Closer

Justine’s parents had been fighting for months when her father left for Alaska. They always argued in the bedroom, door closed, but the sound traveled through the cracks. Her father spent too much time at work. Her mother was distant, disinterested. When Justine’s father took the position in Anchorage, her mother refused to see him off at the airport. Justine had to watch him pass through security and disappear into the terminal alone. She watched planes take off from the window, unsure of which one was his. She tried to remember which way was west.

He sent her letters while he was gone. Letters that described the aurora borealis spread across the sky, icicles growing into elaborate shapes overnight, and how to extract clear water from bark using a Swiss Army knife. Letters with waxy, fireweed leaves pressed between the pages. And bark rubbings of Alaska Cedars. Trees that, he told her, Northwest Coast Indians would carve into canoes. Wood durable enough to take to sea. He sent her pictures taken underwater, of schools of fish in a twister formation. Of a woman in scuba gear, posing, suspended, next to a beluga whale, a dark braid sticking from the back of her head like a tail. Kara, the picture was captioned. He explained that she had grown up in Southern Belgium, was only thirty-three, but had already traveled to twenty-two countries and helped discover a deep-sea fish that lit up like a rainbow when mating. The envelopes were never addressed to her mother, so Justine hid them. The last envelope, the first one since he decided to stay in Alaska, simply contained a CD, whale songs scrawled in pen across its case. Justine had slipped it into her backpack, unopened.

Calum and her mother return from their drive late in the afternoon, an hour before the sun sets unseen behind the gray clouds. Her mother has pockets full of shale and chalky quartzite that she places on the mantelpiece. “You missed out,” she says. That night, in Calum’s kitchen, the two pull out old photographs from her mother’s semester abroad and lay them across the table, and when that’s covered, across the hardwood floor. Forming a breadcrumb trail. Forming a story. Justine hovers in the corners of the room and watches over their shoulders. She recognizes places from her mother’s slides. The mountain. The beach. The monument. But these photos are taken from different angles, with different focuses. They extend the pictures where her mother’s slides cut off. Her mother took pictures of landscapes, the people blurred, but Calum favored details. A jellyfish caught among the rocks like a drop of water. Foam circling a pint of beer. The two of them, arms around shoulders, freckly and holding rock picks. A tight shot of her mother’s face, smiling, eyes looking at something past the camera lens, dark red mud smeared across her right cheekbone. When they leave the room, Justine kneels on the floor and combs through the photos, looking for familiar blemishes on her mother’s face, following the trail of fingerprint smudges around their edges.

 

For the next two days, a hard rain pelts the house. It drums on the windows, drowns the flowerbeds at the end of the driveway. Calum leaves for work before Justine wakes up, and she and her mother spend the day inside, scouring the bookshelves, working their way through Calum’s tea collection. Justine finds a book on sea life and learns that sound moves differently underwater, five times faster than on land. She learns that a whale song can travel for three miles in the ocean. Calum returns in the evening with mud-stained pants and hair slicked down by rain. On the second day, he comes home with news. He has convinced his boss to give Justine’s mother a part-time, temp job assisting him with field work.

“Thank you,” she says. She squeezes his arm and volunteers to make dinner. Justine notices that her mother’s voice is different when Calum is home. Her accent shifts. About to aboot. Thank you to thenk you.

The next day, her mother goes to work with Calum. She wants Justine up and out of the house, exploring on her own, so Calum asks an Isle boy named Thomas to show her around Kyleakin, the nearest town on the island. Thomas meets Justine at the post office. He’s seventeen, tall and long-limbed, with dark hair cropped short enough for her to see the shape of his skull. He has an accent that’s guttural, difficult to understand. Justine hopes he’ll be able to take her to the Pier Coffee House, or maybe to the mainland, where she can buy a new pair of sneakers or boots. Instead, they pass the time walking the docks. After lunch, Thomas takes her to a pub, small and smelling of fish and beer. He pays with pound coins, and the bartender slides her short glasses filled with liquid that’s amber in the light, that burns her throat and the back of her nose as it goes down. She throws up over a wall into a patch of whitlow grass on her walk home.

