A Scottish Ferry Tale

What others are saying about

A Scottish Ferry Tale:

"Expertly rendered with the skill of an author who knows her setting well and has the skills to make it come alive.... A satisfying read by a first-time novelist with great promise!"

- Richard Christiano, author of Gabriel's Fired

"A page turner! This untraditional romance has characters with depth and a sarcastic sense of humor." 

- Saint Louis University Library

"Volkers' intelligent sense of humor will have you smiling from the first page. Then you'll find yourself trying to get your chores done faster so you can get back to reading to find out what happens next."

– Amazon review

A Scottish Ferry Tale

Nancy Volkers

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2010 Nancy Volkers

This book is available in print at Amazon.com, BN.com or through your local bookseller or library (upon request).

This is a work of fiction; names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Lines from i have found what you are like. Copyright 1923, 1925, 1951, 1953, © 1991 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1976 by George James Firmage, from COMPLETE POEMS, 1904-1962 by E.E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. Used with permission from Liveright Publishing Corporation.

Excerpt from A Poet’s Advice to Students. Copyright © 1955, 1965 by the Trustees for the E.E. Cummings Trust. Copyright © 1958, 1965 by George J. Firmage, from A MISCELLANY REVISED by E.E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. Used with permission from Liveright Publishing Corporation.

Cover photo and author photo © Nancy Volkers

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This one’s for you, Mom—

so many books, so little time.

Is life not a hundred times too short

for us to stifle ourselves?

~Friedrich Nietzsche

PROLOGUE

It can be easier to love people when they don’t know it. You can watch them, see them, all on your own. There’s no pressure to say or do anything, or explain yourself.

Because the thing about love is, you can’t really explain it. It’s like some stars in the sky, the ones you can see only if you don’t look directly at them. Seek those stars out, try to focus on them, and they disappear.

In the dark, or the early morning, or while the people you love are sleeping or don’t know you’re watching, you can see them for who they truly are, and be who you truly are. That’s where your love goes, after all. And that’s where it lives.

Chapter 1

I really didn’t expect to find myself putting a three-year-old kid to bed any time soon. Yet here I am with my niece, Aisling (that’s pronounced Ashlyn), in her twin bed with princess sheets.

Weed ‘Nuggle Puppy, and ‘No White, Aisling said, snuggling down under the covers with her stuffed rhinoceros. The rhinoceros is named Sneezy. Not because of the Seven Dwarfs, but because my brother-in-law pretended to make it sneeze one night and it got such a laugh that it was dubbed Sneezy on the spot. With her just-out-of-toddlerdom speech, Aisling calls it Neezy the Wino. I do all I can to goad her into saying it—I’m always forgetting Sneezy’s name and what kind of animal he is. But I try very hard not to laugh when she does. She is too young to understand that I’m not really laughing at her.

I pulled the requested books from the pile and we started reading. I’m supposed to sing Snuggle Puppy, but as I don’t know the song, I sing it to a random tune. Ash didn’t seem to mind. She even sings along.

Then we started Snow White. I was barely into the first sentence—Once upon a time, a beautiful queen was sitting by a window in the castle, sewing—when Ash started asking questions.

She hurt her finger?

Um, yeah. She pricked it with the needle.

She kie?

Kie?

Ash pretended to cry.

Oh, cry. No, she doesn’t cry. She does get some blood on her sewing, though.

What she making?

Well… I can’t tell from this. What do you think?

Buttafie?

It does look like a butterfly. With blood on it. Should I keep reading?

So, here’s the thing. This queen sitting by the window, sewing her butterfly . . . she dies. On the first page. Not only that; she’s holding baby Snow White in her arms at the time. That seemed a bit harsh to read to a preschooler, so instead I said the queen disappeared.

She die, Ash corrected me.

Oh, right. She did die.

How many times had her parents read this story? Did they ever edit it?

What die mean?

So they didn’t edit, but they didn’t explain either? Not explaining was uncharacteristic of my sister. Rachel explained everything, thoroughly, to the point that people stopped listening. But I didn’t think my sister wanted me to be the one explaining life and death to her only daughter.

Um, dying is kind of like disappearing. Has Mommy or Daddy talked about it?

No, said Ash, but I knew that could mean No, or it could mean Yes, a bit, or it could mean Yes, many times. I had been living with my sister for only two weeks, but I’d quickly come to understand that three-year-olds seemed to live in their own little worlds, in which truth had no real meaning and time was elastic. It was sort of an appealing place to think about, really. Especially when you were 25, achingly single, underemployed, motherless twice over and dealing with (or not) a dad who needed an intervention.

Anyway.

I kept reading, figuring that was the best way to distract Ash from the death discussion.

Snow White’s dad, the king, is lonely, so he marries a nasty queen. This I had some empathy for, though I thought his priorities should be a bit different with a child in the picture.

