2010-2017

The emails from Jimmy, not as much of a flurry as the ones with Mary, less like obsession and more like the flush of early love. In one of the early ones, he sent Alison a family tree. Since you are trying to find out where you are from.

Most of the branches stretched to Canada and Australia. Just the one line, through Jimmy’s father, stayed.

She printed it, as though having her hand on something tangible connected her to them—these wild-haired people to whom she was so clearly related. There he was, big Jock MacInnes, leading up to his father, a boilermaker, then to the bottle-maker grandfather. Jimmy’s great-grandfather had held the last slim grip on their ways by finding work as a gamekeeper. His father was listed as shepherd. The only one allowed to stay when the rest of the family had had their belongings tossed out of their crofts, the landlords finding sheep more profitable than people. They marched these people away. Away from their homes, their land, their traditions during The Clearances.

Alison stuck this family tree on the growing collage of images that she’d been creating on the wall in front of her desk. Wade paid a rare visit to her studio one Saturday morning.

“Jesus,” he said. “This looks like a shrine.” He leaned in to the images. “And not space for even one picture of me.”

“I see you every day.”

“It’s as though you’ve been carried off by a cult.”

“Not a cult,” she said. “A place I can look at them and not subject everyone else to it.” Not a cult at all. My family. How could he not see that she had space for them and for him, if he’d just let her.

She continued rising early, checking email, working her clay in the loft. She felt alive, then, in ways she hadn’t felt before. At last, she was beginning to open into her true self. This, she fought to reconcile with what she’d built before, torn between this renewed sense of her ability to create, these new relationships and the story of who she was within them, and her own children, sprung from within, yet not her at all. As though she’d been a hummock of land, and they were springs bubbling up, making their own path down, carrying granules from the stream bed, from deep within. Charlie had made directly for the sea, following a tide that pulled him out and away. Will, always bright and filled with energy, like a mountain stream over rocks. Mikey meandering, spreading wide, sometimes feeling like a flood with all his emotions. Tori, deep and gentle, so often flat and smooth on the surface. Tori, with her dark eyes that mirrored Alison’s, opened so wide she felt she could fall in at any request.

The current one was for social media.

“Please, Mum,” she begged.

Mikey, climbing over the sofa, replied. “You didn’t let me when I was twelve.”

“They didn’t have Facebook when you were twelve, honey.”

“Well, you wouldn’t have.”

“Probably right. I’ll talk to Dad.”

“Mum. You don’t have to ask Dad everything.” Tori, again.

“Yes,” Mikey said, hands folded across his chest. “You could make one decision all by yourself.” How like Wade he sounded, mocking.

“What if it’s no?”

Mikey on his knees now, peering over the sofa. Tori, eye to eye with Alison. All of them with their eyebrows slightly raised, as though Alison had suggested she might go off in a hot air balloon.

“Help me get dinner started and then you can show it to me.”

“You have to have an account to see it properly,” Tori said.

“Then you can make me one.”

When Wade’s foot creaked the loose board in the foyer, the three of them hunched over the computer in the den. None of them shifted as he went to the fridge, got his beer, opened it, joined them.

“What’s so interesting?”

“Facebook. We’re making an account so Mum can see it’s okay for me to have one, too,” Tori said.

“No,” Wade said.

“Have you looked at it?” Alison turned to face him, stood, kissed his cheek.

“She’s too young. There are creepy people online,” he said.

Alison moved to the stove, drained the pasta, shivered. There are creepy people in real life. Brothers of friends’ boyfriends. Basements.

“There are friends, too,” Tori said.

“It seems fine, Wade.” Alison set the pasta on the table. “How was your day?”

“Rough,” he said.

“Sorry. I made your favorite pasta and sauce. Fresh basil. That crusty bread you like.” From scratch.

“Then let’s eat.”

Around the table, the pasta passed, sauce, bread, salad. They ate, wordless, for a while, and then Tori ventured another try, in her softest, sweetest voice. All their friends, and many of their friends’ parents, were on there. When she mentioned Wade’s partner’s daughter, she seemed to have hit her mark.

“Your mother has to be your friend on there,” he said. “No hiding things. And I reserve the right to look any time.”

“Thanks, Dad.” Tori, who sat next to him, leaned over and kissed his cheek.

In bed that night, Alison turned to Wade. “It’s fine, isn’t it? You know so much more about that stuff than I do.”

“I can have the IT guy at work put a keystroke monitor on their computer if we’re worried.”

“Wade. That’s creepy.”

“Not if it keeps them safe.”

“It’s creepy, Wade.”

“You don’t see what I see at work. Some people need to be protected from their own choices.” He rolled over, pulled the blanket up over his shoulder.

Moonlight through the curtain. Wade’s breath slow and steady. Alison lay, tense, beside him. Her muscles refused to fully release to sleep. The notion that they’d spy on their children, read their innermost words without their knowledge or permission seemed like a violation.

