“So you’re still running,” she said.
I gave her a humorless smile. “Only this time I’m doing it standing still.”
She gave me a sad nod. “I have to go to the ladies’ room. Watch my seat for me, would you?”
“Sure.”
“You’ll still be here when I get back?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said.
Though to tell you the truth, I didn’t expect her to come back. What was there to come back for?
There was a deep ache in my chest as I watched her go. I guess I always knew that by returning to the city, this day would come. I just thought I’d be better prepared for it.
I was only half aware that the Kelledys had finished their set and some canned music was playing. Generic Irish. Fiddles and pipes, a guitar hammering out the rhythm. A woman sat down in Annie’s seat. I started to say something, then realized it was the flute player. She caught me off guard with a warm smile. Up close, I was surprised to see that the green tints in her hair hadn’t been put there by the stage lights.
“Are you a friend of Annie’s?” she asked.
“We go back a while.”
“I’m Meran,” she said and offered me her hand.
“Joey Straw,” I said as I shook.
Her handclasp took me off guard. Her hand was soft, but the grip showed steel.
“Annie’s talked about you,” she said.
My heart sank. I live for stories, but I don’t like the idea of my life being one for others. Still, what can you do? I looked around for her husband, the harper, thinking he’d come by and our conversation could focus on safer ground. We could talk about their music, maybe. Even the weather. But he was sitting at a table near the stage, chatting with a couple who didn’t seem to be old enough to be up this late, never mind ordering a beer. I remember feeling so mature at their age; now they looked like infants to me.
“It’s not what you’re thinking,” Meran went on. “Annie’s never blamed you. She talked about you because she missed you.”
“I missed her, too,” I said, turning back to look at her. “But it’s old history now.”
“Is it?”
“What do you mean?”
“What is it you’re so afraid of?”
“That they were right. That what happened to Nicky could happen to me.”
I didn’t know why I was telling her this. I should have been saying, look, you seem like a nice lady, but this is really none of your business. But there was something about her that inspired confidences. That called them forth before you could even stop to think about what you were saying, what secrets you were revealing that were better left unspoken.
“Do you really believe that?” she asked.
“Hell, Nicky was a choirboy,” I tell her. “What he did—it came out of nowhere. There was no history of, you know, hurting animals and stuff. He wasn’t abused—at least not so’s I ever knew. Anybody hurt my little brother, I’d have had a piece of him. So you tell me: What happened?”
“Let me tell you a story instead,” she said.
That’s when she told me about how words had their own tribe, back in some long ago. How when you spoke, you weren’t just talking about the world, you were remaking it.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Annie’s a dear friend of ours. I’d like her to be happy.”
“Don’t worry. I’m not going to mess up her life again.”
Meran shook her head. “I never thought you would.”
“How can you say that? You don’t even know me.”
“The Joey she told me about would never hurt her.”
“But I did.”
“Yes. But you wouldn’t hurt her again, would you?”
“Of course not, but...”
This conversation was making my head spin. I felt like I’d been walking forever with my shoes on the wrong feet and my coat on backwards.
“Annie’s got her own life now,” I said. “And what could I offer her anyway?”
“Truth. Trust. Love.”
I felt a strange sense of disassociation. I wondered when Annie was coming back from the ladies’ room, if she was coming back at all. But then I realized that time didn’t seem to be moving the way it should. It was as though the inside of the pub had turned into a pocket world where everything was different from the world outside its doors, as though I was looking at everything from the corner of my eye. The air swayed. Every minute held the potential of an eternity.
“I can wake up that old tribe of words for you,” she said. “Not for long, but for long enough. Tell me which ones you need.”
I understood what she was saying, but it didn’t make any sense. Things just don’t work in the real world the way they do in a story. Strangers only offered magical assistance in fairy tales.
“Look—”
“Don’t question it,” she said. “You know it can happen.”
The weird thing is, I believed her. I can’t even begin to explain why. It really did feel like we were sideways to the world at that moment. That anything could happen.
“Magic words,” I said. “Can they change the past?”
She shook her head. “They can only change the present.”
“But everything we say or do changes the present.”
She shook her head again. “Not like this. The words I can wake for you will bring about true transformation. Which will you choose?”
There was no contest. Until I’d seen Annie tonight I hadn’t realized what it was that had really brought me back to the city.
“Trust enough for a second chance,” I said.
“Done,” Meran told me and she smiled.
I heard a rumbling deep underground, like distant thunder reverberating in the belly of the world. The vibration of it rose up, shivering the floor, rattling the glasses and liquor bottles behind the bar. Something swelled inside me, something too big and old and weighty to fit in my body, in my head, in my soul. Then it was gone, like a cat shaking water from its fur.
I looked around, but no one in the pub seemed to have noticed. Only the harper, Meran’s husband. He lifted his head and slowly studied the room until his gaze reached us. Then he nodded and returned to his conversation.
“What... ?” I began.
