March 18-25, 2017

A rare, late frost on the grass sparkles outside the kitchen window. Yesterday, it was eighty degrees—spring in South Carolina: winter one day, summer the next. The scent of pumpkin waffles, my daughter’s favorite, rises. My phone buzzes: a new email. Tea warms my hands. A cardinal lands on the deck railing. Tori’s soft footsteps sound upstairs, followed by the drift of her new favorite rapper, Post Malone, about whom I know she feels guilt. He’s white. Cultural appropriation.

I touch the email icon. Target sales, MoveOn, Booking.com. Swipe, swipe, swipe. There is no longer the money for shopping, donating, booking.

And then an unknown address with the subject line: Urgently need to be in touch with Alison Earley. I move my finger to swipe away what surely must be spam or a hacker or something else I don’t want. I hesitate, feeling unusually compelled to open it. The bathroom door opens and closes upstairs.

I set the phone on the counter, turn back to the waffle iron. What if it’s some weird trick of Wade’s? In the nine months that we’ve been separated, I’ve learned more about my husband than in the previous thirty years. For one, his skill with technology is impressive, particularly for a lawyer with paralegals and office managers and runners who do everything from preparing briefs to filling up his gas tanks to buying cards for special occasions. He doesn’t even turn his computer on for himself but can access mine from a distance.

A waffle in the oven to keep warm, batter for another poured, kettle on to boil, a fresh cup of tea made and half-drunk before I lift the phone. Fuck it. If Wade is up to his hijinks again, I might as well know.

Dear Alison,

I hope I’ve reached the right Alison. I’m Jimmy MacInnes’ next-door neighbor. We met once, briefly. I’m not sure you’ll recall it.

I’m sorry to write like this, but it’s the only way I know to get in touch.

Alison, Jimmy has died.

Can you be in touch to let me know I’ve reached the right person? I’ll give you the details. Or if this is the wrong Alison Earley, can you reply anyway, so I’ll know to keep looking.

Hüsker Larsen

Steam from the waffle iron. I watch myself lift the top, remove the waffle, open the oven door. I’ve made enough—still, I pour more batter. I grip the edge of the stove, feeling as though I am being pulled underwater. I fear I may not be able to remain standing. I can’t catch my breath.

Of course I remember. A bright night with a full moon and a rare, calm February sky. My cheeks flushed with cold. I had come from the pub, a shot of courage warming me as I made my way along the path by the sea, the streetlights of the mainland twinkling across the wide Firth of Clyde. When I rounded the corner, they stood, chatting across the low wall that separated the two halves of the semi-detached house. Jimmy trotted down the path to meet me. A quick hug. A peck on the cheek. His hand, warm in the small of my back as he steered me towards the house.

“Alison, this is Hüsker, my neighbor, obviously.”

I reached out for his hand, not so much noticing him as thinking about the people who had lived in his half of the house before him.

“Alison,” I said.

“My daughter,” Jimmy said.

“Obviously,” Hüsker said. He squeezed my hand. “Nice to meet you. I’ll leave you to it.”

“Nice to meet you, too,” I said. My daughter. The first time he had said it to anyone in my presence.

“Mum?” My daughter, Tori, behind me.

I straighten and turn to face her. “Morning, honey. Sleep well?”

“What’s wrong?”

My hand reaches into the oven, lifts the warm stack of waffles, sets them on the table. Syrup. A plate.

“Mum?”

“My father. I think he’s dead.”

“You think? Grandpa?”

“Yes. No. Jimmy.” I hand her the phone. Probably the wrong thing to do, to hand my child my grief. Over the last few months, so much has changed. I am no longer sure what to hold, what to discard, and what to share. How much information helps? At what point does it add to the pain? Her eyes flick across the email. She met Jimmy just once. “He looks like us,” she’d said, after. “If we were men in a Charles Dickens novel.” She was right. With his owlish eyebrows, wavy white hair combed back, and long mutton chop sideburns, he could have been Ebenezer Scrooge or Jack Bamber. “He once referred to himself as the Mayor of Casterbridge,” I said. “Not far off, the time frame.”

“Oh, Mum,” Tori says now. “You okay?”

“I made your favorite,” I say. I take my seat at the table. “I’m fine.”

“Bullshit, Alison.”

