Deuces Down

PROMISES by Stephen Leigh

SEPTEMBER, 1995

The squall roared and threw horizontal rain, coming in from the northeast off the North Channel and the Waters of Moyle. The storm had developed unexpectedly an hour ago. The fierce wind rattled the shutters, howled through the cracks in the stone walls and stretched wispy, persistent fingers down the chimney. Rain hissed and beat on the stones, and streams of cold water fell from the ends of the roof’s thatching.

“Shite!” Caitlyn cursed as a gust blew out the match she’d placed to the newspaper under the peat in the hearth. There were only two matches left in the pack, and she’d been trying to get the damned fire going for the last fifteen minutes, since they’d gotten back from Church Bay.

“Máthair?” Moira, Caitlyn’s daughter, shivered in the chair, her knees up to her chest and a woolen blanket wrapped around herself. They’d both been soaked just running the dozen steps from the car to the cottage. The storm had blown down the lines somewhere on the island, which made the electric heaters useless, and the small, three room house had seemed as icy and damp as the sleet outside. Moira’s face was illuminated in the orange-gold light of the oil lamps, her round features emerging from darkness like a Vermeer painting. “I’m awful cold.”

“I know, darling. It’s just that the peat’s gotten soaked, and this damned wind…” Caitlyn struck another match. Her movements were clumsy and stiff, but she managed to light a corner of the paper. The crumpled sheet blackened and curled, the flame leaping blue and yellow as it crackled, but the flame hissed wetly and guttered out once it reached the sod, and Caitlyn cursed again. The shutters banged in a renewed gust, and a rivulet of water trickled down the inside of the chimney.

The noise of the storm lifted to a wild roar: the door to the cottage opened. A man’s form filled the doorway. Moira screamed at the dark apparition, like a banshee in the midst of a tempest, startling enough that Caitlyn wouldn’t have been surprised to hear a keening death-wail. Caitlyn rose-slowly, the only way she could move-to Moira’s side. She patted her daughter’s shoulder with an unbending hand. “Hush,” she told her, though her eyes were on the stranger. “There’s nothing to be frightened about.”

She hoped she was right.

He hadn’t moved. He swayed from side to side, as if it were only an effort of will that kept him standing. With just under two hundred people on the island, Caitlyn knew them all by face and name, and this man was a stranger: tall, with skin the color of dark chocolate. He wore a leather jacket and there were straps and harness about him that looked as if he’d cut something from around him with a knife. He was drenched, the short, wiry black hair beaded with the rain; he steamed, wisps of vapor rising from him. She supposed he might have come over on the Calmac Ferry, maybe one of the rare visitors that came over from Belfast or Dublin to see one of the island’s archeological sites and who had been surprised by the storm. Strange, though, that no one down in Church Bay had mentioned a visitor.

“I saw you through the window,” he said, and the accent was decidedly American. His eyes closed, then he opened them again with an effort. “I can help…” He took a step into the room, almost falling, then another and another, walking past them toward the fireplace as Caitlyn hugged Moira to her, watching and wondering what she would do. I haven’t checked the phones; they may be down too, and besides it would take Constable MacEnnis forever to get here in this weather…

The stranger crouched in front of the fireplace. He reached out a hand toward the small stack of peat. Caitlyn cried out with mingled wonder and fear.

Flame surged around his fingers, the peat hissing in the blazing heat of it and finally catching fire. He left his hand there, in the dancing blue flames, and Caitlyn saw the flesh blistering and charred to gray-white.

He collapsed.

Caitlyn saw his eyelids flutter. She waited, and when the man’s gaze found her, she brought the glass of water to his cracked, dry lips. He drank gratefully, muscles moving in his long throat. “Better?” Caitlyn asked. He nodded. “What’s your name?” she asked then.

He hesitated, and she saw his eyes narrow. “John,” he said. “John Green.” His head lifted up, looking around the small room. His hand brushed the bed underneath him with a metallic rattle.

“Sheet metal,” Caitlyn told. “I doubt it’s very comfortable for you, but you scorched my best sheets, and I was afraid you’d actually set the bedding on fire, as impossible as that seems. But maybe not for you, eh?” She kept her voice carefully neutral. “When I first felt your skin, I thought you were burning up with the worst fever I’d ever seen. You were sweating terribly. I was sure you’d die. But then I saw your hand healing as I watched, and your breathing was quiet. You slept easily, yet the fever never left you. And you’re still sweating, though there’s a chill in the air. So you’re an ace, are you, John Green?”

“I’m nothing like an ace. That’s for damn sure.” The man gave a hoarse chuckle, grimacing as he pushed himself up. The blanket-actually an old horse blanket Caitlyn kept in the car; she wasn’t about to risk her good comforter on the man-fell around his waist. He seemed to realize for the first time that he was naked under the blanket, and he pulled the edge of it back up around himself. “My clothes?”

“Washed and ready for you.” She cocked her head at him with a faint smile. “Soaked through and muddy, they were. You didn’t want me to leave them on, did you?” He was staring at her, and she knew what he saw. The face that looked back at her every morning from the mirror was striking: flawless milky skin under curls of bright red hair, wide and round eyes that were the green of rich summer grass, full lips that seemed to easily smile. “You’re a rare beauty, Caitlyn Farrell, that you are,” her father had told her, years ago, and she’d blushed at the words even as she’d hoped desperately that they were true. “The image of your máthair, when she was young…” Her father had died during the ’62 Infection, or at least that’s what they’d been told-one of the thousands who had drawn the black queen. He’d been at work and neither he nor his body had ever returned home. And her mother… she’d been with her mother the night the virus spread over Belfast, and she’d watched in terror as the virus tore her mother’s body apart, as the woman screamed in terror and pain. Her mother had always loved knitting and sewing; the virus had drawn needle-sharp spines from her bones, lancing through her flesh at all angles, tearing and ripping, leaving her snared everywhere in a nest of hundreds of ivory porcupine quills that stabbed at her own flesh and that of those who would try to care for her. For twenty more agonizing years, she would live that way.

Caitlyn had first thought that the virus had somehow left her unaffected. She’d been wrong…

“Máthair!” Moira called from the other room, and she heard her daughter’s running footsteps. “Is the burning man awake yet?”

Caitlyn rose from her chair as her daughter burst into the bedroom. She could feel his gaze on her: the way her head would not turn without the entire body moving with it, the creaking protest of her knees, the slow-motion change of the expression in that perfect face, the awkward way she hugged her daughter, bending from the waist with her back impossibly straight: a doll with frozen joints. “You can see him in a little bit. Go on with you, now.” Moira stared at the man in the bed for a moment, then laughed and ran from the room.

“She’s cute. Looks like you. Your sister?”

Caitlyn turned-slowly, carefully, her whole body making the motion-to find Green regarding her curiously. “Her máthair. Mother.”

She saw him blink in genuine astonishment. “I’m not just saying this, but you sure don’t look old enough to have a child that age. What is she? Nine? Ten?”

“Ten in another month.” She couldn’t keep the sadness from coloring her voice. Whatever the man might be thinking, looking at her, he kept it to himself.

“Where the hell am I?” he asked.

“You don’t know?” Green shook his head slowly. Caitlyn waited to see if he would say more; he didn’t. “You’re on Rathlin Island,” she told him finally, “just off the coast of Northern Ireland. And I’m curious how ’tis that you came to be on Rathlin, seeing as you don’t know where you are. I take it you didn’t come over on the ferry. You don’t know about Rathlin, do you?”

She saw his hesitation again. “No, I don’t. I… I was on a ship, a pleasure craft, just me and a few friends I was visiting, coming out from Scotland. The storm… I guess it was too much for the boat…”

“And your friends? What happened to them?”

“Gone,” Green answered. “Lost.”

Caitlyn gave him slow nod. “I have soup on. You look strong enough to dress yourself. There’s a chamberpot under the bed if you would be needing it, or you can use the bathroom just off the kitchen. I’ll let you get yourself ready while I put the bowls on the table. You can come on in and eat with the two of us, or I can bring it in here.”

“I’ll be out,” he said. “Just give me a few moments.”

Another nod. Caitlyn left the bedroom, feeling his gaze on her as she walked out with the stiff-legged gait of a marionette.

The man emerged from the bedroom by the time Caitlyn, with Moira’s help, got the soup to the trestle table. He sat, wearily, and she ladled out a bowl for him, passing it across. She could feel the heat radiating from him. “Would you be wanting some milk with that, Gary?” she asked.

“Sure. Sounds good. I-” He stopped. At the end of the table, Moira giggled.

“’Tis Gary, not John, isn’t it?” Caitlyn asked.

Muscles clenching in his jaw, he nodded. The spoon in his hand reddened like the glowing filament on an electric stove. “You knew all along?”

“The radio,” she told him. “I was listening to the BBC. There was a news reports about a plane fleeing from the authorities in the States that had come over Ireland and gone down not a dozen miles out from here. The man said the passengers might have parachuted out of the plane, and were dangerous folk: a man who claimed to be former U.S. Senator Gregg Hartmann, who looked like a great yellow caterpillar, and a nat woman with blond hair named Hannah Davis. The pilot, they said, was a black man.” Caitlyn paused. “They gave his name, too, and you don’t look to be a yellow caterpillar or a woman.” She glanced at the bowl in front of him. “I’d tell you your soup’s getting cold, but I doubt that’s a problem for you.”

