Chapter 16
Chapter
Sixteen
The wind picks up just before sundown.
I’m at the kitchen table, with the kettle going and the feeling of the kirkyard still on me, when I hear it: the soft repetitive bang of wood on wood from somewhere outside.
The boat shed door. I left it closed when I worked in there last, but I had also oiled the fuck out of those hinges as per Alasdair’s suggestion, and now I think it’s working against me.
I sigh. I really don’t want to go outside. I want to be inside this cottage with the kettle and the lamp and the hot orange glow of the wood stove.
But the shed door will batter itself to splinters by morning if I don’t close it, and I don’t think I’ll sleep a wink with that racket.
I pull on the wax jacket and my boots and let myself out.
The water in the bay has gone a gunmetal that reflects the cloudy sky, the sunset nowhere to be found. The wind is up, gulls wheeling in the sky just before they turn in for the night, and the bracken is shaking, the fronds creating a rattling sound I find pleasing.
I cross to the shed, the breeze tousling my hair not as cold as I thought it would be; more electric than anything.
The latch has lifted itself, the door is swinging on its hinges, banging soft against the frame in the small gusts that come up off the loch, the same gusts that create waves and the occasional white cap. I push it closed and slide the latch back into the hasp. I jiggle it. It holds.
I look out to the loch, the widest deepest part, taking in the wind and the weather and that’s when I see something.
A woman in the water.
She is well out into the loch, past the mussel beds and where the bay opens up into the main run of the water, and she is swimming.
The kind of unhurried steady breaststroke a person does when they have been in cold water a long time and are not in any hurry to get out of it because their body has gone completely numb.
I freeze where I am.
She’s not the same woman I saw in the bay a few nights ago, so there’s that. I told myself she was a gull. I told myself I had been drunk. I told myself a lot of things.
But this is not a trick of the eye, even with the light going down. This is an actual woman in the water.
But what kind of woman would go swimming at dusk in a coming storm?
I don’t know; sounds like something you might do, I say to myself.
I lift my hand, instinctively.
“Hello!”
My voice carries small across the water.
She lifts her hand back.
For half a beat I think she is waving and I am ready to feel ridiculous about thinking any dark and spooky thoughts. She’s clearly a swimmer. Just a swimmer. Highland people are a hardy lot. Some of them do this for sport, the way people in Colorado do polar plunges in the lakes in January.
Then I see what her hand is doing.
She’s not waving.
She’s beckoning.
Her hand is curled toward herself, the way you call a child closer. Slow. Deliberate. Once, twice, a third time.
Come here, she seems to say.
Come into the water.
The breath leaves me.
She has stopped swimming. She’s treading now. She’s far enough out that I can’t see her face clearly because the twilight is blurring it and her hair is dark and wet and clinging to her cheeks.
But I can see her arm and her hand and the deliberate slow motion of the gesture.
Come here.
Then she starts swimming again.
Toward me.
The same unhurried, steady stroke. She’s not in a panic, she’s not in a hurry, but she is closing the distance, and she’s not closing it the way a friendly swimmer angles toward shore to wave hello.
She is coming straight at me. Across the open water. From a long way out.
As if to get on shore and tell me something important.
As if to wrap her hands around my ankles and drag me under.
Oh hell no.
I don’t move; I can’t move. I can only stare.
She’s fifty meters out now. Maybe less. The dusk is thickening, but I can see her better. Her shoulders are bare; her hair plastered to the sides of her face. I still can’t quite see her features and nor do I want to at this point.
The oar.
There’s an oar leaning against the side of the shed. It belongs to the small boat below that’s half on the rocks, half in the grass.
I take three steps backward toward the shed.
My hand finds the oar without me having to look for it.
I lift it—it’s heavy—holding it across my body the way I have seen women in films hold improvised weapons, which is not a way I have ever held anything in my life except when I went to Disneyland and picked up a life-sized version of Thor’s hammer.
I don’t know what the hell is going to happen, but if she comes out of the water, if she walks up the rocks of my spit, I’m going to swing this fucking oar at her.
