Page 79 of Bonetide

I sigh. I really don’t want to go outside. I want to be inside this cottage with the kettle and the lamp and the hot orange glow of the wood stove.

But the shed door will batter itself to splinters by morning if I don’t close it, and I don’t think I’ll sleep a wink with that racket.

I pull on the wax jacket and my boots and let myself out.

The water in the bay has gone a gunmetal that reflects the cloudy sky, the sunset nowhere to be found. The wind is up, gulls wheeling in the sky just before they turn in for the night, and the bracken is shaking, the fronds creating a rattling sound I find pleasing.

I cross to the shed, the breeze tousling my hair not as cold as I thought it would be; more electric than anything.

The latch has lifted itself, the door is swinging on its hinges, banging soft against the frame in the small gusts that come up off the loch, the same gusts that create waves and the occasional white cap. I push it closed and slide the latch back into the hasp. I jiggle it. It holds.

I look out to the loch, the widest deepest part, taking in the wind and the weather and that’s when I see something.

A woman in the water.

She is well out into the loch, past the mussel beds and where the bay opens up into the main run of the water, and she is swimming. The kind of unhurried steady breaststroke a person does when they have been in cold water a long time and are not in any hurry to get out of it because their body has gone completely numb.

I freeze where I am.

She’s not the same woman I saw in the bay a few nights ago, so there’s that. I told myself she was a gull. I told myself I had been drunk. I told myself a lot of things.

But this is not a trick of the eye, even with the light going down. This is an actual woman in the water.

But what kind of woman would go swimming at dusk in a coming storm?

I don’t know; sounds like something you might do, I say to myself.

I lift my hand, instinctively.

“Hello!”

My voice carries small across the water.

She lifts her hand back.

For half a beat I think she is waving and I am ready to feel ridiculous about thinking any dark and spooky thoughts. She’s clearly a swimmer. Just a swimmer. Highland people are a hardy lot. Some of them do this for sport, the way people in Colorado do polar plunges in the lakes in January.

Then I see what her hand is doing.

She’s not waving.

She’s beckoning.

Her hand is curled toward herself, the way you call a child closer. Slow. Deliberate. Once, twice, a third time.

Come here, she seems to say.

Come into the water.

The breath leaves me.

She has stopped swimming. She’s treading now. She’s far enough out that I can’t see her face clearly because the twilight is blurring it and her hair is dark and wet and clinging to her cheeks.

But I can see her arm and her hand and the deliberate slow motion of the gesture.

Come here.

Then she starts swimming again.