Chapter Sixteen
What Refuses to Love Freely — Tavish
Six weeks on, and the moon came round full on a Thursday.
And now, I can put the skin on when I like and take it off when I like.
I hung it on a nail in the small room off the back hall where anybody could walk past it.
I go out most mornings before light and come in for my breakfast. I sleep in that room, which Isla has decided to have no opinion about, and she has told two separate people I’m her cousin’s boy from Wick, and I’ve let her.
Mara’s out of the strap. She’s shooting the boats—the fleet, the men, the whole working season, and there’s a gallery in Aberdeen that wants forty of them by March. She’s told me twice that it pays about a third of what she turned down. She seems pleased about that in a way I’ve given up following.
Her wee silver thistle was still in the dish by her lamp with the camera batteries. She’s never once picked it up, and she’s never moved it either, that I know of.
I have seven stones on the windowsill in my room now. Nobody’s ever counted them but me.
I found her on the beach before dawn, the camera around her neck, the coat I gave her pulled tight against the wind. She was shooting the water, but she wasn’t hiding behind the camera anymore.
I stood beside her and waited for her to finish snapping shots.
“You’re early,” she said.
“You’re earlier.”
She laughed, and the sound went across the water like it belonged there.
"Come. Let's walk to the pool." I led the way. The pool was silver and luminous.
We didn’t speak for a while. The seals came up past the mooring, heads bobbing, watching us the way they watch the boats. One of them rolled in the water and showed its belly, white as the moon that had pulled the tide up the night before.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” I said.
She turned the camera off and looked at me.
“The sea doesn’t forget a debt.”
She waited.
“What you did in that cave—it wasn’t just for me. The water remembers. It remembers what was given, and what was taken, and what was left behind.”
“And Callum?”
“The sea took him. Not as punishment. As balance.”
She nodded, like she’d known that already.
“There’s more,” I said. “The thing I told you about. The thing the sea wants to give you.”
She lifted the camera again, but she didn’t take the shot. “What is it?”
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the small silver thistle she’d had since the harbor wall. I’d taken it from the dish the night before, when she was asleep.
“This was never yours,” I said. “It was given for you.”
She looked at it, then at me. “From who?”
“From the sea. From the first promise kept on this coast.”
She took it, and the second her fingers closed round it, the water stilled. Not a ripple. Just the seals, watching, and the light coming up over the point.
“And you’re not going anywhere?”
“No.”
She put the thistle in her pocket, slid her coat off, and set it and her camera up high on a large rock.
Mara stood in the water at the edge of it with her face turned upward said nothing at all for a long while.
Neither did I. We were in there a good ten minutes before either of us opened our mouths. There was nothing to hear but the soft lap of the water and the two of us breathing, and I would have taken another hour of it.
"It's different."
"Aye."
"Why?"
"The sea's stopped grieving." I sat down on the wet rock. "That's the best I can do for you."
A few seals slipped from the far ledge. Mara sat beside me.
"There's a thing I'm meant to tell you." I put my feet into the water. "You gave up the one thing you most wanted to keep, and you asked for nothing after. So did I. And the water noticed."
"Noticed."
"On nights like this one, it'll hold you. Down there, underwater, the same as me. That's what it's offering."
She turned round.
"How do you know that?"
"The same way I know when the tide's on the turn." There was no better answer. I've stopped hunting for one. "I just do."
She waited a moment.
Then she turned over on her knees at the edge of the pool, the way she did the first time she was in here, when whatever it was came up at her out of the water and she scrambled away from it and called it vertigo.
She did not hesitate for one second.
She put her face in the water and breathed.
She came up with the water running off her and her eyes wide open. "Wow." Then she dove into the water.
I went in after her.
We went down together into the light, a woman born on the land and a man born in the water, and the surface came over the pair of us and closed.
Neither one of us was holding the other.
The sea only keeps what refuses to love freely.
She accepted my outstretched hand, and for a time, I showed her all my world had to offer.
I hope you enjoyed reading!
If you'd like to read a sample of Magical Midlife Survival Guide then click onward…