Chapter Eleven
What does it mean to start over?
To dismantle yourself and begin again?
I am living my life without instructions, off the edges of the map—outside of anything I ever thought possible.
And for the first time in my adult life, I don’t feel afraid.
The days grow warm, the nights muggy and windless.
We haul blankets, pillows, and the last of the whiskey down to the grassy bluff overlooking the sea, and we sleep under the stars.
He traces the veins along my forearm like he’s charting a course, mapping constellations.
Thin tufts of grass poke through the blankets, sand finding its way between the covers. But we don’t care.
I never went camping as a kid, or as an adult, but I find myself craving this, the dirt and the stars and the night air in my lungs.
This place has made something different of me. Woven in with the wild. I feel settled, calmed, like I’m remembering something so pure it’s always been there, waiting, dormant, lost to time. A truth known by my ancestors.
I think of all the children I’ve counseled over the years, the parents who’ve shared their grief, their stress, their worry and pain and listlessness. The endless number of phobias and panic attacks and unraveling nervous systems.
If I only knew then what I now understand, I would tell them to run.
Fucking run for your lives.
Flee the life they bought on credit: the sterile house in a square, ordinary town, with false expectations and fast internet and pills to swallow down the numbness of it all.
I would tell them to burn all of it down.
So they can build something new.
I wasn’t the only one dying back there on the mainland. We all were; our lives poisoned by the very things we thought would save us.
Now, I sit with my knees pulled up, looking out at the black sea, Clay’s hand at the small of my back while the sky deepens into the colors of night. And I know I have left things behind that I love.
But I love myself more.
I love this more.
“What’re ye thinking about?”
“How I wouldn’t trade this for anything.”
His hand travels up my spine, to the base of my neck, fingers in my hair. “Aye.”
I settle onto my back, listening to the soft, easy sway of the sea against the rocks below. “Tell me again about the green flash.”
“Mmm,” he mumbles as I sink into his arms. “For centuries, sailors have claimed to see a green flash just as the last of the light is fadin’ from the sky. A spark of green at the horizon. Might only be a tall tale, or might be true.”
“But you’ve never seen it?”
“Nae, not yet.”
He’s told me all this before, but I like to see the hope in his eyes, I like to imagine the horizon shivering a soft hue of green just before the dark takes hold.
His fingers coil around my necklace, tracing the shell he gave me all those months ago.
It feels like a promise. He is mine and I am his. For as long as this lasts.
And I hope it lasts longer than time itself.
“We’re drifting south,” Clay says. “Closer to the equator.”
“Have you been this far before?”
“Hard to say.”
The days feel languid in the heat, making us slow, lazy.
My skin tans from the sun, beating over the island, and most afternoons I wear only a thin cotton dress that I shortened using a pair of heavy scissors I found in the kitchen.
Sometimes we retreat inside during the hottest part of the day, lounging in the shade of the porch.
I make ginger ale—made from fresh ginger root and a squeeze of lemon from our only lemon tree in the greenhouse, set to steep in the sun.
Clay gulps it down, asking for it every afternoon.
Sometimes I lie naked on the rocks, soaking up the warmth—feeling like I’m on a weekend vacation in Mexico or Bali, imagining a waiter coming to ask for my margarita order.
“Ye dinnae make it easy on me,” Clay says with a smirk one afternoon as I stroll up the dirt path toward the house, a shawl pulled over my shoulders. “Wearing nothing an’ expecting me to keep working.”
I give him a sidelong look, teasing—daring him to do something about it—and he follows me back to the house.
We find a comfortable pace to our daily life. Waking each morning just before sunrise, Clay gathering our blankets from the shore while I go inside the house to make tea.
I count my cycle, measuring the days alongside the patterns of the moon.
I can’t be sure if time can be trusted, but I calculate the days when I could get pregnant, doing my best to avoid them.
I find a rhythm, a steadiness in my body that I never knew before.
Like I can hear my own heartbeat, feel the blood through my veins. An intuition that’s hard to explain.
In the evening, I read to Clay on the front porch. Most of the books on the wood shelf in the living room are about gardening, raising sheep, repairing a thatched roof. But I retrieve the book from the bedside table: The Complete Poems and Songs of Robert Burns.
