I sank to the floor and pulled my sister into my arms, stroking the hair off her face. Gus at least had the wherewithal to flush the toilet.
“Aggie, hey, you okay?”
She opened her eyes and when she saw me she smiled. “Hello, you,” she said, then laughed. “Hello, me.”
“Can you stand?”
“Of course,” she said, which turned out to be at least half true. Gus and I supported her as she stumbled on the legs of a foal to the car.
“Darling,” she said to her husband as he tried to bundle her into the back seat. “Wait.”
“Get in the car, Aggie,” he said.
“Are you angry with me, my love?”
“Have a fucking guess.”
She laughed. “That’s strange.”
“Just shut up,” he told her flatly, and something of me came awake, some alertness.
“I didn’t want this,” she said.
“Bullshit.”
“Don’t you get it?” Aggie asked. “I’m not your property.”
Gus shoved her hard onto the seat. She fell back, almost hitting her head. I stumbled, unbalanced by the sensation.
“Hey!” I said, but Gus was wrestling Aggie into her seat belt, and he was being too rough, which was making her buck against him, and he snarled something and grabbed her by the throat to hold her down and with his fingers squeezing my windpipe I made a fist and punched him awkwardly in the back of the skull, punched myself awkwardly in the back of the skull.
Gus spun around, holding his head and staring at me with feral eyes. “What the fuck? I was just getting her in the car!”
“Don’t touch her like that,” I managed, dazed.
He laughed. “Jesus fucking Christ. You’ve got no idea, do you, kid? She fucking loves the drama—she creates it. She loves to be roughed up.”
“Stop it, Gus.”
“And she’s not the only one. You liked it rough, too, from memory.”
I pushed past him and leaned into the car, my head pounding with adrenaline. Aggie had given up the fight and was now struggling to get her own seat belt clipped. I reached across her and gently clicked it into place, then I gave her hand a squeeze. “You okay?”
“Sure,” she said, and she sounded so tired, more tired than any human could safely be. She ran a finger gently from her forehead down her cheek; a loving touch to my face, one of our secret languages. “Are you, Int?”
“I’m fine. Let’s go home.”
She was asleep by the time we got back. Gus carried her inside. Our fevers had passed. There was no more anger in the air, only weariness, only sadness. I took water and painkillers to Aggie’s bedside and then found him sitting on the vacated couch in the living room. His surgery buddies had gone home and he hadn’t turned on any of the lights.
I sat next to him, tingling, senses wrung dry. “That was too much,” I said. “Way too much.”
“I know.”
“She didn’t do anything wrong.”
“She gets pissed at another man’s house and you don’t think that’s wrong?”
“They’re friends. She’s allowed to have friends, and she’s allowed to get pissed.”
His stony silence was disagreement enough.
I got to my feet, done with him. “Grow up, Gus.”
“I didn’t know you had it in you, Inti,” he said, pausing me.
“What?”
“That fight. I thought you were too sweet for that.”
I turned so he could see my face when I spoke. “When it comes to my sister, I can be anything I need to be. Don’t forget that.”
* * *
After Gus left for work the next morning, I sat on his side of the bed. Aggie was pale and hollow-eyed, but she accepted the coffee with a grateful smile, and sat up to enjoy it.
“You’re usually gone by now,” she said.
“I’m going in late. We need to talk.”
“I already know, Inti.”
“I’m going to say it anyway, for my own sake.” I licked my lips, glancing out the window at the sun-drenched street. “I should have said it ages ago. I didn’t want to … I didn’t want to be involved, but this has to stop. You need to leave Gus.”
“I know.”
“He’s not a good man.”
“Then he’s perfect for me. I’m a piece of shit.”
I looked at my sister. “It scares me, that you’d say that about yourself.”
“What am I, except a pale shadow of you? What do I do but follow you through life? Without you I’m just nothing.”
My mouth fell open. “That’s how I feel about you.”
Aggie laughed a little. “So which of us is right?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’ve missed you,” I said.
“I’ve missed you too,” she said.
“I’ll pack our bags. We can leave today.”
She shook her head, and I knew it was going to take something really bad happening before she would consider it. Then she said, startling me, “You should pack just for you. Find somewhere else to live. Closer to work, maybe.”
I stared at her. “What do you mean?”
“There’s no reason for you to put up with our crap. All the fighting. It’s horrible, and I can see how much you hate it.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
“It’s not leaving,” she said with an eye roll. “Don’t be dramatic. You could get a place closer to work. Have your own space.”
It wasn’t an unreasonable suggestion except that we had never lived apart and never wanted to, and the certainty we had always shared about this set alarm bells ringing in my mind. He was coming between us and she was letting him, and something about it felt very wrong.
And so an idea began to take shape.
21
Thursday night at the wool shop. I stand outside in the cold for a while, trying to drum up the energy to go in. What am I doing. I don’t want to socialize so why the hell am I here?
I steel myself and push through the door. The bell rings and several faces look up.
“Here she is,” Douglas says. “Come on in, lassie.” The old man stands up to offer me his seat and pull another over for himself.
