Magic of Winter

by Martina Boone

  He stopped, his face flushing with temper. “Don’t you speak to me in that tone of voice.”

  “If I sound like I’m speaking to a child, it’s because you’re behaving like one. Didn’t you hear me say I’ve spoken with your doctor? I know exactly how selfish you’re being.”

  “You stay out of my business.”

  “You don’t think the fact you’re deciding to kill yourself is my business, too? Not to mention that you couldn’t be troubled to tell me you broke your leg, much less that you have cancer. And refusing treatment? That’s daft even for you.”

  “Treatment you call it? Hah. It’s butchery, plain and simple, and drugs that are more poison than medicine.”

  “You’d rather keep your leg and lose your life?”

  “My life ended the day I put your mother in the ground,” Donald snapped. “What do I have to live for?”

  Cait reeled back as though he’d slapped her. Never mind how many times he’d said things like that in the past, she had never learned to expect them. Never gotten used to them. Maybe she was always going to be as thin-skinned as the child she had been when it came down to the wounds that he inflicted.

  “I hoped I was worth something to you, too,” she said, fighting tears away. She refused to show weakness by letting him see her cry. “This past year, I’ve even let myself be fooled into thinking we were becoming friends. Obviously, that was a mistake, but I am still your family. You’re still my father. That’s what you’ve told me all my life, that you were my father and that meant something. Meant that I was supposed to look up to the example that you set.”

  He dropped heavily into his chair, the pigheaded set of his mouth easing slightly. “This is no reflection on how much I care for you, only that I’m tired of waiting to die. Tired of being alone.”

  “You won’t me. I’m moving home.”

  “I don’t want you to. Your life is elsewhere, and I won’t have you stuck here watching me die in slow inches while you fetch and carry for me. You already had that with your mother. Anyway, you’re meant for something better than you can find around here.”

  “That’s a shame then, isn’t it? Because the decision’s made already, and before you ask me for the hundredth time what I think I’ll do with myself stuck in the glen, I’ll tell you. I’m going to reopen the Library and Tea Room. And if you so much as try arguing with me, I’ll pour every last drop of whiskey in this house down the sink and make sure no one in the glen will sell you so much as a half a glass.”

  Her father’s jaw went slack. “Oh, Caitie. You’ve quit your job? But you love it.”

  Since she hadn’t quit yet, Cait ignored the question, tried to ignore the twist of loss that accompanied the thought of doing it. “I love the Tea Room, too,” was all she said. “I love it nearly as much as I love you, so if you care for me at all, you’ll fight to stay alive. I will help you fight.”

  “You’ll nurse me and cook for me and wipe my bottom, you mean.” Her father thumped the table with his fist, all the frustration and anger that had been eating at him for months coming out in his voice as he continued, “What sort of life is that?”

  “The kind I’m happy to have. It’s life. Which is what you need to be choosing. Don’t you know how disappointed Mum would be to think you’re willing to throw yours away? Think back to how hard she fought.”

  “Aye, she fought. For all the good it did her.” Donald winced as he stood back up, the cane shaking as he leaned against it. “It’s my decision, Cait, not yours. And it’s my own right to make it. Let that be the end of the discussion. Do what you like with the Tea Room; I don’t care. The money from it would have to you in any case, but if you want to make me happy, you’ll clear out and go back to London. In fact, I don’t want you in my house. Get out.”

  “No.” Cait stuck her fists on her hips and glared at him.

  He stared back at her a moment, then turned without saying another word and hobbled toward the doorway, his head high and his spine held rigid.

  “Come back here and eat your breakfast,” Cait called after him. “You have to eat something.”

  “I’ve lost my appetite.”

  “Have tea at least.”

  “Later,” he said, hobbling toward the stairs. “I’ll just go back to my room and have a wee rest in some peace and quiet first.”

  Empty Spaces

  Such an empty place; so vague.

