Call Down the Hawk (Dreamer, #1)(54)

Adam continued, “Only problem with that is that I agree with Declan.”

“For fuck’s sake.”

“I didn’t say I had the same reasons. I don’t think you have to spend your life under a rock, but I don’t think you should go chasing tigers until you’re sure you have matching stripes.”

Now Ronan knew he sounded irritable. “Poetic. You’re a fucking sage. I’m writing that down.”

“I’m just saying. Go slow. If you wait for break, I can help, maybe.”

Ronan did not want to go slow. He felt like this was a candle that might burn out if he waited too long.

“I just want to know,” Adam said finally, in a slightly different voice from before, “that when I come for break, you’ll be there.”

“I’ll be here.” He was always here. Double-sided murder crabs had made sure of it.

“In one piece.”

“In one piece.”

“I know you,” Adam said, but he didn’t add anything else, nothing about what knowing Ronan meant.

They sat in the quiet of a phone call with nothing in it for nearly a minute. Ronan could hear the sounds of doors opening and closing on Adam’s side of the call, voices murmuring and laughing. He was sure Adam could hear the night noises of the Barns on Ronan’s end.

“I have to go paint over some crab blood,” Adam said eventually. “Tamquam—”

It had been over a year since either had sat in a Latin class, but it lingered as their private language. It had been one of the languages spoken in Ronan’s dreams for a very long time, and so Latin had been one of the few classes Ronan had thrown himself into when they were at school. Adam couldn’t stand not to be the best at whichever class he was in, so he’d had to throw himself into it with just as much fervor. It was possible that no two students at Aglionby had ever come away with such a thorough understanding of Latin (or, possibly, of each other).

“—alter idem,” finished Ronan.

They hung up.

Ronan climbed out of the car in a better mood than he’d climbed into it. Poking Chainsaw the raven where she slept on the farmhouse porch railing, he unlocked the door, and then the two of them went inside. He set himself a fire in the sitting room and started a can of soup on the stove while he showered and cotton swabbed all the black rubbish out of his ears and hair. A curious energy was running through him. Adam had not told him yes but he hadn’t told him no, either.

He’d told him go slow.

He could go slow, he told himself.

He could go look at photos of his real mother and compare her to the woman he’d seen earlier that day. That was slow. That wouldn’t hurt anything. He could do that while eating soup in front of a fire. Surely that would keep both Adam and Declan happy.

He retrieved an old photo box from the storage space in his parents’ old bedroom and returned downstairs. With a mug of soup, he sat by his fire in the sitting room. It was a comforting, low-ceilinged space with exposed beams, the fireplace yawning in an unevenly plastered wall, all of it appearing to belong to an older country than the one it had been built in. Like the rest of the house, it felt as organic and alive as Ronan. It was a good friend to look at these photos with.

He really was in a good mood.

“Cracker,” Ronan told Chainsaw. He held one out to her where she sat on her pooping-blanket on the couch. She had one eye on the desired saltine and one eye on the fire, which she didn’t trust. Every time it popped, she twitched with knowing suspicion.

“Cracker,” he said again. He tapped her beak with it so that she’d pay more attention to him and less to the fire.

“Kreker,” she croaked.

He stroked the small feathers next to her large beak and let her have it.

Sitting on the floor, he flipped the lid off the box. Inside were haphazardly stacked vintage photos, some in photo books, some not. He saw his mother, his father, aunt and uncle (he pulled that one out to save it for further study), his brothers when much younger, a variety of animals and musical instruments. His mother looked as he remembered her—softer than that portrait. Softer than that woman wearing her face in the little white sedan. He was glad to see that his memory hadn’t tricked him, but it didn’t really provide an answer for the other woman’s existence.

He kept digging, down, down, down, to the bottom of the box, until suddenly, he saw a corner of a photo tucked beneath another that made his fingers draw back. He couldn’t see much of the photo, but he recognized the corner. Not truly recognized. Rather, he remembered the way it used to make him feel to look at it. He knew without pulling out the rest of it that it was a photo of Niall Lynch in his youth, not long before he came over from Belfast. He hadn’t looked at it in many, many years, and he didn’t remember many of the details of it apart from the overwhelming memory of not liking it. It had made a younger Ronan feel bad enough that he had stuffed it right down to the bottom of the photo box, where he wouldn’t easily uncover it again in other photo-looking sessions. All he recalled now was his father’s ferocious energy in it—he was a wild person, more alive than anyone else Ronan had ever met, more awake than anyone else Ronan had ever met—and his youth. Eighteen. Twenty.

Thinking about it now, he thought that the youth was what had engendered Ronan’s pronounced dislike. To child Ronan, seeing his father with so much life ahead of him felt retroactively terrifying. Like the Niall in the photo had so many choices left to make, and any one of them might make him never end up their father.