Touring Scotland had seemed to Lily an ideal opportunity to get some thinking done. To have a little alone time to reflect on where she had been in the last few years. What the haze of late-night hours, stock options, and board meetings had meant, if anything.
Mostly she came because of Gram. Her dear grandmother who’d left her native Highlands when she was not much more than a girl, eager to see what the rest of the world held in store. Gram, who never did lose her lilting brogue or the youthful light in her eyes.
She had always said that Gram had done all the heavy lifting, raising her as she did when her biological mother took off when Lily was just in grade school. Sandra, as Lily had insisted on calling her mother, had become infatuated with some third-string minor league baseball player who’d breezed into town for training camp. When the time came for him to breeze back out, Lily’s mom had her bags packed and ready, figuring she had a better shot at romance not saddled with a kid, and while she was still on what she liked to call “the right side of forty. ”
Sandra rambled back into town some years later. This time she had a balding sixtysomething banker by her side and was thinking to pick up where she left off, eager to fill out her new role of staid suburban wife with a ready-made child. Lily wouldn ’t have it, which didn’t much matter anyway. By that time, Gram and her “wee bonny bàn”—as she had lovingly nicknamed Lily for her outrageously curly white -blonde hair—were inseparable. The old woman was fiercely protective of her granddaughter, and it was only after some cajoling that she allowed Sandra and the new husband even to see Lily.
And now Gram was gone.
It had always been easy for Lily to deny just how old Gram was because she’d been so vital, ever obsessing over her crafts and poetry and roses.
Though she was comforted by the fact that Gram had gone peacefully in her sleep, Lily found no consolation. Rather than celebrate Gram ’s memory, she couldn’t get past a laundry list of regrets. Gram had dropped everything and made endless sacrifices to raise Lily, when she should’ve been playing bingo and touring the globe with her seniors ’ group instead.
Now that her grandmother was gone, Lily found that instead of pursuing the next big thing in her career, all she wanted to do was escape to Gram’s homeland. To take that
“one last trip to the Highlands ” that her grandmother dreamt of before she died.
At the outset, Lily thought it’d be an opportunity for a little reflection. The landscape was so solitary, though, she found she had almost too much time to think.
Back in San Francisco, she had gotten used to not dealing with much of anything outside of her work. It had started in the 1990s, when her temp job at a small Internet magazine had spiraled into a creative director position as she reached the ripe old age of twenty-four. A number of years, thousands of hours and one soured relationship later, she found herself with nothing but a used luxury sedan, a sizeable nest egg, and a few new wrinkles. Not even laugh lines, those. Just a couple of creases developing in her usually furrowed brow.
Lily wondered what it had all been for anyway. She had been an artist. And instead of following her dreams, she had ended up arranging layouts for other people ’s photographs of places she’d had no time to visit.
Maybe it had all been to prove Sandra wrong, to prove that she could get an art degree and not end up panhandling in the street. All she knew was that she surprised even herself when she hit the business world. Lily’s colleagues had thought she was shrewd, viewing the temper that had been a liability in her personal life as a take- no-prisoners attitude. She kept thinking, just one more year of vesting stock options and then she could quit and paint to her heart’s content. But she never did quit.
Then the technology market crashed. It started out slowly at first: the occasional minor layoffs, management re - orgs. But before she knew it, she was the lone designer among tracts of empty cubicles, left to pack up the pieces of a failed online venture for an anonymous corporate parent.
All those years at work and she had never even made any real friends. The MBA types blurred together in a sea of khaki and navy blue, people distinguishable mostly by which color BMW they chose or whether they hung Stanford or Harvard pennants in their offices.
There was one guy she saw for a few months last spring—a computer programmer who was a bit on the nerdy side. It was pleasant enough, until he got transferred to the corporate headquarters in Boston. Somehow the topic of Lily putting in for her own transfer never came up, and the relationship fizzled as blandly as it had begun.
Reflecting on her career, she was left with a sour taste in her mouth. Years of denying herself a life, and for what? A pile of worthless stock options?
And she ’d done it at the expense of the one person in the world whom she truly loved and who truly loved and understood her. All the sacrifices her grandmother had made, and the only way Lily had ever repaid her was to become so consumed by some meaningless job that she prioritized Gram right out of her life.
She replayed in her head all the vacations that were cut short by her demanding schedule. All the times she put off returning Gram ’s call for a day or two, caught up as she was in some work-related project. All of Gram’s home-cooked dinners she backed out of, wanting instead to stay late and catch up on e -mail.
She had even been too busy to properly mourn her Gram ’s death.
At the time, Lily had a thousand ways to justify it to herself. She had been the lead on a creative pitch to the board members, asking for one last round of funding to save her company. The meeting happened to be the day after Gram’s funeral. Lily rationalized that Gram would’ve wanted her to press on with her life, especially as this was a prized task she’d been handed.
So she hadn’t even taken a day to grieve.
Now the only people Lily had left in her life were a mother and stepfather who were veritable strangers and a handful of college buddies she played phone tag with every six months or so.
Lily wadded up the tartan blanket she ’d brought to insulate her from the damp Scottish hillside, shoved it into her pack, and got to her feet. Spinning slowly around, she sought her next landscape subject. A shift in focus might be just the thing to clear her mind. If only one of those stately bucks that roamed the hillsides would stand still long enough for her to sketch. She ’d even settle for a shaggy old Highland cow.
Spying what looked like a small footpath in the distance, Lily set off down a particularly rough hillside. Although she was headed away from her cottage, she figured that the best way to get out of her own head would be to take a brisk hike. She could do with a little adventure, and if she got lost, the mountains and the loch would serve as a reference point to get her back by dark.
She smiled when she caught herself humming a tune that she hadn’t thought of since she was young. Whenever Lily had a hard time falling asleep as a child, her grandmother would stroke her hair and sing her favorite lullaby, with words that had passed down through generations of Gram’s own Clan MacMartin, telling of a fairy lad mysteriously come to Lochaber and made a hero. Lily would listen in wonder to the story she knew better than any other, hearing it as if for the first time. Or sometimes she would just drift off to sleep, hearing only the mesmerizing lilt of her grandmother’s voice.
She could hear that voice in her head now, Gram ’s rich alto brogue, as clear to her as if it had just been yesterday.
Regardless that she had sung the song hundreds of times, Gram would always begin the same: “My wee bonny bàn, now here’s a tale of a young lad, bookish but braw he was”—Lily smiled at the memory of Gram and how she ’d always elongate the word braw into an extended crescendo “— your long- ago cousin on the MacMartin side. ” As if any family had existed for the elderly woman other than her own Clan MacMartin.
Then she’d always stroke Lily’s hair, slowly singing,
“He was a fey lad and not so old