I’m ready. Somehow, I’m prepared. I’m standing at the edge of a Highland Bay with an oar in my hands, ready to hit a woman with it, and the decision feels oddly rational instead of violent, which should worry me.
But right now, I’m only worried about her.
She’s forty meters out.
Thirty.
Still swimming, still coming, and ugh her face—I don’t want to see her face. Does she even have a face? Are her features just a blur?
I plant my feet on the rocks. I lift the oar a little higher.
And then…
She turns.
She turns in the water, smooth, without breaking her stroke, and no longer swimming toward me.
She is swimming along the shore. Parallel to it.
Headed southeast. Toward the bend of the loch where the coast curves around toward Torridon Village.
The same unhurried steady stroke, only now her body is laid out long and pale along the surface of the loch, and her dark hair is fanning out behind her in the dimming light.
She moves along my shoreline the way a person moves along a hallway, looking for a specific door.
I watch her.
I do not put the oar down.
She swims for what feels like a long time. The dusk is going dark now, the loch is going darker with it. She is a pale shape moving along the water, getting smaller, until she rounds the bend toward the village and is gone behind the curve of the coast.
The loch is empty.
I stand on the rocks with the oar across my body, and the wind in my hair, and the cold reaching my boots, and I don’t move for a while.
A swimmer.
It was just a fucking swimmer.
I say it out loud to myself, into the wind that takes the words off the rocks and away. “It was a swimmer. A weirdo, but a swimmer. People swim. People swim in cold water. People are weird. She wanted me to come in the water and join in her weirdness.”
The wind agrees with none of this.
But I’m going to choose the version of this that lets me go back inside with peace of mind.
I lower the oar. I lean it back against the shed. I check the latch on the shed door one more time, then I cross the patch of grass and let myself in through the back door. I immediately lock the door behind me, and stand in the kitchen with my back against the door, breathing for a moment.
The cottage is warm. The kettle is whistling merrily. I have only been gone five minutes.
It felt like an hour.
I turn the kettle off, then refresh all the salt lines around the cottage.
I am going to dream about drowning tonight. I already know.
I do dream about drowning.
I dream a woman holds my ankles under the water, not letting go.
I try to surface, but the surface is silver above me, and I cannot reach it.
The woman’s grip is the grip of a person who has been waiting a long time to hold someone down, and the cold is the kind of cold that sinks into the bones.
I wake with my heart hammering against the inside of my chest, the duvet kicked off, and the sheet damp under my back.
It is dawn, thank fuck. The light is grey and clean and I survived the night.
The wind has died. The rain has not started yet, but the clouds have the heavy darkness of a downpour coming.
I lie in bed for a long moment with my hand on my chest, remembering the dream wasn’t real, remembering to breathe.
Eventually I get up and get on with my day, though the only thing on my mind—other than the swimmer—is the fact that I’m driving over to the castle tonight.
And that alone means I have to prepare for what’s to come.
A few days ago, I might have alluded to such an event as the, “Iris and Alasdair Fuck Fest,” but now I feel it’s just too silly and crude.
After Alasdair’s warning, and the look on his face, this has all taken on a much more serious tone.
I guess there’s no point in pretending that it’s going to be just sex and nothing else, no matter what he says.
Still, I run a bath to make myself as fuckable as possible.
I add the thyme salt to the bath and get in, using the same salt to exfoliate before I shave my legs and everywhere else.
I stay in the water until my fingers wrinkle and the heat has gone into all the places that have been cold since I stood on the rocks last night, scaring myself silly.
I towel off. I rub the fancy Dipytique lotion Maddie gave me for Christmas into every part of my skin. The lotion smells like expensive roses and I imagine Alasdair running his nose along me, breathing me in.
I do my hair a little fancier than usual, styled straight with Effie’s loud but effective blow-dryer, then just a little bit of eye makeup and copious amounts of deodorant.
I look like a woman who has decided exactly what she wants.
I get dressed in skirt again since he seemed to like it so much, plus a cream waffle-knit with a soft scoop neck. A wool cardigan. And underneath it all…nothing. No bra, no underwear. The scoop neck is fitted enough to hold me up, and what’s the point in panties if they’re just going to come off?
Then I put on my combat boots.
I look at myself one more time.