Then there’s a page or two about how jealous the nasty queen is of all the other women in the kingdom, especially Snow White. She’s always asking that mirror about the fairest one of all. I thought she should stop investing so much in the opinion of an inanimate object—as well as maybe reevaluate her focus on outward appearances—but I kept those thoughts to myself.

Not only is the queen jealous, but when the mirror says some other woman is the fairest of them all, the queen has that woman put to death. More death…. and more editing on my part. I just skipped the sentences about murder, and hoped that Ash wouldn’t notice.

On the next page, the queen locks up Snow White, banishing her to the basement to scrub floors. This irritated me. Not that scrubbing floors is fun, but cleaning has a bad enough rap as it is, and it seems that fairy-tale authors had issues with it. Cinderella also was forced to clean. Once Snow White makes it to the cottage of the Seven Dwarfs, she spends the better part of a day cleaning and cooking before she even knows who lives in the house. And while I didn’t think Sleeping Beauty had been put under a dusting-and-vacuuming spell or anything, I hadn’t read that one in awhile.

Ash had a lot to say about the page where Snow White is banished to the dungeon.

Keen no like ‘No White. Keep her in castle, she said.

Yep.

Maybe ‘No White give keen a hug. Make her feel better.

I looked over at Ash. She had Sneezy in a headlock and was looking at me seriously.

Or maybe ‘No White share her toys.

Those are great ideas, Ash, I said, wanting to hug her until she popped. Those might make the queen feel better. They sure would make me feel better.

Me too, Aisling said.

Unfortunately, ‘No Whi—er, Snow White is locked in the basement. So she can’t even get out and give the queen a hug or anything.

How her eat?

Maybe they let her out to eat, or bring her food down to her.

Aisling studied the illustrations.

Where her dad?

That’s a really good question, Ash. I wonder where her dad is too. You’d think he’d be looking out for her a little bit.

I was afraid to read on. I knew what happened next; the queen sends the huntsman out into the woods to kill Snow White. The guy is supposed to bring her heart back in a box as proof that she is dead. (Honestly? Wasn’t there an R-rated Brad Pitt movie like that?) The huntsman can’t bear to hurt Snow White, so he tells her to run away and never come back. Then he kills some poor innocent forest animal—which doesn’t tweak his conscience at all, apparently—and brings its heart back in a box instead.

This is not age appropriate.

Luckily, Ash said she was sleepy and ready for me to turn out the light. I did, and she put her little arm around my neck.

Night-night, Aunt Cassie, she said.

Night, sweetie, I said. I love you.

I love ooh, Aisling said, and snuggled up against me.

Long after she was asleep, I lay there thinking. I let some tears squeeze out. Aisling was one of the few people in my life I could love without question. And I hardly knew what to do with the way I felt when she gave me a hug or said she loved me in her astoundingly cute, baby-duck voice. I thought back to the night she was born, when she was less than an hour old and I held her for the first time.

She wasn’t Aisling yet; she hadn’t been named. And she wasn’t the fairest of them all, or even close. Under the Snow White Rules of Naming, she’d have been Red Wrinkle. Plus, thanks to that journey down the birth canal, she had a cone-shaped head. The midwife had put a little hat on top of it about three seconds after she was born, which I thought made the baby look really stupid. But I didn’t say anything.

She also had white stuff all over her forehead.

That’s vernix, Rachel had said, when I asked about it. It’s like really good moisturizing cream.

I sat with the baby in a chair in Rachel’s room at the birth center. The baby had just nursed for the first time, then fallen asleep. Rachel, who hadn’t eaten through her 30-hour labor, was consuming pizza at an amazing pace, and talking between bites about taking a shower. She’d already called Dad and Stella, and Glen had called his dad, while the midwife and her assistant cleaned up the messy birth stuff, which I had successfully avoided seeing. I had stayed near Rachel’s head during the birth, holding her hand and refusing to look below her neck.

The baby and I sat in that chair, and I looked at her sleeping face and wondered. How long would it take for her to start smiling? Crawling? Walking? Talking? Would it feel like only a few weeks had passed before she started kindergarten? Where would I be when she graduated high school? I’d be 40 by then, or close to it. I could not imagine how that would feel. Yet I thought it couldn’t feel that different from 22. Would I feel any older? Wiser? Where would I be?

By the time there were only a couple of pizza slices left, Glen and Rachel had decided to name the baby Aisling. It had been Glen’s great grandmother’s name. I thought the whole strange spelling thing was just wrong, but they didn’t seem to worry that she’d be spelling her name to people her entire life. While Rachel was helping the midwife fill out the birth certificate, I was imagining 25-year-old Aisling making an important phone call.

Hi, I’m calling about the job posting. Aisling Reynolds. My first name is spelled A-I-S-L… no, no H. A-I-S-L…

I imagined her in school, where she’d have to endure 13 years of Ay-sling? Is Ay-sling here?

