1987

Cool air swirled around Mum and Alison when they landed. The taxi into the city, tenements rising around them. Up the stairs and in. Home. They were barely through the door before Mum began rummaging in Papa’s desk. On the phone and off again, she rattled off a list of things she had to do and places she had to go. She handed Alison the spare key, told her to leave a note if she went anywhere, and then hurried out the door and into another taxi.

Who knew if any of it was where Mum was really going. The room seemed to swirl around Alison. Her Papa had had a heart attack. He’d died instantly. Mum was gone. She had no idea what she should be doing.

She made her way to the kitchen, ran her fingers over his mug and plate and knife and fork on the draining board. She tidied them away, returned to the sink, held on and cried. She wanted to go out, to be in the swirl of the fresh air. She wanted to stay in; she had the strange sense that he would come home at any moment. She wanted to do something. What would Papa do if he were here? She decided to do that: put the kettle on, make a sandwich, put it all on the tray and serve it in the front room.

The clock ticking, the tea steaming, soothing as she drank, Alison began to settle. She had two weeks. There would be a funeral. There would be packing up his flat. She didn’t know what time she would have later on, but she had now. She’d better make use of it.

She dialed the familiar number, held her breath as the phone rang and rang. She hesitated when Vic picked up, heart racing.

“Hallo? Anyone there?”

“Vic! It’s me, Alison.”

“Alison! What’re you ringing for? This’ll cost ye a fortune.”

“I’m here, at Papa’s.” The tears came then, partly grief, partly relief at hearing Vic’s voice. Alison wanted to climb through the phone, to feel Vic by her side.

“I take it you’re not on your hols,” Vic said.

“No. Papa—he’s dead.”

“Al, I’m so sorry. I’m sorry he’s dead, and I’m sorry but I’ve only a minute. I was out the door for me train and came back in when I heard the phone.” She had a gig in Aberdeen, back late on Thursday.

Alison wanted to do what Mum did: get up off the sofa, follow her urges, leave and be with Vic. She was there for a funeral, though. And Vic hadn’t asked.

“Maybe Friday?” Alison asked. She did not know how she would cope if Vic said no.

“Aye. I could manage that. I’ll come through in the morning?”

Alison wasn’t sure if it was hesitation she heard in Vic’s voice or just that she was in a hurry. She pushed away her doubt and her grief, just for a moment, allowing a flutter of joy. At last, she was home. And Vic was coming. Not now, but soon.

~

Two days of Mum flitting in and out, of neighbors stopping by, of a few spare moments for Alison to escape into the fresh air to walk these familiar streets. The funeral on the morning of the third. Alison listened to the minister, a stranger, list Papa’s roles—fireman during the war, brother, father, grandfather, gardener—eyes on the coffin under the cloth when she was meant to be praying, she held in her tears. They were for her own loss and for Papa. He deserved the words of someone who knew him; he deserved his truth to be told. She had sat with Mum and the minister, followed the rules of what they said needed to be done, been the good girl, swallowed her words before they even formed, kept the peace, as always.

The wake, at least, seemed true to form. He’d left instructions for that, right down to the whisky. People packed into the flat. Some remembered Alison from Papa bringing her to play billiards as a girl, others from The Sheiling. Some she did not know at all. Round the room, people raised their glasses again and again, offering stories of his life—adventuring around the world with nothing but a rucksack in his twenties, fireman in the war. Alison had known only a sliver of him. She felt she was getting to know him more fully in death than she had in life.

After she’d tucked Mum into bed, Alison sat in the front room alone, sipping the last of the whisky. She’d meant to ring Vic to be sure she was still coming in the morning, and what time. There hadn’t been a chance. It was too late to do it now.

~

Alison woke to a knock at the door. Her stomach lurched as she made her way down the hall, peered through the peephole.

There stood Vic, with her black hair short on one side and long on the other. Kohl-lined eyes. Black, silk waistcoat and gray shirt, bolo tie, pleated trousers and shiny wingtips. Alison glanced down at Papa’s old pyjama top. She sighed and opened the door.

“Am I too early?” Vic, with that same familiar grin.

Alison shook her head. Her stomach lurched again. She turned and ran for the loo.

