I don’t dwell on it, really I don’t, but it’s one thing to be told you’ve got a great talent and quite another to be denied the chance to use it because you won’t follow a silly rule or two.
Maeve’s expression turns crafty. “Go and meet this O’Neill, and when you come back you can tell us all about it on Wren Day.”
I haven’t been invited to a fairy holiday gathering for four years now. It’s not that I miss the carousing and the singing and the food, but it would be nice to dance with my cousins again, the earth tingling beneath our bare feet.
She pushes the paper back across the desk. “Meet him, find out what he wants, and politely decline it. And by all things sacred, no more lamenting on airplanes. At least wait until you get to baggage claim.”
I don’t have much choice here, so I pocket the information.
“Wear something nice!” Loman calls out, a parting zing. “You can’t look like a boy in front of a Great House.”
Just for that, I plan to wear the manliest things I own when I meet this John O’Neill.
Three days later I’m back in America. I telephone O’Neill from one of the last remaining payphones in Logan Airport and reach a voicemail. Around me, passengers scoop up their luggage and hurry outside into the blustery cold wind.
“If you’re looking for the girl who sang on Flight 112, call me back right now,” I say. “I won’t be here long.”
I figure he might need some proof that I’m not a prankster or crazy woman, so I sing a few notes and hang up.
The crew van has already left without me, meaning I’ll have to take the bus to the hotel. I’ve been awake for about eighteen hours. To kill time I silently note every single fashion faux pas around me, including ill-fitting pants, clashing ties, soiled jackets, and cheap brown shoes. Honestly, some men should not be let out of their houses.
The phone rings. O’Neill sounds convinced, if a little cautious, as he says, “Thank you for calling me. Where are you?”
“The airport,” I reply. “Just passing through.”
“I’m in Marblehead. This time of day, it’s about forty minutes away. Will you wait for me?”
“I can’t meet you now,” I tell him. Certainly not in my Air Killarney uniform, and not when I’m so dead tired that my eyeballs feel swollen. “How about four o’clock? There’s a pub in Revere called The Broken Mug. Near City Hall. Meet me there.”
“How will I know you?”
“I’ll be the only one with a silver comb in my hair,” I say.
Seven hours later, after a shamefully small amount of sleep, I put on black slacks and a reasonably feminine dark red blouse. This is the only blouse I own. Actually, Monnie owns it, but she let me borrow it. All personal vows aside, it’s probably best to blend in when I meet O’Neill. Hair as short as mine is easy to recognize, so I conjure a simple glamour to make it seem long and curly. I don’t have a coat but the cab ride is mercifully short and the pub is warm. It’s the kind of place long past its glory, if it ever had a glory to begin with, but the ale is good and the patrons mind their own business.
John O’Neill arrives at four o’clock sharp, wearing new black jeans, a blue sweater from Nautica, black boots and a vintage black leather coat. He’s even more handsome than I remember. In the brief moment it takes for him to scan the pub and spy me, I can pretend that he’s here for me, Colleen, and not some supernatural creature he heard on a midnight flight over the ocean.
I like men for more than just their clothes, after all.
As promised I’m wearing a silver comb in my hair. Traditional calling card of all banshees. He approaches my table carefully.
“You’re here,” he says.
“As agreed,” I say. “Sit down.”
He slides off his coat before he sits. Nice square shoulders, long arms, fingers that look deft enough to both fire a weapon and cradle a baby. He smells like woodsmoke.
“What do I call you?” John asks.
I want to tell him just to hear the syllables roll off his tongue. But some things are best unsaid. “It doesn’t matter, Mr. O’Neill. We won’t be meeting again.”
He’s staring at me in a way that’s bordering on rude. I hope the glamour isn’t flickering, or that I haven’t somehow messed it up.
“How did you know my father was dying? We were over the middle of the ocean and he was here, at Mass General. Heart attack.”
“That doesn’t matter either.” It’s not as if Maeve told me to spill any banshee secrets, after all. “It’s what we do. Sing a lament.”
