When the ocean flies, p.29
When the Ocean Flies, page 29
Mary stood beside me, dry-eyed, though I knew her heart clenched. “Happy Birthday, Jayne.” A whisper. Thirty today. She’d told herself that if you were going to come, you’d have done it in the years between when you could access the records and when you became a full adult. Surely that had happened by now. She thought of herself at thirty, married with two children. As settled as she’d get. There was no time after that. Hardly time to breathe for herself in those motherhood years. If you were in similar circumstances, you’d be the same, struggling just to find the time to get the day’s work done, never mind the time to go looking for someone. Someone who had given you away.
Mary might have looked herself, had she not repeated the story to herself so often. The story the matron told that said she must leave the bairn, leave you, that it was the only way to undo the wrong. She must do you no further harm.
Thirty years. Softly, she blew out the candles. She turned to me. “Mummy,” she said. “I can’t hope anymore. I have to say goodbye to her.” I held her. She did not cry. Neither could she make herself say goodbye out loud.
I held her, and held my words, too. When she’d gone to bed, I blew out my candle, offered my love, and a wish for us all: “Before I die, Jayne. Come home before I die.”
2010-2017
The emails from Jimmy, not as much of a flurry as the ones with Mary, less like obsession and more like the flush of early love. In one of the early ones, he sent Alison a family tree. Since you are trying to find out where you are from.
Most of the branches stretched to Canada and Australia. Just the one line, through Jimmy’s father, stayed.
She printed it, as though having her hand on something tangible connected her to them—these wild-haired people to whom she was so clearly related. There he was, big Jock MacInnes, leading up to his father, a boilermaker, then to the bottle-maker grandfather. Jimmy’s great-grandfather had held the last slim grip on their ways by finding work as a gamekeeper. His father was listed as shepherd. The only one allowed to stay when the rest of the family had had their belongings tossed out of their crofts, the landlords finding sheep more profitable than people. They marched these people away. Away from their homes, their land, their traditions during The Clearances.
Alison stuck this family tree on the growing collage of images that she’d been creating on the wall in front of her desk. Wade paid a rare visit to her studio one Saturday morning.
“Jesus,” he said. “This looks like a shrine.” He leaned in to the images. “And not space for even one picture of me.”
“I see you every day.”
“It’s as though you’ve been carried off by a cult.”
“Not a cult,” she said. “A place I can look at them and not subject everyone else to it.” Not a cult at all. My family. How could he not see that she had space for them and for him, if he’d just let her.
She continued rising early, checking email, working her clay in the loft. She felt alive, then, in ways she hadn’t felt before. At last, she was beginning to open into her true self. This, she fought to reconcile with what she’d built before, torn between this renewed sense of her ability to create, these new relationships and the story of who she was within them, and her own children, sprung from within, yet not her at all. As though she’d been a hummock of land, and they were springs bubbling up, making their own path down, carrying granules from the stream bed, from deep within. Charlie had made directly for the sea, following a tide that pulled him out and away. Will, always bright and filled with energy, like a mountain stream over rocks. Mikey meandering, spreading wide, sometimes feeling like a flood with all his emotions. Tori, deep and gentle, so often flat and smooth on the surface. Tori, with her dark eyes that mirrored Alison’s, opened so wide she felt she could fall in at any request.
The current one was for social media.
“Please, Mum,” she begged.
Mikey, climbing over the sofa, replied. “You didn’t let me when I was twelve.”
“They didn’t have Facebook when you were twelve, honey.”
“Well, you wouldn’t have.”
“Probably right. I’ll talk to Dad.”
“Mum. You don’t have to ask Dad everything.” Tori, again.
“Yes,” Mikey said, hands folded across his chest. “You could make one decision all by yourself.” How like Wade he sounded, mocking.
“What if it’s no?”
Mikey on his knees now, peering over the sofa. Tori, eye to eye with Alison. All of them with their eyebrows slightly raised, as though Alison had suggested she might go off in a hot air balloon.
“Help me get dinner started and then you can show it to me.”
“You have to have an account to see it properly,” Tori said.
“Then you can make me one.”
When Wade’s foot creaked the loose board in the foyer, the three of them hunched over the computer in the den. None of them shifted as he went to the fridge, got his beer, opened it, joined them.
“What’s so interesting?”
“Facebook. We’re making an account so Mum can see it’s okay for me to have one, too,” Tori said.
“No,” Wade said.
“Have you looked at it?” Alison turned to face him, stood, kissed his cheek.
“She’s too young. There are creepy people online,” he said.
Alison moved to the stove, drained the pasta, shivered. There are creepy people in real life. Brothers of friends’ boyfriends. Basements.
“There are friends, too,” Tori said.
“It seems fine, Wade.” Alison set the pasta on the table. “How was your day?”
“Rough,” he said.
“Sorry. I made your favorite pasta and sauce. Fresh basil. That crusty bread you like.” From scratch.
“Then let’s eat.”
Around the table, the pasta passed, sauce, bread, salad. They ate, wordless, for a while, and then Tori ventured another try, in her softest, sweetest voice. All their friends, and many of their friends’ parents, were on there. When she mentioned Wade’s partner’s daughter, she seemed to have hit her mark.
