Chapter Seven
Hours pass. And then days.
Rainy, cloudy mornings followed by even darker afternoons.
I sleep most of the day, dreaming of the sea, of drowning. I wake layered in sweat, then stagger to the window to check the shoreline. But see nothing. No sign of land.
Day five, I move slowly downstairs. Tired of the small, dusty bedroom. Of the constant gray light through the curtained window.
He leaves the house after sunup, and I watch him from the kitchen window repairing the roof on one of the smaller sheds, carrying buckets of fresh water out to the sheep’s trough. He stays outside until the sun sets, purposeful, tireless.
I remain in the warmth of the house, adding wood to the stove, the bruise on my hip fading, the pain softening until I hardly feel it at all. I only leave to use the privy, as he calls it, a wooden outhouse a few yards from the back kitchen door. It isn’t as bad as I’d feared—tidy and clean.
But when it rains, I dread the wet march through the mud, and the howling winds.
Time passes like an itch against my skull.
We barely speak.
I know he doesn’t want me here. His tone is always rough, quick, as if he could cast me aside like a useless stone out to sea. I am an unwanted guest in his home, on his island, and I know he’s hoping a slip of land will appear just as desperately as I want it to.
But even for all our wanting, it does not come.
He catches fish in the evening, hauls in crabs from the shoreline.
He tills the wet soil in a patch of rectangular land beside the existing garden, then pulls up yellow squash and carrots and other hardy root vegetables.
We eat together in the kitchen, mostly silent, and I feel like a ghost. A passing shadow.
A burden eating his food and sleeping in his bed while he contorts himself on the couch each night.
We can’t go on like this.
Rain streams down the kitchen windows where I’m peeling potatoes, like he showed me, using a small wood-handled knife, the blade sharp and precise, then drop the peelings into a metal bucket that will be taken outside to the square compost pile behind the house.
But after the last potato—which he called a tattie—sits naked in a pot of water, ready to be boiled on the fire, I stare out the window, the sea thrashing against the shore, and a feeling of unease starts to crawl up from my toes into my rib cage. Anxiety that turns to panic.
Almost like claustrophobia.
I shouldn’t still be here.
In this kitchen. This drafty, battered farmhouse that I swear tilts and sways in the constant wind.
There must be a way out of here.
I find a pair of rain boots in the hall closet—about my size—and a black rain slicker that’s three sizes too big, and I head out into the downpour.
He’s in the garden, pulling up weeds.
“There must be a boat,” I shout through the rain. “A way off.”
He doesn’t lift his head. “No boat.”
“Spare wood, then, supplies to build something. A raft, fabric for a sail.”
He flashes his eyes up at me. “Ye know how to build a boat?”
“No,” I say. “But you must.”
He resumes his work, moving down the row of tomatoes, snipping off the dead leaves with his thumb and forefinger. His hands are used to being in the dirt. His arms and shoulders are muscled and strong beneath the cotton of his rolled-up sleeves. “Ye know how to sail?” he asks.
“No, but I could learn.” He keeps working, doesn’t reply. “Please!” I shout at him. “I know you don’t want me here, so help me find a way off.”
He exhales, shifts back on his heels, irritated, but his eyes fall to my feet, to the boots I’m wearing. “Where’d ye get those?”
“What?”
“The boots.”
“In the hall closet.”
He stands up, wiping his palms against his legs. “Take them off.”
“What?” I shake my head, confused.
“I said take them off.”
Frowning, I step out of the boots, my bare feet sinking into the cold, wet earth.
He won’t look at me, but walks to my side, grabs the boots from the ground, then heads for the house.
The rain falls harder, the soil turning to soup, and I know that the boots must have been his wife’s—and for some reason, I’m allowed to wear her clothes, but not the boots.
When I reach the house, making muddy footprints through the front door, he’s already at the stairs. “I’m sorry,” I say, shivering. “I should have asked before I took them. I won’t do it again.”
He stops, breathes in a way that feels like it unsettles the entire house, makes time stall against the walls. He turns, looks at me, but I can’t tell what he’s thinking.
“I just want to get out of here,” I add, my voice pitiful, small.
His jaw tenses, eyes hard, and he crosses the living room back to me, his boots heavy with each step. His hand touches my arm, gentle but firm, and he leads me back out the door.
