The Tide and the Key

The cottage sat at the end of a road that wasn't much of a road, more like the highway gave up and let gravel finish the job. I pulled my little rental car as far as it would go and sat there a minute looking at the place. Stone walls, slate roof, a chimney smoking even though it was July. Behind it, the sea. In front of it, nothing but gorse and wind.

My name's Billie. I was twenty-three that summer, and I'd taken the housesitting job because it paid travel and came with a cottage, and because the coastal authority needed tide tables compiled for this stretch of peninsula and nobody else wanted to sit out here for two weeks doing it. Fine by me. I like numbers and I like quiet, and the ferry line paid the authority, and the authority paid me, all settled before I ever left the city. No favors. I want that said once and then dropped.

The man whose cottage it was, Samson, I'd never met. He worked the ferry tender, whatever that meant exactly, and he'd gone to visit his sister in Inverness for a fortnight. He left me a note on the kitchen table, written in careful block letters as if by someone who didn't write much. Milk in the shed fridge. Don't touch the boiler after ten at night. Keys hang in the diner if you lock yourself out.

That last part turned out to matter more than I thought.

The diner was a twenty minute walk up the coast road, the only building between the cottage and the village that counted as a building. Roadside place, windows fogged with salt spray most mornings, a woman named Amy who ran it and talked like she was charging by the word. I ate there maybe every other day because cooking for myself in a strange kitchen felt like a chore I hadn't signed up for.

Behind the counter, the whole back wall was keys. Hundreds of them. Old keys, new keys, brass and iron and one or two that looked like they'd come off a church door. Every one had a paper tag, faded yellow mostly, with a name and a date written on it. Ellen Roberto, 1987. Dougie MacLean, 2003. I asked Amy about it my second day there.

"People leave things behind," she said, wiping the counter like it had offended her. "Keys especially. A key means somebody meant to come back. When they don't, I put it up. That's all the story there is."

I thought that was kind of sad and kind of lovely and I didn't think about it again for days. I had tide tables to build. High water, low water, times to the minute, twelve pages of it. The work was boring in the good way, the way where your brain goes quiet.

Day twelve, a courier van came grinding down the gravel road. This was a place where a van showing up was an event, so I went out to meet him. He had one small box, brown paper, and he seemed almost disappointed there wasn't more drama to it.

"Addressed to a Samson," he said, checking his clipboard. "You him?"

"No, I'm the housesitter. I can sign for it."

He had me sign, handed it over, and was gone in a cloud of dust. The box was light. It had a proper address on it, Samson's name and the cottage, but no return address, just a postmark from down the coast somewhere.

Here's where I have to admit something, because the whole rest of this story hangs on it. I put the box on the kitchen table and looked at it for a long time, and then I opened it. Not my mail. I knew that. But I was twenty-three and turning twenty-four in two days, and I'd spent twelve days alone with tide tables and a boiler that grumbled, and my own life felt like it was waiting on a deadline I hadn't chosen. Twenty-four. Nothing changes at twenty-four, nobody throws you a party, but it felt as though a door was closing on something anyway.

So I opened it.

Inside was a lock of dark red hair, maybe eight inches of it, braided neat and tied at both ends with a green ribbon. Underneath it, a note on the same kind of paper Amy used for her specials board. The handwriting was slanted and careful.

Samson. You know what this is and you know what it means. I'll be at the diner at dusk on Friday. If you don't come, keep it and think kindly of me. If you do, bring the key. Yours, A.

I sat there with a stranger's hair in my hands and my skin crawling in a way I couldn't name. It wasn't disgust. It took me a minute to figure out what it actually was, and what it was, was envy. Somebody out there had sent this man a piece of themselves and asked for a key in return, and there was a whole language going on that I'd never been let in on.

I put the lid back on. Mostly. Then I took it off again and touched the braid once, just once, with one finger. It was soft the way hair is soft when somebody actually takes care of it.

That was Thursday. My birthday was Saturday. I had one more day of tide tables, and then the car came back for me Saturday morning, and I'd be back in the city by Sunday with nothing to show for the year except twelve pages of high water marks.

I didn't sleep much Thursday night. Friday I finished the last table by noon, checked it twice, and then sat in the kitchen with the box in front of me and argued with myself out loud, which is a thing you start doing when you've been alone too long.

"You can't just walk it over," I told the teapot. "It's addressed to him. You open a man's mail and then hand-deliver it, he's going to think you're a nutter."

The teapot had no answer. But the thing was, the note said dusk on Friday, and dusk on Friday was today, and the diner was a twenty minute walk, and Samson was due back Sunday anyway, and if I didn't go, some stranger named A. would be sitting in that diner at dusk waiting for a man who didn't know to come.

That was the reason I gave myself. The real reason was that I wanted to see the man who got sent hair in a box, and I wanted to not be alone on the last night of being twenty-three.

I walked up the coast road a little before six. The wind was doing its usual thing, coming off the water flat and steady, and the diner windows were fogged even though it wasn't morning. I could see one light inside. My heart was pounding, no point pretending otherwise, and I stood outside the door maybe a full minute before I went in.

There was one man in the booth at the far end, by the window. Big fella. Broad through the shoulders the way dockworkers and ferry men get, forearms like rope, dark hair pulled back. Late twenties, I'd guess, twenty-nine maybe. He had a mug of tea in front of him and a flat cardboard box beside it, and he was staring at the wall of keys like it owed him money.

Amy was nowhere in sight, which was its own kind of miracle.

He looked up when the door shut behind me. "You're not Amy," he said.

"No. I'm the housesitter. Out at the cottage." I held up the package like evidence. "A courier brought this yesterday. It was addressed to you, and I did a terrible thing and opened it, because I figured if it was urgent you'd want to know, and the note inside mentions tonight. Diner. Dusk." I ran out of air. "So. Here I am. Hand-delivering it. Like a nutter."

He didn't laugh, but something in his face moved