When she came back, Vic was in the kitchen. She had the kettle on, toast in the toaster, as though they’d lived there all along. “Must’ve been a bit of drink taken, so.” She reached for the tea leaves.

“Not a lot. I’m a lightweight. Not used to whisky.” Alison stood beside her at the sink, wanted to reach for her hand, didn’t want to presume anything.

Vic turned to her. Alison turned, too. Face to face. A moment suspended. Perfectly still. Should she lean in, see what happened? Would that spoil something?

Vic grinned, breaking the tension. “I see you still have fabulous fashion sense.”

Before Alison could reply, the kettle screamed, the toast popped, and Mum appeared at the kitchen door, fully dressed.

“Victoria,” she said. “You’re a surprise.”

“Amn’t I always?”

“Just as well. You can keep Alison company while I go to the solicitor and the bank. It might take a while.”

“What’s happening with Papa? You know, his. Remains?” Alison pointed to the urn on the mantle.

“I wasn’t thinking when I let them hand me the urn. I’ll take it back later. They’ll plant a tree for him. Anything else you need before I go?” Mum was fresh and bright.

Alison shook her head, wondering what she wasn’t seeing.

As soon as the outer door shut, Vic stood, decisively. She took down the urn. “Where shall we take him?”

“Vic!” Alison said.

“You don’t want him at the crematorium, do you?”

“No, but we can’t just steal him.” Alison took the urn.

“We’re not stealing. Come on. You’ll not have another chance,” she said.

Holding the urn to her chest, Alison closed her eyes, reached for Vic’s hand. “You’re right, as always. Let’s do it.”

They set out, arm-in-arm, Papa safely nestled in his own rucksack, making one last trip to the sea.

At the edge of the cove, they sipped whisky from Vic’s flask, smoked cigarettes, tilted their heads back, leaned on each other, sunk hands into sand.

“This can’t be legal,” Alison whispered to Vic.

“Of course it’s legal. Lots of people scatter ashes. And anyway, fuck legal,” she said. “The law isn’t made to help people like us.” Her jaw stiffened in a way Alison hadn’t seen before. There seemed to be something Vic hadn’t told her. Alison winced at the notion that Vic kept secrets from her, but it was what she’d done, too. She’d never mentioned Chuck’s brother or Les or any of the others. Could they somehow hold each other and heal?

They poured most of him into the ground. Alison knelt, briefly, with her hands on top of the mound, then poured what remained of his ashes into one palm. She walked to the sea, Vic at her back, watching.

Alison held out her hand and waited for the wind to lift and carry him to the sky. Everything comes back, he’d said. She’d believed him.

Vic had to go back to Strathnamurrah, to her job at the pub. A hug on the platform at the station.

“Ring me?” Vic said.

Alison nodded, waved as the train pulled off, held the familiar terror that she would never see Vic again.

When she returned to the flat, she found Mum sitting on the sofa, sober, and with her suitcase packed.

“I can’t do this. I need you to finish.” She handed Alison a thick roll of cash. “You’re better at this sort of thing than I am.”

“Mum?”

“It’s just a few days. I’ve sorted the important things. I’ve left you a list and Mr. McNulty’s number beside the phone if you need help.”

Alison stood, cash curled in her open palm. Mum’s heels clipped quickly down the stone steps, suitcase thunking behind her. At the window, Alison raised her hand as Mum got into the taxi. She stared at the money for a minute, then tucked it into her jeans. She’d never closed up a house, or even watched someone else do it. Did Mum really have anything sorted? No matter. Alison accepted, in her typically silent way, that Mum was gone, and this fell to her.

She turned to the desk, scanned the list. She was to be there for people who had bought or laid claim to the remaining belongings. She was to be there to let the council in to take the carpets. When it was all gone, she was to lock the door, put the keys through the letterbox. If Mum had really done everything else, she’d have plenty of time for herself. She thumbed through the rest of the documents in the desk: old to-do lists, her own letters, copies of his passport, the death certificate, his marriage license, the death certificate for the grandmother she had never known, Mum’s birth certificate and his, something Alison never had. Long ago, she’d told Vic she’d go to the House of Records when she was eighteen, find out who she really was. Could she now?

