Adrian McKinty - The Dead Yard

There’s only going to be one chance at this and I can’t blow it. She sits, her dress bunching up over her knees. She moistens her full raspberry lips in anticipation of something exciting.

“Kit, I want to tell you something and I didn’t want anyone around to hear,” I explain quietly and take her hand.

“What?” she asks a little too eagerly.

“I think you know what I’m going to say.”

“No?” she says, a touch of fear in her eyes.

“You do,” I insist. “It’s about you; me and you.”

Kit’s smile evaporates. Her eyes narrow. She does know what I’m going to say. Women always do when you’re in this subject area.

“I hope you’re not fucking with me,” she says, even her surfer/stoner accent disappearing in the gravity of the moment.

“I am perfectly serious, Kit. I think there’s something between us. Something important. Something real. I’ve been in love with one person in my life but she was in love with someone else, so that didn’t work out too well. But I know how I felt then and I know how I feel when I’m with you now,” I begin slowly.

I look at her.

I’m trying to keep the conflict out of my face. The confusion of thoughts and emotions.

It’s an odd sensation. I don’t know if I’m playing her or not.

If this is a lie or whether it’s some part of the truth.

But I’ve begun and the only choice is to continue.

“I’m falling in love with you,” I say and pause for a full beat.

“You shouldn’t say that if you don’t mean it,” she whispers.

Her eyes close and she holds me tighter.

“I do mean it. And it’s not that we’ve got a lot in common: you surf, I don’t; you’re rich, I’m not; you’re American, I’m Irish. But none of that matters. It wouldn’t matter what you did, or where you were from, or what you were like. I think I’ve loved you from the moment I set eyes on you. In the bar at Revere, when you were waiting tables and wearing your Marine Corps shirt. It was as if the lightbulb flashed above my head and a voice said, she’s the one, Sean, you had one false start, but she’s the one. And it wouldn’t have mattered if you’d hadn’t been nice, and sweet and funny. If you were a bad person or stupid or mean, I still would have fallen for you. But luckily for me, as I got to know to you, I saw that you were perfect. You are perfect.”

She blinks and stares at me in amazement, and when she sees that I’ve finished speaking, she turns away. She’s been robbed of her voice and she may even be tearing up. We sit in silence for two minutes, the only sounds the birds on the water, the breeze in the trees.

I’m waiting for her.

It’s her move.

I’m feeling… what exactly?

Yes, that’s it: guilt. Above all, guilt. At the lies within the lies within the lies. And I still don’t know if that speech was part of them too.

“I’m not sure what to say, Sean,” she mutters at last.

“You don’t have to say anything. I just wanted to get that off my chest. To let you know how I feel. I don’t even need reciprocation. I don’t need you to say that you love me. I don’t need you to say anything. Now that I’ve told you and you believe me, that’s enough. That’s enough for the present.”

She takes my hand in hers and holds it. And then she kisses it.

“Talk about something else for a while. Let me think,” she says.

“We don’t have to talk.”

“No, I want you to talk, I like to hear your voice,” she insists.

“What about?”

“Anything. You talk and I’ll listen and think. Tell me something I don’t know.”

“Ok. Um. Let me see. We’re in Maine. Oh, I know. You probably don’t know this story. But some people think the Irish were here first, in Maine or Nova Scotia or somewhere around here. Did you ever hear that? You ever hear the story of Saint Brendan?”

“No. Tell me.”

“It’s a bit of a fairy story, but the theory is that Saint Brendan and a bunch of monks sailed a coracle from Ireland to America. They sailed right across from Ireland and landed somewhere around these parts. And of course Brendan met the Indians and he proselytized to them and tried to convert them from their heathen ways. And then the monks traveled around and saw great wonders and built a church and had lots of adventures, then they came home again. A mad Englishman sailed a replica of Brendan’s coracle over here sometime in the 1970s.”

“What’s a coracle?” she asks.

“I don’t really know, it’s some kind of leather boat, I think.”

“When was this?”

“A thousand years before Columbus.”

“Do you know the entire story?”

“Bits and pieces,” I say.

“Tell me the whole thing.”

And I do tell her. Everything I know of Saint Brendan and Saint Patrick and Saint Columba and all the Irish missionary navigators, and she listens to me and relaxes and laughs and holds my hand tighter and before I’m done, she turns to face me. She’s nervous. Terrified.

“I want you,” she whispers in a tiny, shy, almost nonexistent voice. And she lets go of my hand, takes off her shoes and her dress, and stands there naked. Her pale body and small breasts, her long legs and dark eyes and hair. She is so beautiful that she robs me of my breath. My pulse pounding in my ears.

She helps me take off my trousers and my boots. And she hooks herself under my outstretched, handcuffed arms, and she pulls me close and kisses me.

We lie on the forest floor and she arcs her torso over mine, my arms round her back and leading her. Touching her spine and buttocks and the back of her hair. Clement and meek, the both of us. Like it’s our first time. She gives herself and I ease her to the leafy ground and grasp her tighter, touching her with my lips. I kiss her on the shoulders and the faint, scared smile on her face. And she rolls me back to the forest floor and stretches out her body on me, kissing me, breathing words that are careful and true.

“I feel the same way, Sean, from that night, from the journey in the car, I couldn’t help it, I can’t help it…”

And she tells me more. “This, this is my first, my first time.”

It shocks me. Incredible, in this day and age, that she has waited, saved herself, for the right moment and the right man.

And it proves that a lot of her character was bravado and an act and it shows me that she thinks she’s found that man at last.

And gently, very gently, I climb on top of her and I can see that this is the way it’s supposed to be. That this is what it’s been like for everyone else. Not hard or frantic or desperate. But like this. Geometries of movement and belonging, a giving of each other for each other. We maneuver our limbs and she puts me inside her and I can feel her pulse, a hasp of beating.

“Sean, I know it’s strange, but I-”

“Ssshhhhh…”

I push, and for her it’s an awakening. A revelation. And no less for me, too. And I fall in those blue eyes and the shadows of thoughts on her face. Things that I couldn’t read but now I can.

“Hold me. Hold me tighter,” she says.

“I am.”

“Hold me. Hold me and never let me-”

“I won’t,” I say and hook my handcuffed arms about her back.

We make love under the trees like a human and his elven enchantress. Or is it the other way around, that I am the woodland spirit and she is the lost mortal girl entering the dark part of the fairy tale?

We make love and she cries and I talk to her and hug her. And the moment is beautiful and complete and in the present tense there is no future, there is only her pulsing heart and her skin and the look of completeness on her soft lips and sylvan eyes.

It’s perfect. But I’ve seen this movie before. It’s the scene in the book of Genesis before the storm.