After that, she explores alone. Her mother and Calum leave to do field work in the morning, and she walks into Kyleakin. She walks from one end of town to the other, counting the houses. She buys fish and chips from a restaurant and nods to fishermen who come into dock at nine with nets full of squirming, silvery fish. In the post office, she thinks about calling her father, but realizes that a five minute call would cost all the pound coins her mother has given her. A week passes in this way. She examines palm trees on street corners. Palm trees whose seeds, Calum explained, traveled from the Gulf Coast to Scotland in the North Atlantic current. She walks in the rain, cocooned in rain gear, and lies on the top of crags, waiting for the weather to change, wondering what Calum would think if he saw her, eyelashes wet and brown, Scottish mud seeping into pours of her skin. Maybe she would pass as her mother, decades younger, still a girl.

On the other side of the island, her mother buys her an old Nikon camera. Justine already has a digital camera, but her mother says they aren’t the same. Digital cameras are all about efficiency, while with a film camera you have to take your time, get to know your subject. The next morning, Justine feels brave and uses her change to take a bus up the coast. She gets off when the barren land, spotted with sheep, turns to forests. She’s packed her camera, an egg sandwich, and her nature guide. It feels good to be among trees again, walking through clovers, through carpets of pine needles. In the forest, distances are contained rather than open and never-ending like the ocean. She walks until the trees are thick and close together, and then she climbs. Bark against palm. Soft space behind the knee hooked around branch. Using muscles that she hasn’t exercised in weeks. Her fingers slip on the weblike moss, but she likes the challenge. Justine climbs and climbs until the branches are thin and young and won’t support her weight, and then the sun breaks through the clouds for the first time, and she leans her face against the trunk. Warming it. Feeling for the movement of sap underneath. Willing the movement of water up, up through its pores.

 

They have been in Scotland for two weeks. Now Justine’s mother and Calum both return in the evening with muddy pants, rock dust on their shirts. Justine’s mother wears her hair up, and over dinner they talk about the new fossils shipped to the Staffin museum, the quartz uncovered on the southern shore. Her face looks shiny and young. Justine hears that lilt in her voice and wonders if already her mother’s palate is changing, adjusting to Scotland. Justine goes to bed early at night, not because she’s tired, but because she doesn’t know what to say around Calum and her mother, who talk about nothing but their adventures in college, about work and stone and plates shifting and grinding, slowly.

“The separation of Pangaea is what defines our continents,” Calum murmurs as he flips through topographical maps and rubbings of fossils.

Justine hears her mother reply softly, “I don’t think we’re going to make it.”

“Why?” asks Calum. He’s lit a fire, tossed on pine logs that fill the house with a smell like earth and syrup. It catches in Justine’s throat as she breathes. She’s in her bed, but awake, watching the light of the fire cast shadows against the quilt.

“We haven’t held hands in two years,” her mother says, “We can’t sleep in the same bed, can’t sleep when we feel each other there. It’s like living with a stranger. He has some theory about the whales’ songs changing, but I really don’t think he’s right. He’s always following theories, always working. And I can’t care anymore. It’s like all my care has dried up.”

Behind the quilt, Justine turns in her bed, pulls the covers up over her head. The smoke coats the inside of her throat and her lungs, and she wishes that the wind would blow stronger, working its way between the boards and pulling the house apart. She presses the blanket to her ears, and their voices fade. She hears laughter. Calum hums.

 

The next day, Justine leaves the coast, follows a one-lane road behind town, where sheep chew on grass next to the pavement. As she passes them, they bleat and scatter on black hooves. She uses the last of her film taking a photo of a four-wheeler driven by a bearded farmer, a sheep dog leaning against his back. The dog is tense, hair slicked, tongue red and flapping. Dust rises in plumes around the wheels, and the farmer nods. Speaks in Gaelic: “Mattiva.” Good morning. Then, he’s gone and everything is quiet again. Quiet but not quiet. The wind doesn’t stop.

She walks until the road arcs back to the ocean. Fifty yards away, the coast slopes up into cliff, and she walks toward it. Approaches it hesitantly. It’s maybe two hundred feet high, casting a dark gray shadow across the waves. Burnt-yellow grass covers this side of its face, and she grabs handfuls of it, using the strength of its roots to crawl-climb up. Her fingers close around empty snail shells, around an otter rib embedded in the soil. Pieces the ocean spit back onto land.

