“Where are we going?”
“I just have to stop at my house and pick up a present for the baby. I almost forgot. Won’t take a minute.”
The road dipped down towards the sea. I could see the roof and chimney of a house nestled at the tip of an inlet. There were no other houses in sight. I released the seat belt, holding it at the ready.
“Do you like music?” he asked suddenly
“Excuse me?”
We made another turn onto a long driveway. A dozen sheep were penned on the right, and on the left was an empty enclosure.
“I bet you like ABBA. I bet you grew up dancing to their music.”
I can’t tell you how bizarre this conversation sounded. MacKenzie was speaking in such an odd way, tense and jerky. He pulled up in front of the house. I let go of the belt, opened the door, and jumped out of the car. I was on the verge of throwing all civility to the wind and making a run for it, when he leaned over and said, “Does your mother know?”
I gaped.
“That’s the name of the song. ‘Does Your Mother Know?’ I bet you danced to that. Am I right?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
MacKenzie was staring at me.
“Am I right?” he said again. “One of your favourite songs, isn’t it?”
“Where is she?” I asked. “Is she still alive?”
He nodded, looking less crazed. “She’s inside. She asked me to get you.”
The front door of the house opened and four border collies spilled out, bounding over to meet us with tails wagging. A plump woman in dark glasses with bleached-blonde hair came to the doorway. She was wearing jeans and a sweater that sported an image of a border collie on the front. A tartan scarf was wrapped around her lower face as if she were suffering from a toothache. She gave a tentative wave. It was Joan, and I wouldn’t have known her. I was flooded with feelings so tumultuous I could hardly breathe: relief, rapidly followed by anger. Fury, to be precise.
“Let’s go in,” said MacKenzie.
We had to push aside the exuberant dogs, who then peeled off and went to explore some essential thing. Joan retreated inside the house while Duncan ushered me in. I registered a hazy impression of a modern bungalow, white walls and light-coloured furniture, a smell of damp dogs.
Joan was standing with her back to me, looking out of the far
window in a way that reminded me of Lisa staring out at the sea at Tormod’s cottage.
“Hi, Joan,” I said, and she turned around. Now I could see what she had been trying to hide. The scarf had dropped and the left side of her face was swollen and a livid bruise splotched her jaw. Her bottom lip was split.
“I understand you had a car accident.” I knew my voice was thick with sarcasm, barely containing my anger, and she flinched away from it.
“I wasn’t drinking, Chris. I know I wasn’t drinking.”
Duncan was right behind me.
“She was knocked unconscious. She banged up her leg, too. Show her.”
Obediently, Joan rolled up the bottom of her jeans and revealed her shin, which had an angry-looking lump and a long, ugly bruise the colour of ink.
I gave the injury an insultingly brief glance. “You do know that the police are looking for you, don’t you? Your passenger died. You disappeared. Not good choices, Joan, not good.”
We stared at each other in the old familiar way, like two fighters trying to find the right balance so we could parry the next blow. I could see the flash of anger on her face, too. MacKenzie pulled out a dining-room chair and perched on the edge.
“I’ll explain everything in a minute,” said Joan, “but I’m just glad to see you, Chris. I couldn’t believe it when Duncan told me he’d met you on the moor. What a shock. How did they get hold of you?”
“The usual way. Your ID was still in the car and the police found my number as next of kin. I was actually attending a conference in Edinburgh.”
“Really! Then you were quite close. This side of the pond anyway.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, thanks for coming.” She glanced at me timorously. “You must have been worried.” She seemed almost afraid to say that, in case I hadn’t cared.
I didn’t answer. She touched her bruised chin cautiously. “I was lucky.”
Duncan had been watching us with the concentration of a referee. “Tell you what. Why don’t I make us all a nice cuppa? Christine, come and sit at the table.”
He pulled out a second chair with a gallant gesture, which irritated the hell out of me. I was sick of pretending this was all business as usual, a happy reunion between a mother and daughter. However, I couldn’t refuse without being a complete boor. I sat down.
He chuckled. “You must have wondered what was happening when I was driving here. You looked like you thought I was kidnapping you.”
