Page 5 of Bonetide

The drawing is quite good, if I do say so myself, considering he’s not a flower. I have caught the stillness of him, the way he was watching me, his whole posture on edge. A chill runs through me, for he reminds me a bit of a predator about to pounce.

But there’s something off about the figure on the page and it takes me way too long to realize what it is.

I’ve drawn him exactly as I saw him.

And while I remember the feel of his eyes, I can’t, for the life of me, remember his face.

Chapter

Two

Iwake up sore.

The good news is that I expected to wake up sore. Yesterday was the kind of day that pays interest, and my body has been keeping accounts on me for the last three years, if not more. The bad news is that I did not expect to wake up sore and halfway across the bed with all my limbs in different time zones, because the dream I was having involved a man I haven’t met treading water and looking up at me, and apparently that was enough to spread me out like I was waiting to get railed by a ghost.

Christ, I think I need to get laid. It’s been way too long. Not only had I not slept with anyone since the divorce, we’d stopped having sex at least a year before I found out Ryan was cheating on me. You’d think that would have been a sign…

I make my mind stop thinking about Ryan—it’s taken time to perfect this—and lie there for a minute. The light coming through the bedroom window is the soft yellow-gold of a Scottish morning that is going to be lovely until the next storm rolls in off the Atlantic, which the weather app on my phone tells me is sometime around dinner time. Outside, gulls are arguing somewhere over the bay, their cries loud and piercing. The cottage has gone the kind of quiet that has its own texture, all peat smoke and old stone, with the low constant shush of water against the rocks not far below.

I sit up the way you sit up when you have fibromyalgia and you’ve slept wrong. Slowly, respectfully—just in case you anger the pain gods—and with a brief internal renegotiation of what the day is going to ask of me. My hips are stiff. My hands are stiff. My jaw, for some reason, is also stiff (was I giving blow jobs in my dreams?). I manage to do some stretches my physical therapist taught me when I was twenty-seven and brand-new to the diagnosis, and I think, as I do every morning, that I should be more grateful to him and curse him a little less. Still, the curses come.

The pill organizer is on the kitchen shelf where I left it. Duloxetine. Low-dose amitriptyline left over from last week’s bad nights. The vitamin D my doctor made me promise to take when I told her I was moving to a country that has, in her words, three weeks of summer if you’re lucky (jokes on her, I have seen the sun at least twice since I’ve been here). The pills go down with a glass of water from the kitchen tap, which tastes faintly of iron and stone, and I cinch the heating pad around my shoulders, feeling like a pack mule when I do so.

The kettle goes on. The wood-burning stove is cold, the embers from last night gone to ash, and I carefully crouch and clear it and lay new kindling and strike a long match. This ritual of lighting it, combined with the comforting smell of the smoke, finds the place behind my sternum that has been holding tight for four days and loosens it, just a little. I open the back door for a moment to let the air in. The bay is silver and very calm, the heather on the slope across the loch is purple as a bruise in the early light, and a small swarm of midges find me almost immediately, so I shut the door again.

I contemplate locking the door for a moment but in the light of day, it seems silly. It’s just a perfectly ordinary morning on the rocky south shore of a sea-loch in Wester Ross, and the only reason it feels like anything else is that I’m still half-thinking about a man I’ll probably never see again.

Who I drew last night.

Whose face I can’t remember; whose gaze I can still feel.

I push that out of my head, put a slice of bread in the toaster, and drink my coffee standing up at the window, watching the water, mesmerized by the way the light glints on it. I wrack my brain for what that phenomenon is called. By the time the toaster pops, making me jump out of my skin, I’ve decided on the very scientific term, “sun-sparkles.”

The slow mornings here are by far more enjoyable than the mornings I had at Andrew and Maddie’s place where I always felt like I was in the way, because, I mean I was. Here, I can take my time and luxuriate for as long as I want.

Which is part of the problem because it’s day five now, and I’ve been pretending that this has been a vacation when really it’s the start of the rest of my life, which means I need to get to work, which means I need to create an area in the cottage for me to work, which means I’ve got some sorting to do as my life starts to amalgamate with Effie’s.

Which means finally acknowledging the small wooden door under the stairs.

It’s tucked into the corner of the sitting room beside the fireplace, painted the same deep cream as the wall, set so flush you wouldn’t notice it unless you were looking. The hinges have been painted over more than once until it looks like caterpillars are trying to push through from the other side.

I walk over to it and do nothing but stare for a moment. There is something about hidden doors and small places in old buildings that give me the heebie jeebies. I’m sure there’s nothing inside except for brooms or something but all I can imagine are spiders and other creepy crawlies. For a plant girl, I’ve got an irrational dislike of bugs.

Still, I can’t make this my own place until I know every inch. I sigh and stare at it some more. The latch is iron, looped through a black iron eye, and it’s old enough that opening it requires a small negotiation rather than a turn of the wrist. I work the loop free with my fingertips, and the door swings inward with a long low creak that I feel in my teeth. The smell that comes out is a mixture of camphor and dust and old wool and the particular dry-sweet note of paper that has been sitting in the dark for a long time. What was that smell called again? Lignin?

I take the flashlight from the drawer by the kitchen door, afraid for a moment when I turn my back to the darkness, then turn it on, hoping to catch any menacing insects in the act.

The space inside is the height of my shoulder, sloping down with the line of the stairs, and there’s just enough room to crouch in. The floorboards are bare and cool. A pair of old rubber boots lean against one wall like they’ve been waiting for someone. A broken tea set. A folded piece of oilcloth. A spool of grey twine, mostly unwound. Yes, some brooms too. And in the back, against the lowest part of the slope, under a sheet that has gone yellow at the edges, the shape the size of a steamer trunk.

I duck warily, careful not to get my hair caught in any cobwebs, then get my hands under the handles. The weight surprises me and I have to brace my shoulder against the inside of the doorway and lean back into my hips, and even then, the trunk only comes out in slow stages, dragging on the boards. By the time I’ve got it through the doorway and into the sitting room, my hands are shaking the way they do when I’ve asked too much of them, and I have to sit down for a minute with my back against the armchair to wait for my body to stop yelling at me.

I take in the chest. The brass hardware on the trunk has gone green and the leather straps are cracked. There’s a label tied to the lock with kitchen twine that says, in neat handwriting, Iris.

Seeing my name where it’s not expected is jarring and a tiny thrill runs through me. I don’t know when Effie would have done this—before she went to the hospital or back when she decided this cottage was to be mine—but it’s been waiting for me.

I move the trunk into the kitchen because the kitchen has the best light. I make a fresh cup of tea, then pull a chair up and open the lid.

The hinges sigh. The smell is stronger up close, camphor and the chalky scent of paper that’s been pressed against itself for years. The first thing I see is paper in many forms. Letters tied in bundles with kitchen twine bows, a romantic look of a bygone era. Notebooks, dozens of them, some with cracked oilcloth covers, some leather, some plain spiral-bound pads from the seventies. Loose sketches on heavier paper. Pressed flowers between sheets of waxed paper, the ghost of their color still showing through. A small wooden box that rattles when I lift it. And, lying flat on top of everything, a leather-bound sketchbook.