8. They Call It Aqua Vitae for a Reason
8
THEY CALL IT AQUA VITAE FOR A REASON
I was sober a while, but I’ll drink and be wise
For fear I should die in the end of thirst.
— THOMAS MACDONAGH, “THE YELLOW BITTERN”
“ A re you sure you want to go out?” Reina called from her room as I got out of the shower.
I was struck with déjà vu, as much because I was back in the little greenhouse we’d shared the last two years of college as from the nature of the question. More than most, Reina knew how out of character my request was.
I paused in her doorway and cocked my head, heavy in a turbaned towel. “Now you ask me?”
My best friend chuckled from the bed, where she had been waiting for the shower to free up. “It feels like the right thing to do. I don’t mind if you want to spend the evening crying at ghosts roaming the bar, but it doesn’t seem like your favorite thing to do on a good day.”
I chuckled. I’d been imagining myself doing just that while I was in the shower. As soon as we’d arrived from the airport, I’d beelined for the bathroom while Reina lit a bundle of sage out of deference. Touch the water .
Normally standing under running water would calm the voices and dim the visions. And did. Except one.
Gran.
Touch the water .
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.
In vino 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 raucous céilithe , 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,
Too ra loo ra loo, too ra loo ra lay
Upon his knee a pretty wench
And on the table a jug of punch!
In the center, one of the couples seemed to be, falling into each other when the song ended. The man wrapped his arms around his partner’s waist and lifted her a few inches off the ground. Even from this far away, I could see the smile playing over both their lips just before they met.
Similar instances had been teasing through my fingertips and elbows, even through my gloves and shirt all evening. Though this bar had undoubtedly been more than just a setting for meet cutes and flirtations, those seemed to be the memories I was attracting tonight. And I wasn’t going out of my way to avoid them.
What must it be like to throw yourself at someone with such abandon? Their bodies were flush, hands roved around waists and torsos, slipping under hems, daring each other to stop. Everything was instinct. Nothing to interfere with the motions of their bodies or the chemical attraction between them. It didn’t matter what was going through either of their heads, because the fact was that they both wanted each other, badly.
Maybe that was my primary problem…maybe I just didn’t want it bad enough not to care about anything I heard.
But goddess, sometimes I wanted to.
Right now, it was all I could think about. For no reason I could fathom, I wanted it so badly I could hardly breathe.
“It’s called grief, baby.”
I turned to find Reina’s face torqued with sympathy and pain.
“Stop that,” I told her as I picked up my fourth glass of whiskey, though she knew I didn’t mean it. I had never minded if she read my thoughts, and I wasn’t about to explain them now.
“You don’t need to be ashamed of it,” she said. “Everyone needs companionship and love, especially when they’re in pain. Death makes us all crave closeness with others. And you don’t get enough of it as it is.”
I snorted and took a drink of my whiskey. “So, what, I’m in mourning, so I should get drunk and go home with a stranger?”
“If it’s what you want. Why deny yourself basic needs if that’s what it takes to help you get through this time? How long has it been, anyway? Months?”
Try years , my mind answered before I could stop it.
Irritatingly, she didn’t seem surprised. “I thought so.”
I grimaced. “Reina, I love you. But please get out of my head now and wipe that pity off your face.”
She held up her hands in surrender. “Sorry. Force of habit. But that is a long time.”
She didn’t have to tell me. Just like I didn’t have to tell her about my last ill-fated attempt with a friendly lifeguard from the athletic center. It had started reasonably enough under his shower, the water mitigating the worst of his thoughts. Even then, it wasn’t terrible to feel just how much another person wanted me. In my admittedly limited experience, most men weren’t conscious of much more than that when they were in the middle of the act.
But as soon as we got out for a second round, however…that was when the trouble started. As soon as my naked body fell onto his bed, I was surrounded by about every other lover who had played on the jersey sheets, including one from just that morning. He touched me, and I felt every comparison he made, conscious or not.
I had never felt more disposable. Or disgusting.
“It’s not worth it,” I muttered into my glass. “They all end the same.”
But even as I said it, the crowd at the other end of the bar parted, revealing an attractive man who, by the look of it, had been watching me for some time. When he caught my gaze, he held up his pint glass in offering. An invitation.
Reina followed my gaze, then smiled at me. “You sure about that?”
“Yes.” No .
Reina snorted. “Okay, then.” She slid off her stool.
“Where are you going?”
She polished off her whiskey and set it on the bar with a clink. “Not all of us live like nuns, my friend. There’s a beautiful man at the pool table who has been thinking about how to kiss me for the last fifteen minutes. I’m going to let him try.”
I looked over my shoulder at a short, dark-haired man with glasses who was looking at Reina as if that exact question was on his mind.
I scowled back at her. “You don’t want him. He’s a bike guy. His pant leg is still rolled up. And he has an earring and a chinstrap and I bet he takes at least fifteen supplements a day, probably won’t eat nightshades, and…yep, those glasses are definitely just props.”
A hand landed on my neck, fingers touching my bare skin. Instantly, my mind was flooded with Reina’s irritation. And pity.
You’re looking for reasons for me to be alone too, now?
“Stop that,” I snarled as I batted her hand away. “I didn’t ask for that any more than I want you reading my mind right now.”
“And I didn’t ask for you to judge my preferences.”
I slumped. “Sorry.”
“‘You can’t live unless you live,’ right?” she asked softly.
The pit in my stomach grew into a chasm. The man at the end of the bar smiled. Something in the back of my eyes pricked, but no tears came.
“Right,” I whispered.
Reina slipped into the crowd to meet her prospect. When she accepted his handshake, I looked away, no longer wanting to intrude.
“Can I buy you another drink?”
I turned to find the man who had been watching me earlier now sitting near my elbow, chin perched on one hand. This close, he wasn’t quite as handsome as I’d originally thought. His brown eyes were a bit dull, like someone who spent too much time watching reality television, and his jaw was soft around the edges, as though he enjoyed his beer a bit too often.
Reina’s pity echoed through my mind.
“Sure,” I replied. “Why not?”