“What are you going to do now?”

Caitlyn would have shrugged, but it wasn’t something her body could do. “I’m going to eat my soup, and make certain my daughter eats hers. Then I’m going to wash the dishes.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know. But that’s all that’s going to happen.” She paused. “You’re not a danger to me or my daughter, Gary. I can see that, just looking at you. And you are on Rathlin.”

“You don’t know me.”

“I know enough.” A faint smile touched the corners of her lips and vanished. “Eat your soup,” she said.

“You really should,” Moira interjected, her voice serious and earnest as only a child’s can be. “Máthair makes very good soup.”

The man nodded.

“You’re sweating,” Moira told him.

He touched his sleeve to his forehead. “It’s a bit warm in here for me,” he said. The spoon sizzled as it touched the broth.

After lunch, Caitlyn went outside and stood in the sunlight, her eyes half-closed. She could hear the sea pounding relentlessly against the cliffs; to the northwest where the ruins of Robert the Bruce’s Castle were hung in moss and vines. Gulls swung over-heard in the rare blue sky, calling in the harsh voices. A few minutes later, she heard the door to the cottage open and shut again, and footsteps crunching over the gravel walk. “What did you mean, that I was on Rathlin?”

Caitlyn swiveled her entire body to turn to him. “You don’t know about Rathlin? The Belfast Infection of ’62?”

He lifted his shoulders. “I heard something about Belfast, I think. Not a lot.”

Caitlyn nodded. “I suppose it wasn’t much compared to what happened in New York the first time. Still, the outbreak was a nasty one. No one knows where it started or why, only that most of Belfast was affected. Five thousand or more people drew the black queen and died in the first day; people fled the city in droves during the panic. Afterward, the government decided that they if they wanted to bring the people back to the city, they had to show Belfast was clean and safe. They didn’t want the jokers staying around to create yet another Jokertown-that wouldn’t look good. One of the politicians got the bright idea that maybe they should just move the jokers out. Relocate the resulting Jokertown to an island. And, oh yes, make sure that they were sterile and couldn’t produce more monsters. So they moved the hundred or so inhabitants who once lived here on Rathlin and brought in the jokers, and of course the relocation and sterilizations were all ‘voluntary’…”

Caitlyn tried to give her smile a sardonic twist. “They brought maybe three or four hundred of us in before they were stopped-too many protests from the United Nations, Jokers Amnesty International, the JJS, and nearly every human rights organization. But they also didn’t move us back. To make it look better, they gave us some limited self-government.” She laughed, a sound with an edge of bitterness. “You Yanks did the same thing with your Native Americans, putting them on reservations. Officially, we’re part of the UK. Unofficially, they leave us alone and try to forget us. Eventually, Belfast got its Jokertown anyway. Most of us already here on Rathlin-the Relocated-stayed. Why not? This is our island now. There are less than two hundred of us left; we’ve gained a few people over the years who came here, but we’ve lost far more.” She paused. “Not many left. Most just died.”

“You must have come here later.”

She shook her head. “I was with the initial group. I was sixteen, then.”

The man was staring at her, and she could see him doing the calculations behind his eyes. “Thirty-three years ago… You can’t possibly be forty-nine.”

“Touch me,” she said to him. When his eyes widened, she laughed. “Go on: my face, or my arms.”

His hand reached out to her cheek. She nearly flinched, expecting his skin to be hot, but it felt nearly cool. He stroked her cheek, pressing once. She knew what he saw, what he felt: a slickness like hard rubber that would not easily yield to the press of his finger-tip. Like touching a doll’s face.

The touch, though, was nice, and his hands were gentle and his chocolate eyes sad, and the baritone of his voice was rich and deep like a cello. Almost ten years, it’s been. An entire decade since you’ve been held and kissed and loved… She tore the thought away as Gary ’s fingers dropped from her face. You can’t think that way. You can’t.

“That’s what the virus did to me. It left me a permanent sixteen. I suppose I’ll always look this way. My body’s slowly hardening, calcifying. I came here because my mother was one of the Relocated; they knew I might have been infected, but no one was quite sure at first. I know now-and I don’t need the blood test to tell me. It’s moving through the rest of me now, faster and faster. I can’t turn my neck, can’t bend over easily, can’t bend my knees or my elbows all the way. And it’s spreading inside, or so the doctors tell me. Sometime soon…” She continued to smile; she had no choice. But twin tears trickled down the ceramic gloss of her cheeks.

“I’m sorry,” he told her. It was the same thing he had told her, the man who’d been Moira’s father.

“Don’t be sorry for me,” she said. “Be sorry for her.”

The man glanced back at the cottage. His gaze moved across drystone walls, erected over a century ago. Stones that would still be there long after she was gone. “Your daughter carries the virus too.” There was no question in his voice. Caitlyn nodded in reply.

“Aye. She does. When they came out with the blood test, I had her checked.”

“You said they sterilized the Relocated…”

“They did. Maybe they botched my surgery. Maybe my tubes grew back. Maybe the virus wouldn’t allow it. Who knows? Maybe I should never have left the island.” She took a deep breath, feeling the pain in her chest as muscles resisted expanding. “And maybe I should never have come back here after I did.” Caitlyn lifted her arm and daubed at the tears with the sleeve of her cotton sweater. Her arm moved like a clumsy stick. “Have you ever done something you felt was right, but you knew at the same time was incredibly stupid, something you knew would end up possibly hurting you more than you could bear?”

“Yeah,” Gary answered, his voice no more than a whisper. “I know that feeling real well. Real fucking well.”

Inside the cottage, Moira turned on one of the cassette tapes Caitlyn had bought her at the store in Churchill Bay. Her high, little-girl voice sang along with a bright, cheery children’s tune. “She carries the virus, aye,” Caitlyn said, smiling at the sound. “It’s in her blood, from me and from her father who had a minor ace, and if she’s like almost all who carry it as a latent, it will manifest itself when she hits puberty. When that time comes, I have a 99% chance of watching her either die in agony or becoming horribly disfigured for the rest of her life.” She turned back to Gary, feeling her face still trapped in the eerie smile. “I could have had an abortion. But I was scared, and I was still in love, and I was stupid. I should have had an abortion. Instead, I listened to him, the father who said he’d love me forever and who told me that after all the chance that the virus would get passed on to her was just one in four and that I should have the baby. I promised him I would. I kept my promise. And I found out that for him ‘forever’ was only until he fell in lust with some nat woman he met in the pub. By then I was so big with Moira that it was too late to do anything but carry her to term. Now I have to look at her every day and know that I’ll lose her soon… or worse. I have to look at the eyes of the people here on Rathlin with me, who stare at me and wonder what kind of monster would condemn her child to that.”

Caitlyn took a deep, sobbing breath. “That’s something I wonder myself, every day.”

Someone was pounding on the door. “Caitlyn!” a man’s voice called. “Aye ye in there?”

“I’m here, Duncan,” Caitlyn called back. She saw Moira sitting up her bed alongside. The clock on the nightstand said 7:00 AM and the sun was barely up. “Go on, girl, and let Constable MacEnnis in. Start the coffeemaker going. I’ll be right there.”

“What about the black man, mama?” she asked, a bit wide-eyed.

“He’ll have heard Constable MacEnnis, I’m sure. If he’s still here…”

Moira jumped from the bed and padded away. It took Moira several seconds to roll stiffly from the bed and get to her feet. Pulling her nightgown close around her, she walked lock-jointed into the front room. The couch where the stranger had lain the night before was empty, the blanket on the floor. Moira was at the door, holding it open just a crack. “Constable MacEnnis says for you to come outside, man,” Moira said, with a tone of awe in her voice. “There’s another man with him.”

“I’m coming, Duncan,” Caitlyn called. She patted Moira on the head as she reached her. “Why don’t you stay here, darling? Get yourself some cereal…”

The sunrise had left a damp and heavy morning fog in its wake. Two figures stood in the mist. Duncan MacEnnis was, like all the residents of Rathlin except Moira, a joker. Caitlyn knew his story-everyone on Rathlin knew everyone else’s story. MacEnnis had been a constable with the garda, the police force in Belfast. He’d been called to investigate the report of a man acting strangely in an alley between dreary brownstones. As MacEnnis approached the suspect, who was gibbering madly and pounding at the brick wall of the nearest house as if he could smash his way through it, the man exploded in a gory fountain of flesh and blood. The virus wasn’t carried in the blood and gore that spattered MacEnnis, but it was in the air that night, carried on the breeze moving down the valley of the River Lagan. Nothing had happened then, not until after MacEnnis had cleaned up after his shift and stopped in at Crown Liqour Saloon on Great Victoria Street. There, he’d lifted a glass of stout and watched as his hand melted around the glass, the flesh running like hot wax down his arm, his shoulder, his chest, his face, puddling then hardening again as he screamed in agony and terror, as patrons shouted and scurried away from him…

The Melted Man, with runneled flesh and eyes popping garishly from a hairless, pitted skull.

