Cala Read online

  Euna was suddenly free from all sensation.

  Everything was calm. The flowers. The steam. No one was talking. No one was making mistakes.

  She fluttered her eyes and saw Muireall above her, looking flustered. She was straddling Euna so tightly her knees were digging into her high ribs. She was speaking, too, though the sounds had not yet sharpened into words. They were more like rain. But oh – above her friend’s face it really was raining, in a grey, unyielding way. The drops cuffing the roof were far louder than Muireall’s voice.

  As a girl, she had been told faith invoked a sort of emotional stoicism. A devout person is the one who has learned to ask, What does God want from this situation? rather than, What do I want from it? And though she had agreed in her mind, and even, at times, managed dispassion, her gut always had its own loud language.

  Euna remembered what had flooded her just before she fainted: void. Detachment. When the figure outside the glass had scared her, maybe she had accepted that she was to die. There wasn’t much sense in fussing about what was destined.

  Muireall slapped her cheek, not violently, but not tenderly either. Please say something, mè bheag.

  Euna tried to speak. She wanted to offer her friend this grace, of reassurance. But her mouth was less hers than it had been when kissing Aram. The muscles around it seemed to have been severed. She managed a cough, through loose, insensitive lips, and that seemed to be all Muireall needed. She shone with delight. The wind lifted, blowing the stony rain sideways, tearing the cellophane patch from the glass.

  Around Euna, colours started to saturate, contours to become clear. It was a young woman in a plaid skirt, Muireall said, stroking Euna’s forehead with the back of her hand.

  Muireall would certainly not have described the minister’s wife as young, but Euna happened to know the minister’s daughter had recently turned eighteen. The proselytizer had invited the Cala women to attend her coming-of-age ceremony, which he peddled as a garden party with parlour games and fruit juice. After that, he told them, the daughter would travel to the Middle East to do mission work, before returning to marry an older widower from the congregation and settle for good in Pullhair.

  Euna said, It might have been the minister’s daughter.

  What have I always said? They’re wicked. I bet she was trying to shoot us instead of the bird.

  Euna’s cramps were agonizing. She needed to be lying under covers, curtains drawn, a hot water bottle between her legs. Her aura was an aureole around each bloom. Why did you bring me to the greenhouse? she asked Muireall. Were you going to punish me?

  Muireall looked hurt. Of course not, she said. She stopped stroking Euna’s forehead, though she did not take her hand away entirely. I noticed the maidenhair ferns were dying, and I needed your help to save them.

  The words came out in such a fond, sororal way. Was Euna a béist for always assuming the worst of her friend? With Muireall’s help, she gradually stood, then walked down the aisle to the maidenhair. She fingered the nearest fern with care, especially at the ends of its fronds, where the downy leaves had gone brittle. The plant was visibly dying, but Euna did not say that word to Muireall, nor did she despair of their mutual power to restore it to health.

  It’s just dried out, she told Muireall. Go get the rain barrel and we’ll give it a nice, deep soak.

  Muireall looked both ways before stepping outside and retrieving their large pail of water. She parted the fern’s fronds and poured, the soil absorbing the soak instantly. She poured and poured until the intake was more gradual. The finger lime, the fear lining Euna’s throat, the minister’s daughter in her plaid skirt – Euna’s sin was the dry root of it all. She could no longer stand for Muireall to be the one holding the pail, and she pulled it into her own hands. By then, of course, the plant was overwet, in danger of root rot. Such a fine balance, Euna thought, though she continued to pour.

  *

  Back at the house that evening, all of the women were suffering from fuil mhìosail pain, in their stiff-lipped, intermittently rude way. Muireall and Euna had not yet told the others what had happened in the greenhouse, in part because they knew it might sound strange, even suspect, and they needed to refine their story first. The four of them had gathered in the living room for their monthly Moog circle, in which Euna played the synthesizer and they performed old standards that Muireall remembered singing with her high school choir, tonight including ‘Contented wi’ Little and Cantie wi’ Mair’ and ‘Broom of the Cowdenknowes’. They called this kind of therapy ceòl-cluaise, or music for the ears, and it had the same effect hymns were meant to – it opened the women to a world beyond their suffering, or rather, opened them to a world that would not exist without their suffering.

