Chapter 22
Nelle stares out the window, silent.
James doesn’t have to ask what’s bothering her. They are nearing the village, and she is scared to face the burned ruins of the cottage she has so desperately sought.
“It doesn’t seem right,” she says at last.
James goes left down a narrower road, dropping his speed to thirty-five kph. The air swells with salt. Between the hills ahead, a black ocean sits underneath pink skies.
“When I close my eyes, I see the cottage,” she says. “I’ve never been there, but I can see it. Intact. Like a memory.”
“You might have a vivid imagination.”
She cuts him a look. “I am a walking, breathing, literal product of someone’s vivid imagination, am I not?” Her voice takes a frustrated edge. “It was more than that. You know when you’re dreaming about someone you know in real life? Like your mom or a friend?”
Or you, James thinks. Sometimes he lurches up in the dark, drenched in sweat after watching her catch flame and burn like paper, other times his favorite dreams of her rouse him awake with wet, sticky briefs.
“That’s what this cottage feels like. Not imaginary, not made up. I can envision it as clearly as Jessie’s apartment, so it doesn’t make sense that it burned down. How can I see something that’s not there?”
“Maybe . . .” He pauses and rethinks what he wants to say. “Maybe it has to do with what you are.”
As soon as the words come out, he knows he made an asshole mistake.
Nelle’s nostrils flare. “What I am?”
He watches the road, thankful to have a reason not to look at her.
“The way you came into this world.” Desperate to clarify, he pulls the journal from his back pocket, the pen-scarred pages falling open.
“I just meant that maybe this is connected to you seeing the cottage from Quill’s memory. Because he created you.”
“Oh.” She stares glumly. “Maybe.”
“But if your vision does have something to do with that,” James adds, “it only makes it more meaningful.”
Nelle sits up straighter. James reaches across the console for her hand when he realizes that she’s perking up because they are here. He slows as they roll through town. He wants Nelle to ease into this, yes, but he is also scared of what they will find at Wallace Quill’s childhood address.
Scourie is nothing to boast about. A stone house here and there.
A filling station. A general store. A small police station.
The twisty road climbs back up into the hills, lined with more houses and dark-green backyards.
James studies the landscape as they ascend, searching for a lonesome chimney, a heavy stone pulling his stomach down, down, down.
Icy air cups the nape of Nelle’s neck, so she unties her hair. It cascades over her shoulders but does little to protect against the biting wind. Neither does the red coat she pulled on when she stepped out of the car.
Though maybe she’s not cold. Maybe all the blood has just left her body.
Terry was right. Only a chimney rises from the dead grass. Like a boring brick tree.
Nelle sags. “This is so fucking pointless.”
“Hey now.” James brushes his thumb over her knuckles. “Think about everywhere we’ve gone. Everything we’ve done. Absolutely no part of this,” he stretches his arms out to the hills, now bluish in the evening shadows, “could ever be pointless.”
She can’t help but love his buoyant attitude, even as she sinks inside.
Down the hill, behind what was once the cottage, a small pond glimmers like an amethyst. No bigger than a pool, but to Quill and his little brother, it must have felt like a great lake.
Stagnant water full of weeds and grass. Nelle imagines it during the winter, ice-skate lines crisscrossed over it like a toddler’s scribbles.
And buried beneath years of silt, Sam’s decomposed skeleton.
Nelle runs a hand through her hair and stares at the chimney one last time, as if the house might materialize from its decimated past.
“C’mon,” she says. “Let’s go home.”
James shakes the fountain pen, writes in the journal, and Nelle feels that all too familiar release in her limbs.
She climbs into the car and buckles her seat belt, sinking back into the headrest. Let’s go home, she said.
But where is home? Lincoln never was. New York doesn’t feel like it yet. Scotland sure as hell isn’t.
So home is the road, she supposes. Why hasn’t the car started?
She finds James through the window, tall in his heather gray sweatshirt and jeans, hands in his back pockets, talking to an old woman at the edge of the property.
Nelle can only see her back. Her hair is tied in a waist-length braid, white wisps spiraling around her ears.
She wears a long wool cardigan, a cotton dress printed with flowers peeking out underneath.
Nelle presses her nose to the glass, waiting for James to let her out. Waiting and waiting for him to remember that she can’t leave until he writes for her. One minute stretches into an irritating two. Then the woman shifts on her feeble legs, revealing her face, and Nelle forgets her irritation.