This new language, my name instead of Mum, has surfaced recently. Should I tighten the boundaries? She’s seventeen. A senior. Navigating college applications and a new house—the halfway house, we’ve nicknamed it—to get us from one life to the next. College for her. Empty nest for me—her brothers already grown and flown. Suddenly single. I cannot think about it. Instead, I cook and clean and pretend that makes everything okay.

“I will be fine,” I say. Bullshit, Alison.

She sits, pours the syrup, pauses, looking right at me with those eyes the same as mine, dark pools in the morning light. “You don’t always have to be fine, Mum.”

“I know.” More bullshit. “Eat your waffles before they get soggy.” Let me have this one moment where everything still seems normal.

~

The shush of the shower says I have time to reply, including my phone number. Tori has always taken long showers; Wade used to bang on the door, telling her to get out. Perhaps these small luxuries console her, now.

I’ve hardly sent the email when the phone rings, and Hüsker’s voice comes 3,000 miles across the Atlantic and inland.

“He rang me, before he went into surgery,” Hüsker says, his voice gravelly and soothing down the line. “He wanted me to bring his laptop, so he could email you when he came out.”

Hüsker had been holding the laptop in his hand when Jimmy’s sister, Maeve, rang, telling him it wasn’t needed anymore. A surgery, to clear blockages of the heart. A success, as they wheeled him from the bright lights of the operating room to his bed. In the wee hours, a collapse within. By dawn, he was gone.

“He didn’t tell me.”

“He wouldn’t have wanted you to worry. He wouldn’t have told me, either, had he not needed his laptop.”

I imagine his white hair framing him in the operating room, recall the pair of us, tipsy under the streetlight. Five weeks ago. I take a breath. “Do you know about the funeral?”

“Not yet. I can keep you updated.” A pause. “Alison?”

“Yes.”

“Did you? Have you? This is a bit of an odd question.”

“I have four children. I’ve answered odd questions before.”

“You have his sense of humor.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know Maeve?”

A clench in the gut. A familiar wave of shame rising like bile. “I’ve never met her.”

“I had a feeling.”

“Is there something else?”

“No. No. Just my imagination, I’m sure.”

Had Tori said that, or Wade, or my best friend, Vic, I’d have pressed: what’s your imagination?

In the background, a woman’s voice, asking who’s on the phone.

“I’d best go. I’ll email as soon as I hear something. Maeve said they were waiting till Monday to get the will from the solicitor and then they’d make plans.”

“Waiting for the will?”

“To see if he had any last wishes. He didn’t tell anyone what he wanted.”

“Of course. Thank you.”

Three beeps, indicating the call has ended. Tea, lukewarm and bitter now.

I pour out the tea, step into the small sunroom that now counts as my studio. My project-in-progress rests on the counter. My wheel sits in the corner, rarely used these days. It calls, though. I center the clay, let my hands guide. This soothes.

~

For three days I watch myself make Tori’s breakfast, lunch, dinner. I feel outside myself on our 5k run in the woods and as I work and rework the same lump of clay on the wheel, feel suspended as I sit at the table forking in stir fry and then frittata and then pork tenderloin across from her. Her homework is ridiculous, she says. She fears she won’t get into a decent school or, if she does, get a large enough scholarship. She rails against meeting her dad for dinner. I console and cajole, refreshing my email, telling myself Maeve hasn’t called because she knows Hüsker has. Of course she’ll be in touch, I keep telling myself. I’m his daughter. The thought is with me at stove and table, when the moon shines through the slats in the blinds in the wee hours, and in the produce department at the supermarket.

~

When I began to search for him, I told myself that a reply would be enough. Later, I told myself that meeting him was enough. Even that turned out to be more than I’d bargained for: meeting him upended the story of my beginning, of myself, revealing the false tale sent with me by the church. I thought I’d reconstructed it. Now it feels as though something critical is missing, again.

~

An early burst of summer heats Monday evening. Wade and I stand side by side, rigid, on the deck. He is here to take her to dinner, his twice-monthly commitment.

“Are you going to let her shower forever?”

“Are you on a tight schedule?”

“It’s a waste.”

“Or a small pleasure.”

He sighs. “Don’t have a whisky, do you? Since I’m waiting.” He grins.