She swung her feet out of bed, slid out from under the covers. Wade held his place. She made for the back door, paused with it open, looked up at the moon, and then back at the computer. She sat, pulled up her new account, scrolled through, typing in a few names to see who else was on. She found the PTA Vice President, Wade’s partner’s wife. She sent neither of these a friend request. Alison looked up Mary’s children, wondered if it would be strange for them to receive a request from her, and then decided to do it anyway. She sat back, paused, hands hovering over the keyboard. When her fingers landed, they typed Vic Nagle.

There she was. A streak of gray spiking up amid the dark, eyes staring straight out, as though they saw right into her, the same as that first day Alison had met her. The cursor hovered. Alison’s throat tightened. Hands shaking, she began to type.

Dear Vic—

Not, she was sure, the proper salutation for a Facebook message.

It’s you, isn’t it? Victoria Nagle, who used to live in Strathnamurrah. This is Alison (Keith), who also lived there.

Suddenly stilted, Alison deleted it all. What if she hates me? Mrs. Nagle’s voice down the line, the last time Alison phoned: “Best you concentrate on your family.”

Alison started again.

Vic,

It’s Alison.

I miss you.

She clicked before she changed her mind. Friend request sent.

~

Dinner and homework and everyone in their rooms the next night. Wade out golfing, the days having lengthened, not that the nineteenth hole needed light.

In the attic, in the dark, her face reflected in the screen. The icon illuminated. Friend request accepted, along with a message.

Ah. I wondered who you were now—your last name. I never wrote it down. I looked for you on here, as Alison Keith, not Earley. How’s the bairn? Be twenty-two now? I miss you, too.

Write back. Soon.

Love,

Vic xxxx

Alison couldn’t reply fast enough.

I’m sorry I hurt you, she wrote, in the second message.

Ach. I’ll say who hurt me, she said. It was only a nick.

Every night, then, she had a third name to look for in her inbox. Every night, it was there. Each time she saw Vic’s name, Alison felt as she had when she’d bent on the trail that afternoon long ago, pregnant, and sucked the orange wedge—receiving sustenance that her whole body craved.

~

The truth was that on the night, twenty years before, when Alison had called to say she was getting married, Vic had hung up, turned around and come breast-to-breast with her mum.

“You look as though someone’s just slapped your face, Victoria.”

Vic crumpled to the floor, there in the front hall, and wept.

“Who’s done this?” Mrs. Nagle knelt.

“Al,” Vic had gasped.

“Al?”

“Alison. She’s getting married.”

“Feck.” Vic’s mum had watched Vic pine when Alison first left; she’d seen her resign herself to having lost Alison forever. Puppy love, Mrs. Nagle thought. And then she’d noted the lift in her daughter when Alison phoned and said she was in Glasgow. Maybe it was something deeper, something that could last, she thought.

Vic’s mam held her until the sobs stopped; she pulled her up and through to the kitchen. A whisky for both of them.

Aidan came in in the middle of it. “What happened to her?”

“She’s a broken heart.”

“A wha’? She hasn’t even a boyfriend.”

“Get out of here. Away and find something to do before I help you find a broken arse on my wooden spoon.”

“You can’t have a broken arse.”

“Do you want to test that?”

Aidan thumped down the hall and plonked in front of the telly; Vic’s mum told her she’d never known anyone to get from cradle to grave without a broken heart. “The medicine you need isn’t here.”

Mrs. Nagle held Vic that night. In the coming days, while Vic grieved, Mrs. Nagle emptied the jars she hid in the far back of the top shelf in the kitchen. She got Vic’s aunt to pitch in, along with a few sympathetic women in the village. Mrs. Nagle presented the lot of it to Vic.

“Get yersel away, at least for a while. Amsterdam, maybe. Somewhere friendlier than here.”

“That’s for emergencies,” Vic said.

“There isn’t a bigger emergency than this.”

It turned out that Amsterdam would come to Vic, first, in the form of Marianne, who was on a hill-walking tour of Scotland. Vic returned with her and settled with her in Amsterdam, where she spent fifteen years playing music and pulling pints. Happy at first, Marianne seemed to turn after they had a hand fasting, the old Scottish tradition of a ceremonial binding of hands to indicate a partnership, as close to a wedding as they could get in those days. After it, Vic felt Marianne tighten down, becoming controlling and increasingly critical. It seemed better than being alone. Alison understood more than she let on.

~

Wade’s grip tightened, tiny punishments meted out, each one so small Alison told herself she was being petty to even notice: he began to make just his side of the bed, arrived home with good beer for himself, claimed he hadn’t noticed she was out of wine, threw out the leftovers when she made dinner and had to leave for a PTA meeting before they ate. “I thought you’d eaten,” he said.

He spent increasing amounts of time on the golf course. “It helps me think,” he said. “I’m networking.” He had no money to share with her. “You’re working, now. You shouldn’t need it.”

