Miss Lettie had looked at Alice with a crookedly furrowed brow.
Alice knew what Miss Lettie suspected, but it was not the stirring of a new life in her belly that had caused her to faint. This was of a much darker nature. A vision had filled Alice’s eyes and clouded everything else. It was unclear, but as soon as she found her feet, she had run to the phone in the hall and called Mum, the one person who would need no context to her question.
As she suspected, Mum had promised to call her back and set to investigating. Miss Lettie brought Alice a cold cloth for her head and brought Coira a tea and biscuit, which she happily accepted. The little girl was currently pawing through a book full of photographs of dogs of the Windsors and smiling at a black-and-white photo of a young Elizabeth II kissing a corgi. Between the uncommunicative nature of Paul’s family and the time difference, Alice would have to wait a full twelve hours to find out what had knocked her to the floor.
The story relayed to her so many hours later started with Mum calling Paul’s mother and sister to find out where he had been staying since he’d returned to Colorado Springs. They had told her to bugger off and hung up. Three times they had told her that, and it was only on the fourth call that they relented. What business of it was hers, they had sneered. “Your darling daughter has gone off and left him. What does she want to do, come crawling back now?” It was only after a series of distinctly Scottish curses that didn’t need threats to bolster them that Paul’s Welsh mother had given Mum an address.
“You think the polis in Glasgow were bad?” Mum had said with disdain. The local sheriff saw no reason to go knocking on a man’s door when he hadn’t done anything wrong and there was no call to believe he was in any danger. Mum had eventually driven to the little basement apartment herself. It was a miserable structure, tucked under a dilapidated cabin, devoid of light and looking more hole than house. He hadn’t answered the door, and Mum had gone to the family upstairs, from whom Paul rented the basement. They saw no cause for worry; he was a homebody, very quiet. But it had become clear that the old woman wasn’t budging, so they had found a key and walked to the rusted metal door to let her in.
Mum strictly refused to describe what she saw in the wretched apartment, but Alice did not need the words. She could see it in her mind’s eye. The kitchen sink overflowed with filthy dishes and bits of rotted food; flies swarmed at the destruction. The refrigerator door hung open; the smell of sour milk hung in the air. The landlords grew immediately panicked and ran upstairs to call 911. Mum had walked on into the apartment, past the shag-carpeted living area furnished with milk crates and a folding chair and into a hallway that reeked of rot. There was no light, and all Mum could see was the faint outline of the water pipes that lined the ceiling. The bathroom stood at the end of the hall, the door slightly open, and Mum had walked on, holding her breath so as not to let the gorge rise within her.
He had been floating in the foul water for days, the doctors later said. Mum had no knowledge of how they determined that; his skin was sucked back from his face, his rust-colored hair the only glimmer of color on his grey and pallid corpse. The walls were covered in symbols that meant nothing to anyone but the wretched figure in the tub. Painted with blood, some were pictures, some were words in a language that didn’t exist as far as Mum could tell. It made no sense. She stood there, bearing witness to the end he had brought on himself, the empty pill bottles lining the floor around him, a cobweb crust of sticky white over his mouth and eyes.
There was no note, no apparent reason for such a tragedy. Alice had listened as Mum talked, her voice stoic and pragmatic. “You should know that it’s the belief on his side that all this was because of you staying back. It’s hogwash, of course. You know that—it’s utter hogwash. There was a demon in that young man that no one could have protected him against; it’s been waiting to come out since he was born to this world, and he lost the fight is all. You don’t listen to the rubbish they’re saying.”