Too much to think about. She rang Vic instead, told her all of it. “You can’t stay there with the lot of that gone. Come here. Mam won’t mind.”

But she had to stay at least until she’d completed the items on Mum’s list.

~

Alison woke the next morning and the next and the next with a lurching stomach again. Lack of sleep. Stress. Alone, she opened the door again and again as Mr. McNulty lay claim to the fridge and Mrs. Henderson from across the hall claimed the sofa, and so on. In the back of her mind, she churned the idea of going to Edinburgh to find her birth certificate. In the forefront, she held Vic.

~

With the list complete, Alison took one last look around, closed and locked the door. She couldn’t make herself put the key through the letterbox. She wanted to hold on to it as long as possible. She tucked it into her bag, made her way to the railway station.

The familiar train, the walk, all of it under gray skies, dreary and lovely. She took her seat at the bar until Vic finished her shift.

They walked out into broad daylight at ten. “Fancy fish and chips?” Alison said. “I haven’t had any in five years!”

They sat on the wall where they’d first met. She could feel Vic eyeing her.

“What’s going on in that head of yours?”

Alison’s heart beat faster. If she said it, Vic would make her do it. She felt like that little girl watching the gypsies, wanting so badly to move forward, frozen with fear. She took a breath. “Do you remember me telling you I could get my birth certificate when I turned eighteen?”

“I do.”

“If I go, would you go with me?” Alison said.

“I’d go anywhere with you,” Vic winked. “Just have to sort it around work.”

The next morning, Vic’s Mum made them breakfast, and they rang the House of Records, made sure that what Dad had told Alison was correct. Alison imagined the two of them marching across Edinburgh together.

They were nearly out the door when the phone rang. Vic was needed at work. Alison felt rooted to the spot. How could she face this alone?

“Go,” Vic said. “I’ll be here when ye get back. You must.” Her eyes cast down. “You don’t know when you’ll have another chance.”

Alison didn’t want to think of that, but, as usual, Vic was right.

Alison found a quiet car on the train, tucked into Simple Minds on her Walkman, closed her eyes, pretended Vic was there.

Out into the fresh air from Waverly Station. The old city hid behind the castle. The new town bloomed in front. This is where they got me. She’d been there before, of course, on school field trips, but she hadn’t thought of it in that way then.

Face to sky: a few white clouds, friendly cumulus, hanging high above. Move. She walked briskly, following the directions the woman on the phone had given, not allowing a moment of pause where fear and doubt might seep in and redirect her.

The House of Records seemed suddenly to appear. Inside, high ceilings, plaster walls, tile floors, the faint aroma of cleaner mixed with perfume and sweat and the stale smoke trail of the most recent visitors. Somewhere within these walls rested all the births, deaths, marriages. How many connections documented? How many disconnections? Beginnings and endings. What comes between, a mystery.

She joined the queue.

At the counter, she told the woman she was there to see her original birth certificate.

“You want a copy.”

She hadn’t thought of taking a copy with her. “I just want to see it.”

“Have you not …” the woman paused. She lowered her voice and leaned in. “Are you adopted?”

“Yes.”

“And it’s the original you want, not the Certificate of Adoption?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve an appointment?”

“Yes.”

“Passport?”

As though she was going to travel to another country.

“Just have a wee seat over there.”

She sat in a shaft of sunlight, perspiring. People who came in after her conducted their business and left. She waited, watching the easy flow of others, in and out, feeling increasingly awkward, wishing to put on her headphones but being too polite to do so. And then a short, pale man arrived in the frame of an interior door.

“Miss Keith.” He smoothed his hair, fingers sticking out, palm of the hand making contact with the pomade. His small eyes made him seem like something subterranean. Mole or vole.

“I’ll just need to see your passport again. Sorry,” he whispered.

Alison rose, she stood three inches taller than he did, showed him the passport.

He nodded. “Follow me.”

The hall stretched in front of them. The thud of the heavy door behind them, leaving the light-flooded room, the line of people moving.

He scurried ahead, heel tips on his shoes scuffing the floor. Doors on either side. Closed, closed, closed. He passed an open door, stopped abruptly, turned. She nearly bumped into him.

“Just in there.”

