November 9-12, 2017

Three days of steady rain. I stay in, reading and rereading Eilidh’s words until they begin to feel as though they live within me, the whole long line of them whispering to me.

I waken in the night to the shush of wind and water, recall the black sky above the house in Strathnamurrah, the lashing rain on the walk to school. Vic and I cupping our hands trying to light up. If I hated it, I’ve forgotten.

The spillway from the neighbor’s pond foams and roars like a live thing. Facebook shows flooding in the midlands, trees down, power out. Social media is awash in ark memes. In the grocery, duck boots and Wellingtons slap linoleum. Stubborn, I wear my usual boots, scoff at the silliness. You’d think the whole city lived on a farm. It’s just rain.

Tori texts, asking if it’s flooding. Yes, but I’m fine. My house sits well above grade. The little creek in the back has gone from whispery burble to throaty roar, but it would have to break its banks, crawl fifty feet through the woods and rise two stories to do any damage. I turn over, let the wind and rain sing me to sleep, to dreams.

A giant appears at the edge of a hillside, his hand reaching. His boots are covered, up to the knees with long grasses, making him seem to be a limb of the hill. He groans a long, creaky sound that seems to come from deep within, as though the mountainside itself is wounded. I waken again. Still the spatter of rain, the swirl of wind, and the groan of the giant. I sit up. The dream flies away. The noise remains. I stand, fumble in the dark in the direction of the noise, which seems to come from behind Tori’s door. I turn the handle, holding my breath. The noise stops, but the air still seems unsettled.

The open door reveals long, bare branches of birch that reach like gnarled, arthritic fingers, through the space where the ceiling was. A joist dangles next to me. Wind whistles through the window. Between the branches, a sliver of moon is visible. Two nights ago, I slept in this room.

Stunned, I blink at it as though I can make it retreat in the same direction as my dream. I have no idea what to do next. Part of me wants to go back to bed and pretend I heard nothing. If Wade were here, we’d decide, together, what to do. Correction: if Wade were here, he’d decide what to do, no matter what I wanted or suggested. Perhaps I’d have help or at least a hand to hold if I’d gone on a dating site as Mary suggested. Or if I’d said yes to Vic all those years ago.

My heart races. My mind darts about at a similar pace. The air outside matches me. What am I supposed to do? I reach for my phone, thinking perhaps I should call 911, wait for the sirens and lights to add to the cacophony of this stormy night. Or maybe my father, thousands of miles away. Tori. Vic. Mary. None of that will alter what’s in front of me. 2:12 a.m. Six or seven hours before my insurance agent will answer. I set down the phone, reach for one of the limbs. Smooth bark under skin, wet and cold, weeping onto the pillow, the comforter, the floor. My heart begins to slow. I am inside and outside at the same time, exposed. And alive. The air stills briefly and then another swirl begins.

~

Outside, the whole, huge round of roots tilts sideways in the yard, leaving a gaping hole like one I might have wished to dig as a child to get straight through to the other side of the world, in the time before I understood the layers of soft soil and steel-strong rock and boiling magma at the heart of it all.

I bend, touch hands to earth, close my eyes, become a girl again. My shoulders shake as I release. I am here. I am here. I am here.

Back inside, I sit at the kitchen table, coffee brewing, trying to decide what to do. Sirens cut through the night, blaring out from the main road at first and then coming closer. This has happened three or four times in as many months. The octogenarian wife around the corner calling for help for her husband. I’m pouring the coffee when the lights flash in front of my house. Feet thump down the front walk. I open the door. Fire, ambulance, the lot. In the glow of his porchlight, the man across the street stands in his pajamas. He waves and starts in my direction.

“Ma’am, are you ok?” A clean-shaven firefighter says, all but in my house.

“I’m fine. Would you like some coffee?” I say, and then wonder if this makes me seem very southern or very crazy.

My neighbor arrives, smiling proudly. “I called them for you.”

“Want some coffee?”

“No. No. Just wanted to be sure you’re okay. I heard the noise. These boys’ll take good care of you.”

I nod, say thanks, again, turn. I’m not thankful, though. I do not want these men stomping through my yard, slashing the silence. I am not a cat stuck in a tree. Nonetheless, I follow them to the back yard. We stand in a row, staring at the trunk, white in the moonlight.

“At least it’s stopped raining,” I say.

One of the men asks about my husband, and then boyfriend. Under the night sky, he can see neither the color of the shame that heats my cheeks—no man has claimed me—neither can he see the slight smirk that follows: the hope that he’ll ask if there’s anyone I can call, then. Just so I can say, ‘my girlfriend.’ Even though I no more have one of those than I have husband or boyfriend. What follows is a sudden surge of tears, which I quickly stanch. “Sorry.”

“Understandable. This is scary. Specially being on your own. Hold tight. Wayne’ll get you a blanket while we check everything out. Make sure it’s okay to go back inside.”

It isn’t the tree, though, or the shattered gutter and gaping roof, inviting the outside in, that has made me cry. A fissure has opened within me. It’s past time I let the inside out.

From my vantage in the yard, I watch the shadows of men inside my house like gigantic insects as they go about seeing whether it is safe for me to be there. Wayne, with his ginger beard and Semper Fi tattoo, returns, stands a little too close.

“You gonna be okay?”

“I have insurance.”

“Cold front coming in. You’re not going to be able to stay here for a bit, while this gets taken care of.” He puts his hand on my shoulder, as though just his touch will make me better, as though he has been invited to fix me. I look down at it, suddenly boiling. Every little thing every man has ever done is suddenly there: the man at the gas station, the hundreds before him, Jimmy leaving no will and no connections, Wade with his younger woman, Wade with his control and condescension. Dad, even. The linebacker from Clingman. And Jimmy again, before that, starting the whole thing going. I move my shoulder back. Wayne’s hand drops.