Alice had nodded as though her Mum could see and accepted what it was she had to do. Her daughter needed to say goodbye to her father, she needed to settle his affairs in the States, and she needed to decide her next move. She needed her mum and aunt, and it would take time. Keeping the rent on the flat in Glasgow was more than she could afford to do from the States, and Alice had no earthly idea how long it would take to close out the chapter of her life with Paul. So she said goodbye to the little flat on Bell Street, not far from her childhood home and a long walk to her Many-Greats Grandmum Moira’s grand house. She said goodbye to Miss Lettie and the magical room at the top of the stairs. She packed their things and said goodbye and bought plane tickets to a country she’d sworn she’d never return to. “You’ll be back, love,” Miss Lettie had whispered in her ear as they hugged one last time. Alice had nodded silently. She would, she had no doubt, but her eyes and throat still burned. She would have to start over once again when she returned, and at that moment, the task seemed overwhelming.
Mum called the night before the flight and told her that they had found a note of sorts, not anything that explained but something she felt was meant for Alice nonetheless. “Read it,” said Alice, and Mum had paused, then recited with a hint of the old country in her voice.
“Your hat flew from a trash truck and nearly drove me off the road when I was seventeen, and I’ve known from that moment on that you would be in my life forever. I’m not one to believe in coincidences, and luck is for eejits who play the lottery, but I’m sure that something means for us to be together.”
Despite the reasons to do so, Alice refused to believe that it had been her who had driven Paul to swallow a bottle or two of pills and sink into a bathtub. He had demons, as Mum had noted. Demons that chased him his whole life through; demons that drove his anger and his negligence; demons that made his thoughts wander; and demons that had nothing to do with Alice. For all her myriad sins, Alice could not take this one upon herself. She had seen it so many years ago on High Street. She hadn’t known what it meant: a flash of a symbol drawn in blood on a tiled wall, a wisp of Coira’s raven-fire hair, the feel of the Scottish rain on her face, and the familiar pulse in her left wrist. Paths did not always make sense when they revealed themselves, but now it was as clear as day.
Alice closed her eyes as Coira napped in the stiff airplane seat. She tried to see something of her child’s fate, but nothing came to her except images of Arthur. His sweet face lost so long ago in childhood. She heard his wheezing breath and felt the child’s softness of his hand. She had never been skilled in seeing what lay ahead for Coira; she only dreamed it was a life free from the pain of knowing. It was a nice dream, and she said a silent prayer to whomever might listen that this time around she be granted clemency from suffering, that she be allowed the joy that threatened to be denied. Alice reached a hand out and ran it through Coira’s curls. With Scotland increasingly far away, she said a soft farewell.
CATHERINE FRASER HAD NOT slept for three nights. On the night of the last dream, she dreamt she was walking the steep cliffs that overlooked the rocky shore some distance from here. In her dream, she was older than her present youth; she was a young woman, and her dark hair tinged with fire was long and wrapped around her as a fierce wind blew up from the sea. She was standing on a cliff overhanging a small fishing village; she could see weathered wooden boats with cloth sails made of muslin and worn rope docked at the port and bobbing up and down in the rough sea. Some distance out, a larger vessel sat, seemingly abandoned, no life apparent and a dark gloom overhanging its presence. Catherine could smell the sickly sweet rot emanating from the ship; from the town, a sense of quietly controlled panic ebbed and flowed with the rough water.
As she stood on the cliff, she began to see a wee cabin, no more than two rooms, with a rough wooden fence surrounding it and a path laid out in rough, flat stone leading to its arched door. Smoke trickled from a chimney, and the air smelled of sage and bilberry root. In her dream, Catherine walked down the pat
h and opened the arched door. She was not afraid; she belonged here. Sitting at the table was a woman of unspeakable beauty with olive skin and raven hair. She looked up from her work and locked her dark eyes on Catherine; she smiled and ushered her in. Catherine felt a rush of warmth and was struck by the realization that she was dreaming—and suddenly very afraid to wake up. She crossed to the woman, who had a stack of small squares of muslin cloth in front of her. As Catherine watched, she took a drop of indigo dye from a glass bottle, and a single drop permeated the layers of cloth.