  Just a country where the thunder goes

  and things disappear.”

  Truman Capote

  “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”

  Once her father had gone, the silence in the kitchen echoed with the things Cait should have said. But long years of living with him told her he wouldn’t listen. Mrs. Bogan stropped herself along Cait’s shins, complaining in Siamese.

  “You’ve had all the breakfast you’re going to get, you beggar,” Cait said. But Mrs. Bogan sat in front of her, looking up so plaintively that Cait couldn’t help relenting. She cut off a bit of egg and placed it on a saucer that she set down on the floor.

  “May as well give it to you as see it go to waste,” she said, then she scraped the remaining eggs into the garbage bin.

  Her own appetite had fled. She salvaged the sausage and the rest of the meal, then stood helplessly uncertain what to do. Finally, she picked up the phone.

  Elspeth Murray answered straight away. “Is that you, Cait? Everything all right?”

  Startled, Cait asked, “How did you know it wasn’t Dad phoning?”

  Elspeth sighed. “I can’t remember the last time he phoned me. Told you last night, what the glen knows about your father these days comes to us through Brice, and it’s a miracle Brice still has the patience for it. Looking back, it’s easy to see we should have done more for Donald. Been more insistent. The old devil’s always been clever with a lie, though, when it suits him. And I say that knowing full well it’s the pot calling the kettle black.”

  “You don’t know the half of the lies he’s been spinning,” Cait said, her voice sounding more bitter than she’d intended. “What he told Brice yesterday still wasn’t close to the truth.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The cancer wouldn’t have to be a death sentence. They can amputate the leg, and he’d have a good chance at recovery, but he’s not willing to fight to live.”

  Elspeth was silent a long while, and when she spoke again, her tone was as brittle as the eggshells Cait had scraped into the trash. “I know that seems unthinkable to you. When you’re young, with your life stretched out in front of you, death and pain are hard to understand. But sometimes, it’s not about what lies ahead as much as what lies behind you. Your father said something to me one day that makes me wonder if it isn’t a relief to think he can stop worrying about past mistakes. He was down at the pub with Duncan so I didn’t think much of it at the time—men tend to talk in hyperbole when they’ve had a few glasses too many.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He talked about letting your mum and Robbie down. Said Robbie would still be alive if he’d only let him leave the glen instead of telling him he should stay. It’s always dangerous to make assumptions like that, but it’s hard to argue against the logic. Robbie was always a sweet-natured boy. Oh, he would fight to the teeth to defend someone else, the same as you, Cait, but he could never bring himself to defy your father. You were away at university, so you didn’t see the way being stuck here in the glen ate at him, though. He was like a dog chewing his way out of a trap in the end. I confess, I encouraged him to leave. Your mother did, too. He couldn’t see himself withstanding your father’s wrath, so in the end, he signed up for the army knowing that once he’d done that, no matter how much your father raved and ranted, there’d be no getting out of it.”

  Cait’s fingers on the phone were numb. “Robbie loved the army,” she said past a thick lump in her throat. “He was happier there than he’d ever been.”

  “Aye, but that doesn’t change what your fa
ther thinks. To his mind, he forced Robbie to run off and get himself killed. Then your mum died, and Donald’s said more than once that it was a broken heart that let the cancer take root inside her.”

  The small kitchen suddenly seemed even smaller, the walls closing in. Cait flung herself out the glass-topped door and turned her face into the cold, sweeping wind.

  The sun had risen, washing the glen below her in a palette of winter light. The lochs reflected the freshly snow-dusted braes and the bristling white evergreens along the banks. A stag had come down the hillside for a drink, and he lifted his head as Cait watched, scenting the air before bounding away with his hooves throwing up a cloud of snow behind him.

  “What can I do to help him?” she asked into the phone, sounding only half as desperate as she felt. “I have to do something.”

  “Out-stubborn him. Show him what he has left to live for. But you can’t force him to change his mind.”

