Blackthorns of the Forgotten Page 10

  She walked a few steps, her stockinged feet padding along the floorboards. Warmth encircled her like the embrace of a beloved. She drew her arms around herself as a radiant light washed over her—streaming in from the stained glass window—its etching depicting a gathering of angels. She was caught in a dazzling prismatic web. Colors bathed her body, as if being cleansed in a rainbow. This was true tranquility.

  And yet the longing still clutched at her. She did not know why, or for whom, all she could feel was overpowering sadness and grief, the certainty that the colors would soon fade and she would be left alone in a monochrome castle. Adara fell to her knees.

  Don’t go! Please!” she choked out, her voice rough from disuse.

  A gentle breeze lifted the sheer curtains of a second window. Sunlight tumbled in like a gleeful child. Through the shafts of light images took fluid form. She saw herself dancing around a bedroom. The freedom of her feet as they skimmed the floor then allowed her body to take to the air with the flawless precision of her youth. A man who had read her dreams by looking into her eyes. They were playing like frivolous children, fighting with pillows—the soft touch of feathers against her cheek and the sound of the man’s laughter riding on the night air. Her breathing quickened as the memories cascaded over one another in her mind.

  She watched as a single shape disclosed itself in the sunlight. The intensity stung her eyes but she could not—would not—look away. Just when she believed the brightness would blind her, it was gone; and in its place, in front of the window, a figure appeared. Softly focusing behind a veil of tears, she could make out no identity—only penetrating green eyes.

  This was the poetry, the longing. Here was her missing voice. As soon as the realization came to her, the image was gone.

  ~~~

  Gillean had just donned a thick, cotton robe, when he heard Adara’s sobs through the closed bathroom door. Tossing a hairbrush into the sink he bolted down the hallway to find his wife leaning precariously out of an open window. Rain streamed in, mixing with the tepid, late-March air.

  He grabbed at her, placing one hand around her slender waist, the other over her head as he hauled her inside. She was completely soaked as if she had joined him in his shower.

  “No. Bring it back! Bring it back!” She struggled against her husband’s hold.

  Gillean staggered at the first words his wife had uttered to him in what seemed an age. Her eyes were the deepest shade of violet. They looked past him, as if searching for something—someone that had been right there a moment ago. Her hair, a fiery red, stuck to her cheeks and shoulders. She shivered uncontrollably.

  “Adara! Adara!”

  He pulled her to him hoping the contact would break whatever spell she seemed to be under. She smelled like moist earth and clover.

  He was exhausted, drained from the tour and the constant state of helplessness he felt watching his family splinter apart before his eyes. Some unseen hand had taken a mallet and smashed their house of glass. All the memories and past experiences counted for nothing. They were merely slices of a life which no longer existed, or perhaps never had.

  The question resurfaced time and again—whether he was alone in a hotel room reaching for sleep, with the adoring voices of hundreds of fans still ringing in his ears, or more often, cradled in the arms of Ciar. He wondered why he could never fully rest, why he never felt whole, real.

  “Leave go of me.” Adara shoved at him.

  “What the bloody hell’s the matter with you? Hanging out of windows, are you trying to off yourself?” The words came without the benefit of forethought, just as they had when he’d lived in this place all those years ago and she had aroused the passion in him with her dancing.

  Adara began to shake again. Water dripped from her almost skeletal body. She looked so lost and fragile.

  “I’m sorry, Dara-Day.” He spoke the name of love from their youth. “What’s the matter? Please, talk to me.”

  She stared at him, saying nothing more. He attempted to take her arm and lead her to the bathroom to dry off, but she resisted.

  “What have you done, little Gilly?” Her eyes were empty of all expression.

  “What?” He backed away from her.

  Ena chugged up the stairs breathing laboriously, her stiff knees cracking with the movements of an older woman.

  “Glory be to God, Gillean! What have you done to her?”

  Ena brushed by her son casting him a look of aspersion. She took the woolen shawl from her shoulders wrapping it snugly around Adara.

  “Is this how you look after your wife? I thought I taught you better than that.”

  “Mother, I…I didn’t know. I came out of the shower and found her like this.” Gillean was once again ten years old, caught sneaking off, shirking his chores to play in the castle battlements. “Honestly, I don’t know what’s wrong.”

  “You’d better get to finding out. She needs help, Gillean. Or haven’t you noticed?” Ena smoothed her daughter-in-law’s sopping hair.

  “What am I supposed to do, Mother?” Gillean threw up his hands in disgust and pity for the shell of the woman who was his wife. “She wants nothing to do with me.”

  “What have you done, little Gilly?” Adara repeated in a childlike voice.

  Gillean and his mother exchanged a disturbed glance before she took Adara for a hot bath.

  “Bring it back, Gillean! Bring it back!” Adara shouted over her shoulder, her severe eyes confining him to the spot where he stood now shaking.