In this moment, Catherine understood that while this was a dream, it was entirely real, and as the drop of indigo dye stained layer after layer, she saw flashes of the realities that lay stacked against each other. In this moment, Catherine knew that everything was happening all at once, all at the same time, and that she was a child and an old woman simultaneously. The raven-haired woman was a whisper of smoke in the wind and flesh and blood before her. The fishing village was thriving and alive and devastated by illness and death in the same moment. She understood that there was no time, no death, and no end. She felt the vibration of the ley lines deep beneath the earth and the whisper of an ancient creature that long ago ceased to be recognizable to mortal eyes. Catherine breathed this in and opened her mouth in release, the newfound certainty releasing itself in a roar that shook the seaside cliffs and sent spikes of rocks plummeting to the water below.
Catherine woke with a start, the details of the dream already fading. Her mother ran in, startled by the little girl’s screaming over what had to be a nightmare. Catherine immediately began to write down the passage of the dream, but the edges were already foggy; she forgot the color of the woman’s hair and what the drop of indigo dye meant. She tried to draw the ship abandoned out at sea and strained to remember why it mattered. The only thing that stuck—what she had been doodling in her notebook for the last three days—was a strange symbol that was seemingly nothing: two jagged sets of intersecting lines creating a strange sort of unity.
The little girl drew and wrote and muttered to herself for three days while her Mum and Dad looked on. Both were medical doctors and knew that before much longer, she would need to go to the hospital. But on the third day, just as her family was preparing for the worst, Catherine closed her eyes and dropped into a dreamless sleep. Somewhere, deep in the layers of thin muslin squares, the raven-haired woman smiled to herself, and the Cailleach in her cave slumbered on.
COIRA WAS ARRANGING HER plush animals in Alice’s old bedroom. Alice had moved into Aunt Polly’s recently vacated room, empty for a bit now that she had moved in with her new gentleman friend in town. Mum had rolled her eyes and held her tongue, but her silence on the subject spoke volumes.
Alice had told Coira before they left Scotland what had happened to her father, and the little girl had hardly reacted. She had shrugged and gone back to her book of dogs of the Windsors. Alice had chalked it up to shock and hadn’t pressed the girl. Mum watched her with her brow furrowed.
“She does understand, doesn’t she?” Mum had asked cautiously.
“I assume so,” Alice answered irritably. “I don’t know another way to tell her. She knows what ‘dead’ is. I think she’s just too young to really put it all together.”
Mum said that was hogwash. She poured tea and reminded Alice that she’d been no bigger when her father had died, and she had known full well what had happened.
“You sat out back of your grandmum’s cottage and brought the rain for three straight days. You didn’t speak a word. The sky went black and the neighbors thought the world had gone mad,” Mum said as she stared at the little girl in the next room talking softly to her stuffed bear.
“There’s simply no way you can say I brought the rain, in Scotland nonetheless,” Alice grumbled. She wasn’t in the mood for this talk; her head was swimming with the stack of unpaid bills and paperwork from the Air Force that she had to deal with.
“I know what I know,” Mum said firmly. “But that one hasn’t reacted at all, for all I can see. It’s not natural.”
Alice stirred her tea and didn’t answer. She didn’t remember much of her father, just flashes of images and the smell of cinnamon. She remembered his worn work boots and riding on his shoulders as they marched down High Street. It was the clearest memory she held of him. He had balanced her on his shoulder, and they had walked to the sweet shop, where he had bought her a little cake. The cake with a little swirl of honey on top was clear as day in her mind, but her father’s face, the sound of his voice, were no more substantial than a ghost. She remembered that day in the courtyard, however. She had watched the black clouds roll in from the hills, and when the rain started to fall, she had welcomed it. She remembered a feeling that her lungs were being crushed and her head would crack in two like the fairy story about the egg that fell off the wall. She knew that Coira understood what “dead” was, and she would react when she needed to and not before.
