Filed To Story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
I hurry back to the kitchen to light a dozen candles. It’s really late now, and full dark.
“Okay,” I call up the stairs. “Dinner’s ready!”
They all but trip over themselves coming down.
“Oh my god,” Fen breathes.
Laid out on the kitchen table is our feast. I have cooked a roast chicken (which took days to defrost) and all the trimmings: platters of roast vegetables, stuffing and gravy, fresh bread, as well as a fettuccini dish with lemons and butter and capers for anyone who doesn’t want to eat meat. There is a cheesecake and mud brownies (favorites in my family, both of which I have made for Liv and Jay on every birthday since we were kids), and a bottle of wine, and a weird homemade lemonade I tried to make for Orly which is basically just a sugar syrup with frozen lemon cubes in it. Within the light of the sea of candles it seems almost mythic, this feast.
The family are dazed. I am not sure how Dom will feel about it, but we look at each other and there is something hungry in him.
“Your hair!” Orly points an accusing finger at his sister, staring wide-eyed at her skull.
“The bald twins look like they’re in a cult,” Raff agrees.
Fen and I share a glance and laugh.
“First we drink,” I say.
Instead of pouring the wine into cups, I take a swig right from the bottle and pass it around. “Let it stain your mouths and dribble down your throats,” I say.
Dom doesn’t say anything as Raff takes a gulp, but when Fen reaches for the bottle I feel him stiffen beside me, and I touch his arm to stay him. She is nearly eighteen and she deserves to be a teenager for a night. Fen takes a gulp and then passes it to her dad, who does the same, and Orly has his lemonade, which he says is the best thing he’s ever tasted, probably because he’s never tasted so much sugar. We keep passing the bottle until it’s gone, until it has stained our teeth and lips and chins.
Dom can’t help himself, he says with an ache, “The rations, Row.” Not just the food and drink but the candles, too, and the gas it took to cook all of this.
I say, “Fuck the rations,” and we eat, every last morsel of it, savoring our mouthfuls and moaning with delight. We eat until our bellies can’t take another skerrick, until we are, at long last, full. Then we sit back in our chairs and Dom and I drink sherry and we talk, and while Dom and Fen don’t speak directly to each other, there is an undeniable easing of the tension. As the kids chat I watch their dad’s eyes, I watch how that gaze moves between each of his children’s faces, I see the pride there, the swelling of his chest, the tiny quirks of his lips, the joy they give him. I think how lucky they are to have him, that it was into his care they were born. What a gift to be so well loved.
We decide we will take it in turns to each have one really long hot shower. There is a risk, of course, that the hot water will run out, so we spend time discussing who most deserves to go first and who should be last, and when we can’t agree on that we decide to draw straws.
“Is this what it’s like on the mainland?” Orly asks. “You can stay in the shower as long as you want?”
“Not really,” Dom says.
“Oh.” Orly looks sad.
“I dunno why you’re complaining,” I tell him. “The battle it takes to get you in a bath, my god.”
He giggles, then turns serious. “So. I was thinking about your snow gums.” He is looking at me.
“Were you now,” I murmur.
“I was thinking you’re gonna need help to replant them.”
Fen nods eagerly.
“And to rebuild your home,” Raff says.
I stare at the three kids.
My eyes and throat prickle. It’s the openness of them, and their generosity. It’s the thought of them entering my other life, my real life. Of meeting my sisters and their children. Of setting foot on my land, which is ash now but still mine, and so much a part of who I was. I feel impossibly moved by the three of them, I feel a thrill at the thought of offering this land to them, a place to keep them, to provide for them, but I am simultaneously overcome with the reality of the promises I’ve made, the obligations I am bound to. Dom is looking into his glass. He says nothing, maybe wishing as I do that things could be so simple.
We don’t clean up straight away, which is tantamount to a crime in this household. We leave the mess, leave carnage behind us, and I hand Raff his violin. He looks hesitant, but I say, “Something to call the ghosts,” and he understands, and nods.
I guide them all outside, into the windy night. It is dark still, but the nights here are so short that the early morning light is already starting to creep its way in.
“It’s cold!” Orly shouts.
“Then you’d better dance,” I say, and we do. All of us, even Dom. As Raff plays a riotous, endless song, we lift our arms and we spin and twist and twirl and jump, we make shapes of our bodies, we make languages of them. I see Orly on Dom’s shoulders, his hands lifted to
the stars, giving great whoops of excitement as his dad runs in wide arcs. I see Raff stamping his feet as he plays with abandon, and Fen making him laugh so hard the music skips but only for a beat. I see a moment-a moment to make my heart falter-in which father and daughter stumble face-to-face and look at each other, I see them each trying to decide what to do, how to move through this moment, and then I see Dom reach for his daughter’s hand and spin her, I see him dip her low and I see her laugh. I close my eyes, drinking it all in, knowing it is a place in time that I will never forget. The world is dangerous and we will not survive it. But there is this. Impermanent as it may be.
I am certain I’m not the only one who feels the presences on the wind. All the hungry ghosts of Shearwater Island, come to dance with us on the hill.
Dominic
To live for your children seems a normal thing, a respectable one; to live because of your children is something else. Mine are the blood of me, and the oxygen in that blood, the airflow and the neurons firing and the stretch and release of muscles in limbs, they are the foundations that make up my skeleton, all the collagen and calcium upon which I stand and fall, and the pulse and the flow and the beat. But I think maybe this is too much for them to be. The breath of a man. The life of him. I think it is too heavy a thing for children to carry.
We dance on the hill and I watch them, and I think that I have been holding them hostage. So we will leave this place and I will let them go, I will let them become. Not Orly yet, but one day. And for the first time I realize that this will not lessen the profundity or fervency of how I love them. It will not mean I stop protecting them, would not lay down my life for them, will not be there every second that they need me. It just means that I can’t let them worry about me anymore. Whatever that takes.
I look at the woman who has made all of this clear to me. Who has given us this gift. She is so beautiful in the glow of the rising sun, as she tilts her head back to laugh with my children. How did I not see this beauty the first moment I set eyes on her?
Later, we huddle in front of the fireplace to get warm. Rowan rises for bed before the rest of us. I take her hand, wanting to stay her, but
she looks at me and tells me to enjoy the moment with my kids, and I know what all of this has been about. She has done this for us.
When it is just me and my children, Fen moves to sit beside me. I feel no hurt or betrayal-all of that has trickled out of me. Instead all I see now is how terrible it must have been for her, to do such a thing, to think she
had to do it, for me. I reach out and run my hand over her short spiky hair. In her eyes is a question.
“Impossible to tell from the seals now,” I say, and she smiles.
Fen takes something out of her pocket. “I saved these.”
In her hand are Claire’s three wedding rings. The first engagement band I saved up for in our early twenties, the wedding band, and the ring I got her on our tenth anniversary, not long before she died. An immense wave of emotion rises up in me at the sight of them. Something like love and loss and pain and relief. For a second the desire to take them and close my palm around them is so strong I can hardly breathe. But I only need to look at my children and it passes.
“Those are yours,” I say. “One for each of you. That’s what she’d want.”
Rowan