Our Lady of the Harbour Read online

  “Old history,” Amy said. “I’ve long since dealt with it. I don’t know that Matt ever even knew anything existed between us, but I’m cool now.”

  “It’s for the better.”

  “Definitely,” Amy agreed.

  “I should probably warn my little friend about him,” Lucia said, “but you know what they’re like at that age—it’d just egg her on.”

  “Who is your little friend? She moves like all she was born to do was dance.”

  “She’s something, isn’t she? I met her on Wolf Island about a week ago, just before the last ferry—all wet and bedraggled like she’d fallen off a boat and been washed to shore. She wasn’t wearing a stitch of clothing and I thought the worst, you know? Some asshole brought her out for a quick wham, bam, and then just dumped her.”

  Lucia paused to light a cigarette.

  “And?” Amy asked.

  Lucia shrugged, blowing out a wreath of blue-grey smoke. “Seems she fell off a boat and took off her clothes so that they wouldn’t drag her down while she swam to shore. Course, I got that from her later.”

  Just then the door to the club opened behind Lucia and a gust of cool air caught the smoke from Lucia’s cigarette, giving it a slow dervishing whirl. On the heels of the wind, Amy saw Matt and the girl walk in. They seemed to be in the middle of an animated discussion—or at least Matt was, so they had to be talking about music.

  Amy felt the same slight twinge of jealousy watching him with the dancer as she did in the first few moments of every one of the short relationships that came about from some girl basically flinging herself at him halfway through a gig. Though perhaps “relationship” was too strong a word, since any sense of responsibility to a partner was inevitably one-sided.

  The girl laughed at what he was saying—but it was a silent laugh. Her mouth was open, her eyes sparkled with appreciation, but there was no sound. She began to move her hands in an intricate pattern that, Amy realized, was the American Sign Language used by deaf-mutes.

  “Her problem right then,” Lucia was saying, “was finding something to wear so that she could get into town. Luckily I was wearing my duster—you know, from when I was into my Sergio Leone phase—so she could cover herself up.”

  “She took off everything while she was in the water?” Amy asked, her gaze returning to her friend. “Even her underwear?”

  “I guess. Unless she wasn’t wearing any in the first place.”

  “Weird.”

  “I don’t see you wearing a bra.”

  “You know what I meant,” Amy said with a laugh.

  Lucia nodded. “So anyway, she came on the ferry with me—I paid her fare—and then I brought her back to my place because it turned out she didn’t have anywhere else to go. Doesn’t know a soul in town. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure she spoke English at first.”

  Amy looked over Lucia’s shoulder to where Matt was answering whatever it was that the girl’s hands had told him. Where had he learned sign language? she wondered. He’d never said anything about it before, but then she realized that for all the years she’d known him, she really didn’t know much about him at all, except that he was a brilliant musician and good in bed—related talents, perhaps, since she didn’t doubt that they both were something he’d regard as a performance.

  Meow, she thought.

  “She’s deaf-mute, isn’t she?” she added aloud.

  Lucia looked surprised. “Mute, but not deaf. How you’d know?”

  “I’m watching her talk to Matt with her hands right now.”

  “She couldn’t even do that when I first met her,” Lucia said.

  Amy returned her attention to Lucia once more. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I know sign language—I learned it when I worked at the Institute for the Deaf up on Gracie Street when I first got out of college—so when I realized she was mute, it was the first thing I tried. But she’s not deaf—she just can’t talk. She didn’t even try to communicate at first. I thought she was in shock. She just sat beside me looking out over the water, her eyes getting bigger and bigger as we approached the docks.

  “When we caught a bus back to my place, it was like she’d never been in a city before. She just sat beside me all wide-eyed and then took my hand—not like she was scared, it was more like she just wanted to share the wonder of it all with me. It wasn’t until we got back to my place that she asked for pen and paper.” Lucia mimed the action as she spoke.

