Illyria (2 page)

10

But I was. I took a deep breath and pinched my nose, closed my eyes and shoved aside the moving tangle of leaves, and ducked inside.

Beneath the porch, it was dim and cool and smelled of earth and old paint. A harlequin pattern of sunlight filtered through the trellis, pied with the shadows of leaves and vines. There were clay pots and rusted garden tools underfoot; also large black beetles and yellow-or blue-spotted salamanders that looked like lost toys. There were brown recluse spiders, too, which various elderly aunts claimed had caused the deaths of careless servants in an earlier day; cave crickets; and, flanking the small raised doorway that led into a dark anteroom, a half dozen plaster leprechauns that my grandfather had brought back from one of his yearly trips to Connemara. The leprechauns were the size of small children, and painted in too-bright colors-- bottle-green jackets, scarlet caps, yellow belt buckles. Most of the paint had gone from their faces, which gave them the eerie look of grave monuments.

I was afraid of them, too.

Rogan knew that. And so he waited, as always, squatting inside the doorway with one hand already outstretched to pull me up beside him. I flapped my hand at the ground, scattering invisible bugs, then sat.

"Thanks," said Rogan.

He reached into a niche between two wallboards where we kept a candle in a blue glass holder and a box of matches, lit the candle, and set it back in the wall. The unsteady light washed over him and I stared, as always; unembarrassed because we were alone, and it was dark. And it was Rogan.

11

He was so beautiful. I never understood why it wasn't spoken: that he was the most beautiful boy you had ever seen. Or maybe it was only me who felt that. The Tierneys were all tall, and our hair was brown or fair or tawny, and we all had deep-blue eyes. There hadn't been a Tierney with anything but blue eyes in five hundred years, my father said. All of the Tierney boys were handsome in a bluff, cleanshaven Hyannisport way, and most of the girls were pretty.

Rogan looked like he'd fallen from a painting.

He was tall like the rest of us, with long legs, long arms, square sturdy hands. His hair was reddish-gold, fine as a baby's hair, and he grew it as long as he could until his father dragged him to the barber up in Getty Square. He had high cheekbones in a feline face--not like a house cat's; more a cougar or lynx, something strong and furtive and quick. His nose was like mine, although it had been broken more than once. His mouth was wide and surprisingly delicate, the only thing about him that might have seemed girlish. Until he smiled, and showed narrow white teeth that were also like an animal's. He had huge, deep-set eyes--wary eyes, which made it slightly alarming when he suddenly turned them on you--and they weren't Tierney blue but a true aquamarine, the palest blue-green, changeable as sea-water in sunlight or cloud.

But the most striking thing about him was the way he moved. Gracefully--sensually, I would have said if I were older--but also with this strange lightness, almost an unease; as though he had trouble getting his footing. His arms moved as if drawing patterns in the air; he'd tilt his head sometimes like he heard something. Even his furtive gaze wasn't sly but oddly watchful.

12

Yet it wasn't a vigilance that protected him from his brothers or his father, and it was also completely unconscious--I knew because I watched him constantly, had been watching him for as long as I could remember, and maybe for longer.

Once I eavesdropped, unseen, as Aunt Kate and my mother discussed him. The two of them didn't like each other: my mother was suspicious of her sister-in-law's oddly ageless beauty, her chic black gamine hair and expensive clothes, and, it was whispered, her wealthy lovers.

"Fey," Aunt Kate said. She twisted her emerald ring as though it hurt her finger. "Rogan's fey." My mother must have made a face, because Aunt Kate went on, annoyed. "That's nor what it means."

I heard my mother draw on her cigarette. "All I can say is, if I ever had a red-headed child, I'd strangle it."

Now, watching Rogan, all I wanted to do was touch him. Instead I clutched my own skinny thighs and looked at him sideways, while he held up the match and watched it burn to his fingertips. Finally he tossed the match aside.

"Listen," he said.

I cocked my head. "I don't hear anything."