“Your mother has to be your friend on there,” he said. “No hiding things. And I reserve the right to look any time.”
“Thanks, Dad.” Tori, who sat next to him, leaned over and kissed his cheek.
In bed that night, Alison turned to Wade. “It’s fine, isn’t it? You know so much more about that stuff than I do.”
“I can have the IT guy at work put a keystroke monitor on their computer if we’re worried.”
“Wade. That’s creepy.”
“Not if it keeps them safe.”
“It’s creepy, Wade.”
“You don’t see what I see at work. Some people need to be protected from their own choices.” He rolled over, pulled the blanket up over his shoulder.
Moonlight through the curtain. Wade’s breath slow and steady. Alison lay, tense, beside him. Her muscles refused to fully release to sleep. The notion that they’d spy on their children, read their innermost words without their knowledge or permission seemed like a violation.
She swung her feet out of bed, slid out from under the covers. Wade held his place. She made for the back door, paused with it open, looked up at the moon, and then back at the computer. She sat, pulled up her new account, scrolled through, typing in a few names to see who else was on. She found the PTA Vice President, Wade’s partner’s wife. She sent neither of these a friend request. Alison looked up Mary’s children, wondered if it would be strange for them to receive a request from her, and then decided to do it anyway. She sat back, paused, hands hovering over the keyboard. When her fingers landed, they typed Vic Nagle.
There she was. A streak of gray spiking up amid the dark, eyes staring straight out, as though they saw right into her, the same as that first day Alison had met her. The cursor hovered. Alison’s throat tightened. Hands shaking, she began to type.
Dear Vic—
Not, she was sure, the proper salutation for a Facebook message.
It’s you, isn’t it? Victoria Nagle, who used to live in Strathnamurrah. This is Alison (Keith), who also lived there.
Suddenly stilted, Alison deleted it all. What if she hates me? Mrs. Nagle’s voice down the line, the last time Alison phoned: “Best you concentrate on your family.”
Alison started again.
Vic,
It’s Alison.
I miss you.
She clicked before she changed her mind. Friend request sent.
~
Dinner and homework and everyone in their rooms the next night. Wade out golfing, the days having lengthened, not that the nineteenth hole needed light.
In the attic, in the dark, her face reflected in the screen. The icon illuminated. Friend request accepted, along with a message.
Ah. I wondered who you were now—your last name. I never wrote it down. I looked for you on here, as Alison Keith, not Earley. How’s the bairn? Be twenty-two now? I miss you, too.
Write back. Soon.
Love,
Vic xxxx
Alison couldn’t reply fast enough.
I’m sorry I hurt you, she wrote, in the second message.
Ach. I’ll say who hurt me, she said. It was only a nick.
Every night, then, she had a third name to look for in her inbox. Every night, it was there. Each time she saw Vic’s name, Alison felt as she had when she’d bent on the trail that afternoon long ago, pregnant, and sucked the orange wedge—receiving sustenance that her whole body craved.
~
The truth was that on the night, twenty years before, when Alison had called to say she was getting married, Vic had hung up, turned around and come breast-to-breast with her mum.
“You look as though someone’s just slapped your face, Victoria.”
Vic crumpled to the floor, there in the front hall, and wept.
“Who’s done this?” Mrs. Nagle knelt.
“Al,” Vic had gasped.
“Al?”
“Alison. She’s getting married.”
“Feck.” Vic’s mum had watched Vic pine when Alison first left; she’d seen her resign herself to having lost Alison forever. Puppy love, Mrs. Nagle thought. And then she’d noted the lift in her daughter when Alison phoned and said she was in Glasgow. Maybe it was something deeper, something that could last, she thought.
Vic’s mam held her until the sobs stopped; she pulled her up and through to the kitchen. A whisky for both of them.
Aidan came in in the middle of it. “What happened to her?”
“She’s a broken heart.”
“A wha’? She hasn’t even a boyfriend.”
“Get out of here. Away and find something to do before I help you find a broken arse on my wooden spoon.”
“You can’t have a broken arse.”
“Do you want to test that?”
Aidan thumped down the hall and plonked in front of the telly; Vic’s mum told her she’d never known anyone to get from cradle to grave without a broken heart. “The medicine you need isn’t here.”
Mrs. Nagle held Vic that night. In the coming days, while Vic grieved, Mrs. Nagle emptied the jars she hid in the far back of the top shelf in the kitchen. She got Vic’s aunt to pitch in, along with a few sympathetic women in the village. Mrs. Nagle presented the lot of it to Vic.
“Get yersel away, at least for a while. Amsterdam, maybe. Somewhere friendlier than here.”
“That’s for emergencies,” Vic said.
“There isn’t a bigger emergency than this.”
It turned out that Amsterdam would come to Vic, first, in the form of Marianne, who was on a hill-walking tour of Scotland. Vic returned with her and settled with her in Amsterdam, where she spent fifteen years playing music and pulling pints. Happy at first, Marianne seemed to turn after they had a hand fasting, the old Scottish tradition of a ceremonial binding of hands to indicate a partnership, as close to a wedding as they could get in those days. After it, Vic felt Marianne tighten down, becoming controlling and increasingly critical. It seemed better than being alone. Alison understood more than she let on.
