GABE
I tried to skip a stone on the surface of Loch Ness, but I overthrew it and it plunged into the water with a plop. The air was thick with fog and misty with fine rain. I was there waiting for the guy who’d seen Nessie, but I gave zero fucks about the interview I was supposed to do with him. Zero fucks about exclusive interviews. Zero fucks about monsters. Zero fucks about anything. Except for Lily.
I pulled the hat she’d knitted from my jacket pocket and put it on. Or tried to, anyway. I had to pull on it pretty hard to get it to fit—I suspected it might have been intended for Ivan, but whatever. Even as broken up as I was, I still wanted to wear it. She’d made it, and it was mine, and that was what mattered. Even if it did fit me like a damned yarmulke.
Rubbing my eyes, I looked out at the dark water, rimmed with green. I was in one of the most beautiful places on earth, and I should’ve been enjoying myself. I should’ve been taking photos, making notes, recording clips. But instead I just stood there and stared out at the water, like a jackass who had lost the one good thing he ever had. I felt like utter, total, and complete shit. I had gotten a glimpse of what life could be like with her, and now it was just a slowly vanishing point in my rearview mirror.
“That’s a lovely wee cap, my lad,” said a voice behind me in a singsong Scottish burr. I spun around and saw an old man hobbling out of the mist. He wore a green rain slicker and huge muddy boots. He walked with a cane, and each time he planted it, he jiggled the handle, making sure it wouldn’t slip. He hobbled closer. “I’m Malcolm MacGregor. I’m the one who saw Nessie. So I’m guessing that makes you Gabriel, then?”
Gabriel. Nobody had called me Gabriel in thirty-five years, not since my grandmother passed away. The word took me right back to being in her kitchen—pound cake on the good china and 7Up from the matching teacups. “Yeah. I’m Gabriel. You can call me Gabe. Pleasure to meet you.” I shook his hand. It was a good handshake, firmer than I expected. A fisherman’s handshake, maybe.
He was still peering up at me, smiling. Tickled. “It’s really just a suggestion of a hat.” He worked his mouth around his dentures and furrowed his bushy eyebrows. “A hint of a hat, perhaps!”
I yanked it down harder, barely getting the edges to touch my ears. The old man’s eyes twinkled. His rain slicker was unbuttoned, and underneath I saw he wore a sweater that was all manner of screwed up—holes and knots and loose threads. Yarns that didn’t match. A completely random pattern that looked like it might have been a snowflake until it turned into a flower and then a star. “I like that sweater,” I said.
He snickered and nodded. “Aye! I’m blessed to be married to a terrible knitter myself.” He reached out for my arm to steady himself, planting his cane and leaning on me. Arm in arm, we made our way over to a bench on the edge of the loch, surrounded by a carpet of moss. I helped him sit down, and he winced and groaned. Studying my hat again, he smoothed his sweater. “God bless the terrible knitters. Could I interest you in some misshapen slippers, perhaps? Or a curiously small scarf? A single mitten, even?” He beamed, sniffing and laughing. “Bless her soul.” He sighed. “But I don’t suppose you came all this way to talk to me about haphazard knitting.”
True. But the fact was that I needed to talk to someone about Lily. And badly. Thanks to the time change, it couldn’t be Markowitz. So it looked as though it was going to have to be old Mr. MacGregor. Because my heart was fucking blown apart, and not even the mother of all monster legends was going to put it back together. I needed to make sense of the pain or I was going to lose my mind. “How long have you been married to this terrible knitter of yours?” I asked.
Mr. MacGregor leaned back on the bench. He closed his eyes and smiled. “Seventy-two years this March. To tell you the truth, I don’t much count the years before her. I don’t know what I was doing, but I wasn’t living, that’s for certain.” From his pocket he produced a small paper bag, wrinkled at the top. Inside were some jelly beans, and he offered me one, taking one for himself. “And your terrible knitter? How long have you been married to her?”
My jelly bean got lodged in my throat, and I coughed hard to stop myself from choking. Mr. MacGregor slapped my back, and I waved him off. Finally, I managed to say, “I’m not.”
He drew back, startled. “But you’re wearing her hat!”
“Right,” I said, coughing a bit still. “But we aren’t . . . we’re not married. We aren’t anything.”
Mr. MacGregor gaped at me in disbelief. “But why not? You young people. Always thinking and planning and this and that. Doing your important jobs. Going to your important places. Saying you’re so busy. But do you know what happens, lad?”
I waited for the answer. Apparently, judging by the wriggle of his huge white eyebrows, he was waiting for me to answer first, so I asked, “What happens?”
“You get old! Like me. With nothing to do. One day, you find yourself sitting beside a lake.” He opened his arm, sweeping it out toward the loch. “You’re just sitting. You’re doing nothing. You’re enjoying living your life. And then you see a monster. With your own eyes, you see lumps in the water, going past. You clean your glasses, you squint. And it’s still there. Do you know who the first person you tell is?”
