Page 21 of Past Lives
The ship shrinks behind her. The wind off the lake drags her skirts tight as a bandage. She clutches her valise and the well-creased letter to her breast, heart thudding with dread and a stubborn flicker of hope. “Chosen for her robust constitution,” it reads, “common sense and hearty manners.” It does not say the rest. No family. Barely a dowry. Unremarkable, but for her willingness to disappear to the colonies. She tries not to let the bitterness rise.
There is no dock, only a congregation of men in buckskins and women in home-sewn wool. Their faces are hungry and reserved. The trees loom in smoky tangles behind them—strange, wild things, relentlessly green and full of damp shadows. Even the mist smells unwashed. She tries to stand tall. Her shoes sink with each step, swallowing her city posture whole.
Harrison Cole is the only one who doesn’t look away when their eyes meet. She feels a pulse of uncertainty as she tries to read his expression. He seems older than promised, all anglesand hollows under his scruff. His eyes are the color of mossy stone and wide, even in skepticism. He says, “Miss Billings,” and tips his hat, his voice low and careful, as if afraid of startling her—and his carefulness makes her feel both nervous and oddly reassured.
“Mr. Cole,” she replies, attempting a curtsy; her boot sticks and she pitches forward, cheeks burning with embarrassment. The men snicker. Harrison offers a steadying hand, calloused and huge. His grip is so warm she nearly flinches, startled by the unexpected comfort and the intimacy of his touch.
“I hope you like bread,” he says, deadpan—and only then does she see the panic flickering beneath his stoicism, a nervousness he’s trying to hide. She laughs—too brightly, desperate to ease both their anxieties, but it cuts the tension. He lets her go, relief ghosting across his features.
They are married three days later. There is no church; the preacher is a pocked man called Smalls who reads from a damp prayer book while Harrison fidgets beside her. The only witnesses are the cluster of settlers, her letter-writer (Mrs. Avery, regarding her with a certain pity), and the trees.
On their first night, the roof leaks. Every time the rain spatters her forehead, she startles, trapped between giggles and tears. Harrison lights a tallow candle, inspects the drip, and says, “I built this house with no right angles, but plenty of love.” She watches him crouch, fixing the leak with a scrap of hide, and wonders if she can learn to love a man who speaks only when there is reason.
Time stretches like a long corridor of chores and small victories. Her hands harden. She blisters, then heals, then blisters again. Harrison teaches her to chop wood. She is awkward at first, but she likes the violence of it. They burn everything they touch: bread, fingers, firewood, the shreds of their old selves.
At night, he tells her stories. Only then does his voice open, hesitant and shy, as if her laughter might burn him too. She learns he left a brother behind. He loves the taste of the river after a thaw. But he hated the city, not enough to wish it gone from his bones. He will not kiss her unless she invites him. Even then, it is gentle, almost polite.
Winter descends like an executioner, early and pitiless. They burrow in animal silence, counting flour jars and boiling creek water, worry flickering in their eyes. Her cough starts as a pinprick and grows, each breath filling her with dread. Harrison concocts a paste from willow bark, jaw tight with concern, but she can still taste the mud. She tries not to let him see her tremble, fearing what her weakness might mean for them both.
One night, she wakes in his arms, shaking so hard she thinks her ribs will crack. He wraps them in every blanket, pulls her to the hearth, rocking her as if she were a child. His heart beats frantically and tetherless against her back. He begins to hum—a sound so out of place she nearly cries from its intimacy.
“Tell me about the spring,” she begs, dizzy and bitter with fever.
He describes the color of ice breaking on the river, the way the first snowdrops spear through rot, how fox kits cry for their mothers. She closes her eyes, greedy for all she will not see, a longing sharp and aching in her chest. Harrison keeps talking, voice rough with something unsaid, until it blends with the wind outside, and she is only bone and memory, hollowed by loss.
In the morning, there is only cold. He carries her into the day, wraps her in his coat, and lays her under the pine tree that served as their altar. The earth is frozen, but his hands are patient. Neighbors watch him dig and dig, until he is nothing but a dark smear against the brightness of the snow.
Time collapses. When the thaw comes, wildflowers stab through the dirt above her heart, and Harrison lies beside her inthe grass, face turned to the sky, adrift in grief and hope as he waits for the world to come alive again.
Chapter 15
Heath
I wakewith ice in my bones and the scent of ancient woods pressed under snow—a trick of dreaming, I know, but it lingers as my eyes flutter open in semidarkness, the hourless gray of Highland dawn smeared across the rain-lashed hotel window. I’m still in Invergordon.Not 1842. Not Canada.A luxury suite, a thousand years and a world away from the log house and the starvation, the agony of loss. I feel the saline slick of tears drying on my cheeks and blink them away. Christ.
The bed is king-sized, pillows battered and sheet a shambles, and beside me, Maya is burrowed into her own crescent-moon of covers, hair streaming over bare shoulders. She sleeps with her face to the wall, as if warding off something. I see a starburst of freckles at the nape of her neck, glinting in a bruise I don’t remember giving her. My hand aches to touch, but I hold back. The dream still claws at me, echoing cold and terror through the vascular system of my skull.
I prop myself up, elbows digging into the mattress, and try to slow my breathing to something less panicked. Every time I close my eyes, I see the other Maya—the one from the snowbound log house—dying by inches. She was so light in my arms when I carried her out behind the hut, trailing a shawl likea comet’s tail. Her last words—“Only you, only ever you”—stick in my head like barbed wire.
I want to believe it’s just an echo, a little trip of the subconscious, but that would be a lie. The ache runs deeper than that, a dread coiled at the base of my spine, something that feels… ancient. It’s as if I’ve always known Maya, as if she’s been stitched into the muscle memory of every version of myself, every quantum possibility, every shoddy universe I’ve ever shuffled through. I’ve done more drugs than I care to remember and know a hallucination when I taste one, but this is not that. This is the crackle and snap of reality itself muttering: You know her. You always have.
I remember every minute of last night—our kiss in the rain and how desperation clawed at me to reach the hotel as soon as we could. How I’d pressed her into the bed with a selfish, animal greed, the need to possess and comfort, to lose myself in the heat of her body and the trembling urgency of her hands. In the aftermath, sated and limp, we’d talked for hours. About travel, about parents, about childhood—her pale blue gaze never wavering, as if she were searching my face for proof of something. I wanted to tell her I already loved her, beyond the limits of logic or language. But how do you explain something that doesn’t make sense?
Now, in the icy hush, she stirs. Rolls toward me, the sheet slithering down to bare the soft curve of her hip. Her lashes flutter, and she blinks awake, mouth the barest O of surprise.
“What time is it?” she murmurs, voice burnt at the edges by exhaustion and sleep.
“Early. Still dark.” I shift closer, a hand cupped to her face, thumb smoothing a stray hair behind her ear.
She yawns, then narrows her eyes at me, as if in the tunnel of that gaze she could see straight into the core of my unrest. “Nightmare?” she says, gently.
“Mmm.” I nod. No point denying it. “I dreamed… I lost you. Again.”
She smiles, slow and hesitant. “I know those dreams.”
“Do you?” I ask, and my voice cracks like lake ice under a boot heel. “Sometimes I think I’ve lost you a thousand times already.”
She touches my chest, palm splayed over my racing heart. “We are not tragic Russians,” she teases, but her eyes are wet. “Maybe we could be boring, just for today. Just order room service and watch bad television.”
