My Very Best Friend (32 page)

“And?” I glanced down at my shirt to give the man a break.

“And what?” His eyebrows shot up. “Am I not getting the lady thing here?”

“Toran!” I shook my head, pointed my fork at him, and stood up. “New clothes. New shirt, new skirt.”

He blinked. Twice. “Wow.” His voice rumbled. “You’re right. You do have new clothes and hair. I like the red. It’s pretty. Very pretty.”

“Of course I’m right. Did you think I wouldn’t notice that I bought my own self new clothes and got a haircut and contacts?” We both laughed. “I’m wearing makeup. Mascara. Lipstick.” What else? “Blush. See?”

“I see it now!” He was victorious, a man in the know, per-plexion gone!

“Toran Ramsay.” I spread my arms out wide, making my statement. “I’ve had a makeover.”

“A what?” Dang. Baffled once again.

“A makeover. It’s when you get your hair all done up and you get rid of glasses that slide down your nose and you buy new clothes.”

“Ah. I get it now.”

“Yes. But how do you like it?”

“How do I like it?” He smiled, gentle, smooth, easy. He sat back in his chair. “I like it. I think you’re gorgeous. I’ve always thought you were gorgeous. How do you like it?”

“I like it.”

“Me too. You’ve had an overmake. Wait. What did you call it?”

“A makeover.”

“A makeover.”

He stood up, came to my side of the table, and kissed me. He ran a hand through my hair and his eyebrows shot up. “Feels smooth.”

“You bet it does. It’s been hair tortured. She took tweezers to my eyebrows and plucked me silly. Like a chicken.”

“Ah, but you are not a chicken. You’re my Charlotte. You’re still you. You’re beautiful. You were beautiful yesterday, you’re beautiful today. You’ll always be beautiful. I like your new haircut. I like the skirt. You have pretty legs. Very shapely. You’re thin, too.” He said it as if he hadn’t noticed it before. “Any woman who can talk about quantum physics and how important Scottish kilts and tartans are, all in one conversation, is the sexiest thing on the planet, with an overmake or not and lipostick.”

“Thank you.”

He kissed me, then held me close. “I’m not an eloquent man, Char, and I’m not a romantic one, but I love you. However you are, I love you.”

My heart thumped, my body tingled, and my brain synapses popped back and forth with skippy exuberance. I hugged him, laid my head on his chest. I could hear his heart thudding away, quick. “I love you, too.”

“I’m so glad, Charlotte.” His voice wobbled. “Every day, I am grateful for it.”

“Me too.” My voice wobbled, too. “You are one handsome stud muffin Scot. And I’m glad you like my overmake.”

We laughed and kissed again. My “lipostick” was immediately gone. It was easy to slither out of my new skirt. My other skirts had lots of fabric, but this one didn’t. My sandals slipped right off instead of having to be unbuckled. He admired my red bra. “I’m going to lose my head, luv.”

We decided to bounce on my new bed. We liked it. Twice we liked it.

Afterward he went to get the raspberry pie and we ate it in bed. He kissed raspberry juice off my cheek.

Pretty soon he was kissing tears off my cheeks, too.

I was happy.

Happy, happy, happy.

It was a moment in life I knew I would not forget, even when I was 101.

I was so in love with Toran, if an alien spacecraft crashed near the cathedral in town and Toran was standing next to me, I don’t think I’d spend two seconds staring at the craft. Toran would get all of my attention.

He put vanilla ice cream on my stomach and licked it off. I put vanilla ice cream on his missile and licked it off. The missile shot off.

I thought of the letters, stories, and drawings that Bridget and I exchanged when we were little girls. If I knew where Bridget was now I would write her a letter and tell her I was madly in love with her brother. Still.

March 10 or 11 or 14 in 1973. I don’t know the date.

Dear Charlotte,

They said that because I can’t stop screaming and yelling at them to get me my daughter get me my daughter get me my daughter and because I keep fighting with them that now I have to go to a special place to get better.

I was hoping my father would come for me. Or my mum. They didn’t. I’m alone, alone. I know that Toran doesn’t know where I am. They lied to him. Toran would leave university and come get me if he knew what they did to me.

Father Cruickshank came to see me at Our Lady of Peace, and I screamed at him and said he was a rapist and he pretended to get all sad, and said prayers over me, and told the nuns I was mentally disturbed and when they were out of the room he grabbed me by the throat and told me to shut up or else. He told me not to say a word about how he stuck his thing up me. He told me I was going to a place for crazy people and no one would believe what a crazy girl like me ever said. He told me he had talked to Toran recently. He told me that to scare me.

I hit him, twice, and screamed, and the nuns rushed in and he said the Our Father prayer, loudly, and made the sign of the cross. I told him he was a bastard and the nuns said I am lucky that Father Cruickshank is a forgiving man. They had only met him that day so they didn’t know. They don’t know.

I kept screaming at him and they had two men come in and tie me down and when I was down and the nuns left so he could “pray over this mentally disturbed child, may God bless her,” he put his hand on my left breast and squeezed it tight, then he stuck his hand on my privates and told me he couldn’t wait to see me back at St. Cecilia’s.

No one knows the truth. No one would believe the truth.

Now you know, Charlotte. You know.

Love,

Bridget

April in 1973 I think but I am not sure of the month

Dear Charlotte,

Insane asylum.

That’s where I am. I’m not crazy. My father and mum came to see me and say I have to stay here until I quit screaming and crying. I told them

I wanted to go home, that I want my daughter, I want my daughter, I want her, they said no, you can’t have your daughter, and I begged, then I hit my father and screamed at my mum and they came and gave me a shot.