The man behind MacEnnis was a giant. He stood head and shoulder above the garda, and his face and hands seemed to be carved of gray and shiny stone, all the edges hard and sharp. She knew him-she’d seen his pictures many times in the papers: Brigadier Kenneth Foxworthy; the man they called ‘Captain Flint,’ whose hands were razor-edged knives, whose voice was as soft as his body was hard. An ace, not a joker.

“I see that you know who I am,” the man said, the voice so low a whisper that Caitlyn had to lean forward to hear it at all. “You don’t seem too surprised. Would that mean you know why I’m here?”

Caitlyn glanced at MacEnnis; the skull-face was impressive, teeth gritted behind a lipless mouth, but the constable gave a nearly imperceptible shrug. “I assume you’re going to tell me-” Caitlyn began, when two other people came from behind the cottage: a man with a bulging, domed forehead holding a blue steel revolver as he herded Gary toward the group. A sheen of perspiration covered Gary ’s face and hands.

“He was halfway across the field, Brigadier,” the man called. “Must’ve slid out the back when he heard us coming. A bit of a hard run, the way he’s sweating, but he stopped when I showed him the gun.”

“Excellent work, Radar,” Flint whispered. He turned back to Caitlyn. One eyebrow raised slowly in question; otherwise, the face remained entirely impassive.

“He’s a friend of mine,” she told the stone giant. “He’s been here a few days now. He told me he was going for a walk around the island. I don’t believe we have a law on Rathlin against that.”

MacEnnis was staring at her with his bulging eyes, though he said nothing. Flint merely snorted. “Odd, then, that he doesn’t appear in the ferry’s register or in the Ballycastle visitor’s log. How did he get here? Fly?” He turned to the black man. “That is how you came here, isn’t it, Mr Bushorn?”

Gary shrugged. “You tell me.”

The expression-or rather, the lack of one-on Flint ’s face remained undisturbed. “Where are your friends?”

“They weren’t friends.”

“You expect me to believe that blatant falsehood about being ‘kidnapped’ and forced to fly Senator Hartmann and Ms. Davis here?”

“I expect you’ll believe whatever you want.”

“Tell me where they are.”

“I don’t know. They parachuted out of the plane near Dublin.”

“Then why didn’t you broadcast that immediately and land there or in Belfast?”

“Hartmann had already shot out the radio so I couldn’t call. It was night, I didn’t know the area, and I was flying by sight on a stormy night. I figured by the time I got to Scotland, it would be dawn and I could see better. I didn’t make it.”

“You’ve been here a day and half and have made no attempt to contact the authorities. Hardly a ‘victim’s’ response.”

“I wanted to avoid being your victim, too. Do you blame me?”

Flint seemed to sigh. “Handcuff him and put him in the car,” he said to Radar. “He’s under arrest. There are agents from the States coming over for him.”

“No.” Caitlyn moved toward Gary as Radar pulled the cuffs from a back pocket. “ Duncan, he’s asked to stay here. He’s one of us.”

“Shite.” The curse was audible to everyone, and MacEnnis’s face became even more skull-like with the rictus of a grimace. “Is that true? You’re a joker?” MacEnnis glanced at Gary, who looked first at Caitlyn.

“Yeah,” Gary said finally. “I guess it is. Or maybe a deuce.” He lifted his hand, his eyes tightening in concentration. A moment later, a small blue flame flickered from his fingertip and swept down the entire index finger. Gary grimaced in pain as the flame licked at his flesh. “That’s it. That’s the extent of my great powers. Get a Bic lighter, and you can do the same. Otherwise, I have a body that runs way too hot, and it fucking hurts. I’m good at scorching bedsheets, too.” They could all see the finger’s skin bubbling as the flame guttered out. The dark flesh had gone an ugly white as great blisters rose. Gary cradled the damaged hand to his belly. Perspiration was rolling down the side of his face. “I ain’t no goddamn ace. Right now, asylum sounds good.”

“Got any other skills?”

“I’m a fair mechanic.”

“You’re in luck, then. Things break here, all too often.” With a sigh, MacEnnis turned back to Flint. “Sorry,” he told the Brigadier. “I can’t let you to take this man.”

Flint almost, almost laughed. “I don’t think you understand, Constable,” he husked. “I’m taking him back to Scotland. He aided two extremely dangerous fugitives in escaping from the authorities in New York City, and this is now an international matter. Rathlin is still part of the UK, the last time I checked. He comes with me.”

“Rathlin might be UK, but odd how I don’t see nats here at all. Odd how we get almost no money from Belfast or London. Strange how the only businesses here are those we’ve made ourselves,” MacEnnis answered. He waddled forward until he was standing in front of Flint, his horrible face tipped back to stare up at the man. “This isn’t Northern Ireland, this isn’t the Scotland or Wales or England. ’Tis Rathlin, and you can squawk all you like about the law, but ’tis me that’s the law here, and I’m thinking that I’d rather have me a mechanic on the island than an arrest on my books.”

Flint leaned over the much smaller man. One of his fingertips, almost casually, touched the tip of the nightstick in its loop on MacEnnis’s uniform belt. A sliver of ash curled away, falling to the ground. “You are interfering,” he said, “in a greater matter than you can realize.”

“Ace matters?” MacEnnis asked. “That has nothing to do with Rathlin. Rathlin is for nasty jokers.” He glanced at Gary. “You, mister. You want to go with Cap’n Flint here?”

Gary shook his head. MacEnnis turned back to Flint. “You see, he already likes it here, and he’s a mechanic. I say he can stay. If you take him by force, you’ll do so without my cooperation. We’ll protest to every authority and every human rights organization, including the UN.”

Flint hissed, a sound like steam. “You are making a mistake here, Constable, one that may harm everyone infected by the virus. And you are subject to UK law, despite the lax and indulgent attitude Rathlin has enjoyed in the past.”

“The mistake, Brigadier, is the arrogance of you aces. This is Rathlin. I wonder how it will look when taking this man results in an extremely visible demonstration down in Church Bay, with every joker here putting themselves between you and your ship. Sure, you’re stronger than us and you have the law on your side, and you can demonstrate that, all in full view of the cameras.” MacEnnis tapped the radio on his belt with a hand of bubbled flesh. “You want me to make that call to the Mayor? You said you came here looking for a dangerous ace. I say I don’t see one.”

Flint glared at MacEnnis, who stared placidly back. Finally, Flint ’s searing gaze moved to Gary. “I now know where you are,” he said. “Consider yourself already in custody, because the instant you leave this miserable little flea speck in the ocean, you will be arrested and prosecuted. There is nowhere you can hide. You’ve just given yourself a life sentence to Rathlin.”

With that, Flint gave a nod to Radar and stalked back toward the constable’s open jeep. MacEnnis gave an audible exhalation. “I hope you know what you’re doing,” he said to Caitlyn, “because your track record so far isn’t very good.” Appraising eyes stared at Gary below the rim of his garda’s cap. “Welcome to Rathlin, Mister Mechanic. I hope you like your new home.”

She asked him no questions. She simply let him stay with her.

It had been a week. There’d been no other visitors. No new word at all, not from MacEnnis or the embassy, or anyone. It certainly didn’t surprise Caitlyn that no one came up to the house, that they’d been left entirely alone after the first flurry of activity. She wondered what Gary thought.

Caitlyn was standing at the cliffs at the northeast curve of the island, a painful three-quarter mile walk from the cottage, but she forced herself to do it, not wanting to give in to the encroaching slow paralysis of her body. Her small herd of black-faced sheep grazed in the heather nearby, with Moira cavorting through the field with the one lamb that had been dropped that spring, her high-pitched giggle making Caitlyn’s smile genuine. She didn’t hear Gary come up behind her, only felt the touch of his warm hand on her shoulder. She would have jumped, startled, had her body been capable of it, but she simply stood there, gazing down at the waves pounding the cliffs two hundred feet below like a statue erected there.

“That’s pretty,” he said.

“Aye.” His hand left her, but the sense of the touch remained. She enjoyed the sensation. She could hear him coming around to her left, then saw him. He was looking down curiously.

“See the cave there?” she asked. She pointed, her arm slowly raising; he nodded. “That’s Bruce’s Cave. The tale is that Robert the Bruce stayed there in 1306 after he was defeated in the Battle of Methven and fled Scotland. ’Tis said that while he was hiding in the cave, he watched a spider trying to build its web by leaping from one rock to another. The spider tried and failed dozen of times, but every time it climbed back up and made the attempt again, until finally it succeeded. The Bruce was so inspired by the spider’s courage and perseverance that he resolved to go back to Scotland and continue his fight against the English.”

“I guess I should have studied my history more back in school. I kinda remember the name, I think, but not much else.”

“There’s lots of history here on Rathlin. There were stone age axe factories here 3000-2500BC. The island’s been ruled by Firbolgs, Celts, English, Scots, and Irish. There have been battles and massacres. Out there-” she pointed to the gray ranks of waves stretching to the misted horizon, “there’s Sloghnamorra, the swallow hole of the sea, a maelstrom. Under Church Bay, there’s the hulk of HMS Drake, torpedoed in 1917 by a German submarine; there are a dozen more shipwrecks in and around the island. And the views: you should see the sea stacks by the West Lighthouse, or the cliffs by Slieveacarn.”

“You’d make a fine tour guide, I’m sure.”

“I’m just saying that for eight square miles or so of land, there’s much to see and learn here, if you must stay.”

