Flights of Angels (Exit Unicorns Series) (19 page)

There was talk of an Uncle Peter who had run off with the merchant marines and returned many years later as ‘Aunt Paula’, and then there was a rather involved tale about Cousin Edna and her Protestant married lover by whom she’d had four daughters and with whom she had a house in the countryside. He had never divorced and Edna had defied the entire family by refusing to give him up.

Their talk naturally swung toward their father and reminiscences of their summers out west spent fishing, reading, and talking into the wee hours about history, literature, and life in general. It sounded like a bit of heaven.

One of the aunts went by and stopped to give Pat an emotional embrace, during which Pamela feared for his ability to breathe, as the woman hugged his head to her considerable bosom. She kissed him soundly on his forehead before moving off misty-eyed.

“Ye’ve lipstick on yer forehead,” Casey said, waving a napkin at his brother and grinning.

Pat made a gesture toward Casey, similar in emotional content to several his brother had made during the morning drive. “I swear to yez, if one more person calls me ‘wee Paddy’ as if I’m no more than Conor’s size, I’m not goin’ to be responsible for my actions. Here, give over that sausage if yer not goin’ to eat it.”

“Over my dead body,” Casey said, biting off half the sausage and chewing vigorously. Sated, Pamela leaned back into the crook of Casey’s arm and sipped her stout, watching the crowd through a benevolent fug of food and alcohol.

The two brothers continued to chat happily about family memories, and the occasional cousin would drift over, join in the conversation and then drift out, or an aunt would pass, re-fill their glasses, tip another sausage onto Casey and Pat’s plates, and run a fond hand across their curls in parting. Often they would reach across and stroke Pamela’s cheek or lay a hand on her shoulder that let her know that she too was now considered family. There was a feeling of such mellow goodwill in the room amidst the chatter and laughter and the occasional tear that Pamela thought she could happily live in the midst of the Murphy clan for the rest of her days.

“…Ach no, he wasn’t actually in the seminary yet, so ye can’t fully blame Cousin Alice for that.”

“No, ‘twasn’t Cousin Alice who did that, ‘twas Cousin—” Pamela never did get to find out which cousin it was who had defrocked a potential priest, for Casey broke off mid-sentence and Pamela turned to see what had taken his attention. She felt a jolt of alarm at the terrible white set of his face. His eyes were riveted somewhere across the room and then she heard Pat swear softly. He was looking in the same direction.

They were looking at a woman, dark-haired, with delicate features that had been kept immaculately, for she was in her late forties, Pamela thought. She was still beautiful, upright and delicate as a reed, and she looked terribly familiar. Suddenly Pamela understood at whom she was looking.

“Casey? Is—is that your mother?”

“Aye,” came the answer, “she is. Now, ye’ll excuse me,” he said shortly. He removed his arm from around his wife, placed his glass carefully on a table and stood, walking directly out of the house. The dark-haired woman watched him go with a tight set to her face.

Pamela felt certain that to go after him now would be a mistake. He needed a minute alone, especially now that his mother was walking toward them. She felt Pat stiffen beside her and she took his hand as a small gesture of support. His fingers were as cold as ice.

Up close, the woman’s age showed a bit, though perhaps it was only the strain of her present circumstances that was putting the tight lines around her mouth.

“Patrick?” she said.

“Aye,” he said coolly, and Pamela squeezed his hand.

“I think I’d have known you anywhere. You look a great deal like your father did at the same age.”

“So people tell me,” he replied, the tone of his voice giving no quarter.

“And this is?” she prompted, giving Pamela a look that made her feel like a bug under a microscope.

“This is Pamela. She’s Casey’s wife and the mother of yer grandson.”

That set her back a minute, for the high cheekbones colored slightly and she studied Pamela’s face with interest before she turned her attention directly back to Pat.

“I see your brother is as happy to see me as I expected he would be.”

“He’s just stepped out for a minute,” Pamela said quietly.

The woman smiled, though the expression held no humor. “Stepped out, is it? He turned and walked out the minute he saw me, didn’t he?”

“Yes, he did, though I think you can hardly blame him for that. He wasn’t expecting to see you today.”

“Or ever again for the rest of his life,” the woman replied, a certain edge to her voice that made Pamela bristle in defense of her husband.