“Your terrible knitter?”
He slapped my leg. “Now you’re onto it, lad! The terrible knitter herself! Do you know what? She believes you! Because she’s been with you since the beginning of time and she knows you’re not gonna come home and be telling bollocks tales. Aye? That’s the point!” he said. “You find someone who believes in you, no matter what. And you believe in them! It’s that simple, my lad. Take it from an old man like me. Marry that terrible knitter of yours. Don’t waste a moment. Not a moment!”
I slipped the hat off and sighed as I ran my fingers over the yarn, over each stitch she’d done for me. Just me. All for me. I wanted to give her everything, if only she’d give me the chance. “Not going to happen.”
He crumpled the bag of jelly beans. “What a load of hooey. She gave you her hat, didn’t she?” He said it like it was, I didn’t even know, pledged her undying love to you or moved mountains to be with you or begged you to stay with her forever.
I ran my thumb over the stitches and looked out into the mist. My heart fucking ached. My soul groaned. The idea of losing her forever made me feel a kind of pain I’d never felt before. The Welsh called it hiraeth. In Ethiopia it was tizita. In Portugal they called it saudade. So many words for one thing: the gut-wrenching longing for lost love. “She broke my heart. Pushed me away right when I laid it on the line for her.”
Mr. MacGregor nodded and thoughtfully plucked a yellow jelly bean from the bag. “Aye, mine did the same a time or two. Are you in the mood for a story, lad? So I can share with you what I know about life and love?”
If Yoda himself had appeared to offer some wisdom, I don’t think I could have been more grateful. I took another jelly bean from the bag and nodded. “Definitely.”
He placed the bag of candy between us and clasped his hands together in his lap. “In 1944, the Second World War was on. I thought she was going to marry someone else. I don’t know why I was surprised—I didn’t have the nerve to ask her. Pffuff! Hardly had the nerve to even look at her! So when another fella asked her, why . . . she said yes. Like any sensible girl would! But Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, when I heard that news . . . I was so angry with her.” Mr. MacGregor paused and looked out at the water. “Angry that she couldn’t see how I felt, angry she couldn’t see what I saw. And so what did I do? Seventeen years old, I joined up with Royal Air Force. I thought I was such a hero in my uniform with my anger and my broken heart and my righteous indignation. I was a right tragic poor sod. I had my mission. I’d lost my love. But you know who didn’t care about any of that?” he said, beginning to chuckle. “The Nazis!” His laughter echoed out over the water, and his whole body shook. “Bastards! I got myself shot down over the Rhineland. And there I was,” he said with a clap of his hands, “careening toward the earth, for the sake of love.”
He pursed his lips, closing his eyes and shaking his head. “Such dramatic shenanigans. I thought I was teaching her a lesson, would you believe? But really, I was teaching myself one instead. I loved her as much the first time I saw her as when my plane was plummeting to the ground.” He sighed and sniffed and then began to smile. “I got picked up by Allied troops and shipped to London. Word got back to her, and she wrote to me in hospital. Three lines, short and sweet.” He extended his hand, counting off the lines, starting with his thumb. “You idiot. I love you. Come home.” He chuckled to himself. “So I did. And I forgave her as soon as I saw her face.” He pulled off his glasses, cleaning them with a small soft cloth before putting them back on. “But they do have the right to do it, son. The women do.”
I glanced at him sideways. “To break our hearts?”
He shook his head. “Heavens, no. Merely to make mistakes. Men are mortals. A woman is a goddess. But I’ll tell you from experience that sometimes even goddesses end up with shit on their shoes.”
The last thing I felt like doing was laughing, but I couldn’t help it. It was just the dose of old-man wisdom I’d needed, the kind of no-nonsense truth bomb that finally let me take a deep breath and get some distance from my own thoughts.
Mr. MacGregor went on, laughing too until his eyes sparkled with tears. “They don’t always recognize it in the moment, though!” he said, wagging his finger and smiling. “You’ve just got to let them figure it out for themselves. At first they’ll blame you. They’ll say you brought the shit into the house. But eventually, with time, they’ll see their mistakes if they’ve made them. And then they’ll make them right.” He smiled again. “I don’t believe in God, lad. But I do believe in the way my wife loves me. And in the way your lady loves you as well.”
This guy didn’t know me, but love was universal. And he was right about a whole hell of a lot of things. About the anger, especially. And the lesson learned. Lily and I had been full bore and all cylinders on a high-speed burn into what had felt to me like the biggest adventure I’d ever had. But what had felt to her like pure terror. I’d needed a bit of time to get my head back on straight, and maybe she did too. She wasn’t perfect; she was a human as flawed as me. And made me love her just that much more.