“You left.”

Caitlyn could feel the color rise in her hard cheeks. “Aye, I did. I thought it would be better out there.” She turned to face him. He was watching her: soft brown eyes, a slow smile that crinkled the his face. “I was wrong,” she said. “I belong here.”

He nodded, and she was relieved he asked no more questions. “Yeah. Sometimes you find that place.”

“And New York City is that place for you.”

He shrugged, then nodded. “Yeah. That’s where my family is.” Caitlyn waited, and he continued after a moment. “God, I need to get back there. My family… My mom’s getting up there and isn’t well, my little brother Arnie and his wife own half the business with me, and without a plane or a pilot…” Another pause.

“No wife yourself? No family?”

A shake of his head. “I had myself fixed when I was in the army; you know, snip-snip.” His fingers made a scissoring motion, and he gave her a rueful, almost angry smile. “Didn’t want to father no wild card babies. Guess we ain’t so different, the people here and me.”

He drew a long breath, his nostrils flaring. A wave splashed spray on the rocks below. Gary bent down. She watched him pick up a gray, limestone rock and heave it over the cliff edge. They both listened; there was no sound against the crash of the surf and soughing of the salt wind. “I appreciate everything you’ve done for me,” he said.

“ ’Twas nothing,” she said automatically.

Moira bounced over toward them, laughing.

“To me, it was. You didn’t have to go out of your way, and you did.” Moira put her arm around Caitlyn’s waist. “I just hope-”

“What?”

He shook his head. “I was returning a favor, that’s all. That’s what got me into this mess. I believe you have to pay back what’s given to you, and that’s how I got into this. I owed Hartmann for what he did for me. I promised him I’d do him a favor, any favor. All he had to do was ask. So when he did…”

“You’re saying that Captain Flint was right?”

A nod. “Yeah. I don’t know why Hartmann and that woman wanted to come to Ireland, but I brought them. Now”-he picked up another rock and threw it-“it looks like I stay.” There was pain in his eyes, and Caitlyn would have frowned. Instead, the smile lessened.

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I.” Another grimace. “If I’m going to be a mechanic, then I need to set up a place of my own. You said the population was down to a few hundred from five? Bet that means there’s lots of vacant houses around. Guess I can find one that’ll do.”

“Stay with us,” Moira interrupted. “I like you. You’re the Burning Man. Do you know math?”

“I used to be pretty good at it.”

“Then you can help me. School starts next week.” Her voice dropped to a conspiratorial stage whisper. “Máthair’s just awful with math.”

Gary ’s eyes drifted upward from Moira to Caitlyn’s face. “I think your mother’s smarter than you think.”

She didn’t know what she saw in his face then. MacEnnis’s words came back to her: “… your track record so far isn’t very good.” She hadn’t felt the impact of a person’s gaze since… How much of it is because he looks so normal, compared to the others on the island? Are you still that shallow, girl?

She said it anyway.

“You can stay with us. If you like.”

She expected him to balk and refuse. At the very least, she expected him to question what that meant even though she wasn’t sure herself.

He didn’t. He stared at Caitlyn for long seconds, then looked down again at Moira, smiling at her. “I’d like that,” he said to Moira rather than Caitlyn. “And we’ll work on that math.”

“… right, I understand, Arnie, but I’ve given the accountant permission to liquidate my 401k-use that to get through the next few months, at least, even though taxes are gonna chew up a lot of it… No, the plane’s a total loss. I had to ditch in the ocean… You need to hire another plane and pilot… I know, man. I know. But I called the embassy in Belfast, and they told me that there are indictments out for me for attempted murder, assault, illegal flight and dozen other things down to littering, and that if I leave this island, not only will the UK have my ass but the good ole USA will be filing immediate extradition papers… All right, man. I’ll keep trying… Right. Hartmann’s office gave me the name of a lawyer, some guy named Dr. Praetorius; he’s supposed to start working on that end… Give my love to Mom and tell her not to worry. I’m fine at the moment, but I miss everyone. Tell Serena the two of you will make it through this, and kiss little Keisha for me too, and let her know that her uncle loves her… Make sure you take care of Mom. Call her every day and check on her; you know how she is about taking her pills… Yeah, goodbye.”

Caitlyn heard the click of the receiver in its cradle, and when she glanced up, Gary was staring at her. “I’ll find a way to pay you back. I know all these calls have been expensive. Arnie doesn’t think the business is going to make it, and they found a blood clot in Mom’s leg…” Gary ran a hand over tight-curled black hair.

“What did Mayor Carrick say when you spoke with him?”

Gary nodded. “There’s nothing he can do either-he was the one who suggested calling the U.S. Embassy. I’ve tried to get hold of Senator Hartmann’s offices, too; no one will talk to me there; all they could suggest was some J-Town lawyer-Hartmann’s the one guy who might be able to get me out of this, and no one knows where the hell he is. No one else seems to be able to do anything. If I leave, I’ll be tossed in jail. That’s the bottom line.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Not as fucking sorry as I am,” he answered, then grimaced, looking in the direction of Moira’s room. “Sorry,” he apologized, pacing the length of the room and back.

“She’s asleep. You must be tired, too.”

He responded as if he hadn’t heard her. “I need to get back. Everything and everyone I know is back in New York.” He looked at her with stricken eyes. “I should never have done what I did, but I promised the man. I promised.”

“Promises are important.” She managed to say it without bitterness.

“Yeah. And this is one I wish I hadn’t kept.” He blinked. Walking over to the chair where she sat, he crouched down, touching her arm. His fingers radiated heat. “Sorry. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. You’ve taken huge chances with me, someone you don’t know at all-all of you here have. It’s just…”

“I know,” she said. “You want to go home.”

He laughed, bitterly. “You got that right.”

NOVEMBER, 1995

Gary sat with Moira at the desk near the front door. He huddled with her over her open textbook. Caitlyn watched the two of them, wondering.

He’d already become more a part of her life than she’d ever expected. He and Moira… her daughter had bonded immediately and unquestioningly to her ‘Burning Man,’ and he responded to her with a teasing seriousness that made Caitlyn sometimes feel clumsy in her own relations with Moira.

And yet… He kept his distance with Caitlyn, careful not to say or do anything that might be construed as an advance. At first, she’d found that comforting…

“Look,” he said to Moira, his baritone voice warm in the cool air of the room. “Remember when you introduced me to Codman Cody at the West Lighthouse? How many fingers does he have?”

Caitlyn could see Moira squeeze her eyes shut in concentration. “Six,” she said at last. “Four on his right hand, two on his left.”

“OK. And if he held his left hand over his right, that’d be two over four-like a fraction. What if he took away half the fingers on each hand? What would that look like? Think about Codman Cody’s hands…”

Again, the eyes closed, then opened. “That would be one on one hand and two on the other,” she said.

“Would he look silly then, with only three fingers?”

Moira giggled. “Aye, he would.” They both laughed, then Gary drew a two-fingered hand and a four-fingered hand on the paper in front of them. “So you can divide the number of fingers on both hands by two, right? Which means two over four can be reduced to what fraction? Look at the hands.”

“One over two!” Moira roared. “One half.”

Gary applauded softly. “Hey, you got it! What if he had six fingers on his right? Could you reduce two over six?”

A pause. Then: “One over three.” Moira giggled. “I understand. Thanks, Gary.”

“You’re welcome. Now… why don’t you get to bed? Your mom and I gotta talk…” He kissed her forehead and Moira flung her arms around his neck. She ran over to Caitlyn and did the same, then scurried off to her room. Caitlyn watched Gary straighten the desk and put Moira’s notebooks in her backpack.

“You’re good with her,” she said into the silence, and his deep brown eyes glanced back at her..

“She’s a great kid. I like her a lot.” His gaze turned away as he tucked Moira’s math book in and closed the flap. His dark, long fingers tapped the blue cloth. He pushed back the chair. “I’m going for a walk. Wanna come?”

She hesitated. “I don’t know… Moira…”

“Just tell her we’re going. She’ll be fine.”

“All right,” she said finally. “Let me get my shawl…”

The night was cool but dry, a strong, high wind draping shreds of cloud over a half-moon and ripping them away again, though only a faint breeze stirred the dry leaves of the hawthorn in the yard. She envied the ease with which Gary moved in the darkness, contrasting with her own clumsy, stiff-legged gait. He slowed his own pace to hers, walking alongside her down the narrow asphalt road winding westward. He was careful not to touch her, always keeping a distance between them. They said nothing, listening to the night birds, the soughing of the wind, and the faint sound of the water. They passed Abigail Scanlon’s cottage, a quarter mile down the road-‘Wide Abby,’ they called her. The old woman was out on her porch: Caitlyn could see the outline of the misshapen body, like someone laying on their side, the legs at either end of the stretched frame, the head a bump in the middle of a log, the hand waving at either end, unable to reach each other across the huge girth between them. Caitlyn remembered how they’d had to alter her cottage, the door hinged sideways, all the furniture low and wide. Caitlyn waved to her. “A beautiful night, ’tis it not, Abby?” she called out. There was no answer, only a faint wave from one of the hands.

