“I was run off the road by a moron.”
“Of course. Did you get a license number?”
“I was a little more concerned with not getting splattered under his wheels, actually.”
He moves the cold metal around on my chest, then jots a few notes on the clipboard beside my bed. “No internal injuries, thank goodness. We had to put a few stitches by your temple there. You have some abrasions along your ribs and hip, consistent with the accident you described. And a dislocated shoulder, which we’ve already set. It will be sore for a bit, but you should have full mobility within a week or so. ”
That’s the first time I notice the sling on my right arm. I hadn’t felt the pain before. Don’t feel it now, thanks to the drugs zipping through my bloodstream.
“We couldn’t find any identification on you. Is there someone we can call for you?”
I remember leaving my wallet behind when I left for the kirk. But I’d had my cell phone. “My phone. The guy who found me gave them my phone. Where is it? I need to call Parker.”
“Ah, I’ll see if it’s at the nurse’s station. Who’s Parker? A relative?”
“Brother-in-law. He’s here with my wife.”
“Wife?” His unibrow folds in confusion, then lifts. “Ah, why didn’t you say so? How do we contact her?”
A lot of good that would do. Yet he’d asked the question in all innocence.
“She lapsed into a coma while we were on our honeymoon here. They don’t think ...” The realization that this isn’t a dream wallops me with the force of a hurricane wind. If this is reality, then what had I just been through?
A memory. A memory of a life lived long ago.
“Sir?” he prompts.
Damn it. I can’t say it. But I have to face it. I have to. There’s no more escaping to the fourteenth century. “Is this Berwick Infirmary?”
“Aye, the only.”
I swallow, force the words out. “Coma. They don’t think she’s going to make it.”
“Ah.” He tilts his head back. “Yes, I know who you are now. Let me get your phone for you.”
A few minutes later he’s back with my phone.
“I can’t make out the numbers without my glasses,” I say. “Maybe you could —?”
“Ah, yes.” He steps toward the bed and retrieves a pair of glasses from the adjustable table next to it. “Here you are. They found these on the road. Luckily, they weren’t damaged too badly. Nurse Stephens managed to straighten the frames for you.”
I slip them on and stare at the display, scanning through the missed calls. Parker has called twenty times. What the heck? I’ve only been gone a few hours. Why didn’t he just text me?
Then I see the date. It’s the 21st. The day Claire and I are supposed to be going back to Ohio. A sinking feeling tugs at my stomach.
Oh God. Is she ...?
A knot forms in my throat. I slam the phone against the bed and bite down. If the doctor doesn’t leave, I’m going to break down in front of him.
“It seems one of the nurses took a call not long ago for you,” the doctor says. “It was your brother-in-law. She told him what room you were in. He said he was on his way, but he wanted you to call him right back as soon as you could.”
“Sure.” I gulp in several breaths, turn my head toward the window. “Could you leave?”
“Yes, of course. If you need anything, the call button is on the left rail there. The nurses are only two doors down.”
I wait until the door clicks shut, then scroll to Parker’s name and hit ‘Send’.
“Hello?”
“Parker? It’s me, Ross.”
“Ross! Where in the hell have you been, man? I’ve been trying to reach you.”
“Run off the road by a truck. Guess I fell down a hill, hit my head. Dislocated my shoulder again, too. But I’m going to be okay.” Physically I’m going to be okay. Mentally I’m about to fracture into a million pieces.
“Ross, I need to tell you about Claire.”
I don’t want to hear it. Sooner or later though, I’ll have to.
“You won’t believe this.” He laughs. He actually laughs. Sick bastard. “She woke up yesterday. She’s a bit groggy, can’t remember some things. But they say she should make a full recovery in time. God, I can’t believe it, can you?”
The phone drops from my hand onto the pillow. I try to process it all, but can’t. How do you go from accepting the loss of your first love and moving on, to falling in love with another, to this?
“Ross? Ross, are you there?” His voice sounds muted coming from the tiny speaker. I retrieve the phone and press it to my ear again.
“Yeah, I’m here. Just in shock, that’s all.”
