birds sweep through the air, light green spray off the water, waves lapping against the stony strip of beach, streaks of white as the wind whistles through. Alba loves the solitude and wonders if her father does too.
“Well, hello there, little lassie.”
Startled, Alba looks up to see an old woman with short gray hair mostly hidden under a woolen hat. Suddenly scared she’s trespassing, Alba jumps up and steps away from the house.
“What might you be doing here, then?” the woman asks, but her tone isn’t harsh and her words are sky blue, the color of kindness and friendship.
“I’m looking for someone.”
“Aye, well then, maybe I can help.” The woman smiles. “Who is it you’re looking for?”
“He’s called Albert,” Alba says. “I think he lives here.”
“Aye, Al Mackay, he used to, but not anymore.”
“Oh.” Alba swallows her regret. But at least she now knows his surname. “Where did he go?” Alba asks, desperately hoping she isn’t about to hear her father is dead and gone.
“I couldn’t tell you, lassie, I’m afraid. And no one’s bought the house since Al left. Living here isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, wouldn’t you know. Some seem to think it’s the edge of the world.”
“When did he leave?” Alba asks. “Do you know where he went?”
“Four years ago, or thereabouts. But no, he kept himself to himself, did Albert. I was the only one round here he ever said more than three words to.”
“Oh,” Alba says softly, tears gathering in her eyes. “Oh, I see.”
After the woman leaves Alba returns to the doorstep to sit and soak up any remaining traces of her father, leaching the last molecules of his presence out of the stone, until the tips of her fingers are numb. When she pulls herself up to stand again, her legs are sleepy and leaden. At the gate Alba stops and turns to look at the low wall running back up to the cottage then continuing parallel to the house, leaving a passageway enough for a small person to squeeze through.
There must be a back garden. Alba can’t believe she didn’t think of this before. There might be an open window, or one with a faulty catch, or a back door unlocked. Glancing around, Alba turns and hurries up the path, then squeezes through the passage.
The back of the house looks very much like the front, but before she can examine it, something else catches her eye. The stone wall runs to the end of the garden, marking a square around the house and grounds. At the end, where the wild, overgrown lawn should continue, lies a blanket of color that glints and sparkles in the sunlight.
From fifty feet away, Alba can’t quite make out what she’s looking at. As she gets closer, a sense of foreboding swallows her curiosity and she slows to step carefully through the scattered daisies and cowslips. And then Alba is looking down at layers of multicolored glass, the fragments of smashed bottles forming a blanket of a dozen different colors. Like a piece of modern art, she thinks. Alba bends forward, her fingers hovering a few inches above the glass. Here and there, jutting out of the jagged edges are torn labels, historical evidence of the identity of individual bottles before they were sacrificed for the whole. Alba wonders if her father was an artist as well as a poet, someone who turns the ordinary into the extraordinary. She feels a flutter in her chest, a tiny, fragile connection to him across time and space.
Then she catches sight of something else. On the neck of a frosted pink bottle is a splash of dried blood, a shadow left behind, a clue. And, all of a sudden, the years fold together, showing Alba a truth she first missed. Her father must have drunk every bottle before he smashed them. Thousands of glasses of wine, whisky, champagne, cognac . . . She’s looking at a graveyard of multicolored tombstones marking every hour of her father’s alcoholism.
Alba stands, seized by an urgent desire to run, to be as far away from this display of pain and despair as it’s possible to be. She’s enough of a mess already, she doesn’t want a father who is even worse than her. She needs one who is strong and brave, a man who can hold her in his arms and promise that everything will always be all right. After a lost and lonely childhood, Alba doesn’t want another parent who really isn’t one