Redemption Anyway (short story)

 

 

She purchased a travel package to Edinburgh, Scotland, even though she had no reason do anything pleasurable. Not even maintaining friendships, health, or beauty (she once obsessed about, buying beauty gadgets, taking supplements, and doing at-home beauty treatments to stave of middle age aging) mattered; she’ rather be home sulking over the seven-year loss of her relationship with her only daughter Emily, except that several days before her flight she had an epiphany so profound it rattled her undeniable reasons why her daughter refused to see or talk to her, including Emily’s cruel streak, and her conniving and vindictive ex-husband’s influence over their only child.  After Googling, for the thousandth time, Why Adult Children Become Estranged from Their Parents, she found an answer so relevant it rocked her heart and soul and left her shaken and devastated in new ways: “Most adult children become estranged from their parents because of emotional abuse in their childhood.”

Judy wanted to cancel her trip, process her newfound information, write her daughter a letter, and contact her via Facebook, email, or telephone, even though she had long been blocked from those forms of communications, a realization that made her tear up.  At the moment, though, she was overwhelmed by the distraction of having to prepare to travel to a country she never thought of visiting, except she knew better than to refuse her instincts:  After several months of signs to include an onslaught of digital ads for Scottish tourism, bagpipe music played at the local Saturday Farmer’s Market, and stories shared by strangers about their recent adventures in Scotland, she got the message and begrudgingly withdrew money from her small savings account to purchase from a budget internet traveling site a low fare airline ticket for a 5 days/4 nights stay at a Bed and Breakfast in Edinburgh’s city limits.

It was her grandmother with roots in the Hopi Native American Tribe, who had lived with her family until her death when Judy was 10 years old, who taught her to read the energy of her daily life until her actions flowed with the knowing of what to say, do, eat, a knowing she had been out of touch with since her grandmother’s passing; its sudden return seemed heralded by a bugle blown loudly by her grandmother in the afterlife.  Judy was going to Scotland no matter what

Packing for international travel was a nightmare. She wasn’t emotionally, psychology, or physically up to the task and took pleasure in raising her middle finger to life in defiant resistance of what she had to do. She even lied to her manager at the bank where she worked as a teller, asking for time off to deal with a pressing, private family matter.

Tucked away in the darkest corners of her closet, she found expensive and classic dresses, pants, sweaters, and tops made of natural fibers like silk, leather, cashmere, linen, cotton, pieces she wore when married to a CEO and lived in New York City. Her move to Portland, Maine, seven years ago no longer required such clothes.  The psychic feel of Maine was dark and nurturing and allowed her to live peacefully with her sadness while dressed in comfortable, practical, and preppy buttoned-up cotton shirts, khaki pants, and sneakers or hiking boots like most people wore in town. 

Mainers could be creative, brilliant, rebellious, hardworking, independent but also cantankerous, judgmental, overly intellectual, and committed to griping personal fears, losses, and imperfections that occasionally conjured Stephen King-like mental terrors, an experience she was familiar with, even though the image of seagulls daily soaring outside her window, no matter how brutal the weather, reminded her to heal, forgive, rise above, and be brave and graceful while doing it.

She pulled on A-line dresses, tried wool hats, held jeans over her bony figure and put what fit into her carry-on luggage.  Sadness and loss changed her physique and features. Her once voluptuous figure was sickly and thin, blue eyes buried in hollows of dark circles, red hair grey and frizzy, and lips colorless. She looked like a wraith, hollow, empty from lacking the animation of a healthy body. Appointments to the hair and nail salon were in order; regardless of her state of mind, she would never travel internationally looking like she felt. Past travels taught her that respect for others and their culture required she look her best, and that was the gift she gave a faraway world where she was as much a stranger to time, place, and others, as they were to her.

On the day of her trip, she was pulled into new sensations and challenges, including currency exchange, standbys, layovers, and delays due to fog and increment Fall weather. Conversations with other travelers were enjoyable except when they shared stories of traveling to visit adult children or grandchildren; then she felt the pain of losing Emily and her newly realized part in it grab her chest, stop her heartbeat, and leave her body struggling to regain its normal pulse. She excused herself, walked to the bathroom, locked herself in a stall, took a couple swigs of Maine-made honey mead from the liquor flask she bought from a vintage store in town for the purpose of her trip, and took reassuring deep breaths while the liquor warmed and soothed her.  Embarrassed when asked to empty the contents of the flask at security checkpoint, she was determined, if necessary, to take a shot of whiskey, scotch, or any hard liquor on hand at the airport, on the plane, or at her destination.