They walked on. She could feel Gary glancing from her to Abigail. “Moira goes to ‘school’ every day, but she’s the only one there,” he said finally. “She seems to know everyone on the island, and half the time she’s over at someone’s house. But y’know, in two months I’ve never seen anyone at all ever come to your house. I notice that you don’t go to the grocery yourself, that the person who delivers them leaves the box on the stoop and never knocks or rings the bell to say hello. I notice that your neighbors don’t say much to you.” He stopped, and she knew he was waiting for an answer. When she remained silent, walking on, he continued. “Is it me? Is it because I’m there?”

She smiled, because she must. “No,” she answered. “It’s not you. It’s… complicated.”

“I’m listening.”

“I don’t know if I can explain it to you. This isn’t your home; you weren’t sent here. You didn’t have to make the choice we made.” He said nothing; after a moment, she continued. “I came here with a mother who looked as deformed and disfigured as anyone here, who was in the same kind of pain. She lived for two decades that way, in daily pain and torment, and I took care of her. I took care of some of the others, too. That was nothing special. That was something we all did, those of us who could. And then… she died. And I left-because I could; because as far as I knew then, all the wild card had done to me was keep me forever young; because-unlike the rest of them here on Rathlin-I could get by in the normal society out there. I wasn’t ugly or horribly changed. I didn’t ooze slime or have spines or drag myself around like a slug. I was pretty and normal. Back then, when you looked at me or saw, you wouldn’t notice anything unless you watched me very carefully. I left. I left them behind. At the time, I didn’t think I’d ever come back.”

They’d reached the point where the road curved away north to Church Bay. The west side of the island around Church Bay slid gently into the water, unlike the steep cliffs that lined most of the island’s perimeter. They stood on a rise, the bay glittering below, while away over the channel, the lights of Ballycastle in Northern Ireland gleamed six miles away, tantalizingly close and impossibly far away.

“They’re jealous of you,” Gary said, “because you look like a nat, because you could blend in.”

“That’s part of it, aye. Then there’s Moira. They love her, Gary, they do. She’s Rathlin’s only child, and they all feel like they’re her aunt or uncle. But at the same time, she… She’s a slap in their faces. All of them made the decision to stay here. They made the decision that they wouldn’t bring any more children into the world to be like them, to suffer the way they’ve suffered. I left them, and I came back with Moira…”

“So they hate you.”

Caitlyn tried to shake her head. It would turn only slowly. “Hate’s an awfully strong word, and too simple. It’s… it’s more that they’re terribly disappointed in me. I’ve shamed them, and along with that they can’t quite ever forget that I selfishly abandoned them, and they can’t forget that I’ve almost certainly condemned Moira to die young and in horrible pain because of the virus she carries. What I did was selfish and it was abandonment, and it was cruel. I did it purely for me.”

“Sometimes you have to think about yourself first.”

“Maybe,” she answered. “But then you have to live with everybody else afterward.”

He gave her a contemplative hmm, leaning on the stone fence that bordered the roadway. She saw his gaze catch on the Ballycastle lights and remain there. “You really want to go home, don’t you?” she asked him.

A nod. “Yeah. I do. Arnie called earlier today, while you were bringing back the sheep. Mom’s getting worse, and their finances… My savings are gone; I can’t afford that lawyer any more. I done everything I can think of to do. I even talked to Codman Cody about trying to sneak off the island at night in his boat, have him land me somewhere on the coast and see what happens…” She saw his hand form a fist and slowly loosen again. “I left without saying goodbye to anyone. I miss my family, I miss my friends, I miss walking around the city, all the people and the sights and the food… But I ain’t going back as a prisoner.” He looked at her over his shoulder with a wry smile. “I guess there are all kinds of prisons, aren’t there?”

There was such gentle sympathy in his face, such compassion in his eyes… She wanted more than anything to lean toward that mouth, to kiss him and to feel him respond. She stared back at him, the eternal smile on her face, holding her breath. She could not move.

But he did. His head turned, he bent toward her so close that she could feel his warmth. He stopped. Pulled back, his expression stricken and guilty. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have… I’m really sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” she told him.

He shook his head. “It ain’t right, not when I’d leave here tomorrow if I could. Not after you took me in, let me stay with you. I’m really sorry, Caitlyn. I don’t want to make you feel threatened or bothered or-”

“Stop it,” she told him. “It’s fine. It’s…” … what I want too. I’m just so afraid of it and I don’t know if I can anymore, and… There were a dozen other things to say, but she couldn’t say any of them. “… forgotten,” she finished.

But she didn’t forget it. She remembered. It haunted her dreams for a long time.

“I hope you find your way home,” she told him.

Rathlin’s lone lawyer was also Rathlin’s Mayor, an elderly gentleman with long white hair that covered most of his body. His snouted face and prominent front teeth made him look like a large rodent; the delicate eyeglasses perched there, the wire rims tucked behind his ear flaps, magnified the tiny black eyes, and the suit he wore made him look like a cartoon character.. His hand were pink and wrinkled and folded on top of the newspaper that covered his desk.

Joseph Carrick: ‘The Rat of Rathlin,’ as he’d been dubbed by the Sun and other tabloids.

DISASTER AVERTED! the headline trumpeted. Then, in smaller type: BLACK TRUMP DESTROYED IN JERUSALEM. SENATOR GREGG HARTMANN AMONG DEAD.

“I thought… I thought that since Senator Hartmann was dead that the charges against me might be dropped,” Gary told Carrick.

Carrick’s whiskered nose twitched. “I’m afraid they haven’t. I’ve made the inquiries you requested: the charges against you stand, and I’ve been told by the authorities in Northern Ireland, Great Britain and your own country that nothing has changed-you will be arrested the moment you step foot off Rathlin.” Carrick traced the headlines with a slow forefinger. “I am sorry, Mr. Bushorn. There’s nothing I can do.”

“Mayor,” Gary said, a tone of desperation in his voice, “Look, Hartmann was just about my last hope. I gotta get back-you don’t understand.”

“Joseph, surely there’s something else you can do?” Caitlyn’s voice drew Carrick’s attention away from the paper. His tiny lips, in the shadow of the snout, pursed in a tight moue of annoyance. Joseph Carrick had once openly courted Caitlyn, in the months after her mother’s death and before her flight from Rathlin. Caitlyn knew he’d considered her departure a personal insult-she’d heard him say it to others: “She think she’s too perfect to be touched by the likes of a joker… ”

“I’ve done all I can,” he answered tartly. “Surely you’re not totally disappointed in the news, Miss Farrell, since that means your ‘house guest’ will be staying.” Caitlyn’s cheeks went hot-she started to answer, but Gary had already risen from his chair. His forefinger stabbed the paper in front of Carrick.

Around the finger, white smoke curled away. “You,” Gary said, “will apologize to Caitlyn. I don’t care if you’re the fucking Mayor, I don’t care if you call Constable McEnnis and have him drag me off the island as a result.” His hand went down flat on the newspaper. The smell of ash and burning paper rose. Tiny flames leapt around his hand. “You know nothing about her, or you would have kept your mouth shut just now.” Fire crackled around his wrist. “Do I make myself clear?”

Carrick’s tiny eyes widened more than Caitlyn thought possible. He nearly squeaked as he pushed his chair back from his desk. “Aye, I understand,” he said hurriedly. “Caitlyn, I’m apologize. I certainly didn’t mean to imply…”

Gary swept the paper onto the wooden floor and stamped out the fire. The photo of the crater in the midst of Jerusalem was now a smoking hole. “I believe Caitlyn asked you a question just now.”

Carrick was staring at the ruins of the newspaper alongside his desk. His head jerked back to Gary, then Caitlyn. “I suppose I could contact a few people I know in your state department. Perhaps some sort of amnesty could be arranged now that the Senator is dead and the crisis over. Why don’t you come back in a few weeks or so…”

He did come back. Every week. And every time the answer was the same.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Bushorn…”

DECEMBER, 1995

There was wrapping paper strewn over the front room of the cottage, and Moira was sitting happily near the fire playing with a rag doll and a chess set. Caitlyn had given Gary a short-sleeved shirt woven from the wool of their sheep. “You don’t exactly seem to need a sweater,” she told him. “So I thought…”

“It’s lovely,” he told her, and the way he looked at her made the smile widen on her face. “Here,” he said, handing her a package. “This is for you.”

He set the small box on her lap. Awkwardly, she opened it-her elbows had tightened severely since the onset of winter, and she could barely move them. She stripped away the bow and the paper, and opened the lid. She could feel him watching her.

Inside, in a nest of tissue paper, was a pocket watch. She could hear it ticking. She stared at the watch, shimmering through sudden mist in her eyes. “Where did you get this?” she asked. It was all she dared to say.

“I found it, out in the back shed when I was looking for some tools. I cleaned it up, took it apart. I traded Motormouth down in Church Bay some work on his cycle in exchange for ordering the parts I needed from a repair shop in Dublin. They said it was an expensive watch, an old one. Gold over silver on the casing, and well worth the time and money to fix it. The inscription said ‘To Patrick, Love Shannon.’ I showed it to Moira; she said she’d never seen the watch before, but that you’d told her that Shannon and Patrick were the names of her grandparents. So I thought…” He paused. His head cocked inquiringly toward her. “Do I do something wrong?”

Caitlyn tried to shake her head. It moved slowly left, then right. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s..” She stopped. She still hadn’t touched the watch. She didn’t dare. “It’s a long story.”