Set into the woman’s wrinkled face are Quill’s black eyes.
The rail-thin woman in a baggy cardigan seemed to appear from nowhere, little embroidered flowers scattered across her cotton dress like beads of water.
James grew so accustomed to people ignoring each other in New York, such a natural fit for his social anxiety, that an approaching stranger feels wrong now.
“Hi,” he says, to be polite.
She surveys the dead plot, snow-white wisps curling around her face. Despite her age—she must be eighty, pushing ninety—there is a youthfulness to her.
“Do you know whose house this is?” she asks.
“Wallace Quill, I believe.”
The woman shakes her head. She’s missing a few teeth. “Thomas Quill.”
“Wallace’s father.”
“You’re a fan, I presume.”
He clears his throat, praying he can lie his ass off. “I’m actually a distant cousin of Wallace’s. He passed away recently, and I’m doing some research for his eulogy. Where he grew up, what his life was like before he moved to the States. The people he . . . impacted.”
He forces himself not to gag on the words. Giving that much respect to Quill is almost too nauseating.
“What’s your name?” the woman asks, hands behind her back as she observes the chimney.
The shape of her nose, or maybe her cheekbones, rings familiar.
“James Quill.” His voice wavers.
The woman turns, those eyes pierce his, and the dots connect like a twisting knife in James’s gut.
“Penelope Waters,” she says. “My daughter was Lily Waters. Her husband was Thomas Quill. Now, I’ve studied the Quill family tree, extended cousins and all, for many years, and I’ve never spotted the name James among its many branches.”
James stands, speechless, licks his lips. “You’re Wallace’s grandmother?”
“Yes,” Penelope says. “And since I’m generous, I’ll offer you one more chance to tell me who you are.”
At this point, the truth is his only option, though it makes him feel shameful for having lied to her in the first place. She peers at him with the guilt-inducing, disapproving look of a trained grandparent.
“My name is James, but I’m not related to the Quills. I’m also not writing a eulogy for Wallace Quill because, for one, he’s not dead, and for two, I would never. If honesty’s what you want, then know that I hate him with every fiber of my being.”
Penelope beams at him, life igniting the coals of her eyes.
“I didn’t come here alone. I, uh, brought someone who’d probably like to meet you. Or rather, she brought me.” He bends toward the car, away from Penelope, and quickly scribbles a command in Nelle’s journal.
She cuts him an irritated glance as she climbs out, but he is too excited to care.
This is exactly the sort of discovery she hoped to encounter in Scotland, some real insight into Quill’s life, and therefore herself.
Meeting an actual blood relative of Quill’s, not to mention someone who probably knew him closely as a child, will exceed her wildest dreams.
But when Nelle charges up to her great-grandmother, she leaves no room for introduction. “You’re related to him.”
Penelope extends her shaky hand, tracing the curve of Nelle’s face.
Nelle flinches at the touch but doesn’t pull away.
“So are you.” Penelope’s hand stills. “Why don’t you both come back to my house instead of wasting money on a hotel?
I’ll make tea and snacks, and I think I have some old movies, though the Lord knows the DVD player’s likely too ancient to function.
And I’m not sure where the remote is. Never mind that, I have books. And cards. And tea.”
Nelle wells up as she watches Penelope hobble down the street to a parked car.
James feels something so pure, it makes his chest ache.
Though they met only minutes ago and barely exchanged five words, Penelope held Nelle, recognized her as a granddaughter, and accepted her without question. A sort of unconditional love that, in twenty-one years, Nelle never received from Quill.
Penelope Waters lives two kilometers down the road in a small house with a sheep pen in the backyard.
Her living room has pink and eggshell striped wallpaper, a brick fireplace, and books crammed into every free space.
On the table, in the hutch, and along the mantel sit ceramic cats.
Nelle sinks into a plush pink armchair by the unlit fireplace, her hands warm around a cup of tea, black.
Across the living room, perched on the edge of a white sofa next to James, is her great-grandmother.
Nelle tries not to stare, but it’s surreal to be in the presence of a relative. She obviously knew that Quill had parents and grandparents, but the idea that any of them were still alive, or that she would ever meet them, seemed like a childish wish.