“Thank you,” I say, sitting beside Mrs. Doyle, who Duncan visits most days and who I bought a pregnancy test from. In the circle are a few faces I know—Holly and Bonnie are both here, and wave to me—and a few faces I don’t recognize, not only women but a couple of men too.
Holly sits on my other side and passes me a cup.
“What’s this?”
“Nettle wine,” she says. “Douglas makes it.”
“Of course he does.” I take a sip and let out a long whistle.
“Yeah, it’s rocket fuel, but we don’t have any choice—he makes us drink it,” Holly says.
“Where’s your knitting, love?” Mrs. Doyle asks me, only I don’t understand her broad accent so she has to repeat it.
“I don’t have any. I’ve never knitted before.”
“Good Lord,” she says. “Well now, that’s all right, I’ll show you what to do, love.” This she has to repeat too, until she starts laughing and says, “Now I thought I was the one going deaf,” which Holly has to translate for me and then we are all laughing.
While Mrs. Doyle teaches me to knit, using enormous needles and thick loops of wool I suspect are normally used to keep the children occupied, Holly chatters away—turns out she and Amelia have twin daughters who are giving them no end of grief. When she finds out I was once a teenage twin who gave her mother no end of grief she squeals with excitement.
“Help me, Inti, please. All they do is whisper to each other and laugh at us!”
I shrug as Mrs. Doyle has to untangle the pathetic effort I’ve made, and it should be known that the seventy-three-year-old woman has arthritis in the hands and can barely move them, but even she is able to knit a few stitches without getting them knotted into a mess.
To Holly I say, “It w
on’t be what you want to hear.”
“Lay it on me.”
“You will never be as close to them as they are to each other, so just give up on that now.”
She slumps back against her seat. “Christ. She packs a punch, huh, Mrs. Doyle?”
“Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain, love,” Mrs. Doyle says without looking up.
“Sorry, Mrs. Doyle.”
Next the conversation turns to the Dundreggan estate, west of here near Loch Ness, a flagship rewilding effort by the charity Trees for Life. Mrs. Doyle, as it turns out, is a longtime volunteer and is headed there tomorrow for the next phase of tree planting.
“How long have you been volunteering?” I ask her.
“Years now. Most of us in these parts have planted trees at times. We have to look after our home, now, don’t we?”
She tells me, slowly so I can follow her, of the four thousand hectares of the estate’s land that are being rewilded, of the millions of trees planted, but also of the trouble they’ve had. “Birch seeds cover the ground each year, trillions they say, but the deer come along and eat up any of the tree shoots so nothing can grow. Now we’ve been tackling the deer trouble for many, many years here, love, since before you were alive. And out that way they’re not as fortunate as we are here—they don’t have any wolves to move the deer along.”
“Maybe the wolves will find them,” I murmur. “One day when it’s safe for them to roam further.”
“Och aye, I do hope so. But for now, do you know what we do over there to keep the deer moving?”
“What?”
She points across the circle to Douglas and wheezes with laughter. “Mr. McRae heads over that way with me sometimes and he and some of the younger laddies go out at night and they screech away on the bagpipes. Bless them if it isn’t the worst sound on Earth and drives the cheeky pests right away.”
I laugh with her as Douglas straightens in his chair. “Now I know you didn’t just insult my piping, Mrs. Doyle.”
“Not at all, Mr. McRae, I was quite generous, considering.”
Douglas holds his belly while he laughs and soon the whole circle is chuckling along with us. I think there’s a bit of flirtation going on between the two of them.
“What else is being done to rewild Scotland?” I ask Mrs. Doyle, wanting to keep her talking, thrilled to have found her.
“Oh, many things, love. It started out all wrong, I’d say, when we first realized our forest clearing had brought us down to a few pathetic groves of Caledonian pines. Instead of planting natives our forest management planted groves of non-native conifers! The lunacy! Just terrible for the native wildlife. In any case, we started getting back on track and began to plant the natives and reintroduce the poor lost animals. There were the beavers, to start. I hear now down south the landowners are paying to have the critters on their land, they love them so much. And soon enough we’ll head up far north to the flow country.”
“What’s the flow country?”
“The Mhoine, love. The world’s largest peat bog. It stores hundreds of millions of tons of carbon. More than any forest, I believe.”
“Truly?”
“And they want to put a space station on it! Of all things! The eejits. You know what happens to peat when a spark hits it? It catches on fire and it burns on and on and it releases all that carbon into the air. It’s fragile. And they want to explode rockets on it! The insanity of the rich, aye?”
I nod, horrified. “Why are you going up there?”
“To protest, of course.”
I look at her in awe. “I hope you don’t mind me saying but I haven’t come across many people your age who are so open to conservation.”
“Oh, rubbish. We’re here, in among the rest of the noisemakers. We’re here.”
I feel a stirring of hope in my chest to hear the passion in her voice.
“And you know the secret, love?”
“What’s that?”
“Well now, you don’t have to rewild on such large scales. You can start small, in your own backyard. I’ve been growing wildflowers for years and oh—all sorts of wee creatures have been coming to visit me.”
