by Cathy Lamb
“Thank you. Aye, it’s all mine, and Bridget’s. But it’s only me here. I love this land. Despite my father, I love it. It’s been in my family, all the way back, two hundred years. It’s my responsibility. But I am alone out here. Who do I leave this to? Who is it for? Bridget doesn’t want it.”
I wanted to shout, “I will have our babies. We will keep the land for them. You want four kids? I can squish out four. Five? Sure thing. Six? Pushing it, but okay, baby.”
“There’s no . . .” I wanted to say the words stupid, irritating woman, but I didn’t. “There’s no woman in your life?”
“No, there’s not. I was married once, when I was twenty-three. I think Bridget told you? We dated for six months. Not long enough. It did not work out. We were living in London, but I had to come home after my parents’ deaths to run the farm.
“Carissa didn’t want to live the rest of her life in the country. I understood. It had not been our plan, and I changed the rules after we were married, as I felt I had to move home. She said it wasn’t fair for me to ask her to do so, and I think she was right. You marry someone and you are agreeing to the life that you will give each other. When that changes, some people don’t want to make that change. Country life, the village, it was too small for her. She moved back to London, and I commuted back and forth on weekends unless we were in the middle of a harvest.
“I was different after my parents’ deaths. I worked all the time. Bridget was in rehab again, then left, and I couldn’t find her, so I was constantly worried. I blame myself in many ways for the breakdown of my marriage. I was not attentive enough during that time of my life to Carissa. We started arguing. She met someone else. When she told me, we divorced.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t imagine a woman being interested in anyone else when she had you.”
“Thank you.” Those blue eyes softened. “That’s awfully kind.”
“You’re welcome. It’s true. Do you miss her, though?” Gag. I hoped not.
“I saw Carissa about a year after the divorce. We met, had dinner, in London, and I remember listening to her talk, and if I had any doubts about whether the marriage should have ended, they were completely cleared up then. We were not well suited. I couldn’t wait to leave, which makes me sound terrible, but that’s how I felt. It was like having dinner with a stranger, a blind date, and the date was not working out. I had assumed I would be married forever, and that was a struggle for me, for a long time.”
“I assumed the same.”
“You were married and divorced also, Bridget said.”
We talked about my marriage and I was brief.
“You had no other choice,” he said, when I was done.
There was no judgment.
No dismissive, minimalizing statements. No shock.
Only, “You had no other choice,” then, “You were strong and did the right thing.”
“I wasn’t strong.”
“Yes, m’lady. You were. You just don’t see it in yourself.”
I wanted to kiss him. Before I said something awkwardly suggestive, as flirting is a confounding foreign language to me, I said, “What I want to know is, how can anyone say no to the Scottish countryside?”
He grinned. “Come, let me show you more of Bridget’s Haven.”
We walked, and talked, back through the blueberries, and Toran took my hand and we linked fingers. I about swooned like a fragile, brainless maiden. I have not wanted to be around men much in the last years. I think they are basically sexist and want a traditional relationship where the woman is the cook/ cleaner and ego booster and penis stroker. What’s in it for me? I don’t trust them. I can’t read them. I’d rather not get hurt again.
But Toran?
He was thoughtful and sensitive.
His fingers tightened around mine, but I knew he was holding my hand as a friend, so I told myself to chill out, simmer down, and quit letting my imagination run amok.
He smiled. He was irresistible.
Lithium. Sodium. Potassium . . .
I started reading romance novels when we moved to Seattle when I was a teenager. I was grieving my father’s death. I lost my best friends, Bridget, Toran, and Pherson. I lost Scotland and Clan Mackintosh. I lost our home and our land, the village of St. Ambrose, bagpipes, the Scottish games, the North Sea, the traditional Scottish dances Bridget and I learned for competitions, the songs, and my school. It was devastating.
I lost it all.
We lost it all.
