Chapter Fifteen
The Sea Only Keeps — Mara
The Websters’ boy found me on the shelf at half six in the morning, going along the shore for his father’s creels, and he got a rope down, and then he got two men.
I was on that rock about five hours. They put the shoulder into a strap at the hospital in Fraserburgh and told me not to use the arm for six weeks, and I have found out since how many things need two hands.
Three days later, I stared out the window with my coat draped over my shoulders, wondering about Tavish.
The village says Callum Brodie went into the caves on the lowest tide anybody could remember, and the water came in behind him.
Which was true, and explained nothing, and nobody had asked a single question about it.
They dragged twice and came up empty. There’ll be no stone for him either, and I heard three separate people say it was the same as Rory.
They shook their heads and went on with what they were doing.
Nobody suspects anything. There is nothing to suspect. A man drowned in a cave.
Isla put a cushion under my elbow at the table without being asked and took the cup off me to fill it, because I could not do that one-handed either.
“You’ll not lift anything for a while.”
“Six weeks.”
“Aye.” She went to the glasses and started on them. She washed three before she said the next part, and she said it more to the glasses. “The storms have stopped.”
“It’s been calm.”
“It has not been calm here in years, pet.” She turned a glass in the cloth. “Not one autumn. Ask anybody. And now there’s boats out four days running, and Kenny’s up on his gable in his shirtsleeves.”
I sat there thinking.
I have the answer to a thing this village has lived under for nineteen years, and there is not one person on this coast I can tell.
“Mm.”
I went down to the shore Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Nothing. Gray water, weed, the boathouse at the far end with that iron cross still hanging on its nails.
On the Wednesday night, I opened the laptop. The bottom drawer of the wardrobe was standing open across the room with nothing in it except my spare clothes, and the little silver thistle was in the dish by the lamp where it had been since the harbor wall.
The email was two weeks old. The deadline was today. Staff photographer. A desk, a contract, a salary that made me do the math twice. It meant no more airports and no more invoices and no more wondering about February.
It was a good job. Any sensible person would take that job.
I typed the reply with one hand. It took me twenty minutes.
I did not do it for him. He was three days gone. I had no reason on this earth to think he was alive, and I had not once let myself finish that thought.
I did it because I have spent six years saying yes to whatever was nearest and calling it a life. I’d sat in a car outside a wedding venue and understood what that had cost me, and here was the same thing again in a different font.
I said no. I thanked them. I sent it with my thumb on the trackpad.
Then I went down and ate a bowl of Isla’s soup and could not tell you one thing about how it tasted.
Thursday, before light, I went down to the beach where I had found him.
The sea had changed. I had not properly taken it in until I stood there in the dark and waited for the sun. There was a swell coming in on about a nine count, and it broke clean along the stones and hauled out and came again. It had been doing that for four days.
The light came up.
It came gray first, along the underside of the cloud out past the point, and for a while the water and the sky were the same thing. I could not say where one stopped. Then a seam opened low down in the east, and the gray went out of it.
The bay went pale gold. It came across the water toward me in a band, and the band widened, and where it crossed the swell, every rise of it lit along the top edge and went dark again on the way down, over and over, the whole way in.
Then the gold thinned off into silver. The wet stones took it and gave it up again, and the weed on the high line turned from black to brown, and the whole beach came out of the dark in about ninety seconds.
I have chased that light on four continents, and I have never had it handed to me like that.
My coat was open. I did not once put my hand to it.
There were seals out past the mooring. Six or seven of them, heads up in the gray, and I didn’t gaze on any one of them longer than another. I had stopped doing that.
I got the camera up.
Half a lifetime of this. Every funeral, every hospital corridor, every bad night of my adult life, I have put a rectangle around it and stood on the other side of the glass and been fine.
The seals, the light, the water going easy on the stones. It was a good frame.
I snapped the shots.
And I stood on that beach with my one good arm at my side and let all of it wash through me—three days, the cave, his hands closed around the thing I’d been keeping, a man on a rock going into the water—and I did not put a rectangle around any of it.
I have not done that since I was twenty-three years old.
My gaze flickered along the beach again.
He was standing on the stones about forty feet along.
Wet through, in a pair of trousers I have never seen, and whole.
The weight was on him, and the color, and the gray at the corners of his mouth was gone as if it had never been there.
I saw immediately what the water had returned to him.
The density was back—he looked heavier, as if the sea had sealed a layer into his bones.
He looked magnificent. Broad shoulders and chest, narrow waist. A swimmer’s body, I realized.
He nodded once—once—and I saw in the gesture a thank you, or a goodbye, or a promise. I didn’t know which.
I realized then I had no plan for what to do if he returned. I had not expected the return.
He walked closer.
“Your arm.”
“It will be good as new in six weeks.”
“Aye.” He put his hands in his pockets and took them out again. “The swell’s dropped two feet since Tuesday.”
“I noticed.”
“I know you did.”
We stood there. He looked out at the water and then at the stones and then at me.
“I’m not going to say sorry to you the way you’re owed it. I’ve been thinking of that for three days. I can’t get the words to come out right, so I’ll not give you a poor version of it.”
“Okay.”
“I’d rather do it slowly and get it right.”
“Okay.”
Nothing was fixed. He had lied to me for nine days. It was still sitting there between us on those stones, and neither of us knew how to address it.
He could go. That was what I kept thinking, standing there. He was not held by one single thing in this world. He could walk into that water in the next ten seconds and never come up this coast again. There was nothing I had that would stop him.
He came anyway.
“There’s a thing the sea wants to give you. It’s not mine to hand over, and it can’t be done yet.”
“What does that mean?”
“There’s something I want to show you. But we’ll have to wait for the moon.”
I held his gaze. “Yes,” I said, before I had any idea what I was agreeing to.
Because for the first time in six years, I was choosing something.
Not running. Not hiding.
Choosing.