A shot. Hold me down. Strap me down. Hurts! And another shot. Pills.

I want my daughter. Legend.

Toran can’t find me here. Can you find me, Charlotte?

Love,

Bridget

Maybe May is the date

Dear Charlotte,

My roommate talks to herself and yells at voices that I can’t hear and there are other people here who do the same thing and rock back and forth and spit and pee on the floor and hit each other and it is always noisy and the nurses in the white coats and the doctors yell too and tell us we can’t leave our rooms and I have been here so long so long so long and I want my baby and I don’t know where Legend is and I have not seen my mum or dad and I don’t care but I want Toran and you and Pherson.

They make everyone swallow pills and I feel nauseated and sick and weak. I told them I wanted out, out, out, out! And two men said the doctor said I can’t leave and I tried to get out five times or six or seven and they put me in a room that’s padded. Padded. So I wouldn’t hurt myself. Padded.

Can you find me, Charlotte?

Straitjacket. Straitjacket.

Come get me, friend. I have to search for my daughter. She’s gone. She’s with another mother. I want her. I want my daughter even though her father is a rapist.

Rape. Rape. That was a new word for me. Rape.

Baby.

Can you find me?

Love,

Bridget

June or July 1973 (I don’t know the date)

Dear Charlotte,

They won’t let me send this letter to you, Charlotte.

They search everything.

I will hide it.

I save them. You are my friend, Charlotte, my best friend, but I can’t tell you this. I am dirty. I feel so dirty.

I am shameful, that is what my father says, shameful. I have shamed the family. He said I’m a slut like his mother was a slut. She’s a whore, I’m a whore.

I. Am. Bad.

You are my only friend. I think you would be my friend even if you knew, but I am not going to risk it. I am a bad person. A burden. Dirty. Better off gone. I can’t eat. I can’t sleep.

I remember everything. Everything. Hand on throat. Rip. Pain. Blood. Can’t breathe. Dark. That’s why I scream.

Where is my daughter? I want my baby back. Legend. I love you, Legend.

Love you,

Bridget

I went outside my cottage and screamed.

Bridget, where are you? Please come home.

12

I worked for about seven hours the next day in the office, reconciling Toran’s accounts with the bank’s statements. I took, and made, many calls. I was getting more and more involved in the farm, and I liked it.

In the late afternoon, I decided to take a hike into the hills. I passed the graveyard but did not yet go to my father’s grave. I would soon.

I walked through the meadow, the bluebells and narcissi swaying. I stopped when I came to the viewpoint over Toran’s lands. It had been a rainy night, but the skies were clear, the blue low and pure, scoopable.

Someone, somewhere, was playing the bagpipes.

I thought about my writer’s block. Writer’s block can be explained by having a brick stuck in your head where your brain should be. I seriously wondered if I would ever write another book in my life. The words were stuck, the thoughts were stuck, the storyline was stuck.

The last sentence I wrote, before I left my island, was “Peanut butter sticks to my mouth and makes me feel like I’m choking. McKenzie Rae does not eat sausages because they’re too phallic.”

Maybe I was done as a writer.

Am I done?

Did I want to write more books? I have written nine books. Is that all that’s in me?

But if I didn’t write, what would I do?

Go back to research? Work at a university? Teach? Get my doctorate in one of my favorite biology topics?

The bagpipes blasted a long, haunting note, then went back to a quicker rhythm.

Could I become a farmer?

I gazed down at Toran’s fields, the different types of potatoes, the long, endless lines of blueberry bushes, the apple orchards, tended and well cared for.

I liked tractors. I grew up driving one on our land. I liked building fences. I liked planting and watching crops grow. I liked helping my father and mother to load produce onto trucks where it would be sold at markets all over Scotland. I liked being outside. I liked gardening. Even large-scale gardening.

I liked being the numbers woman.

A farmer? Again?

I smiled. I could so do it, and I’d love it.

Was I giving up on my dream, though, of being a writer? Was that a dream I had, then accomplished, and now it was time for a new dream? Did I care about being a writer anymore? Was I giving up on my writing career to help a man I was so in love with my brain was now mush?

The notes of the bagpipes swirled around me, a cocoon of music, the songs of Scotsmen and women, all my relatives, who had come before me, whose shoulders I stood on, who stood on the shoulders of Scotsmen and women before them.

One final noted sounded, and I thought of my father, playing for my mother, for me.

I loved it here.

It felt like home.

In my books, McKenzie Rae Dean always saves people. Every time. Sometimes it’s one person. Sometimes two. Sometimes it’s a multitude of people.

Save, save, save.

I couldn’t save him, but McKenzie Rae, she will save. She will win. She will overcome.

She is the me I wanted to be when my dad needed saving.

One would think after all the books I’ve written that I would have worked this part out.

The saving part.

I haven’t.

I looked up at the hills, where he was buried. I would go soon.

Soon.

Not yet.

“Come and sit by me, Charlotte.”

Toran was sitting on his leather couch. I sat down next to him. I was wearing one of my new skirts, light blue, and a summery top with blue flowers that was cut low enough for my red bra to peep on through.

When I first arrived at his home that night, we went for a sexual tumble, which ended up with me on his butcher block counter, and then we ate. I did sterilize the counter. Twice. It is important to rid a kitchen of germs, but it absolutely was not going to stop me from having butcher block sex.

He picked up my hand and kissed it. “I want you to know my intentions, how I feel about us and our future. I don’t want you to leave Scotland. I want you to live here. We can settle out the rest later. I don’t want to push you or make you uncomfortable, or press for something you’re not yet ready to give. We have only been together for a short while, but I cannot imagine my life without my best friend, without my best love, ever again.