The grass turns to stone, and she tests it with the palm of her hand, feeling for weak points. But the stone, gray, flecked with white, its grain running parallel to the sea, feels solid. She moves upward, placing her weight on her feet, feeling through the soles of her sneakers for the easy holds. Then, she looks down. She sees the water spreading out beneath her, pushing a line of foam, crashing against the lower cliff. A black-backed gull dives below her. The knuckles on her left hand shake, slip. She feels sick and retreats.

Justine walks to the coast every day after that, searching for sea glass or smooth stones in the shallows until she summons the courage to try the cliff again. Each time she promises herself she’ll go farther. To the leafless shrub on the outcrop. To the brown markings that look like a face. But whenever she sees the sea spinning beneath her and imagines the fall, imagines sharp rocks hidden by sea foam and jellyfish lurking in the protected tide pools, she turns back.

One day, three weeks after she and her mother moved to Scotland, walking through the sheep fields to the coast, she hears an engine. She turns and sees Calum, alone in his car, on the main road. He pulls over, and Justine walks to the window.

“Where’s my mom?” Justine asks.

“She’s back at the museum, cataloging samples we found on the west coast. I thought I’d give her some space and pick up lunch at the house.

Justine rubs her toe against the blacktop. Calum asks her if she needs a ride.

“It’s fine. I’m just walking to the coast.”

“Oh, that’s okay. I’ll take you.”

Justine climbs in, and Calum shifts into first gear. As he drives, Justine adjusts the passenger seat. She pulls it forward, lowers the headrest. Her mother’s dried boot prints are on the mat, the smell of her peach body wash in the fabric of the seat. When they reach the dirt path that leads to the cliff, Justine points and Calum pulls over. She quickly readjusts the seat, and they get out. Calum follows her to the narrow, gray strip of beach, and Justine wonders if now he’ll leave her, but he matches her pace as she makes her way to the cliff.

“Do you walk to the coast often?” Calum asks.

“I like to come here and climb.”

She sees Calum eye her knuckles, her palms. They’ve grown rough, callused over the past few weeks.

When she reaches the cliffs, he says, “Show me.” She hesitates, then scrambles up the bank. When she hears his footsteps behind her, she continues. The path is familiar to her, and she’s confident. She uses her entire body to climb, swinging her hips, hooking her knees around holds. She stops where she usually does, muscles burning, eight yards beyond where the grass ends. As she clings to the slope, Calum scrambles up beside her.

“You’ve got good rhythm,” he says as he jams his fingers into a crevice she hadn’t noticed before. She sees a small, half-moon scar between his first and second knuckles.

Justine leans her cheek against the rock. It’s cold, damp, and she has the sudden, odd desire to lick it. She imagines it tasting bitter, of salt. She imagines rolling that taste around on her tongue like a marble.

“Let’s climb higher,” Calum says.

He takes the lead this time. Justine tries to follow, watching the way he uses his surroundings. A fist around a branch. A heel lodged in a crack. Holds that she’d never find on her own.

“How’d you learn how to climb?” Justine asks through breaths.

Calum slows down, waits for her to catch up. The rock face is smoother here, and Justine fears a slippery patch or a dead end. She’s forced to catch her breath by Calum’s elbow, her knee brushing the heel of his foot. “I grew up on the Isle,” he says down to her. “Thirty years ago, there wasn’t a bridge to the mainland. My brothers and I were hard pressed for entertainment. We’d race and swing from holds like we saw gulls do and flap at each other with our arms, trying to push each other off. We liked to climb in the rain, in the wind, to feel nature fighting.

Justine looks down at the water with its invisible currents, its invisible monsters, and gulps.

“Did you teach my mom to rock climb?” she asks.

“No.”

Justine breathes. Her hands cramp, and she wants to move again, but every obvious hold seems too far out of reach.

“Close your eyes,” Calum tells her. “You’re using your eyes too much. You have to get to know the rock to climb it. Feel its face.”

Justine lowers her eyelids, unclenches her right hand. Lets it slide up, against the rock, feeling for the fissures. When she finds nothing, she opens her eyes. Her breath comes quickly. She climbs back to the ground, not waiting to see if Calum will follow.

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