  Tonight’s session was slightly different. Lili had written an original song she was keen to perform, so Euna was scrambling to learn the chords between more comfortable refrains. It was both moving and unnerving that Lili had chosen to write her own music. Unnerving, perhaps, because Euna had not thought to do it first. And because she had not, for years, considered all the songs they had never heard, in their seclusion. Now this fact struck her as the only great injustice. Of course, so much of that music must be cac, patent and pointless trash, but surely there was also worthy, challenging, near-divine art, which she was worse for never hearing.

  Lili stood in front of the women in her pink playclothes, her hair in large, calculated curls. She clasped her hands in front of her chest like a child at a recital and counted Euna in on the keys. Euna played the way she wanted to, and Lili sang the way she wanted to, and though each part was lavish and lovely on its own, together they were dissonant. What are you doing? Lili asked her.

  Euna said, I’m just improvising on what’s written here.

  Lili leaned back sharply, a caesura. Did I tell you to do that? she asked.

  Muireall, who had been tolerating Lili’s change of character with a mysterious patience, rose to her feet. She whispered something inaudible to Lili, and then the girl said, Do what you need to do, as long as you remember to play my chords.

  Grace pretended to twiddle her hair, but Euna could see that she was covering her left ear. She was especially sensitive to sound, as she was to light, and this disharmony clearly troubled her. They never had this issue when they played those songs from Muireall’s girlhood, which had prescribed parts, and which, anyway, were familiar to everyone by now. The Moog circle was usually one of their most affirmative activities. They always left feeling restored, tender, eager to warm their pillows and share more earworms.

  Are you okay? Euna asked Grace.

  Grace straightened her spine, evening her hair waves with both hands. Of course, she said. You sound wonderful.

  They had a strange habit, Euna had noticed, of flattering one another when their instinct was to critique. Or on the other hand, of refusing to accept genuine compliments, either because they did not agree or because they did not know how to voice the agreement. If Euna praised Muireall for her precise, effective pruning of their rose bushes, or Grace for her proper seasoning of their pasturer’s stew, she often received an eye roll in return, if not an outright insult. She had been told on more than one occasion that her kindness was, in effect, overpowering.

  We sounded like cats in heat, Lili said. You know that, Gracie. Why won’t you ever just speak your mind?

  Grace got decidedly quiet. Euna did not think that Lili had raised her voice, or said anything untoward, but neither did she trust her own judgement. And she knew, if Lili had done either of these things, Grace was unlikely to mention it. She had entered a mood Euna referred to as loch reòite, frozen lake. It was as if Grace were trapped in a thick ice block, an impenetrable slab through which no language could pass. Euna could talk her tongue insensate and still Grace would be in that cold and separate world, no more available or open.

  Leave her alone, Euna said. Let’s just try again, you and me.

  Euna followed the sheet music as it was
written, while Lili’s voice made waves in the song. Euna waited until after the second verse to improvise, having by then listened more closely to what the girl was singing. This was a loose retelling of ‘The Little Mermaid’, the dismal Danish fairy tale they used to read nightly when they first moved to Cala. Where the first verse was full of the youngest mermaid’s anger at having been left in the underwater kingdom while each of her older sisters explored the world, the second was marked by the mermaid’s anxiety at having her turn to see the water’s surface, to notice and fall in love with a prince. There, leading into the chorus, Euna let the synth go neon.

  Now she understood why the build of sound had to be incremental, and why it had to start with the voice.

  Back under water, Lili’s heroine was learning that humans live shorter lives than do mermaids, but they may endure after death in soul form, while mermaids turn to sea foam. A water witch offered the mermaid a potion that would let her walk on human legs, though it would also cause her excruciating pain. Lili made her mouth into a wide and unflawed O, and she tried to sing her highest, Yes.