“I’m not going anywhere.” He sat cross-legged on the floor in front of her. “Is it your watch?”

Another slow nod. “Aye. Patrick was my da; he drew the black queen and died in ’62; Máthair gave him the watch on their first anniversary. The watch came with us to Rathlin after… after the Relocation. Funny, it worked fine in Belfast, but once we got here, it never did. Something broke inside it, I guess, jostled loose.”

“The mainspring,” Gary said. “It snapped. Probably wound too tight, or it had gotten rusty over the years.”

Caitlyn reached down and touched the face of the watch. “I took the watch with me when I left Rathlin, after she died. He… Moira’s father, that is-”

“Does this man have a name?”

“Robert,” Caitlyn answered. It had been ten years since she’d spoken that name. It still hurt. The word was an incantation, summoning up all the pain and anger she’d felt, and she could feel muscles pulling uselessly at the smooth expanse of her face. She let out a breath, trying to exhale the poison within the memories. “The watch…” Another exhalation. “It was another broken promise in a long string of promises: the promise that he loved me, the promise that he’d stay faithful, the promise he wouldn’t drink, the promise that he wouldn’t hit me, the promise that he’d take care of our child, the promise she wouldn’t have the virus…” She stopped, hearing the bitterness rising in her voice and hating the sound of it. “He had an ace, the ability to enchant with song, and when you heard his voice, you couldn’t move or leave and he could twist your emotions about, make you cry or laugh or shout or fall in love. But the talent was wasted on him, lost in the drink, the temper, the skirt-chasing and the ego. He knew what the watch meant to me. I gave it to him, not long after we became lovers. He said ‘Sure, Caitlyn, I’ll be getting it fixed for you.’ I kept asking him about it afterward, for weeks that turned into months, and he’d always tell me that, aye, he’d taken it to the jewelers, but that some part or another was on backorder and that he’d be going to check on it tomorrow…”

She laughed, a sound as bitter as her words. “After he left us for his pub floozy, I found the watch when I was packing to come back here. It was in one of his dresser drawers, still in the cardboard box in which I’d given it to him. He’d probably forgotten to take it with him that first time-it wasn’t really important to him, just as I wasn’t really important to him. And rather than tell me the truth, it was easier for him to make up the lies. Maybe he didn’t even remember where the watch was anymore. When I came back here, I couldn’t stand to look at it. It didn’t remind me of my parents anymore; it reminded me of him.” She wrapped the chain of the watch around one finger. She held it up to her ear, listening to the steady metronome of the mechanism inside.

“Thank you,” she said. “Now it will remind me of my parents again.”

She reached toward him; he leaned forward so that her hand touched his cheek, and he pressed it tight between head and shoulder, holding her. “You’re welcome,” he said. She was crying; she could feel the tears rolling hot down her cheeks, and he reached forward and blotted them away with a thumb. “Hey, it wasn’t that much,” he said.

“You can kiss her.” That was Moira, bounding across the room and wrapping her arms around Gary ’s neck from behind as he sat in front of the couch. “She’d like that.”

“Do you really think so?” Gary asked her, though his eyes were on Caitlyn. “I wouldn’t want to do anything that you or your mom would regret.”

“Oh, no,” Moira answered. “You can. She likes you.”

“Moira,” Caitlyn said reflexively. Gary was still watching her, his hands on the cushions of the couch on either side of her. She could feel their heat on her legs.

“Well, you do,” Moira answered. “I can tell. I’m not stupid.”

“Moira, I think that the decision to whether or not to kiss should be your mom’s, not mine.” He reached behind and pulled Moira around until she was sitting on his lap. “But I will kiss you,” he told her, and gave her a comically sloppy kiss on the forehead as she squirmed and giggled on his lap.

“She’s asleep?” Gary asked.

“Aye,” Caitlyn said softly. He was standing near the fireplace. She’d placed the watch there on the mantel, where she could see it and hear it ticking. She limped over to stand in front of him. “She says what she thinks, I’m afraid.”

“I never thought that was a bad thing. Keisha, my niece, she’s the same way. Adults should do it more often.” One corner of his mouth lifted. “I’d never make you a promise I wouldn’t keep,” he said. His head leaned down toward hers. His lips were soft fire against the slick ice of her skin, and she opened her mouth to him, the embrace suddenly urgent as his fingers tangled in her hair. His touch was a flame along her breast, a heat between her legs. “I don’t know,” she said, suddenly frightened. “It’s been so long, and my body…”

“Hush,” he’d told her. “I’m scared, too. Sometimes, the women I’m with, they say it’s too hot, that they don’t… and I…”

This time it was her touch that stopped his words. “We’ll go slow. We’ll help each other. We’ll figure out what works. If you want.”

“Caitlyn, the one promise I can’t make to you is that I’ll stay. I need you to understand that before anything happens. I’ll be your friend and lover, I’ll help you with Moira, I’ll never try to deceive you. But if and when they let me go home, I’m gone that same day. If that changes things, then let’s stop now. I don’t want to ever hurt you.”

“That’s not a promise I’d ask you to make,” she told him.

“Then this is what I want,” he answered. “I want it very much.”

MARCH, 1996

“Oh, God… Arnie, no, no…”

The sudden catch in Gary ’s voice made Caitlyn hold her breath. “Yeah, yeah, I understand… When did it happen? How?… Uhhuh… Wasn’t there anything they could do, something…? How’s Serena and Keisha taking this? You called Uncle Carl yet? Is there anything I can do… Yeah… No, let me see if I can arrange… No, not a lot of hope for it… I’ll call you back, and Arnie-I love you. Be strong, man… Yeah, see ’ya.”

Gary stood there after he put the receiver down, staring vacantly. Moira, reading a book by the fireplace, looked over at him also. “ Gary?” Caitlyn asked. “What’s wrong?”

“My mom,” he said. “She died.” He blinked, and tears rolled from his eyes. They steamed and sizzled as they reached his cheeks. “She died and I wasn’t there, and they’re burying her on Saturday, and I’m here. I’m fucking here.”

Moira’s eyes widened at the profanity- Gary was always so careful around her, but he didn’t seem to have noticed. “Oh, Gary…” Caitlyn started to rise-slowly, the only way she could-from the chair to go to him, but he waved her away.

“Just… just leave me alone. I need to take a walk.” He strode out of the house, then, without looking at either of them, steam wreathing his face.

“Máthair,” Moira said as the sound of the closing door seemed to echo through the room. “You should go with him. He needs you.”

“I walk so slow, Moira,” she protested.

“He needs you,” Moira repeated, but Caitlyn was already rising, moving as quickly as she could to the door, taking her shawl from the peg as she left. The sun was setting in the west, obscured by driving gray clouds, and fine mist dampened Caitlyn’s face. For a moment, she didn’t see Gary, then she caught sight of a dark figure, walking over the rolling hills toward the cliffs. She hurried after him. “ Gary!”

He turned. She saw him wave at her, gesturing her back. Then he turned again and continued to walk on. She hesitated, then followed.

He was standing near the edge of the cliffs above Bruce’s Cave, staring out over the water. The sun had set, the edges of the clouds behind them tinted the color of blood, though ahead the sky was unrelenting black and dark gray, streaked with squall lines out over the water. Waves broke a startling phosphorescent white on the rocks far below. He hadn’t turned as she approached, though she knew he had to have heard her. She put her arms around his waist from behind, pulling him into her; it was like embracing a woodstove, but she continued to hold him. “ Gary, I’m so sorry…”

“Arnie said that she must have had the stroke some time in the morning. He came to check on her when he couldn’t get hold of her on the phone, and found her unconscious. By the time they got her to the hospital, she was in arrest, and they couldn’t bring her back.” He spoke without looking at her; she felt more than heard his voice, her head on his back. “She wasn’t real good about taking her meds. I used to call her every morning just to remind her.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Maybe not. Or maybe it was.” He turned in her arms. “I’ll never know, will I?” His eyes were narrowed, eyebrows lowering above like thunderheads. He pushed himself away from her. “I won’t be there for the funeral, won’t be able to grieve with the rest of my family. The business I spent most of my life trying to build is gone along with my savings, and what little I had left I’ve spent trying to get out of here. I’ve written or talked to every damn representative, to every paper from the Times to the goddamn Jokertown Cry, and I’m still on Rathlin!” The name was a shout as he flung his arms wide. “This isn’t fucking jail; it’s worse.”

The words cut, lancing deep into Caitlyn’s core. She was crying, unable to stop the tears, cold against her cheeks, salt mingling with the fresh water of the mist. “ Gary…” She could say nothing, only stand there stricken and numb like the lifeless statue she was inevitably becoming, her arms still spread in the end of the embrace.

He was steaming in the mist, like a living cloud, and she couldn’t tell whether he were also crying or not, his features half-obscured. The droplets hissed on his skin like water spilled on a hot griddle. “I have to get out of here,” he said. “I’ve lost so much, and there’s no way I can ever, ever get it back again…” He stopped then, looking at her. “Caitlyn,” Her name was a sob. “Oh God, Caitlyn…”

His hands were on his head, his face lifted to the sky. She saw his chest swell in a long, ragged breath, then slowly relax again as he sighed. “It hurts,” he said, simply.