  “I can’t compete with Robbie. I never could, and now he’s dead and perfect. Forever.”

  “And you’re alive and here. Donald was always a fool where the two of you were concerned. A fool when it came to seeing the Fletcher name live on, wanting to teach Robbie what it meant. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you.”

  Cait considered that long after she’d rung off. As much as she herself had idolized Robbie—and she had—she’d resented him as well. Resented the way her father treated her as less. Robbie was the boy, the son, and she was the girl, an alien thing her father didn’t understand and didn’t always see as worth the trouble. And she had been trouble. Fletchers didn’t run with MacLarens or get themselves excluded from school. They didn’t drink or smoke or swear. Especially Fletcher girls. If her father had understood that first incident on the playground a little better, if he’d even tried to listen, Cait might have been less rebellious afterwards, but then again, maybe not. The trouble she’d gotten into had always been tangled up with loving Brice, and Brice had been plenty of trouble on his own. Some of it had been bound to rub off.

  Still considering what Elspeth had said, she cleaned the kitchen until it gleamed and made a fresh cup of tea that she took upstairs for her father. He was asleep on the mattress again on the floor of the empty room, his face stamped in pain even when he wasn’t conscious. Cait stood and watched him breathing a while, but she didn’t have the heart to wake him. She tucked the quilt around him more tightly instead, noting how much it had picked and frayed in the time that she’d been gone, as if it has seen too much use. Mrs. Bogan crawled up beside Donald and curled herself at his feet, her crossed blue eyes half-closing almost instantly.

  “That’s a good girl,” Cait whispered. “You stay with him even when he pretends he doesn’t want you.”

  Then she left the barren, quiet room.

  All around her, the house was a husk of what it had been. A shell vacated by its former occupants. She wondered idly whether the inside of a shell was brighter when the mollusk was still living in it and, if she’d been at her desk or had her phone with her, she would have looked that up out of curiosity. Instead, she had nothing to focus on except how much she hated the emptiness around her. Hated that her father had deliberately emptied the house of evidence that his life had once been well worth living, emptied it of color and sound and the chaos of life.

  When the silence had grown too insistent, she marched herself upstairs and opened up her laptop. Trying not to let herself think of it as yet another loss, another defeat, she sent in a resignation letter which she followed with a brief phone call to her chief at the newspaper. Alice Jenkins-Pratt, whose Pulitzer Prize and brilliance had intimidated Cait more than she was willing to admit since the moment that a writing sample sent in had landed her an interview beyond her wildest expectations, was surprisingly flattering and reluctant to see Cait go.

  “I wish I could tell you I could hold the position open for you,” she said. “But maybe we can find you some freelance work.”

  “I’d like that. I’m not far from either Edinburgh or Glasgow.”

  “I’ll think about where we can use you. You need to be hungry, though. Sniff out ideas of your own and follow your curiosity. Don’t stop writing.”

  Cait thought of the hours her mother had always put in at the Tea Room, and how much work had gone into the library long after the doors were closed for the evening, and she suspected there’d be little chance for her to drive around chasing interviews and leads. Still, even the slim possibility of freelance work brought a surge of satisfaction that let her know just how much the job had meant to her. But she did love the Tea Room, too.

  She stared at the phone after she’d hung up. That was it. She now officially had an empty calendar stretching in front of her, days and days marked with question marks.

  Resolved not to let that daunt her, she scrawled a quick note and left it on the kitchen table, then she bundled herself against the cold, snatched up her keys, and let herself quietly out of the house.

  What she really wanted was a start on getting rid of all that generic white at the Tea Room to burn off some of her excess energy, but it was too much to hope that Brice would have been able to find the paint this early. At his usual pace, she could expect he’d deliver that sometime after New Year’s. Well, she’d been unfair asking him to get it for her anyway. She’d drive in to Stirling herself later, once she and her father had found time to talk a little more. In the meanwhile, the doctor had said her father needed to eat better than he had been, and since she didn’t want to be out of reach too long, there was only one place to go. She could only hope that Grewer’s Sweets and Groceries had someone behind the counter other than Rhona or her two vile daughters.

