Excerpt: Borderlands Journey

Chapter Twenty-Two

After that night, she hadn’t been the same. She had, when she was the Watcher in the Flame, already catalogued in her own mind all the mundane changes she had made, in her job, her place of residence, her friends and associations, all the things she had done within three weeks, so that she would never, never have to see Mark again. She had shrunk from the doing of it, because she had still been entrapped with her own spell of forgetting, and it had been excruciatingly painful. But she had done it. And she remembered what she had done, then, in more detail, now that she had faced the whole wretched experience and was going to actively work to correct it. So, what had she already done? She had, in effect, obliterated Mark, and all that had come from him, from her memory.

Indeed, she recalled, since all that had taken place had happened before Samhain, on that night she had done a cutting, a way of removing her magical energy from anything that would have anything to do with Mark. She hadn’t, with all the things she had Worked to erase from her memory, forgotten about the pictures, because they were not under her control and were still a threat to her. She still had to consider them, and even when she had moved back up the country she had found herself, that first week, having horrendous nightmares, waking in a sweat of horror, worrying and fretting about where they were, about what they might have depicted, since she hadn’t seen them all, about what Mark might have been doing with them in her absence. The thought of them, of him, had wrecked her.

And so, Samhain eve, she’d made sure she couldn’t be bothered that way again. She’d made certain the camera which had taken the pictures, which she couldn’t visualize really well because she hadn’t seen it, had had, (along with every other camera Mark owned to be certain she got the right one,) an unfortunate electrical accident. Somehow all the photos on all the chips of every camera he owned just disappeared, and she cut his energy away from her so that he wouldn’t even remember there had been incriminating snapshots of her on one of them.

She’d bound him, bound her memory of him, so the dreams couldn’t haunt her. She’d burnt the two or three notes she’d held onto that he had sent her, even things having to do with business before they’d become involved. She burnt the picture of Class Day that had him and the Head in it, and she’d made certain that all the things she had used in teaching in that school were destroyed in the incinerator, even things she otherwise would have kept. Samhain Eve it was, a time for ending things, and she made certain that every tiny thing that linked her to Mark in any way, shape, or form disappeared.

Thinking about it now, from her disembodied perch of cosmic clarity, she believed that what she had done had been necessary, but had also been a mistake. She hadn’t realized that doing this cutting would also include obliterating any memory she had of the fact that he had raped her, but she realized now that this particular bit of forgetting might have happened whether she had done a spell about it or not Women who were victims of rape and sexual assault often blocked it out. It was a protection. And she’d needed protection, so she had let herself forget.

And then she had begun to try to change her life, and she had met Ian. She still remembered Mark, simply as a bad boyfriend, even though all the details of what had befallen her had been obliterated in her spellwork. So she was only able to show interest in someone whose personality was diametrically opposed to that of theatrical, flamboyant, dark and rakish Mark. And that was, of course, brown, unremarkable, shy and somewhat boring Ian. Her safe haven, her harbour.

So she had begun to see Ian. Or, more correctly, she had acquiesced passively to Ian’s beginning to see her, to court her. By the day in that first week in December when they had had dinner at the Riverside Restaurant, she already knew Ian was falling in love with her. And she? She felt nothing. And she wanted it that way. Those feelings of passion, of romance, of willingly losing oneself in the Being of another person, those feelings were dangerous. So she floated along, letting Ian be the one who made all the moves, and simply going along for the ride. Because he was there. Because he made her feel safe. Because she didn’t want to ever, ever be as vulnerable as she had been with Mark.

And because of all that had happened, which she had, by magic, made herself forget, she wasn’t even open to herself sufficiently to realize that she was cheating Ian with her bland but well-cloaked indifference. Admittedly, Ian obviously didn’t know it either, and seemed well-satisfied with the little she could give him. He had even complimented her once or twice on her restrained demeanour, on what he called her “classiness”, on her modesty. He liked it that she was quiet, that she didn’t drink at all, that she didn’t like roistering. He seemed to be most delighted with the parts of herself that were not, in fact, Herself.

