June 4, 2017

The boys land like a flock, one, two, three, insisting on waiting on each other at the airport. They’ve obviously talked. I say this to Tori.

“Fascinating. Men talking,” she says.

I’m not sure if she’s making fun of them or me or all of us.

“Tori.”

“Well. Somehow, they manage to take up ridiculous amounts of space and make lots of noise and say nothing that matters.”

“They’re your brothers. And at least you’ll get a break from being left with just me.”

“Mum.”

There’s a glint in her eye, though, and the hint of a smile. Her big brothers coming for her, at last the center of attention after all those years of them being bigger and faster and stronger and louder and doing all the things, always ahead of her. They let her tag along a decent amount, but she was more like a doll than a sister, something foreign that had to be protected at all costs. Worse, though they were never actually at the same school at the same time as she was, she still had to live in their wake every time a teacher or band director saw her name. “Earley. You’re the little sister?” In ways she doesn’t yet recognize, though, being in their shade helped. I think this as I watch them pull up outside my little house. I’m sorry, boys. Too often I doubted myself so much I failed to stand between Wade and them. He was so focused on pushing them to be what he was, or what he had dreamed of being. He pressed too hard, noticed every flaw and rarely the goodness. Tori, a girl, was left to me, to grow into herself.

In the door, bags crowd the hall so that the path through is nearly the width of a tightrope, one I would gladly walk without a net beneath me any day.

I’ve pre-made their favorites: sausage rolls, macaroni and cheese, other bits and pieces that are a blend of where I came from and where Dad brought me.

As I set the food on the table on the deck, I know that it is best for them to have good relationships with both me and Wade. I want to be the kind of secure and generous-hearted parent who just wants them to be wherever they are happiest. Perhaps one day. From the kitchen, I watch them open their beer, clink bottles and glasses to toast Tori. I am grateful that they have chosen to be here instead of at Wade’s. I know it’s mostly for Tori. I hope at least a sliver of it is also because of this cooking, this heart, because I have been the person who has made their home. I fear that they will change their hearts, turn towards Wade and his money and power, his big house and fun trips. Everything first class. And I will be, once again, abandoned.

“Mum,” Will calls. “Get out here.”

I pull the mac and cheese out of the oven, step outside. For this moment, I can let go of the final countdown to the divorce day and to empty nest, of all the change and loss that has happened in less than a year.

On this morning’s walk, a hawk paid me a visit, soaring overhead, then landing in a distant oak. Its cry drew me from my normal smooth path, across hummocks and through bracken nearly as tall as I. When I arrived at the foot of the tree, the crying ceased. For a moment, we breathed the same air, and then the bird lifted from the branches, circling once and again overhead, seeing all from above. As I watched the wings outstretched, riding the drifts of air, I imagined that it might have soared over you, wherever you are, and ridden the sky back to tell me you are well. Or perhaps this hawk was sent to remind me to return to my writing for you, which has ceased for some time. Having told the ancient tales and the more recent parts of our family’s story, I found myself barricaded from the will to continue. This hawk in the air reminded me of the capacity in us all to soar above it, to see what we need, and to rise above when necessary. This, then, is the beginning your particular part of our larger story.

In 1964, the other half of the Edwardian that Hamish chose for us, and in which we had lived for over a happy decade, lay vacant, silent, waiting.

Later, I would imagine them chugging across the waters, as they must have done. That day, the first I knew of them was when they came clattering across the tile entry: Mrs. MacInnes, rigid and slim, her face askew and her glare dripping through her glasses and down her nose. Even on the tiny distance from the garden gate to the front door, she seemed to be scrutinizing every tiny detail. Her husband came hulking behind her, box in hands—big Jock MacInnes, as I would come to know him. A man-boy came next. In his face, there was the roundness that said boy, but his body spoke a certain manliness: James, then striding on his thick rugby-players’ legs. Later, I’d learn that he took the stairs three-at-a-time to get up to the wee room at the top, that he’d claimed the converted attic room as his upon first sight. His sister arrived last: Maeve. At 14, she’d had all the upsurge in height she was going to get. Vertically diminutive like her mother but already with a hint at the breadth of big Jock. Smiling, though. I watched her turn on the tile entryway, slowly, like an oversized doll in a music box. Her mother’s glare stopped her, as though Mrs. MacInnes had closed the lid on the music box, silenced the tune.

Outside, big Jock paused, took it in: blonde sandstone, lighter and leaner than the ones built in Glasgow in the era before it, where he’d grown up, and this elegant Edwardian with its carved gables and uncluttered lines hadn’t the dinge of blackout paint from the war, partly worn off, like those in Glasgow.

In the beginning, Hamish took Jock to the pub. Hamish wasn’t one of those pub-going men, but he thought it would be a nice welcome to the island. Jock babbled, after a handful of pints, that he’d grown up with those Victorian tenements made from Locharbriggs sandstone; they’d been clean in his childhood. He was in London by the time they painted them all to avoid the Luftwaffe. When he returned, after the war, he and the buildings had both been darkened. At least he had a bride. He brought her home to Glasgow, to be near his family, brothers and sisters he’d grown up with near the shipyards on the Clyde.

She insisted on returning to a proper hospital—Queen Charlotte, in London, where she trained and worked—to have her children. There had been other instances, too, of things just not being good enough. Jock’s sisters wouldn’t put up with her disdain; they shunned her. A move, Jock agreed, was in order. But not to the south, as she’d wanted.

Up and out, across the waters, they went, like so many others. Only they weren’t going on holiday. Married nearly seventeen years when they stepped into the house on our wee island, sitting, Jock thought, a safe distance from the mainland.

A thin wall and low fence were all that separated our families.

Mrs. MacInnes, as she insisted on being called—Ivy—frightened me from the beginning. There was an edge to her, like an animal that has been wounded and might strike out to defend itself, even when affection was being offered. Perhaps it would have been better had I acted on instinct and discouraged all contact.

I saw them looking, of course, James and Mary. He was a handsome lad, and she a pretty girl. Hamish scowled each time they left the house but said nothing. “Jock,” he muttered once, after they’d gone. “No good son can come of that.”

“What’s the harm?” I replied. Young love. It wouldn’t last, no doubt. Let them have their fun.

It would not be long before I would wonder if I should have stopped it. But then you might not have been at all, and though I have only seen you once, and never pressed your skin to mine, I cannot now imagine having denied you a path into this world.

That is all I can bear for one day.

So, my darling girl, wherever you are, I hope the path you are travelling in this world is kind to you and filled with love. I hope there are hawks overhead and that you have sense enough intact to feel them.