll be stuck on this plane forever. “When did you decide you hated dresses?”

I try not to sound defensive. “The minute my mother put me in one. Every day after school I’d rip off my uniform skirt and get into trousers. Girl’s clothes just don’t make sense. They’re flimsy and frilly and make you look silly.”

“I guess I should ditch my lace underwear,” he says, his expression dry.

I gape at him. “You’re not.”

He smiles. “No. But I had a friend in boot camp who did. Big secret. Who cares?”

“Plenty of people.”

“Let them worry about other things, like war and death.” His smile fades then. He peers past me through the window at the flawless blue sky. “Do you know . . . is she dying? My mother?”

I squeeze his hand. “I don’t sense anything.”

He sits back in his seat. “She can’t leave. Not yet.”

Death doesn’t work that way, but we both know that already.

Finally the flight ends with a town car and chauffer waiting for us in Boston. The car takes us north along the winding coastline. John is an army sergeant on a limited income but his parents’ house in Marblehead is a white and gray mansion overlooking the ocean. It’s getting to be dusk but the whitecaps on the ocean are clear, as is the smell of salt and seaweed.

“My father made his fortune in commercial fishing long before I was born,” John says when he helps me out of the car. “I never even saw any of his boats.”