~
Wade’s grip tightened, tiny punishments meted out, each one so small Alison told herself she was being petty to even notice: he began to make just his side of the bed, arrived home with good beer for himself, claimed he hadn’t noticed she was out of wine, threw out the leftovers when she made dinner and had to leave for a PTA meeting before they ate. “I thought you’d eaten,” he said.
He spent increasing amounts of time on the golf course. “It helps me think,” he said. “I’m networking.” He had no money to share with her. “You’re working, now. You shouldn’t need it.”
Over and over, she brought herself back to that afternoon in his mother’s den, when she first really looked in those gray-green eyes and saw, through them, Wade, unguarded, as though she could see his very core. He’d been beautiful. Too good for her. Yet here she was, still. In this family they’d made. For this she would go to the ends of the earth. Or of herself.
This love pulled against the primal draw towards Jimmy and Mary. The addition of Vic to this pull was almost irresistible. She felt at war within, and without a clue as to how to broker a peace agreement between these parts of herself. She found more time for all of them, even though her hours at the gallery increased so much that Olivia asked her to become full-time gallery manager.
“I don’t know,” Alison said.
“I need the help. I’m not getting any younger.” Olivia paused. “And neither are you. Your children are nearly grown—past time you had good work for yourself.”
Alison blushed. She needed the money. She wanted the job. “I’d love it,” she said. The thing is,” she paused.
“I know you need time to see your birth parents. I know they’re far away. We’ll work it out.”
“Yes, then,” Alison said. She saw no need to tell Wade.
Her income there and the money from her art, which was selling increasingly well, were more than enough for her to cover the costs of another trip. She did the math for Wade, of money and time. She never went to girls’ nights out like other wives did. She didn’t spend eight hours on a Saturday golfing. She argued her case. She did not say that she felt as though her whole soul wanted this trip, as though something irreparable might happen if she didn’t heed this calling, to Mary, to Jimmy, to this land and sea she so loved, and, this time, to Vic, too. She did not admit that she also wanted space for herself. Space away from Wade.
“Okay,” he said. “Just go.” He hung his head. “I can see that you think you have to.”
“I’ll make it up to you, Wade.”
~
Mary’s house had come to seem, if not home, then comfortable. They learned to navigate this unmarked terrain. Mary was Mother-Not Mother. The gap of Alison’s childhood lingered, with no way to reclaim it. Whatever arguments they might have had when Alison was a teen would never happen. Whatever tears Mary may have wiped away had long-since dried on their own. Whatever stories Alison might have told her had settled in the well of Alison’s past. Still, Alison felt a need to be near her, this woman who seemed so steady, so kind, who asked about her children, her art, her hopes. Who listened. In the time she had alone with Mary, she felt as though she had finally come home. She thought, sometimes, of Mum. All the hurt she held. She wished Mum had had a mother like this as well.
As Mary slid the plate in front of Alison at breakfast, Alison felt her childhood-self return. Each time they were together, Alison seemed to reach a new age. They joked about it. It felt as though they were rapid cycling through the years since they’d last known each other.
“Meeting Jimmy at noon,” Alison said.
“Do you want me to go with you?”
“I’m fine on my own.” She took a bite of bacon, scanned Mary’s face. “Do you want to go? To see him.”
“No. Maybe one day. I just,” she paused. “Be careful.”
“Mary. I’m forty-four. And I’m going to Inverkiven, where I’ve been going since I was four.” Alison sounded like Tori in a rare, sassy moment.
“Sorry.” They said it at the same time.
“I must be around twelve now,” Alison said. “And I want to do things on my own, and you’re worried I’m not ready, or I’ll get hurt.”
“All of that,” Mary said. “Mostly, I want to keep you safe.”
~
On a bench by the sea, not far from where Alison had first seen him, Jimmy rested, arms along the back railing. She came from behind, settled next to him, pulled from her bag the First Fridays Gallery Crawl brochure, featuring photos of local art from in and around Terra Pines. She’d put sticky notes on the pages with her work.
“What’s this?”
“Some of my work.” She felt like a six-year-old bringing a stick-figure drawing home to her parent, a thing she hadn’t done with Mum and Dad. Report cards, essays with good marks, yes, but never had she come downstairs and shown them the drawings she’d done in her room, never anything she made at university, either.
Jimmy’s thick, rangy eyebrows lifted.
“Very impressive,” he said. “Thank you.”
“Want to walk?” She asked.
“Knees,” he said. They’d both been replaced before he was thirty-five. Rugby. Clearly, they needed doing again.
Into The George, then. They took seats across from each other. Still afraid that he’d run if she asked too much or dug too deeply into emotional terrain, she asked instead about his work.
Eyes bright, he pulled a pen from his breast pocket, asked the server for a napkin, drew a diagram with atoms bouncing, water cooling. He paused, pen in air.
“On the train, on the way to the interview, I had to turn around in my seat to stop thinking about your mum, about you, about the split. I couldn’t look back, to where I’d come from, what I’d done. Had to face forward.”