From the moment the jet’s wheels bounced of the runaway on approach to landing in Edinburgh, she smelled rich dark soil and sweet moss.  Scotland was mystery beyond the pale of its commercialization, movies, whiskey, and fashion, with overcast skies and atmospheric moodiness.  From above, she saw mounds of vibrant grassy earth jutting onto small roads as if intending to slow travel for ancient Scots still on the move, if only in spirit. On the runway, descendants of those long-ago men wrestled luggage onto conveyer belts, their body language filled with the gravitas of legacy, brute strength, and easy-going manliness. It was no wonder Scottish men were the country’s pride and joy. She had forgotten how travel pulled her into automatic scrying, a form of divination that for her streamed from sense perceptions, a talent also inherited from her grandmother. 

On the way to the bed and breakfast, the taxi driver spoke of the loss of tourism during Covid; the struggle of downtown Edinburgh to lure office employees and building rentals back to the city limits post Covid; the return of the Tattoo Festival last summer, bringing millions of tourists worldwide to tiny Scotland, population 5 million; subtle, ongoing tensions between the English and Scots; and complex feelings about the royals. He recommended a whiskey tour and getting lost and exploring the side streets of beautiful Edinburgh. He wished Judy well when he dropped her off at her bed and breakfast, an elegant stone structure as old as the United States.

The married proprietors of the place were welcoming with their twinkling eyes, warm smiles, and energetic and caring fussiness, letting her know about the free daily breakfast, small parlor lobby’s hour of operations, and things to do Edinburgh’s city limits, all marked up in black ink on maps they handed to her.  After settled into her single, cozy attic room, she went for a walk. She had missed a guided tour of the Royal Mile scheduled that day because of 24 hours of flight delays.

Even though she was exhausted, her mind and body were re-energized on the frenzied city streets filled with tourists, international students from the University of Edinburgh, locals, immigrants. Churches, cemeteries, museums, all built of stone and blackened by ancient age spots encircled the city like a fortress. When she reached Prince Street, a large avenue with constant commotion from moving trams, buses, taxis, cars, bicycles, and foot traffic, she heard her first bagpipe played by a young man dressed in full traditional Scottish regalia.  Even though she had not done much research on Scotland before the trip, she had learned that bagpipes were played by Scottish men marching into battle.  Sonorous, mournful sounds now pulled on her heart as if tuning its muscle to a different emotional frequency. Even though she hated crying, allowing only a couple of tears to flow before quickly wiping them away, even when thinking of Emily, she now cried unabashedly using the sleeves of her cashmere coat to wipe her eyes while other tourists stopped to take pictures of the performer before walking away to other sites. 

“Esta bien,” a young Spanish woman with soft brown eyes, who stood next to her, asked while handing her a tissue.

“What do you know about it?” Judy snapped, grabbed the tissue, and blew her nose. “You’re probably just here on a weekend trip,” she snarled at the woman who did not understand English. It was something her Emily would do, reach out to a stranger in need even if it embarrassed her.

The young woman smiled and shrugged her head innocently as her friends pulled her away to other sites.

After Judy got back to her room that night, she ate the turkey sandwich bought at a grocery store in town, unpacked her carry-on, put her clothes away, took a steaming hot shower, and surveyed her small, charming attic room with an eclectic mix of designs: carpet; wall papered, wood paneled, and painted walls; Italian titled bathroom floors; 70s lounge chair; unfinished writing desk; and vintage, fairy stenciled headboard. 

In bed, her thoughts returned to Emily. Guilt overwhelmed her. How could she ever smile or laugh again? She now saw her hand in their estrangement: Memories of name calling, screaming, and threatening overcame her. Unlike her late parents, who emotionally abused her for no apparent reason, she felt justified in her actions towards Emily because she hadn’t cleaned her room, finished her homework, made curfew…. All those years, she hardly kissed or hugged her affection-starved daughter because the world was cruel like her parents were cruel, like she eventually became cruel, and like Emily must become cruel.  Rage overwhelmed Judy: Her epiphany was too late; its consequences dire--She was dead to her daughter even though her daughter would never be dead to her.  Maybe, she thought, feverishly, hopefully, Emily’s distancing herself from her would break dysfunctional family patterns forever.

