Finding Fraser (26 page)

Feeble Finish…

4:00 pm, May 2

Nairn, Scotland

After today, I believe it is time to bid
adieu to Nairn. This is a country of strong weather and rare beauty. I may not
have found my Fraser, but I have found something of my soul here, and it was
worth finding. It is a feeble finish to my grand plan, but my next step must
take me away from my beloved Highlands and back down to Edinburgh. I hope my
luck will be better there than it was in Glasgow, as I need to make enough
money to pay for my ticket home.

- ES

Comments: 5

Gerald Abernathy, Fort William, Scotland:

Hey girl, if you do head south this week
and pass through Ft. W, come see me. I’m feeling a mite tetchy still, and have
decided to accept medical advice and take up residence in a rest home here
until I am well again. Love to see you if you are passing through…

HiHoKitty, Sapporo, Japan:

Sad to see journey come to end.

がんばって

(Read 3 more comments
here
…)

Clearly
the bloom was off the rose.
I sat by the monitor
for nearly an hour, but to no avail. My comments had fallen almost to zero,
with my loyal HiHoKitty one of the last remaining. The rest—apart from
Gerald—had returned to selling me erectile dysfunction medication.

I signed off with a sigh, and waved to Katy
behind her monitor at the front desk as I headed out the door. The next bus
south was not until midnight, so I decided to wait and go the following
morning.

The evening was clear and cold, and as I
pushed my bike down the walk, I thought about Gerald. A rest home—what
the heck was that? The words conjured up images of stately Edwardian manors and
starched aprons. It seemed odd that he hadn’t wanted to return to the warmer
climes of his southern home. Presumably, though, he had to take the medical
advice he was given. I felt badly for him, being so sick, so far from home. If
there was any way for me to stop and visit him on my journey south, I vowed to
try and do it.

I shivered a little with the cold, and
walked my bike across the street to the garage to ask about the cost of keeping
it until the following day. In the back I could hear pounding and clanking,
accompanied by someone singing.

“
Bar-bar-bar-bar-barbara-ann
…
”

I leaned across the grease-covered table
that stood in for a desk and tried not to touch anything.

“
Come
take my ha-ha-hand,
” crooned the voice.

“Hello?” I called, hoping to save myself
another verse.

Sure enough, the door to the back swung open
and man I had met the day before came out, wiping his hands.

Unfortunately, the singing continued from
the back.

I tried to ignore it, and pitching my voice
over top, asked the garage owner if he would mind if I kept the bike another
day. He waved a hand at me, told me I could keep the thing for a week and
shooed me out into the street.

“Ye look fair frozen, Miss,” he said,
kindly. “They’ll give ye a spot of tea at the cafe to warm ye up before ye head
back to Morag’s place.”

I was feeling more like a cup of hot
chocolate than tea, but his advice seemed sound, and I was starving, besides. Perhaps
a Nairn scone would solve at least that problem, for the moment.

By the time I had walked my bike across
the street, the sky had a lowering look I didn’t like at all, and I decided to
make it a quick drink and maybe a sandwich to take away with me. I stepped
inside and the wind caught the door, so I needed both hands to pull it closed.
As I turned back into the cafe, the warmth of the place enclosed me for a
single, welcome moment.

Then I got hit by what felt like a freight
train, in the form of a young, blonde woman.

Screaming.

“Ay-ay-ay-ayiiiiiiiiiii,” she yelled, as we
hit the ground. I say “we” loosely, since it was I who hit the ground first.
She literally bounced off me onto her knees. I ended up flat on my back on the
rain-soaked mat by the door, the wind entirely knocked out of me. But instead
of helping me to my feet or apologizing—all the things one would expect
to happen after being suddenly and unceremoniously bowled off one’s feet,
instead she grabbed my arm and wailed again.

I took a whistling gasp to try to suck air
back into my lungs, and the woman continued to clutch my arm with what felt
like a death grip.

I sat up and managed an “Ooof,” not really
having enough oxygen left to express the true nature of my shock and outrage. Her
fingers squeezed like a vise on the flesh of my upper arm.

It was then I realized she was pregnant.

And not
just
pregnant.

“Oiiiiiii … ,” she cried, neatly ripping the
collar off my jacket with her death grip. “It’s COMING.”

I looked around wildly. It was not yet five,
but if this place had a late-afternoon rush, it hadn’t materialized. The cafe
was deserted.

By this time, we were both on our knees and I
realized the mat might not be just rain-soaked after all. The woman had my
jacket collar bunched up in one hand, and the other hand still clenched around
my arm.

“Uh—hello?” I called, now that the
breath had been shocked back into my lungs. “Anyone? We need some help out
here!”