The funeral was to be held on Saturday. Paul’s body had been cremated per his mother’s request, and given the state of it, Alice could hardly object. It had been done before she arrived in Colorado Springs, so all Alice and Coira could say goodbye to was the grey ceramic jar that held his ashes. Mum had been incensed and grumbled that they could have at least waited a few days so his wife and daughter could say a proper goodbye. For her part, Alice was entirely numb to the decision. She had seen his face floating in the tub in the wretched basement apartment in her mind’s eye. She had seen it all those years ago on the lane in Glasgow. She had no desire to see it again. As for Coira, there was no reason that Alice could see to make her last vision of her father so nightmarish. No, the grey ceramic jar was fine. Coira had reached out and run a small finger down the side. Paul’s mother had sobbed, and his sister sat in a corner staring blankly. Alice and Coira had left dry-eyed, Alice feeling as though her head was detached from her body and floating on a string somewhere up above her physical form.
Alice waded through the paperwork, unraveling the mystery of who Paul had really been. She learned that he had not been transferred to a desk job as he had told her; rather, Paul had been given a medical discharge for psychiatric issues. She discovered a whole trail of incidents that went back far from the outburst on the base that she had learned about from the other wives. She learned that Paul had spent a significant amount of time covering up his life from her and from anyone else who might have cared to look. Alice read files that described fights he had gotten into on base, along with an incident where he had peed himself as he sat in the command office and then walked blankly through the compound until he had been taken to the medical unit. She learned that he had been taking painkillers, enough for the Air Force to list “persistent drug use” under the reasons for his discharge. Alice learned that nearly everything he had told her about his life on base was fabricated or glossed over in such a way that it no longer resembled the truth.
On the day of the funeral, Alice felt drained to the bone. She was angry at Paul for all the lies; she was angry she could never yell it to his face now; she was angry because he was gone and she was left with all the mess—which had been the history with him all along, Alice thought bitterly. Mum and Aunt Polly dressed Coira in a neat little dark blue dress with white trim. She twirled in the fancy clothes as though going to a party. She clutched her plush bear and stood expectantly by the door.
“You do understand where it is we’re going, don’t you?” Mum had asked her gently.
The little girl nodded gravely and did not speak a word.
Alice wore a smart black suit that she had made herself back at Miss Lettie’s. It was another in her Jackie O series of clothes that she believed gave her invisible strength, like armor. When she had sewn it, she had envisioned wearing it to dinners and perhaps job interviews, never her husband’s funeral. She methodically brushed her raven hair back and pinned it up in a thick coil at the base of her neck. She did not apply any makeup; her face was pale and nothing would
hide the bags under her eyes. The four of them climbed into the car and drove to the graveyard on the edge of town. On his mother’s insistence, Paul was to be interred in his family’s plot, and Alice had no mind to object. She didn’t care where his ashes lay. She hated them right now; they were full of lies and deceit, and they had used her and tricked her and played her for a fool.
As they stood in a small semicircle around the gravesite, the pastor read Bible passages and talked about a better place and the light of the lord. Paul’s mother had wanted a church ceremony but had been denied by the priest; suicide had knocked Paul out of the kingdom of heaven as far as he was concerned. This had been one of many accusations that had been thrown at Alice leading to this day. The way Paul’s mother and sister told it, if he’d never married her then he wouldn’t have done this dreadful thing, and so not only had Alice killed Paul, she’d denied him everlasting life in the kingdom of heaven. Alice had rolled her eyes and kept her tongue. She didn’t believe in heaven—or hell either, for that matter. One of the few things she did know with certainty about Paul was that neither did he. He may have been raised a Catholic, but he had left it behind as soon as he could.
So they had to settle for a pastor from the local Congregational church who had never met Paul and had learned of him from a written description submitted by his mother and a photograph taken by the Air Force, his uniform clean and crisp, staring straight ahead, his eyes blank. Had he been lying then? Alice thought bitterly as the pastor droned on and on about the great forgiving lord calling home his flock. Had the few letters he had sent from Vietnam been a lie too? Paul had never talked about his time there except to tell Alice one singular story.
Hag Page 13