“It did cross my mind.”
“I wasn’t sure how you’d react,” said Joan. “whether you’d come or... send for the police or what. So I told Duncan to offer to show you the village or something like that and then to give you a sort of code so you’d know it was really me he was bringing you to. I thought that song was a good one. Only you and me’d know about that dancing.”
That wasn’t the only reason she’d chosen the ABBA song. She could have used anything, the name of the first hair salon she worked in, where I’d go to wait for her after school; any of the early places we’d lived in together when I was young. She had brought in the song because it was one of the few times we had felt happy together. I’m sure she hoped this would soften me up. Joan was a mistress of manipulation.
Duncan got to his feet and headed for the kitchen.
“I’ll be right back.”
There was a serving opening between kitchen and dining room, and I could see him as he started to make tea. He was alert to everything going on this side of the wall. Joan sat down in one of the easy chairs in front of the fireplace. She was obviously stiff and sore.
“Well, here I am, as requested,” I said. “And you still haven’t told me what happened.”
There was a lively fire burning in the grate, and she said something, but she was addressing the flames.
“I didn’t hear what you said.”
She faced me and her eyes were filling with tears.
“Oh, Chris. I wish I could, but I don’t remember. That’s why I needed you to come.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“Here we go. Warm us up.”
MacKenzie emerged from the kitchen, carrying a large tray with teapot, cups, and a plate of cakes. He put it on the table.
“Chris would probably prefer coffee,” said Joan.
“You should have told me,” said MacKenzie.
“No, no, tea is fine, really.”
There was another weighty silence while he did the tea dispensing. He addressed my mother.
“Shona? Would you like a bannock?”
That answered one question. She was indeed the girl in the photo. Joan gave a little apologetic smile.
“Chris isn’t used to anybody calling me Shona. That used to be my name,” she added.
“Really? Shona MacAulay, I presume, whom I was told not more than an hour ago had run off in the wilderness with a Red Indian, never to be heard from again. You reincarnated as Joan Morris — I take it for reasons that I don’t know of, but which you are surely going to tell me.”
She winced, but she’d also come to the end of her patience. Same old pattern: me being deliberately provocative until she finally lost her temper and we screamed at each other.
She banged her fist on the arm of the chair and set off yelling.
“Cut it out! You just want your pound of fucking flesh don’t you. Well, fuck off. Who needs you, you toffee-nosed little shit? Just fuck off. I’m your mother for Jesus’ sake. I’m your fucking mother, and you just don’t give a toss, do you?”
I’d heard these words many times before so the term “toffee-nosed” wasn’t new to me. However, I was aware that an accent had returned. She must have worked hard to eradicate it. Now she was sounding quite Scottish, long e’s in “shit” for example. I don’t know if I would have jumped in and started retaliating with finely honed insults. I’d like to think I wouldn’t have... that I’d outgrown that phase. However, I never had the opportunity. Her anger was spent as quickly as it had flared up and she dropped into painful sobs, deep and choking, unlike any drunken wailing I’d heard from her before. Duncan ran over to her and took her in his arms. She leaned her head on his chest and he stroked her hair, whispering to her in Gaelic.
My God, he loves her.
I was still sitting at the table with my teacup in my hand, and I felt like Regan and Goneril rolled into one. I got up and went over to her. Tears and mucous were dampening Duncan’s nice jacket and I fished a tissue out of my pocket and stuffed it under her cheek.
“I’m sorry. You’ve obviously had a bad time. I do really want to hear what happened.”
It took her a while to stop crying, and Duncan stayed with her, not looking at me. I knew he was furious with me for acting like such a callous bitch, but who the hell was he to judge anyway? What did he know?
Finally, she quieted down. I couldn’t get over his tenderness.
“All right now?”
“I’m fine.”
She looked terrible, her eyes red and swollen and her cheeks blotchy. Funny thing was, I had never seen her so soft and vulnerable. Probably not since we had danced together.
I made myself useful by bringing over the cup of tea, which she accepted with a shaky smile.
“I just don’t know where to start.”
“As Humpty Dumpty said to Alice, ‘Start at the beginning and go on to the end.’”