“I know.” Caitlyn took his hand, ignoring the heat. “ Gary, I see you in pain and it makes me hurt, too. I wish there was something I could say or do to help. I’m so sorry for your loss, for the way you’re trapped here…” She stopped. His fingers pressed hers.

“You’re all that makes it bearable,” he told her. “You, and Moira, too.” His hand cooled; the rain no longer steamed as it touched him. “I never had the chance to tell her goodbye. Now I never will.”

“I know. It’s not fair.”

He nodded. He pulled her to him. For a long time, they stood that way, until the light had left the sky and the hard rain began in earnest.

AUGUST, 1996

The boat and the pier smelled of fish and Codman Cody.

“You shouldn’t be going, Caitlyn,” Gary told her. “If you fell in somehow…”

He didn’t say the rest. He didn’t need to. Caitlyn knew it all too well. In the last few months, the rigidity of her body had become worse. She couldn’t sit at all anymore, and getting in and out of bed was difficult because she could barely bend from the waist. She could walk, albeit slowly and with a strange, lock-kneed gait like someone pretending they were a doll. Her shoulder and elbow joints still worked, but detail work with the hands was now impossible; she would never knit or sew again. She smiled at Gary -it hurt too much to frown. “I’ll be fine. Codman has life jackets, and I can stand near the cabin, away from the side. Gary, I need to be there. Please don’t argue.”

His face softened. “All right,” he told her. “But you wear a life jacket. Moira, you want to help your mom?”

Moira nodded. Cody blinked his round, wide-set fishy eyes, the scales on his skin glinting in the light from the lantern hung on the piling of the tiny pier at the western end of Church Bay. He tossed a life jacket to Moira with the shorter, two-fingered hand, webbing stretched between the wide-spread digits. “Hurry,” he told them. “The tide’s running out strong now.”

Moira fastened the straps of the life jacket around Caitlyn, and then hugged her. “Be careful, Máthair,” she said.

“I will. I’ll see you soon. Remember, you’re to go right over to Alice ’s house; I’ll pick you up there.” Moira nodded solemnly. She was blinking back tears, Caitlyn noticed, and she patted the girl’s head. “Go tell Gary goodbye.”

Caitlyn watched her run over to Gary, watched him effortlessly pick her up as Caitlyn once had and embrace her as Moira wrapped arms around his neck. “I wish you didn’t have to go,” Caitlyn heard her say to him.

“Part of me wants very much to stay,” Gary told her, still hugging her. His gaze was on Caitlyn. “But I want to go home. You understand that, don’t you? I want to go home.”

“Máthair says they’ll arrest you if they catch you. They’ll put you in jail.”

“Then I have to make sure they don’t catch me, don’t I?” He put her down. “I’ll miss you so much, Moira. Give me a kiss?”

She kissed Gary, hugging him fiercely, and then turned and ran down the pier to the shore. Caitlyn could hear her crying as she ran, turning toward Codman Cody’s small house, where his wife Alice waited.

“’Tis nothing,” Caitlyn told Gary, who stood watching Moira’s sudden flight. “She’s just upset, but she’ll be fine. Help me into the boat…”

A few minutes later, the Áilteoir (“That’s ‘joker’ in Irish Gaelic,” Caitlyn had told Gary when he asked) was grumbling its way toward the entrance to the harbor and out into the open waters of Church Bay. The night was moonless, the waves gentle as the small fishing vessel moved out into the open water, rolling sofly. The light of Ballycastle shown directly ahead, and the line of the Irish coast was a blackness against the star-dappled sky. Cody steered the Áilteoir due south, following the line of Rathlin’s southern arm. Once past the Rue Point and the South Lighthouse at the tip of Rathlin, he turned southeast, intending to land east of Ballycastle in the less-settled land between Fair Head and Torr Head. From there, Gary would try to make his way south to Belfast, where he could determine the best way to the States.

Caitlyn felt worry settle in her stomach. She’d helped him plan this escape, keeping to herself all the doubts and fears. She’d judiciously enlisted Duncan MacEnnis’s help, and the Constable had recommended a local joker who could create the false IDs and passport Gary was now carrying, under the name he’d first given her: John Green. It can’t work, she wanted to tell him. A black man walking about in Ireland -how more conspicuous could you be? The first garda you come across will figure out who you are and place you under arrest.

She clamped her lips shut, and concentrated on keeping her balance with the motion of the boat in the long swells. If he were going to leave, she wanted to be with him as long as she could. She wanted to see him on the shore. She wanted to watch him walk away into the night. She didn’t think she could bear the pain of the loss if something went wrong and she hadn’t been there.

“We’re coming up on the two-mile mark,” Cody said from his seat at the controls. He grinned at Gary and Caitlyn, exposing the twin rows of tiny triangular teeth that lined his mouth. “Another few minutes and you’re technically off the island.”

Gary nodded. He was standing alongside Caitlyn, his body a welcome warmth against the stiff sea breeze. He put his arm around her. Neither one of them said anything-it had all been said earlier that day, along with the tears, the kisses, a final few stolen moments of intimacy. His arm brought her close; she tried to bring her head down to lay against his chest and halfway succeeded. “Promise you’ll be careful,” she said, no more than a whisper. She wondered whether he would hear her, but she felt his lips on her hair and a kiss.

“I will,” he answered.

“Shite!” The curse came from Cody, and Caitlyn felt Gary ’s body jerk and then move quickly away.

“What’s the matter?”

“I have a blip on the sonar. Out there.” He pointed to starboard, close to where Ballycastle glittered. Red and white lights blinked closer to them, sending wavering reflections chasing themselves over the water. They all heard the noise at the same time: the full-throttled roar of powerful engines. “Bleeding patrol boat. You’d best get in the cabin, Gary. Don’t want them seeing you out on the deck…”

Gary ducked into the small cabin and closed the door behind him. A few moments later, the blue-white glare of a spotlight stabbed across the waves and settled on them. The patrol boats, a fast cruiser, pulled within hailing distance and shut its engines. “Hey, Cody!” someone yelled. “What the hell are you about in that rusting tub of yours, now?”

Cody blinked into the spotlight, shielding his eyes. “Cap’n Blane, is it? What’s the problem? I’m still in Rathlin waters.”

“You’re a good half-mile outside, man.”

“Not according to my instruments.”

“Then your instruments are off or you’ve forgotten how to read them. And since when do you do your fishing at night? You know the regs, Cody-prepare to be boarded for inspection.”

“Ah, now, Cap’n, you don’t be needing to waste your time with that,” Cody protested hurriedly. He clambered down from the top of the cabin to stand next to Caitlyn. The spotlight widened as he moved, then narrowed again. Caitlyn lifted her arm, squinting into the light. “The truth be, Cap’n, I’m not exactly fishing. I was taking Caitlyn here for a bit of a ride, and I suppose I wasn’t paying as much attention to the instruments as I might be, if you take my drift. You’re a married man too, are you not, Cap’n? So I expect you understand. Do you think I’d be trying to smuggle something over in this puttering slow thing?”

Cody’s arm was around her, and she could smell the odor of rotting fish. But it was easy to smile… “I’d hate for something like this to get back to my missus,” Cody said.

Caitlyn could hear conversation, then a burst of rough laughter and someone’s voice saying audibly, “She’s missing a nose if she’s shagging the Codman…” The spotlight snapped off. Afterimages danced purple and yellow in Caitlyn’s vision. “Turn that rustbucket around, then,” Blane’s voice called loudly. “And next time, keep it closer to home.”

Cody waved; the patrol boat’s engines coughed and then roared as the prow lifted and the props churned the water to white froth. The lights receded, heading back toward Ballycastle. Cody went back to the wheel; Gary emerged from the cabin.

Cody spun the wheel, and the Áilteoir turned. The South Lighthouse gleamed ahead of them. “They’ll be watching now,” Cody said. “I don’t have a choice.”

“I know,” Gary said. “Maybe next time, eh?”

Cody sniffed. “Don’t know about this ‘next time,’ either,” he said. “The Áilteoir ain’t much but she’s all I have. I come out again like this, and Blane or whoever’s out there waiting isn’t going to be so accommodating. I lose the boat, and I lose everything. Doing this once is one thing, doing it again…” Codman gave a massive blink, his bulbous eyes seeming to vanish into his skull and them pop out again. “I’m sorry. I hope you understand.”

Caitlyn thought Gary might be angry or upset. Instead, strangely, he shrugged and sighed. “I know, Codman. I have a plane rusting on the bottom north of Rathlin that was my life, that I’d scraped and saved and borrowed to buy. And I threw it away for…” He shook his head. “I don’t even know for what, but it sure as hell wasn’t for me. So yeah, I understand.”

He said nothing else on the way back. He held Caitlyn’s hand, and he stared over the stern of the boat toward the lights of Ireland.

MAY, 1997

Each word was a separate, labored breath of air. “Tell… them… to… come… in.”

The doctor’s eyestalks blinked, and he scuttled away crab-like, his brilliant orange and blue carapace leaving her vision. Caitlyn heard him talking softly with the two of them, and a few moments later, she heard Gary and Moira enter the bedroom. Their faces swam above her as they stood over the bed. Gary was trying to smile; Moira was openly crying.

