The Shells Of Chanticleer (28 page)

“The truth is, I don’t want you to tip back home at all. I began to side with my dad about his plans for you, but only in the last few days. I only thought that if your shell was here I would have something to remember you by. I hope you don’t hate me for this; I knew how it would upset you. But in the end, all that mattered to me was having more than just memories of you. I wanted something real. It’s my fault that you were dipped last night. I told them to do it.”

I closed my eyes. So it wasn’t just Crispin and Bing who did this to me. Sebastian had betrayed me too. He had known my deepest fears, and yet he went with them and dunked me in that vat of water anyway. Well, there was a way to fix this problem. I had so little say in most of what had happened to me in Chanticleer. It was all done behind my back or when I was sleeping. But now there was something I could do. They had put the hammer in my hand. I did have a choice.

“The shell goes,” I said.

“Don’t do that,” Sebastian pleaded.

“It will break his heart,” Crispin said.

I laughed at their panic. I picked up the hammer. In a minute the shell would be crushed to pieces, shards of it scattered across the limestone floor. In a day or two I would be back home. I didn’t know how much of this I’d remember and I didn’t care. I raised the hammer slowly, should I make a direct hit to my temple or a symbolic strike at my leg where the splinter had gone in? Where would it shatter best? My arms shook with the weight of the hammer as I held it above my head, but my wimpy heart wasn’t built for revenge or destruction and I couldn’t smash my shell.

What would it matter, I wondered, if my shell was there when I was gone? I wouldn’t have felt betrayed if they had wanted me to pose for a farewell photograph, or an oil painting, or even a sculpture. Was I really so afraid of innovation, of an unconventional means of expression, that I would destroy someone else’s work to soothe my wounds?

I was a shell of Chanticleer but I wasn’t a hideous failure. I could separate the two. I was no Poppy, no Aria; there was a difference. I had been dipped, but it had been for a reason close to my heart.

I would have never agreed to it beforehand, but now that the deed was done, it was the missing piece in the puzzle. I wouldn’t be forgotten. If I relented and didn’t smash it, then there would have to be conditions. The shell had to be private, kept at home with Sebastian. I held the hammer, undecided. Sebastian and Crispin were frozen, watching me, waiting. I chickened out.

“Alright,” I surrendered. “You can keep it but it stays here. No parading it around. No public spectacle. This is only for this gallery. No speeches in the town square type of thing, please.”

Crispin stepped quickly to take the hammer out of my hands, lest I change my mind.

Sebastian pleaded, “I’m so sorry, Macy, so sorry. Can you forgive me for doing this to you?” He put his hand on my shoulder and looked into my face. It was the first time I had seen him afraid.

“Yes, of course.” I said, dismissing his guilt with a wave of my now-empty hands. I thought how Sebastian had always defended Crispin Sinclair, and I realized why. I loved Sebastian; could he have really sprung from someone as evil as I had imagined Sinclair to be? I had been so intent on believing Sinclair was the devil that I’d boxed Sebastian into a corner where he couldn’t tell me the truth. I wouldn’t blame him for that anymore.

“I’m sorry that you had to hide who you were from me for so long. Everyone tried to tell me Crispin Sinclair wasn’t evil, but I couldn’t hear it.”

“All water under the bridge now,” Crispin stated, “if you can pardon the pun.”

“I can,” I said.

“I promise you I am not evil, Macy,” he said smiling at me. “I don’t bite.”

I remembered those words. Sebastian had said the same to me when we first met.

Meanwhile, Crispin kept talking. “So now we are all agreed. Everything works out in the end, I always say. And how does that saying go? If it’s not okay it’s not the end, right dear? We’ve troubled you enough this morning on an empty stomach.” He called out, “Bertram!” The old man’s footsteps sounded in a few seconds. “Breakfast for all of us, please, in the grand salon.”

Sebastian grabbed my hand as we made our way out of the gallery and into the beautiful room. He led me to the sofa and sat next to me, putting his arm around me. He looked me straight in the eye. “Are you mad at me?”

I tried to convince him. “No, it’s weird, but it’s alright. In fact, I should have thought of it myself. It was really the obvious solution to our separation, wasn’t it?”

“Maybe it was, Miss Macy.”

