Chapter Eleven
The Weight of Keeping — Mara
The weather came in on Wednesday night, fierce and unforgiving.
Not a squall. Squalls go through. This sat down on top of Kilmuir Cove and stayed—two days of rain going sideways, wind finding every gap in every frame, and the sea loud enough to hear from the front room, which I’d never once heard it do.
Isla had a bucket on the flagstones under the corner of the ceiling and towels rolled at the foot of the door.
“Boats have not been out since Tuesday.” She wrung a towel into the bucket. “Kenny’s lost slates off the gable, and the Websters have water in the back room.”
“Is it usually like this in October?”
She stopped with the towel in her hands.
“No, pet.” She went on wringing. “It is not.”
I went down to the shop on the Thursday for milk, and there were three men in there not buying anything. One of them was saying his father had seen a fortnight like it once, and the other two went quiet, and the woman at the cash register asked me if I was finding the village to my liking.
Tavish came down the stairs at nine on the Friday morning and stopped on the fourth step.
Not for long. Two seconds, a hand on the wall, and on he came. But I have watched that man take sixty-one wet stone steps in a wind without pausing to think about it, and he stopped on the fourth step of a staircase in a warm house.
So I made the list, because that is what I do.
Two weeks ago there was weight on him. It had gone off faster than it came.
Two weeks ago there was color in his face. There was none now.
Two weeks ago he named every bird on that headland whether I asked or not, and the weather, and what the tide was doing under a boat. He had not named anything in three days.
I put my hand on his wrist, reaching past him for the kettle, and his skin was cold.
That was the part I could not get past. The night I hauled him off those rocks, he had been in the North Sea in October, and his hand was not cold, and it was the first wrong thing I ever noticed about him. He had sat by a peat fire for a fortnight, and now he was cold.
Two weeks of getting better. Four days of this. He was four feet from it in a drawer and now the drawer was shut. He was going the other way, fast.
I contemplated what it all meant.
The reasons were good.
Callum Brodie folded that oilcloth. Which meant he had known where it was for nineteen years, and he had been in my room once already, and there was not a lock on that door worth the name. The safest place for that skin was on my body or four feet from my bed with me lying awake beside it.
That was my first thought.
The second one I did not like either. I had tried to give it to him already. I put it on the table and told him it was his. He sat three feet away and did not touch it, and I still do not understand what I did wrong. I don’t know how to give a man a thing he won’t pick up.
On Friday afternoon, I went up for a dry pair of socks and found myself standing at the wardrobe.
I opened the bottom drawer. I didn’t take it out.
I put my hand on it through the layers, and the beat came up into my palm the way it always had, slow and steady and going on and on.
And a sentence arrived in my head, whole and finished and in my own voice.
He would stay.
Not dead. Not gone into the water and away up the coast to go hunting four people who were born the same year as him. Here. On land. Alive, slow, graying, and here. If I kept it in this drawer, he would still be sitting in that chair by the window at Christmas.
I know that life. I had lived it before.
I said yes to a man for six years because leaving meant losing him, and I sat in a car outside a wedding venue with a photograph of a chair in my lap.
I pushed the drawer shut and sat down on the floor with my back against the bed. My hands were shaking.
I didn’t know what to do.
Later, I opened the laptop and stared at the email that had been there for two weeks. I closed the lid.
By evening, he was worse than he had been at noon.
The gray at the corners of his handsome mouth had moved. I had looked at that gray a dozen times since the first week and written it down unchanged every time. It was up along the jaw now on the left side.
He ages wrong and fast. Any place that sees him for three weeks a year will say he has gone gray in a season and blame drink or hard living. They don’t know him.
We sat at the fire.
“Isla’s chimney’s drawing badly.”
“It’s the wind sitting on it.”
“Will it hold?”
“Aye.”
I waited for him to say more, but he didn’t.
“The Websters have water in the back room.”
“They’ll have had that before.”
There were gaps in our conversations now, wide enough for the sea to roll right through.
I watched him across the low fire, the way his gaze drifted toward the window, his mind somewhere halfway down the cliffs.
He used to fill those silences, not with talk—he was never one for talking—but with the hum of being present, the steady pressure of his self.
Now there was only the wind, the sagging tick of the clock above the mantel, the occasional flare from the peat. Even when he answered, the words seemed to come from a greater and greater distance.
I tried to bridge the silence. “Maybe tomorrow it’ll lift.”
He nodded once, neutrally, neither for nor against the possibility. I wondered if he’d heard me.
Then he set his glass down.
“Can I ask you a thing, and you’ll not take it badly?”
“Yes.”
“Are you keeping it to save me, or to keep me?”
The rain went along the window. A gust came down the chimney and pushed the smoke into the room and pulled it out again.
I did not say anything.
I looked at the fire and the fire did what fires do, and I heard the sea going at the harbor wall two streets down, and I counted eleven of those before I understood that the counting was the answer.
He did not ask it again. He did not soften it or take it away or fill it up for me, which any other man alive would have done.
“Aye.” He was a long time about it. “Well.”
He got up and put his glass on the counter and went along the back hall to his room, and I heard the door.
I sat there until the fire was down to nothing.
Tomorrow morning. I will put it in his hands tomorrow morning.
But I knew, even as I thought it, that tomorrow might already be too late.