Over and over, she brought herself back to that afternoon in his mother’s den, when she first really looked in those gray-green eyes and saw, through them, Wade, unguarded, as though she could see his very core. He’d been beautiful. Too good for her. Yet here she was, still. In this family they’d made. For this she would go to the ends of the earth. Or of herself.

This love pulled against the primal draw towards Jimmy and Mary. The addition of Vic to this pull was almost irresistible. She felt at war within, and without a clue as to how to broker a peace agreement between these parts of herself. She found more time for all of them, even though her hours at the gallery increased so much that Olivia asked her to become full-time gallery manager.

“I don’t know,” Alison said.

“I need the help. I’m not getting any younger.” Olivia paused. “And neither are you. Your children are nearly grown—past time you had good work for yourself.”

Alison blushed. She needed the money. She wanted the job. “I’d love it,” she said. The thing is,” she paused.

“I know you need time to see your birth parents. I know they’re far away. We’ll work it out.”

“Yes, then,” Alison said. She saw no need to tell Wade.

Her income there and the money from her art, which was selling increasingly well, were more than enough for her to cover the costs of another trip. She did the math for Wade, of money and time. She never went to girls’ nights out like other wives did. She didn’t spend eight hours on a Saturday golfing. She argued her case. She did not say that she felt as though her whole soul wanted this trip, as though something irreparable might happen if she didn’t heed this calling, to Mary, to Jimmy, to this land and sea she so loved, and, this time, to Vic, too. She did not admit that she also wanted space for herself. Space away from Wade.

“Okay,” he said. “Just go.” He hung his head. “I can see that you think you have to.”

“I’ll make it up to you, Wade.”

~

Mary’s house had come to seem, if not home, then comfortable. They learned to navigate this unmarked terrain. Mary was Mother-Not Mother. The gap of Alison’s childhood lingered, with no way to reclaim it. Whatever arguments they might have had when Alison was a teen would never happen. Whatever tears Mary may have wiped away had long-since dried on their own. Whatever stories Alison might have told her had settled in the well of Alison’s past. Still, Alison felt a need to be near her, this woman who seemed so steady, so kind, who asked about her children, her art, her hopes. Who listened. In the time she had alone with Mary, she felt as though she had finally come home. She thought, sometimes, of Mum. All the hurt she held. She wished Mum had had a mother like this as well.

As Mary slid the plate in front of Alison at breakfast, Alison felt her childhood-self return. Each time they were together, Alison seemed to reach a new age. They joked about it. It felt as though they were rapid cycling through the years since they’d last known each other.

“Meeting Jimmy at noon,” Alison said.

“Do you want me to go with you?”

“I’m fine on my own.” She took a bite of bacon, scanned Mary’s face. “Do you want to go? To see him.”

“No. Maybe one day. I just,” she paused. “Be careful.”

“Mary. I’m forty-four. And I’m going to Inverkiven, where I’ve been going since I was four.” Alison sounded like Tori in a rare, sassy moment.

“Sorry.” They said it at the same time.

“I must be around twelve now,” Alison said. “And I want to do things on my own, and you’re worried I’m not ready, or I’ll get hurt.”

“All of that,” Mary said. “Mostly, I want to keep you safe.”

~

On a bench by the sea, not far from where Alison had first seen him, Jimmy rested, arms along the back railing. She came from behind, settled next to him, pulled from her bag the First Fridays Gallery Crawl brochure, featuring photos of local art from in and around Terra Pines. She’d put sticky notes on the pages with her work.

“What’s this?”

“Some of my work.” She felt like a six-year-old bringing a stick-figure drawing home to her parent, a thing she hadn’t done with Mum and Dad. Report cards, essays with good marks, yes, but never had she come downstairs and shown them the drawings she’d done in her room, never anything she made at university, either.

Jimmy’s thick, rangy eyebrows lifted.

“Very impressive,” he said. “Thank you.”

“Want to walk?” She asked.

“Knees,” he said. They’d both been replaced before he was thirty-five. Rugby. Clearly, they needed doing again.

Into The George, then. They took seats across from each other. Still afraid that he’d run if she asked too much or dug too deeply into emotional terrain, she asked instead about his work.

Eyes bright, he pulled a pen from his breast pocket, asked the server for a napkin, drew a diagram with atoms bouncing, water cooling. He paused, pen in air.

“On the train, on the way to the interview, I had to turn around in my seat to stop thinking about your mum, about you, about the split. I couldn’t look back, to where I’d come from, what I’d done. Had to face forward.”

I’m sorry.

He hung his head, the shame still so present, palpable.

Alison pulled the napkin to her and rubbed her thumb along one corner. She turned to him, faced his hunched shoulders and shame-filled eyes. “It’s ancient history,” she said. “We’re here now?”

“That we are.” He downed the rest of his pint in one gulp. “Another round.”

As he returned from the bar, a crowd of women on a hen night jangled in, shaking their cups at him. A Scottish tradition before marriage: the bride-to-be dressed up and her pals dragging pub to pub making lots of racket and soliciting donations. Jimmy dropped in some coins.

