And Also With You Read online

  And Also With You

  By Tandy McCray

  Text copyright © 2013 Tandy McCray

  All rights reserved.

  To Ben. Everything I have and everything I do. It’s always for Ben.

  And to the fandom where I started and shall always belong, I thank you.

  Table of Contents

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  ONE

  The problem with whiskey is that when I run out I’m left not with an empty glass or a pounding head but the aching, paralyzing noise of my own mind.

  Most bars close early on Christmas Eve. It’s one of the busiest nights of the year for taverns but they usually still close since even peddlers of sin give up on the devil this one night a year. The liquor stores will close soon, too. If I want to make it to Brady’s for another fifth to get me through Christmas Day, I have to hurry. Kyle, the proprietor at O’Reilly’s Irish Pub, tries to pull a Mr. Martini on me as he’s closing up shop.

  “You want me to call you a cab, Miss Robin?” He’s messing with the blinds on the picture window up front, staring at what looks like more snow than we’ve had all year. It’s still coming down, too. Picture perfect. How absolutely lovely for all the little children and families.

  “No. I kin walkeht jas finh.”

  I don’t remember my coat being this big and octopus-like when I put it on this morning but I’ve been here all day. I might’ve lost weight. It’s possible. I have walked the thirty or so steps to the green-tiled bathroom at least eight times. I know I have.

  “Miss Robin.” Whoa. Kyle’s really close to me. I don’t know how he made it back to the bar so fast. I try to focus on him, on his big blue eyes or the dime-shaped hole in his chin, or even on the fat band of gold on his third finger that ties him to the lovely Arelia, but I cannot seem to really see anything for too long. Everything swims. Everything whispers. Everything goes away.

  “Miss Robin?” Is he talking to me? I guess so. I don’t think there’s anyone else left here but me. “Let me call you a cab. It’s freezing out there. You’ve a long walk, lass. Yah don’t need to be out in thau wind. You’ll catch a right cold.”

  “Es’okay.” I wave him off, blundering toward the door. I know just how to walk it. I’ve walked it so often, through so many last calls. I can go there in my sleep. I need to go just two steps this way, beyond the jukebox, and then twelve to the door, or fifteen if I have to take my time and watch my feet. “I know tha’ wey. Thanks yeh, though.”

  He’s grabbing some things up from the bar. It looks like his puffy coat and the deposit bag, and probably somewhere in the pile, his revolver. “Hang on, then. Let me call Arelia. I’ll just take yeh on home meself.”

  Why do men always think they need to save a girl? I don’t want to be saved. I am beyond it, and I have made peace with it, and I am welcoming of the fall. Come for me, Lucifer. The sooner we meet, the sooner I can stop burning through my inheritance and leave something for the children at St. Jude’s who will receive the entirety of the assets I will leave behind.

  He is wrestling with the register tape and calling for me to stop. I get the door open and the cold. Lord Almighty. It hits me like a wave of seawater to the eyes, stinging and burning and blinding. It sobers me up a bit, and Christ knows I can’t be having that. Brady’s is less than a mile. It’s slick as snot out here but I’ve got my good boots on and I can make it. I can. It’s not so much snow. I’d say only about fifteen inches so far and the plows are out. Their amber lights remind me of whiskey which reminds me of how O’Reilly’s closed, and I start to walk as fast as I can on the cobbled sidewalks, gritty with sand and salt.

  I get down to East Broad and make a split second decision to duck into the alley beside the tattoo shop. The concrete wall makes a chilly cushion against my face, but I lay my cheek against it, staring at the sidewalk six feet away and waiting for O’Reilly’s heavy steps.

  The plow truck goes by at just the right time, throwing a wall of snow up over the walk, covering my path into the alley. The snow is running down the gray concrete. My fingers make little swirls against it, pushing at the porous surface. It’s just like a gravestone. It’s a weeping marker, cold and frigid, of the dead and gone. I need to get to Brady’s already but I wait. I wait.

  Five minutes or twenty go by. I can’t be sure. I hear him before I see him. He’s got his phone out. “I don’t know where she went. Let meh just jog down to the next block, lovey. If she’s not round I’ll come on home, I will.”

  He hurries past the alley. He never looks my way.

  I count in my head, one to twenty, one to twenty, except damn it all, I can’t remember what’s after fourteen so I skip up to eighteen and begin again. Count and sing a bit of fa-la-la-la, and it’s so cold, so cold. I do not want to freeze to death. I want to meet the fallen angels with warmth in my belly and a fire in my heart.

  My fingers lead me along the alley wall; hand over hand, leaning ragged and bleary on the wall. The coast is clear. I set out again, foot over foot, into the abyss of snow and twinkling lights and every window lit with cheer.

  I look up a while as I walk, but I cannot see a star at all. There was no snow in Bethlehem, was there? A camel maybe, and a few dark-skinned Jews, but nobody in America thinks of it that way. Jesus is as white as Santa Claus these days. People love lies. Priests and doctors both. They say, “She has a good chance. We caught it early,” when what they mean is, pick out the casket while you’ve still got time. They say, “God will never give you more than you can bear,” when what they mean is, God does not care about you at all. He’s busy giving the next unlucky chick breast cancer. He’s quite moved on from you all.

