Page 80 of Bonetide

Toward me.

The same unhurried, steady stroke. She’s not in a panic, she’s not in a hurry, but she is closing the distance, and she’s not closing it the way a friendly swimmer angles toward shore to wave hello.

She is coming straight at me. Across the open water. From a long way out.

As if to get on shore and tell me something important.

As if to wrap her hands around my ankles and drag me under.

Oh hell no.

I don’t move; I can’t move. I can only stare.

She’s fifty meters out now. Maybe less. The dusk is thickening, but I can see her better. Her shoulders are bare; her hair plastered to the sides of her face. I still can’t quite see her features and nor do I want to at this point.

The oar.

There’s an oar leaning against the side of the shed. It belongs to the small boat below that’s half on the rocks, half in the grass.

I take three steps backward toward the shed. My hand finds the oar without me having to look for it. I lift it—it’s heavy—holding it across my body the way I have seen women in films hold improvised weapons, which is not a way I have ever held anything in my life except when I went to Disneyland and picked up a life-sized version of Thor’s hammer.

I don’t know what the hell is going to happen, but if she comes out of the water, if she walks up the rocks of my spit, I’m going to swing this fucking oar at her. I’m ready. Somehow, I’m prepared. I’m standing at the edge of a Highland Bay with an oar in my hands, ready to hit a woman with it, and the decision feels oddly rational instead of violent, which should worry me.

But right now, I’m only worried about her.

She’s forty meters out.

Thirty.

Still swimming, still coming, and ugh her face—I don’t want to see her face. Does she even have a face? Are her features just a blur?

I plant my feet on the rocks. I lift the oar a little higher.

And then…

She turns.

She turns in the water, smooth, without breaking her stroke, and no longer swimming toward me. She is swimming along the shore. Parallel to it. Headed southeast. Toward the bend of the loch where the coast curves around toward Torridon Village. The same unhurried steady stroke, only now her body is laid out long and pale along the surface of the loch, and her dark hair is fanning out behind her in the dimming light. She moves along my shoreline the way a person moves along a hallway, looking for a specific door.

I watch her.

I do not put the oar down.

She swims for what feels like a long time. The dusk is going dark now, the loch is going darker with it. She is a pale shape moving along the water, getting smaller, until she rounds the bend toward the village and is gone behind the curve of the coast.

The loch is empty.

I stand on the rocks with the oar across my body, and the wind in my hair, and the cold reaching my boots, and I don’t move for a while.

A swimmer.

It was just a fucking swimmer.

I say it out loud to myself, into the wind that takes the words off the rocks and away. “It was a swimmer. A weirdo, but a swimmer. People swim. People swim in cold water. People are weird. She wanted me to come in the water and join in her weirdness.”

The wind agrees with none of this.

But I’m going to choose the version of this that lets me go back inside with peace of mind.