For the first time, she knew she would never see or speak to her daughter again.  Undeniable, gut-wrenching truth sent her into full body spasms and sobs. An emotional, physical, mental, soulful, psychological writhing grief verging on suffocating madness she’d never experienced before. For hours, she sobbed and screamed into her pillow for fear of waking up other guests.  When she got up to breath, she walked to the window, opened it, and found a sky so dark blue it seemed heavy from holding up the universe. She took a swig from the small Scottish whiskey bottle bought at liquor store earlier that day and breathed in the cool night air. Then she grabbed the pen and note pad on the desk to write the first lines of the hardest letter she’d ever written.

Dear Emily,

I was emotionally abusive to you.

The next day, she rode on a musty smelling van with other Americans on a guided tour of a fishing village, palace, golf course, bridge, and cathedral outside Edinburgh’s city limits.  Because of jet lag, lack of rest, and emotional and physical exhaustion, she drifted in and out of sleep while a handsome Scottish guide wearing only a kilt and t-shirt on a cold Fall day because he said he liked being cold at work and warm at home, spoke about Scotland’s history, including the days when it was known as a stinky city for lack of plumbing and smelly excrement thrown out people’s windows; killing of 5000 “witches”; Romans in lowland Scotland; Jacobites; Burke and Hare murders; hairy Highlanders; beautiful Queen Mary of Scots; bonny Prince Charles…. while pointing where historical events took place on idyllic, green lands.

It was too much to process. Judy had booked several tours with her travel package figuring it was the best way to see Scotland in a short amount of time, but the first tour’s demanding orders to take pictures, take in sites, take coffee breaks, take bathroom breaks on command and within a short amount of time was exasperating, so she decided to cancel her other tours when she got to her room later that day and focus only on seeing Edinburgh.

Her interest was now singularly piqued by the guide’s reference to the medieval cathedral of St. Andrews and an ancient queen’s order for all Scots to make pilgrimage to the patron saint of Scotland. In the village of Fife, where they had a two-hour stay, Judy followed narrow streets to her destination. Because she was tired and dazed, she paid close attention to speeding traffic driving on narrow roads in the opposite direction from the States, while walking behind giddy students from University of St. Andrews, happy locals, and tourists, many of them American men proud as peacocks for fulfilling their bucket list wish of playing golf on the mythical green lawns of St. Andrews edged by a just as mythical Atlantic Ocean.

St. Andrews Cathedral, destroyed during the Scottish Reformation, was now a naked relic, monstrous and vulnerable, of standing carved stone walls missing doors and windows, and scattered everywhere. She took a seat on a solitary slab and looked at other tourists walking the uneven maze of leftover walls, pillars, and decaying gravestones rising to the sky from uneven patches of grass and brown earth. There was a museum on site, but Judy didn’t have the energy to process more information. The cold wind and salty air off the Atlantic revived her. She figured she would sit here most of the two hours given to be in town and leave with enough time to get a hot chocolate at a nearby coffeehouse.   

After googling St. Andrew, she learned he had been the first disciple of Jesus who continued to preach his word even after Jesus’s death, for which St. Andrew was also eventually crucified.  His compassionate, brave, chivalrous giving of self was an inspiration to all Scots who aimed for the same lofty goals, even today. “Legend had it that the saint’s remains were brought to Fife by the Greek monk, St. Regulus, who had a vision in which he was told to take the remains to the end of the earth for safekeeping.”

Her mind wandered to the location of missing walls, doors, windows, chapels of the cathedral in its heyday: How long were pilgrim lines? What was the process of pleading to the saint?  Was their tithing for pleas? Was music sung or played during services? What days and times were pilgrims allowed to state their lost causes? What pleas did royalty, nobility, and peasants make? Maybe a cure for disease, bravery to fight in war, victory in battle, peace from English’s oppression, power, faith, salvation, love.  Maybe the end of estrangement from a loved one. She wouldn’t dare ask the saint for that miracle. Her cause was truly lost, but she had no tears left to cry about it today. Anyway, she wasn’t’ religious. Her Native mother had converted to Catholicism for her Irish American father and practiced its rites and rituals, even daily reciting the Hail Mary, yet her mother was mean and angry all the time, which Judy attributed to her father’s drinking, cheating, and lying, and because she said her only daughter looked like her “no-good husband.”

When Judy looked at her phone, she noticed it was time to head back. As she stood up, her right foot sunk into the soft, brown earth causing her to lose her balance. To stop her fall, she grabbed a nearby pillar, first with one hand and then with the other. When she found herself tightly embracing the tall relic, her heart silently gushed its most desperate, unearthed questions:

“I don’t deserve my daughter, St. Andrew. I know that now. But who is going to love me? Who am I going to love? Who am I going to love now? Do you hear me?  Are you here St. Andrew?” she pleaded wholeheartedly before heaving a loud sigh. With her eyes closed and chest tight up against the relic, she imagined the pillar a sound beacon pinging for eternity the lost causes of past, present, and future pilgrims to the saint in heaven.  She was one of those pilgrims now.

