Chapter Five
Superstitions and Salt — Mara
The camera died somewhere between the boathouse and the beach, and I carried it around the village anyway.
Salt gets into everything. I’ve lost a body of work to a monsoon in Kerala and another to a sandstorm, and I understood what the shutter sounded like the first time I pressed it in the morning light—nothing. A dead click. Nine years of dead click on a strap around my neck.
I went out with it regardless and framed the terraces in my head the way I’ve framed everything since I was twenty-three.
Isla asked how I’d slept, five hours after I’d shut a door on a man standing in the dark.
“Fine.”
He wasn’t in the front room when I went past it.
Three unpaved terraces climb from the harbor, and I walked the middle one twice. Stone cottages, deep-set windows, slate still running from the night. A shop with a hand-lettered card in the window about eggs.
Four doors on that terrace had iron fixed above them. Small black shapes, nailed into the lintels, painted around rather than taken down. Not one of them was a cross. I’d walked under them in the rain on the first night.
The woman was already on the harbor wall when I got there.
I came along it past a slate slab set into the stonework, names cut into it, no dates and no order.
She sat at the far end by the moss-covered bollard with a net across her knees.
Her hands moved through it the whole time.
She had no bag with her, nothing but the net, and boots older than most of the village, and the wind coming down that wall did nothing to her hair.
I stopped ten feet away.
She raised her eyes to me and went on working. Neither of us bothered with hello.
“I owe you an apology.”
Her hands kept going.
“The camera’s dead, if that helps.” I lifted it and put it down. “Salt. So nothing came of it.”
She worked on.
“Seals carry the souls of people.” She pulled a strand tight. “The sea takes what’s stolen out of it.”
Her hands stopped. She raised her head, turned, and fixed me with eyes the color of deep water, flat and patient and entirely without mercy.
“A man without his skin dies slow, and he dies bad.”
The wind came along the wall and whipped around me.
“Is that—do people here still say things like that?”
“I’ve said it.”
I understood that was the most she was going to say. She hadn’t argued, hadn’t smiled, hadn’t given me a single edge to hang on to. My fingers went to the strap at my throat and stayed there.
She worked something out of the mesh and held it up between two knuckles.
Silver. Small as a coin, pressed into the shape of a thistle, black in the crevices.
“That’s been in three times this month. I keep putting it back.”
There was something at the corner of her mouth when she said it—not a smile. The nearest thing to one she had. She offered me the thistle.
My hand went out and took it. It had gone out the same way in the boathouse, and I’d had no more reason then than I did now.
She’d already returned to the net.
“There’s a pool out past the point where the first promise was kept.” She said it to the water, not to me. “The sea remembers a fair trade, even when folk don’t.”
That remark I understood. Local color—every coast has a pool or a stone or a chapel with a story stuck to it, and I’ve photographed forty of them. I filed it under community legends.
Her hands went on through the mesh. I stood there a beat too long and walked up the terraces with the thistle clasped in my fist.
Isla was washing glasses at three in the afternoon with the bar empty.
“I wanted to thank the man who helped me up the path. Brodie.”
“Callum.” She kept washing. “He’d not want thanking.”
“He was out in the weather at eleven at night.”
“He’s like that. He brought me a fish in August and mended the pump handle while he was standing there. Wouldn’t take anything for either.” She lifted a glass to the light. “Half the village has a story like that and none of us can pay him for any of it.”
“So what’s his story?”
She set the glass on the towel and didn’t pick up another one.
“He lost his brother in the caves.” She wiped her hands down her cardigan. “Came out of it wrong.”
“How long ago?”
“Nineteen years this month.”
I thought about that, but it meant nothing to me. A number in a village full of numbers.
“Wrong how?”
“He keeps the tides.” She started another glass. “Writes them down. Has done ever since.” She turned it in the cloth. “It’s sad, pet. Everyone finds it sad.”