“And whose fault is that, do you think?” she asked.

“Mine.” The woman said with a blunt honesty that was only too reminiscent of both Casey and Pat. “Patrick, do ye think we might have a moment?”

Pat looked at Pamela.

“Go ahead,” she said, giving his hand a final squeeze. “I need to find Conor and feed him anyway.”

Over the last few years she knew Pat and Deirdre had exchanged letters, and so this meeting between mother and son was not quite as fraught as it would have been otherwise. She stood for a minute, watching Pat wend his way through the crowd with his mother. There were similarities, despite Pat’s overwhelming resemblance to his father, Brian.

Conor, when located, was being paid court to by a circle of women. He absorbed all this attention with the air of a tiny pasha, though upon sighting his mother he started to fuss. She retrieved him and looked about for a quiet spot to change and feed him.

She saw Sophy beckon to her from the hallway off the crowded parlor.

“Here, come into my Auntie’s bedroom, love. Ye’ll want a bit of quiet for you an’ the babe, no?”

Pamela followed Sophy away from the din of the Murphy clan into the quiet of an old fashioned bedroom, thick with late afternoon sunshine and the smell of dusty rose petals.

“Well, that went about as well as could be expected, I suppose,” Sophy said wryly, laying out a clean blanket on the bed for Pamela to lay Conor down.

“They knew she might be here but I think it’s still a shock to see her after all these years.”

Sophy nodded, looking very tired suddenly. “They’re strong men. They’ll manage it, but damn that woman. She never did have much sense of timing.”

She leaned down, gave Conor a kiss and left the room, shutting the door firmly behind her back. To Pamela’s strained nerves, the quiet was immediate and relieving.

She laid Conor on the bed and removed his tiny green outfit. He was always happiest in just his t-shirt. Like Casey, he had a small furnace inside that kept him warm at all times.

“Hello, love. Did you miss Mommy?” she asked, removing his diaper and exposing his dimpled bottom to the air. He cooed in delight, kicking his legs happily and not at all interested in having another diaper, clean and dry notwithstanding, placed on his bottom.

She gave him a few minutes, spending it stroking his tummy and kissing his face until she could feel the tension that presaged his realization of just how empty said tummy had become.

She sat with him in a rocking chair in the corner of what had been Lucy Murphy’s bedroom. The windows faced west and the sun flooded the room with rose-gold, lending a gilt edge to the worn bedding and carpet. The room smelled faintly of the dried rose petals that filled a crystal bowl on a tall bureau. On the table beside the bed was a pair of reading spectacles and a picture of a young couple on their wedding day, beaming into the camera. In an era when the fashion had been solemnity in photos, their happiness seemed a living thing. The man was tall and thin with a full head of dark hair, and the woman tiny and fair. Casey and Patrick’s Murphy grandparents, for she could see both these people in the aunts and cousins.

Conor set to nursing with a hearty appetite, the soft round of his skull edged in the same gilding, setting his dark curls afire. Here, in yet another generation, she saw the echoes of family for Conor, though still tiny, held traces of Casey in his face and what her husband might have looked like as a child. She wondered what a shock seeing the fully-grown man must have been for his mother, yet the woman had come here knowing it was likely her sons would also attend.

Pamela stroked Conor’s cheek and when his mouth popped open, switched him quickly to the other side. Just then, the door to the bedroom opened and in walked Casey’s mother.

She started slightly when she saw Pamela sitting in the rocking chair and then smiled tentatively.

“Oh—I’m sorry. I didn’t realize anyone was in here. I just thought I’d come spend a minute in my mother’s room.”

“Please stay,” Pamela said, making a quick decision and hoping Casey didn’t kill her for it later. “I don’t mind.” She did wonder where Patrick had gone, and so soon after encountering his mother.

Deirdre turned back, shutting the door softly behind her.

Pamela sat Conor facing forward in the manner Casey always used to burp him, his soft chin in the vee of her fingers and her hand braced against his chest.

Conor perked up, holding his head straight in an effort to examine this new person. The strain left Deirdre’s face and she smiled at him. Conor responded with a gurgle of joy and flailed his plump arms and legs.

