Off Kilter

by Donna Kauffman

  Katie sauntered closer, wiggling the stack of photos in her hands.

  “I’m tellin’ ye,” he warned, “I dinnae want to see them. I’ll be haunted for life. I’m no’ jokin with ye on this, darlin’ Kate.”

  She lowered her hand with the photos, and her expression, or what he could see of it from the corner of his eye, sobered a little. “You’re really serious, aren’t you?”

  “I really am, aye. My thought has been that we’ve grown close as friends so quickly because we have an understanding of each other. ‘Tis true we both embrace laughter and fun, and think most folks would be far better if they just lightened up a wee bit and didnae view all things with such dour seriousness. But because you are betrothed to my closest friend and our island leader, and clearly besotted with the lucky sod, your open and fun nature is seen as friendly and puir of heart, which I know it to be. Just because I am an unattached male, it doesnae mean I should be viewed any differently. I am a happy, hearty soul who enjoys the excitement life brings and embraces it fully, but I dinnae conduct my life in a way that would be considered immodest or amoral.”

  She stared at him for a beat, then another, making him feel more than a wee bit ridiculous for his outburst. But he’d been taking the ribbing of everyone on the island for the past week and he was tired of it. Most especially when it came from those he expected to support him.

  “Well,” she said at length, “these aren’t amoral or immodest.” Then she fanned the photos out a bit. “Okay, maybe a wee bit on the immodest side,” she added with an inviting grin. Upon seeing his scowl, she grew a little impatient. “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Roan, you could use some lightening up yourself right about now. It’s not like it’s pornography. They’re good natured and sexy, which, to my mind, is natural and perfectly healthy. They’re a bit of fun and if they bring business to Kinloch, then what’s the harm?”

  He didn’t respond right away, and hoped the subject would naturally come to a close. He should have known better.

  “Wait.” She walked around the desk until he finally looked up at her. She held his gaze for a long moment. “I think I see what this is really about. It bothers you a lot that Kira saw these, doesn’t it? Is that it? You don’t care what the world thinks of you or your behavior, but you do care what she thinks.”

  He refused to answer—on the grounds that she was one hundred percent correct. He knew he was being a sheep’s arse about it, but the fact was, he didn’t need whatever respect he might have fostered in Kira over the past year and a half to be blown to middling hell because she saw him as some halfwit more interested in exposing his manly bits than he was serious about growing the island economy.

  He reached over on the desk and picked up the reject packet. “Here,” he said, in lieu of a direct response. Katie knew she was right. He didn’t need to confirm it. “Look through these, and find something else we can submit. I know Tessa is a hotshot in her field, and I’ll be the first to applaud the successes she’s had, but that doesn’t necessarily qualify her to judge this.”

  “But you’ll trust my judgment?”

  Roan looked at her. “Let’s just say I think you have a better understanding of the attraction between women and men than she does.”

  “Well, I’d like to argue that, strictly on feminist grounds.”

  “But you’ve met her.”

  “I have.”

  “So, do me a favor, okay?”

  Katie held his gaze, and he was thankful for the sincere affection he saw there.

  “When is the deadline?”

  “Has to be on the ferry tomorrow.”

  “Okay, I’ll look them over tonight. But you get to call Graham and explain why I’m ogling half-naked photos of his childhood buddies.”

  “He’s no’ to be part of this selection process,” Roan warned.

  “Oh, not to worry,” she replied. “I don’t know that this would be his preferred way to spend an evening together.”

  Roan grinned. “Point taken.”

  Katie juggled the packets and slid the finalist photos back in their envelope. “You’ll be here in the morning?”

  “I have a seven o’clock phone conference, then computer lab at the school at eleven.”

  “Hey, I heard the soccer team did well with their game against Castlebay. Good job, Coach.”

  “Football, ye Yank,” he said, even as his face split in a wide grin. He was proud of his kids. “Kicked Castlebay’s arse, they did.”

  “Graham told me those kids have played together since being old enough to go to school and hadn’t won a single game in two seasons. I think what you’ve done to help out is great.”

  “All they needed was some steady direction. It gives me a chance to kick the ball about again, prolong that whole growing up thing a wee bit longer.”

  “I hear you, Peter Pan. But they’re lucky to have you.” Katie walked to the door, and glanced back. “Roan, if Kira knows you,” she said, making a circle in the air with her hand to indicate the whole of him, “the real you, then your posing for this picture will make her laugh, and be proud that you’re willing to step outside your comfort zone for the sake of the island. If she doesn’t, then maybe you need to set your sights on someone else.”

  Caught off guard yet again, he took a moment too long to come up with his ready response. “I would, luv, but Graham has already won your heart.”

  “Maybe you were right then. You should think about getting a few cats after all. Being as you’re so pathetic and all.” She winked at him and ducked out before he could lobby a response.

  He was smiling as he went back to work, but with her comments about Kira echoing through his mind, he wasn’t nearly as settled as he’d like to be.

  Chapter 4

  Tessa finished lacing up her hiking boots and tugged the legs of her jeans down over them, before quietly letting herself out the back door of the croft.