  ~~~

  The spirit hovered above, watching the distressing drama unfold, but was unable to intervene. Here was an angel of the scarcest kind, an earthly being granted a second chance, the wings to fly because of his disobedience, and because he had given his life for an innocent—a child.

  It was the child who had saved him, but it was love, at once both pure and complicated, that induced him back to earth. A love borne in the heart of the child’s father, in which there was a place reserved solely for the angel: who he had once been, and who he might now be. No matter what incarnation either of them cycled through, their bond was eternal.

  The child’s mother loved him because he had shown her how to love herself, yet she did not make the connection. She cast her love outward, still not recognizing what was within. Her nameless yearning had brought him to the precipice of materializing, but he could not advance any further. He was trapped in a netherworld of waiting.

  The angel was aware of all these things, most especially the torment of waiting. He could do nothing, help no one, until he was called for by one of these three: the child, the mother, or the father. What the angel did not know, or rather, would not acknowledge, was the love that grew inside him, as rare and unusual as his existence. It was this efflorescent love that suffused the air around his charges. He was like a live wire waiting to be tapped. But as with most sparks there results a flame. And sometimes not even the best intentioned of beings can confine a wild fire.

  Reckoning

  Gillean walked the wooded path with heightened awareness. While his mother saw to calming Adara, his wife’s words would not release him. “Bring it back,” she had entreated him. He could have easily made the argument that his wife was not in her right mind, finding her as he did. But the fact that those three words were the first she had spoken in days made the case for her lucidity. Much to his dismay, Adara’s request was the only thing she had done recently that had made sense.

  The more haunting, ominous question, “What have you done, little Gilly?” required an answer to preserve his own sanity. He could no longer avoid the memories so neatly tucked away. Mid-tour he had met up with Ciar in Prague. He finally gave himself to her, not out of love or even desire, but from the insufferable turmoil Sully’s death had brought about. Adara’s silence merely stated the obvious. She loved Sully, and Gillean concluded Sully must have loved her. Adara remained firmly ensconced in her emotional wasteland while he thrashed about like a drowning man refusin
g to go under.

  Gillean had presented his grief, confusion, and pain to the intense artist, hoping she could mold it into something beautiful. But he had held back. He had never spoken to Ciar of the spirit-man. He would not let the name cross his lips. An armored centurion guarded the place where those memories were kept. Gillean believed if he uttered the name, he would be opening Pandora’s Box. Oddly, Ciar had never talked of Sully either. Her earlier warnings were not repeated. She wanted Gillean, and he obliged without conscience.

  He was consumed by the image he did not want to reclaim, the name his lips could not speak, the pot of churning feelings he did not wish to stir.

  Sully.

  Gillean stood underneath the Blackthorn tree, releasing the name like a dove to the sky. Dusk smoothed over everything with its gray brush. Twilight subdued the lushness of the land. The air carried the tiny filaments of severed willows. He lifted the collar of his overcoat. The evening wind tripped in, rustling the leaves of the robust tree.