“Wait a minute. I thought you said your last name was Finn?”

“That’s my middle name. It’s not a complete lie.”

“Enough to cover your tracks,” I agreed. There was no question in my mind that I would have hid from Sebastian if I had known he was Crispin Sinclair’s son. He knew it and I knew it and I shook my head and laughed at myself.

“What’s so funny?” Sebastian asked.

“Everything,” I admitted.

They insisted I stay and eat with them and I was too hungry and exhausted to argue. I had been through the worst; there was nothing left to fear. I had lived through being dipped. Bing had been right. It didn’t hurt to become a shell. I sat on the fancy sofa where the china place-settings had been so thoughtfully laid out for me the day that I had bolted. Now I sank into the soft down cushions and ate happily. I could not have sat comfortably with Crispin Sinclair my first time there, but I was no longer that frightened girl anymore.

I felt that everything inside that could hold me back had been beaten out of me, harshly. I was boxwood, expertly pruned within an inch of my life by a master gardener with comically oversized shears. Yet, in doing so, everything essential had been spared and given the space it needed to breathe and grow, to bear perfect fruit.

It would be small of me to hold onto any anger about the shells. Sebastian and I were both grasping at straws in the face of our forced separation. I began to feel wistful again when I thought about tipping back home, and a tear dropped into my warm caramel sugar. Crispin saw it fall.

“Oh, goodness. I feel just terrible about all this. Such a sweet girl you are. Let me make it up to you. Macy, would it help you to know that you do not need to leave here, if you so desire?” He spoke softly, like a grandfather would. Sitting three feet from that face I feared for so long, I was taking my first real look at him. In the bright morning sun his skin was wrinkled but soft and pink, a baby and an old man combined.

“Wait, what?” I said in complete surprise. My hopes were raised. I looked at Sebastian. He was staring at his father, confused.

Crispin looked at me steadily, weighing his words. “I hesitate to bring it up because these things need to be done delicately. It would be an exception to the rule, but not impossible. You would give up a lot. Everyone you love back home. It would be permanent. You would become staff.”

I put my hand to my mouth in excitement and almost jumped off the sofa. I looked at Sebastian but he was watching his dad anxiously, without joy. I wondered,
Why isn’t he happier? Didn’t he want this as much as I did?

“Dad, she does not understand what you are saying. Are you sure about this?” He wasn’t smiling.

“I am doing this for you son,” Crispin said.

“Let me explain it then,” Sebastian pleaded, and Crispin nodded.

Sebastian looked directly into my eyes, speaking to me slowly, carefully, so that I did not misunderstand. My heart was beating wildly and I tried to match the serious expression on his face but I couldn’t. I was all smiles.

“Macy, my dad is not spelling this out to you completely. There is only one way to stay in Chanticleer as staff. You understand that when you came here, you were at death’s door …. you still are.”

“I know,” I said.

“But there is only one way to stay permanently, and that is through the grave. That’s what it means to be staff here, Macy. We died before we came here, that’s what we are.”

He let it sink in for a moment. Both pairs of eyes were on me, watching me process. I knew he had dropped a bomb and they were watching my reaction. However, I remember that at the moment before I had just stolen a look at Crispin’s teeth, trying to figure out if they were real or wooden. They were definitely real, I decided. So that’s what I was thinking at the moment I found out that the boy I loved was dead.

The smile on my face faded then and something that Bing had once said reverberated with me. ‘I don’t want to overwhelm you with the oddities of this place.’ The memory made me miss Bing. He had been at my side since day one, navigating the strange new world with me whenever I felt overwhelmed. I wished he were with me again to make me laugh at my discomfort.

I cleared my throat in an attempt to speak, but nothing came out. I cleared it again. This time my voice showed up. “Are you saying that you are dead, but I am not?”

“Not yet. You are between both worlds. Between heaven and earth. It can go either way; you are so close to your own death. That is how you can see us and be here.”

I looked at Sebastian and before I could stop myself, I said, “I kissed a dead boy?”

Sebastian chuckled at my discomfort. “Yes, and came back for more.”