A muscle twitches along his jaw. “I’ve lost men in battle and you’ve never sung for them.”
“They weren’t your blood, and I wasn’t in the neighborhood.” I drink from the coffee in front of me. Straight coffee, nothing with a kick, because I’m flying in four hours. “I’m sorry for your father.”
“Don’t be. He wasn’t—well, he was old. He was from here, Boston. My mother came from Galway. They married late and they had me late and now it’s too late to say most of what I wanted—” Abruptly he stands up again. “Will you wait here while I get a drink?”
It’s no hardship to watch him go to the bar and order a Guinness. Those jeans fit his backside quite well. He isn’t wearing a wedding ring but surely he has a girlfriend somewhere, a woman who’d be wise not to let him out of her sight for too long. When he sits down again he says, “My mother told me all banshees are haggard old crones, toothless and gray haired. I’m glad she’s wrong.”
“Trick of the light,” I say lightly. “I’m as cronish and ugly as they come.”
“No, you’re beautiful,” he says, and then ducks his gaze. “I haven’t been able to get your song out of my head.”
Banshees don’t enchant men. It’s not our job. For a moment I worry that somehow I cast a spell or built the glamour too strongly.
Maeve will not be happy if I accidentally use fey magic to snare a human lover.
“Mr. O’Neill, why is it you had to speak to me so urgently?” I ask.
He lifts his head and eyes me squarely. “To find out if I was losing my mind. I’m on emergency leave from Iraq. I tried to get here before he died, but it was too late. When I go back, I have to know that my brain’s not cracked or fried. Not that it matters to the U.S. Army . . . ”
Despite myself, I touch his hand. His skin is warm but there’s Sorrow inside him, swollen and raw. His father might have been a good man, or maybe not, but it’s a rare son who can bury his father without cost.
“Your brain is fine, Mr. O’Neill. You won’t hear me again.”
“Never?” he asks.
I steel my resolve. “Our paths aren’t likely to cross again. Honest truth, no denying it. I’m leaving tonight and won’t be back this way soon. You’re going back to Iraq. “
“Is there a way I can reach you? A cell phone, a post office box?”
The door opens to let in three men in the middle of a sports argument. They’re loud, boisterous types, good-humored until they drink too much, bad-humored afterward. Just like many of my passengers. They remind me that I have to get back to the hotel, get myself in uniform, eat dinner, catch the van, and fly back across the Atlantic tonight.
“It’s not in our best interests,” I tell him.
“I think you’re wrong,” he said, again with that direct stare. “I think it would be completely in my interest to see you again.”
It’s been awhile since anyone flirted with me. But it’s not me he’s flirting with. It’s a woman with long hair in a red blouse.
“I have to go,” I tell him. “My condolences, again, on your father.”
Out on the sidewalk, I see that he rode here on a motorcycle. If ever Sorrow had reason to wail, it’s because of men and their motorcycles. “Can I give you a ride somewhere?” he asks.
Banshees can lie just like anyone else. “No, my ride is coming.”
He passes me his leather coat. “You’ll freeze to death in the meantime. Take this.”
His hands brush my shoulders as he helps pull it on. I think, under slightly different circumstances, he might try to kiss my cheek. And I’d let him. But the rawness is still in him, and it stings.
He goes his way and I go mine.
At the hotel I realized I don’t have any way to return his jacket. Worse, still, he left his cell phone in the inside pocket. A nice silver gadget, one with all the latest apps. I call the number from the Craigslist ad but it goes to voicemail. I can’t just leave it, so I take it with me on the flight and back in Dublin leave it in a kitchen drawer. The leather jacket, I wear to market. It smells like an American soldier and it looks good on me.
It’s my luck to work on Thanksgiving. It’s also my luck to catch the flu and spend the week afterward sick in bed, because being a banshee doesn’t save you from tiny little bacteria of doom. And it’s my luck that I’m just getting out of the shower, barely feeling well again, when my neighbor Mr. Hubbard comes knocking to borrow sugar again.