Chapter Eight #6
We are silent for a time, listening to the storm grow in strength outside, and I allow my eyes to skip down the features of his face.
The scruff of his beard is a few days grown.
He’s shaved himself a handful of times since our evening on the porch, but he’s not as skilled.
He’s nicked himself along his chin. Tiny marks. Yet he hasn’t asked me for help.
Maybe he senses the strain from last time still hanging in the air.
Maybe he doesn’t want to feel whatever that was again.
Or he’s afraid to.
I know I am.
Still, I squint at him across the table, marveling at the passage of time. “It really is remarkable,” I say, already feeling a little loosened from the whiskey, my edges blurred. “You haven’t aged at all.”
The comment makes his mouth pucker down, and he settles back against the wood chair, hand against his glass, swirling it in a circle. The cut on his thumb has long since healed and only a smooth scar remains. “The sea can play tricks on ye. It canna always be trusted.”
“This is more than that,” I answer. “This is something else—something beyond logic. It’s as if time has no bearing here, on the island.” It’s a relief to say these words aloud, even if I know it makes him uncomfortable.
“Perhaps what we know of time is only a partial truth.”
I lean forward against the table, taking another sip of the whiskey. “But how is it possible?”
He finishes the liquid in his glass, then fills it again.
“Dinnae ken. I stopped keeping track of time long ago.” He lifts the glass but doesn’t drink.
“This island is anchored to no land, no calendar, no place that is governed by man.” His eyes flick to the window, rain blowing hard against the glass.
“The island is its own country now.” He takes another long sip of the whiskey.
“The country of Saltwell,” I mutter, running my finger around the rim of the glass.
“Population two. Or no…” I smile to myself.
“Population one, tourist one.” I take another drink, and this time it only warms me, so I swallow another, my head feeling soft, the corners of my vision melting into the background.
I like the feeling. I want to forget for a night where I am—all the reasons why I shouldn’t be here.
“Two months,” I mutter to myself.
He squints at me.
“I’ve been here over two months—” My grip tightens around the glass.
“Aye. An’ I’m just starting to get used to yer clatterin’ around the house.”
I make a face, but I can see the smile edging at his lips. “That’s not true. I’m as quiet as anything. You hardly even know I’m here.” My tone is light, teasing, and I feel myself wanting to laugh.
Now it’s him who makes a face. “Ye been knocking around the house like a hairy coo was set loose in here.”
“A what?”
“A hairy coo,” he repeats, as if this clears it up. “A Highland cow.”
I laugh, loud and full—unable to hold it back—and take another drink of the whiskey. It tastes like water now. Like nothing. “Wow,” I say, still grinning. “I’ve never been compared to a cow before.”
“Ye should be honored. A Highland cow is a beautiful sight. Wish I had one on the island.”
I lift an eyebrow. “Apparently you do.” I wave a hand at myself, and he laughs, eyes twinkling, relaxing even more into his chair.
But when the quiet settles over us, I force myself to look away from him—that old peculiar itch working its way up into my chest. I watch the rain thrash against the kitchen windows, listen to the house groan and settle, trying to keep its footing.
“Ye from Nova Scotia?” he asks, and I tilt my eyes back to him.
The question feels so… normal. As if we’re sitting at the hotel bar back in the Faroe Islands, and he’s trying to make small talk. Pass the time.
I shake my head. “Lived there when I was young, but moved away to go to college, didn’t go back after that. Things were… difficult there, after the night—” I inhale, looking away. “After I met you. People didn’t believe me, about the island.”
He nods, savors another drink, touches the table with his other hand. His movements seem slower than usual, careful, or maybe I’m imagining it.
“I live in Seattle now, where I went to university.”
“With James?” he asks, glancing at my ring.
I extend my fingers, staring down at the ring.
It seems absurd suddenly, wearing it, out here in the middle of the Atlantic.
I put it on the day before I swam to the island—a promise that I would return to Seattle and marry him.
But I think I also wear it now because it feels like a tether to home, a reason to hope, someone to go back to no matter how much time has passed.
“No,” I answer, turning my hand so I can no longer see the ring. “We don’t live together.”
“But ye’ll be married?”
The question makes every muscle inside me tense. “Yes.” I swallow another sip. “I think so.”