“Here she comes,” Meran said. She squeezed my elbow before she stepped away. “Now you have to do your part. Earn your second chance.”
I turned to see Annie coming toward me and didn’t worry about the explanation I’d thought I needed so desperately a moment ago. Everything seemed out of focus right then, except for her. I didn’t know where I was going to begin. But I knew I had to try.
“What was Meran talking to you about?” she asked as she sat back down on her stool. “The pair of you looked positively conspiratorial.”
“Second chances,” I said.
Annie’s eyes went bright behind her glasses again.
“I’ve got a lot to tell you,” I said.
She studied me for a long moment, swallowed a couple of times. I knew what she was thinking. Once burned, twice shy. Who could blame her? I just prayed the magic words would do their stuff.
“I’m listening,” she said.
It’s funny the difference a month can make.
I managed to get a job at a garage a couple of days after that night. I’ve always been good with cars and my boss is helping me work out a schedule so that I can take the courses I need to get my mechanic’s license.
Annie and I are taking it slow. We go on dates, we talk incessantly—on the phone if we’re not together. We don’t make promises, but we keep them all the same.
I didn’t see Meran again until I went to a gallery opening with Annie at the end of January. It was a group show by some friends of hers. The Kelledys were there. Cerin was playing his harp in a corner of the gallery while Meran mingled with the other guests. I waited until I had the chance to talk to her on her own. She was
studying a canvas that depicted a flood of wildflowers growing in a junkyard. It was only when you looked close that you saw these little people peeking out at you from among the flowers. They looked like they were made of nuts and twigs, held together with vines, but you could tell they were alive.
“Lovely, isn’t?” Meran said.
I nodded. I liked the way it looked both realistic and like a painting, if you know what I mean. All the information was there, but you could still see the brush strokes. Art like this tells a real story; you just have to work out the details on your own.
“I want to thank you for helping me,” I told her.
Meran turned to look at me and smiled.
“I didn’t do anything you couldn’t have done for yourself,” she said. “Except maybe give you the courage to try. Everything else was already inside you, just waiting for the chance to come out.” She waited a beat, then added, “But you’re most welcome all the same.”
I felt so disappointed, the way you do when you finally figure out there isn’t a Santa Claus, an Easter Bunny, a Tooth Fairy.
“So … the words ...” I said. “There was no magic in them?”
Of course there wasn’t. How could there have been?
Meran kept smiling, but now there was an enigmatic look in her eyes.
“Oh, there’s always magic,” she said.
Forest of Stone
“I lived in a tree,” he said. “Not in some little house, nestled up in its branches, but deep inside the trunk itself where the sap flows and old secrets cluster. It was a time, let me tell you, but long gone now. Then I was a king in a forest of green; now I live like a beggar in a forest of stone.”
I let him talk. He always had some story or other to tell, and if he invariably came back to this one, I didn’t mind. There was something in the telling of this particular story that woke a pleasant buzz in the back of my head, a sweet humming sound like a field full of insects on a summer’s day. His quiet voice created a resonance that made me more aware of my own heartbeat and how it resounded against the drum of the world below my feet.
There was a melody playing against that rhythm, but I could never quite grasp it fully. Maybe we never do and that’s why there’s always a Mystery underlying the world.
“How long did you live there?” I asked when he fell silent, rheumy eyes gazing off into distant memories.
I tried to imagine him as he’d describe himself in the story: strong and tall, dressed all in green, chestnut hair flowing down his back, a great beard half hiding his face. Advisor to kings, a wizard in a tree. But all I could see in my mind’s eye was the person who sat here with me on the steps of St. Paul’s, an old broken man plagued with a continual cold, hawk’s nose dripping, a cough wracking his chest. The only green was an echo of the forest, hidden in those watering eyes.
“How long?” he said. “Forever and a day. Until I befriended a little girl in need of a friend and she pulled me out of my tree with her love. I was free to go then, across the water to the Region of Summer Stars, and so I did. But it wasn’t what I thought it would be. I found no peace there, no rest for my old soul.” He coughed, gaze turning from the traffic passing on the street in front of us to meet my own. “Perhaps it was because I didn’t die. Because I crossed over, upright and on my own two feet, taking my blood and bones with me.”
Like the forest with its prison tree, this place of summer stars was always vague to me. He gave no details that I could hold on to. From his description, or rather lack of the same, it could be any place or every place.
I took it to mean a pagan heaven, like Tir na nOg, some after-world of the Gael, but that didn’t tally except as metaphor. People, even a homeless man such as this with a mystic bent, didn’t return from the dead. That was the providence of avatars and saviors and I greatly doubted he was either. But what he was, or once had been, I was unable to say.
“You should leave your bones behind when you go,” he told me. “I learned that quickly enough. Safely buried, or better still, leave them as ashes, burned in a bone-fire. Otherwise this world calls to them and you can never be content. Your blood moves to the tides you left behind and there is ever a yearning for something other than twilight. You long for the sun, and the dark of a moonless night. You long for life.”