“Hey, I had to go back to the hotel and grab a change of clothes, but I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. I told the nurses to have a wheelchair ready for you. I’ll take you to see her when I get there. Okay?”
“Sure, okay.” But the enthusiasm in my words is lacking. I’m not sure what to feel just now. Joy? Loss? Relief? Maybe it’s the guilt that’s eating me up?
In my fists, I ball the sheets up so tight my hands begin to cramp. Tears slick my cheeks and roll onto the pillow.
I need more than fifteen minutes to sort this all out, to get my head on straight. But I don’t have more time. And I can’t just spit out everything that’s happened to me. They’d all think I was insane. Instead, I have to jump back into this life as if nothing ever happened.
I don’t know how I’m going to manage that.
Parker punches the door open and wheels me through. There on the hospital bed is Claire, just as I’d last left her: flat on her back, her tousled blonde hair spread around her puffy face, her eyes closed.
For a second I think she’s slipped back into the coma before I could see her again. Then Parker flips the switch by the door. The light blinks to life, humming for a moment as the bulb warms up. She doesn’t move, not even when Parker clears his throat.
He bends closer to me. “She’s tired. Still sleeps a lot. Come on, let’s say ‘hi’.”
When we reach her, I take her hand, careful to avoid the IV needles taped to the back of it, but that brings no response. Her skin is cool, her fingers limp, her whole body sunken down into the mattress like she hasn’t moved from it in days.
They had warned me she might have brain damage. Am I going to spend the rest of my life caring for someone who doesn’t even know who I am? Can I be that strong, that selfless? I want to shake her awake, hear her shout my name and feel her throw her arms around me.
Face toward the ceiling, Claire’s lashes flutter open, then quickly drift shut again.
“Claire? Claire? I’m here.” I clutch her hand more firmly. “I came back for you, Claire. I came back.”
She squeezes my hand back so lightly I almost don’t notice.
“About time, Ross Lyndon Sinclair.” She turns her head toward me. A faint smile pries apart lips that are thin and cracked. “Took you forever.”
I kiss her knuckles, try to swallow back my tears, but they come anyway. “Yeah, it seems that way.”
38
HERE & NOW
Berwick, Scotland — 2013
Every day, Claire improves steadily. They had released me after twenty-four hours, but only after Parker insisted that he’d stay with me for a few days. My shoulder had been set, my gashes sewn up and my abrasions liberally swabbed with iodine. Claire was poked with more needles than a lab rat, as they ran test after test on her, took x-rays and did more MRIs, and woke her up every three hours to take her vital signs. By the fourth night of this, she was so irritated, she tells me, that she threw a half-filled water pitcher at the door when one of the nurses knocked. It makes me wonder if I’ll have to deal with personality changes and volatile mood swings, but fortunately she seems fine except for that one incident. It’s all for a good cause, though. They’re going to write her up in the medical journals as a modern day miracle.
A week pl
ods by before they’ll even talk of letting her go home. I worry that we’ll eventually get swamped with a mountain of medical bills between the two of us. But since we’re in the land of social health care, I decide not to let it bother me. For now.
For now, I only want to remind myself how damn lucky I am. But that’s hard to do, because I still ache for Mariota. And I feel guilty about it, about having slept with her after resisting for so long, even though I shouldn’t. That was another life, I tell myself. I was someone else back then. There was no Claire. Only Mariota.
Yet I miss that life. The simplicity, the rawness of it. And I miss Mariota, terribly. She’s gone now, though. I have to go on. It should be that simple.
Yet it’s not.
Still, something else troubles me. Something I can’t quite put my finger on. Like there’s a piece missing.
Claire poses in front of the hospital bathroom mirror, pulling a brush through her hair in long strokes, a distant look on her face. She doesn’t even notice me coming through the outer door. I lean around the doorframe of the lavatory, gazing at her. Several seconds pass before she gives a startled reaction.
“Oh!” The brush falls from her hand to land in the sink with a clatter. Startled, she looks at me in the mirror. “My God, Ross. You scared me to death.”
