Closer

A month since Justine and her mother arrived in Scotland, Justine starts to worry that they will never go home. She worries about missing school, wonders if they’ll let her rejoin her class after missing so many weeks. That weekend, it snows for the first time since they arrived. Wet flakes that melt in the yard but coat the stones by the coast and catch in the sea foam. Justine walks into town to buy hot chocolate, and when she returns to Calum’s house, he’s already there. The shoulders of his sweater are dark with melted snow. His hair is wet and clings around his ears.

“Your mother,” he says, out of breath. “She’s had an accident, might be a broken rib. I’ve already taken her to the doctor, but I think you should be there. She was going in for X-rays when I left.

Justine grabs her backpack from the living room and they rush out into the snow, into the car. The wheels spin on the gravel driveway. The seat back is reclined all the way and smeared with mud, and Justine pulls it forward as they leave Kyleakin, brushing off the dirt with the back of her hand, leaving it there once she realizes she has nothing to clean it with. She feels in her bag and asks Calum if she can put a CD into the player. It’s her father’s recording of whale songs. Songs that could travel miles and miles through empty oceans. Nothing to bounce off of but silent, suspended fish. She had almost forgotten about the disc, here in Scotland without a CD player.

“Dad plays their songs at home all the time. It calms me,” she says, and Calum nods as she opens the case and slips the CD into the slot. She recognizes belugas in the first track, wonders if they’re from Alaska.

The only doctor’s office is on the opposite side of the island, in Kirk. They make it through three whale songs before they reach it. Calum leads Justine inside the small, thatched building, points her to the door. When she knocks, her mother replies, “Calum?” from inside.

Justine opens the door. She barely recognizes the woman sitting on the examination table, wrapped in a thin hospital robe. In the bright, sterile light, it’s like her mother has shifted to a higher resolution. The robe is open in the back, and Justine’s eyes follow the curve of her spine. The skin is almost purple where bone presses against flesh.

“What happened?” Justine asks.

“Nothing, I’m fine. We were examining the west shore for trilobite fossils, and I slipped on a wet patch. It’s probably nothing serious.”

The doctor enters the room.

“Ma’am,” he says. “We didn’t find any cracks. Only a bruise. Painful, but an injury that will heal on its own.”

“Thank you,” says her mother. And then to Justine, “See? Not that bad.”

“I’ll just need to do a final check before I let you go,” the doctor says.

He pushes aside the robe, and Justine’s mother’s belly and upper leg are exposed. Justine is surprised to see blue veins like tributaries of a river inching up her thighs. She’s surprised to see a pouch of flesh under her mother’s rib cage. The veiny parts that hang from her upper arms. Justine looks at her mother, and for a moment, their eyes meet. Her mother doesn’t blink, and Justine turns away. She looks at the wall.

“Really, Doctor. It’s fine,” her mother says. “Barely hurts anymore.”

The doctor removes his hand, and her mother pulls at the fabric, covering the parts of her body he revealed. She changes back into her clothes quickly, silently, with a curtain separating herself from Justine.

Calum jumps to his feet as they enter the waiting room.

“Thank God it was just a bruise,” he says. “I’d feel terrible if you were seriously hurt on the job.”

Justine’s mother nods and places a hand over her ribs. When they reach the car, she reaches for Justine’s wrist.

“Are you okay?” Justine asks.

“I’m fine. Let’s walk to the water before we go home.”

“Sure, mom.”

They make their way slowly down the road to the coast, Calum a few steps behind. Justine knows they’re close to the water when the wind picks up, wild, cold. Her mother curls her spine protectively as snow sweeps off the roof of a house and then straightens again. A block farther, and they’re at the sea. For the first time, Justine looks out at the uninterrupted Atlantic. Gray. Misty. Stiller than she expected.

When they’ve reached the water, Justine’s mother kneels and pushes away the snow. She pulls out a handful of egg-shaped stones.

“Sandstone. Carried down through Europe on a glacier in the ice age.”

Justine kneels next to her, sees her mother wince as she struggles to remain balanced on the balls of her feet. A gull dives and scoops a fish from the water a few yards off shore. Justine reaches a hand out, instinctively, and catches her mother’s shoulder.

Her mother pulls another rock from the snow, this one thin and gray, and breaks it in half. She points to a spiral-shaped fossil where the stone cracked.

“A brachiopod,” she says. “Extremely common here. The only other place where they’re found so frequently is the coast of New England, where the countries used to touch.”

Justine ladles snow into her hands and presses it between her palms, packing it together, watching it melt out from between her fingers. Her mother drops the stone, and Justine follows the path of her gaze out over the ocean, out toward the horizon.

“Hello, America,” Justine says.

Her mother waves.

 

That evening, Justine tells her mother she’s going on a walk. All afternoon, her mother has wandered through the house, stacking her notebooks and graphs into piles, stopping on the arm of the couch every few minutes to place a hand on her ribs.

Justine thinks about walking to Kyleakin, watching the sun set against the bridge connecting it to the mainland. Instead, her feet carry her down the familiar road to the cliff. The snow stops as she walks. Already, it’s melting to slush on the streets, the ground too warm to keep it in place. In the fields, sheep break it apart with their hooves. When Justine sees the gray line of water on the horizon, she thinks about how close, how crowded, the ocean felt when she first arrived. Now it’s just empty. Like space in between instead of space itself.

Justine reaches the cliff, and she climbs. Without hesitation. Hand over hand. Using her elbows, her toes, the tips of her fingers. Her palms pass over a fossil of a shell, over a piece of quartz embedded in the cliff. On an outcrop, she finds a broken eggshell the size of a hail stone, cool blue and speckled. Where the cliff pleats in on itself, she wedges herself in the hollow, pressing her knees and elbows against the walls, suspending her body in place.

All around, the wind howls. In cracks. In holes. In hidden caverns. The muscles in Justine’s wrists feel strong, hard, and she closes her eyes. She presses her cheek against the mountain and imagines that she can feel it moving. Imagines continental drift in reverse, the countries puzzle-piecing themselves back together. Magpies and crows fly in the same sky. Whales share a single, massive ocean, no landmasses to stop their song. And rock collides with rock, buckling under the pressure, deciding to fold.