  She had to admit, the fact that it had been Rhona of all people wearing Brice’s shirt that day had made Brice’s cheating that much the more humiliating. For all that Rhona tarted herself up like a Sunday dinner and spent a fortune fighting time, she was nearly old enough to be Brice’s mother.

  Challenge

  “No amount of fire or freshness

  can challenge

  what a man will store up

  in his ghostly heart.”

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  The Great Gatsby

  It scared Cait to admit how much she still cared what people in the glen thought about her. Anxiety bloomed in her chest as she drove down the hill and started to encounter familiar faces. Fear of acceptance was just one more thing she’d convinced herself she’d outgrown. One more instance she’d been wrong.

  She’d fought so hard to get past her “wild girl” reputation when she’d come home from university after Robbie’s death. She and Brice had always meant to get away once she graduated, to get away from the disapproval and the wagging tongues. She was going to work her way into a job as a journalist and Brice was going to restore cars, but after Robbie died, she hadn’t had the heart. She’d come home and taken a leaf from Brando’s book and clawed her way back to acceptance by volunteering for everything the village threw at her: helping with flowers at the kirk, singing in the Scottish Blend Choir, teaching art classes for the wee ones at the Village Hall, raising money to rebuild the Hall when it burned. Now the thought of having to start all over again made her stomach ache. Once you’d had to struggle for something, it was doubly hard to lose it.

  She could picture all too easily what everyone must have said about her these past months since her father had taken ill. See them leaning on their fence posts, staring up at the house with avid scowls. Can you credit it? Cait Fletcher abandoning her poor father like this? Aye, well, what would you expect from her? Wildcats don’t change their stripes.

  A small part of Cait even conceded that they wouldn’t be wrong in thinking that. Had she really ever changed? It was only the things she did and the way people saw her that was different. To be honest, she’d ended up embracing the reputation they had given her as a teenager out of sheer resentment. With the pleasant warmth of too much beer or some of Mad Mackenzie’s
illegal whiskey buzzing through her bloodstream and Brice’s arm around her shoulders, it had been easier to put on a bit of swagger and ignore the disapproving, worried looks from the adults and the way the girls giggled behind her back, the way the boys nudged each other when she walked past.

  That was how it was in a place that had pitted MacGregor against MacLaren for close to five hundred years. Fletchers usually sided with MacGregors against MacLarens, but after the accident that had killed Brando’s parents—the accident that the village had unfairly blamed on him and Brice and the bull-tipping incident—even most of the MacLarens had taken against those two. They’d been so alone, going back to school after the funerals trying to pretend their whole world hadn’t just come crashing down. And the older boys hadn’t been able to resist hurling insults. Brice, trying to protect Brando, had punched Angus McNee in the jaw and then all of Angus’ mates had waded in. Eight to two hadn’t seemed fair to Cait. With half the school circling around, she’d scooped up a handful of rocks and thrown them.

  Luckily, only Brian Williams had been daft enough to hit a girl.

  Unluckily, Cait had ended up in the Head’s office with the rest, her nose bleeding and her eye swelling, her and Brice and Brando on one side of the room while the other boys glared back from the opposite row of chairs. And that was how it had remained until the day she’d left for university. In that one unthinking moment when she was nine, she’d crossed an invisible village line that was impossible to cross back again without distancing herself from Brice.

  Which was one more reason to stay as far from Brice MacLaren as she could manage now that she was back.

  She rounded the bend slowly on the slippery single-track road and, thinking of rebuilding relationships, when she spotted Lissa Griggs getting out of her husband’s old red truck, she pulled the car to a stop. Shielding her eyes against the sunlight with a forearm, Lissa waved as she recognized Cait.