“Did you forget I was coming to take you home?” I slide my arms around her waist and kiss her neck. “You looked far away just then. Where were you?”
Sighing heavily, she wriggles out of my hold, then marches to where her suitcase is on the bed. She’s wearing her favorite flowered sundress and a pair of strappy low-heeled sandals. Her hands flutter over her skirt, smoothing the wrinkles as she stares down at her painted toenails.
“Have you ever had a dream,” she says, “that seemed so real you believed it?”
“All the time.” I cross the room and sink into the vinyl chair in the corner.
“I mean like ... like you were actually there?”
“Did you have a dream last night?”
“Not last night, no. When I was unconscious.” Her dark eyes flick to me, then down again. “I always thought that being in a coma you’d just be thinking of nothing. Or you’d hear people around you and not be able to respond. But it wasn’t like either of those things.”
“What was it like?” I have to admit, I’m curious. So far I haven’t asked her about it because I figure she’ll tell me if there’s anything worth telling.
“Most of it didn’t make sense at first,” she says. “It was here, in Scotland, and yet it wasn’t. The land looked the same, the hills, the forests, the glens. But the people were different, the way they talked, what they wore. It took me awhile to realize it was a different time. A long time ago. But it wasn’t so much like a dream as a —”
“Memory?”
“Yes.” She nods vigorously. “A memory.”
A shaft of sunlight divides the space between us. Half-blinded by the brightness and barely able to see Claire, I lean forward into the light, my elbows on my knees. “And what do you remember?”
“That I was standing on a cliff, with the sea below and birds everywhere, and a strong wind in my face, waiting for someone to ...” — she struggles for words, her forehead creased in concentration — “to come back to me.”
“Your husband. You were waiting for your husband to come back from a battle.”
“Yes ... yes. And then I learned that thousands had died and I was sure he hadn’t survived, but I still hoped.” Her mouth slips into a frown, her shoulders weighed down with sadness. Suddenly, her head snaps up. “Wait. How did you know that?”
In that moment, everything makes sense. To me, at least. Grief and remorse are expunged in an instant. I rise, my heart pounding so hard I feel like it might explode. “Because I was there with you, Claire.”
She comes around the bed, staring at me in disbelief. “But how? It was only a dream — wasn’t it?”
I take her face in my hands. “It was real. As real as you and I standing here together now.”
“How do you know that? How can you be sure, Ross?”
“Your name was Mariota.”
Her eyes go wide. She clamps her hands over mine and whispers, “Roslin?”
I laugh with relief. For weeks, I had tried to deny my feelings for Mariota, thinking that I would somehow be betraying Claire if I gave in. But my heart had been right all along: Mariota was Claire. “Yes, that was me. Do you understand now? We’ve lived before. We were together even then, almost seven hundred years ago.”
She arches a skeptical eyebrow at me. “Excuse me if this is all a little hard to swallow.”
“I know, I know. But how else do you explain it?”
The whine of cart wheels is followed by a thump. Nurse Stephens has steered the meal cart into the doorframe.
“Oh,” the nurse remarks in surprise, backing the cart up to maneuver it into the hallway, “leaving this morning, are you? Well, we’ll miss you something fierce, Ms. Forbes.” She unhooks the clipboard from its hook on the wall and scans it once. “They can’t stop talking about you in the staff room. The doctors say it’s a miracle you snapped out of that coma as if it had never happened. They can’t explain it. Please send us a letter when you get home, love, let us know how you’re getting along, won’t you?”
Claire rushes to her to give her a quick hug. “Of course, I will. I’ll never forget what good care you took of me. Although I can’t say I’m unhappy to get out of here.”
“Home is where you belong.” Nurse Stephens tilts her head, her lower lip quivering. She dashes a tear from her cheek. “You two look so perfect together. After all you’ve both been through ... I’m so happy to see you like this. Just think of the stories you’ll have to tell that wee one of yours someday.”
“Yeah, someday.” Claire turns Nurse Stephens by the shoulders and guides her out the door with a sudden urgency. “I’ll write, okay? I promise.”
“And send pictures of the three of you?”