My face must have looked repulsed, so he set me straight. “Don’t give yourself airs Miss Macy. You are the one lying in the hospital bed peeing into a bag. We are all the same matter. My dad and I are just a few steps ahead of you. In fact, you have yet to be restored to your perfect state like we have. You must have wondered, at least a little bit, how to explain our presence here?”

“So Bing, and Miss Clarice, everybody else.…” I trailed off.

“Yes, call us the dead. But that’s a word from your world, old-fashioned in fact. We call it post-living here,” Crispin explained. “We’ve all taken our turns on earth, some of us more than once. Who better to advise those still on it? So when we say, don’t let your fears keep you from enjoying your life, it’s because we know that life is over in the blink of an eye. Looking back from up here, that life seems as if it was nothing more than one long dream.”

I nodded, embarrassed that my prejudice was obvious.

“So what exactly is my choice here,” I said, utterly confused. “To die young?”

“If you like. If not, you can tip back home and live fearlessly, and we will save a place for you here when your time comes. It is up to you. You can see I am no spring chicken. I lived a long, full, fearless life. I highly recommend it.”

I turned to Sebastian, obviously young and beautiful, and he read my mind. “I did die young Macy. I died young and I can assure you there’s nothing to be afraid of. As for my dad here, my death tested him. It will test your family too. I won’t pretend otherwise. It is a difficult choice.”

It was a terrible choice—a frightening choice. I had thought I didn’t want to go back to earth and be myself again but the alternative made me tremble to even consider it. Everyone was afraid to die, it wasn’t just me. I was not brave enough to work on that issue. But then I looked at Sebastian and my heart ached again at the thought of forgetting him and I took a deep breath. I was in Chanticleer to confront all my fears. Of course they would make me face this one.

“So if I stay now my body dies on earth, in the hospital? Will I feel it here when it happens?”

“No,” Crispin said. “We would arrange everything. We’ve done it before, you know, once. We did it for Bing in fact.”

The terrible price Bing had mentioned. No wonder he didn’t want to tell me. He had cut off his family, with no regret. I didn’t know if I could do the same to mine.

“When did you die, Sebastian?”

“A long time ago. It was 1777, in the war of revolution. I’d show you the bullet hole, but it didn’t remain.” His fingers reflexively caressed the hollow of his throat.

“You were a soldier?”

He nodded.

“I knew you,” I said. “I have a memory that we said goodbye at the gate. And then I lost you, until the memory came back to me that night we met in the Cornish Manor.”

Sebastian looked at me blankly. He showed no spark of recognition in response to my comments; they awakened nothing in him. For me, however, the strange visions I had when I was around him suddenly seemed more real than ever.

“I did not have a sweetheart when I left for the war,” Sebastian said. “I died without one.”

Crispin was silent, observing, his chin resting on his hand, recalling days lived too long ago.

“We knew each other. I am certain of it. I’m not making this up, am I? I can see a farm and a gate, at the bottom of the hill next to the road. You were there.” I suddenly felt free to blurt out the memory that Sebastian awoke in me. My eyes began to tear in frustration and I shook my head and looked at Crispin for the answer. He would have been there. He should know all about it.

Crispin asked, “You are saying that you said goodbye at the gate, correct?”

“Yes,” I said. “And I died, waiting.” I was sure of that fact right then.

“Any other details?”

“No, only that, but it’s always the same. It’s very strong. I feel stupid saying it.”

Crispin was quiet for a few minutes, thinking. I was tottering on the brink of discovery.

“I think I understand,” Crispin said. “Sebastian, do you remember the farm? The Robinsons? Their gate was at the roadside and we stopped there often on our way home, catching up. You stopped there to say goodbye to Gene and Catherine, the whole family, the day before you left Providence for battle.”

He nodded. “I did.”

“You remember their daughter, Marceline; she was about thirteen when you left. She died, three years later. I remember hearing the news; it was a sad time; I was preoccupied grieving for you. Perhaps that is the memory that you are carrying, Miss Macy. You must have lived another life; you must have been that young girl. How else would you know those details?”

“Maybe. How did this Marceline die?”

“It was a beautiful summer day, a luncheon party by the seaside. It was a large group. She wasn’t alone, but somehow she became separated and was carried away by the undercurrent. They found her body just before sunset. Her dress had snagged on the brush a few miles down the coast. Otherwise, who knows when she would ever have been found?”