the village shop, lived next door and had gotten up to see what all the fuss was about, just in case she missed any vitally important gossip.
She didn’t consider what she did to be gossip, but instead an intensely important life force to the surrounding area and, in fact, a moral source for good, practically heroic—hence her standing in her eiderdown dressing gown outside her (spotless) front step at one o’clock in the morning. Plus, everyone had known wee Islay from a bairn, knew it wisnae fair, the poor lass. When all the other kids were running themselves ragged down at Zahira’s nursery, she’d had to be kept home like a china doll sat on a shelf, never moving, jumping, running—everything children wanted to do. She was made of porcelain and couldn’t be let out. It was a real hardship, to live somewhere as beautiful as Kirrinfief, which had the loch close by, the mountains, and as much freedom and space to play in as a child could dream of, and be stuck indoors all the time watching TV or playing with her iPad.
And here were all the medical folk of the town—Joan and Cormac and Jake—as well, my goodness, a full house. But they were smiling and chatting and everyone was excited, and the next minute out came Islay herself, being wheeled on a stretcher, sitting up, a tube in her nose to keep her blood supplied with oxygen.
“I can’t believe it,” Islay’s mother was saying, clutching her hands to her chest. Gregor, her dad, was blinking hard, trying to shush her, that it was very early days, that these things weren’t always a definite, that there were false alarms.
“Wheels up!” shouted Jake into his walkie-talkie, face beaming.
“Och, listen to you,” said Cormac, helping him wheel the bed. “With your fancy language! What are you, on Air Force One?”
“They’re sending a plane with the heart in it.”
“Who is?”
“British Airways! They volunteered!”
“They volunteered to fly here?”
“I think they had to move a plane,” said Jake. “Anyway, they’re rushing it.”
Cormac shook his head. “That’s amazing. That’s just amazing.”
He patted Islay on the shoulder.
“Can you believe this? They’re rolling the red carpet right out for you.”
They hopped in the ambulance, Jake in the front, Cormac and Islay’s parents in the back. Even though Islay was thirteen, she was still clinging to an old, raggedy toy seal she must have had since she was a baby.
Jake had every new gadget on his phone and pulled up an app that identified planes that flew overhead. They ignored him at first, then gathered around, in amazement, watching as the only flight in the air at that hour—BA 978, noted as “special cargo”—blipped its way up the country from London. They fell into silence. Jake gave the phone to Islay to hold and started up the ambulance.
THE TRIP THROUGH the pitch-black countryside seemed to take forever. Jake had the headlights on high beam, given the unlikeliness of bumping into anyone—at least until 4:30, when the farmers started getting up—and every hedgerow, it seemed, contained a pair of suddenly glowing eyes. Creatures stirred by the road: hooting owls, a shiver of starlings taking off from a tree, a quick rustling in the gorse or the high grass as small creatures rumbled through, past almost before you knew it. Cormac imagined the ambulance, the only little pool of light in the whole world, as it shot past distant darkened farmhouses and vast fields of sleeping cows, one occasionally stirring itself sleepily to watch as the precious cargo sped by; the animals of the Highlands, it felt to Cormac—ridiculously, of course—standing aside respectfully to let them through, nothing standing in their way, as a girl sat on a bed, tracing a plane through the night skies.
Chapter 11
The sun rose at six A.M., approaching the March equinox, and Cormac was there to see it, partly because he’d gotten caught up in making sure the operation went all right and partly because he had to wait for Jake, who had to sleep an acceptable amount of time before he was allowed to drive the ambulance back again.
He didn’t mind. He’d sat with the parents for a while, then, as Joan was still back in Kirrinfief, he took the calls from the hospital office in London, after explaining who he was. He was a little intimidated, talking to the world-class teaching hospital—it felt a little like taking an exam—but he explained as much of Islay’s backstory and state of mind as he