Page 23 of A Winding Wave of Magic
The coast was calling, only two hours away now. Part of me wanted to borrow Reina’s car and drive there tonight. Face what needed to be faced. Learn the secrets undoubtedly waiting for me.
But there were other ways of healing—ways I hadn’t learned until I’d left the isolated beach when I was older. I hadn’t realized how lonely I was in Boston until I’d felt the embrace of a true friend. I needed Reina more than I needed to go to Manzanita.
So I’d have to mourn my grandmother tonight another way.
“Penny loved a good drop of whiskey,” I said. “If I were dead, she’d have the entire Sunset Tavern toasting my memory. She’d throw a town wake that would last for days. The least I can do is have a glass of whiskey in her honor.”
“We could just do that here. I think I have a bottle of Jameson somewhere., and I doubt she’d mind.”
Like most seers, Penny hated a party, but there were some moments when there was no replacement for tradition.
Ní neart go cur le chéile, or so the saying went.There’s no strength without unity.
So Reina and I would have to make our own.
So I just shook my head and pulled my towel more tightly around my body. “‘You’ll never live unless you live,’” I said again. “How many times did she tell us that too?”
Reina looked doubtful but didn’t argue.
“So, let’s go live. For Gran’s sake.”
I was running from something,though I couldn’t say what. It was the same feeling I’d had in my dreams about the mountain. The same sensation that had nipped at my heels on my way into a frozen pond, continued even after the visions had quieted, that had glowered at me from the back of my closet as I packed for Portland.
I’d left the box Gran had sent me there, too afraid of carrying it back to Oregon, though part of me wondered if that was where it belonged.
This odd feeling of being chased, however, came right with me. And perhaps that was what drove me to a bar for the first time in years.
Or maybe it was just my reaction to grief, so tight and acute, like I hadn’t felt in fifteen years.
The feeling continued as I managed to find a pair of jeans and a sweater as gray as my mood, pull my hair back into a braid, and swipe on some lip gloss. I felt like a fraud, a painted shell of a person, but this had to be better than acting like a statue while I used up all of Reina’s hot water. Since receiving the telegram, I’d been walking around like a ghost, numb and hollow as I made my excuses on campus and took enough leave to take care of Gran’s affairs. Even the visions that usually chased me around seemed faded, like clothing left too long in the sun.
I needed something to jolt me out of this strange, looming fog. I need to cry, scream, shout.
Or maybe just a good stiff drink.
Invino veritas, I kept telling myself as we approached the pub. It was all for Gran. Somewhere out there, her essence could still See me. Or I so badly wished.
“Surprise!” Reina said as she stopped outside a big public house on Milwaukie Avenue. A worn wooden door swung open as a few patrons exited, carrying with them the scents of stale alcohol and French fries alongside the lacy intonations of a mandolin.
The sign above it read “Donegan’s Alehouse.”
“Very funny,” I said.
“I figured going to an Irish pub would be the closest thing to a real wake we could give Penny. Listen, they’ve even got live musicians.”
I followed Reina into the bar and was immediately swept up in the chatter of people and clinking glasses, all set to lively drinking songs in the background. Given that it was a Friday night, it was reasonably busy, but not as packed as I’d feared. There was still room to walk without touching people. I’d keep my gloves on, but my shoes and the rest of my clothes seemed to be doing their job tonight.
“All right,” I conceded as we found a couple of stools at the bar. “You’re right. She would have said this reminded her of home. What was it she always told us every time she sent us back to school?”
Reina grinned. “‘You can’t live unless you live.’”
She ordered a couple of whiskies from the bartender while I looked around. I felt like my grandmother was with me, gently touching the top of my hand while she shared memories of her youth.
Gran had grown up in the Aran Islands, off the coast of Galway. When the winter storms howled in front of the house in Manzanita, she and I would sit by the fire listening to the Clancy Brothers, and she’d take my hand and show me her girlhood.Sometimes it was visions of her mother telling stories in Irish while she knit socks and sweaters. More than once she shared the raucouscéilithe, the dancing sessions to the tunes of fiddles or sometimes a full band, with plenty of whiskey and ale being spilled in a place much like this.
Within an hour, Reina and I were stinking drunk and crooning like everyone else to the fiddle-driven jigs of the Celtic Bandits. The bar (and everyone in it) seemed pleasantly bright and attractive. Reina and I cheered the five or six couples twirling drunkenly around the dance floor.
Too ra loo ra loo, too ra loo ra lay,
