Of course he didn’t listen. He rolled, and her coat was there, and she was momentarily relieved by both those things, by the fact that he was still doing just as he pleased, until she saw the bruising on the side of his head that had already begun to take on the colors of the purple darkness and the deep blue shadows of the night around them. Beneath his sweater, his shoulder was misshapen, too, most probably dislocated, and his left ankle was contorted. God only knew what else.
It was only then that Cait remembered her phone. Her hands shook as she groped for it in the snow, afraid the dispatcher would have hung up or that they’d been disconnected, but the man was still there, and she told him what she knew, and he promised her help would be there shortly. She put the call on speaker and went back to trying to warm Brice’s hands, trying to keep his eyes from closing again, keeping him talking until the banana yellow air ambulance finally landed on the widest part of the drive and the crew came running with a stretcher.
They worked quickly, white helmets and reflective strips on their red suits gleaming in the portable lights while they started an IV and gave him morphine for the pain and immobilized his ankle and shoulder and put a collar on his neck before moving him onto the stretcher for transport.
“Can I go with him?” she asked, her eyes pleading. “I need to go with him.”
One of the crew nodded, and she held Brice’s hand as they lifted him, refusing to let go. She couldn’t let him go alone.
The helicopter had made an uproar landing, the sound of the great blades whoop-whoop-whooping unusual and distinctive enough that all over the village lights flicked on and people emerged in coats and snow boots pulled hastily over their pajamas, blowing on their hands as they hurried over.
Cait remembered the oven when she was duck walking beneath the slowly turning blades of the helicopter’s rotors. She turned and searched for a face she could trust in the crowd, and she found herself spoiled for choice. It hit her at that moment that there wasn’t anyone in the village who wouldn’t help, who wouldn’t do anything they could. That all you had to do was meet them part way and they folded you within the community so that in Balwhither you were never on your own unless you chose to be.
Angus Greer stood closest, so she shouted at him, “I left the oven turned on at my house. Could you go and turn it off?”
“The oven?” he shouted back, cupping his ear.
“Yes, the oven. In the kitchen!” She exaggerated the words as best she could. “And could you find someone to stay with my father in case he wakes up?”
“I don’t imagine he’s asleep anymore,” Angus yelled.
And that was precisely how Cait felt herself, she realized, as though she’d been asleep for a long time and was only now coming fully awake. Realizing what she’d been missing.
This feeling inside her at the thought of losing Brice was why her father didn’t want to keep living without her mother. The idea of a world without Brice in it was unthinkable, the way that life couldn’t exist without water or food or oxygen. Maybe love was as essential as any of those other things. Maybe humans were built to need something more than themselves, at the risk of having something inside them wither and became petty and selfish and wrong.
But there was a difference between love for other people and being immersed in love with the one particular person who opened your heart wide and made it larger, but also made it vulnerable. Having given her heart to Brice, Cait realized in that moment that she was never going to have it back again.
She had loved him for most of her life, but somewhere along the line she had fallen in love with him in a single heartbeat, so quickly that she couldn’t name the moment or the reason. Thinking of all the old doubts, the old fears, she realized that not one of them mattered.
She’d been twelve when she had announced to Robbie that she meant to marry Brice one day.
“In the ruins of the old kirk,” she’d said, “while the heather’s in full bloom. I’ll wear black boots and a long white dress, and Brice will love me and think I’m the most beautiful girl in the world.”
Robbie had laughed and ruffled her hair. “The undeniable fact that you’re the most beautiful girl in the world won’t change regardless of what Brice MacLaren thinks, so don’t go getting daft ideas of weddings in your head.”
Cait didn’t care about weddings, or dresses, or heather. All that mattered was that she couldn’t lose Brice.
And she climbed into the helicopter more afraid than she’d been in all her life.
Promises
“I don't ask you to love me
always like this,
but I ask you to remember.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Magnetism
They kept Brice in the hospital after an alphabet soup of tests that included x-rays and CT-scans and MRIs followed by a long delay and surgery, but thanks to the snow and an innate sense of self-preservation that had sent him rolling as he hit the ground, he’d only broken the ankle and both bones in his lower leg. The damage could have been much worse.
“If you wanted out of Christmas dinner,” Cait said, when she was finally alone with him beside his bed, “there were easier ways to do it.”
“Aye, well, after what happened, I didn’t know if you were still speaking to me, much less planning to cook for me.” He looked pale beneath his weathered tan, and a growth of stubble softened the sharp line of his jaw. The swelling at his temple had darkened to a violent purple and black streaked with angry red, and the color had begun to seep down beneath his eye. Normally full of restless energy, he lay ominously still, his muscles lax and his pupils retracted to pinpricks by the morphine.
Cait reached for his hand. “You had me worried.”
“I had me worried, too, for a while—until you came along. Why did you, by the way? It was the middle of the night.”
“Guilt, probably. I’d missed your calls, then you didn’t answer when I rang. I couldn’t think where you could be where you wouldn’t hear the phone. The messages you’d left made it clear you weren’t likely to ignore me calling.”
