The Passions of Emma (42 page)

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Authors: Penelope Williamson

Tags: #Romance, #Adult, #Historical

BOOK: The Passions of Emma
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“
Mo bhanacharaid
. . .” she wheezed, and the air sucked wetly in her chest. “That means ‘my particular woman friend’ in Irish, did I ever tell you that? And it is a grand, true friend you are—”
Emma, who had been bent over the bed, tucking in the clean sheet, suddenly seized Bria’s hand with both of hers and brought it up to her cheek. “Oh, God, God. I don’t know how I’ll live without you.”
Bria felt the weakness seeping over her, the stones building, building, one by one. But she managed a smile. “Remember . . . ? All you need do is look in the mirror.”
“No, no.” Emma shook her head so hard the tears splashed from her eyes and onto their clasped hands. “I was wrong, wrong. You aren’t the mirror side of me, you’re the best of me. You taught me how I should be. You’ve given me a glimpse of the life I should live for myself, and now you are leaving me to live it alone.”
No, Bria thought, I am leaving you to live it with my Shay.
Shay . . .
She was wildly in love with him still, now as much as ever.
Those times when she came awake at night and found him in the chair next to the bed, watching over her, she wished his last
memories of her wouldn’t be these. But rather of those other times, when she had been young and pretty and full of life.
One night she asked him to lie down on the bed with her. With him stretched out beside her in the dark, face turned to face, his arm lying heavily on her waist—it reminded her of those times in the cave, when they had been so young and had lain like this, just lain together, holding each other close, holding on.
She put her palms against his chest and felt the tension in him—he was a man ready to fly into a thousand pieces. She thought of that time in Ireland when for three days she’d believed he was dead, and the pain of it had been truly beyond what she could bear. She wondered how he was standing this, how he had stood it all these months, watching her die breath by breath. Or if, somewhere deep inside himself, he had prepared his heart for her passing a long time ago.
Shay’s heart had so often been mysterious to her. But she thought that if she asked him for a moment’s truth this night, to tell her what was his heart’s desire, he would say, “For you to live.”
And that was the one thing she could not give. So she would give him instead his heart’s other desire, even if he didn’t know yet what that was.
So she laid her hands on his chest and felt his heart beat. “Will you do a wee thing for me, m’love?” she said. “After I am gone. I want for you to mourn me, weep for me, and miss me sorely. But after a time I want you to ask our Emma to be your wife.”
Moonlight shining blue through the window showed her the shock on his face, and underneath the shock a tinge of hurt and guilt. And one other feeling she had hoped not to see—resistance.
“That is not a wee thing, Bria,” he said.
“A grand thing, then.” She moved one hand up to grasp his neck and pull herself closer against him. She felt his pulse leap and throb against her hand, felt his heart beat against her hand.
“A daft, impossible thing,” he was saying, his voice roughened with pain. “You can’t will her into taking your place. Not in my
heart and not in the hearts of our children. You can’t just be telling me to love her and be thinking I’ll marry her after you are gone.”
“But she loves the girls and they love her, and at the age they are, they sorely need a mother. And our Jacko, wee little thing that he is—he’ll be needing a mother most of all. And she would be a good wife to you. She would follow you to the end of the world.”
His laugh was ragged, broken. “Darlin’, she has money enough to buy the world. What would she need with me?”
“There is the need born of love. She
loves
you, Shay. I know this, for I’ve seen it on her face, and I know her as well as I know myself, for we are the same in our deepest places. She loves you for the fine, brave, dreaming man that you are.”
She felt his chest move in a hard breath. “
A mhuire
, Bria. You’re my wife. You’re the only wife I want.”
So she laid her head against his chest, her cheek nestling into the hollow above his heart. She could hear it beating. “Let your heart find its way,” she said.
It could have been hours later or only moments when she said, “I did wrong to you, Shay . . . that night on the beach in Gortadoo, seducing you away from God.”
He rubbed his open mouth over her cheek and nose and lips. “
Mo chridh, mo chridh
. . . I wanted you for my wife then, and I want you still, and I don’t know how I’m going to live through your dying.”
On those evenings when she had the strength, she asked to be carried outside to watch the day end. They would bundle her up in quilts and sit her in her straw-bottomed rocker, and she would watch the sun slip away, slowly and silently, behind Poppasquash Point.
On this evening the setting sun was trailing gold ribbons across the sky. The air was soft and still and full of promise.
Evenings like this, she remembered . . .
A Saturday-off afternoon, picnicking at Town Beach. She sitting with her back against an elm’s gnarly trunk. Shay’s head lying in her lap and her playing with his hair, so warm from the sun and soft it was, sliding through her fingers. The girls studying a tidal pool, squatting in the sand, knees spread wide, two heads bent together, red and brown. Their darling girls . . . And then Bria looking from the two heads, red and brown, down to her husband’s face and seeing that he was sleeping.