“Sure, sure.” Claire urges her out into the corridor, then yanks the door shut. Before I can ask her what they were talking about, she ducks into the bathroom and makes a big commotion as she collects her makeup bag and other toiletries.
“Um, Claire ... dear.” I poke my head around the door, but she won’t meet my gaze. “What’s wrong?”
She fishes around in her makeup bag. “Nothing.”
I lift her chin and force her to look at me. “The truth, Claire.”
“It’s just that ... that ...” And then it all comes out in a torrent. “It’s all my fault, Ross. I know we had it all planned out, that we’d start trying for a family six months from now. I was being careful. I really was. Then we got carried away that one night and, and, and I suppose I just forgot, but I figured maybe luck would be on my side, so I didn’t say anything to you... Oh God, how stupid was I to have that whiskey? What kind of mother am I going to be? What if our baby has problems? It’s my fault. I’m so dumb and I’ve ruined everything and you should just divorce me right now because —”
“Stop, stop, stop.” I pinch her lips between my fingers, then wrap my arms around her and pull her into me. I kiss the top of her head. If this is her hormones talking, we’re going to be in for a long, bumpy ride. “I knew about the baby before you woke up. And I believe you didn’t know. It’s going to be okay, Claire. It really is. So we’re going to be parents a little early. Big deal. We’ll be fine. We’re smart people. We’ll figure it out. You’re going to be a great mom. The best. Me, though? You’ll have to be patient. I’ll try hard, every day. I didn’t have a very good example for a father, but at least I know what not to do.”
“Are you going to tell your dad about the baby, Ross?”
“I suppose so.” To others, it’s natural to tell your family you’re going to have a baby, knowing they’ll be happy for you. But every time in my life I told my dad about something I thought would make him proud of me, he had ridiculed me, found fault, or fl
ipped it all inside out to make it into something bad. Not this time. Not ever again.
“Do you want me to do it?”
“No, this is something I have to do myself. I need to stand up to him. Set limits. My whole life I’ve kept quiet, swallowed the hurt, and run away. But not anymore.” I start to help her put the last of her things in the overstuffed suitcase. “If there was one thing I learned while I was ‘away’, it was that if someone’s always finding fault with you, sometimes it’s because they’re still fighting something in their past. I can’t be part of that fight any longer, whatever it is. He has to understand that or he just can’t be a part of my life, our lives, ever again. I know that seems harsh, but you can’t change someone unless they want to change.”
“It makes perfect sense to me.” She cups my jaw in her palm, smiling in that gentle, understanding way that has always melted my heart. “So you’ve checked out of the B&B?”
“Yeah. Dermot says bye and next time we come back, he’ll give us a couple nights free.”
“That’s nice of him. Are we on our way to the airport, then?”
“We have a few hours before we need to check in, so if you don’t mind, I’d like to swing by St. Joseph’s Kirk. I never did get to talk to Reverend Murray again. I already called and he’s expecting us. Something he told me doesn’t quite add up and I wanted to see if he learned anything new about the Sinclairs.”
39
HERE & NOW
Near Berwick, Scotland — 2013
We meet with Reverend Murray at the pub in Aberbeg. The man behind the bar greets him heartily. I assume they know each other from church services or community functions, until the barkeeper asks if he wants ‘the usual’.
“This happens more often than I’d like to admit, but it seems I confused a few facts.” Reverend Murray pulls a dark frothy drink toward him and takes a sip. “It was Sir Henry Sinclair who died at Halidon Hill.”
“I’m aware of that, but his son died just days later, didn’t he?” I say. “From wounds received during the battle, perhaps?”
He looks at me with utter befuddlement. “Oh no, no. Not at all. I contacted my cousin’s friend in Kirkwall and asked him to look into family records there. There’s a small graveyard on one of the northern islands, near where a castle once stood. It’s nothing but ruins now, the markers on the graves barely legible. But he said there was clearly a Sir Roslin Sinclair buried there whose birth date matches this one.” He spreads out the paper and points to the name. “He had a son named William, but also a brother by that name.”
In the Time of Kings Page 24