Chapter Seven
The Almost — Mara
I have something of yours. I’ve had it since the first night.
Eleven words. I’d built them in bed at six that morning and I ran them the whole way through breakfast—I have something of yours. There’s something in my room. I took something out of the boathouse.
Just a few words, and I’d say them on the headland where there was nobody to hear.
“He went up an hour ago.” Isla had the bucket out on the step. “Nine days now without a blow. Nine. My mother would’ve had something to say about that.”
“Good luck for me. I’ve been photographing in sunshine all week.”
“Aye.” She went on with the step. “Something like luck, pet.”
I left the camera on the bed.
He was at the top of the sixty-one steps with the coat Isla gave him hanging wrong off one shoulder, and he came down four of them to meet me.
“There’s a bird you’ll want. Two of them, on the third ledge.”
“Tavish—”
“Peregrines. They’ve been off the coast three winters, and they’re back.”
And that was one. It went down easy. I stopped, and my whole body thanked me for stopping.
We went north along the track. The grass was flat with the wind, and the sheep didn’t move for us, same as always. There are eleven of them on that headland, and not one has ever given me the right of way.
“Why do they not shift?”
“Nobody’s ever made them. Four hundred years of sheep on this hill and nobody’s once made them.”
“That’s a management problem.”
“It’s a Scottish problem.” He got a hand on the wire for me where the fence sags. “You’d want to see them in a gale. They stand facing it. Every one, same way, like a row of stones.”
“Do you stand facing it?”
“I’ve nothing else to do with weather.”
I laughed at that, and he didn’t seem to understand why, which made it better.
The light was going gold over the water the way it does out there at five in the afternoon. Three days till the big tide, he’d said on Tuesday. The email was sitting on my laptop with four days left on it, and I hadn’t opened it since the fire.
I counted the swell coming in. Eight seconds, nine, eight. It broke on the rocks at the foot of the cliff and hauled out and came again. You can set a watch by it. I’ve stood on enough headlands waiting for light to read a sea’s rhythm inside ten minutes.
Tavish’s color was up. Weight on him. He took that path like a man who’d never sat down on a wet step in his life.
The gray was still at the corners of his mouth. I checked. It hadn’t moved.
“There’s something I need to say to you.”
He stopped walking. He didn’t ask what. He stood there with his hands down and waited, and gave me all the room in the world.
My hand went to my throat for the camera strap and found my collar instead. I took it down and put it in my pocket, and the eleven words sat in my mouth and got heavier the longer I held them, and he waited until I was ready.
“You should get a coat that fits.”
He got the shoulder of it between two fingers and shook it. “It’s Isla’s husband’s.”
“I know. It’s terrible.”
“He was a wider man.”
There was a pause.
He let it go. He’d decided to let it go—I could see him decide it—and I’d have given a lot to know what was behind that, and I didn’t ask that either.
At the top the path runs out along a shoulder of rock, and the wind comes over the lip hard enough to lean on.
We stopped there because he stopped.
Talking was finished. You can’t do it in that wind without shouting, and neither of us shouted. My hands went up and buttoned my coat at the throat.
The swell came in. Eight seconds. Nine.
I don’t know how long we stood. Long enough that the light changed. Long enough that the not-talking stopped being a gap in the conversation and turned into the thing we were doing. I needed to say the eleven words, and I spent the time standing there instead.
He was closer than he had been. I hadn’t moved, and I didn’t see him move.
I turned my head, and he had his eyes on me already.
Nobody has looked at me like that in six years. Daniel used to watch me the way you watch a thing you’ve already bought. This was not that.
His hand came up.
Four inches, at the most. It stopped, and started again, and there was a hitch in it a quarter of the way across, and I understood he’d thought about this before today.
Two inches from my face.
The ground hit the bottom of my boots.
I felt it before I heard it: the world buckled upward, a concussion through the stone shelf running blunt and total up through the soles of my boots, through both shinbones and my knees, jarring my spine, so the vertebrae stacked momentarily out of order.
