She said, “Do you love me?”
He said, “Of course, Bernie, you know that.”
“Why you call me that then?…” she said, and then they said at the same time,
“You know I hate it!”
“I know you hate it…”
He said, “…and you only let me call you that, and you won’t hate me for it. You know I love you. Why you asking?”
“Why I’m asking? You just said we gonna have to save my daddy, from what? Why you worrying me when we supposed to be having a fun summer? Didn’t you promise me that? After everything at school, that girl getting raped, that boy dying, you promised me we was gonna just have fun for once.”
“You act like this is what I want…”
“You should hear yourself sometime. Your whole life is about your uncle’s imaginary friend, you do everything he tell you.”
“You know he ain’t imaginary. You fake like you can’t see it, but I know you do Bernie. Don’t be scared. I need you, your daddy need you.”
“Why you need me? You want to save that monster, you save him. So he can beat somebody else half to death.”
“You lie to me and say you can’t see it, but you use it to help every man your daddy beat up. Lorne told me, he saw you. You know how to use it Bernie, and we can use it to help your daddy. Anes is using what she remember of the repulsive force and it’s enough to make your daddy a bad man. But we can change it for him, use it to send Anes far away. You can have a good daddy for once. And you can keep Anes away from your family. If she after your daddy, then she’ll probably want one of his sons when he dead. It don’t stop, Anes don’t stop. We have to stop her.”
Bernadette and Kyrie together were proper vessels for Lorne powers and they used it together to create a perimeter around the Franklin family home that Anes could not penetrate. Bernadette’s father returned to normal size and he was a gentler man from then on.
They loved one another for years, and were married in their young adulthood. Neither were interested in children, both were motivated to find a life together better than anything either had seen in their youth. Bernadette was a seamstress and eventually created her own laundry business that she was able to manage out of her family’s home. But that was not what Kyrie wanted, a reason to stay in Bluffton where he had watched his favorite uncle die, and his own father had made life difficult for him with the demands of his manhood. Kyrie stayed in Bluffton because of his love for Bernadette, and that is where he started his career selling property. He was a natural; handsome man that people trusted implicitly and he knew the area well because he and Bernadette had explored much of it in their youth and into their young adulthood. They divorced the first time when Kyrie floated the idea that they should make plans to move somewhere, anywhere else. Bernadette was hoping to open a second location of her business and she thought that she had been doing so with the blessing of her partner, but as he explained to her,
“Like I can tell you no.” Kyrie said. The two were on the front stoop of the wrap around porch of Bernadette’s house and she was seething with anger. Kyrie was staring at her stare off angrily into the distance.
“So you lie to me then? You make me feel like you got my back in everything, but what you really doing is lying to me? Why?”
“Is it lying if I would do anything to make you happy?”
“That’s a lie, if it was true you wouldn’t be crying right now because I’m making real roots for us.”
“Roots?” Kyrie wanted to laugh, but he was angry. He was more sad than angry, but a life with the kind of man that his father was made it difficult for him to sort the two emotions. “Like the roots we got here worth keeping. Thank God we helped your daddy the way we did, but if we stay in this swamp, things will just get worse.”
“That’s what Lorne say?”
“That’s what I say,”
Bernadette shook her head. “I want to believe that all this is coming from you, but in most the time that I known you, you ain’t really been one to just make decisions for yourself…”
“Bernie, that’s unfair, and you know it…”
“…sometimes I think you only with me cause Lorne told you to be. Well, fuck him, and fuck you. Why don’t you go talk to him about relocating and I’ll go about my life.”
“What you trying to say to me?”
“I don’t think I’m saying it too soft, and my words plain. We ain’t got no business together. Not that we ever could, could we? Seem like to me that repulsive force working harder than ever, I can feel you. You know what it feel like?”
“Bernie, don’t do this…”
“It’s like a punch, and then a suck, but then that punch again. Like, I can feel you there, the weight of all your bullshit is so much, it got its own gravity…”
“…You don’t listen at all to me…”
“…drawing me in, but the smell of it, all that bullshit…”
“…this ain’t about nothing but us…”
“…its strong, like a fist, and its strong enough to hurt me and I can’t take it anymore. Go be with Lorne. This is over for us.”
“You jealous of something you ain’t got no need to be jealous of,” Kyrie said desperately. Bernadette was not the type to make idle threats and he knew that if she was ready to walk away, then there was nothing he could do to stop her. “You know everything I do, everything I get from Lorne is to help people, mostly the people you love cause it’s your family got that curse…” He trailed off. The curse of the Franklin family was a very sore subject for Bernadette.
“You don’t have to make me anymore angry, Kyrie. I’m plenty mad as it is. Just say goodbye, and I will see you soon enough with divorce papers.”
It happened just like that too. Kyrie said goodbye and soon after Bernadette’s lawyer tracked him down in Charleston. He thought about not signing them, ripping them up and mailing the pieces back to her. But after a night conversing with Lorne, and crying, he decided that he would never refuse any request from the woman he loved more than everything.
Kyrie was unhappy for three years before he reconciled with Bernadette. He returned to Bluffton often with the excuse of seeing his own family, but he would go to the places that he knew she frequented and wait to see her. He finally worked up the nerve to confront her at her office and she stood, glaring at him with what seemed to be more hatred that she knew she was capable of. But he apologized to her, explained that Lorne had indeed influenced his decision to move to Charleston where he had been moonlighting, using his Lorne powers to confront the powerful magics that characterize the city. He explained to her that he had been able to help a lot of people, and that if she would move with him, they could do a lot more together. And Bernadette broke down in tears, she told him how much she missed him. They decided to remarry, and by then, Bernadette could manage her business operations from anywhere. They were happy in Charleston for about a decade, before the night that Bernadette found Kyrie unconscious in a cemetery. He had been doing Lorne’s bidding and some type of evil energy or power, had lured his body and drained it of its life force. It was Bernadette’s love that brought him back. But she was done with their adventures in Charleston, and she left the city, hoping that he would follow. He never did, and Bernadette insisted on their second divorce.
Nowadays, Kyrie mostly converses with Lorne, who tells him that he and Bernadette will be together again soon enough.
“It’s not necessary. I’m ruining her life. All I do is worry her.”
Kyrie goes for long walks along the pier and he usually glares at Fort Sumter when he passes it in the distance. Today, he doesn’t care that he looks crazy. People passing by see him talking out loud, but he is a handsome man, and even his casual wear makes him look expensive, so no one worries too much or looks for too long.
“She’s all I can think about. I keep having dreams, I saw her through my window last night.”
Lorne has a very kind energy, even though his past as an entity of the veil existence complicates that characterization. His life has been very long and he has committed acts that could be seen as reprehensible to some. But Kyrie has only ever known him as an adviser who has helped him keep people safe, and he wants to continue that more than everything, but the last time he lost Bernadette, she made it clear that she loved him and would not accept a life with him that still involved Lorne’s influence.
“You really think she can forgive me again?” Kyrie asks. “Even if she can, I don’t think that she should. I just take her places she don’t want to be. Make her do things she don’t want to do.”
Lorne is good at making Kyrie see things from different perspectives.
“Maybe. Maybe she need me for something. But if that’s the case, she know where I am.”
Kyrie thinks about all the people who have stared off at the Atlantic from a pier in Charleston, South Carolina, and he thinks that of all those people, he is the most unlucky of them all. He was trying to be the good man that his uncle asked him to be, but that was making him unhappy. And despite his best efforts, it seemed that he could not make his good self compatible with his happy self, and maybe he never would.
PRL Serials 