“Ye think so? It seems an odd thing, to be unsure,” he says, pushing the bottle of whiskey toward me. “Ye either love the lad, or ye don’t.”
“I love him,” I answer quickly.
Clay lifts an eyebrow, like he can hear the waver in my voice. Like I’m trying to persuade him, and myself, into believing it.
“It’s not that.” I lift the bottle and carefully fill my glass again.
“He’s a good man, I know that. I just wonder if I’m not any good at love, at knowing what I want.
At seeing what’s right in front of me and trusting it.
” This is far more than I intended to say aloud—more than I’ve ever admitted to anyone about myself.
The whiskey has muddled my head. But as I stare down at the glass, I wonder if this is the center point of my whole life.
I’ve been unable to trust myself—trust what’s right in front of me—because I’ve never trusted what I saw that night when I was twelve years old.
But now I know I was right all along. The island is real. My mind was never as faulty as I once thought.
“You shouldnae need convincing about who ye marry.” Clay rests an arm over the back of the chair, the glass of whiskey suspended at his lips before he takes a drink, and I have to look away. From him. From his liquid blue eyes. “He’s either the one ye want, or he ain’t.”
I smile a little. “If you met him, you’d see that I’d be stupid to say no to him. I’d be a fool not to marry that man.”
“Aye, but a happy unmarried fool is better than a miserable married one.”
I laugh, and he lifts his glass toward me again and we both drink, candlelight in our eyes, warmth in our bellies.
“You were sure, then, about your wife?” I ask.
He nods. “Sure as that storm is pure Baltic an’ will drench ye to the bone if ye step outside.
” His accent grows thicker the more he drinks, and I smile, liking the sound of it.
He smiles too, at the memory of her, most likely.
“She was a kind woman who became like a frightful storm when her temper rose.” His eyes flash to me, and I wonder what he would say about me if ever asked: that I was often clumsy in the kitchen, asked dumb questions that any sturdy woman in his time ought to know, and generally had no idea how to behave around a herd of sheep.
“Being away from him…” I say, my words a little muddied, a little loose. “I know I don’t want to lose him.”
Clay makes a sound from the back of his throat, lifts an eyebrow.
“What?” I press.
“It’s easy to love someone from afar. It’s the loving them when they’re right in front of ye that’s hard. The everyday. The harshness of life. If ye can still love him during all that, then ye know what you have will last.”
We stare at each other and a lump gathers in my throat, a fist in my chest. Or maybe it’s the weight of his eyes. The burden of his words.
Not because they hurt, but because I know they’re true.
I’m afraid, terrified, that what James and I have… won’t last.
What if the hope I’ve felt is just a story I’ve told myself? A fiction about how things will be different once I get back home. What if the story starts to slip through my fingers, and I no longer know what to believe, what to trust?
“Do you think I’ll ever get off this island?” I ask softly, before taking another drink.
“If yer lucky, this storm’ll blow us south, an’ we’ll run aground on one of those soft, sandy beaches with the sagging palms.”
I breathe, then take another sip.
“A year past, I blew ashore onto an island. A couple lads fishing on the beach said it was called Guadeloupe. Picked some fruit from the trees, before the tide took me back out.”
“The Caribbean.” I grin, sinking back into the chair, the glass against my lips. “I could use a pina colada right now. The scent of coconut sunscreen, and a trashy book.”
He lifts an eyebrow at me.
“If only this were a cruise ship.” I finish the last of my drink, and the alcohol swims inside me now, making my cheeks flush, heat roaring through me, and I shrug off the oversized sweater, letting it drape across the chair so I’m wearing only the white cotton camisole I’ve been sleeping in each night—another item that belonged to his wife.
The clothes he lets me wear. His eyes seem to fall to my shoulders, my throat, my skin exposed in the candlelight.
I push myself up from the chair, needing to move my limbs, feeling too trapped by the chair.
Too trapped by all our words and what-ifs.
“I wish you had a record…” My thoughts get stuck on my tongue.
“A record player.” I crave the steady, soothing sound of music.
I miss Netflix and podcasts and the drone of voices that are not mine or Clay’s.
I long for a distraction, for the endless dark hole of the internet, for anything other than the monotony of these days that seem to go on without end.
I hadn’t realized it until now—I had been so caught up in the chores of each repeating day—but now I see how on edge I’ve been. How much I’ve missed the real world.