It’s been almost two years since she started coming late in the evening. Since Ethan started pressing his flannel collar before his shift. Trying to make himself a bit tidier. Make himself seem more presentable.
He pulls the pipe’s warmth into his chest, then exhales. The smoke melts into the fog.
The fog reminds Ethan of home: Kilberry, on the Sound of Jura in western Scotland. Still home, though he’s lived in the United States forty years. Forty years since he packed a duffel and quit his post as a docker in Kennacraig. Forty years since he chased a lass.
It had fizzled with Cindy. The plan was rubbish to begin with, shacking up with a holiday-making American, pissing his savings on a ticket from Heathrow to JFK. He still remembers how the isles grew smaller and smaller through the little oval window.
Tanner pokes his muttonish head out the door. If he registers Ethan’s rule breaking, he doesn’t show it. The lad’s not the brightest bulb. He says, “Did you want me to do the entire cold case?”
“A’course. What do you think I’m paying you for?”
Tanner grumbles as he slinks back inside. Ethan shakes his head. Kids these days.
New York City was gritty in the seventies, and before long, Ethan and Cindy had bigger plans. Cindy emptied her flat in Brooklyn to buy an old Volkswagen van, which they drove across the country, and its vastness blew Ethan’s mind. Pennsylvania, Indiana, Nebraska, Nevada. Any one of them could’ve contained Scotland entirely.
When they found the sea again, Ethan was relieved. They lingered on the coast of Northern California for weeks, making love in the shadows of giant redwoods, before working their way north along the Pacific Coast Highway. In a ramshackle chapel somewhere near the Oregon border, he and Cindy tied the knot.
Weeks later, in Aberdeen, Washington, the van’s transmission finally failed. Ethan tinkered with it, but it was gone. And in the morning, so was Cindy.
And that was that.
Aberdeen suited Ethan. He had never visited its namesake town on the northern coast of Scotland, but it felt familiar. Low, gray skies. Gruff, industrious people. He took a job as a longshoreman. Found a bed in a rooming house. Took his tea early in the morning, while watching the fog drift over the ship masts.
The union treated him well, retiring him with a modest pension at the age of fifty-five. Out of grudging necessity, he moved inland, closer to the city, to the physical therapists needed to reshape his back after years of hoisting logs onto boats. But retirement made him restless. Shop-Way had a swing shift to fill, was happy to furnish an ergonomic chair at his register. He did them one better and gathered up his savings and bought the place.
Now, ten years later, he still doesn’t need the money, not exactly. The union pension covers rent, food, gas for his truck. But the trickle of profit from the store affords him new vinyl records for his collection and a nice bottle of scotch now and then. Proper Islay whiskey, not Highlands rubbish.
Headlights flash on the slick pavement as a car swerves into the parking lot. Ethan snuffs his pipe and ducks back through the front door.
He posts up at the register as a young man and woman stagger in, arms so deeply entwined that they move like a single person. They ping-pong down the aisles, giggling as they ricochet off the pillars of chips and soda. They fumble with a debit card at the register. They peel out onto the road, washing the front windows in white light as they go.
Idiots. They’ll kill someone. Someone like Ethan’s sister, Mariah, who was struck by a truck when she was barely ten. Fishermen on their way back from the pub. The world is full of idiots.
The thought of Tova’s hatchback out there on that road makes Ethan queasy. He wishes he could drive by her house and make sure her car is parked there. Maybe her lights would be on.
But no. He broke himself once, chasing a lass.
Day 1,306 of My Captivity
I AM VERY GOOD AT KEEPING SECRETS.
You might say I have no choice. Whom might I tell? My options are scant.
To the extent I am able to communicate with the other prisoners, those dull conversations are rarely worth the effort. Blunt minds, rudimentary neural systems. They are wired for survival, and perhaps expert at that function, but no other creature here possesses intelligence like mine.
It is lonely. Perhaps it would be less so if I had someone with whom to share my secrets.
Secrets are everywhere. Some humans are crammed full of them. How do they not explode? It seems to be a hallmark of the human species: abysmal communication skills. Not that any other species are much better, mind you, but even a herring can tell which way the school it belongs to is turning and follow accordingly. Why can humans not use their millions of words to simply tell one another what they desire?