I read him old Scottish poems with my legs propped in his lap while he rubs the soles of my feet, easing the tension from the day. He smiles when I fail to apply the correct Scottish swing to my voice, and I poke him in the ribs for laughing at me.
When our eyes sag with exhaustion, we carry our blankets back down to the bluff, spread them out in the grass—where a soft wind curls up from the sea, cooling our flesh—and we make love beneath the stars, before drifting into sleep.
And it all starts to feel too good to be true, too easy, too comfortable.
“It hasn’t rained in nearly a week,” Clay says, standing between the rows of bean shoots and cabbage.
The sky has been an endless anemic blue for days, and even the water along the shore has turned aquamarine. A warmth to it like bathwater. We must be getting closer to the Caribbean.
“If it doesn’t rain soon, we’ll lose our crops.”
We carry buckets of fresh water from the house down to the garden, pouring them one by one onto the parched soil. But the basin of rainwater in the cellar won’t last forever—either we will die of dehydration, or the garden will.
Hauling buckets down from the house is hard work, making us sweat—making us even more thirsty—our backs and shoulders throbbing. And it hardly gives the plants enough to survive. We can’t keep on like this.
“We need a good storm,” he says, scanning the horizon, a hand over his eyes.
But it doesn’t come.
The leafy herbs die off first—mint and basil. Then the lettuce, radishes, cabbage, and broccoli—they all begin to wilt. We harvest what we can quickly, early, before we lose it all.
The strain in Clay’s face makes me uneasy.
He’s always so steady, resolute, like he’s seen every hardship this island can muster, and nothing new can upend him.
But this feels different. We continue to carry buckets of water to the garden, but our bodies are starting to buckle, especially in the growing heat.
I usually collapse in the shade of the old elm tree that grows crooked beside the garden fence.
Clay continues to work, bringing down buckets while all the other chores on the island go neglected.
Day fifteen since we last had rain, and we wade out into the ocean after a day of slogging water.
My hands are blistered, forehead sun-scorched after I forgot to wear my hat for the first half of the day.
We sink in up to our necks, bobbing in the warm tropical water, neither of us able to speak—too exhausted. Too afraid of what we might say.
I know our situation is getting desperate.
I dip my head back, letting my hair swirl around me. It’s gotten long, uncut in nearly ten months. Maybe I’ll ask Clay to trim the ends. Or maybe I’ll just let it grow, become wild and tangled.
“We’ll be needing to shear the sheep tomorrow,” Clay says. “This heat is too much for ’em.”
I nod, keeping my eyes on the ocean, knowing that the heat isn’t the only risk. It’s the grass that usually covers the island, now turning brittle and dry. Soon, they will have nothing to eat.
I pull myself closer to him, but still I don’t touch him. I just want to be nearer. I just want to hear his breathing, the reassuring rhythm of every exhale.
“We’ll be okay,” he says, the setting sun in his eyes, like he knows the tension winding through my thoughts. “We’ll survive. I always do.”
I let my eyes flick closed, feeling the last of the sun against my face, the sultry warmth of the ocean against my skin.
Sometime in the middle of the night, I feel a cold ping against my temple. I’m curled on my side, the dry grass stirring softly around us, a hand pressed to Clay’s chest. There are no blankets over us, it’s too warm for that. We haven’t slept inside the house in at least a month.
I start to drift off again, when I feel another ping, and another.
A droplet of rain.
I sit up, looking out at the sea. The stars are gone from view, blotted out by clouds.
“Clay.” I touch his shoulder.
His eyes open, and the rain begins to fall in earnest now.
I stand, tilting my head back to feel the drops against my face, cool and inviting.
I laugh and Clay rises to his feet, bare chest to the sky.
He grabs me, kisses me hard, before we begin gathering the blankets and pillows from the grass, darting for the porch as the rain picks up steam, pummeling the island.
I rush inside, but Clay stays out on the porch. I know he won’t be able to sleep now. He’ll stay up to watch the rain, to see if it continues to fall. I curl up on the couch, watching him through the open doorway until my eyes drift closed.
My sleep is calm and restful, soothed by the sound of the rain against the roof.
But when I wake, the air inside the farmhouse is anything but serene.
Wind lashes the walls, banging the exterior shutters against the windows, threatening to shatter them. I stumble from the couch, moving to the doorway. But Clay isn’t on the porch.
I call out to him. He doesn’t answer.