I left Reelig Glen that day without collecting any data from the twinflower. When I met Sam — he caught my attention by waving two flashlights, the beams, for a moment, resembling large yellow eyes — on the outskirts of the glen, I told him I had been unable to locate a twinflower. And later, when another member of the research team discovered the very twinflower I had abandoned, I acted shocked and said I hadn’t been able to see very well through the rain and night.
The bagpiper did not play that evening because of the weather. The ground floor of the inn was quiet, as the other scientists had declined another night at the malt shop, completing final equipment repairs and packing instead. After returning from Reelig Glen, I had wandered around the Craigdarroch, hoping to bump into Sarah or McKay, or perhaps to even see them together, to witness some private moment of their marriage, but no one was around.
Later in the evening, I sat at the desk in my bedroom and stared out the window. I had discovered in the desk drawer a thin stack of Craigdarroch stationery, envelopes, and a black pen with the hotel name embossed along the side in gold. I placed a sheet of paper on the desk and picked up the pen and began to write.
July 20th
Inverness, Scotland
Peter:
Today it rained. Today I found a twinflower. It was, like so many other things, not at all what I had hoped. But it is a flower and only a flower and how could I have grown to expect so much from it? Perhaps this is the origin of disappointment. When we give something more power than it could ever possibly possess.
How is it that you are already leading a different life?
I cannot say that I wish you well. Maybe one day I will.
E
I sealed the letter in an envelope and returned it to the drawer. I planned to send it the next afternoon, after I had returned from watching McKay’s descent into the Loch, not yet knowing that I would forget the letter altogether until I had left Inverness and was flying back to Washington, that I wouldn’t speak of it until I saw Peter at a botany convention in Chicago a year later, where I would press my legal pad against my chest and say, After we parted, I wrote you a letter, but I left it in a desk in Scotland.
I folded my arms on the desktop and rested my head against them. I listened to the rain beat the roof and watched it coat the glass — the panes looked like they were melting — until it eased and the night turned still. There was a knock at the door. It was Sarah, coming to deliver me a bowl of soup and some bread, which was wrapped in a paper towel. I thanked her and set the tray down on my desk.
“I wanted to make sure you got a proper dinner,” she said.
“You’ve been very kind,” I said. “You and your husband both.”
“I heard he took you to Urquhart Castle last night.” Her hair was pulled back, and she wore thin gold bracelets on her wrists. “That’s where he’ll depart from tomorrow morning.”
“For the last time,” I said. “Unless they find something, of course.”
“The last time for now,” she said.
I sat in the chair. “Does it worry you when he goes down in the submarine?”
“I’ve gotten used to that too.” She looked down at the floor for a moment. “One afternoon, last summer, McKay went diving with an underwater camera. Did he tell you about this already?”
I shook my head. Sarah told me that she had been in the lobby when he came running into the Craigdarroch, still in his wetsuit, wild with excitement. He said he’d seen the Loch Ness Monster, that he’d captured the creature on tape, that he finally had proof. He called two marine biologists he knew at the University of Aberdeen and they drove up to Inverness the next morning.
“While we waited for these men, he told me what the monster looked like,” Sarah said. “He said its fins resembled gossamer, that the color of its skin was deep green, like peat moss.” But, she continued, when the biologists arrived and watched the tape, there was nothing to see, just footage of lake water. McKay had protested, said something must have gone wrong with the recording, but they didn’t believe him and left.
“He doesn’t think I believed him either,” she said. “He’s still angry about it.”
“Did you believe him?”
“I wanted to.”
“And there was really nothing on the tape?”
“Not a thing,” she said. “I watched it several times by myself, pausing and rewinding, looking for just the smallest sign.”
She sighed and pushed up her sweater sleeves. She apologized for taking so much of my time, said I must be anxious to get some rest. We wished each other goodnight. After she left, I stood by the closed door and listened to her footsteps going down the stairs.
I woke early the next morning and set out for Urquhart Castle. The sun was rising when I started down the road; the landscape seemed so different than the one McKay and I had passed in the night. Gold light crept through the fog that was draped across the mountains, and the treetops poked through the haze like spears.
Once I reached the ruins, I stopped beside the tower and looked over the stone wall. The men stood on the bank, holding radios and backpacks full of equipment; the mini-submarine was already floating in the shallow waters of the lake. I wandered around the ruins, the hunks of stone, the slanted tower. I climbed the chipped steps, stood at the top of the structure, and gazed into the Loch. The surface of the lake was rippled like silk.
McKay waded into the water and climbed inside the submarine. Then Ian slapped the metal top and the men pushed the submarine into deeper waters. I noticed a figure sitting on the grassy hill between the castle and the water’s edge. It was Sarah, watching her husband’s descent with a pair of small binoculars. She sat with her elbows resting on her knees, the binoculars wedged between her pale hands. I wondered how many times she’d watched McKay disappear into the Loch, how many more times she would watch him before her patience ran out. There was unhappiness, I could tell, and yet I longed to know what held them together, as though that could give me some sense of how to set about repairing my own life.
The submarine disappeared gradually, like a vessel that had sprung a slow leak. I wondered what McKay was seeing through that tinted window. Murky water, shimmering fish darting past? The wind increased and it looked as though the breezes might lift the water like a dark curtain. Ian, Theodore, and Dale spread across the bank, occasionally speaking into their radios. Sarah was as still as a sentinel, and I wondered if this was an accurate portrait of their life together: he goes, she waits. I watched until the small waves closed over the dome of the submarine like a mouth. I had three more weeks in Inverness, and I imagined the days stretching before me like the clean gray lines of my graph paper.
I went down the tower steps and over the stone wall, moving toward Sarah. Fog was nestled in the crevices of hills, as though the clouds were unraveling. A gust of wind blew my hair across my face; strands stuck to my lips. When I reached Sarah, I sat next to her and pressed my palms into the grass.
“I’ll wait with you,” I said.
Without lowering the binoculars, Sarah asked what it was like being down in the submarine. “The other scientists brought it with them from London,” she said. “McKay’s been after me to sit inside it, but I didn’t want to.”