CHAPTER 24

James was leaving. Leonora saw it in his round eyes, in the talking brows that always spoke his thoughts; she saw it in Father McIntyre’s face, in the shadows that he dragged. The priest’s light flickered like a candle near a draft and she could not look at him without shrinking from his pain like a slug under salt.

If the sea and the sun and the cliffs were beautiful, they only paled next to James. For she loved him as only a child can love another, with arms stretched so wide and open that the expanse of the world could fit in the embrace and there would still be room to spare. Her heart nearly split in joy for James, to know that his family had come, that he should get the life he deserved, and until the morning that was enough.

Then it came. The dawn. She met him in the hall. Did not have eyes or thoughts to the Deacon or to the Father waiting by the door—only James, his clothes packed in an old work shirt, the sleeves tied as a handle, his knuckles white with clutching. He saw her, too. For a moment, neither moved, only stared, breathed.

“I’ll check the carriage over,” said the Deacon. “A few minutes, James. That’s all.”

There was panic in James’s eyes. Leonora squashed her own as she took his hand. He looked down at her fingers, his nostrils flared. She squeezed his hand, pushed the burn away.

He shook his head then, almost angrily. “I don’t have to go.” He looked at her quickly, then away as if she hurt his eyes. “I’ll stay, Leo. I’ll stay if you want.”

She bled like a bruise below the surface, blue and black pain that spread under her skin while her face remained unchanged. She pulled him by the hand and he followed. The burn grew hot and rough inside, but she would not acknowledge it, sent it to her toes, told it to wait. She walked him into the hazy morning. Step, step, step. Absent, dreamed movements; it was all a dream—the thick mist, the gray horses strapped to the carriage, the parsons black as shadows.

Leonora pulled James to Father McIntyre, the man’s eyes rimmed red. She let go of her friend’s hand but stood close. Father McIntyre reached out blindly, his hands shaking, and hugged James tight. A cry left the priest’s throat and then he pulled away, his face, his body twitching.

James glanced at the Deacon already sitting in the carriage with reins in hand, then turned to Leonora. She smiled through the fire, held him steady with her eyes, held him up by the arms with only her will. His voice cracked. “I can stay, Leo.”

“Go.” Her pitch was high, nearly too thin to hear. James blinked in a daze and turned to the carriage. He was stuck in the dream, too.

His back had only just turned when the first tear dripped from her eye, trickled down her cheek and landed on her lips still poised in a smile.

James sat in the beaten leather seat. The Deacon smacked the reins and the horses found their rhythm. James’s back swayed with the carriage. He did not look back and for this she was thankful, for the burn threatened to take over if he met her eyes.

The carriage crept through the haze, turned gray. James’s brown hair muted but was still visible against the back of his neck. Then the white took over and he disappeared in the mist.

Leonora turned to Father McIntyre, a granite statue. The priest was gone, swallowed up in black instead of white. In his place stood cloth and skin and eyes, all stone, blank and flat.

The darkness came for her now and something far and deep shrieked in terror. The burn from a life not so long ago, from an early-morning dawn, returned. She knew those lost eyes, that tremor in bony fingers, the drawn face of a broken man. She remembered another broken man, another father who had dropped her hand and vanished into the very air. The tears released. Tears that flowed thickly around her eyes, blinding them and soaking her cheeks and the collar of her dress. She wanted to scream, wanted to shake his arms: Don’t break! Don’t leave me! But the man did not hear her sobs, did not see her, and turned blindly to the church as a ghost.

Alone in the silence, again. The waves hushed, the birds absent. The trees did not wobble a leaf and there Leonora stood with the panic circling about her chest. She could break and she felt the cracks and she shook her head plaintively. Leonora squeezed her eyes tight, knew how easy it would be to just give in, to crumble in the dust until it all disappeared, but part of her fought hysterically, the fear of vanishing worse than the pain.

She pulled through the despair to the one face that was not broken—James. She focused every thought and feeling on him. He was going home. She pictured him in the arms of his new family, in a life where his brows were never knit, and she smiled through the tears. If his life was happy, then she would not break.

Leonora’s body opened again, the grief still whole, but she was still there. She reached for every beam of goodness James had brought her and she clutched it to her ribs and scratched through every other memory to collect the crumbs and remnants of him and she tucked them secretly and hoarded them in case they tried to escape.

Leonora stood tiny and straight against the expanse of the seaside land and did not break. But the lesson had been taught well and she would not forget. It joined the threads and pulled tight and knit hard into the fabric of her being.

They all left her in the end.