August 21-November 6, 2017

In a light breeze, leaves shimmy on the branches of huge oaks that surround the quad. The sun beams as though it’s summer, but the air tells a different story. August in Maine. Boxes of clothes have been unpacked, the bedside table, twinkly lights, and batik built, strung, hung. Arms around my girl. I hold the tears until I turn.

Sixteen hours back down the coast stretch out ahead of me, my daughter, the last of my children, left behind. I take a few steps, then turn, scan the crowd, find her with her dark waves flowing out behind her like a wake. She strides on, towards what, I don’t know. I force myself forward, to the car and the drive, and, for the first time in my life, an empty house. This is what I’m supposed to do.

When I reach the car, I flop in, grab the steering wheel tightly. My hands shake. I cling harder. Breathe. Turn the key in the ignition. Release the handbrake.

My gut clenches. Hot tears seem unstoppable. Again, the rise of the terror that I’ve just unknowingly seen the last of someone I love.

Car in gear, engine revved, window down. The roads wind, blurry through the tears. Probably, I shouldn’t be driving. I’m not going to sit and weep in the parking lot, though.

I stop to fill up. The metal pump rests, cool, in my hand. The numbers on the ancient gas pump click past. I fear I may disintegrate, right there in the middle of the day, in the middle of nowhere. My inside feels hollow, the way the belly feels after food poisoning. I am empty, exhausted; there’s nothing left. This isn’t just physical: all my selves are gone. No more wife-self, mother-self. Who am I supposed to be now?

~

The nights remain open; even filtered by the trees, the light is too bright, creating a spaciousness that I dreamed of when the children were small and that now makes me feel tiny, naked, vulnerable.

Pots and pans rest cleaned and stacked and silent and formidable in their places. Dinner is store-bought bread and cheese. Not even grilled.

At last, in mid-October, the heat dissipates, and the darkness closes in. I welcome the still, black sky. Under a full moon, the trees become sentinels reaching skyward. I sip my wine and watch night after night, wrapped in a blanket, as the moon shrinks and shrinks. Eventually, it dissolves into the darkness. I want to go with it. I clutch at the threads of myself: the gallery, my hands at work in my studio, Mary, Vic.

~

The evening after the clocks turn back, I sit on the deck as a fine mist descends. The months have ticked past. Mary has called every week, wishing me strength, telling me to give it time. Still, I feel lost without the swaddling identities of wife and mother. I call Vic, even though I know she doesn’t really understand.

“You’re free,” she says. “No more weans hanging off your arms. What did you want before them?”

To not be afraid of who I was. To be loved. You.

“I don’t know, Vic.”

“Remember that girl with the books and the drawings and the love of being outside, wandering?”

“I’m fifty, Vic.”

“I’m fifty-one.”

“I’m meant to be a grownup. To know who I am.”

“Stop thinking so bloody much.”

“I’m afraid.”

“Of what?”

“I can’t name it.”

I can’t tell her, having not told her about what happened that summer I was first here, about dragging myself from the bed to the creek, filthy inside and out, about Wade and the children making me seem clean and legitimate, at least on the outside, about forcibly holding that girl I was under. All those years I tried to drown her. Here she still is, perhaps stronger than ever.

“Ah darlin’. What’ll we do with you?”

“I dunno. Change the subject. Got any decent bands booked?”

We chatter, as old friends do, about the bands and who’s hard to deal with, and about her youngest brother’s recent divorce and the new girlfriend, and for a little while, I feel safe.

Later, head on the pillow, I am again awakened by a strange sound, part click and part scrape, as though someone or something wants in. Heart pounding, I sit up, sure the noise came from the other side of my bedroom door. As my eyes adjust to the dark, I realize that the door is open, as it always is. I listen. It is only the tap of a tree branch against the side of the house. Even after I tuck back down, I feel as though there’s something it’s trying to tell me.

Happy birthday, dearest Jayne.

I’ve lit a candle for you, placed it in the window, as I do each year. My hope for your return is still as strong as ever it was; the grief at your absence has grown less searing than it was in those first years, beginning even before you were born.

I spent the months between Mary coming home and your birth thrashing around. I could hardly still myself all the time that Mary was gone. Hamish said I was like a bee buzzing for nectar, jumping from flower to flower. I didn’t feel nearly so nice as that; inside, I felt like a cleg—a big, black horsefly. I recall seeing a girl bitten by one when I was a girl, too. Oh, the howl she let out, and the great streak of blood running down her arm. It must have been 1936. Clegs seemed like the most dangerous thing then. Yes, that’s what I felt like, thirty-one years later: black and poisonous and wanting to draw blood from something, only I didn’t know what.