Why did my mother, Jasmine, leave? She loved Scotland, but her grief was all consuming. She could hardly stop crying. She couldn’t stand to stay in the hills where she and my father had told each other their dreams, next to the ocean waves she’d jumped over with him, under the white Scottish moon where they’d kissed so many times.
We packed up, found Mr. Greer the renter, and left.
We went to Seattle, where she had gone to college and had friends. She started waitressing at a friend’s mother’s Italian restaurant, then enrolled at the university and received a scholarship for journalism. My mother used articles she had written for the paper in St. Ambrose in her application.
We lived in family housing on the university campus. We struggled. The rent from Mr. Greer covered the mortgage and taxes on the home here, and that was about it.
I went to school and did not make friends when I arrived. I had an accent. I had odd clothes, an out-of-style haircut, crooked teeth. All the kids already had their cliques. I sat alone in the cafeteria, and I was frequently the target of bullying. I was gawky and awkward. I was depressed.
It was like landing on a different planet and I did not belong on the planet. I requested to not have a lunch break due to the torture of the cafeteria situation, but my counselor wouldn’t let me do that and encouraged me to “socialize, Charlotte. Please.”
Now that worked splendidly. Tell a teenager to socialize and everything will be well.
Toran had written me several letters, but I hadn’t answered his, or Bridget’s. My depression left me almost paralyzed with grief. About a year later I heard that Toran had a girlfriend. I had a long cry.
In 1970, America was on fire. The Vietnam War being one of the flames, the other the civil rights movement. Several of my classmates’ brothers, fathers, and cousins were fighting in Vietnam, and the rest feared they would be called up. My mother supported the civil rights movement and was vocal about why.
There were antiwar protests and demonstrations that my mother took me to as well. We marched, we yelled, we made signs. After participating in protests, some of which we drove long hours to get to, we would go back home and she would write articles for the university’s paper and, often the city’s paper, as a freelancer.
My mother was always a feminist, believed in equal rights and opportunities for women, for everyone, but after losing the love of her life she channeled her anger and loneliness into saving women. She couldn’t save my father, but she would save her fellow females. She had her doctorate in three years and became a professor at the university, which soon gave her a broader platform on the national stage to encourage women to fight for their rights.
Though she was opinionated, strong-willed, intimidating, and demanding on the outside, when she shut the door to our home, she was . . . Mum. Funny. Loved to eat popcorn and watch movies. Together we cooked all our Scottish favorites to feel closer to my dad, especially the desserts. Together we mourned the loss of my father, her husband. It was hard to breathe that first year—grief took our breath—but cooking dimmed it.
She would write her articles, plan her lessons for her university students, or craft a speech she would make in New York or L.A., and I would study, read, and write at the kitchen table. She was my best friend and encouraged my writing. I was her beloved, nerdy daughter.
After I studied, my favorite subjects being math, physics, and biology, I would read a romance novel. The romance novel allowed escape. Vietnam. The Kent State shootings, the Beatles brea
king up, Elvis starting a concert tour, Jimi Hendrix’s death, Janis Joplin’s death, my father’s death, the loss of my friends and Scotland, it all went away.
I wanted a happy ending and love and to believe there were men out there who were protective, heroic, strong, smart, and madly in love with me, a girl with googly glasses, lanky hair, braces, acne, and awkwardness in a new country that rendered me almost completely verbally paralyzed. In every single book then, as now, I pretended that I was the heroine. I wanted peace in the midst of a country going hippie, going to war, and going crazy with the thousands of deaths of their brothers, sons, and husbands in a jungle overseas.
I read the classics, too. I read To Kill a Mockingbird, then The Prince’s Woman. I read Lolita, then The Mistress of the Castle. The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Passion’s Purse. The Catcher in the Rye and Eden’s Love Gift. Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Twelve Years a Slave, followed by Catherine’s Throbbing Justice.
