Ruby
I receive a text message from my parents: We’d like to talk to you. When is a good time to call?
I know what it’s about. I’ve been managing to fob them off so far with short, cheery messages that I’m doing okay, letting them know I love them and am thinking of them.
I know how hard it must be for them, missing Lucy so terribly and having me so far away, though I hope my absence may be allowing them to share their grief with each other, without having to be careful around me.
I’ve discovered if I follow the coast path a little way toward Donald Kilgour’s house, there’s a point where the phone reception is much better than it is at Igdrasil. I suggest a time the next day after lunch, while it’s still light and I can get out to go for a walk.
A fine sea mist envelops me as I follow the path, skirting the pebble beach where the smell of seaweed hangs in the air.
Shetlanders have many words to describe the weather, and I suppose this would be what’s known as a smirr—a drizzle as fine as a Shetland lace shawl—as opposed to a trollamist, which is a thick fog that muddles the mind and takes away all sense of direction.
The storm petrels have left the island now, this year’s fledglings following their parents on their long journey south across the vast sweep of the ocean, and the corncrake has departed, too.
For a moment, I long to be like the departing birds, following the summer, able to avoid the coming darkness.
But I know that running away isn’t an option.
Avoidance will take you only so far. Sooner or later, I will have to face up to what lies ahead and find a way through it.
Geordie cut the meadow a while back, and the sweet summer hay is safely gathered into his barn to feed his cattle through the winter.
The land has a shorn look, and the hills seem to hunch their shoulders against the wind as it picks up, churning the waves in the bay into a froth and making the mist swirl around me.
I climb a few yards above the path and find a sheltered spot where I can sit, phone in hand, waiting for my parents to ring.
Isobel’s tree-of-life scarf is wrapped around my neck, and I brush the fine wool with the tips of my fingers, taking comfort from its warmth.
Even though I’m expecting the call, it still startles me when my phone rings, breaking the quiet. My parents’ voices come clearly through the mist and the miles between us, bringing tears to my eyes even as I smile.
We make small talk for a while as they ask how things are on the croft and give me the latest news from home. Then there’s a moment’s silence, filled with the question that comes next. It’s Mum who asks it.
“Have you had a chance to think it all through, Ruby? Have you made any decisions?”
We’ve already had these conversations. Mum was diagnosed with breast cancer ten years ago—they caught it early, luckily, and she’s been in remission after the trauma of major surgery and lengthy post-operative treatment—but when it was discovered in Lucy, too, just four years later, they ran some tests that had recently been developed.
What those tests found was a small mutation on chromosome seventeen of her genetic makeup, also known as the brCA1 gene.
That tiny fault in the coding means the three of us—my mother, my sister, and I—are almost ninety percent more likely than the rest of the population to develop breast cancer and almost fifty percent more likely to develop ovarian cancer.
By the time Lucy’s illness was discovered, it was too late to save her.
The months dwindled to weeks, the days to hours, as the clock ticked down for my sister.
I was with her through it all, holding her hand as she went into surgery, sitting with her in the chemotherapy suite and trying to distract her from the needles and the nausea, looking after her at home in our flat, then sitting at her bedside in the hospital, refusing to leave her for a second when she was moved to the hospice.
After she had gone, once we were able to think of anything other than her needs in the days and hours she had left, the doctors told me I had some big decisions to make.
We were identical twins, so my genetic makeup is exactly the same as Lucy’s was.
The clock was ticking for me, too. They explained things carefully and kindly, talking about the statistics, the probabilities, and the options.
My sister had shown me what most likely lay ahead in my future—how could I go through that, and how could I put my parents through it again?
I’d seen how Lucy’s death had taken a part of them. Could they survive losing me as well?
I could have preemptive surgery, removing the parts of me the cancer would most likely target. And that would mean I could live. But I would lose more than just the physical parts of myself. I would never be able to have children.
So, I can take the risk, live life from one checkup to the next in the knowledge that a bomb is ticking inside me, gambling that the genetic cogs won’t turn, sparking the mutations in my cells before I’ve had the chance to make a family of my own.
Or I can have the surgery straightaway and be given the peace of mind and the likelihood of living a longer life, knowing it will be without certain options that others take for granted.
I still don’t know how to answer my mother’s questions. “I’m not sure,” is all I can say. I go over and over the choices in my head, but I can’t seem to come to any clear decisions. We all know time might be running out.
“Is there someone there you can speak to? It might help if you could talk it over a bit.”
“Not really,” I say, thinking of Hanna and Isobel, neither of whom knows the dilemma I’m facing and neither of whom I would want to confide in.
My mother hesitates, then says, “We’ve talked to the doctor again. She’s suggested a psychologist in Lerwick. I can send you the number for the practice if you’d like.”
My first reaction is that I don’t want to talk to a stranger about such personal things.
But as I can’t talk to those I love about them, perhaps a stranger is the perfect option.
Someone who can look at the situation dispassionately, help me find some answers.
I agree she should send me the number and promise I’ll book an appointment.
“We love you,” my parents say, as we end the call. “Come home to us if you need to, anytime.”
The thought of being back there with them tugs at my gut, but the emotions are mixed.
This is still where I want to be. Shetland is offering me time and space apart from the rest of the world, the time and space to allow the mist in my mind to swirl and settle.
I reassure them that I’m okay and promise I’ll keep in touch, telling them I love them, too, before I hang up.
I sit a while longer, closing my eyes to shut out the images of Lucy’s last days that crowd into my head in the aftermath of the call.
In the bay below, a pair of red-throated divers call to each other across the water, their mournful cries sounding ghostly in the mist. There’s a saying here that they foretell bad weather.
When the fishermen hear them on the sea, they know it’s time to head for the safety of the harbor.
I get to my feet and walk back toward Igdrasil.
As I reach the beach, the wind dispels the smirr a little, and the island is revealed.
“A trowie place,” Hanna called it, a place where the boundaries between this world and the next are thin.
I long to walk out to it, to see if I can hear Lucy’s voice there so I can ask her what I should do.
Some days, the yearning to be with her again is as strong as the pull of the tides.
But the causeway is disappearing beneath the water, the sea cutting it off again. I turn away and head back to the croft, hearing Hanna calling my name through the mist.