  The bells are tolling at Saints Simon and Jude. They start as I cross the street to that side on the path to Brady’s and the rolling quell nearly startles me off my feet. I’m so close to them it feels like they are chiming in my guts. I get right on to it, the hulking mass of urban diocese, and want to walk on but my feet won’t move. It’s so awfully cold. Brady is a tightwad sonofabitch. Surely he won’t close early tonight. I could go in just a moment, just to feel my fingers again before I get along.

  I dip my finger and cross myself because it’s ingrained in me, and she wouldn’t be pleased with my disrespect. I already smell like the bottom of a ripened barrel. Surely I won’t burst into flame with a little holy water and a quickly bent knee.

  The last pew isn’t that warm because the doors are open. I make it on two more, third from the back, and that’s all the further I will go. I need a little warmth and that’s all. The row is empty. The kneeling bench unfolds against my clumsy fingers and I fall and do not get up.

  Everything dips and swims until the altar up front and the sacraments on the walls look like a bad trip. I’m in the middle of a Kevin Smith movie and I swear if I see Buddy Christ, I’m going to barf.

  My eyes close, my head against the wood of the pew in front of me. I breathe, slow and choppy, through the loose pulling in my head. For a moment, as I feel everything veering right in my brain as I fight the spinning and the nausea, it is as though I am eight again and waiting for her to take my hand and lead me up for communion. I am nerves and limbs. She is light and air.

  I squeeze my eyes shut tight, tight, tighter, and I pray for one moment, for real. I pray for redemption and for peace and mostly, to not be alone tonight of all nights, with a memory that cannot unsee or unknow a sorrow too deep for spoken words.

  The kneeling bench sinks a little more and I open my eyes. A man is crouched beside me, his hands a temple of pointed fingers posed for prayer. “Scuse me,” he says, and I s
mell the whiskey on him, heavy like mine and delicious.

  His hair is dark with streaks of red like whiskey set aflame.

  His eyes are brown.

  TWO

  The place fills up pretty quickly. I keep my head down because what I drank at O’Reilly’s isn’t settling well, and because my eyes are bloodshot. No need to terrify all the families with children decked out in their Christmas finery. The more I slump, the closer to me he scoots on the kneeler. He smells like wood. There’s another smell, one I can’t quite identify. The knees of his jeans are dingy gray and worn. He wears gloves with the fingers out, and there is motor oil or something around his nail beds. That explains the other smell. It’s engine grease.

  “Oh, excuse me. Can we get through?” It’s a youngish Mexican woman with two dark and shiny-haired children and an older woman, grandmother probably, behind her. I look around for the first time. There aren’t any other seats. My warm hovel of quiet refuge has become a celebration house for the blessed.

  Time to go. Everything feels sluggish and faulty, as though I am mired in the ice that clings to the stained glass windows like ghosts. I want to go, but I can’t move. She stares at me. Her smile slips just a bit. The red and white lines on her soft sweater run together and I close my eyes and breathe through my mouth, desperate for…something.

  I register the warmth first, the way his arm goes around me, over my coat but still so hot on my back, and his other hand with just the fingers peeking out lands on my stomach where the coat has come unclasped. The gasp that comes out of me hangs in the air between us but he doesn’t let go. A twist and a gentle heft, and I am sitting on the bench out of the way. He kicks the kneeler up and motions the family through.

  “Please,” he says. “My wife isn’t feeling well tonight but she wouldn’t miss Midnight Mass. You know how it is.” I am positive he’s been drinking but his words are sharp so it would seem that he holds his liquor better than I do.

  He looks at me, really looks, and I lean back against the wooden benches to still my swirling head and give him my eyes. I don’t know what he thinks he’s doing, and I don’t care. I just really don’t do that anymore.

  Care. I don’t care.

  The older woman leans down as they pass us. She pats him on the shoulder. “I’ll say a prayer for your wife.” She smiles at me, like poor thing, and I grimace. He’s watching as I do. If he wants a thank you, he’s not getting one.

  The service starts with singing, and for Christmas Eve they bring out their best singers, the fine china of worship, who sing with voices so glorious that one cigarette might ruin them forever. I try not to soak it up. Strangely, Sean Connery’s voice comes back to me. They are the pilgrims and I am the unholy land.

  The liturgy goes on with all the usuals but when they are reading about the baby and the promise of life eternal because of the One born this day, I start shaking again. It’s midnight here in Bethlehem and that always gets them going, because we are the chosen city, the Christmas City, and oh, my God, I need a drink.

  “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”

  I don’t realize how cold I am until his hand closes over my fingers. I have clenched them in the frays of a gold and green scarf she used to wear, but I cannot focus on it for long. It’s not as warm in here as I hoped it might be, and Brady’s is going to close, and what, what? He actually is holding my hand.

  “The Word of the Lord,” says the woman up front in the deep red dress, and the man holding my hand squeezes and says, “Thanks be to God.”

  I don’t do that either. Thank God.

  His hair is short, fuzzy; the way men’s hair looks when they are growing out a crew cut. I focus on him because he’s warm, and because no one has touched me in nearly a year. No one.