She poked her head, catlike, around the door frame: bare room with only one small desk, like the ones they had in primary school, and a microfiche machine on top.

“It’s all lined up for you.”

“Thank you.” What she’d say to anyone. What she’d say even if she was shown into a prison cell. A slight bow of the head, gratitude. Dad’s voice echoing: what do you say? Mum: you owe me.

“I’ll leave you to it. Take your time.”

She stepped in. The walls a pale gray, dingy. Was this exclusively for people like her, following the vole down the hall, forced underground to find where they are from?

He closed the door.

A flash of fear that she would somehow become trapped here. Go. Vic’s voice in her head. If she were to be trapped, Vic would know where to come to set her free.

Blue microfiche, the image yellowed. Alison perched on the edge of the chair. There was her name. Not her name, now. Not Alison. The one she started with: Jayne. Jayne Kerr. The handwriting small and neat. Mother’s name: Mary MacGilavry Kerr.

Jayne.

And Mary.

The tight signature at the bottom: her mother’s signature. She lifted one hand to the screen. Her chest clenched. She pulled her notebook from her bag, copied the name, as though she was likely to forget.

Father’s name: .

Heat. Red cheeks in this gray basement. She wished she were stoat, or beaver, water creature, able to dive down. Cool, dark water. She held her breath. Held her tears. Who are these people? This Mary? This Jayne? Who am I? Jayne and Alison, like two separate people, with two separate lines of possibility, one body. No father. She couldn’t look at it a second longer.

She pushed the chair back, suddenly taken by the need to burst up, out, back to light and air.

Hands clasped in front of him, the man waited in the dim hallway.

“I’ll just show you out.”

How many people had he seen like this? Are we all predictable? Perhaps everyone comes out gasping, as though they’ve been underwater too long and are swimming to the surface. Perhaps some glare at the little man, as though it’s his fault. Do some weep into hankies, wiping away mascara streaks on cheeks, hoping to return to normal by the time he holds open the door to the world. How can they, ever?

Alison blinked in the bright light of the waiting room, turned to him. She took his clammy hand in her too-warm one and shook it. “Thank you.”

“Just back in the queue if you’ve changed your mind and you’d like a copy.”

She sputtered out into the bright afternoon empty-handed. This other self, this Jayne, it was too much. And the blank space. She didn’t want the paper reminding her. And it would be something else to hide from Mum. Tears welling in her eyes, she thought of the blank space, of her mother’s name, of her own, her other self, her first self. A cigarette and a pint and another cigarette and she felt revived enough to take the next steps, no longer sure she wanted to. It all seemed so much, but she thought of going back to Vic, and her asking about it all and Alison saying she just hadn’t gone. She knew she’d regret it.

As she made her way through tourists and office workers out for lunch, she felt alien, not herself, suddenly made into some sort of in-between creature: not Jayne, not (now) Alison, fatherless.

When she reached the top step into the building, she had a flash of standing alone and small beside Dad when they collected Andrew. She forced herself inside and up more stairs. She pressed open the door. Inside, a suited woman sat at a desk, looking surprised at her presence.

“I’m here for,” Alison paused. She should have thought of exactly what to say. Vic would know. “I’m adopted and I want my birth mother.” She shook her head. “The records. Of her. Of my adoption.”

“Just a moment.” The woman disappeared through an interior door. She returned with another woman, Mrs. something. Alison didn’t quite catch the name.

“So sorry,” she said, shaking Alison’s hand. “We don’t do those anymore.” She pressed a card into Alison’s hand, with the name of the new agency. “Just back down the street and to the left. They’ll be able to get your records.”

The directions were clear. Alison stepped, face flushed, into another waiting area. A girl her age sat at the reception desk. She offered a broad, toothy smile, the kind Alison might have expected in America.

“Just sign in here and someone will be with you shortly.” She tapped her bright pink nails on a clipboard. Relieved at not having to say, again, what she wanted, Alison stepped forward, and bent to write.

“This is your first time in, correct?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“And have you been to other agencies?”

She paused, her first name already written.

“The Church of Scotland. They said the records were here?”