Dying was suffocation by inches. Dying was slowly being turned to painted stone. Dying was forcing the muscles of lungs and heart to pump and knowing that it was a battle she had already lost, that she could continue fighting for only a few more minutes.

At least she would be a beautiful, smiling corpse.

“I… love… you,” she told them. “I’m… sorry.”

“You can just be quiet,” Gary told her. “There’s nothing to be sorry about.” His hand stroked her face; she felt nothing of the caress-not the touch, not the heat. “We love you, too. I wish-” He stopped.

She would have nodded, would have smiled. She could only cry. “Moira?” she said.

“What do you want, Máthair?” She sniffed and scrubbed at her eyes with her sleeve. It hurt most to see her, to see how her face had lost its baby fat over the last few years. To see her shape changing to that of a young woman. To see the glimmer of the adult that she might become-and to know that because of the virus, she would never be that person.

Caitlyn had thought that the worst thing would be there to witness what the wild card virus would do to her daughter. Now she knew it was worse to leave and not know. “You… be… careful,” she told Moira. “Every… one… will… watch… out… for… you.”

“I know, Máthair.” Then the tears came, and Moira hugged her desperately as Caitlyn strained uselessly to hug her in return, to move the arms frozen at her sides.

“Go… on… now,” she told her. “Please.”

Gary slowly, gently, pulled Moira away from Caitlyn. They started to walk away, but Caitlyn called out to him. “ Gary…”

“Go on, Moira,” she heard him tell her. “I’ll be right out.” Then his face returned, hovering over her. “Hey,” he said. “Are you in pain, love? Maybe Doc Crab can-”

“No,” she told him. “No… pain.” She forced another breath through her lungs. She would have closed her eyes, but those muscles were no longer working, either. “You… kept… your… promises.”

“It was easy. You made it easy.”

“One… more.”

“What?” She saw his face, his eyes narrowing. “Ah,” he said, and the exhalation said more than words.

“No… you… don’t… understand… Promise… that… if… you… get… the… chance… to… go… home… you’ll… still… go. Don’t… worry… about… Moira. They… will… take… care… of… her… here.”

“Caitlyn-”

“No!” The shout, though hardly more than a hoarse whisper, cost her. She had to struggle for the next breath and was afraid it wouldn’t come. He waited, his hand stroking her hair. “Promise… it. That’s… all… I… can… give… you… now. It’s… what… you… want.”

“I know,” he said. “But it’s not going to happen.”

“… promise…”

Gary sighed. “All right. I promise. I’ll go home.”

JANUARY, 1998

“… it’s not simple, I know, but you can get it. First you have to isolate ‘x’ on one side of the equation, so…”

A knock on the door interrupted the algebra lesson. Moira shrugged at Gary and went to answer it. “Good evening to you, Moira,” Constable MacEnnis said. The garda stood outside the door in a misting drizzle, beads of water running down his cap, the impossibly round, white eyes bright in the murky day. “This just came for Gary. I think he’ll want to read it.” He handed Moira an envelope. The ivory paper felt thick and heavy in his hand, spotted a bit with the rain. “It’s from Mayor Carrick,” MacEnnis added.

She could feel Gary behind her at the door. She handed him the envelope and stepped back. “Come on in,” she said to MacEnnis. “No sense in standing out in the rain.”

MacEnnis touched the crown of the cap with knobbed, scarred fingers. “I don’t think so, Moira. I should get back…” He nodded to them and walked back to the Fiat parked at the side of the road. Moira shut the door, turning to find Gary still staring at the envelope in his hands. She knew then.

“Go on,” she told him. “Open it.”

He seemed to start, as if she’d shaken him from some reverie, then slipped his forefinger under the flap and slid it along the seal. He pulled out the paper-cream-colored legal bond-and unfolded it. She could see him reading the words, saw the tremble start in his hands and the eyes widen. Without a word, he handed it to her.

… granted a presidential pardon, effective immediately. Any and all charges pending against you have been dropped by the governments of the United States, the Republic of Ireland, and the United Kingdom…

She handed the paper back to him, then flung her arms around his neck, giggling as if she were nine again. “Oh, Gary! I’m so happy for you!”

He hugged her, but the embrace was half-hearted and he released her almost immediately. “Moira, I can’t…”

She didn’t answer. Instead, she went to the mantle, standing there for a moment as the heat from the peat fire warmed the front of her body, then turned, serious. “The night Máthair died, I listened to her talking to you.”

He rattled the paper in his hand. “Moira, this doesn’t mean that I have to go now. Or… we can both go. Would you like that? Would you like to go to New York City?”

She shook her head. “No. I wouldn’t like that at all. I’m staying here. I’ll be thirteen this year, Gary, and there’s plenty of people here to look out for me. I’m Rathlin’s only child, remember? They all know me.”

“I should stay until-” He stopped. They both knew what he meant.

“I know my odds, Gary,” she said. “I’ve known them for a long time. I also know that almost all latents express either at puberty or during some great emotional crisis. Well, the virus didn’t show itself when Máthair died, and I doubt anything will be more traumatic than that, so…” She shrugged. “I don’t want you to see me die, Gary. I don’t want your last memory of me to be something awful. I’d rather stay that little girl you helped to learn her math.”

“God, you sound like her.”

Moira laughed at that, pleased, and with the laugh was a trace of the childish giggle. She came toward him. The paper with its words of release was smoldering in his grasp, and she took it from him. “This is what you always wanted, and Máthair knew that. I heard you make her a promise,” Moira told him. “Now keep it.”

He said nothing for a time, and she saw steam rise from the corners of his eyes. She went to the mantle and took Caitlyn’s pocket watch from where is sat, bringing it over to him and pressing the round form into his hand. “Remember us,” she said. “Remember us as we were.”

“I will,” he said finally.

The sound from the television set was tinny and the picture half lost in static. “Do you have any statement to make?” a reporter asked, shoving a microphone toward Gary, a darkness in a blizzard of transmitted snow and teeming rain from the storm flailing the island. She could see the curve of Church Bay behind him, gray in the downpour and besieged by a small invading squadron of press with cameras.

“I’m going home,” he said simply. “That’s all. I don’t have anything else to say, and I’d like you all to just leave me alone.” The press of reporters shouted a torrent of questions, but he ignored them, pushing through them. She heard some faint cries: “Damn, look out! He’ll burn you if you touch him!” The cameras pursued him, but Gary pushed his way up the ramp and onto the ferry. The reporter who’d asked the question turned to face the camera. “This is the scene, live on Rathlin Island- ”

Moira touched the remote and the television went dark. She stared at the glass tube for several minutes before getting up. She pulled on a sweater and her slicker and went outside to check on the sheep and open the gate to the pasture.

She had moved in with Wide Abby Scanlon, who’d agreed to be her guardian, but Moira told Mayor Carrick that she wanted to keep the old house and move into it herself when she was older. The man had wriggled his rat nose and she knew what he was thinking. “Chances are that you won’t be needing the house, dearie. Chances are you’ll be dead…” But he’d agreed, and every day she walked back to the old place. Every day she did the chores and pretended for a time that she was an adult and this was her house now, and that she was living here for the rest of her life.

That she would die here, as Máthair had, as her Gramma had.

She swept out the barn and laid down new straw, then walked out across the field to the cliffs and just stood there as the sheep grazed, watching the waves thunder into the rocks in cascades of white foam. After a few hours, she went back to the cottage to fix supper-she should get back to Abby’s house, but she didn’t want to. Not yet.

She crumbled newspaper and placed it on the grate, then put a few turves of peat on top. She reached up to the mantlepiece for the book of matches and crouched back down.

The pack was empty. She tossed the empty cardboard into the fireplace. The stillness of the house struck her then, the silence lurking inside even as the storm softly lashed the structure. She wanted to cry, hunkered there in front of the cold, dead fireplace, listening to the rain patter and splash against the windows and roof while the house itself was consumed with somber quiet.

She heard the door open, heard footsteps cross quickly toward her. A dark hand reached past her shoulder and touched the paper. A flame curled away, yellow fire spreading as the paper began to crackle and smoke curl away toward the flue. She could hear the ticking of a watch. “I knew I could find you here when you weren’t at Abby’s,” he said.

He was smiling at her, uncertainly. She tried to frown sternly at him. “You broke your promise,” Moira began, but Gary shook his head.

“I promised Caitlyn that if I could, I’d go home,” he said. “I got as far the train for Belfast before I realized that I was going the wrong way.”

“ Gary..” She stopped. Took a breath and let it out again. She wasn’t going to hug him, wasn’t going to smile at him, because if she did either of those things, she’d be lost. “It’s going to happen soon. I can feel it. You should have gone. I want you to go.”

“Is that what you really want? To be alone? To be with Wide Abby when it happens and not me? If it is, tell me now and I’ll go.”

“He cupped his large, dark hands around her cheeks, warm and soft and loving. He kissed her forehead, and she sank into his embrace, pulling herself tightly to him, a child again, sobbing into his chest. He simply held her, rocking back and forth as they sat on the floor in front of the fire. “I don’t want to die, Gary,” she said. “I’m so scared… so scared…”

“I know, I know,” he crooned, whispering. “I’m scared, too. But whatever happens, I’ll be with you. I promise you that. I’ll be with you.”