You could say that misery launched my writing career. I think it’s true for many writers out there. Misery, loneliness, aloneness, and a natural tendency toward watching people because they don’t fit in.
I was the valedictorian and gave a speech at graduation. My classmates actually gave me a standing ovation. They had gotten used to me. By then they had accepted my brainy, awkward Scottishness. To be even more rebelliously different, now and then I wore a kilt. For the talent show I did a traditional Scottish Highland dance in our clan’s tartan kilt and a blue velvet waistcoat with gold trim. Screw them, I thought. They liked it. I had also started to fight back. With my fists. That helped. There was, however, no one giving me a louder standing ovation than my mother, Jasmine Mackintosh.
I would study physics and biology in college, but I kept reading romances.
“You will study how things are. You will study the smallest things in the world, Charlotte.”
“Small as a mouse?”
“Smaller.” My grandma pushed my hair back, her gray curls framing her face. We were making a Tipsy Laird together. “Something so small we can hardly see it. You’ll study what we don’t understand and can hardly see.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. I have no idea. I see a body, too.”
“A body?” I stepped back, horrified.
“Maybe a murdered body,” she mused. “I’m telling you what I see. It confuses me. But one thing I know, we don’t always have to know all the answers, especially with this darn Second Sight curse.”
“I know that I love you, Grandma.”
“I love you, too. Where you go, my love goes with you. Where you go, Scotland goes, too. This is your country, your home, your ancestors. Never forget it, Scottish granddaughter.”
“I won’t, Scottish grandma.” I smiled at my own cleverness.
We went back to making the Tipsy Laird, with yellow custard, fruits, whip cream, and a “tipsy of whiskey,” as she said. She let me pour in the whiskey.
Then she put in a tip more, “For luck.”
Stanley I and Stanley II had pulled off the old roof of our cottage and put on a new one, after hacking at the vines clinging to the house and trimming back an oak tree that had been short when I lived here twenty years ago.
When the roof was replaced, they started the gutting and remodeling. The electric and plumbing would all have to be replaced.
White, non-custom-made kitchen cabinets had arrived. I had chosen white appliances and a light beige laminate for the counters, except for one expanse near the sink where I was having butcher block put down for pie crust rolling. There would be a white tile backsplash.
I had Stanley I and Stanley II take down a wall between the kitchen and family room to make the kitchen larger and to open up the first floor completely, except for the library. I would then have room for the table my granddad built in the kitchen. I also told Stanley I and Stanley II I wanted to use the armoire my granddad made as a pantry so the kitchen design would need to work around that, too.
Not that I would use it as a pantry, as I would be selling the house. Probably.
The downstairs windows had been replaced, and I could not believe the difference in light. The old trim had been pulled off, and new white trim would be put up soon, as would white wainscoting in the kitchen. The old wainscoting had to go—it was half off, and looked like it had been eaten by beavers.
The fireplace and mantel, built by my great-grandfather, would remain the same, but the stones he had gathered from our land would be cleaned, the wood mantel restained.
I would love sitting in front of the warmth of my great-grandfather’s fireplace until I went home to Washington to weed my garden on Isolation Island.
The wood floors were not in as bad a shape as one would expect, because Mr. Greer, without asking, had covered them with brown carpet for the last twenty years.
All the walls would be painted light yellow. I was having Stanley I and Stanley II build bookshelves for the library so I could read in a leather chair with a light and my tea nearby, until I returned to my cats, their stroller, and my science books.
I walked upstairs, the stairway skinny, to my parents’ bedroom and stood in the middle of it. Half the upstairs was their bedroom, with dormer windows on both sides. I remembered how many times I had climbed into my parents’ four-poster bed and laughed with them. My father would sometimes play his bagpipes to wake up my mother as a joke.
My parents’ bedroom would soon be painted a light, powder blue, easy for me to sleep in. The other two bedrooms and the small loft would be white.