You never deserved how I treated you; it’s no excuse, but I didn’t know better.

The next day, Judy wandered around a busy Edinburgh and found ancient castles, medieval churches, spooky cemeteries, roaring little rivers, pretty bridges, botanical gardens, new Edinburgh… The city rose like a wedding cake from its underground closes and chambers, once used by criminals and gamblers to a skyline wrapped in emerald-green hills. Since she was on a budget, she didn’t spend money on paid attractions and walked around until she found the Royal Yacht Britannia, built during Queen Victoria’s reign; the houses of Robert Burns and JM Barrie; Clarinda’s Tea Room, once a pub where Robert Burns fell in love with his muse Clarinda Agnes Maclehose, also buried in the church cemetery next door, to which he dedicated, “Ae Fond Kiss”; a memorial to Lincoln and all the Scots who died fighting in the Civil War….  The Scots honored and remembered everything., she thought.  

She was overwhelmed by her first solo travel out of the States even though she wasn’t sure why she was instinctually drawn to Scotland, except that since arriving her feelings about Emily were constantly triggered.  Her last trip to Europe was ten years ago when she was married, and her husband planned and paid for everything. Still, she wouldn’t allow fears to deter her from seeing Edinburgh, so she treated herself to a whisky at the most popular pub in town and a pizza at a restaurant frequented by locals.

At the mall, she enjoyed a hot dark chocolate in coconut milk; at a second-hand store she purchased dark blue Mary Jane heels, like new; and at the Farmer’s market she bought a bottle of raw honey from a beekeeper who told her he watched his bees’ flight patterns to learn their routes; studied the language of their dances, which he videotaped in their hives, to know where they directed other bees to fly for pollen and nectar; and he smelled and tasted what they brought back to distinguish flowers, fruits, trees, vegetables, and crops, like the lime flowers, heather, and clove in the bottle of honey Judy bought from him.

The Scottish were lovely, authentic, and genuinely helpful when offering Judy directions and insights about their city, but there was a contemplative solitariness to them, as if they were processing the weight of the past, the pride of legacy, the wonder of living in a city that always taught and showed them something new, as several Scots confided in conversation. American tourists, on the other hand, seemed fidgety with their tight, nervous expressions among the multi-layers of Scottish history, culture, and people who knew that this too shall pass, more will follow, and that too will pass. Americans lacked the comfort of such deep-rooted knowing; political correctness, political divisiveness, corporate interest, consumerism, compounded trauma of mass shootings, and obsession with singularly achieving personal future goals masked the need to explore the country’s painful past, to reconcile it with its current legacy, and to give its people a genuine, spiritual, and liberating peace about it all.

Except for the guidance Judy’s grandmother provided, she didn’t know much about her Hopi or Irish ancestry; her parents worried too much about bills and fighting to share their ancestry with her.  Recently, she read in the paper that young Native Americans were using social media to broadcast Native issues, celebrate ancestry, showcase ritual dress, song, and dance.  The country had already changed the name of Columbus Day to Native American Day, and California had changed the name of a few of its northern parks to original Native names and returned sacred lands to its first people. Like her grandmother long ago predicted, Native American young would one day rush to broadcast, day and night, the truth of America’s painful past until the country remembered, made amends, healed, and started dreaming new dreams. Her grandmother had predicted the internet.

After lunch, Judy ran into the modernist Parliament Building; its distorted, disjointed design of concrete, wood slabs, and dark little windows as if thrown together haphazardly, shocked her.  She recalled studying Picasso’s Guernica in college and learning that the masterpiece was dedicated to lives lost by the bombing of Guernica by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.  Strangely, the Parliament Building was also designed by a young Spaniard who died after its completion. The audacity and courage of the Scots, she thought, to face the royals in their Holyrood Castle, where they stayed when in town, directly across the street from Parliament, with a statement about their long-pained relationship akin to, “all is forgiven, but not forgotten, and always HONORED.”  When she asked the Scottish about the design of their Parliament, they said it was beautiful inside. Did she see the inside? They asked as if an outsider wasn’t privy to too much Scottish truth.  She nodded her head half-heartedly, thinking she saw what she needed to see.

I forgive you for leaving me. I forgive myself for what I did to make you leave me.