He was, she found out early on, a good Catholic, and she had accompanied him to Mass to hear him solo in the Choir, so she was pretty sure that he had at first assumed she was also a Catholic. She knew it was her reserve, amongst other things, that was making him treat her with such deference and respect, ways of relating to her that were balm to her bruised soul, after Mark.

So she had met Ian in mid-November, almost 2 weeks after her cutting from Mark. And by the time the first week in December rolled around, she felt as if Ian had become a constant in her life, as if she had been seeing him forever. And it was obvious that, an older man who might have, for some time, been hunting a wife, Ian was finding himself well-satisfied with Cait, or as he often called her in quiet, tender moments, in his mangled Irish Gaelic, “Caitlín Eibhlín”. Indeed, it was only those quiet, tender moments that worried her. She was awaiting the time when he would want to take her home, to take her to his bed, and although she really couldn’t recall why it should be so, she dreaded that moment.

One night, about the middle of December, she thought that night had arrived. They’d gone to hear Ian’s nieces, Aisling and Rhiannon, sing a cantata in the church in Waterford where his sister Isabel lived. It had been a lovely evening, and the two girls, aged nine and eleven, were fine singers and lovely-mannered children. They’d taken out Isabel and her husband Egan and the girls to the Brasserie for a treat afterwards, and she had let herself share in the festive champagne, even though Ian and she didn’t generally drink. But this was a special occasion, and she had a glass, and then had one more, just letting herself go a trifle. She didn’t get silly or anything…but, surprisingly, Ian did.

It wasn’t that he was drunk, not exactly. But he didn’t usually have anything at all except a lager once in a while. Never wine nor whiskey, and this evening, goaded on by joking from Egan and his sister about being a “sober old man”, he’d had both. So…he wasn’t drunk enough to register on a breath test, she thought, but he was embarrassed that he’d even let himself have two drinks, and especially that his gait had gotten “fiddly”…and he made a decision.

“Caitlín Eibhlín, ‘tis sorry I am for it, but we aren’t going to be driving home the night. I’ve had a bit too much, lass, and I think I shouldn’t be driving. We’ll stay the night here, unless you want me to put you in the train.”

He looked so miserably ashamed that she couldn’t help putting her arms around him in comfort. And of course she never thought what it might mean to her, and to their relationship, when she said, enthusiastically,

“I would love to stay. I don’t need to go to work (she was still playing in the pub, Thursday through Sunday) until tomorrow night, so let’s relax here and have a nice time with your sister. We can go home tomorrow, isn’t it?”

He smiled in a rather wobbly fashion, and returned her hug. She looked up from the embrace as Isabel walked into the lounge where they had been standing, and smiled at them both briskly.

“Egan has brought our car round to take you both home with us, if you like. We’ll bring you back here tomorrow to pick up your own car…they’ve said it’s fine to leave it here in the car park overnight. Come on now, Ian lad, you look like a week of wet Mondays. Let’s go home and make some coffee.”

Ian smiled deprecatingly, and Cait got the feeling that he was embarrassed for his sister to see him slightly to the left of centre from the drink. Sure he wasn’t drunk, not really, but for him even feeling a bit in his cups was a great departure from normal. She took his arm in a comforting grasp as they exited under the portico, and he slid into the back seat beside her and slipped his arm around her shoulders for the ride to Isabel’s house.

The two of them followed Isabel up the stairs to the hallway, where she opened the door of the room on the far end of the house. She smiled as she turned on the light and beckoned them in.

“We made sure this room was for guests since the streetcar line is so noisy on the other side of the house. You two can lie in tomorrow, unless someone has to be somewhere.”