“Christ,” he said. “Must they make such a racket?”

A hug on the station platform. Every time, Alison wanted to remain there. She’d begun to trust him, to trust their pattern: an afternoon or evening together over drinks or a meal, a short walk to car or train. Each time, a little more of him revealed. He’d mentioned his sister and niece, but had not offered an introduction. He said he’d told his sister about Alison. She’d asked for nothing else, reminded herself that, in the beginning, she’d wanted only to meet him. Already she had had more than that. He’d call a couple of nights before she was due to leave, ask for just a little of her time, meet her on the street, gifts in hand. A last hug. See you again? “Anytime, anywhere,” he said.

She turned from him and headed not back to Mary, but to Glasgow instead.

There, the familiar scent of diesel and the thunk of the jackhammer somewhere outside the station greeted Alison as she stepped off a train similar to the one Vic and she used to take to Papa’s. A deep breath in. Alison wanted to savor the anticipation. After twenty-three years, Vic again.

Gray hair spiked, arms folded, a black suit with a pink tie. Alison caught her in profile, followed her sightline to a scuffle on the other side of the station: two lads at each other, beer foaming into the air, a crowd of police closing in. When she turned back in the direction of the clock, their eyes met. Across the station, then, towards each other. A hug. A peck on the cheek. Arm in arm. So natural. As though Alison had never gone.

Out of the station and up Hope Street. Into Assam. Two middle-aged women having a natter: politics, the weather, Vic’s mum, who was still in Strathnamurrah. She and Vic’s aunt had managed a mortgage on a tiny cottage. Everyone but Aidan—now living in Australia—married, some of them twice or more.

“These bairns of yours,” she said. Alison had told her only a little of them in email. She spoke about each of them, what their passion was, even if, as in Tori’s case, it seemed to shift from month to month, Vic leaned closer. She took Alison’s hand.

“Lucky kids,” she said.

“Lucky me.”

“It’s you who made that luck.”

“I got good stuff to work with.”

“No better than our mothers had.”

“Yours, maybe.” Alison laughed.

Vic took her other hand. “Don’t laugh. Listen.”

When she’d, at last, wrenched herself free from the woman in Amsterdam, and come home, her mother had sent her to a counselor.

“What a load of shite I thought I was when I sat there that first day. Not good enough to be a dog’s master, never mind a partner for an actual human.”

“Oh, Vic.”

“Do you hear me?”

“Are you better, now?”

“I am, Alison. And what about you? And this Wade of yours?”

“We’re fine.”

“Are ye now?”

Alison pulled against Vic’s hands. She held on.

“So long as he treats you like the good woman you are.”

“Vic, I have a good life.” Alison paused. “He’s a good man.” She wasn’t sure which of them she was trying to convince.

“Aye.” She released Alison. “I had what looked like a good life in Amsterdam. She was quietly cruel. No one knew. Even I didn’t realize how bad it was until I was shed of it.”

The waiters arrived with steaming plates of naan and palak paneer and chicken tikka. She did have a good life: a roof over her head, children to whom she was deeply connected, a job, her art. This life with Wade had redeemed her all those years ago. Perhaps if Vic knew, she’d understand. Alison swallowed. She would not spoil this night with that old story.

“It’s not—we’re not—the same.”

“I’m well aware of our differences, love. I’d hate to think I was having dinner with myself. I can do that at home, any day. So long as you’re happy.”

Alison tore a piece of naan in half, one piece for each of them. “I’m happy just now.” Happier than she wanted to admit, everything seeming to fall away as they ate and drank, all of it flowing so easily. Definitely happy. And wrenched in ways she wasn’t ready to face when they hugged on the station platform again. That same hollowing feeling taking over as she watched Vic move away from her.

~

In the air again, she let the thrum of the engine and wine soothe her. Here, she did not have to choose. She did not have to feel the canyon in her heart.

Landing, into the line for immigration. Phone on, hoping for a welcome home message. Instead, AT&T:

Your online account has been activated. Your password has been changed.

Alison didn’t use the online service. Had someone stolen her identity? Was it her fault?

She said nothing through dinner, the distribution of gifts, homework, updates. Behind the closed door of the bedroom, she broached the subject.

“I think someone hacked my phone account,” she said.

“What?” Wade, shedding his shirt, hanging it perfectly, even though he’d take it to the dry cleaners, where they would do things to his precise specifications.

She handed the phone to him.

“Weird,” he said, face smooth. “I can call them in the morning.”

“I’ll do it,” she said. “You deserve a rest.”

“Either way,” he said, sliding under the covers. He lifted her side. “Come in.”

He kissed her neck. “Where’s my gift?”

“Don’t you like the golf shirt?”

“Yes, that isn’t all you were planning on giving me, is it?”

His chest above her, the weight of him on her should have felt like a welcome; instead, she felt like a piece of property, marked, claimed.