The whole shoulder of the headland jumped under me, and my arms shot wider, steadying against nothing, my balance not only taken but methodically removed, like the first shunt of turbulence on the transatlantic red-eye, when you have just enough warning to remember how little holds you up in the air.
The sound landed a heartbeat behind the impact—a single, uncut, impossible break of stone somewhere below, so sharp and so deep that my chest went hollow with the echo of it.
I gasped, and Tavish caught my arm, balancing me, matching the exact pressure I used to steady myself, so that for a second neither of us moved or spoke or breathed. Then, as if we had agreed to it beforehand, we both leaned forward into the wind, peering down the drop toward the sea.
Below us, at the base of the cliff, where the swell had been methodically breaking every nine seconds, the usual white water was gone, erased by a solid, gleaming wedge of foam that had shot up the entire cliff face.
It had left a band of fresh, dripping black on the granite, thirty feet higher than the last line of salt.
“I thought—” I started, but Tavish had already let go of my arm and gone to the edge, boots grinding against the lichen, scanning the shore below.
He said nothing. His eyes were wide and black and fixed on the place where the sea had just struck, and I saw that he was breathing with his mouth open, breathless not from exertion but from something like recognition, or dread.3
A few seconds later the normal waves returned, the measured eight-count, the pull and break and pull.
The wind restarted, catching my damp hair and plastering it against my cheek.
The moment, whatever had happened, was over, except that the air between us was changed—emptied out, or maybe filled up, but different.
I realized the camera was not around my neck, and I had the sudden urge to document the exact place and time.
But Tavish was still looking down the cliff, not blinking, not moving. I found myself leaning towards him, drawn by the gravity of his stilled attention.
“What was that?” I said, low.
He seemed to be checking the math on a difficult equation, or refusing to say a thing already known. “Not the weather,” he said finally, and when he turned to me his face was a mask of confusion, or maybe shame.
We stood that way, shoulder to shoulder, for a count of four more swells. Then Tavish straightened, squinted at the clouds to the east, and said, “It’s nothing. Some trick of the ledge, maybe.” But he didn’t believe it. I could see that much.
“Has it happened before?” I asked.
He hesitated, shoulders lifted, then dropped them and said, “Once. Not for a long while.”
I expected him to say more, but he turned and started back along the path, not looking at the water, not at me.
After a brief hesitation, I followed Tavish back along the path, neither of us speaking. The sheep still didn’t move, but I thought they looked more alert, pulled into themselves against the wind, as if they, too, had registered the anomaly.
At the bottom of the steps, Tavish waited for me. The gold in the light had faded, and there was nearly enough darkness to pretend nothing at all had occurred.
We both turned.
“That’s the tide.” His voice had a crack across the middle of it. “That’s—the shelf. It comes off the shelf like that.”
“Right.”
“It does that.”
“Okay.”
He got ordinary again inside about ten seconds, which was worse than the crack.
We went down the sixty-one steps with the light gone gray and the eleven words still in my mouth.
The wrong moment. That’s what I built on the way down, and I built it well, because I’ve had practice. You don’t say a thing like that to a man on a cliff in a wind he can’t hear you in. You say it at a table with the fire on and a glass in his hand and nothing behind him but a wall.
Tomorrow.
I called it timing.
Isla was up. The bar was dark. I got my boots off on the stairs, so I wouldn’t wake her and went up in my socks past the fourth step and the ninth.
My room was cold. I put the light on and hung my coat on the hook and sat on the end of the bed to unpin my hair.
The bottom drawer of the wardrobe was standing two inches out.
I got down on the floor and opened it. My spare jumper. Under it the oilcloth, folded the way I fold it, and the thing inside it warm through the cloth against my palm, with the slow beat still going under the surface.
Everything there.
I shut that drawer with my knee.
But something was different. The warmth was stronger. The pulse faster.
And for the first time, I wondered if the skin knew I was keeping it.