“Unnnngggghhhhh … ,” the woman groaned.
“Don’t leave me. The bairn …”

“I—I won’t leave,” I said, trying not
to freak out. I wasn’t even an auntie yet, and I‘d had zero experience with
birthin’ babies.

The woman let go of my torn collar and
clutched her midsection, groaning. I noticed with some shock that, though she
was clearly well along in the pregnancy, she wore a waitress uniform. It was
buttoned to the waist and she’d unbuttoned the lower half, covering the baby
bump with a voluminous white apron.

“Is there anyone in the kitchen who can
help?” I asked her, but she was beyond answering for the moment. Her head was
down, and she was panting urgently.

I heard a door slam in the back, and a cloud
of cigarette smoke floated gently in through the serving window. “Hey, hey—we
need some help out here,” I yelled in the direction of the smoke, trying to
keep the panic out of my voice.

A startled face appeared around the corner
of the kitchen wall.

“What the hell …” he said. The face
disappeared and I heard the door slam.

The woman groaned again, and started rocking
back and forth on her hands and knees. “Too soon—it’s too soon,” she
panted.

I’m not actually sure what I said at that
moment, to tell you the truth. All I can remember is seeing a wash of blood on
the floor and then pretty much a black wall of panic closed in. The next thing
I knew a young man in chef’s whites was on his knees beside us.

“Cara,” he said imploringly to the woman.
“Are ye all’ righ’? Is the baby comin’?”

“Uh—yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s
what’s happening here,” I said. “But it seems so fast—aren’t these things
supposed to take forever?”

I revised my estimate of the man—he
was more like a boy, maybe sixteen or seventeen, max.

He looked at me as though he’d not noticed
me before. I could see panic in his eyes that I was sure was reflected in my
own. “Ah’ve no fookin’ idea,” he gasped. “She’s the only one on until seven. What
do I do?”

My arm had already gone to sleep—there
was no way this woman was going to let go of me any time soon. “Get help,” I
said. “Call 911!”

He looked at me like I was crazy, and then a
light dawned in his eyes. “It’s 999. I can do that!” He jumped to his feet. “And
I’ll run to Jacquie’s,” he said. “She’s just across the street. She’ll know
what to tell them.”

“Wait! Have you got a towel or a blanket or
anything I can put down—just in case?”

He nodded and dashed into the back, returning
seconds later with a giant stack of dishtowels. “We havenae anythin’ bigger,”
he said. “Righ’. Back in a tick.”

He put his hand on the doorknob and the
woman—Cara—groaned. “Get me some help, Ash,” she said, through
gritted teeth. “Ah cain’t bloody do this alone.”

Ash was yelling into his cell phone on his
way out the door, so, “I’m here,” I said, as soothingly as I could, all the
while wishing to hell I wasn’t.

But Cara’s one spell of lucidity had passed.
She began panting in a way that I didn’t like at all. It reminded me of the
birth scenes I’d seen on television. Without the tidiness. And the doctors.

My hand had gone a grayish shade, all
feeling lost.

“Cara,” I said. “Just hold on. Someone is
going to be here any minute. It’s going to be all …”

Her face snapped up to look at me, and I
thought her eyes were going to pop out of her head. Her mouth opened so wide I
could see she had three silver fillings on one side—but not a sound came
out.

We stared at each other for a single long moment.
Her eyes slowly closed, and she let out a perfectly gentle, relieved sigh.

And behind her on the stack of dishtowels,
was a baby, with a tangle of fabric around one leg.

“God in heaven, that were fookin’ brutal,”
she said, glancing over her shoulder. “And she’s ruined ma’ knickers, ta boot.”

The door behind me blew open, hit me in the
ass and a mob scene took over.

After that, in spite of the mob, things
unfolded in a much more comfortable fashion. Someone got me a chair, and pushed
a cup of tea into my hand. A pair of ambulance attendants neatly scooped Cara
and her lustily crying baby onto a gurney and rolled her out the door. Even the
pile of dishtowels vanished, somehow.

The kid in the kitchen whites arrived,
grinning, at my elbow, and poured a generous tot of whisky into my tea. We
toasted each other silently, and he took a long slug from the bottle.

“An interesting day,” he said.

I nodded and sipped.

“You a tourist?”

I nodded again, and sipped some more. “I’m
leaving tomorrow,” I clarified.

He pointed at the ground. “Here? Or
Scotland?”

I shrugged. “Here. I need to head south to
find a job, to earn money for my ticket home.”

He was silent a moment, as the ambulance,
siren on, drove away. A collection of chattering people stood around outside
the cafe, laughing and smoking and waving their arms in the air.

“Well, if ye’re not set on headin’ south, it
looks like we need a new waitress. And yeh seem pretty good at thinkin’ on yer
feet. Want the job?”

I looked at him and blinked. It seemed my
time in the Highlands might not yet be at an end, after all.