By Rose Skelton

I meet Conor in the spruce forest. He whistles his whereabouts; I return his call. It’s mid-July and a mild summer wind breathes through the trees, a low moan that envelops us in the cool island gloam. I follow the sound and scour the ground for what mushrooms might be growing: summer chanterelle, puffball, deceiver. It’s the kind of forensic looking that I begin in July and don’t give up until the trees are naked and the hills are the color of rust. A fast, careful, sieving of images—birch leaf, tree root, crisp packet, coin—a longrange and close-up searching for the gifts of this Scottish island: the edible, the poisonous, the one in a million. The friend that took me two years to meet, though we lived in the same small town. The mushrooms he taught me how to find.

It is the first year of the pandemic and we have fled Texas where my wife, Nomi, has a job at a university, for the Hebridean island that is—was—my home. Nomi desperately wants a baby, has done for a decade, long before we met. She and I have been fighting about it for four years, as long as we’ve been together. But we are thirty-nine and forty-one now and it is probably too late. What do I want? I want not to argue about it anymore, not to have to go through the high-cost, low-chance medical procedures that I fear will rip us apart. I want not to have to choose sperm from a roster of men who claim to look like Tom Hanks. I want not to bring up a child in America.

Today, it is I who knows the spot: a corner of the forest where the path lurches to the east, where chanterelles—if conditions are right—will grow. “Come,” I beckon, and Conor follows me through the trees, our footsteps hollow across the dry forest floor. There, in a mossy clearing, is a bright ring of chanterelles bursting through the lime-green: sphagnum, haircap, frizzled crisp-moss. We sink to our knees, flip the blades on our knives, splice our fingers around the stems. The gills are rubber to the touch. Side by side, we lift the largest heads into our baskets to be fried with butter, sage, garlic. I breathe in the scent of the forest, its rotted leaves, its maggoty underland. I am filled with the exhilaration of knowing this land and of roaming it purposefully with my friend.

Conor and I do this every year together. We both work contracts—he on boats, me in classrooms—but mushroom season: we spend it together in the forest. The season tethers my year. And we have our ways of reading it—the mossy hummock under that band of beech trees where the first chanterelles of the season grow; the nook behind the rock just across from the skinny waterfall where the first horn of plenty bloom. The mycorrhizal network, the nervous system that holds our land together, sends us the same gifts in the same place every year. We read the forest and we transmit it to one another over dinner, by text, in a secret spreadsheet where we document an entire season’s knowledge: what the land offered up, what it held back, what the season to come might hold.

But life is getting more complicated, the season harder to isolate. Nomi and I live in Texas now, though we make it home every summer, and Conor has a new love, a friend we helped him to meet. Work is harder to turn down, spare time now spent with others. The baby feels like it would be the end of it all—the forests, my freedom, maybe even Conor, who himself does not want to be weighted with kids. I worry that if I lose the life I have crafted—steady on my own craggy rock—I will cease to be me. The mushrooms, when they come, pin me to something I can depend upon.

With our baskets in hand, Conor and I follow the path toward the wooden bridge where a band of beech trees twist beside a burn, their branches blowing eastward toward the sea. We know a spot behind the trees where fat cep grow in the loam and we cross the bridge, my pulse quickening as we approach, the body already knowing the feel of the find. But the burn merely splutters across the rocks. It hasn’t rained since we’ve been back and the spring was dry too, Conor says. We worry for the summer to come, for the mushrooms that may not grow. We whisper for an onslaught of rain.

We scour the south side of the beeches and find only a few tiny buttons of summer chanterelles that we leave until they have rain and time to swell. Our baskets remain light as we exit the forest. But we have gathered something, I remind myself, data for our collective memory bank: where we have been, how the air felt on our skin, how our footsteps sounded beneath us, what we found, who we found, what we didn’t find. We pack it all away unwritten, the archive secret between us.

*

I have left the island, but it sticks in my bones. It is place of unashamed beauty, a rough parade of mountains running down to the ocean, and moorland that whistles white with bog cotton all summer long. It’s the place I had to leave for my marriage. It’s where my best friends live, a small community of people who have become my kin: Jenny the architect, Charlotte the potter who lives in the old schoolhouse on the moor, Other Jenny the whale biologist who is sometimes little sister, sometimes wise aunt. It is a place where scarcity forges intimacy, a closeness that comes with having to fight to find people alike.

