Total pages in book: 95
Estimated words: 90951 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 455(@200wpm)___ 364(@250wpm)___ 303(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 90951 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 455(@200wpm)___ 364(@250wpm)___ 303(@300wpm)
Now, my head is all…
Well, who the hell knows if my head is going to come out of this in one piece.
I hope Bea isn’t watching, I think.
It’s my last coherent thought before a gray tide pulls me under.
Chapter Five
BEATRICE
Ican’t feel my nose.
Again.
Scotland has given me the coldest summer of my life—complete with back-to-back hurricanes that nearly swept my cottage into the sea—and I fucking love it.
I love the windswept drama of exploring the Isle of Arran with my hair lashing into my face like a gothic heroine, then coming home to my woodstove, my cozy kitchen, and endless mugs of hot tea while I pluck out new melodies on my guitar.
Still, the October days are getting more seriously chilly than anything I experienced this summer. I should probably add more wood to the fire before the cottage turns into an icebox, but I’m too wrapped up in this track.
I’ve listened to the remix ten times in a row now, spinning around the living room with my hands in the air and my skirt swirling around me. The Blackwater Mix of Burn Me—the one I cut myself in a cramped Glasgow studio with Peter, a darling engineer who keeps me in chocolate-coated digestive biscuits every time we meet—is raw.
Powerful.
Angry and hopeful, ethereal and down in the swamp water, wrenching secrets from the earth, all at the same time.
The bass line drops low enough to make my teeth vibrate, and the backup vocals I recorded on my phone in the cottage’s echoey bathroom at three in the morning while the first hurricane wailed outside are primal. The layers of the melody creep out of the rhythm like green vines over ancient stone, bringing life. A witchy, rising-from-the-ashes-where-they-tried-to-burn-us kind of life…
I’m in love.
I want every song on the record to sound like this.
But will Checkers feel the same way?
The thought stops my swirling, sending me pacing into the kitchen for more tea as the song starts again.
Checkers, my producer in New Orleans, wrapped his mix of the other half of the album months ago. It’s glossy, polished, and radio-ready, nothing like the gorgeous mess bleeding through my headphones. But the Scotland tracks are me in a way the others aren’t anymore. Checkers’ mixes are commercially sound, no doubt, but they’re a sermon I wrote before my time in the wilderness.
These mixes are a revelation, direct from the Goddess, received on my hands and knees at the edge of a windswept sea. I wail into the abyss in these tracks, and the abyss wails back.
This is my sound now. That’s it. There’s no going back to glossy from here.
Bean kicks in agreement, just as the bass hits again.
She already has big opinions about music.
I rub my hand over her bossy heel, smiling as I wonder if melody will speak to her soul the way it speaks to mine. The way it speaks to her father, though he left the pro musician life behind a long time ago.
Of course, he never told me why he abandoned his career as a teen indie music phenomenon to focus on hockey.
Blue kept me in the dark about so many things. I know almost nothing about his childhood, his family, how his kirtan singing career started, how it ended, or why he ended up married at eighteen, then divorced a year later after leaving the hippy commune where he grew up.
Looking back, I can’t believe I thought I knew him at all. Archer Blue is an enigma, a code that doesn’t want to be cracked, a mystery that is no longer mine to solve. If he had any interest in being solved or being a part of Bean’s life, he would have made contact sometime in the past five months.
But he didn’t, and that’s fine.
It really is. It’s fine, and I’m fine—fine in a way I’ve never been before. I’m strong, centered, and in love with my music and this island and creation and the precious girl growing inside me. My life feels whole and overflowing with beauty, just the way it is. I don’t need a man and, frankly, at the moment, I don’t want one. Where would I find the time? I barely have time to get this album locked and loaded before Bean arrives.
So, I guess everything worked out for the best. And if Blue changes his mind and wants to be part of our child’s life down the road, we’ll figure that out once I’m back in the States.
If I go back…
“When you go back,” I mutter as I pull out my earbuds. I’m nearly at the end of the six months a U.S. citizen is allowed to be in the U.K. without a visa. Bare minimum, I’ll have to go back to the States to apply for a long-term residency permit.
And I’m pretty sure my brother and parents will kill me if I send a birth announcement from a foreign country before any of them even know I’m pregnant.