I almost said something, but it was her parents’ decision, not mine. Let Ash hold it against them. I’d back her up on it.

Aisling’s middle name, Cora, had been my mom’s name. When Glen and Rachel started talking about names, Rachel said they considered Cora as a first name. But Rachel wasn’t comfortable naming one of her kids after our mom.

It would just be too… close, she said. She said that Glen looked at her strangely, but I knew exactly what she meant. You might wonder too much if the young Cora was going to turn out like the older one. A middle name is safer.

My sister wanted a completely drug-free birth. She and Glen took Bradley classes, which I gathered were not anything like Lamaze classes, mostly because when I said, Oh, like Lamaze? Rachel almost bit my head off. Despite that show of testiness, Rachel was totally cool with the pregnancy thing—she was totally cool with almost everything in life, really, so this didn’t surprise me—until movie night at Bradley class.

That night, the class had to watch videos of women in Guatemala giving birth while squatting over piles of blankets. Apparently the videos were a standard part of the class, but I don’t know what the instructors were thinking. Rachel called me that night in tears. I was home with our father, having just graduated from college. Thinking she was someone else (these were the days before call waiting), I answered the phone with a cheerful Hi there!

I can’t give BIRTH! Rachel practically threw up into the phone, before sobbing uncontrollably.

At first, I thought she meant that she had some sort of medical problem.

Rach, it’s okay, I tried. Plenty of women have C-sections, and I know it’s not what you want, but…

No, no! I’m not having a C-section! At class tonight we had to watch these movies of women giving birth and the heads were coming out and they were so… big. Huge. I can’t fit a head through there!

Then it was actually kind of funny, but I didn’t laugh. I tried to calm her down a little bit, although I had absolutely no clue what to say, because I agreed with her. I mean, that opening is not wide. Baby’s heads are small, but they are not that small. I have never seen a full-term baby’s head that was as small as a penis… not even a very large penis.

Rachel, women do it every day, I said. There’s millions of years of evolution behind you. It will be okay.

Strangely, it was the evolution point that began to calm her. Rachel and I are not all that much alike, but we are both scientific thinkers. We just use our scientific brains in different ways, I guess. Once she calmed down, she admitted that she’d freaked out in the car on the way home, so much so that Glen had to pull over and hold her until she stopped shaking. He, too, mentioned that babies’ heads made it through women’s vaginas every day (though I doubt he used the word vaginas) and that her body would make it work when the time was right.

After that day, I never heard her say she was worried about whether the baby would fit or how she could possibly give birth. She did mention her near-hyperventilatory outbreak to her Bradley instructors. She said they were quite surprised. No one ever had mentioned being upset by the videos. Rachel thought that this meant she was a freak. I told her she was just the first person ballsy enough to say anything about it.

Come on. People who do these classes are all ‘birth is natural, breathe through your nose, picture yourself at a beach, labor is almost like an orgasm’—they are not going to admit if a birth video makes them hysterical, I said.

This made Rachel laugh so hard that she had to drop the phone and run for the bathroom before she peed her pants. I congratulated myself, sort of; it is hard to make Rachel laugh. But I had figured out that pregnant women are close to peeing their pants a few times a day, so that part didn’t impress me much.

In my arms, Aisling slept on. I guessed she hadn’t been sitting around in the amniotic fluid getting anxious about trying to fit her head through that little muscular tube. The nice thing about being a pre-newborn (at least I imagined) was the lack of expectation. You really didn’t know what was going to happen, so bingo, nothing to worry about.

I wished very much for some of that peace and clarity in my own life.

They told me her name while I was holding her, and I was the first one to call her by name. Aisling, I said. Aisling Cora Reynolds. Hello, Aisling. Hi, Ash. Greetings, A.C. Ace. Ashlyn-bean. Ash Bo Bash. Welcome to the world. It is one glorious, incredible, fucked-up, amazing, frustrating, hot-fudge-sundae sort of world. I hope you enjoy it. Sorry about that head-squeezing thing. I think your hat will fit better in the morning.

Then I passed her off to the midwife, who wanted to give her another once over, and took the last piece of pizza for myself.

****

So why was I, at the age of 25, living at my sister’s house and reading badly written fairy tales to my niece? I could have had my own apartment. Except that would require an income stream strong enough to cover first and last month’s rent, utilities, food, and transportation and clothing for the job that was presumably paying for the apartment. I did not have a full-time job. I had a master’s degree, but currently, I had a part-time job. I had quit a perfectly respectable full-time job to find myself, or apply to graduate schools (again), or choose your excuse and I could find some way for it to apply.

The truth was, I was heartbroken. But I was pretending not to be.

Chapter 2

Once upon a time, a young woman flew over the ocean to see her beloved.

My senior year of college, I was involved with Jason Kirkland, who spent his spring semester in Edinburgh. We had talked about seeing other people while he was there, but decided that we were so in love that this wouldn’t be an issue. Then I went to