On her last day in Scotland, she sat on the first floor of the National Museum of Scotland too exhausted to do a thorough tour of the massive three-story building, so she strolled around the first floor taking in what the internet labeled “itinerant” collections, including an Atomic Crusher, goddess statue found in an ancient Egyptian tomb, fossil of the largest deer that ever lived, modernist fashion designs with focus on eco awareness, ancient Scottish gravestones… When she stopped to read about the inspirations for Walter Scott’s books, she read about his obsessions with learning and collecting all things Scottish from stories and artifacts of Ballads and Borders, Crimes and Passions, Knights and Crusades, Religion and Reformation… Suddenly, she had another epiphany: the Scottish lived in constant awareness of their tragic, violent, glorious, mythical past, its present incarnations, and future mutations, with the inner strength to accept, transmute, and let it go, all the time.

On her last night in Edinburgh, she took invigorating laps in the cold waters of the Olympic size community pool several block away from the bed and breakfast. When she got back to her room, she took steaming hot shower, ate a salad she purchased in town, and wrote the last line of her letter.

I hope you’re healed, healthy, and happy. I love you.

Then she walked to the window, opened it, tore the letter into tiny pieces, and threw it into the cold, dark Scottish sky.  “Emily, I let you go,” she whispered. The words throbbed in her chest. Maybe, she thought suddenly, anxiously, she didn’t mean it; how could she let her daughter go?  She should try to contact her. Send her another letter.  She must reach Emily. Then she started to cry but remembered her grandmother’s long-lost words:  You must let everything go. Everything, my child,” a memory now returned as a blessing.  

On her last night, and for the first time in Scotland, she slept peacefully.

On the plane ride back she nervously and excitedly wrote a list of things she wanted to do when she got home:

1.       Join local ukulele band

2.       Read a good book

3.       Eat healthier

4.       Travel to Colorado to put flowers at grandmother, father, and mother’s graves.

5.       Learn more about Hopi and Irish roots

For the first time in a long time, memories of Emily did not overwhelm her even though she feared their return. The excited, young passenger sitting next to her broke her train of thought. The woman with a blazing white smile, two long braided pink ponytails, and tattoo of tall pine tree on the inside of her left arm introduced herself as Bella and said she was flying to Maine to see her mother. Judy shuddered at the reasons she gave for her travels.

Bella was studying ecology at a university in northern California, and she wanted to save America’s wildest lands; using drones to collect data was the focus of her studies, she said with relish.  She hadn’t seen her mother in a year being away at college, and she looked forward to hiking mountains they hadn’t hiked in some time.

“Does your mother like your tattoo?” Judy asked.

“Not yet. She doesn’t know I got one. It’s a redwood tree.  They surround my college campus.  Out there they call them jolly giants, and they say we live behind the redwood curtain. My friend said she did mushrooms in the forest once and saw the redwoods hugging each other.  Yea, I’ll have to convince my mom about my tattoo, but she’ll understand, eventually,” Bella said, smiling and winking at Judy.

“Excuse me, I’ll be right back,” Judy said as she rushed to the bathroom, tears welling up in her eyes. Judy never understood Emily, never even tried.   She sobbed and swayed in the narrow stall, the same intense writhing, emotional, physical sobbing she experienced on her first night in Scotland, and she feared she would continue sobbing on arrival.

When the plane started shaking and the fasten seatbelt sign came on, Judy was still in the bathroom. In the past, her heart would have pounded, her hands clenched the seat, but now she didn’t care about the disturbance, even when the plane’s rocking pushed her up against the door.

“I can’t do this.  Take me out of my misery already. Take us all out of our misery,” she said out loud, angrily,” but then she remembered Bella’s excitement about seeing her mother and the Scottish who smiled anyway and always.  By then, the plane had stopped shaking, the seat belt sign was turned off. Judy wiped her tears, blew her nose, washed her face, and returned to her seat.

“Are you okay?” Bella asked.

“Now I am,” Judy said.

After the plane landed, she wished the young woman a wonderful time with her mother, and she meant it.  She realized that as difficult as it was to cry over losing Emily it would happen, and it would pass.

  As Judy rolled her carryon to the airport exit, she felt lighter, her heart filled with an incoming knowing, like when she was a child and knew the day the ice cream truck was coming, or when her mother, who out of the blue ordered her to put on her bathing suit she already had on because she knew they were going to the community pool to swim.

This time her knowing was richer and fuller, and it filled her entire body and mind with sublime anticipation.  When it overwhelmed her senses, she got the message:

“I will give my love to everybody,” she said to herself. “Thank you, St. Andrew, thank you,” she repeated as she pushed the revolving doors and exited the airport.