“Why is it always twilight there?”
He shrugged. “Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it was only twilight for me because the ribbons of my life there were still entwined with this world, this life.”
“Do you still want to go back there?” I asked. “To return?”
“I don’t know what I want or don’t want. I only know I’ve been too long in this world, if only viewing it through the bark of a tree for most of my years. I miss something, but I don’t know what. Perhaps my old life, before I let curiosity snare me with its woody embrace.”
“What were you in your old life?”
He took so long to answer that I thought he hadn’t heard me.
“Let me tell you a story of a king and his advisor,” he said finally. He smiled, eyes clear for a moment. “It explains nothing, but it will pass the time.”
“What if pigeons were really angels?” Jilly said.
Geordie looked down the wide sweep of steps that fronted St. Paul’s Cathedral. The usual, unruly flock of pigeons were mooching for handouts from the tourists and passersby up and down their length. In the midst of the birds he could see the old homeless man that everybody called Woody, ragged coat sleeves flapping as he tossed handfuls of sunflower seeds he couldn’t really afford to buy. For some reason the sight of the old man made Geordie think of Tanya. Maybe it was because of the stories Woody told, rambling accounts that mixed up well-known fables and fairy tales with pure make-believe. That was the world Tanya lived in, more months out of the year than Geordie cared to dwell on. Hollywood. A more contemporary Land of Make-Believe.
“Sometimes,” Jilly went on, “when I hear the flutter of their feathers in the air, I forget that we don’t have wings, too, and I just want to fly.”
“I’m tired of long-distance romances,” Geordie said.
Jilly sighed. “I know you are, Geordie, me lad. That’s why I’m trying to cheer you up with pigeon angels.” She waited a beat, then added, “You could always move to L.A. to be with her.”
“And be what?”
“Yourself.”
“And you could always get a job doing storyboards for an ad agency.”
“It’s an honorable position.”
Geordie smiled. “Maybe. But it’s not you.”
“This is true.”
“That’s how it’d be for me out there. I’m all scruff and too poor to be considered eccentric. Could you imagine me going to a premiere or some awards show?”
“You clean up well,” Jilly assured him.
He shook his head. “I’d only embarrass her. She wouldn’t say anything, she might not even think it, but come on. Beauty and the beast is an old story. It doesn’t play anymore.”
Jilly put an arm around his shoulders and gave him a hug. “You’re very broody today and it doesn’t suit you at all. Leave the brooding to your brother. Writers are supposed to brood about things. Fiddlers don’t. Remember jigs and reels? Happy things?”
Geordie sighed. “I know. I hate mopey people, and here I am, doing it all the same.”
They sat quietly for a moment. Below them the pigeons kept rising in nervous clouds as some imagined danger startled them—a tourist coming too close, the sudden whoosh of a bus—before the flock settled once more.
Without looking at her, Geordie said, “Do you ever get the feeling that although you’ve never seen a thing, you still know it?”
“Like what?”
“You know, when someone’s describing a place you’ve never been, and it’s all familiar, not because you’ve ever been there, but because you know that one day you’ll go there?”
Jilly gave him an odd look. “I suppose ...”
“That’s how I
feel with Tanya sometimes—like I can already see the time when we won’t be together anymore.”
“That kind of thinking makes things happen,” Jilly told him.
“Whatever you think makes something happen.”
“I suppose. So wouldn’t it behoove us to think positively?”
Geordie had to smile. “Behoove?”
“It’s a word.”
“I know it is. I’ve just never heard it used in ordinary conversation before. Wait,” he added, forestalling her next comment. “I know. Conversations should never be ordinary.”
“That’s not true. I like ordinary conversations. But I also like twisting, windy ones where we work out all the great mysteries of the world in whatever time we have and then sit back and have another cup of tea, knowing it’s a job well done.”
“I’d miss you if I moved to L.A.”
Jilly nodded. “I’d miss you, too.” She hesitated, before adding, “But maybe it’s something you have to do.”
“Perhaps it was only that you left something undone,” I said the next time the old man and I talked. “That’s why you came back.”
“I’m not a ghost.”
“Well, no. Of course not.”
“And we all—the living and the dead—leave things undone. It seems to be part and parcel of human nature to put off today what we hope to do tomorrow.”
“Well, then maybe you simply missed someone.”
He considered that. “No. I don’t think that. My lover betrayed me, my king had a sword sheathed in his chest, my father abandoned me to the forest. There was no one else.”
“You sound bitter.”
And had every right to, I suppose, if anything he was saying was true. Even if it was only true in a metaphorical sense.
“Do I?” he said, genuinely surprised. “I suppose I do. But I don’t have reason to. Once you have lived as part of a forest you learn to forgo such things.”
“What about the little girl? The one you befriended?”
“The girl?” He shook his head. “She is gone now as well. I think it was a long time ago that we were friends.”