"No, idiot--listen to
me.
My voice. Listen to me talking. Talking talking talking. Hear it?"

I did. "Wow," I said. "It broke!"

"Yeah. And listen to
this--"

He put his hands on his knees and leaned forward, his face jutting into the darkness until I could no longer see it. He began to sing.

13

"When all beside a vigil keep,

The West's asleep, the West's asleep..."

My flesh crawled. I knew the song from one of my father's Clancy Brothers records. "The West's Awake."

"And long a brave and haughty race

Honoured and sentinelled the place.

Sing, Oh! not e'en their sons' disgrace

Can quite destroy their glory's trace..."

I had never heard it sung like this. I had never heard
anything
sung like this, or heard a guy's voice remotely sound like this. It wasn't even singing; more a sustained wail, Rogan's mouth somehow shaping words that seemed to claw against the voice that formed them. He was
keening,
in a tenor so pure and wild and primal that it didn't even sound like music: it was like being burned by a song. It was like hearing something die.

"But hark] a voice like thunder spake,

The West's awake! The West's awake..."

His voice rose to a falsetto, then fell. It held the last notes for so long that I couldn't tell when they faded into an echo, until the echo itself dropped into silence and Rogan sank back into the half-light beside me.

14

"Holy cow." I was crying--when had I started to cry?--not just my face wet but my hands, my shirt, my jeans. "Rogan, that--"

I stopped. His chin was tucked against his chest, his hands clutching his head as he rocked back and forth, mouth bared in a grimace as he moaned something over and over again, words I couldn't understand. I didn't even know if they
were
words. He looked ghastly, unearthly; like a picture I had once seen of a body trapped in a lava flow. I stared, too terrified to move, until he turned toward me and I saw his eyes, his own face streaked with tears; and suddenly I understood what he was saying--

"I made that--I made that--I made that--"

I grabbed him, hugging him to my skinny chest as we both began to laugh hysterically.

"That was me!" He almost shrieked, and I covered his mouth with my hand, still laughing. "That was me!"

"Shut up! Rogan, shhh---"

He bit my finger. I yelped and snatched my hand back, then fell on him. He held me so hard I punched him. "You're choking me!"

He relaxed his hold. I rubbed my face against his shirt to dry my tears, then pressed my fist against his chest. His heart pounded so hard it was like another fist hammered inside him and I splayed my fingers, imagining I could hold it, like a baseball, or a stone. He smelled as he always did, of detergent and sweat, his mother's Chanel No. 5, and dirt and chalk dust.

But he smelled of something else, too. He smelled the way his brothers did, and my older boy cousins; their tree-house smell,

15

sweetish and rank, slightly ammoniacal; at once green and earthen. No one had told me what that smell was, and nobody ever would. But I knew.

"Maddy," he whispered.

He ran his finger along my chapped lips, then lightly tapped the wires of my braces. I took off my glasses as he tilted his head and brought his mouth close, rubbing his lips across mine. His breath was warm and sour. I stroked his hair, tentatively, drew my hand down to cup his ear then touched his cheek, the line of his jaw. He'd always felt like me, smooth and clean. I had never noticed hair on his face but I felt it now, his skin damp and slightly abraded, like touching a cat's tongue. He angled himself so that he was on top of me and gently pushed me down, so that we were lying face-to-face.

We stayed like that forever, breathing, sometimes moving. I felt as though my clothes had disappeared, and my skin; as though my bones had uncurled like ferns to twine with his. Finally he stirred and touched my face.

"Where are your glasses?"

We sat up. The candle had burned out. The dark underground room felt warmer than it had earlier, and it no longer smelled like dirt and earthworms. It smelled like Rogan. It smelled like us.

"It will all be different now," he said. His tone absent, as though reciting something he only half remembered. "Will you help me with that stuff for math?"

"Sure," I said, and scrambled after him to head back outside.

16

***

ROGAN WAS RIGHT: IT WAS DIFFERENT. NOT ALL AT

once, and not immediately.