The girl looked confused, and then it dawned on Alison: the receptionist thought she was pregnant, there to do what her mother had done. Her hands went to her belly. Shit. The morning nausea. In all of this, she hadn’t noticed that her period was late. Very late. If she were pregnant, she couldn’t come here. Alison could not add a lost child to a lost mother and brother.

“I’m adopted?” It sounded as though she was asking permission for it to be so.

“Oh.” The flutter of hand to hair. “Yes. Of course. Sorry. No. Don’t sign there. That’s for …” She cleared her throat. “For mothers. Just have a wee seat and I’ll get someone to help you straight away.”

Alison stuffed her hands, shaking, into her pocket, feeling as though the receptionist had seen something inevitable in her, and judged. She sat anyway, and shortly, a slightly tousled woman arrived, shook her hand, offered a cup of tea, which she declined, and led Alison back to her office.

They sat, face to face, in comfortable chairs. The whole time, Alison imagined her mother, Mary, (the immensity of knowing her name) sitting there, pregnant and not knowing what was to become of her. As Alison told the tousled woman about the morning’s journey, her voice felt as though it came from somewhere else; her body felt hollowed out, as though she was feeling her own loss and her mother’s at the same time.

“And why do you want to have a look at the records?” The woman spoke slowly, patiently, as though Alison were five and had just asked for a rise in her pocket money.

“I just want to know where I’m from.” She wasn’t really sure what, exactly, she wanted, and perhaps the woman sensed this. She also wasn’t sure when she might be able to come back.

“And do you plan to contact your birth mother?”

“I don’t know.” She hadn’t considered it.

“And what do you think you’d want if you did contact her?”

“Nothing. I don’t know. I just wanted to see. I live in America.” She’d imagined walking in and giving them her name and the names she’d found on the birth certificate, and that they’d rummage around in some filing cabinet or something and let her see. She hadn’t considered a line of questioning. She sat, still and silent.

The air hung between them.

“Sometimes it’s best to leave things as they are.” The woman handed Alison her card.

Inside, Alison felt like a preschooler. Another child that age might have stamped her feet, shouted, “They’re mine. My records. Give them to me.” But she’d been an obedient child, the kind who would listen quietly as Dad explained about her brother’s leaving and who would silently press her palm to the door, waiting in case he came back.

“Have a think about it and give me a ring if you change your mind.”

Perhaps if Vic had been there, or if she’d known that the blank space where her father’s name should be meant only that he hadn’t turned up at the registry in person, as the law required, to have his name added, she’d have pressed harder. Instead, she hurried out, feeling as though she’d done something wrong. She wanted to go back in, demand what was hers; she wanted to run away, pretend she’d done none of this.

A light rain had begun. She made it to the corner and stood, jacketless, fingering the woman’s card in her pocket.

As she made her way back to the railway station, she felt she’d been judged wanting and barricaded out of her own truth. Yet surely the woman knew what was best.

~

Sway of the train back to Glasgow. Headphones on to shut herself in. She dozed, slipping in and out of what was part dream and part imagining about what the files containing the social worker’s notes might say. Mary, there in the chair across from Mrs. whomever she was, unable to draw her eyes away from the tiny diamond ring and wedding band. Mary. Was she too timid to say what she wanted, like Alison? She preferred to imagine her more like Vic.

Mrs. someone, the case worker, with her spine straight, face closed, in a threadbare chair, surrounded by church-office furniture. Protestant. Prim. Sparse, taking down notes: Edinburgh, Scotland. 1967 … attractive girl … hasn’t told her parents … no work … certainly sure about adoption … not in touch … does not wish any contact with him …

“And how long had you known him?” the case worker asks. A modest strand of pearls circles the crewneck gray blouse that protrudes from a tunic of the same color. Layers to protect her, like all the older women of the day would have worn: full length slip, a girdle, perhaps, stockings, a sturdy white bra.

Across from her, young Mary, with her own layers, of womb with its placenta, with its extra layer of life within.

“Long enough, obviously.”

“And can you describe him for me?” Mrs. sits taller, lips pursed.

Mary nods, toying with the idea of describing him in detail, in The Act.

Glistening, she thinks.

“Just over six feet,” she says.

Broad shoulders looming over, one freckled hand on her breast whilst the other held his rhythmically moving body over her.

“Athletic,” she says.