  The note she was reaching for was past her cords’ capacity, and quite suddenly they broke. So much of the story was still untold. The mermaid marrying the prince; the witch giving her a knife so she might kill him and recover her life under the sea; the mermaid throwing her body into the ocean and becoming foam, only to rise later into the air. But before any of this could happen, Lili sulked down into a wicker chair. She insisted she could not reach that Yes, and that the song could not continue without it.

  She started to knead her throat, growling low as she did. We’ll finish it during our next circle, she said.

  Euna was not so game to give up the song. Heading into that chorus, she had felt airy, immaterial, as if she did not have a body at all. She had been hunting for that feeling a long time without knowing it; the covers they usually played in the Moog circle were fun, occasionally pretty, but this had moved her in a way she had not forecast. For a moment she had been a flawless swimmer, no margin between sea and skin. That’s a whole month from now, she said. We’ll forget everything we’ve learned by then.

  Grace, still in her loch reòite state, looked at Lili and Lili alone. She asked, Why did you write that?

  Lili shook her head from side to side, making a scene of her curls. She seemed angry, on the edge of an outburst. Do you know you’ve never let me run a single errand? she asked Grace. Euna went twice last year.

  This comment caught Euna under the chin. For months she had been behaving well in order to go unnoticed, to hold her name out of the other women’s mouths – this, to her, had become the guise of freedom. Now Lili was parading her life in front of their little public, as if it were an idol’s, as if it merited envy. She could not just let this happen. She said, You think you know everything.

  Muireall came between them. Let’s not do this right now, she said, putting her hand on Euna’s shoulder.

  Why do you act like I’m not even here? Lili asked Muireall.

  Muireall had a habit of avoiding conflict unless she, personally, had reason to punish someone. Even those occasions could hardly be called conflicts. The ground between the watcher and the watched was never level. You’re imagining things, little tattie, she said.

  Lili started to throw candlesticks and novels. She slashed a sack of ashes on a stray nail and smashed firewood against the mantel. At last she punched her hand through the glass face of the grandmother clock, a motion so violent that Grace ran over, ceding the safety of her loch reòite, and slapped the girl. Lili’s hand was backstitched with blood, a purl of pure crimson. She sat down in the middle of the bearskin rug, calmly, and drained into its neck fur. Euna went to the kitchen to get a rag, which she dampened in the storage cask. She came back and wrapped Lili’s hand tightly, holding the rag in place long enough to feel a peaceful force pass between the two of them.

  Tea? Muireall asked.

  Lili nodded. Grace straightened her dress and went to the kitchen to boil water.

  After the day she had lived through, Euna only wanted to sleep. If one were inclined to believe in omens, which Euna no longer was, the Saanen and the minister’s daughter and the synth-induced disturbance might call for a deeper reading. I’m beat, she said to Muireall. Would it be all right with everyone if I went upstairs?

  Muireall brightened. She liked when the other women asked for her permission. Go get some rest, she said.

  Euna held Lili’s rag-wrapped hand to her heart and looked the girl in her eyes. They were soulless, all glass. Then Euna stood and took the stairs two at a time. This month she was sharing the double bed with Grace, and she glowed knowing she might fall asleep alone that night, with her choice of pillow and bed side. Silence other than the voices through the floorboards, the occasional wildcat on the hill.

  She stripped naked. Instead of putting on her nightgown she crawled between the sheets as nature had intended her. What a day. She lay nude between the cotton sheets, cold but humming with a kind of stress-heat. Through the window, the moon was no bigger than a slice of finger lime. Or else, right now, she was gigantic. She could reach into the sky and pluck that slice, snack on its arc, let the citrus trickle down her throat. Maybe she would not die bored, after all.

  *

  A week passed peacefully. The women had started loving each other in a sort of charged, stepping-on-seaglass way, careful not to wake gloom or anxiety in any of the others. Each word was well chosen, each act observed first from at least two angles. And though it took work, and though what they achieved was undoubtedly fragile, they were able to hold Cala in a state of conscious harmony. They were as safe as they had ever been. Lili’s outburst had not broken them, as it might have. What that screaming and smashing had done, at least for the time being, was drain the resentment that had been building like a blister in the house.