I’d like to pour him a whisky, to sit with him, pretend that we could make it work, even after all that’s happened. I’d like to pour him a whisky, watch the golden rivulets run over his bald head and down his cheeks. I turn for the kitchen, pull the cut-glass tumbler from the shelf. Dusty. Wipe, pour. Two cubes of ice from the tray.

He sips.

Shoulder to shoulder, inches apart, his energy pricks at me, like needles.

“Did she tell you my father died?”

“Not your dad. Jimmy. Yes. I meant to text.” He pauses. “You’re not thinking of going.” The sun catches his pale eyes, wraithlike. The sun shone on him the first night I met him. His bronze skin gleaming. Such a man would never afford me so much as a glance. And yet he did.

I stare, frozen, wishing for words, movement, anything.

“You were just there,” he says.

“He was alive, then.”

“Alison. You can’t just keep going back and forth anymore.” He jiggles the ice. “How are you even going to afford that?”

“I’m his daughter.”

“And what about Tori?” They’ve managed without me before, though Tori complained about canned food and Wade staying late at the club.

“I’m his daughter,” I repeat. I am. I was. I am. I am Jimmy MacInnes’ daughter.

The last night I saw him returns: a black, late-February sky drawn down around us, last out of the restaurant on a Monday. There by the harbor, we stood, our feet in almost exactly the same spots as the night we met. I was flying back the next morning. A shard of light from the streetlamp reached Jimmy’s eyes. His broad-shouldered shadow angled to the side. He wore the same gray tweed jacket he’d worn when I met him, and every time we’d gone to dinner after, no matter the season. A pint in the village, or even in Glasgow, wouldn’t have warranted it. Then it would have been jeans and a shirt, his long, white sideburns left untamed, eyebrows like owls’. Dinner was an event.

He wrapped his arms around me, same as he had from the first night on. He’d opened his arms, asking, that first time, like a boy asking his mum for seconds. That last night, my hands still rested on his forearms as we separated.

“Am I ever going to meet anyone else in your family?” My jaw and my gaze angled towards the ground. It was uncharacteristically bold of me. The wine, apparently, allowed my heart to have its voice.

“If that’s what you want.”

“Why wouldn’t I?” I meant it as a rhetorical question, but his eyes darted about, like a lost bird looking for a place to land.

“I’ll have a list for you next time you’re over.”

“A what?”

“A list. You can choose who to meet first.” He leaned in, kissed my cheek. Six years, and still, every time I touched him, I wanted to fold into him, to climb onto his broad chest and rest, as though that was where I belonged.

“I’ll figure it out,” I say to Wade, there on the deck. How, I am not sure. “Can Tori stay with you?”

“You know I only have one bedroom.” The apartment he’s rented in the city. The rent higher than my new mortgage.

I swallow. “You could stay here.” I push away the images of him rifling through my desk, reading my journals, hacking my computer. It wouldn’t be the first time.

“Ready, Dad.” Tori, standing in the back door.

“We’ll talk,” Wade says.

“About what?” Tori asks.

“Nothing,” Wade says.

She looks from him to me and back.

“I can stay on my own.” She turns, grabs her purse, heads for the front door. Not for the first time, I wish for her courage.

On Tuesday, I call and email Maeve, using the information Hüsker supplied. No reply. On Wednesday and Thursday, Hüsker feeds me what details he can get: there is no will, the funeral won’t be before Monday. I stomp my way around my morning walks, repeating, “I am James MacInnes’ daughter.” Consumed with grief and the sense that some critical element of my self has again gone missing and can somehow be reclaimed by being acknowledged as Jimmy’s daughter, I book flights. Hüsker had better be right about the timing of the funeral. I can find nothing remotely affordable except a flight with an all-day layover on Saturday, landing early on Sunday. It’s Scotland, I reassure myself, with its typically lengthy death timeline. Neither Wade nor I want Tori to stay alone. I swallow the dread at the thought of him in my bed, touching whatever he wants. I pack my journals into a box and put them in the trunk of my car, which I leave at the airport. I use the phone at work to call Vic and tell her I am coming. I’m in the airport before I can bring myself to make the other call, to Mary, my natural mother.

“Hallo! This is a nice surprise.”

“Well, it’s a surprise.”