His pale skin, luminous in the dark, his thick, dark hair with one lock hanging down, waving at her the whole time.

Jolt of the food cart bumping into the seat ahead. Alison sprang upright, eyes wide. A clammy sweat had gathered at the edges of her hair. The image of her father, nameless, on top of her mother hung on, the meaning shifting: What if the fairy tale was all a lie? No Beautiful Girl. No Handsome Boy. No love. What if she’d been conceived in a basement, with a wall of trophies in Mary’s peripheral vision? What if that’s why they didn’t just hand her the file?

She ordered a tea, paid and took it, hand shaking.

“You alright, hen?” The woman next to her, nearly as old as Papa.

“Yes, thanks.”

She wished for fresh air and feet on the ground and the hand of someone she trusted to hold. She wished to be out of this rolling metal tube. She wished to go back to the morning, to have followed Vic to work. There was nothing to do but sit there. She pressed play, turned the music up loud. The woman beside her, with her soft, lined face and kind voice terrified Alison: if she asked again, Alison might not be able to say she was okay. She might cry, right there in public on the train; worse still, she might tell one of the secrets that she held.

~

Two hours later found her with a corner booth in the far back of The Corbie. The swirl of smoke and neon, and black-leather-clad bodies.

“Out with it. What did you find?” Vic sat close, thigh to thigh.

“I only got the stuff on the birth certificate.”

“Church of Scotland cunts bar you?” Her face was hard, angry. Alison felt it was her fault, for not having pressed hard enough.

“Don’t be like that. Don’t be angry. Please.”

It didn’t help that, increasingly, the set of a jaw, the rise in a voice, any anger transported her to Mum, out of control, out of herself, lacerating whoever was there.

“Sorry, we both know how those kinds of fuckers keep people like my mum down. Let men like my dad hop about like bachelors, no responsibilities at all, thinking they can just swoop in and be dads—not even that—be pals whenever they want.” She stopped, slugged down half the pint. “He came two years ago, out of the blue. I was too angry to write.”

“Oh Vic. I’m sorry.” Alison turned her own glass, avoiding taking a sip.

“He’s the sorry shite. He turned up at the front door with a bag of stupid wee trinkets that were too young for the lot of us. And not a penny or a thank you or anything for Mam. At least in America you can get a proper divorce, make the man pay his fair share of the money even if he doesn’t do his fair share of the actual work.” She set down her glass. “How come you didn’t get the rest?”

Alison told her about the whole day’s journey, about feeling paralyzed and doubting why she’d come, being afraid of what she’d find out about the blank space, the strangeness of having another name.

“Jayne.” Alison said. She faced Vic, who pushed Alison’s her hair back out of her face, gently. “With a ‘y’.”

“Maybe she meant it to be fancy,” Vic said. “You’re not a Jane. With or without the ‘y’. And Mary. Like the virgin herself, and the man not in sight. Bastard.”

“Vic.”

“Yes. Right. Sorry. You bastards are the good ones.” She put her hands on Alison’s shoulders. “You’re still you. And maybe it was another virgin birth. Maybe you’re the second coming. It might go better this time if it was a woman.”

Ah, Vic. Alison allowed herself to gently lean on Vic. A lightness arriving. Alison allowed herself to rest in it.

~

The next morning, she stood in Vic’s tiny upstairs bathroom, her back turned on the slim white piece of plastic that would make its silent pronouncement regarding parenthood. Water ran behind her, clear, from tap to sink, making sounds that implied that her actions were the same this morning as any other. It seemed provident, somehow, that it would be here that time would ripen the seed in her just enough to register.

Seconds ticked over on her watch. Vic called out to tell her breakfast was ready.

“Just a minute,” she called back down. She’d be down in closer to two minutes, actually. The package said ClearBlue Easy, after all, not ClearBlue Instantly. She had promised herself not to look until the time was up, so she imagined being at the sea, thought of the beginning of the Clyde, in the middle of Scotland, thought of her flowing out from Scotland’s waist, becoming wider and wider like a woman opening herself to the world. She wondered, again, about Mary, tried to imagine them, standing side by side. She’d have been almost exactly Alison’s age when she’d fallen pregnant. Alison had counted the weeks, knew that this child, now too small to be counted in any way other than a thin line on a plastic pregnancy test, would be due on almost the same day as she, unbidden, swimming in, in a time that no one seemed to have chosen, as she had swum in and made a connection as sure as salmon who swim home generation after generation.