~

Eggs in the pan for breakfast, lunches made. Out the door, Tori and Alison each pecking Wade on the cheek as they went.

The house, deliciously silent when she returned. Work didn’t start until 9:00 a.m. most days. Time for a coffee and a shower. Past the kitchen table, lifting Wade’s coffee mug. A sheet of notebook paper on the table.

Alison,

I hacked your phone. I knew you weren’t telling me everything about Scotland. How stupid do you think I am? Vic? Who is Vic? And why is he texting you at one in the morning? I’m sick with it. I have to gather myself, decide what to do. As you read this, I’ll be halfway to Atlanta. I fly out from there.

There’s a check on the fridge. I’m not sure when I’ll be back. Arthur’s taking my caseload.

Wade

Hands shaking, she called him. No answer. Again. Again, until he picked up.

“What?”

“Wade. Why didn’t you ask me?”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Vic. My friend from Scotland. I did tell you.”

“Why was he texting at 1:00 a.m.?”

“She, Wade. Victoria.”

“Victoria? Like our daughter?”

“Yes, Wade. Like our daughter’s name.” Alison took a deep inhale. “Which your mother suggested.” And which Alison readily accepted. “Wade, come home.”

A car horn honking.

“Not today.”

“Wade, wait. When? What will I tell Tori?” But he’d already hung up.

She stood in the kitchen, shaking, breaths coming in short gasps. Who would she be without him? Bile rose in her throat. This was her punishment for her rekindled relationship with Vic. They hadn’t done anything. Had they? Still, she felt she deserved this.

Without thinking, she stripped the bed, she went to work, she bought new sheets on her lunch hour, and when she picked up Tori and took her to soccer practice, she said nothing. She ordered them a pizza, set it on the counter half an hour before Wade would have been home.

“Dad hates pizza,” Tori said.

“Dad isn’t eating with us tonight.”

“Oh.”

“Dad’s taking a vacation.”

Tori could always manage to look so stoic she seemed disinterested, but she had the keen sense of a fox, always sniffing out the truth. She asked why he’d gone without them.

“He’s stressed.” Not a lie.

“Why didn’t he tell us before he left?”

“He’s just kind of had too much. He needs a break.” Calm on the outside. Focused on reassuring her daughter. On the inside, desperate to make it normal, to make herself safe. She could have said, ‘ask your father.’ He would say it was her fault. Look at the time she gave to emailing Mary and Jimmy, and Vic. Look at the joy she felt with Mary, or the safety she felt in Jimmy’s embrace, and now the thrill of the touch of Vic’s hand, the press of their bodies together in a brief hug. It didn’t matter that they didn’t make the slightest move in the direction of anything more. Vic fed her. Alison allowed it. For the first time in her life, she felt nourished. Not for the first time, she felt shamed at its source. She imagined what Wade might say: Your mum has been seeing someone in Scotland. She hurt me. I didn’t want her to hurt you, too. Their family, their Happily Ever After, disintegrating. She couldn’t be responsible for that.

“I’ve kind of had it.” Tori lifted a slice of pizza.

“You kind of have teenageritis, which is not quite the same,” Alison said. “And don’t roll your eyes at me.”

“I didn’t.”

“You did, on the inside.”

“Fair.”

“Come on. Sit down. Tell me how your day was. Dad probably wants the same kind of break I had.” Alison smiled. “Did you wear him out?”

For two weeks, she concentrated on Tori. When Will called, she avoided mentioning Wade. Mikey sensed something was up. Still, she held to her story. She pushed back every rise of indignation: Wade could just book and leave for a vacation and everything else would be just fine. She’d had to save, in secret, to scrimp, to leave the fridge full and the meals planned or in the freezer, to arrange how Tori would get to school, to extra-curriculars. It took months to arrange one week to see her mother.

Still, she feared what would happen if he didn’t come home. Her work wouldn’t support them. And under that, the notion that she just wasn’t good enough to keep it all together. The same feeling she’d had after she’d told him she was pregnant, and he’d been busy the whole next week. That old, old story rising, the one in which the Beautiful Girl lost everything when the Handsome Boy left.

~

Two weeks later, he strode through the door, as though he really was returning from vacation. He kissed her on the cheek. “I love you,” he said. He pulled her in. “I missed you.” He hugged Tori. “Missed you too, girl. Gifts.” He handed them each perfectly wrapped parcels. Tori’s contained a new phone. Alison’s contained matching necklace and earrings made from hand-blown glass. He knew exactly what she liked.

He turned her in his arms, put the necklace on, pressed his lips to her ear. “I couldn’t stand the idea of you being with another man. I love you too much to bear it.”

She turned to kiss him, let him hold her, tried to conjure the feeling she’d had when she first met that beautiful man at the party all those years ago. “I’m right here,” she said. “With you.” But she could not quite make the feeling arrive.

~

In the morning, sun through the bathroom window, wiggling lines of light. Spring. Humid already. A rare morning when she had to be out at the same time as Tori. A quick shower.