  The sun hadn’t quite made its way over the horizon yet, and the rock-strewn meadows that bordered Kira’s property were still drifted over with a thick, morning fog. She could barely make out the fuzzy bodies of sheep clustered just beyond the closest stone wall, much less those farther out. The occasional grumbling bleat was the only sound in the otherwise quiet dawn.

  The weight of her favorite, standard issue, classic Nikon F-301, circa 1985, was a familiar comfort hanging around her neck, one she wasn’t taking for granted on the peaceful September morning. Pulling her fleece jacket a bit closer, she zipped it up against the morning chill and set out through the side gate, across the rear field, heading toward the stacked stone wall in the distance. She planned to take the herding trail she knew led well beyond it, circling the base of the sole mountain peak to be found at that end of the small island. Beyond it lay the singletrack north road that eventually looped around the entire island, but her destination was the rocky shoreline on the far side of the north track.

  She couldn’t make out the mountain at all; the fog was too thick. Actually, Ben Cruinish was more a very large hill than a real mountain. Nothing like the towering twin peaks that formed the stunning skyscape at the western end of the island. The flaxseed crops that were the basis of the baskets woven on the island were grown in the protected valley between them. The easternmost tip, where Kira’s croft was situated, was more meadow and stream, populated by sheep-rearing crofters and the fishermen who plied their trade off the northern coast, out past the Sound of Ailles in the waters of the Atlantic.

  The rhythms of island life might seem slow, even rustic, but the islanders were methodical in accomplishing the daily tasks required to subsist off the land and sea. Their work ethic was positive and hopeful, something she’d witnessed in places with far, far less to be positive or hopeful about. The people didn’t seem to take for granted the natural bounty they had available to them. They took deep pride in the traditional artistry of their intricately woven baskets, their single export and source of income.

  She’d traveled enough, seen en
ough, to have an honest respect for cultural traditions, and marveled at how they persevered the world over, through centuries of strife and constant challenge. The people on Kinloch had every right to be proud of their heritage, and how it had not only kept them a viable, thriving community within their homeland, but had grown into a commodity being traded in a global marketplace, where people around the world enjoyed the fruits of their very creative labors.

  But it wasn’t Kira’s wildly imaginative waxed linen baskets or the quiet calm of island life that were the focus of Tessa’s thoughts. She’d woken again, with adrenaline pumping through her so hard she’d been shaking, nauseous with it, her skin hot and flushed, the bed linens damp from sweat. For the fifth night in a row, her unconscious mind had dragged her through the harrowing journey it kept insisting she take when she finally, exhausted, had closed her eyes and prayed for uninterrupted sleep.

  Since arriving on Kinloch, she’d been safely tucked away in Kira’s croft, quite consciously secure in the knowledge that no bombs would be dropped, burning the roof over her head, or leveling the buildings around her; that no vicious, virus-carrying insects would be feasting on her flesh; no night-marauding animals—two legged or four—would be hunting for her. Nor was there even a remote threat that anyone would storm the cottage, looking to roust her from her sleep and drag her off to a cell somewhere, to question her endlessly about her reasons for being in the village in the first place.

  No. None of those things would ever happen to her there.

  But tell that to her subconscious. All of those things had happened to her in other places. Often enough that it felt perfectly normal for her to sleep with a knife under her pillow, a net over her bed, and a fire extinguisher within easy reach—which could also double as a Louisville Slugger when necessary.

  She’d spent the past nine months trying to figure out how to come to terms with the tricks her mind had started playing on her, while still maintaining a full assignment load. She understood it was a form of post-traumatic stress, and was smart enough to know she couldn’t just ignore it, outrun it, or out think it. Extensive counseling had helped her understand it and why it was happening, and even change the way she thought about it and dealt with it. But counseling hadn’t stopped it from happening.

  Mostly because it was still happening … for real.

  Several months into counseling, she’d heeded the counselor’s advice and taken a brief, five-week sabbatical. She’d made huge, confidence-building strides. But back in the field, one bomb had gone off, and everything had come screaming right back with it. No amount of employing all the techniques she’d learned would stave the terror off. Not as long as the bombs kept exploding. And people kept dying. The counselors and therapists who’d helped her had all said the same thing: find a new career. You can’t handle this one any longer if you want to stay healthy.

  She’d rejected that diagnosis. Out of hand. She’d tried alternative methods, including hypnosis and acupuncture, among other more off-the-wall therapies. Those who knew her would have been boggled at the things she’d experimented with. Even she was surprised by the lengths she’d gone to. But she’d have tried anything if she could find a way to manage her disorder effectively so she could stay in the field and continue her work. Photojournalism was what she did. It was who she was. She couldn’t contemplate an alternative.

  But it had finally gotten so bad that she wasn’t functioning, wasn’t sleeping … and she sure as hell wasn’t doing her job effectively. In fact, for the six weeks prior to coming to Kinloch, she’d missed deadlines and struggled to complete her assignments, with no hope left that things were going to improve—unless she made some additional changes. Deep down, she knew there was only one additional change left to make.