She thought about how, in Celtic myth, salmon are the symbol for knowledge. Where

these fish swim, some truth is revealed. Alison thought of Mary as a salmon, changing from the bright pink of her youth to a darker, more brooding shade that came on with the offspring within her, then swimming back out, having deposited the next generation, swimming and swimming out to catch the tide, taking her knowledge with her. Where, though? In her rush to retreat from the room, Alison had not noted what address Mary had entered on the birth certificate.

Vic’s feet on the stairs. Alison turned to the sink. The ClearBlue line, undeniable. Vic, banging on the door, asking if she was okay.

She hid the evidence, opened the door, descended to breakfast, sat at the table with the beginnings of a person to whom she was linked, not just by friendship, or even love, but by limb and life, bone and blood.

In those first moments, Alison didn’t think about Wade or marriage or anything else that might happen next. She fantasized about carrying this baby with her down to the edge of the River Clyde, standing in a gentle breeze, making their own home.

She held her secret all day and into the evening, on the train to Glasgow. She sat at the bar, watching Vic on stage. Vic, glistening under the lights. Vic, hugging the drummer. Vic, making the life she wanted. Beautiful Vic, whom she would have to leave again. Too much to bear. She needed space, told Vic she needed to take care of something at the flat the next day, and that she wanted a last trip to the sea.

“Meet you there?” Vic asked.

“Yes.” A perfect way to spend her last evening.

When the train pulled in to Inverkiven, a lovely evening sun had begun to peek through the clouds. Vic stood on the platform, waiting, rucksack on her back. A kiss on the cheek, her hand in the crook of Alison’s elbow, lilt in her step.

“Thank fekkin’ Christ the rain’s off,” Vic said.

“Oh aye, we’d have melted between here and the pub.”

“We aren’t going to the pub.”

“Says who?”

“Says I. Follow along, darlin’.”

Around the cove and over the next set of rocks, to a grassy flat out of the wind. The ubiquitous tartan blanket—they’d called them ‘travelling rugs’ when Alison was a girl—sausage rolls, made, according to Vic, by her own fair hand, pastry and all, sharp cheddar cheese, which she knew Alison loved, grapes, even. She set it all out, including, of course, the beer. She opened two and handed Alison one. Alison took hers but hesitated before she took a sip.

“What’s wrong?”

“Just not feeling like it,” Alison said.

Face close to Alison’s, Vic set down her beer. “Alison Keith is trying to tell Victoria Nagle that, on a fine summer’s evening by the shore, with her best girl, if I say so myself, she is ‘just not feeling’ a pint?”

“Yes. That’s what’s happening. Top marks.” She tried to make it a joke, but her mind raced. The morning’s fantasy about the mother being a salmon and holding wisdom and all that Celtic myth nonsense now seemed just that. She couldn’t make a home by herself. Wade should be first to know. Wordless, the fairy tale churned within. Once upon a time … a married mother and father.

And here sat Vic, seeing straight through her, as usual.

“You’re not,” she said. She took Alison’s hand.

“Don’t make it worse.”

“Shit.” Then, “Who?” Something seemed to settle, and darken, in her.

“I’m sorry.” Alison’s head hung, like a wet dog returned after escaping the leash, hoping to be forgiven, let inside to the warmth. She couldn’t say that she’d been raped, that she’d developed some uncontrollable need to appease boys, that she thought Vic had moved on.

“Ah, now. We can’t all be chaste all the time.” Those arms, again, tight and safe. She lifted the beer. “Mam had Guinness whenever she needed a wee lift when she was pregnant. We’re not perfect, to be sure, but whatever’s wrong with us hasn’t to do with the occasional sip of beer.”

Alison took it this time and reached for her cigarette.

“You’ll have to stop that and all, if you’re going to have it. But you won’t have it, will you?”

Alison shrugged.

“Let it go, Al. Stay here. I’ll take you. I’ll be your nurse after.”