  “It’s all kind of mysterious, isn’t it?” Amy said.

  “I’ll say. Anyway, her name’s Katrina Ludvigsen and she’s from one of those little towns on the Islands farther down the lake—the ones just past the mouth of the Dulfer River, you know?”

  Amy nodded.

  “Her family came over from Norway originally,” Lucia went on. “They were Lapps, as in Lapland, except she doesn’t like to be called that. Her people call themselves Sami.”

  “I’ve heard about that,” Amy said. “Referring to them as Lapps is a kind of insult.”

  “Exactly.” Lucia took a final drag from her cigarette and butted it out in the ashtray. “Once she introduced herself, she asked me to teach her sign language. Would you believe she picked it up in two days?”

  “I don’t know,” Amy said. “Is that fast?”

  “Try fantastique, ma chérie.”

  “So what’s she doing here?”

  Lucia shrugged. “She told me she was looking for a man—like, aren’t we all, ha ha—only she didn’t know his name, just that he lived in Newford. She just about had a fit when she spotted the picture of Matt in the poster for this gig.”

  “So she knows him from before.”

  “You tell me,” Lucia said.

  Amy shook her head. “Only Matt knows whatever it is that Matt knows.”

  “Katrina says she’s twenty-two,” Lucia went on, “but if you ask me, I think she’s a lot younger. I’ll bet she ran away from home—maybe even stowed away on some tourist’s powerboat and jumped ship just outside the harbour because they were about to catch her and maybe take her back home.”

  “So what are you going to do about it?”

  “Not a damn thing. She’s a nice kid and besides,” she added as Katrina and Matt walked by their table, heading for the bar, “I’ve got the feeling she’s not going to be my responsibility for much longer.”

  “Don’t count on it,” Amy said. “She’ll be lucky if she lasts the night.”

  Although maybe not. Katrina was pretty, and she certainly could dance, so there was the musical connection, just as there had been with her.

  Amy sighed. She didn’t know why she got to feeling the way she did at times like this. She wouldn’t even want to make a go at it with Matt again.

  Lucia reached across the table and put her hand on Amy’s, giving it a squeeze. “How’re you handling this, Amy? I remember you were pretty messed up about him at one point.”

  “I can deal with it.”

  “Well—what’s that line of yours? More power to your elbow then, if you can, though I still can’t figure out how you got past it enough to still be able to play with him.”

  Amy looked over to the bar where Matt was getting the girl a cup of tea. She wished the twinge of not so much jealousy, as hurt, would go away.

  Patience, she told herself. She’d seen Matt with who knew how many women over the years, all of them crazy over him. The twinge only lasted for a little while—a reminder of a bad time, not the bad time itself. She was past that now.

  Well, mostly.

  “You just change your way of thinking about a person,” she said after a few moments, trying to convince herself as much as Lucia. “You change what you need from them, your expectations. That’s all.”

  “You make it sound easy.”

  Amy turned back to her friend. “It’s not,” she said in a quiet voice.

  Lucia gave her hand another squeeze.

  * * *

  The girl was drunk on Matt, A
my realized. There was no other explanation for the way she was carrying on.

  For the rest of the night, Amy could see Katrina sitting with Lucia at the back of the club, chin cupped in her hands as she listened to Matt sing. No, not just listening. She drank in the songs, swallowed them whole. And with every dance set they played, she was up on her feet at the front of the stage, the sinuous grace of her movement, the swirl and the lift and the rapid-fire step of her small feet capturing each tune to perfection.

  Matt was obviously complimented by her attention—or at least whatever it was that he’d feel that would be close to flattered—and why not? Next to Lucia, she was the best looking woman in the club, and Lucia wasn’t exactly sending out “available” signals, not dressed the way she was.

  Matt and the girl talked between each set, filling up the twenty minutes or so of canned music and patron conversation with a forest of words, his spoken, hers signed, each of them oblivious to their surroundings, to everything except for each other.

