March 28, 2017

The sun is high in the sky, streaming through the curtains when I wake. I pad through to the kitchen, wishing that I’d called Vic and that she was here. I could make a cup of coffee for her as though this is any other Tuesday morning, sit beside her. In a moment, she would lean in to kiss me. When we finished our coffee, we’d leave the sofa and the flat and step out into the rest of our lives together.

I stretch in front of the coffee maker, shake myself out of the liminal space and return to the day after my father’s funeral, where my wife-self, mother-self, American-just-here-for-a-minute-self has prowled the shore in the night and slept until nearly noon.

The phone startles me. Vic, checking to see how I am.

“Were they cunts?” she asks.

“Vic.” My neck heats.

“They weren’t cunts?”

“I haven’t had my coffee yet.”

“You sound as though you’re on my schedule.”

I tell her about Maeve and the hill and the night walk and not phoning her at dawn.

“I would’ve come,” she says.

“I know. But you need your sleep. And I don’t need to be your rescue case.” A tightness behind the eyes. I focus on making the coffee. My adult self doesn’t want to be anyone’s rescue case. My child self has wanted someone to come for her since the very beginning.

“You’re anything but that,” she says. “I could come now.”

My whole body fizzes. She could be here in an hour-and-a-half. We could have the afternoon together. I could come and get her sooner than that, though I haven’t had a shower. She tells me to relax, take care of myself, she’ll make her way. We’ve got it nearly sorted, and then Mary beeps in, saying she couldn’t sleep and waited as long as she could stand it and made an early start thinking I wouldn’t mind if she got here for lunch instead of dinner.

“If you’ve something else on,” she says, the lift at the end making it sound like a question. “I can just get a cup of tea at that place on the front.”

I switch back to Vic, tell her.

“Away you go, then.”

“No, Vic, I. You,” I sigh. “You could come. Meet her.” I’m not sure I’m ready for this, despite having just offered it. I’d have, in the same room, the two women who often seem to see me more clearly than I see myself. For over forty years, I was afraid of women. Vic was the one exception. We were separated too soon. In the intervening decades, I kept to myself, tended to my husband, sons, daughter. Told myself it was enough. Funny, perhaps, that Mary, the woman who gave me away, was the first woman I began to learn to trust. In this moment, I want both of them equally, one after the other, like lovers who each satisfy a different need. Mary, for whom I yearned and whom I feared from the farthest edge of memory. Vic, who returned to my life after three decades of marriage had almost entirely eroded my sense of self. I felt as though I hung on the edge of a cliff, and she stepped in to belay me safely back to ground. I accepted this, a gift from an old friend, though I knew I was selfish to do so. I focused on the feeling of safety, not daring to ask what she wanted, or even what I did, from the relationship. Is this what hangs in the air for us now?

“She’s your mam. You need yer time together. I’ll still be here when she’s away. Ring when you can.”

Typical Vic. I’d forgotten that about her: as bold as she has always been in thought and speech, she can also be catlike, stealing stealthily away when she catches the slightest whiff of a need for personal space. Excess sensitivity, I suppose, from having grown up in a crowded house with never a centimeter’s space to herself.

She hangs up and I return to Mary, but all I can think is Come back, Vic. I shiver, chilled and anxious again. What Vic has given as personal space I receive as her abandoning me. I pour my coffee, try to focus. “What? Mary, I’m sorry. I got distracted. Can you say that again?”

Dearest Jayne,

Today, I walked the hilltop and came back by the shore. Hamish had built a fire outside, and we sat in the heat of the flames as the sun set. Hamish says little, but I know he thinks of you, too.

The fire gave me hope. It made me think of those ancestors on the hill, watching, waiting, and of the woman who made her escape from the man they’d given her to. She waited for the right moment, then snuck across the fields, keeping away from the roads. Hours of walking in bare feet, the heavy load of clothes that women wore in those days, across the moor and over the tops of the hills, guided by instinct and sky. Nearly there. The pebbled shore in sight. Behind her, hooves and howling.

She ran, then, callused feet bleeding on the rocks. Thrashing in, the garments dragging.

“There. She’s there.” Voices on the shore.

She slid under the chilly waters, her own cold hands unlacing her garments to keep herself from sinking too fast. She willed herself to be calm, in the same way, I think, that Mary willed herself to be calm as she made her way back here without you.

They had survived by saying yes to what they were told to do. Mary, giving up her baby, afraid of what fate would deal both of you if she did not. That lone swimmer, having watched her mother and sisters and friends, one by one, jailed or sent to the nunnery, not without a fight, though, like their warrior ancestors before them. She had acquiesced, waited for the right moment, saved herself.

There in the waters, she wanted to burst up, face and neck and shoulders to the moon. Resist, resist, resist. She allowed just her face to break the surface, gently. The torches still flickered on the shore. Under again. She must hurry against the chill. August. Scotland. The deep, deep waters of this firth. Again, the breath. Again, under. She didn’t look back, repeated her return to the depths of the sea until she felt the pebbles of the other shore against her chest. Still, she did not stand. On elbows, she dragged her body to dry land, at last dared a turn of the head, found the mainland shoreline smooth. Just the rounded outline of the land illuminated by the moon and the twilight sky of midsummer.

She made for the fire she hoped was still burning.

She climbed in the dark until she saw them. A staggered run, then. Arms around her, and furs. Home.

This story has always given me hope, even more so now. I hope you do not have to sneak in order to return to us or feel that you are doing something wrong. I hope you will make the journey, find your way home. I hope that tales and wisdom of our ancestors will not end with me.