  They give the second reading. He has a longish nose, strong, but not overwhelming. The brown eyes aren’t just brown. They are blackish. They burn. I wonder about leaving, but when I close my eyes to gather myself, the long lashes and the carefully drawn lips and most of all the imprint of his eyes are still there, an impression in the clay of my mind, and I open them to see him again. I still myself, a stone among the statues. There’s a scar under his left ear that runs down into the neck of his coat. It looks like a burn or maybe a knife wound. It doesn’t make him ugly. It’s nice somehow, a nod to humanity, because without it he would be too perfect.

  There’s a draft and some other family comes in late, dragging twin girls in dishwater pigtails and navy pea coats. I lean toward him as they pass. Without letting go of my hand, he wraps his other arm around my shoulders and draws me against his left shoulder. Wood and oil and smoke and whiskey. He smells like O’Reilly’s only somehow better. This close to him, warmth seeps from his puffy black coat into mine. I just give in. My eyes close. I can hear the mass if I tune in, but mostly I feel him.

  I feel his warmth, and I feel the roughness of his first finger and thumb tracing back and forth over the knuckles on my hand, and I feel the vibration of his voice as he parrots back the words I should be saying back to the priest.

  “And also with you.

  “Glory to you, Lord.

  Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.”

  The priest begins the homily by talking about how tonight, in Bethlehem, we should be filled most of all with hope. It is the dawn of a new day coming, a reaffirmation of our covenant with God.

  “On this night, dear children, all things are possible because of the coming of Our King.”

  His arm tightens against me and when I look up from his shoulder, his stubble scratches my cheek.

  “I should –” I say, just a whisper. He shakes his head.

  “No,” he says. “Just be still.”

  So I am.

  I am still.

  THREE

  I start to cry before the homily is over. By the time the priest begins the Nicene Prayer, the wetness is leaking silently down my face into the collar of my coat. I keep my head tucked against his shoulder. I do not make a sound. If I am very careful, it is possible he won’t even notice.

  I’m not sure why I am crying, except that it’s after midnight on Christmas Day and I am sitting in church with a complete stranger, slowly sobering up. None of these things would be my first choice. Somewhere, there is a bottle and a warm brownstone condo. I meant to drink and sleep and sleep and drink, maybe wake up on the twenty-sixth. Or not.

  The man beside me doesn’t move, except for the rising and falling of his chest with his breaths, and his fingers smoothing my knuckles.

  “God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God…” His voice is quiet and a bit raspy, more of a mutter than out loud words. I wonder how he came to be here tonight. Does he have a family? Is he alone too? I wonder how much of what he’s saying he actually believes.

  His hand squeezes mine extra hard on the last bit of the prayer, and out of curiosity, I look up. There’s a flame in the depths of his dark eyes, wildness, as he recites it. “We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.”

  He notices me looking, and his free hand comes around to thumb away my tears at the same time that I am wiggling my other hand out to pat his hand that covers mine.

  “Let us pray to the Lord.” The lector up front, a balding man in a black and red checked shirt, wears high-waisted black pants. “For all of our active military, serving away from home, we pray to the Lord.” The crowd echoes him, a single voice from many, saying here and across the world right now, “Lord, hear our prayer.”

  That perhaps is the beauty of Catholicism, if there is any to be found. She used to say that when you pray as a Catholic, God hears because so many of you are praying at the same time. It’s religious strength in numbers. I think of how I used to ask for her to be remembered in these prayers when she first got sick. So many people prayed with me. I don’t know
if she was right. I don’t know if it matters if five hundred are praying or just one. If He doesn’t want to give in, will anything change His mind? Ask with faith and you shall receive, she said. I didn’t ask. I begged, but for naught.

  The balding man stops. “Now, please take a moment to silently speak any personal intentions you may have for the Lord.”

  It’s only a few moments, maybe twenty or thirty seconds all told, but at the end of it, I know. While the others close their eyes, bow their heads, bounce their children on their knees, this man watches me and I watch him. Our eyes are open and we look, look, look deep into one another. By the time the man up front breaks the silence with another “Lord, hear our prayer,” I know the truth.

  I am alone. And he is alone. But tonight, tonight we are together.

  FOUR

  I do not take communion, although I might take a little peace and mercy. I just can’t walk that far. We’re on the kneeler again, and he is holding both my hands while the others make their way down the center aisle.

  “When did you last eat?” he says, low, into the dark curtain of my tangled hair. I think about it.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Would you like to get a bite? I can drive us somewhere or–” It might be my raised eyebrows that stop him, or maybe just the horror on my face. I don’t go out. Not anymore. I go to O’Reilly’s and Brady’s, but that’s it mostly.

  I try to trust my words, but it’s tough. “There’s, um, there’s nothing open.” Around us, the organ music is swelling and dipping, crescendos of Christmas beauty. People are happy. It makes my stomach clench–the hunger I’d forgotten till he brought it up, and the happiness, too.

  “Waffle House?” He’s trying to read me. His heavy brows are up as well, pushing wrinkles into that Irish looking forehead. I think he must be a little older than me. Up close there are crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes.