Toward a Secret Sky
Heather Maclean
CHAPTER 1
I was okay until they started lowering my mom’s casket into the ground.
Up to that point, the whole funeral had felt like an out-of-body experience. I walked around inside my own thick-walled aquarium. My motions were slow. My thoughts bogged down. I knew I was on display—everyone craning their necks to catch the slightest ripple of my movement. The obituary in the paper that morning hadn’t helped:
Anna Hamilton, systems analyst for T.A., Inc., passed away in a freak accident on Tuesday night. She is preceded in death by her husband, Hugh, and is survived by her only daughter, Maren, age 17.
Freak. It might as well have been my middle name. And everyone knew it wasn’t an “accident.” I could hear the whispers of the people from her company at the funeral. I knew what they were saying; their too-loud whispers slithered through the air like a toxic smoke.
Isn’t she the one who found the body? Poor thing.
What will she do now? She’s a veritable orphan!
I heard they’re shipping her off to his parents in Scotland. It’s a shame she’s never met them. It’s a shame she never met him . . .
But I didn’t care, because I was safe behind the glass. Nothing could get in and touch me, not even grief.
Nothing, that is, until the screaming started.
We were gathered around the jagged hole that meant to swallow the most important thing in my life. My father died before I was born. Well, on the day I was born, and my mother was all I had. We’d been inseparable, and now we were going to be separated forever. I couldn’t think that way, though, or I’d climb into the ground with her.
I was staring ahead, eyes unfocused, lost in the mournful symphony of the squeaking pulleys, when a sudden scream shattered everything. An unearthly, guttural wail unlike anything I’d ever heard before. For one horrifying moment, I believed it was actually coming from the grave; that it was my mom screaming.
Before I could think anything else, I was shoved forward. I fell, and tiny blades of grass bit at my face. Shadows darkened the ground as thunder roared. I’d grown up in Missouri, so I knew that early spring storms frequently rolled in with no warning. They didn’t bother me; you just ducked and covered. It wasn’t until I raised my head and saw the priest running for his car, his robe flapping wildly around his ankles, that I started to get scared.
By the time I got up, almost everyone was gone. All the handsome men from my mom’s firm clad in their dark suits had disappeared—as if they’d been blown away.
Someone grabbed my arm to lead me away from the open grave waiting to digest my mom’s shiny white coffin, but I dug my heels into the ground. I didn’t want to go.
Who’s going to protect her from the rain? I thought crazily. The mud is going to ruin her pretty blue dress. Not that I’d actually seen her in the dress. The manner in which she died demanded a closed casket. But I did pick the dress out of her closet.
The screaming and the thunder continued. Someone lifted me, tried to drag me away from my mother. I fought them and clawed at their back with my nails. I wanted to run back to the coffin, open it up, and lie down next to my mom. It seemed perfectly reasonable at the time. I didn’t want her to be alone. I didn’t want to be alone . . .
I leaned against the cool glass and studied the scenery as the outdated, purple shuttle bus wound through the Scottish Highlands. The hills were broken up and sharp-looking. Prickly plants and crumbling rocks littered the ground. Huge pine trees rose to the sky like alien life-forms. And the mountains in the distance were topped with snow.
The van headed toward Aviemore, the tiny town where my dad had been born. The last time he’d been there, he hadn’t yet married my mom. In fact, his parents didn’t approve of the match and had refused to come to the wedding. They never spoke again, and when my mom had me, she must not have felt the need to reach out to people who hated her. People I was now going to live with.
That was twenty years ago, I reminded myself. Surely, they wouldn’t hold a grudge against me, especially since, from the photographs I’d seen, I resembled my father . . .
My mother was totally beautiful—a former Miss Springfield—and I looked nothing like her. While she had olive skin and shiny black hair, I got my Scottish father’s pale white coloring, light green eyes, and crazy, thick, curly blonde hair. The kind of hair that once made a hairdresser cry because the haircut came with a free blow-dry, and she hadn’t counted on the whole process taking three hours. Of course, it wasn’t California blonde or even all-the-same-color blonde. It was, someone once told me, “dishwater blonde.” Just what my self-esteem needed: hair that reminded people of dirty water.
“Try ’n stay awake,” the van driver offered, as we pulled up to a large stone house. “The trick to besting jet lag is to get into the new time as quickly as possible. Don’t be taking a nap today, no matter what anyone says.”
Before I knew it, I was standing alone on the gravel driveway between my two, large, soiled red suitcases.
It was hard to tell from the outside how many stories my grandparents’ house was. The roof was impossibly steep, covered in zigzags where the shingles rose and fell at different heights. A single dormer window protruded out of the roof at the very top. I hoped it was an actual room and not just architectural decoration or a useless attic; someplace I could hide out.
Large, flat rocks covered the walls of my grandparents’ house, so slick with the constant Scottish moisture that moss grew in the cracks. The house appeared old, but solid, like it could stand through any storm. I hoped I wasn’t going to be the bad luck that brought it down.
Before I could survey the house any further, my grandparents burst out the front door. I had been dreading this moment for days, because old people make me really uncomfortable, especially old people I’ve never met, and especially old people that might possibly hate me. Would they be hunched over one of those walkers with tennis balls on the bottom? Still have all their teeth? Would they be cold to me? I braced myself just in case.
They answered my concerns about their sprightliness as they bounded across the slippery grass to greet me. And they seemed to like me well enough. They hugged and squeezed me, held me back at arm’s length, admired me, squeezed me again, kissed me on each cheek, and clucked over me. But my grandfather took no time in proudly showing me his missing tooth.
“Murdo, stop it! You’re scaring the girl,” my grandmother scolded him.