  Then at once, after that harmonious week had passed, the peace leached away from their home. So quickly and so absolutely did this happen that Euna questioned whether the harmony had ever existed. She understood that those moments had been real, just as in their decade here there had been many spells of comfort and happiness, none of which was erased by the inevitable swings toward fear, frustration, envy. But still, in want of a good witness, she had a quiet suspicion she had imagined all of it.

  On that peace-leaching day, a brick came through the kitchen window, as the bird had come through the glasshouse pane.

  And then, much worse, much more worrisome, through the brick-hole came a girl in a tartan skirt and pullover slightly too small for her, her lower belly bloated and bare. She flashed her underskirt as she climbed through the glass, scoring her legs. Euna was alone in the kitchen when this happened, burnishing the tiles with a wad of steel wool. She screamed. The girl knelt beside her and stifled the sound with her hand. I need help, she said.

  Euna had a chance to look at her face. She had lovely, creamy skin, but each feature set in that base was foul, almost grotesque. Her eyes, far apart, were the colour of bruised apples. Wind had burned a pink ring around her lips, which were pale and faintly downturned, and flaked the broad tip of her nose. Who are you? Euna asked.

  My name is Aileen, the girl said, hoarsely. I’m Minister Macbay’s daughter.

  She lifted her pullover fully and lowered the waistline of her skirt, showing beyond a doubt that she was pregnant. Euna wondered who the father was. And then, though she tried not to, she pictured the finer points of that union, bed, orchid, hand. I want to help, she told the girl, in part to dull her imagination.

  Muireall came into the kitchen, likely having heard Euna’s scream. And, seeing Aileen, she went stiff. Maybe this was a natural reaction. A stranger had broken the seal of their house, towing bindweed in on her boot treads. But it seemed excessive that Muireall should hold so rigid, and that she, for whom words had such a token weight, flowing with the ease and speed of other people’s tap water, could not think of a single thing to say.

 
I wasn’t going to do anything without asking you, Euna said to Muireall, after a long and mutual silence.

  Still on her knees, Aileen reached for a rag by the soak basin and started to wipe her legs. She had been roughed not only by the shattered window but by the thorns of a rosebush. Euna had spent years singing to the Cala greens to earn their trust, and, to that end, now they never pricked her skin. But they had clearly been hostile to Aileen. In the webs between her fingers Euna saw burdock spikes and cockleburs. Euna felt a sort of affinity with this stranger, not sympathy, but I-know-how-much-the-brambles-hurt. May I help her? Euna asked Muireall.

  Only when she was addressed directly did Muireall move. She walked right in front of Aileen and grabbed her by the chin. The force, again, seemed excessive. You’re not welcome here, she said. We’ve been better than ever lately, and we don’t need you walking on our peace. She was chewing and popping a mouthful of gum, a homemade mash of peppermint and beeswax, and with each spoken word flecks of spit flew through the air.

  Near the beginning of the Life Grammar was a list of values. The women had put their initials beside each point as consent to follow them. VI. Benevolence. Every person is worthy of our love, attention, and open mind. If someone asks for our help, even if they have personally wronged us, we will hear them out in the spirit of goodwill. Euna had understood these values to be complete, not to change depending on who they were being applied to, or on which day. And yet, here was Muireall, tall and cruel above Aileen’s crawling.

  I’m begging you, the girl said.

  Get out of my house, Muireall said.

  Euna was on the floor, too, still clutching the steel wool. She was closer to Aileen’s station than she was to Muireall’s.

  Muireall put her fingers between Aileen’s lips and prised them apart, then hawked her gum into the girl’s mouth. Aileen coughed loudly, choking on the hunk, swallowing hard to make room for clean air. Euna was shocked. The poor girl had started to shake. That she would not leave, despite this humiliation, told Euna she truly had nowhere else to go.