  Gillean felt entirely alone, and a bit stupid for supposing he could command the presence of a dead man. He had once believed in the magic he wrote and sang about. His zealous fans still had no doubt. But the magic he now practiced was the slight of hand it took to assure his supporters that he was still their sincere, beloved bard of Ireland. He shrugged, realizing this too may be beyond him once he and Adara were divorced. How could the man who sang of love everlasting face his scrutinizing public without his wife of over twenty years?

  He walked deeper into the wood, his feet sinking into the wet ground. The familiar scent of burning peat mingled with his growing anger. Each intake of breath brought another regret to mind. Why had he stayed in this backward country all these years? Wasn’t he the one who was going to be different? Why had he opened himself to another man only to be left raw and exposed like a carved out corpse.

  It became more difficult to walk, his shoes making a sucking sound as he extricated them from the mud. Shoving his hands into his pocket, his fingers touched something. Chocolate! Cupping the small, heart shaped pieces in his palm, he deduced Ciar must have left them for him. But it wasn’t Ciar he was contemplating when the wind strengthened, forcing him to button up against the sudden chill.

  “Sully?” He breathed the name. “Are you here?”

  “Turn round, Gillean.”

  Gillean stood as motionless as a soldier in a minefield.

  “Turn round and look what the wind brought in.”

  Gillean did as directed. Behind him stood the man he remembered, except he no longer held the resemblance of Gillean from years gone by. Sully possessed the same radiant green eyes and small stature, but the cheeky grin was replaced by a more thoughtful, mature expression.

  “I insisted on keeping me name. ‘Tis me virtue.” His smile reflected just a hint of the playful boy.

  Gillean was at a loss for words and eyed Sully from head to toe. His dress was smart, with a bit of the old world about him—with his Irish linen shirt, white trousers, low black boots, and a tweed cap sitting atop curling black hair brushed behind his ears.

  Gillean remembered the desolate, powerless feeling of holding Sully in his arms after the accident. One moment he was looking down at the bruised and bloodied body of the man who had commandeered Gillean’s life. The next, Sully was gone, with no evidence of ever having existed.

  “How…?”

  Sully reached out tentatively, lacing his arm through Gillean’s.

  “Walk with me?” he asked rather than directed.

  Gillean nodded silently, thankfully pressing his hand into Sully’s. He turned his head, not wanting his companion to see the tears of relief. The two started off towards a field of feral thistle.

  Sully began his exposition. “I did tell ya that angels are not humans because they have never been born into this life.”

  Gillean nodded again, taking note of the feel of Sully’s skin. He feared his companion might evaporate before he could ascertain what happened on that dreadful night.

  “When I died, I became as the re-encounters had commanded it to be—without me past as a human child, but also having no future with them. So in essence, I was never born.”

  Gillean stopped as his mind jumped to the natural conclusion. “So you’re an angel now?”

  Sully squeezed Gillean’s hand. “Aren’t I. Some forgivin’ spirit decided to fetch this tired old nobody from that road and slap some wings on him.”

  Gillean glanced behind Sully.

  “’Tis just figurative, Gillean. I don’t really have wings.”

  “Why can I see you? How is it you can come to me?”

  “So you can know me. I’m not a bein’ in the sense of havin’ a physical form, but if called upon, I must make meself recognizable.”

  “Called upon by whom?”

  “You.”

  Gillean stepped back, releasing Sully’s hand, and reflecting on the three words that had beckoned him to return to the Blackthorn. “What about Adara?”

  Sully fell momentarily silent as a soft wind glided through the patches of thistle. “If she should call upon me, I am obliged to answer.”

  “Have to, or want to?” Gillean prodded with suspicion.

  “I don’t desire as you do.”

  “Bullshit!” Gillean spat. “You and I…something happened that night. Why would you lead me to believe that you cared about me?”

  “I do care about ya. I’m standin’ here aren’t I?”