“May I?” Deirdre asked, and though the words were spoken without intonation, Pamela noted that the woman’s hands were trembling slightly. “I’ve found that babies will settle better for a stranger at times than they will for their Mam.”

“Certainly,” Pamela said, lifting Conor carefully off her lap and handing him into the arms of his grandmother.

Conor, who possessed his father’s
sangfroid
when encountering new people, merely gave the woman holding him the eye and set to gumming on the lapel of her suit.

“He’s a fine-looking wee man,” Deirdre said, gazing down at the dark head, “like his Daddy was.”

“What was Casey like as a baby?” Pamela asked, unable to resist asking the one person alive who would hold those memories of her husband as a child.

“Oh, he was a bonny, fine, strapping little lad. The women loved him even when he was a babby, always wanted to hold him an’ fuss over him. He was restless though. Lord, the times I thought that boy would be the death of me through sheer frustration at trying to keep him safe. He wasn’t happy until he was up on his feet and running about, knocking his head into something every other minute. He was only eight months old when he started walking. Stubborn as an ox and had a skull like one too. His father claimed he came by it naturally, the Riordans being hardheaded as the rocks of the field.” She smiled at Pamela over Conor’s fuzzy skull. “I imagine he’s just as hardheaded now, but a good husband to ye still?”

“I couldn’t ask for a better,” Pamela replied softly.

“Aye, I thought as much. His Daddy was that way, tender with the women an’ loyal as the day is long.”

Pamela nodded and busied herself with setting her clothing to rights. She was surprised that Deirdre brought Brian up so casually when it was bound to be an incredibly difficult subject for her.

“Casey an’ yerself,” Deirdre gave her a quick glance, “ye love one another a great deal? I was watchin’ the two of ye for a minute before the boys saw me, and it seemed to me you had something rare between the two of ye.”

“We do. We’re very fortunate.”

“It’s what I hoped for them, that they’d find good women, ones they loved. Patrick wrote me some time after his fiancée was killed. I was terribly sorry to hear of it.”

“She was his wife,” Pamela said quietly, for to speak of Sylvie was still an exercise in pain, “though only just. She was lovely and she adored him. It was a terrible loss.”

“And what of you and Casey? It’ll not be simple living in Belfast with his past being what it is.”

“No—but then what marriage is simple? I love him beyond reason,” she said in complete honesty. “I’d follow him through the gates of hell if that’s where he chose to go. Belfast is his home as he is mine, so there we stay. Though we live a ways away from it now.”

“But there are times maybe that it’s a bit much, no? To love a man so?”

“No,” Pamela said quietly. “Though it scares me now and again, I can’t imagine a day without him.”

“Aye, has he left his old occupation then?”

“He has,” Pamela said stiffly. The familiar fear was never far from the surface and, like a barely healed cut, it needed little more than a butterfly touch to make it bleed.

“Mmmphmm,” was Deirdre’s only comment on this statement. “I don’t blame him for being angry but I had hoped he might allow me a word.”

“They felt forgotten, as though you’d walked away and never looked back. Casey maybe a little more so as he was old enough to remember you.”

“You’re a mother. Do you believe that it’s possible to forget your children—to not think of them every day?”

“No,” Pamela admitted. “But still, you can see why they’d feel as they do. It’s not just that you left them, either. They loved their Daddy fiercely and they know the hurt you left behind with him as well. I can’t imagine a woman getting over a man such as the one they tell me about.”

“Would you?” The woman asked, looking very fragile in the sunset reds that were spilling all through the room now. “If you walked away from Casey tomorrow and never set eyes on him again, would you get over him?”

“No.”

“Well, there’s your answer then. Brian wasn’t a man a woman would forget.”

“The difference is I wouldn’t leave,” Pamela said.

Deirdre gave her a searching look and then said quietly, “No, I can see that you wouldn’t. I wasn’t that strong, though.” Pamela was startled to see tears glimmer on the edge of the woman’s dark lashes. “I’ve never lived a day without regret, not a single day. They can hate me or not, but I’d like them to know that, not a single day has passed that I didn’t regret what I’d done. I loved their Daddy too. I think they need to know that and I missed him every day of my life. I still do. I thought I’d die too when word of his death reached me.”