“Why feel guilty, then? I’m the one who—”
“Stop. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. They’re all old wounds, already mended.” Cait leaned forward and kissed him on the forehead.
He pulled her lower, tipped his chin, and kissed her lips. She felt him smile as she sighed and eased away, and he laced his fingers with hers. His hands were more calloused than she remembered them, cracked with hard work and freezing weather. There was lotion in the bathroom, and because she was restless, too, she retrieved it and rubbed it into his skin.
“I could get used to having you spoil me,” he said. “Only I’d planned it the other way around.”
“Oh, you had plans, did you?” Cait found herself smiling wide again. She couldn’t seem to stop smiling now that he was out of danger.
His own smile slipped away, and his eyes darkened. He reached for her hand once more, his grip almost too tight.
“I had hopes,” he said. “That’s why I built the house. Every board I put in place, every nail, every screw, every stroke of a paintbrush was a labor of hope. And I’ve a confession to make.”
Cait’s heart gave a dull thud, because she was done with apologies and recriminations. “You don’t owe me any more explanations. We’ve both made mistakes, and we’re both going to make more mistakes. That’s who we both are, and it’s fine. You managed to have enough faith to keep hoping, and now all we have to do is keep moving forward. I want to grow old with you and still be making mistakes.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. I went down to the loch at Beltane, mo chridhe. When you left and wouldn’t call back, I felt like the color had gone out of the world. I even drove down to London to look for you once—without an address, because your father wouldn’t give me one. I was down at the Inn having a drink, and the laughter and conversation all rang hollow. I walked outside, and the whole glen felt empty without you, so I climb
ed in the car and headed south. It was stupid. The odds of finding you had to have been ridiculous, but by the time I got there it was coming on noon Sunday, so I spent two hours loitering through Waterstone’s in Piccadilly in case you happened by. Then I asked someone for the best independent bookshop in London, and I spent another hour there until I decided you might be too poor just starting out to afford new books, so I went to the Oxfam Bookshop instead. I kept thinking how much you and your mum would have loved it.”
Cait’s eyes were leaking tears again, but Brice was holding her hand so she couldn’t wipe them away. “I have a whole shelf of books in my flat I bought at Oxfam.”
“I didn’t know where to start with libraries. Most are closed on Sundays anyway, so I wandered aimlessly for an hour, left before dark, and eventually slept at a Services on the M6 feeling stupid. The thing was, I kept feeling as though if the two of us were meant to be, fate should have stepped in and pushed us back together. It’s daft, I know, but the idea that you could simply have gone from my life, that was even dafter.”
“It was me being stupid,” Cait said, “but I needed the time to figure myself out.”
“I know. We both did. Only I don’t want you to think I didn’t ever lose faith. Coming back without having seen you like that, I tried to tell myself it wasn’t meant to be. There had never been anything between me and Rhona—I still can’t believe you’d think there could have been—but I tried seeing other women after that. None of them were you. By Beltane, I was feeling desperate, so I went down to the loch with everyone else.”
She squeezed his hand. “We said we’d never need to do that.”
“I needed you. I needed to believe you were coming back.”
The legend of the Beltane Sighting had been around for countless centuries, a tradition as woven into the fabric of the glen as the rekindling of the hearth fires at Tom-nan-aigeal or the Hogmanay burning of worries and grudges. There was even a Gaelic poem about the Sighting inscribed on a stone at the tip of the peninsula where the two lochs of the Balwhither glen came together:
On the bright day
in the morning dew
to the pure of heart
the Lake of Destiny
will reveal the true love who
will warm the winter of your life
and the Lake of Enchantment
will turn sight to truth.
Maybe it wasn’t only the need for heroes that the Highlands bred, but also the need for something to believe in. Faith in something beyond oneself, beyond the present.
“What did you see?” Cait asked, her chest aching with hope.
“You and me and a son who looked like both of us in a house made of windows that looked out over the lochs and the braes around the glen.”
Cait thought of a child that looked like Brice, and she thought of all the things that she would show a child: the waterfall behind the kirk, and the nooks and crannies of the library, the osprey’s nest far down the glen, and the wildcat’s lair high up Cruach Ardrain where she and her mum had crouched downwind for hours every June, hoping for a glimpse of kittens. They’d seen them only twice, but that hadn’t stopped them from going back each year, because seeing a wildcat was a miracle in itself.
Because everyone needed something to look forward to through the long, harsh winter.
“If we’re going to have a son,” Cait said, “we had better make sure there are good strong railings on the balconies.”
“Aye, obviously, I didn’t think my timing through enough. I wanted the inside of the house done first.”
“If it wasn’t for all the extra hardware in your leg now, I’d have said that was a sound enough plan. Good thing there aren’t any metal detectors in Balwhither, isn’t it? On the positive side, now you and my father can do your physical therapy together.”
Brice grinned weakly at the thought of it, then shook his head. “You still think you can talk him into the surgery?”