“Something wrong?”

“No. Yes. I just. Have a bit of news.” I weave my way through the throng, aiming for the nearly empty gate of a plane that has just departed.

“Doesn’t sound good.”

“It isn’t.”

“Straight to it, then.”

“It’s Jimmy, Mary.”

“Ocht, Jimmy! What’s he done now?”

“He’s died, that’s what he’s done.”

“What?”

“Yes.” My reflection blurs in the window, rows of planes beyond, parked and waiting. I hang my head.

“Died?”

“Died.”

“Oh Alison, that’s awful.”

I tell her the when and the where and so on, and that it was Hüsker who told me, and that I’ve heard nothing from Maeve, and what I know about the funeral.

“I’m at the airport. I’m sorry I didn’t ring sooner.”

“It’s alright.” She pauses, long enough for me to wonder if she’s still there.

“Mary?”

“I could come,” she says. “I’ll have to sort something, though. I have the girls on Mondays. I can see.”

“No. It’s alright. Maybe you could come after. On Tuesday. I have till Friday.”

“I don’t want you to have to go on your own.”

I picture the pair of us arm in arm, the bastard and her mother in the church. How will it be for her to see Maeve? How will it be to be back on Tursa, in the church, pressing the point of the pain. Will Maeve let her into the family pew? If not, will I have to choose between them? I do not want this.

“I don’t mind. I’ll be fine,” I say.

“Right. Ring when you land?”

“Of course.”

Darling Jayne,

Each morning, I rise and take my tea by the window in the kitchen, which offers me a view of the waters that flow between this island and the mainland to the east. Hills rise from the shore there. I think of you, somewhere beyond them. I’d rather you were here, in my arms or in Mary’s. I would begin to whisper our stories to you. No matter where you are, these are where you are from. I want you to know the story which you carry in the line from your mother to me and to my mother and grandmothers, right the way back to the start of this place. Crone to mother to maiden, they passed. I curled on my grandmother’s lap or sat at her feet in front of the fire; her words were my fairy tales, my stories, my childhood poems. We hadn’t books. She whispered these tales again and again until I knew them as well as my own name, until they felt as much a part of me as my skin. I cannot whisper them to you, but I can write them here.

This morning, when I stepped out to get the paper and today’s milk, the grass crunched underfoot. Outside, the land gleams, sparking white and pristine. It inclines me to begin, as I suppose we all must, at the very beginning.

In a time before all of us and the people before them, before all of the towns and cities and villages, before kings and queens, the land that would become this island shimmered in her icy wrap. The bright sun warmed her day after day, until, at last, the ice retreated, a white blanket slowly pulling back, carving out the fluid—river, estuary, sea. The land, open to the sky after so long beneath, stirred. The waves, at last allowed to roll, found their way to shore. The hard earth shifted, the molten core spurting up towards the sky and then settling, cooling, shaping new ground. The bubbling of water up through the layers, each trickle meandering to a confluence, once and again, until, at last joining the widest of waters.

After the land was revealed, the waters learned how to answer the call of the moon, that whisper back and forth, as though to soothe the infant earth, born again: shush, shush, shush, under sparkling skies. Furtive sprigs of green, pushed up through softening soil, the slow, brave unfurling into light, neither knowing nor questioning what would come next. Full trust that this, at last, was the right time to sprout and unfurl and shed seed. The land ready and waiting for us to arrive in our own right time.

Our long line of family begins on this fresh land with the women who were holders of the secrets of birth and death, of soil and sky. Reading the stars and the moon, they erected their circles of stone on the high point of this island. Eilean Nam Ban Cailleach—Island of the Crones—its original name. Within this circle, they danced. Painted bodies twirled beneath the moon; days began with the rise of it. The pull of the tides, the spirals of the seasons, the cycles of themselves: blood and bone, swell and hollow. They coupled, seeking the sacred union, the ecstatic dance, flesh to flesh, heart to heart, the fire within their own molten cores.

Each child arriving belonged not just to the woman who birthed her, but to the whole tuath, the tribe. The woman, with her gift of life, and the child, both sacred.

I want you to know that you are still sacred to me. I imagine that, when you come, you’ll want to know the story of your own birth, so different from our traditions. Later I will write of that. It is still too close and painful for me.