The curtain pulled back. (She is thirteen and fourteen and fifteen again). Scrape of the curtain hooks against the rod. Heat rising. Exposed.

“I’m in a hurry.”

Wade, watching. Wade, stepping in.

“I have to get Tori to school and go straight to work.”

Wade, standing in the spray while she rinsed her hair, stepped out, wrapped a towel around her chest—the old Shrek one from Florida when Tori was still small.

Rush of water in the sink. Scrub of brush against teeth. Relaxed. She’d been heard, at last.

Leaning in, stroking mascara on. Wade, stepping out of the shower. She didn’t look, mascara’d the other eye.

Quick tickle of air, and then the hot damp press of him.

The mascara still in her hand when he lowered the towel, the whole thing by now well familiar. A circling back to the pulling back of the shower curtain, the scrutiny, the paralysis, still the desperate hope that this would somehow lead to love. Along with it, unbidden, the rising, again, of that part of her who had to be perfect in order to be good enough. The girl who lost weight, garnered Wade’s attention the first time. She must make this work. She must retain her redemption.

She learned, again, to enjoy hunger. In the quiet of the morning, before dawn, she rose, brewed the coffee, leaving plenty for Wade. She made one small piece of skinny toast, skipped the butter, haunted, again, by Wade’s honeymoon taunt, by his rejection of her in Scotland those years before. She held the arithmetic in her head all day—the adding up of the calories. She had to make it to the evening meal in deficit. Boiled egg for breakfast. Six almonds, dispersed, two at a time, during the morning. Same in the afternoon. An apple for lunch (half, if it was a big one), or a packet of tuna, packet in water, seventy calories. The occasional binge on an entire bag of spinach and arugula, delicious on the tongue. The weight slid off. At last she drew Wade’s attention again.

Every day, the push to wait just ten minutes, and then ten minutes more, to eat, until one meal became the next, if she was good at it, the same way she pushed one minute after another on the treadmill after each birth until the miles added up and the numbers on the scale slid down, never going below 8. This time, they kept going: 6, 4, 2. The delight at being too small to shop in NY and Co. She marched past, proud, denying any flicker of memory of that grieving girl who did the same so many years before.

Nearly nothing in Wade’s arms. Lifted, bed to bathroom floor, where Tori wouldn’t hear. His attention returned; it felt feral. A new camera, already angled in the corner. “So I can look at you when you’re away,” he said.

She tried to ignore the cries of the girl within, the one who loved the sea and the sky and the whisper of the leaves. The one who loved Vic.

Wade, now, turned her, angled her limbs.

“Tilt your head. Look into the camera.”

Even then, hungry. And after, curled in bed, she imagined rising, tip-toeing to the kitchen, flakes in the bowl, milk on top as she’d done as a child (cream!). The soothing crunch. Resist, resist, resist. The memory of fleshy thighs, a small hummock of a tummy. Wade, telling her she was too fat to make love to.

Sleep, then. Her nightmares began again: night after night, walking across a rumpled field of tall grass. A slotted pupil appeared. A widening blackness opened beneath her feet. The eye of the dragon, again. The same as when she was a girl.

Down and down, below the dark soil. At the bottom, black walls rose around her. A well. A ladder attached to the side of the wall, reaching from the grass to a few feet above her head, out of reach, the walls too slick to climb. Shrinking, until, tiny, she became a mouse, scurrying at the edges, squeaking her plea for help. Far, far above, a hawk circled. She pressed her body to the wall, quivering; she wakened, shaking. Other dreams: of mice in the attic, chewing at the wires. Mice in the pantry, in the corn flakes box.

The bottom of the well, dark. The light at the top so distant. A ladder at the edge. The first handhold so far up. She is tiny: Alice-in-Wonderland, shrinking. She is nocturnal, scrabbling at the walls.

She told Vic of these dreams. “You don’t need the ladder. I’m throwing you a rope. Leave him.”

“The kids.”

“You’re not pulling that horrible old line are you? Staying for the kids? Al, it’s poisoning the lot of you.”

“Vic,” she started to cry. “Don’t say that.”

“Ah Alison. I just want you to be happy. And you’re not.”

Wade, striding in, jaw tight. “Are you talking to your boyfriend?”

“I’m talking to Vic.”

~

In bed one night, he told her he’d noticed her at the gas station near their house. She’d been wearing her black pencil skirt, sheer black hose with a seam, shiny stilettos, a thin gray turtleneck.

“I was at the red light, mesmerized by the ass of the woman at the gas pump,” he said. He told her he’d had an erection by the time the woman turned to hang up the pump.

“I realized it was you. My wife. That’s my hot wife. That’s going to be waiting for me at home.”

She beamed. Her stomach churned. He kissed her. She swatted him away. “Wade. Please. I’m really tired.”

“Fine,” he said, rolling over.