  Maybe Katrina will be the one, Amy thought.

  Once she got past her own feelings, that was what she usually found herself hoping. Although Matt could be insensitive once he stepped off the stage, she still believed that all he really needed was someone to care about to turn him around. Nobody who put such heart into his music could be completely empty inside. She was sure that he just needed someone—the right someone. It hadn’t been her, fine. But somewhere there had to be a woman for him, a catalyst to take down the walls though which only his music dared forth to touch the world.

  The way he’d been so attentive toward Katrina all night, Amy was sure he was going to take her home with him, but all he did was ask her out tomorrow.

  Okay, she thought, standing beside Lucia while Matt and Katrina “talked.” That’s a start and maybe a good one.

  Katrina’s hands moved in response to Matt’s question.

  “What’s she saying?” Amy asked, leaning close to whisper to Lucia.

  “Yes,” Lucia translated. “Now she’s asking him if they can ride the ferry.”

  “The one to Wolf Island?” Amy said. “That’s where you found her.”

  “Whisht,” Lucia told her.

  “We’ll do whatever you want,” Matt was saying.

  And then Katrina was gone, trailing after Lucia with a last lingering wave before the world outside the club swallowed her and the door closed behind the pair of them.

  Matt and Amy returned to the stage to pack up their instruments.

  “I was thinking of heading up to The Harp to see if there’s a session on,” Matt said. He looked around at the other three. “Anyone feel like coming?”

  If there were enough musicians up for the music, Joe Breen, the proprietor of The Harp, would lock the doors to the public after closing hours and just let the music flow until the last musician packed it in, acting no different on this side of the Atlantic than he had with the pub he’d run back home in Ireland.

  Johnny shook his head. “I’m beat. It’s straight to bed for me tonight.”

  “It’s been a long night,” Nicky agreed.

  Nicky looked a little sullen, but Amy doubted that Matt even noticed. He just shrugged, then looked to her.

  Well, and why not? she thought.

  “I’ll give it a go,” she told him.

  Saying their goodbyes to the other two outside the club, she and Matt walked north to the Rosses where The Harp stood in the shadow of the Kelly Street Bridge.

  “Katrina seemed nice,” Amy said after a few blocks.

  “I suppose,” he said. “A little intense, maybe.”

  “I think she’s a little taken with you.”

  Matt nodded unselfconsciously. “Maybe too much. But she sure can dance, can’t she?”

  “Like an angel,” Amy agreed.

  Conversation fell flat then, just as it always did.

  “I got a new tune from Geordie this afternoon,” Amy said finally. “He doesn’t remember where he picked it up, but it fits onto the end of ‘The Kilavel Jig’ like it was born to it.”

  Matt’s eyes brightened with interest. “What’s it called?”

  “He didn’t know. It had some Gaelic title that he’d forgotten, but it’s a lovely piece. In G-major, but the first part has a kind of a modal flavour so that it almost feels as though it’s being played out of C. It’d be just lovely on the bouzouki.”

  The talk stayed on tunes the rest of the way to The Harp—safe ground. At one point Amy found herself remembering a gig they’d played a few months ago and the story that Matt had used to introduce a song called “Sure, All He Did Was Go” that they’d played that night.

  “He couldn’t help himself,” Matt had said, speaking of the fiddler in the song who gave up everything he had to follow a tune. “Music can be a severe mistress, demanding and jealous, and don’t you doubt it. Do her bidding and isn’t it just like royalty that she’ll be treating you, but turn your back on her and she can take back her gift as easily as it was given. Your man could find himself holding only the tattered ribbons of a tune and song ashes, and that’s the God’s own truth. I’ve seen it happen.”

  And then he’d laughed as though he’d been having the audience on, and they’d launched into the song, but Amy had seen more than laughter in Matt’s eyes as he started to sing. She wondered then, as she wondered now, if he didn’t half believe that little bit of superstition, picked up somewhere on his travels, God knew where.