  “You said you loved Adara, and then you walked away, or did you wager I wouldn’t remember that bit after ya socked me.”

  Sully’s eyes caught him in the same accusatory stare as his wife’s. “And you said ya trusted me. Were you lying, then?”

  “I did trust you. But, I don’t know who or what you are anymore, or what you want.”

  “I want to help ya.”

  “Oh please. How? By driving me mad?”

  This was going all wrong. Gillean had been truly happy to see Sully apparently alive in some as yet to be understood form. But now the sleeping emotions of the past six months woke with the ferociousness of a hunting dog. He backed Sully up as he came at him with a purposeful step, pointing his finger with the authority of a school master.

  “I want to know about the relationship you have with my wife. Why is she wasting away? It’s for you, isn’t it? She won’t tell me, but you bloody well will.”

  Sully spoke in a flat tone, his body unmoving. “Ya wanted to see me because of yer jealousy? Ya want to blame Adara? Not a chance. Ya see, I have the same memories as yerself. And I recall that I told ya what ya needed to do if ya cared for—” Sully bowed his head.

  “For who? For you? Were you unsure as to how I felt about you? If I recall, I told you in no uncertain terms. I suppose you thought that was easy for me?”

  “It’s not always about you,” Sully put forth with a solemn stare. “What have you done to make things better? And I mean for yer family, not just for Gillean Faraday?”

  “Listen to me you God-forsaken creature—” Gillean spoke through clenched teeth.

  Sully threw back his head and laughed.

  The unnatural glow of his eyes gave Gillean pause.

  “Takes one to know one.” He folded his arms across his chest. “If ya should genuinely want me help. I’ll be waitin’.”

  “What makes you think I want anything from you now?” Gillean yelled. “And just what the fuck happened that night?” His finger pressed harder against Sully’s chest.

  He ignored the intense pleasure of being near the man once again, and instead fired off his hurt-filled questions. “Why didn’t you tell me about yourself and Adara? And who was the woman in the car?” He paused for a breath, saving the best for last. “And how did Ciar know I would find you with my wife?”

  Sully took off his cap, running the brim through his fingers as if Gillean had simply asked him the time of day. “Yer an idiot, ya know.”

  “I thought angels were supposed to be
all sweetness and light,” Gillean scoffed.

  “Ya think ya know a lot of things, Gillean, that’s yer problem.”

  “Then enlighten me. Let’s start with how you are acquainted with Ciar.”

  Sully placed the cap back on his head, straightened it, and smoothed his shirt. “Like I said, I’ll be waitin’.”

  Secrets and Goodbyes

  Gillean entered the castle through an underground door he’d discovered when he was a lad. He’d made good use of it as an adolescent, coming and going unnoticed at all hours of the night. It was one of the few benefits of living in such an unusual home.

  He was glad of the furtive entrance, wanting to avoid the barrage of questions his mother would most certainly launch into, and not ready to be assaulted by the accusatory eyes of his wife. He needed time to think and digest what had just happened. He needed a drink.

  Navigating the dark passageways like a bat in a cave, Gillean knew every inch of the old fortress. He heard the echo of long ago laughter—his and Joseph’s as they played hide and seek in the dank spaces running underneath the main halls. Back then his greatest challenge was how to avoid the tickling hands of his older brother. Now he was searching for an escape from the sticky web of his own mistakes and missteps. He was stumbling through life, reeking havoc on anyone who had the misfortune to be in his vicinity.

  At least that’s what Sully had so smugly indicated. The mere idea of the man-angel, reincarnated demon—whatever the hell he was—made Gillean’s blood boil. Just who was this infernal creature that he should judge Gillean? He was sure there was something going on between the man and Adara. Maybe the whole outlandish story was an elaborate plot hatched by the two in order to convince Gillean he was mad.

  “Angel, my ass,” Gillean mumbled, as he swooped into the hotel bar, waving his hand to the grad student wiping down tables.