  Feeling more lost than she’d ever been, not knowing where else to turn, she’d finally decided to take the “vacation” everyone who worked with her had been gently, and not-so-gently, suggesting. She’d come to Kinloch, to Kira. She’d come, initially telling herself a break from the road would give her time to find a realistic solution that would allow her to heal, while continuing in the only profession she’d ever known, or ever wanted. As she’d debarked from the island ferry and been engulfed in Kira’s tight hug, she’d already known that for the lie it was. There was no realistic solution—other than walking away.

  She knew that. So what she was really doing there, was hiding—taking a vacation from the inevitability of the truth. Only, in the wee, shaky hours of another restless, terror-filled night, she’d decided that wasn’t exactly working, either.

  Sometime around three-thirty that morning, she’d found herself going back over some of the calendar prints she’d taken. Her eye focused on the scenery … and not the kind that had to do with bulging muscles and artfully placed swaths of plaid. There was beauty on Kinloch—natural, staggering amounts of it, no matter the direction in which she’d pointed her camera. But there was also a history there. While the fields were no longer strewn with the carnage of this battle or that blight, what grew was a direct result of what had come from the survival of those brutal challenges.

  That had gotten her to thinking … about the travesties she’d spent her professional career recording, exposing to the world the atrocities suffered by so many, often in places of equally staggering beauty and bounty. It had always struck her as so needless, so … reckless. All of her work, her determination … had done absolutely nothing to stop it from happening again. And again. With an infinity of agains yet to occur.

  Similar madness and mayhem had happened right on these shores, on the very ground where she was walking at the moment. She juxtaposed the savagery of the past … with the bucolic scenery of Kinloch as it was today. There were ruins of an ancient abbey just off shore, and the towering fortress of a castle, slowly crumbling, yet still standing boldly as a symbol to the clansmen and women who made their home there—direct descendants of the men and women who’d laid those very stones, whose very blood had been shed beneath her feet in order to preserve it and all it stood for, and what it would continue to stand for.

  A thread of an idea was born of that.

  She couldn’t stop the madness or the mayhem, either in the world or inside her head. Maybe it was that very helplessness that had eventually taken such a heavy toll on her psyche. So … if she couldn’t continue to subject herself to the ravages of war … perhaps she could turn her attentions to what happened after. What had those wars eventually wrought for the people who’d fought in them?

  Maybe it was time to train her lens on the other side of the equation.

  Smokescreen? Cop out? She wasn’t really sure. It was only a shadow of an idea … and she was aware she might simply be fooling herself into thinking there was merit to it, or substance in it worth pursuing. She was trudging over rocky soil at dawn, dodging sheep, and heading to the shore to take pictures of the abbey … and the tower … and later, the castle. From there, she wasn’t certain. She had research to do. And, if the wisp of an idea took on substance, there would be interviews to schedule.

  It shouldn’t excite her, that burgeoning idea of hers. It should terrify her. But her fingers were itching to get to work. And she hadn’t felt like that in a very, very long time. Longer than she would have ever admitted—even to herself.

  She scrambled over the second stone wall, navigated through another herd of mingling, black-faced sheep, then headed west around the base of Cruinish, toward the north track. The shoreline was still a mile off, but the distance melted away as the hike gave her time to think, to plot, to plan.

  Kinloch wouldn’t be the most interesting place to document a history of then and now, but it was where she was, away from everything, and everyone who worked with her. No one would ever have to know if it turned out to be a ridiculous folly.

  Deep in thought, feeling physically weary, but mentally energized by the new plan, she jumped a shallow gully that ran alongside the north track. She’d barely scrambled to the side
of the road, slipping a little as she tried to gain purchase on the stretch of loose dirt and rocks between her and the pavement, when a single headlight pierced the fog, followed by the blare of a horn. The motorbike was right on her, leaving her no time to leap out of the way. Then came the sound of skidding tires, as it left the road on the far side and slid sideways in the soft dirt before depositing its rider into the bordering gully just beyond.

  “Oh my God.” Tessa managed to right herself without falling back into the gully behind her, then ran across the narrow track. “Are you okay?” She had to shout over the sound of the motor that was still humming on the bike, but was more interested to find out if the driver was injured. “Are you hurt? Should I go for help?”

  She gingerly skidded down the steep side of the gully, then hopped across the mud-and-water-filled trench at the bottom, slogging through the muck on the other side as she made her way to where the rider was presently rolling to his back, groaning. Well, swearing, actually, she realized, as she got closer.

  “Just wait a second, I’ll help you.”

  It wasn’t until she was almost on top of him that the heavy mists, still thickly banked down in the gully, parted enough so she could see him more clearly. “You,” she said, stopping short, the hand she’d been extending freezing in mid-reach.

  “Christ, I should have known.” Roan sat up, ignoring her half-hearted gesture to help pull him up, then made a face as the muck oozed in around the waistband of his trousers when he shifted backward to reposition his booted feet. “Brilliant. Bloody brilliant.”

  “Here,” she said, resolutely sticking her hand out. “Let me help.”