For a moment, she glanced at me warily, as if I was making fun of her, something I’d been guilty of more than once before. I helped her out.
“I guess I have to rewrite my résumé about where I came from.”
“What do you mean?” a sharp tone in her voice.
“You always said you were from Down East, but that isn’t true, is it? You were born here on the island of Lewis. You grew up here.”
A small grin. “You could say that’s out East.”
She was not admitting to the outright lies she told me, but I didn’t want to get into that now.
“Why did your family let everybody believe you had died? And I take it you didn’t abscond with an aboriginal Canadian?”
Again tears suddenly flooded her eyes, and I had to wait while she mopped up. Duncan was crouched beside her, and he took her hand.
“Norman MacAulay was a self-righteous son-of-a-bitch, that’s why,” he said.
“It’s such a long and complicated story, Chris, I think I’d better save it for later. Let’s just say they thought I had disgraced them.” She shrugged and I saw the vestiges of that old teenage defiance. “Two can play that game. I got a job as a nanny with the Cohens. You remember them don’t you, Chris? We lived with them until you were four years old. They were very nice. They were in Scotland on holiday and, luckily, they needed a nanny for their wee ones. I just went with them when they returned to Canada.”
“And you never had contact with your family again?”
“I wrote them to say I had decided to settle in Canada.... I said some silly thing about going to live on an Indian reserve. My father wrote back and said that I was dead to him and he never wanted to see me again.”
“What did you do that was so terrible?”
She swallowed some of the tea and shrugged. “As far as he was concerned everything I did was bad. Me, the lost, perpetual sinner.”
I still thought disinheriting your daughter was pretty drastic, but I let it ride for now.
“A woman at the wake, Mary MacNeil, told me you have older brothers. Did they know where you were?”
“Probably. But they and my father were like peas in a pod. I never heard from any of them.”
She almost dropped her cup at this point because another burst of anguished crying tore out of her. This time both Duncan and I soothed her.
“Did you know she was in Canada?” I asked him over her head.
“Yes, I knew. She wrote to me.”
“Why didn’t you tell everybody the truth? How could you go along with such an atrocious lie?”
“I begged him not to tell, Chris. What was the point? At that time, I had no intention of ever returning to the island.” She sat up a bit and gave another wry grin. “I’d show them! I was going to make good, become rich and famous, and then I’d come back. Like Lazarus brought back from the dead.” Then she looked into my eyes, and the depth of sorrow I saw pierced me to the core. “But it never happened. I truly fucked up my life.”
“It’s not too late,” I jumped in.
The look of despair vanished, covered over by a mask of false cheer.
“No, it’s not, is it? Which is why I came back to Lewis. I told you I had been seeing a wonderful therapist, didn’t I?”
I nodded. I wasn’t about to repeat my jeering remarks about psycho-banging.
“Charlene was the one who suggested I had to face my demons and get some closure before I could move on with my life. So here I am.” There was some other expression in her eyes now, more angry than sad. “But as usual, I seem to have fucked up my chances. Oh God! Chris, I need your help like never before.” Her agitation was such that she had to stand up, and she began to pace. “Oh God, oh God.” She swivelled around and stood in front of me. “I was telling the gospel truth when I said just now that I don’t remember what happened in the accident. I didn’t even know there had been a car
crash until Sunday morning when somebody rang Duncan. And people were saying the Canadian woman was the driver... ”
“Weren’t you?”
She clasped her hands, her eyes never leaving my face. “I truly don’t know. I have a big blank in my mind. I remember getting into the car with Sarah, then nothing until I woke up in Duncan’s bed on Saturday morning.”
“I slept in the guest room,” said MacKenzie hastily. As if it mattered to me.
“How did you explain the fact that you were battered and bruised? Surely you had to say something?”
Duncan was about to jump in and answer for her, but he stopped. I knew he was waiting to hear what story she would give first.
“You tell her, Dunc. I hardly remember.”
He scowled at me yet again. “She said she had come over from her B&B in Skye, but her car stalled a ways from here. She decided to walk along the cliffs, slipped, and cracked her head.”