“What the hell are you doing?”
He releases me once we’re standing at the edge of the porch, and he points out at the sea. “That’s no ocean out there,” he growls. “It’s a black hole that’ll swallow ye up. Sailors die in that water. Even with a good sturdy boat, ye widnae survive on yer own.”
“You want me to stay here for five months, waiting for us to see land?”
“Nae,” he answers, a coldness in his eyes. “But we’ve no choice, have we?”
I listen to his footsteps cross the floor below me, the soft unnamable sound of him pulling off his boots, undressing in the living room while I occupy his bedroom, and then the subtle depression of couch springs, before everything falls quiet.
The farmhouse is old, small, no spare bedroom.
There is heartbreak in the way he moves.
In his eyes. The grief is sharp and unmistakable—I’ve seen it in the kids who walk into my office.
But he is also gruff, boorish, and often rude.
A man who has lost all his civility. His manners.
He is nothing like James, and it makes me long for James in a way I’ve never known before.
It makes me feel guilty for leaving, for hesitating when he asked me to marry him.
He is a kind, patient man—a predictability about him that I crave now more than anything.
But I am stuck on this impossible island with a man who is none of these things.
And I promise myself, when I finally return to the mainland, to Seattle, I’ll tell James how deeply I love him.
I’ll promise to never leave his side, not for anything.
I will be the fiancée—the wife—I should have been long ago.
I resolve myself to this, and it gives me something to hope for.
I spin the engagement ring around my finger—the diamond a small weight, linking me back to James. To home. I count the days I’ve been here: This will be the seventh night. But how many nights have passed back home?
When I was twelve, I had only been on the island a few hours, but it was a whole week on the mainland. Time distorted somehow, bent and tangled.
I try to calculate the difference now, but the results are too terrifying. Seven days here could mean months on the mainland.
I’ve been missing for months…
I imagine Nana wandering the shoals in front of her house, hoping I might appear from the sea.
Has James flown to the Faroes, chartered a fishing boat, joined a search party out looking for me?
But after so long—months in their timeline—surely they can’t imagine I’m still alive.
The odds of finding me would seem slim by now.
Maybe James has gone back to Seattle, called my patients, and told them…
what? That I’ve disappeared without any hope of being found again?
I’m sure the local news has spread to national media outlets: young girl who vanished at age twelve has disappeared once again, twenty years later.
When I finally manage a way off this island, I’ll need to go into hiding just to avoid the press.
But James will see to that, he’s good in a crisis.
He’ll know what to say: She needs time to process what’s happened.
I’ll be back in therapy in no time, hours spent talking to one of my colleagues, sorting through the details of this imaginary experience. Dealing with the trauma. Again.
Because maybe that’s all this is: trauma.
A head injury.
Maybe I’m lying in a hospital bed back in the Faroe Islands, trapped in a coma-induced nightmare.
Maybe… I just need to wake up.
I slide myself beneath the blankets, my face against the cotton sheet, breathing in the salty, earthen scent.
And as I begin to drift off, I think how oddly safe I feel.
There’s something about the soft depression in the mattress, the weight of the wool blankets, the sea-wind against the walls of the house, the unbroken quiet—not a single hum from electronic devices.
No cell phone dinging from the bedside table, no TV static or central heating or streetlamps through the window.
No cars driving through the rain outside, no dog barking next door, no sirens in the distance.
Out here, it’s a different kind of quiet.
I feel sheltered. As if this old house were holding me in the palm of its hand.
Admittedly, I haven’t slept this good since I was little.
He’s standing shirtless on the front porch like a figurehead on the prow of a sailing vessel, undaunted by the lashing rain. Like he was built for this place. This island. This hard-fought life.
I watch him from the living room window, eyeing a small scar on his right shoulder, another across his bicep.
More evidence of the battles he’s faced against the sea.
He sips his tea, quiet, steam rising into his face—and my thoughts bend in on themselves.
He’s handsome, I think, in this early morning light, just risen from sleep.
The kind of handsome that would make most men arrogant, vain.
But he is neither of these things. Rough, perhaps, lacking some decorum.
But not self-important. I imagine he’s always lived an isolated life, even before the island split away from the mainland.