November 7, 2017

Hair scraped back after a run, I fill my gas tank, head inside for the receipt and a Diet Coke, both old habits, one from Dad and the other from the days of living on no-calorie fizz and undressed salads. Someone arrives in line behind me, stands too close. A man, I think. My stomach dances with anxiety.

“You still got it.” His voice is deep, quiet. He might be speaking into his phone.

Heat spreads across my abdomen. I feel the girl inside me who would have taken this as a compliment, a testament to her worth. The woman I am now does not want this gaze. I remain still, stare ahead, tell myself he is on the phone. He steps closer. “You still got it.” His voice is no louder, but I feel his breath on my neck. I step forward.

“I’m talking to you, girl,” he says.

I half turn, the too-polite girl still alive enough to stop me from completely ignoring him. His smile is broad, as though it has won him women, and whatever else he might want, all his life.

I laugh, am relieved when the cashier calls, “Next.”

Outside, I hurry to the car. When I turn to open the door, he is trotting across the parking lot. My feet stick to the pavement. My hands hang at my sides. Even my hair seems to still. I’m frozen. Ever frozen. Only my heart keeps its motion, its quickening beat.

“Are you married?”

I find a small movement: I fist my keys. My hands are bare, except for the faint imprint where my wedding ring used to be. It is daylight, a clear, bright afternoon. There are people pumping gas, clutching large drinks with two hands. I am safe. I want to say “No. There is no man. There is, thankfully, at long last, no fucking man in my house or in my heart to harass me. I do not want there to be a man.”

“Yes,” I say, anyway. The easy way out.

“Your husband’s a lucky man.”

He leaves. I enter the car, check the rearview, take a circuitous route home just in case, hands shaking on the wheel.

Inside my house, I fear I may vomit.

Triggered, I think is what they call it now. The specter of the predator, there with me, always.

I clean the floors, the baseboards. I do laundry. I do not want to go outside, to walk alone, unprotected, exposed.

After sunset, I take to the deck, still too small, still under a too-wide sky, seeking shelter in the buzz of wine and the wrapping of darkness. Again. As I sit, another idea rises. It is not only that I still hold the residue of rape, it is that I do not want the hand of another man, any man, on my body. Ever. Perhaps I never did.

~

When I climb the stairs and slide between the sheets, I still don’t feel safe. Sleep comes mercifully fast, though, and, not long after it, the sight of a woman who is somehow maiden and crone at the same time, standing in front of a cave. Purple and midnight blue silks flow around her, high on a hill, the night sky above, the stars clear, a sliver of moon overhead. She is a queen, surveying her land, strong and confident. From below, arrows fly towards her. She turns, runs for her horse, mounts the white mare, gallops across the ridge line. The two of them become one fluid movement. Dark hair with streaks of white flows out behind her. All else falls away. Her breath, the horse’s breath, the hooves on the hard earth are all that exist.

The horse shies, an arrow to the chest. She staggers, then continues, nonetheless.

From the dark nowhere, they appear, a throng of bearded men. Noose around the horse, hands dragging the woman down. Bind her hands, pull her along. She walks tall, proud, a queen captured, but still royal within.

I awaken with the sure sense that her crime was living as she chose, alone, outside the rules of society, free. She will be jailed, held as an example.

All day, I cannot shake her, or the notion that I have lived only the life she will live after her capture. She makes me wonder about the women who came before me, which leads to Eilidh, and her journals.

I climb the stairs, pull them from the drawer in my bedside table, return to the deck. I turn page after page of Eilidh’s words, so many lives revealed. I think of the world underground, the roots of trees, the dormant bulbs, the bears in hibernation, the ancestors, still and silent and waiting, resting the long, dark winter, not questioning.

“Everything comes back,” Papa said.

Have I gone mad in this empty house? Should I find a pill to cure me? Or might I begin to trust Papa’s wisdom, or Eilidh and the ancestors, or even myself?

~

On the deck in the dark of the early morning, I begin to listen again. I walk out amid the trees: what the foot says, rubbing the earth. Days pass. Birds call above. Moon through the branches, a sliver, growing by the day, then the return to nothing. Bare branches, wavery through an early crust of ice. Hang on. Hang on.

In the evening, I rest on the deck again. Here, the sky and the trees and I become one in the darkness. The hair on my arms moves in the breeze along with the leaves and branches, the grass I have left uncut. I berate myself for not doing what should have been done last week. Irresponsible. Lazy. “Slut,” Mum said. I push that away, return to the velvet night that says I can get to it in due course.

This new sense of oneness draws me in and terrifies me at the same time. The girl who believed she lived in a fairy tale made of a married man and woman shouts to stay back—it is a ruse. Part of me wants to believe her, stay hidden, light a cigarette, pour another glass of wine, make another list, sign up to volunteer, keep doing it until there isn’t a second left to feel or be.