She fell into a silken, dreamless sleep, awakening hours later, eyes wide, Wade on top of her. She could not move. She could not speak. She tried to channel the terror into her eyes, to speak the words she could not say. She did not know what was happening. She caught Wade’s eye.

“You don’t want me to stop, do you?” His voice flirted, as though it was the least imaginable thing in the world.

He had finished and rolled onto his back beside her before she could speak.

“Wade. I couldn’t move or speak or anything.”

“I thought you were less animated than usual.”

“Wade!”

“You seem fine now. Probably just some weird sleep thing.”

She gave up. She kept thinking if she fed him, if she could only fill him, he would reciprocate her love. But he hadn’t seen her at the gas station. He’d seen something he wanted.

She felt like one body of land whose tectonic plates, unseen, had pulled apart. She imagined herself astride the Atlantic; she pushed down the molten center that tried to rise within. She feared it. Afraid she would become Mum, boiling over, spilling onto everything, searing. If she’d ever come close to feeling her true self—that sparkling spring that each of us is—burbling up through the layers of time and place, cascading towards the wide sea, she had allowed Wade to press her further and further away from that. She breathed not a word of it, even to Vic, as she became a smaller and smaller stream, forced underground, digging in her own silty bottom, stirring long-settled pollution, trying to churn up a last bubble of light to pour into Wade’s dark, wide ocean of need. She told herself this was the way she could live in both worlds: this Happily Ever After that she’d been given to, and the mother she’d been taken from.

Five years like this. As Alison shrank to Wade’s desire—all the while battling the voice within that said Go. He’s not a good man. Not good for you—her boys grew into men. Mikey in his last year of law school, Will floating back to visit, then out and away again, working for a nonprofit in South Africa, Charlie doing design for an ad agency in New York. Tori growing into a strong young woman.

Some mornings, after she dropped Tori off at school, she took side roads through neighborhoods with smaller houses, looking for For Sale signs, sometimes stopping to pick up flyers. Once, a stifling summer night when Wade was away on a golf trip, one of the flyers in her hand, she pulled down her biggest suitcase, lay it on the bed. If she left him, what would she take? She lifted her favorite scarf from its hanger, the picture of her and Mary and the children from her bedside table. She heard Tori pad down the hall to the bathroom. She froze. The old terror of separation—the one that had been wired into her brain from her first breath—rose. If she walked away from this marriage, would she lose her children? Would they feel as though she’d abandoned them? Would her redemption be retracted? She binned the flyer, returned the objects to their places, closed the case, slid it silently back into place.

Spelunking in the dark caverns of Wade’s desires, these fears, rooted in her very beginnings, drove her compulsion to remain. Only the thread that led back to Mary, to Vic, allowed her to return to daylight, to keep going. Still, she could not be the one to end it.

~

And then one Thursday night when Tori stayed late in the painting studio at school, Wade burst through the front door, long legs striding. Paper in hand.

“Here,” he said. He handed it to her like a summons.

She didn’t really need to read it to know the gist of it. She turned her back and read, anyway. … tired of not being enough for you … what you really love is on the other side of the world … know what you really want … I’m not that guy … never was.

He knew every word she typed, sent her screenshots of her working in her studio, laughing on FaceTime with Vic. It wasn’t enough that she made herself over for him. He needed her to belong solely to him. She’d asked a question through her actions: If I give you enough will you love me? He was giving her his answer.

A deep breath. Her shoulders lowered. She stifled a laugh, straightened a smile. In that moment, all the years of desperate need for him disintegrated. She would worry about Tori and the boys and all the other ramifications of this later. In that moment, she felt utterly peaceful, as though a lost key had been found, slid into a lock, turned. The door was open.

He had an apartment, already rented. The other, predictable elements. Perhaps she should have checked to see whether he actually took his clubs to his father’s. Perhaps she should have checked the mileage on his car.

She could not afford their house on her own. She did not want to be beholden to him and his money for the rest of her life. She gathered her daughter, found new space.

~

Just over a year later, Alison pulled out of the driveway, the car like an oven. A thin rivulet of sweat slithered down the edge of her hairline, temple to earlobe. July 20, 2017. In that season of drought, the only moisture for weeks came from their bodies. Alison turned past the lake, noting the three feet of solid red clay that rose above its banks, as though the skin had been pulled back, leaving bloody sinew exposed. She parked under a shade tree, made her way into the chill of the courthouse, the air conditioning predictably excessive.

Wade brought as the required witness the only one of his friends who ever seemed to like her. Jake hugged her while Wade stood, stolid, a few feet away.

The judge confirmed who they were and asked a few other questions. Alison watched Wade out of the corner of her eye. When the judge asked if she was sure she wanted to return to her maiden name and she said yes, Wade dabbed his eyes.

After he pronounced them divorced, they rose, turned towards the aisle from their opposite sides of the courtroom. Alison met Wade’s eye for the merest moment. He turned back, as though he’d forgotten something on the desk or heard his lawyer whisper his name. Alison’s lawyer pressed her hand gently into the small of Alison’s back. Alison stepped into the aisle, made her way out of the courtroom first, into this new life.