  Maybe that was the answer to the riddle that was Matt Casey: he thought he’d lose his gift of music if he gave his heart to another. Maybe he’d even written that song himself, for she’d surely never heard it before. Picked it up in Morocco, he’d told her once, from one of the Wild Geese, the many Irish-in-exile, but she wasn’t so sure.

  Did you write it? she was ready to ask him right now, but then they were at The Harp and there was old Joe Breen flinging open the door to welcome them in and the opportunity was gone.

  * * *

  Lucia put on a pot of tea when she and Katrina returned to the apartment. While they waited for it to steep, they sat on the legless sofa pushed up against one wall of the long open loft that took up the majority of the apartment’s floor space.

  There was a small bedroom and a smaller bathroom off this main room. The kitchen area was in one corner—a battered fridge, its paint peeling, a sink and a counter with a hot plate on it, storage cupboards underneath, and a small wooden table with five mismatched chairs around it.

  A low coffee table made of a plank of wood set on two apple crates crouched before the couch, laden with magazines and ashtrays. Along a far wall, three tall old mirrors had been fastened to the wall with a twelve-foot long support bar set out in front of them. The other walls were adorned with posters of the various shows in which Lucia had performed. In two, she had headlined—one a traditional ballet, while the other had been a very outré multimedia event written and choreographed by a friend of hers.

  When the tea was ready, Lucia brought the pot and two cups over to the coffee table and set them on a stack of magazines. She poured Katrina a cup, then another for herself.

  “So you found him,” Lucia said as she returned to her seat on the sofa.

  Katrina nodded happily.

  He’s just the way I remember him, she signed.

  “Where did you meet him?” Lucia asked.

  Katrina gave a shy smile in response, then added, Near my home. He was playing music.

  The bright blue fire of her eyes grew unfocused as she looked across the room, seeing not plaster walls and the dance posters upon them, but the rough rocky shore of a coastline that lay east of the city by the mouth of the Dulfer River. She went into the past, and the past was like a dream.

  She’d been underlake when the sound of his voice drew her up from the cold and the dark, neither of which she felt except as a kind of malaise in her spirit; up into the moonlight, bobbing in the white-capped waves; listening, swallowing that golden sound of str
ings and voice, and he so handsome and all alone on the shore. And sad. She could hear it in his song, feel the timbre of his loneliness in his voice.

  Always intrigued with the strange folk who moved on the shore with their odd stumpy legs, this time she was utterly smitten. She swam closer and laid her arms on a stone by the shore, her head on her arms, to watch and listen.

  It was his music that initially won her, for music had been her first love. Each of her four sisters was prettier than the next, and each had a voice that could charm moonlight from a stone, milk from a virgin, a ghost from the cold dark depths below, but her voice was better still, as golden as her hair and as rich and pure as the first larksong at dawn.

  But if it was his music that first enchanted her, then he himself completed the spell. She longed to join her voice to his, to hold him and be held, but she never moved from her hiding place. One look at her and he would be driven away, for he’d see only that which was scaled, and she had no soul, not as did those who walked ashore.

  No soul, no soul. A heart that broke for want of him, but no immortal soul. That was the curse of the lake-born.

  When he finally put away his instrument and walked farther inland, up under the pines where she couldn’t follow, she let the waves close over her head and returned to her home underlake.

  For three nights she returned to the shore and for two of them he was there, his voice like honey against the beat of the waves that the wind pushed shoreward and she only loved him more. But on the fourth night, he didn’t come, nor on the fifth night, nor the sixth, and she despaired, knowing he was gone, away in the wide world, lost to her forever.

  Her family couldn’t help her; there was no one to help her. She yearned to be rid of scales, to walk on shore, no matter the cost, just so that she could be with him, but as well ask the sun not to rise, or the wind to cease its endless motion.

  “No matter the cost,” she whispered. Tears trailed down her cheek, a sorrowful tide that would not ebb.