His words had started to slur with exhaustion, and Cait brought his hand to her lips and kissed each of his fingers in turn. “I’m going to do my best, but I’ve been wrong all along. He doesn’t need memories of the past. What he needs is a reason to look forward instead of back, the promise of something coming. A grandchild would give him that.”
“We’d best get to work on it soon, then, you and I,” Brice said. “If I close my eyes now, do you promise not to go away? I’m still half afraid that I’m lying in the snow and you’re a dream I conjured up out of pain and fear.”
“I’m more likely to be a nightmare, but I’ll not be going anywhere without you.”
Brice closed his eyes, and almost immediately his breathing grew deep and even. His grip on Cait’s hand relaxed, and she slowly extricated his fingers from her own. Even without touching him, though, she felt the bonds between them woven so tightly that nothing could be allowed to break them again.
That was the other side of love, the promise that two people made to each other to weather the whatever came day by day and moment by moment. Cait had failed him once, but she would never do that again.
Sweetness
“Man prefers to believe
what he prefers to be true.”
Francis Bacon
Having missed Christmas Day entirely, Cait decided to combine it with Hogmanay. On the 30th of December, she finished baking a new batch of salt dough frames, painted them gold and silver, then sorted and copied the photographs. Earlier, she’d even managed to find a few games and puzzles and odds and ends at the W.H. Smith’s at the hospital in Glasgow. Brice had waited in the Land Rover—which Brando and Emma had been kind enough to bring down for Cait when they’d come to visit at the hospital—once he was discharged so she could run into a Marks and Spencer and buy food and the obligatory sweaters for both him and her father. Now he sat in the sitting room with his leg propped on a pillow after her father had gone up to bed, and he helped her wrap the presents and glue the photographs into the frames.
Cait hung the photos as decorations on the tree along with a few balls and bows and her mother’s silver bells. Then she stood back and surveyed her efforts, and tried not to remember that it was the first tree this house had seen since her mum had died.
She refused to think anything but happy thoughts.
“What do you think?” she asked, turning back to Brice. “Will it do?”
His face was an impressive collection of bruises, his right shoulder still in a sling and his right lower leg immobilized in the walking boot. Every movement was agonizing, and even though he hadn’t complained, just going up and down the stairs at his house to help her find the things he needed to pack had left him gray with exhaustion. Four days later, and the pain hadn’t diminished much.
Still, he managed to smile at her and pat the cushion beside him. “It’s beautiful. Now come here.”
She went and let him kiss her, briefly, feeling nearly as awkward about it now as she ever had back when they’d stolen kisses in quiet corners of the house, hoping neither her father nor Robbie would catch them. The fact that her father wasn’t kicking up more of a fuss about Brice staying here to recuperate—taking over the sitting room, come to that—still surprised her.
Not that she intended to look a gift horse in the proverbial mouth.
She pulled back, then changed her mind and kissed Brice again, simply because she could, because he was still here and she felt the urge to kiss away the tell-tale signs of pain. Catching the spirit of it, he pulled her onto his good knee and kissed her with a thorough, firm, and confident exploration that had every cell in her body humming, aching, wanting more. Her fingers wrapped themselves in the fabric of his shirt, and breathed in the smell of him, the joy of him, savoring the softness of his hair against her cheek, the harshness of the evening stubble on his chin, the warmth of his breath, and the hard, broad muscles that even after all he’d been through held her easily, as though he would never let her go.
Reluctantly, she pulled away. “I still
have the Dundee cake to start. Want to come to the kitchen to keep me company?”
He tried to hide it, but she saw the tiny wince of anticipated pain, and she regretted the question immediately. “Aye,” he said. “Only give me a minute to get there.”
She shook her head. “Why don’t you go to bed.” She checked her watch, and it was nearly time for his pain medication. “I’ll bring you a glass of water so you can take your pill.”
He caught her wrist and drew her back. “Cait. I don’t want to take any more of those.”
“You need them. The doctor said—”
“The doctors can say what they like, but I don’t need it.”
“A bit of whiskey, then. To help you sleep.”
“I don’t need that, either.”
She looked at him and he looked back steadily, honestly, and she kissed him again, long and hard. Because even though she hadn’t asked him for it—would never have asked him for it—he’d just given her a gift she hadn’t even known she needed.
She remembered that later as she made the Dundee cake by herself in the quiet kitchen. The familiar motions of the baking made her think of her mother, too, and she could almost pretend that it was still a long-ago Christmas night with the moon playing hide and seek behind billowing clouds that sailed quickly past and left dark moonshadows on the quiet lochs and the village lying tranquil beneath her. Lights shone in windows here and there, the same as they did on Christmas Eve when parents were staying up to manage the behind-the-scenes of Christmas morning, the toys to be assembled, the baking to be done, the last-minute bits of wrapping. Cait’s Mum had always worn her Christmas robe after everyone had gone up to bed on Christmas Eve, the terribly ugly green robe that Robbie and Cait had given her as a gift when they’d been too young to realize how hideous it truly was. But it had been the baking of the Dundee cake that had become a private tradition between her and Cait from the Christmas Cait turned nine.
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