I walked away, shrugging off the story.
Upstairs I sat on the edge of the bed and placed the thistle in the dish where I keep my camera batteries.
My laptop was open on the chair. The email sat where it had been for three days—permanent staff, no more airports, an answer wanted inside nine days. I shut the lid on it.
I made the list. I make lists when I’m frightened. It’s the only thing I do.
Iron over four doors on the middle terrace.
An iron cross on a boathouse wall, and an old woman telling me not to touch what was behind it.
A man dragged out of the North Sea in October whose hand was not cold.
A man who wouldn’t see a doctor and wouldn’t say why.
A man who moved his chair three inches from a poker while he reached for a cup.
A man who asked me what I’d found in the boathouse when I had told nobody I’d been inside one.
And a thing in the bottom drawer of the wardrobe, four feet from my knee, warm as skin, with something under the surface keeping time.
A shape came together out of the list and it fit. It fit the way a lens seats—a quarter turn and a click and there’s no arguing with it after.
I tucked my thoughts into the private space that was all mine. I didn’t tell anyone.
I sat there with the reasons lining up. They were good ones. Not one of them was the true one.
I went down for the light. With a camera that didn’t work.
From partway down the cliff path you can see the whole of that beach.
He was at the tideline with his trousers wet to the knee and his sleeves shoved up over the scars on his forearms, with both hands in the water past the wrist.
He wasn’t moving. He wasn’t watching anything.
For six feet around him the sea lay flat as a table.
Past the six feet it did what the North Sea does in October—gray water shouldering in, breaking white on the stones, the whole coast of it going at once.
Inside the six feet, nothing. Not a ripple. His hands in it to the wrist, and the water not moving.
I stood there on the cliff path. My pulse kicked up in my throat.
Something was wrong with him. Something was wrong with this place. And I was standing in the middle of it with a sealskin in my wardrobe and no idea how to get out.
I didn’t sleep that night. Not really. I lay on top of the blanket with my coat still on and listened to the house settle around me, to the wind finding new gaps in the frames, to the sea breathing against the harbor wall two streets down.
Just before dawn, I gave up and went downstairs.
The fire had burned down to a low, orange glow. Outside, the wind had finally lost interest in the village and moved on, leaving the harbor quiet enough that I could hear the water lapping against the stones.
I sat on the edge of the chair, a cup of coffee warm in my hands, and watched the flames. Tavish was in the window seat, the coat Isla had given him hanging off one shoulder, the gray at the corners of his mouth less obvious in this light.
“You’re staring,” he said without looking at me.
I made a noise in my throat that was meant to sound casual but came out rawer than I wanted. “You’re brooding,” I said, staring into my cup. “Someone’s got to keep you from becoming one of those folk legends where a man dissolves into peat, chair and all.”
Tavish didn’t answer at first. I caught the movement out of the corner of my eye—a cough, or a tension at the jaw, maybe the beginnings of one of his cramped little smiles. It hardly registered on his face, but the room felt it, the air going less brittle.
His gaze was fixed on the window, where the first blue of morning bled over the breakwater.
The sea had relapsed into its ordinary pulse, but my mind played over the image from yesterday: Tavish at the tideline, both hands submerged, the ocean flat for six feet in every direction.
He’d stood as if waiting on a word only the water could give him.
Now, here, he seemed smaller than the man who’d hauled me off a ledge in the rain or faced down a gale for the sake of a stranger’s safety.
If I squinted, I could see how the village had let itself believe him just another unlucky fisherman with a story he wouldn’t tell.
But I’d seen him up close. The scars on his arms were as patterned as markings on a bird, deliberate and healed a long time ago.
And I didn’t quite understand them.
He made a show of sipping his drink, tea perhaps, unlike my coffee. “I’m not brooding,” he said finally. “I’m working up the will to move.”