The house I remembered as a child was much larger than the one I saw as an adult. Our stone cottage was medium sized, no more, and cozy. A place for a family. I choked up when I thought of my family, except for my mother, all gone.
I sniffled and lifted my skirt up to wipe my nose. The clip on top of my head came undone and my hair popped out. I reclipped it.
Nostalgia is a dangerous place to go. It can be very depressing. You can never go back to that place, that time, with the people you want to be with. It’s history. I sniffled again.
Unless you’re McKenzie Rae Dean, time traveler, who always manages a romance in between the danger and adventure and getting the job of saving people done. Then you wait for the pull and the whoosh and, voila, you’re in a whole new time and place.
But I was not McKenzie Rae, and I was spending a fortune.
What was I doing?
It was ridiculous.
It made no sense.
I was gutting and designing the house for me and I was leaving.
It was like throwing dollar bills into the ocean.
I should have bulldozed it, but I couldn’t do it. I absolutely could not do it.
When it was done, it would be restored, a family home fit for a Scottish family, who liked huge fireplaces, a small library lined with shelves, an armoire for a pantry, a long wood table in the kitchen with my and Bridget’s name in a heart, and dormer windows with views of the ocean.
That thought had me wiping my nose again with my skirt. My clip popped, my hair fell down, a tear rolled into my mouth. It tasted like the sea.
6
“I like the swans,” Toran mused, holding up a red napkin that I’d folded for dinner.
“Thank you. I can show you how to make them.”
I had set the table while Toran cooked Scottish stew with beef stock, onion, and carrots. And wine. Brings out the taste.
My mother taught me to appreciate pretty table settings. “Candles and flowers, Charlotte. Always. A feminist indulges her feminine side.”
I had pulled daffodils from Bridget’s garden, put them in blue vases I’d found under the sink, then started folding the swans. I learned origami from Russ, one of my neighbors on Whale Island, who is obsessive compulsive and must always be doing something with his hands. Three whole tables were filled with his origami creations.
Napkin folding was also one of his obsessive compulsive activities. He liked cloth. I n
ow know how to make swans, turkeys, bunnies, roses, and a monster out of cloth napkins.
Toran laughed. “If I made napkins into swans I would not be able to consider myself a manly man Scotsman anymore.”
“I won’t tell anyone and we’ll pull the drapes.”
“I don’t think I can risk it. What if one of my friends came over? What if Pherson returned early from his time on the oil rig? No. I’d never hear the end of it. He would ask me each time he saw me how my origami was going.”
“Then I will have to be the reigning queen of napkin swans here.”
“The reign is yours.” We clinked our wineglasses together, over two candles I’d lit. “I’ve read your books.”
“You have?” My spoon clattered onto my plate. That was a problem.
I fiddled with my glasses, on the taped part. Did he recognize himself? The love of McKenzie Rae Dean’s life, the one she longs to get back to, who looks exactly like him, based on the photos Bridget had sent to me years ago? I was remarkably close in my description. Brown soft curls, blue eyes, hard jaw but a seductive smile. Huge hands, tall, a faint scar on his left temple. Oh no oh no oh no. I felt myself grow hot.
“Yes. All of them.”
I could only nod. I was stricken. Speechless. Stunned. And now I was thinking in alliteration.
“I loved them. Gripping. I could hardly put them down to work on the farm.”
“Really?” My voice squeaked. And were you impressed with how you made love to McKenzie Rae Dean in the first book? What about the time in the ocean, near the cliffs, her breasts in your mouth? What about the time in the barn, McKenzie Rae up against the wall, her naked butt in your hands? And the time in the ruins of the castle, at night, when you kissed . . . low? I flushed, dabbed my head with a red swan.
“But tell me, Charlotte. Who is McKenzie Rae Dean in your mind? Where did she come from?” He leaned forward, those eyes diving right into mine.
I started off slow, tentatively. I am not used to talking about my writing, as I am an odd duck who does not even admit to people that she’s a writer.