“How wonderful,” I breathe. “Could I come and visit you, too, sometime?”
“Of course, love, I would be honored to have you. It’s so much easier than most folk know,” Mrs. Doyle adds. “But now, change is frightening to some,” she concedes after a little while. “And when you open your heart to rewilding a landscape, the truth is, you’re opening your heart to rewilding yourself.”
* * *
A couple of hours pass and I get to chat with most of the knitters, and Douglas tells a lot of really terrible jokes that have us all giggling, and we eat delicious cheese except when I reach for the soft Brie and Mrs. Doyle says under her breath, “That one’s not for you, love,” and by the time we’re wrapping up it occurs to me that this is a perfect opportunity to ask some questions about Duncan.
“Mrs. Doyle?” I say as I copy her method of coiling up the leftover wool.
“Yes, love.”
“I’ve noticed Duncan visits you a lot…”
“Oh, bless him.” She smiles such a smile. “We love our Duncan.”
I’m not sure what I’m trying to ask, so I end up simply saying, “He seems very kind.”
“Oh, aye, he is that. Very kind indeed. That’s why we all have him around so much, the poor laddie.”
“What do you mean?”
“He just needs some love, that boy. He needs family.”
I stare at her. It didn’t occur to me that they might be the ones looking after him. That actually, Duncan is the lonely one.
* * *
After the knitting, I go to the Snow Goose. In the crowded pub sits Lainey. She’s with her brothers and Fergus, drinking white wine. I don’t want to corner her, but maybe she’ll feel more inclined to talk to me in public. I cross to their table and receive nods from the men, but nothing at all from Lainey. She glares at me, wordless and waiting. She seems weathered. Tired beyond her years. She’s the sole owner of a failing farm now. But at least she’s not afraid for her life.
“Inti,” Fergus greets me. “Come to join us?”
“Can I pinch Lainey for a quick word?” I ask.
She hesitates, then gets up.
“What are you drinking?”
“Chardonnay.”
I point her to a quiet corner table beside the fireplace while I go to the bar. I’m about to order two wines before I reconsider and get myself a mineral water.
I sink into the seat, squeezed in behind a stone wall. It’s private here. We won’t be overheard. “How are you?”
“All right, thanks.”
I swallow and admit, “I’ve been worried about you. I came to see you a couple of times…”
“Thank you for the food and wine. What did you want to talk about?”
“First I wanna say I’m sorry for Stuart. For your loss.”
“Why? You made your feelings about him clear.”
Did I? I thought I’d been pretty damn restrained. “How are his family coping? His parents live in town, right?”
She nods, her hands unclenching slightly. “They keep asking where he is.”
“What do you tell them?”
“That I don’t know.”
I’m about to say something when she adds, “It happens to be a lie.”
The words die on my tongue.
She’s watching me, searching my face as I am searching hers. My fingers fidget uneasily.
“What happened that night?” I ask. “After you picked him up from the station.”
“I took him home and we went to bed. He was gone when I woke up. That’s what I’ve been telling people.”
“So what’s the truth?”
“Stu was really beat up. Over his ribs and stomach, horrible bruises. When we got home he said Duncan had gone at him, like he was really angry. And it’d got him thinking, on that drive home. He tho
ught it was weird to fight like that unless it was about something. And so he asked me if it was about something.” Lainey gulps her drink. Her words are calm, measured, but I think she needs the wine. “I said no,” she goes on. “I couldn’t imagine what would happen if he knew the truth. I would lie and I’d take that lie to the grave with me. But he knew it anyway, I guess. Maybe he’d been thinking it for a while. He was woozy, still, but he made me change direction. He didn’t say where we were going but he was very quiet. That’s how I knew something bad was happening, because he hadn’t got angry at me—he was just holding on to it all. Letting it build.”
Suddenly I am nervous. I don’t understand why she’s telling me this. I wanted her to, of course, but I didn’t think it would be this easy. The danger warning in my brain is triggered.
“We got to the turnoff to Duncan’s house,” Lainey says. “I pulled over. He told me to keep driving, but I couldn’t. So Stu got out of the car and started walking.”
“When was this? What time?”
She shakes her head, doesn’t know, lost in the memory. The events she describes are like bullet points, moments she must have gone over a thousand times in her head. “I started driving home. I called Duncan. Warned him Stu was heading for his place and he knew about us. I was thinking fuck Stu. Fuck him, let him do what he wants, maybe it would finally get him in trouble if he attacked the chief of police. But he was in such a state … It was about as bad as I’d seen him. I couldn’t just … I dunno. Something made me turn back. Maybe I thought I could still stop him from doing anything.” She drinks more, nearly finishing her glass. “I couldn’t find him at the turnoff so I kept driving. Past your place. Through the trees. And that’s when I saw you.”
My mouth goes dry.
“I saw what you did to him,” Lainey tells me. “You were right near the road. Didn’t you know you were right near the road?”
I had been. Too fucking close. But then that hadn’t really been my choice, had it?
A waiter arrives to take Lainey’s glass. She orders another wine.
“Make it two,” I say faintly.
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