Perhaps a week before your birth, I had a particularly dark day. I cleaned the windows, the skirting boards, the floors, ironed anything that could be made flat and smooth, baked bread, with yeast instead of soda specifically because it required so much more work. Hamish snuck up behind me as I took the last round out of the oven. I spun around, hair wild and spattered with flour—it had been a frenzied and furious baking. Perhaps he meant to take me in his arms, to soothe me. I didn’t give him the chance, holding my hand up against him, the only time I’ve ever done so. My horsefly-self reflected in his eyes. He felt no better than I, only managed to hold it in. I could see the anger smoldering, though, in the tightness of his muscles beneath his shirt, his clenched jaw, the furrow between his eyebrows. I feared that if we stayed in the house together just then, I would say something harmful, blame him, when I knew it wasn’t his fault. His hand on my back felt like a branding stick. My heat, his heat, the heat of the kitchen, we were a furnace, baking in our own rage and fear and powerlessness.

“I’ll just take some air before tea,” I said. I couldn’t meet his eye as I passed. I didn’t brush his cheek or lips with mine, the only time I left the house without doing so. I did not sit to put my walking shoes on, barely noticed the pile of wood and rubble he’d stacked in the back, as though preparing for an uncharacteristic bonfire.

Away from the village, around the curve of the south end of the island, I marched. The water lapping at my side seemed too kind. I refused to be soothed so easily. I turned inland and up, skirting the edges of the fields of the Ross’ farm. I wanted my feet on the ground and my face in the sky: those could be trusted. I held my pace across the top and down the other side, not thinking, until I arrived at the far end of the village. I realized, then, that I still wore my apron, covered in flour. I might have gone through the village like that, looking like a madwoman—it wouldn’t have been the first time that there had been whispers to that effect. Worse than that would have been someone asking after Mary. Perhaps I shouldn’t have cared; perhaps I should have marched right through like haughty Mrs. MacInnes. I couldn’t bring myself to. Mary would be coming back. Perhaps, I dared to hope, with you. I clung to the faint hope that there was still time to make things right. I didn’t want anyone else’s whispers falling on either of you. Like a fox, I slunk through the alleys and lanes behind the village, sniffing the air for danger along the way.

When the drift of smoke reached me, in the middle of the village, I looked to the hill. Perhaps an early Beltane fire, a celebration of fertility I might have joined in previous years. As I drew closer, I realized it was from our house. I began to run, then, fearing I’d forgotten to turn off the oven.

Out onto the street, I ran, never mind the wild hair and dirty apron. The house came into view, solid as ever. The pile of rubble I’d dismissed came back. Hamish. What else was he planning to burn? I ran faster, hoping it wasn’t what I feared: Mary’s diaries. I’d seen her climb the attic stairs just a few days before I took her east, a tidy bundle under her arm. I’d recognized the edge of one of her diaries. They’d be safe there, I thought.

Hamish brought them down not long after she left, having happened upon them when he was looking for something else. “Leave them,” I said. “She’ll want them when she’s ready.” I thought he’d put them back. I didn’t check.

At the edge of the flames, a photo curled, alongside the thick cover of a diary, the lock already blackening.

I bent, pulled the curled edge of the diary from the flames. Of course, all the pages within had already been consumed. On my haunches, there at the corner of the garden, I felt the tears begin to rise, at last, the sorrow and fear bursting from me like a stream held underground too long, held since Mary came home in December—she and James hand-in-hand down the garden path.

“Hamish?” I wanted to accuse him, to say ‘How could you? How could you rob your own daughter of her words, her story?’

But as he made his way from the other side of the fire to stand beside me, I already knew how.

“It’s done. It’s for the best,” he said. “The way is cleared, now. She can’t dwell in it. She can move on.”

“We can’t just pretend it didn’t happen,” I said, my voice high and desperate. “We have to reconcile with it.”

“That’s what I’ve just done,” Hamish said. “This is how I’ve reconciled.” He thrust his spade in the ground as though marking a boundary. For him, the rage and powerlessness had built up and up until the only way he could stop it was to incinerate it all.

I could see he’d done it out of love. And desperation.

Squelching the story only makes it come out in other ways. Something has to rise from the ashes.

I wept, then, crouching by the fire, as though my tears could douse it. I thought my tears were for Mary, or for myself, and some were, but it was you I truly wept for. You, who would come home, come seeking your story in a month or in decades. He’d burned your very beginnings.

He did not know that you can’t simply burn the bits of the story that hurt; you can’t pretend. The whole tale must be told if it is to be understood. If it is denied, it will return in another form, again and again until its voice is heard. That afternoon by the fire, I felt the beginnings of this understanding within me, and began to realize that it didn’t just apply to you and me and Mary. It has lived and grown within me all this time, and, as you now know, has compelled me to write this.