But the world changed, everything about us changed. Everything about me, certainly.

The school year ended. It was the summer before high school. Early in July my braces came off. After that I refused to get my hair cut in the ghastly pixie cut I'd had since I was two years old. The stuff Aunt Kate gave me for my skin began to work. My face cleared up.

And I started to wean myself from my glasses, using them only to read, or when my parents were around. The rest of the time I kept them in an ugly orange case in my pocket, until the day that I forgot the case in my room.

"Maddy." My mother frowned when she saw me at breakfast. "Where are your glasses? You didn't lose them?"

I took a deep breath. "I don't need them anymore."

My mother made the face she made at dinner when someone said they weren't hungry.

"I really don't," I said quickly. "I can read fine. Aunt Kate said you should take me to see Dr. Gordon and he'll tell you."

"Aunt Kate." My mother glowered. But she did take me to see Dr. Gordon.

And it was true, Dr. Gordon said I didn't need my glasses. Someday I would, when I was older, but for now, as long as I didn't get headaches, I could do without them.

17

"Hooray!" said Rogan. He had grown two more inches, and was now a full head taller than me. "You look a
lot
better."

Aunt Kate regarded me more measuringly.

"I'll take you to my salon." She rubbed the ends of my hair between her fingers and grimaced. "Alain will know what to do about this."

The next time she went into the city, I went with her. My hair was trimmed, not cut, by Alain, a man who wore one chandelier earring and motorcycle boots.

"Beautiful eyes," he said. He glanced at my aunt in the mirror. "How old?"

"She'll be fifteen in October."

"Ohhhh." He smiled at me and arched his eyebrows rakishly. "You're in high school!"

"In the fall," I said.

He nodded, bending to snip my bangs. "Boyfriend?"

I looked up to see Aunt Kate staring back at me from the mirror, the blue Tierney eyes brilliant and faintly threatening in that elegant, ageless face.

"No," she said.

When Alain was finished, Aunt Kate paid him, then took me to lunch at O'Neals' Baloon.

"Good," she said. She watched approvingly as I ate my hot fudge sundae. "This will grow out nicely, Maddy. You look very glamorous."

Rogan had changed as well. He wasn't just taller--his voice had grown, too. At night I'd listen as he stepped onto the tiny balcony outside his room and sang "Wild Horses" in that eerie keening tenor. When he stopped, we'd double over laughing as all the Tierney dogs

18

began to howl, followed by a chorus of angry grown-ups yelling at them to shut up.

In July Rogan joined the choir at St. Brendan's. Not the children's choir, which was all girls--not me, I couldn't sing--but the grown-up choir, which sang at ten thirty High Mass. Our fathers attended Mass on Saturday afternoon so they could play golf on Sunday morning. Our mothers and siblings went to twelve o'clock Mass on Sunday, for those laggards who slept late. Aunt Kate only went at Christmas and Easter.

But I'd walk up with Rogan and sit in the middle of the church (High Mass was never crowded) and listen, bewitched, as his voice soared through the vaulted space, chanting the
Kyrie
and
Te Deum
and
Gloria in excelsis.
It made my flesh crawl. Not just me: I could see other members of the congregation shift uncomfortably in their pews, Tierney great-uncles and -aunts and the Connells' grandparents all staring fixedly at their missalettes until old Monsignor Burke sang the Recessional in his quavering voice, and the Mass was ended.

Only Mrs. Rossi, our diminutive school secretary, seemed to feel as I did. Once she waited with me outside the church for Rogan to come down from the choir loft.

"That was so beautiful, Rogan," she whispered as the rest of the congregation hurried to their cars. "You should be singing at St. Patrick's Cathedral."

Rogan waited till she left, then made a face.

"Another church? Screw that," he said, and we walked home.

Back on Arden Terrace, we hung out with kids from school who came down from Mile Square Road. Our siblings and cousins were all in high school now, or college. One of Aunt Trixie's boys had