Or you, James thinks. Sometimes he lurches up in the dark, drenched in sweat after watching her catch flame and burn like paper, other times his favorite dreams of her rouse him awake with wet, sticky briefs.
“That’s what this cottage feels like. Not imaginary, not made up. I can envision it as clearly as Jessie’s apartment, so it doesn’t make sense that it burned down. How can I see something that’s not there?”
“Maybe ...” He pauses and rethinks what he wants to say. “Maybe it has to do with what you are.”
As soon as the words come out, he knows he made an asshole mistake.
Nelle’s nostrils flare. “WhatI am?”
He watches the road, thankful to have a reason not to look at her. “The way you came into this world.” Desperate to clarify, he pulls the journal from his back pocket, the pen-scarred pages falling open. “I just meant that maybethisis connected to you seeing the cottage from Quill’s memory. Because he created you.”
“Oh.” She stares glumly. “Maybe.”
“But if your vision does have something to do with that,” James adds, “it only makes it more meaningful.”
Nelle sits up straighter. James reaches across the console for her hand when he realizes that she’s perking up because they are here. He slows as they roll through town. He wants Nelle to ease into this, yes, but he is also scared of what they will find at Wallace Quill’s childhood address.
Scourie is nothing to boast about. A stone house here and there. A filling station. A general store. A small police station. The twisty road climbs back up into the hills, lined with more houses and dark-green backyards. James studies the landscape as they ascend, searching for a lonesome chimney, a heavy stone pulling his stomach down, down, down.
Icy air cups the nape of Nelle’s neck, so she unties her hair. It cascades over her shoulders but does little to protect against the biting wind. Neither does the red coat she pulled on when she stepped out of the car.
Though maybe she’s not cold. Maybe all the blood has just left her body.
Terry was right. Only a chimney rises from the dead grass. Like a boring brick tree.
Nelle sags. “This is so fucking pointless.”
“Hey now.” James brushes his thumb over her knuckles. “Think about everywhere we’ve gone. Everything we’ve done. Absolutely no part ofthis,” he stretches his arms out to the hills, now bluish in the evening shadows, “could ever be pointless.”
She can’t help but love his buoyant attitude, even as she sinks inside.
Down the hill, behind what was once the cottage, a small pond glimmers like an amethyst. No bigger than a pool, but to Quill and his little brother, it must have felt like a great lake. Stagnant water full of weeds and grass. Nelle imagines it during the winter, ice-skate lines crisscrossed over it like a toddler’s scribbles.
And buried beneath years of silt, Sam’s decomposed skeleton.
Nelle runs a hand through her hair and stares at the chimney one last time, as if the house might materialize from its decimated past.
“C’mon,” she says. “Let’s go home.”
James shakes the fountain pen, writes in the journal, and Nelle feels that all too familiar release in her limbs. She climbs into the car and buckles her seat belt, sinking back into the headrest.Let’s go home, she said. But where is home? Lincoln never was. New York doesn’t feel like it yet. Scotland sure as hell isn’t.
So home is the road, she supposes. Why hasn’t the car started?
She finds James through the window, tall in his heather gray sweatshirt and jeans, hands in his back pockets, talking to an old woman at the edge of the property. Nelle can only see her back. Her hair is tied in a waist-length braid, white wisps spiraling around herears. She wears a long wool cardigan, a cotton dress printed with flowers peeking out underneath.
Nelle presses her nose to the glass, waiting for James to let her out. Waiting and waiting for him to remember that she can’t leave until he writes for her. One minute stretches into an irritating two. Then the woman shifts on her feeble legs, revealing her face, and Nelle forgets her irritation.
Set into the woman’s wrinkled face are Quill’s black eyes.
The rail-thin woman in a baggy cardigan seemed to appear from nowhere, little embroidered flowers scattered across her cotton dress like beads of water. James grew so accustomed to people ignoring each other in New York, such a natural fit for his social anxiety, that an approaching stranger feels wrong now.
“Hi,” he says, to be polite.
She surveys the dead plot, snow-white wisps curling around her face. Despite her age—she must be eighty, pushing ninety—there is a youthfulness to her.
“Do you know whose house this is?” she asks.
“Wallace Quill, I believe.”
