When he fell silent, looked back at the pendant, Allena slipped it under her sweater. And feeling the quiet heat of it against her heart, waited for him to continue.
10
“AFTER me, my parents tried for more children. Twice my mother miscarried, and the second, late in her term…damaged her. I was young, but I remember her having to stay in bed a long time and how pale she was even when she could get up. My father set a chair out for her, so she could be outside and watch the sea. She was never well after that, but I didn’t know.”
“You were just a boy.” When she touched a hand to his, he looked down, smiled a little.
“Soft heart, Allena.” He turned his hand over, squeezed hers once, then released. “She was ill the summer I was twelve. Three times that spring, my father took her on the ferry, and I stayed with my cousins. She was dying, and no one could find a way to save her. Part of me knew that, but I pushed it out of my mind. Every time she came home again, I was certain it was all right.”
“Poor little boy,” Allena murmured.
“He doesn’t deserve as much sympathy as you think. That summer, when I was twelve, she walked down to the sea with me. She should’ve been in bed, but she wouldn’t go. She told me of the stone dance and the star and my place in it. She showed me the pendant you’re wearing now, though I’d seen it countless times before. She closed my hand around it with her own, and I felt it breathe.
“I was so angry. I wasn’t different from the other lads I knew, no different from my cousins and playmates. Why would she say so? She told me I was young to have it passed on to me, but she and my father had discussed it. He’d agreed to let her do it, in her time and her own way. She wanted to give me the pendant before she left us.”
“You didn’t want it.”
“No, by God, I didn’t. I wanted her. I wanted things to be as they were. When she was well and I was nothing more than a lad running over the hills. I wanted her singing in the kitchen again, the way she did before she was ill.”
Everything inside her ached for him, but when she reached out, Conal waved her off. “I shouted at her, and I ran from her. She called after me, and tried to come after me, but I was strong and healthy and she wasn’t. Even when I heard her weeping, I didn’t look back. I went and hid in my uncle’s boat shed. It wasn’t till the next morning that my father found me.
“He didn’t take a strap to me as I might have expected, or drag me home by the ear as I deserved. He just sat down beside me, pulled me against him, and told me my mother had died in the night.”
His eyes were vivid as they met Allena’s. She wondered that the force of them didn’t burn away the tears that swam in her own. “I loved her. And my last words to her were the bitter jabs of an angry child.”
“Do you think—oh, Conal, can you possibly believe those words are what she took with her?”
“I left her alone.”
“And you still blame a frightened and confused twelve-year-old boy for that? Shame on you for your lack of compassion.”
Her words jolted him. He rose as she did. “Years later, when I was a man, I did the same with my father.”
“That’s self-indulgent and untrue.” Briskly, she stacked plates, carried them to the sink. It wasn’t sympathy he needed, she realized. But plain, hard truth. “You told me yourself you didn’t know he was ill. He didn’t tell you.”
She ran the water hot, poured detergent into it, stared hard at the rising foam. “You curse the idea you have—what did you call it—elfin blood—but you sure as hell appear to enjoy the notion of playing God.”
If she’d thrown the skillet at his head he’d have been less shocked. “That’s easy for you to say, when you can walk away from all of this tomorrow.”
“That’s right, I can.” She turned the faucet off and turned to him. “I can, finally, do whatever I want to do. I can thank you for that, for helping me see what I was letting happen, for showing me that I have something of value to give. And I want to give it, Conal. I want to make a home and a family and a life for someone who values me, who understands me and who loves me. I won’t take less ever again. But you will. You’re still hiding in the boat shed, only now you call it a studio.”
Vile and hateful words rose up in his throat. But he was no longer a young boy, and he rejected them for the sharper blade of ice. “I’ve told you what you asked to know. I understand what you want, but you have no understanding of what I need.”
He walked out, letting the door slap shut behind him.