“Oh, is that what they call it these days?” I tried to sound like myself, but the banter felt like a borrowed shirt—ill-fitting, sleeves too long, the collar tugging at my throat. “Isla says you walk the beach in storms. That you keep the tides.”
“She says too much, that one,” Tavish muttered. But he didn’t sound angry. More like the words had a soft edge, rounded by years of hearing them and letting them matter.
I set my cup down, hands empty and restless. “I’m not good with quiet. It’s one of my many defects.”
Tavish stared at me, then at the cooling embers. “It’s not a defect,” he said. “Some folks fear what’s in the quiet. Some just don’t like the company.”
I almost laughed then—a startled little thing—but choked it off. “And you?”
“Me?” For a moment he looked surprised to be asked. “I’m used to the quiet. That’s all.”
I wanted to ask what he heard in it, but my throat closed on the question.
Instead, I watched the fire and tried to work out my own shape by the shadows it threw. I could feel him beside me, the weight of his presence pulling the room off-balance. The urge to say something reckless, to name the thing that lay between us, sat on my tongue like salt.
I asked, instead, “Do you ever wish you were somewhere else?”
His answer was immediate: “No.” And then, after a beat, “Not even once.”
My hands twisted in my lap. “I think about leaving all the time. Doesn’t matter where I am. I used to think it made me a coward, or just unfinished.”
“Maybe it makes you restless,” Tavish said. “Or maybe it means you’re meant to be moving.”
The silence grew again, but this time it felt less sharp, as if we’d sanded down the edges and could sit with it a while.
My body relaxed, wanting the exchange between us to continue. I’d shown him my real, true self and that seems okay.
I caught myself glancing at his hands—square-knuckled, nails bitten to the quick, the skin along his inner wrists marked with pale lines that looked like the memory of rope.
I wondered what it would feel like to reach out and set my hand over his, pin those scars to the table and ask what story he’d never told.
Instead, I wrapped my own arms around my knees and tucked my chin down, feigning a yawn to hide my face. “I’m going to miss this place,” she said. “Not the weather, but—something.”
He didn’t answer, but when I risked a look, I saw he was watching me, the blue of his eyes nearly black in the half-light.
I wet my lips. “Does it—hurt?” I blurted. “Being here, I mean. On land.”
He set his cup down and turned, resting his forearms on his knees. His sleeves were pushed up, the pale scars along his forearms catching the firelight. I’d seen those scars a dozen times in the last few days and never really looked at them until now.
He followed my gaze to his arms, then back to my face. “Sometimes.”
“And you’ve been doing it for nineteen years.”
“Aye.”
I swallowed. “That’s… a long time to be in pain.”
He studied me for a moment, something unreadable in his eyes. Then he pushed up out of the window seat and crossed the room in three long strides.
He stopped in front of my chair, close enough that I had to tilt my head back to meet his gaze. My heart did something unhelpful in my chest.
“Not all of it was pain,” he said, his voice lower than I’d heard it before.
I opened my mouth to say something clever and came up with nothing.
His hand lifted, slow, like he was giving me time to stop him. He didn’t touch my face. He didn’t have to. His fingers hovered just beside my jaw, close enough that I could feel the warmth of his skin, the faint roughness of old calluses.
My breath caught.
“Mara,” he said, and my name sounded different in his mouth, softer, like he was testing the sound of it with his Scottish accent.
The space between us tightened. The fire popped. Somewhere above us, a board creaked.
He didn’t kiss me.
He didn’t have to.
The air between us did the work, pulling taut until I could feel it in my ribs, in my throat, in the place low in my stomach that had gone quiet six years ago and was suddenly, terrifyingly awake.
Then he pulled back, just an inch, and the moment broke like a wave on stone.
“Get some sleep,” he said, his voice rough in a way that had nothing to do with the sea. “Tomorrow’s a long day.”
He turned and walked out before I could remember how to speak.
I sat there for a long time after, my hand at my jaw, my skin still humming where he’d almost touched me.