Such an ordinary day it had been, an ordinary moment, and yet suddenly she had realized that she was happy. Not ordinarily happy, but savagely happy. So full up to bursting with a pure and violent joy that she could have screamed with it.
And the happiness she’d felt then, she thought, was sweetness itself now in this remembering.
She opened her eyes and found herself alone. No, not alone . . . They thought she slept, Emma and Shay, and so they had gone to stand at the water’s edge side by side, talking quietly. Once she heard Shay laugh.
Then perhaps she did sleep, for when she opened her eyes the sun was shrunken and orange on the horizon. Shay and Emma were still where they had been, and they appeared outlined in a golden light, as things do when the sun first comes out after a storm.
And it was the strangest thing, for she could hear Shay’s voice, not ruined as it was now, but beautiful as it once had been, and it was in her blood, his voice, a part of her blood, pulsing strong and full of life, pulsing hot through her veins.
She heard him as well as if he stood beside her, yet she knew for certain that he was speaking to Emma, speaking to Emma now, saying to Emma, “An evening like this . . . it seems as though the sun is clinging to the edge of the world, and so the day is going to last forever, and in the next instant the sun goes and loses its grip and the day is over after all. But the promise of it stays with you somehow, into the night. The promise and the memory.”
Yes, Bria thought, the memory lives on.
She opened her mouth to say his name and felt her breath leave her body, and she couldn’t seem to get it back.
For a moment she thought it had grown dark. But then she saw that she was wrong, for the sun was shining brighter than ever now, and Shay was coming toward her. A Shay without shadows, all light and youth, joyous and burning, and he said to her, “Will you dance with me,
mo chridh
?”
So she went into his arms, and they were dancing and laughing and loving in the sun of an enchanted day.
B
ria McKenna’s black lacquered coffin sat on a pair of stools in the middle of the kitchen with the faded bird-of-paradise wallpaper and the cracked linoleum floor.
At her head rested a horseshoe of wax flowers set in a silk frame. At her feet, tall candles and a holy lamp burned. Their flames flickered in the draft coming through the door that was open to a night of summer fog.
The holy card of the Virgin Mary that had once hung on her bedroom wall now lay on her chest. She held her brown wooden rosary beads in her hands, as though she were praying. Everyone said what a beautiful corpse she made.
Bria’s husband stood next to the coffin, dressed in a pallbearer’s black cloth suit. He shook hands with the men and accepted kisses on his cheek from the women who came to offer condolences and give him Mass cards for the repose of Bria’s soul. His mouth spoke soft words of gratitude, but his eyes were two flat, smooth stones.
His daughters sat on chairs beside him, their hands folded in the laps of their purple mourning dresses. Noreen answered everyone who spoke to her in a polite, subdued voice. Merry was silent, not even humming, but from time to time she would draw in such a
shuddering breath that the holy medal she wore around her neck would jump on her chest.
Bria’s son, who would never know her, lay sleeping in his cradle by the stove.
Earlier—before Bria’s neighbors and fellow mill workers came to pay her their last respects—the kitchen had been so quiet, Emma could hear the ice melt dripping into the catch basin beneath the icebox. She had helped the girls hang black crepe paper over the door, and she’d heard only the mewl of the harbor gulls and the moan of a buoy out in the fog-shrouded bay.
She’d put cans of wildflowers all over the kitchen, and made pots of tea and coffee, and filled platters with cheese and corned beef and soda bread, and all the while she’d listened for his step on the stoop. But he’d stayed out back, on the beach where Bria had died.
They had thought she was sleeping. They had been standing together watching the sunset and talking. Not about anything of great importance, just talking in the easy way that had grown between them during these last weeks of Bria’s illness.
They’d talked until the sun had melted into a copper-colored bay, and then they had turned around to carry Bria inside and they’d seen she was gone. That was what he’d said, Emma remembered: “Ah, Bria darlin’. You’re gone.”
He went and knelt beside the rocking chair and kissed her cold lips, and then he had picked her up and carried her inside the house.
Emma had stayed on the beach until the mill’s shift whistle blew, then she went in to help him tell the girls. She hugged Noreen while they cried together. Merry didn’t cry. She sat on her father’s lap and curled her body around him, and her humming was the sweetest, saddest music that Emma had ever heard.
She’d stayed with the girls for a while after that, and she’d fed the baby his pap bottle when Mrs. Hale brought him over. But Shay
had been the one to bathe and dress Bria’s body for the waking party, and he had done it alone.
The waking party began somberly enough, with Bria’s brother leading them all in saying the rosary. His priest’s voice chanted the prayers, slow and deep, making of them a glorious chorus of hope and faith. But his face had taken on the ashen-gray color of a dead fire.
Emma knelt with the others and closed her eyes, listening to the clicking beads count off the Hail Marys and Our Fathers. Bria, she knew, would have loved the beautiful music the rosaries made. And she would have loved what came after as well.

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