Like the mists clearing in front of me, I felt my anger start to lighten. I was still busted up inside, but the color of it changed somehow. And I started to see it all a little more clearly. “I love her,” I said. I looked out at the water, imagining the two of us out there together in a kayak. I could almost hear her laugh. Jesus, how I loved her laugh. “I just love her so goddamned much.”
“Then go back to her, if you’re able. She is what matters.” He patted my leg again and said softly, “Take it from an old man, Gabriel. Everything else will come and go. But love will change your world if you let it.”
After the interview with Mr. MacGregor, I went by myself to a pub called the Olive and Dove in Inverness. The bartender was a friendly older lady who put a heart in the foam on my pint of Guinness, which slowly separated into two halves split right down the center.
I sat alone in a booth in the corner by a window and opened the chat window with Lily. Since my anger had subsided, I’d texted her three times:
Talk to me.
I haven’t given up.
I love you.
But she hadn’t replied. According to my phone, she hadn’t even read them.
I rubbed my temples and pulled out my production notebook. I tried to focus, but it wasn’t any use. Work was a distant second to what really mattered now. Staring out into the night, I let myself sink down into how empty I felt without her, empty in a way I’d never felt before I met her. Like she’d opened a trapdoor and I’d fallen right through.
Way in the distance, there was a glimmer of the northern lights, a psychedelic ribbon cutting across the sky. Hell yeah, I’d wanted to share the world with her. Hell yeah, I wanted to take her to beautiful places like this to see the northern lights or the midnight sun or go dancing with me in Rio. I definitely wanted adventures with her, but falling in love with her had been my favorite adventure yet. There was no reason that our adventures couldn’t be in English muffins on Sunday mornings and sweet tea every afternoon. If there was one thing I now knew for sure, other than this ache in my heart, it was that one tiny memory with her would mean more to me than all the other memories without her. No question about it at all.
And yet here I was. All by my damned self, half a world away.
I woke up my phone again and stared at the chat window where I’d been trying to talk to her but instead was just talking to myself. I thought about what I could say to tell her I wanted to make this work and I needed her in my life. I just didn’t even know how to start. And then I realized I might not have to. Because suddenly, all three of my messages showed as being read, like maybe they’d only just arrived on her end. And then there they were. The dots.
Holy fuck, the dots. The typing dots. Lily was responding. Lily was back. She hit me with a rapid-fire one-two-three, each message making me even happier than the last.
Your messages arrived all at once just now!
I love you too.
And I miss you so much.
In my total surprise at hearing from her, I fumbled for my phone and managed to pull a Markowitz: I hit the video-call button by accident. I stared at the screen with my mouth open as I read the words Video-calling Lily.
“Fuck,” I said, not sure if I should abort mission and end the call or pretend like I’d meant to, or maybe just . . .
Didn’t matter. Because there she was. Her smiling, beautiful face filled my screen. But the connection was shitty, and just as soon as she came into focus, she dissolved into blocky pixels again. Glitchy bits of audio came through, but I could only make out half of her words as the signal cut in and out. I snatched up my phone and stepped out onto the back patio of the pub. “Lily? Are you there?” I asked as I shifted and tipped my phone to try to get a better signal. I also tried to get some light on my own face so she could see me, but it was dark as hell out, and I couldn’t see myself in the thumbnail. But moving my phone around did help—though I couldn’t see her, at least I could hear her.
“Gabe,” she said, “I don’t know if you can hear me. I hope you can. I just want you to know that I am so sorry. And you were right about everything. I just hope you can . . .”
The audio cut out again. For Christ’s sake. If I didn’t know how she ended that sentence, I’d go out of my goddamned mind. I hope you can . . . forget about me? Move on? Not a fucking chance.
But then the words I needed to hear came through my phone, cutting through the quiet night.
“. . . I hope you can forgive me.”
The call got cut off one second later, but I’d heard everything I needed to hear. My emptiness and heartbreak disappeared like dust blown off a table. Of course I would forgive her. She was what I wanted and she was what I needed. All my life, I’d been adrift. Not anymore. The sound of her voice gave me back all the hope I felt I’d lost, and endless possibilities of the future unspooled out there in front of me, same as the northern lights.
On our last night at the Willows, she’d talked about Sunday roasts and Christmas lights. Now that I’d heard from her, now that I knew it wasn’t over after all, I had the courage to add new things to that list. Her in a wedding dress. Me putting together a trike at three o’clock on Christmas morning. Looking into those beautiful eyes of hers today and tomorrow and forty years from now.
I wasn’t halfway in. I was all in. And it was time to prove it to her.
So I went back into the pub, slapped a handful of bills on the table, and headed across the street to the B&B where I was staying. Since the minute she’d pushed me away, I’d felt out of balance, like my internal compass had gone completely haywire. But not anymore.
Lily Jameson was my true north . . . and I was going back home.