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TWENTY-THREE
Luckily, I still had a bottle of Jack Daniel’s left over from Phoenix’s stash. I poured us two glasses while Liam lit a fire in the library fireplace.
“What a great room!” he enthused. “I’ve never lived long enough anywhere to have my books in one place.”
“Oh?” I remarked casually, determined not to reveal how much I knew about his peripatetic lifestyle from my Internet searches. “I suppose a writer-in-residence must move around a lot.”
“Yeah, that’s my excuse,” he said, smiling ruefully and saluting me with his glass of bourbon. “But sometimes I wonder if I don’t use the job as an excuse to move on. Like I’m under a curse that keeps me from staying in any one place for too long. Maybe that’s why I’m so touched by Nicky Ballard’s poems. They sound like they’re written by a girl who thinks she’s doomed.”
I stared at him, wondering if he did know something about the Ballard curse, but then I realized that he’d just cleverly deflected the subject from his own history to Nicky’s. Well, talking about Nicky was the reason I’d asked him in. Wasn’t it?
“Itisalmost like she’s cursed,” I said, carefully navigating around the couch and sitting down in the armchair by the fire. He took the opposite chair and I proceeded to tell him what I’d heard about the Ballard family, avoiding any supernatural elements and focusing instead on the legacy of dwindling fortunes, disappointed women, teenage pregnancy, and alcoholism.
“Poor Nicky,” he said when I’d finished. “I’ve passed by that house. You can guess the family’s blighted from the street. She must feel it’s inevitable that she’s going to wind up like her mother and grandmother. We have to keep her from making their mistakes.”
“We?”
“Don’t you know how much Nicky admires you, Cailleach?” It was the first time he’d said my full first name and it caught me by surprise. Most people didn’t pronounce it right on the first try.
“I think it’s you she admires…Liam. Come on, surely you know that every girl in your class has a crush on you.”
“Now you’re teasing me again, and I’m dead serious. Nicky talks about you all the time. She thinks the sun rises and sets on you. She especially admires how independent you are, being a woman on her own and all.”
“Oh, well…actually, you know, I do have a boyfriend.”
Liam’s mouth twitched and he looked away. The reflection of the firelight flashed across the lenses of his glasses, so I couldn’t see his expression. “No, actually I didn’t know. Brilliant. What’s his name? And where is he?” He looked around the room as if I had a man hiding under the couch.
“Paul. He’s finishing up his doctorate in economics at UCLA. I’m going to California to visit him next week. Hopefully he’ll get a job on the East Coast next year.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
I shrugged. “We’ll figure something out. What about you? It must be hard maintaining a relationship with all the traveling you do.” I lifted my glass to take another sip of bourbon but found the glass was empty.
Liam picked up the bottle and leaned across to fill my glass. “Yes, I think that may be why I do it. I haven’t…Well, something happened to me in college and I haven’t really wanted to ‘get involved,’ as you Americans say, since then.”
“Bad breakup?”
He grimaced. “Not exactly,” he replied. “It’s…”
“Complicated?” I suggested when it looked like he wasn’t going to finish his sentence. I was only trying to lighten the mood, but when he turned away from the fire and took his glasses off to wipe his eyes I was sorry.
“I suppose you could say that. You see, she…Jeannie, my childhood sweetheart…she died.”
“It was my first year at Trinity,” Liam began after I refilled our glasses. “I came from a little town in the west. My father was a horse-trainer and Jeannie’s family ran the drapery shop—in Ireland that means a shop that sells just about anything made out of cloth. We’d known each other since we were children. I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t already planning to spend my life with her. But I also loved reading and writing…and I was good at them. I started winning poetry contests when I was ten. Jeannie was so proud of me. It was she who talked me into trying for the scholarship to Trinity…and she who told me I had to go when I got it. She told me we’d be together on holidays and when we’d saved up enough money she’d come join me in Dublin.”
“It sounds like a reasonable plan,” I said. “You were lucky to have a girlfriend who believed in your promise and didn’t begrudge you a chance in the world.”
“Yes,” he replied, downing the last of his bourbon. “I was lucky. I just didn’t realize it. And I didn’t realize how I’d change. I was so excited to be in the big city, surrounded by brilliant people…my professors, sure, but also the other students. Folks who had grown up with books and educated conversation. There was a particular set of Anglo-Irish students who’d gone to boarding school together that I fell in with: Robin Allsworthy and his pal Dugan Scott and Robin’s cousin, Moira. I thought they were very glamorous. Everyone in our year looked up to them and talked about them. When they befriended me Icouldn’t believe my luck. I think I was in love with all three of them, but of course Jeannie didn’t see it that way.”
“How did she find out about Moira?”
“She came in the last week before Christmas break—this time of year, come to think of it. It was meant to be a surprise. She’d gotten a room at a fancy hotel…” He blushed. “We hadn’t…you know, been together like that and I think she was afraid that’s why I’d become distant from her. But when she came I was out in the pubs with Robin, Dugan, and Moira celebrating the end of finals. Poor Jeannie went from pub to pub, following our trail. When at last she found us she saw me with Moira. It was only a drunken snog…I can’t even remember how it happened, but I’ll never forget Jeannie’s face.”
He fell silent, staring into the fire as if he could see his childhood sweetheart’s face in the flames.
“Did you try to explain?” I asked after a few moments.
He shook his head. “She ran away. The streets were crowded around the pubs and I lost her. I looked everywhere for her, but finally Robin, Dugan, and Moira convinced me I should go back to my room and call the hotel. When the hotel said she’d checked out my friends convinced me that she must have gone home and I could put things right when I went home for the holidays.”