She couldn’t terminate the pregnancy, as Vic suggested. Alison couldn’t explain why. She wasn’t against it, for other people; she simply knew she must have this baby. She must keep it.

But could Alison stay? Here, with Vic? Again, the old story rose. She did not want to be a bastard having a bastard. She didn’t want her child to have a blank space for a father.

“I can’t, Vic.” She turned the Guinness slowly in her hands. “And Wade—the father—he should know.”

“Fuck him. It’s you the thing’s in.” Vic stood, turned her back.

“It’s not a thing. It’s a baby.” Alison stood, too.

“Not bloody yet it isn’t.”

“Can we forget it? Please. Can we enjoy your lovely picnic?” Alison touched Vic’s arm, gently.

For several minutes, they stood, tense, side by side, staring at the sea. Vic took a deep breath, bent, stood back up, holding out the sausage rolls. “You’ll need your nourishment.”

They stuffed their faces and then lay on the blanket until at last the sun began to lower behind the westward islands.

“We should have tonight on our own,” Vic said.

“Where?” Alison turned to her.

“Your papa’s.”

“There’s nothing there. Not even carpet.”

“If you don’t want to,” Vic sat up.

“I do, though.”

“It’s settled, then.”

~

The gray dark of summer filtered through the curtains as Vic and Alison took up their places again on the blanket, this time on the floor in the front room. Alison had thought the flat would seem larger without the furniture in it, but the opposite was the case. There was no clock ticking to remind them of time passing; the sun was long gone and the moon, invisible. They turned to each other, touched foreheads. They stayed there for a long, still moment. Vic reached for Alison’s hand. The warmth of it so familiar, so comforting. Lip to lip, then. Vic paused, pulled away, searching Alison’s eyes for an answer. Alison pulled her in. Vic’s lips on her shoulder, collarbone. Her arm around Alison’s waist, the scent of her hair as Alison kissed the top of her head. There was no stopping, now.

In the morning, they sipped their tea slowly, in silence. They took the kettle and teapot to a neighbor who had said she could use them, along with the plates, mugs, knives and forks that remained. Alison locked the door. She paused for a moment and then did as she’d been told, sliding the key through the letterbox.

Outside the flat, looking up. A window open in the flat below. A woman’s hand reaching out, waving at someone along the street. Soon, there would be some unknown person at Papa’s. Nearly as hard to bear as the loss of the man himself.

Vic went with her to Glasgow Central, walked her to the platform. Alison was taking the train to London, and then flying cross the Atlantic.

Diesel and fresh tar swirled in the air. A long hug.

“What we did last night,” Vic whispered, holding her close. “It was perfectly natural, gorgeous, even. Always has been.”

Alison clung to Vic, nodding her head into Vic’s hair.

The whistle blew. Time to depart. Vic stood on the platform, hands in pockets. When the train pulled too far down the tracks for Alison to see Vic, Alison shook within. Would they ever see each other again? She imagined Vic walking away, deciding whether to get the train home, or to do something else in the city, making her own choices.

Alison could have chosen, too. Stay. Honor what she wanted: gray skies, craggy hillsides, that land she still thought of as home, a grounding that was as close as she’d come to a sense of motherlove. And Vic. It went against everything she had been taught to believe, though. And she had no sense of her capacity to make such a choice.

~

Alison returned to ninety-nine degrees outside the airport, sixty-five degrees inside the house. Dad never allowed the air conditioning to run that hard. Expensive. Two sealed envelopes sat on the kitchen table, one labeled Alison and the other Adam. She opened hers not to see what it said, but because she was curious to know how Mum had phrased it.

Alison,

I’ve left your Dad. I’m sure you’re not surprised. It’s time I had a life of my own. You’ll be fine. You’re old enough to take care of yourself. Dad will still give you whatever money you need. I’ll ring you when I get settled.

Love,

Mum xx

Alison stood in a shaft of sunlight in the kitchen. Mum was gone. Vic was left far behind her. The feel of Vic’s lips on her abdomen was suddenly there. She sighed, closed her eyes, touched her hand to the spot. Her baby was under there. She read Mum’s letter again, set it down.

She would not be Mum, selfishly doing whatever she wanted. She wouldn’t be Mary, either, walking away. For this child, she must do what was right.