Outside, the blazing afternoon greeted them, on the day before the solstice, when the light and the dark are in balance.

Alison was hardly in the car when Vic’s message appeared: “You free yet?”

“I’m officially divorced, if that’s what you mean.” Her new status had been officially legitimized. Or was that backwards? It was the old, legitimate, life that had been undone.

“Get yourself somewhere you can raise a glass and get a pint down your gullet.”

“Will do,” she replied, though she hadn’t made any plans. She’d told Olivia she’d be back at work. It didn’t seem right to raise a glass at home with Tori.

Freshly painted walls beamed when she returned to the gallery. Too much white everywhere. The wires for hanging the next exhibit curled, empty, waiting.

“Well?” Olivia emerged from her office. “Was it awful?”

“No. Just a little hollow.”

She pulled a bottle from behind her back. “Drink?”

“Drink!”

“To new beginnings.”

They clinked glasses.

“Thanks, Olivia. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“You’d be just fine, honey.”

When she arrived home, white tulips hunched against the heat on the front porch, her second favorite, snowdrops being at the top of the list. From Mary. A new start, she had written. Soon you’ll be in full bloom again. Beside the tulips, a bouquet of lilacs held its ground. Vic, of course, in her own way telling Alison to bloom from this dead land. This sentiment seemed more accessible. At least it recognized where she was.

Strange to think I’ve been walking this earth, turning face to sky, swimming in the waters for over three quarters of a century. So much has changed, and yet, so little. Women gained the right to vote just before I arrived in this life. We went out in droves to do the work our men had done while they went off to fight the Germans. And then we returned to our homes and our children, expected to return to the way things had always been. That’s what they say—it has always been that way. But I know, and you do as well, that it hasn’t always. Still, we returned to a way of life that denied women like Mary their right to claim their own child unless they had benefit of a man’s ring on their hand.

Now, in the infancy of a new century, we find footing in a world built by the men who came before, still with much of our truth buried, fossils of the soul.

I did not fully realize how much of that I’d done to myself until after Hamish died. He was a good man. It wasn’t even conscious that I held myself in for him. I loved him. Did as I was told to do. After his death, though, I felt myself begin to unfurl. I returned to reading the cards, returned to reading the air and the sky. Began to find my voice in paint and canvas and here, on these pages.

It is clear, now, that I will likely not live to lay my hand gently on your cheek, to wrap my arms around you, to feel us, breast to breast, heart to heart. I’ve read my cards, yours, too. Once, I found the Hanged Man for both of us. At first, the card upright: a willing surrender. The turn happens silently, slowly, step by step, moment by moment. It begins as you stand at the altar, let him slide the ring on. In the mornings, heat rising: satisfy his desire. That was mine.

Yours, I fear, will be different. There’s a suffering there, quiet starvation within: an unanswered hunger of the heart, of the spirit. There’s also a silent starvation made visible: the hunger of the body. This, too, part of the journey required in order for the lesson to be learned.

You also have the Fool. People think he comes only at birth. Men, in particular. Beginnings are not just for physical birth, though. There is always the chance for a new birth of spirit. You’ll come to this again and again. Birth: the giant leap off the cliff, into this life, your bag packed, but without knowing how to open it. And you, my darling Jayne, made a longer leap—not just away from the spirit world from which you came, but away from the physical world in which you started. Brave soul in that wee body I saw once, so long ago.

Circling and circling, as we all are. Not the long line, like soldiers marching. This cycle, through seasons, through places, through time. First, you must conquer the fear. Begin to look within. This is part of your journey. The fool, then, here: a beginning. It will come when all you held important seems to have ended. This is not the fool who is easily hoodwinked, but the open emptiness that allows itself what might come. You’ll feel it within. Try not to allow fear to drive you back to the known. What waits in the dark velvet waters of the soul is much greater. Beautiful girl, breathe into it, press down with the feet. What roots down into the earth? What waters meander nearby? Turn those dark eyes of yours to the sky. What catches the wind? What circles overhead? Trust these.

I close these pages, then, trusting that you will find them, that they will help you find a home within yourself, that they will help you rise, as women have done down through the ages, like monadnocks, alone, beyond the protection of the mountain range. Their stories, like fossils, buried, unseen, waiting for the right time, an alignment of the visible and the hidden. Gather the strength of these women. Their story is yours. Perhaps you and your generation can, at last, heal the rift that we have lived through all these ages. Be, again, whole.

If we are, indeed, not to meet again in this life, perhaps there is a chance for us through the veil, on the other side. Perhaps it is enough that we might swim together in this vast ocean of story.

When you doubt yourself, or need to know you are loved, look to the sky to find me. Root to the earth. I am there. Swim in the waters as I have. Part of me is still there. I am always with you.

All my love,

Eilidh