Cait looked up at Ian with the look of the deer in the headlights, not sure how to respond to the sudden coming to pass of her fears. She knew with the blessing of his sister there would be no reason why Ian might not chance taking their relationship to the next level. And she just wasn’t sure she could handle it. She wasn’t ready for anything that might in any way remind her of Mark. But all this time she’d been letting Ian court her, letting him believe she was interested in him. How could she refuse what he might ask of her?

And then, to her absolute astonishment, Ian simultaneously took away her fear of the situation and inserted another fear in its place. He smiled at his sister and shook his head with a look almost of fond pride in Cait’s direction. It seemed rather odd, actually…if a man could look both proud and embarrassed at the same time, Ian was that man.

“No, Izzy, sorry, but that’s not a horse that’ll start, not here, not now. This wonderful young lady isn’t one of your modern lightskirts. We’re not having it off, my dear…I respect Cait far too much to insult her like that. I’m thinking it’s going to have to be something more permanent and formal for the lucky man with this one. Maybe she can have the twin bed in Aisling’s room?”

Isabel returned Ian’s gleaming smile with one of her own. She almost seemed proud of Cait herself, and certainly threw a look of pride and affection towards her brother.

“Well, lovely, then, of course she can sleep in Aisling’s. Indeed, the gel can go in with Rhiannon for the night, and Cait can have the privacy of the room that’s in it. And grand for both of you that you’re not doing all that modern loose shite that makes people so unhappy. Me for a white wedding, even if ‘tis old-fashioned. People get hurt when they sleep with just anyone.”

Ian laughed out loud for the first time since he had told Cait he was the worse for drink.

“I am not ‘just anyone’, silly lass…and Cait is far from being ‘just’ anything at all. She’s very special. And of course, we’re not sleeping together. We both plan to wait for marriage, I am thinking.”

And there was the word, out there in the open in all its terrifying glory. The fear that pervaded her being at the thought of Ian proposing to her was ten times more than that engendered by the prospect of his having wanted to sleep with her. How on earth could she let the man know she wasn’t interested in him on that level, after he’d all but told his sister he was going to propose? And was there a snowball’s chance in Hades that he would even speak to her again, if he did propose, and she refused him?

Her head was spinning, and only the flurry attendant on getting them settled in their respective rooms for the night made it possible for her to maintain any kind of composure whatsoever. For the remainder of the evening she was uncharacteristically reserved and silent, even for her, which of course probably underlined everything fallacious that Ian, and now his sister and brother-in-law, already thought about her. She told herself that she’d never been in a box this tight, and couldn’t imagine that she would be able to burrow her way out of it with no harm to herself nor to Ian. Once a man had said the word “marriage” in front of his family, there was no way it could be unsaid. What, exactly, was she going to have to be doing about that? Because no matter what she had been doing in order to protect herself from the unwanted advances of the wrong kind of man, she knew she had no interest whatsoever in marrying Ian.

So they had a lovely time at Izzy’s, and they got safe home, and it was the week before Christmas. Ian continued to see her every day, for a coffee or a walk, or some other kind of social occasion; they’d even gone singing carols together with his church choir group, all of whom had been overwhelmed with delight at the prospect of a strolling harper joining their party. And she still had no idea how to make him back off, how to tone things down, how to make it clear to Ian that she only liked him as a friend.

And then, on the Solstice, of all times, on one of the days she actually spent some time honoring her Gods and observing some spiritual traditions, she got a most unwelcome gift. Not from Ian, but from a much more remote source.

She was pregnant.

She was in a state of panic, or she'd never have deceived Ian about it. But she wanted this baby not to be Mark's, so fervently that she now believed she had persuaded herself it was indeed Ian's child.

And so, of course, on Christmas Eve, after Midnight Mass, when Ian presented her with a platinum and diamond ring and asked her to be his wife….she accepted. She said yes.

And the rest, as the saying goes, had been history. Or, should she say, Herstory. Her sad and twisted and ultimately tragic history.

And now, the only thing she had to do was figure out how she was going to change it.