“You got people?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say. Never mind that they are three thousand miles away.

“Reckon we’re done here,” he says.

“Thanks.”

After they’ve rounded the corner of the house and climbed across the front lawn and driven back down the street in silence, I step towards the tree, kick the roots. I bend and grab handfuls of soil, fling them at the tree. It’s too much. Everything is too much. A tree in my house, an empty nest, a dead father, a divorce, and all that came before.

“I deserve better.” I stomp the ground like a two-year-old. I breathe. Do I? When I was a child, no matter what Mum was doing, I believed I should be grateful. After all, wherever I’d come from was worse than that. When I was married, I believed I should be grateful. I had what Mary didn’t get, what started the whole story: a man who married me. What about now?

~

In the morning, there’s the flurry of calls to the insurance agent, the meeting with the adjuster. I’m supposed to find somewhere to live, temporarily. After work, I need movement, so I take to the paved trail that used to be a railway line.

The drizzle and chill have, apparently, kept everyone else away. I push away the internal chatter of being too slow, of not going long enough, of the to-do list that includes clearing out my sad little fridge, of the foods in the pantry that I do not need because there is no longer anyone here to prepare them for. I settle into footfalls and breath.

A mile in, the wind and rain cease, leaving just the slap of my feet on the pavement. Another mile on, I turn back. Four miles in the rain will do. Won’t it? When Wade and I split, I walked in the morning before I made breakfast, ran after I picked up Tori from school, went to yoga three times a week, the gym, cycling, never enough.

Footfalls arrive behind me. Strange. I didn’t notice anyone when I turned. I wait for the person to catch up and pass. A minute passes, and then another. After five, I begin to feel the anxiety rise. Whomever is behind me seems to be matching my stride, hiding in my wake. I pick up the pace. Still, the sounds. I slow, they slow. My chest tightens. Everything seems a little brighter: the cardinal in the tree, the green spines of the spruces. I force myself to stop. I turn.

I can see for half a mile in both directions. There is no one. A squirrel darts across the path. I begin to run again. There, again, is the sound. I stop. Nothing, again. The wind and the earth, apparently, have conspired to create an echo. For the past ten minutes, the greatest fears of my life have resurfaced with each footfall: being taken against my will, dragged off somewhere, hidden from people who might love me. All of it an illusion caused by the wind and the earth and me. All of it gone the moment I dared to turn and look directly at it.

The rain begins again. I do not move. It’s all suddenly so simple, so undeniably clear.

At my house, a tree has made itself part of the décor of my daughter’s room. Blue tarps, like blankets, seem more to be tucking it in than sheltering the house from the rain. Every time I go into the room, the branches seem to be saying, “we tried to tell you gently.”

I turn for the car, pick up the pace. I feel Eilidh’s words with me, all those women who came before her, all leading to me, to this day, to this precise second.

I know what I must do. I do have people. And unfinished business. Three thousand miles away. One flight. Dusk to dawn. Not that far.

A thick fog laid claim to us one early November night several years after your birth. When I stepped out to get the paper, I could barely make out the wall at the end of the garden. The hill behind the house hid. The road and the cove, the waters beyond, and the mainland on the other side had been taken. A fog itself is not unusual here. Perhaps it was the timing. It struck me more harshly than usual that the veil, which opened a few days ago as Samhain approached, had closed again. We must now stay in whichever world we awakened in, until the veil opened again. This is the way of things, yet I could say nothing of this to anyone. They would laugh, dismiss it as an old woman’s nonsense. I have seen it at work, though.

This was how it felt that first November of your life. We had a similar fog, a similar morning, and, as I bent to the ground, straining to hear the muffled whisper of the waves, I felt it and wondered if your mother did, too. If she did, I’m sure she dismissed it. She’d gone away to Perth, to start afresh after a summer of swaying to and fro on the ferry, from this island to the Church of Scotland women on the mainland, listening to their advice, paying for your care. All that time, I held onto the hope that you would be ours, that you would come home. You are, of course, still ours, though I became sure that November morning, that you had been, finally, legally, carried away.

It seemed fitting that you would go during this opening and closing time of the ancients. That morning in 1967, I imagined the man and woman who were becoming your parents travelling through the fog that had enveloped nearly all of Scotland and her islands for the previous several days. All week, the sky refused to allow the day to fully open, muffling every sound, as though insisting that everything take place behind the veil, as though all that happened must transpire in secret.

Perhaps I think of this because I wish to see you again, to feel the smooth skin of your fingers wrapped around mine, and because, though I saw you once, in the hospital (more than they allowed Mary), what has happened to you since then has been a secret. Likely, it will be a secret kept from you as well. The church does not give up its workings lightly. Those first days of life for you, which should have been lovely, the beginning of your part of the story, may never be recovered. I cannot make up for that loss, no matter how much I wish it. Still, I wish that you find your way, when you are ready, back through the veil, to learn who you are and where you are from.

I had never imagined a life away from Tursa until that morning a few years after you were born and then taken. I stood outside, the edges of the wall becoming clearer. A faint sun strained in the distance. For a few more moments, though, nothing else existed: no mainland, no Church of Scotland, no foster mother. No young couple driving blindly through the fog to claim you. For a little longer, I could pretend. But the fog would lift. I would return to kitchen, to my husband, still angry, still holding himself back every time he saw Jock MacInnes. I can’t say I didn’t feel the same.

Hamish had been after me for some time to go to the mainland. A fresh start. For all of us. As the sun broke through, I realized I could go. I could watch my beloved little island from across the waters, the tiny shapes of the MacInnes’ too small to disturb. I climbed the hill, offered my wish that you would find us nonetheless, and then returned to the house and told Hamish I could go.