Another part of me wants to stay in the night forever, to listen to breeze chatter, leaf whisper, owl hoot, to feel myself part of this wild world. A long, long time ago, and very far away, this conversation with the earth herself was where I felt safe. I try to trace the timeline of how I went from that wee girl, who listened to the earth and to herself, to the woman who listed her life away, the charting of how I lost my true self.

In bed, the branch still taps at the window as if to say, “You can’t stay in there. You can’t dive within and stay under. You must come back to the surface, to the gleaming sunlight, to the glowering clouds, to the roaring sky and sea. You must bring yourself.”

Darling Jayne,

I’ve skipped ahead in your story, and now must circle back so that you have as much of your truth as I can offer.

Before Mary missed the Fir Chlis at the mothering home and before Hamish’s fire, there were Mary and James coming down the garden path, home for Christmas and the usual Hogmanay festivities. I knew before she said a word that she was pregnant.

“You’ve news,” I whispered when she leaned in to kiss me.

“Don’t be cross, Mummy.” Same as when she was five and I caught her taking one of the warm pancakes from under the tea towel without asking. She knew I’d have said it would spoil her dinner.

“Of course not, pet.” Not cross, scared.

“We’re getting married,” she said.

James beamed, looking like the cat who’d got the cream.

The door to the front room creaked behind me. James’ lips straightened. His chest deflated.

“Hamish,” I said, turning.

“Come in, James,” Hamish said. He pulled James in fully with one hand and pushed the door shut with the other. “What’ve you done, son?” He held his hand on James’ shoulder.

“I. We,” he stammered.

“We’re getting married,” Mary said.

“You’re scarce twenty.”

“Same as I was,” I said.

“You’ll need to get on with it, then.” He glanced at Mary, his face smooth and stoic. “They’ll not let you down the aisle with.” He stopped, turned to James. “What’ve your parents said?”

James’ neck and ears reddened.

“You’ll need to get on with that, then.”

~

Mary has never told me precisely what happened at the MacInnes’. She and James went, arm-in-arm, out the front door. I went back to the kitchen to peel the potatoes. The front door slammed not half an hour later, and then there stood Mary, dry eyed and looking as though she’d had all the air let out of her.

“Mrs. MacInnes.” She sounded shocked at the sound of the name.

I waited.

“She. He. We’re not getting married.”

“What?”

“She won’t let him.”

He’s an adult, I thought. She can’t stop him. And then I recalled them arriving, Mrs. MacInnes glowering and running the whole show.

I pulled Mary to me. “She’ll change her mind. Daddy will speak to her.”

Only she wouldn’t. A few days passed, and then Hamish said he’d go and speak to the lad himself.

When he went round, James was gone.

“I’ve sorted him,” Mrs. MacInnes said, the door open only a few inches.

“Sorted?”

“He’s away. Working. He can see what being an adult with no qualifications is all about.”

“What about the bairn? Mary?”

“It’s none of my affair what your daughter does with her baby. How do we even know who the father really is?”

I held my head high. I would not let that horrible woman shame me. Or Mary. We held it all in, for Mary’s sake, and, perhaps because we were afraid of what would happen if we let it out. I’ve never felt such rage.

We altered our paths, Hamish and Mary and I, steering clear of the MacInnes’. We altered our hearts, staving off the rage and shame as best we could. Hamish had his fire, as you now know. And a week later, we went, Hamish and I, to visit Mary in hospital. Hamish would have had us do only that. You were there, though. My daughter and my daughter’s daughter, there, in that building. I hadn’t defied him since the hospital and the pills and all that came after, but when I opened the car door, stepped out, entered through the small archway, I knew I could not leave without seeing you as well.

Inside, down the long hall, the harsh smell of disinfectant stung my nose. I felt pulled to the nursery. There you were, round faced and dark haired. Alone. The other babies taken to their mothers. Hand to glass, as close as I could get. I wanted to shatter it. To run in and claim you. It wasn’t my choice, though. It was Mary’s. She had scant few left. I couldn’t take that from her. I didn’t know, then, what they’d done to her in the home.

Onto the ward then. Mary sat, propped on pillows, that red robe James gave her for Christmas still wrapped around her. I couldn’t hold it in. “Acht she’s lovely. Let’s just take her home.” I meant it to be kind. It wasn’t. I had no idea what they’d said to her in the mothering home, that they’d convinced Mary that they had been right—Mrs. MacInnes, the matron at the mothering home, saying she wasn’t fit to be a mother, not a Real Mother, saying she had done wrong, saying the only good she could do now to redeem herself, and to save you, was to give you away, no matter what her body and her heart said. She pulled the robe tighter, blinked away the tears, shook her head. It seemed that the only good I could do was to allow her this one awful choice. I’ve lain awake night after night wondering if that, too, was wrong. What if I had been strong enough to insist, to take charge, to claim you?