The island wasn’t always my home, but it is the place that didn’t let me fall. A decade ago, my grandmother died, leaving a small stone bothy by the loch, and I went there hoping to right myself after a tremendous period of loss—a love, a career, a home. I knew only a handful of people, mostly friends of my grandparents: the woman next door who grew vegetables and her husband who showed me how to pick honey fungus; the zoologist who kept adders in jars on his laboratory shelf. They invited me for tea, bundled me armfuls of potatoes and fat bunches of kale. It was enough to be getting along with, to remind me I wasn’t alone.

When I moved to the town, into my own flat on the seafront, I joined the Lifeboats, an ocean-going search-and-rescue crew, and I did odd jobs—cleaned holiday cottages, planted willow at the farm, sold postcards at the gift shop on
Main Street. I talked to everyone, in my desperation not to be alone, and slowly I gathered friends, acquaintances, people I could say hello to on an ice-gray day. Through Facebook, I worked out who dated whom, who were the siblings, who the boss, who the worker, the board member, the harbormaster, the bigot. I noticed the drivers and their cars as they pulled over to let me pass, waved thank you at the fish-farmer, the carpenter, the vet on the way to an emergency. I noticed where the cars were parked: the hairdresser lives in the yellow house, the horse-lady in the blue, the geologist at the house on the brae where poppies nod in the spring.

“You know why people like you?” says my boss at the gift shop one day as I tidy the postcards in their rack. “Because they see you around. You join things. They know exactly who you are.” I piece it all together, the tessellations, the threads, the loose strands dangling at one end but connected somewhere to something. There is no one who isn’t part of the network in this place, even if they don’t want to be. Even, I find one day: me.

*

After that first flush of summer chanterelles, it’s weeks before we find more. The Scottish summer, usually lush with rain, never arrives and instead the four of us—Nomi, me, Conor, and his boyfriend—spend our free days at the beach, swimming in the icy sea, searing scallops over a fire. Nomi and I, no longer divided by the question of whether to try to have a baby, spend our time muddling over how to have a baby. She is relentless in her search for sperm and her quest takes on a pace that leaves me winded. She studies sperm banks, suggests friends we might ask: teenage boyfriends she has kept in touch with, a friend of her mother’s, a guy we went to graduate school with. What about him? she asks of my friend who plays the banjo. Or that sculptor we met at
the writing residency? Let’s ask your friend the fiction writer, or our friend
in Dallas. Then she returns to an idea she has mentioned frequently over the
years. Will I ask Conor?

One afternoon, he and I take the path from the mausoleum into the forest, toward a freshwater loch that reaches between the low-lying peaks of Beinn nan Gabhar and Beinn a’ Ghraig. Conor’s long legs pull him away from the path, into this patch of boggy land and back, then up a slope where mushrooms could be hiding. Leaves crackle beneath us. We focus our sight in two different modes: long range, looking for the right kind of tree, a certain set of colors that might spell this or that kind of mushroom. And short range: searching for a shape, a mark, a texture that will betray a mushroom the very shade of the leaf it grows beneath. It is a dual-looking that produces a clearmindedness akin to meditation or deep and restful sleep.

Except I am not clearminded. We search, we chatter, and I run over in my head all the reasons he would have to say no: his own decision not to have children for environmental reasons; that passing along genes is a lot to ask of someone. I feel his no hot in my chest.

“Nomi and I are talking about having a baby,” I say, scanning the ground. He responds with kindness: he’s interested, happy for us even. When we reach the loch, our baskets still empty, we sit on the stony beach and take out our tea.

“I’ll just come out and say it,” I spill, deciding quick is better than tactful or not
at all. “You’re at the top of Nomi’s donor list.”

“Oh,” he says, then pauses to look up into the branches of a tree. “I’m
flattered.”

A haze blows in from the head of the loch, the slopes of Beinn Talaidh rising to a crook beyond. I am desperate not to hear his no, and so I tell him we’re asking a lot of people, even though we aren’t, that we might consider a sperm bank, which we won’t. Then I change the subject. But I have asked, and he hasn’t said no. He doesn’t think me a fool. He doesn’t tell me I would make a terrible parent. I am so surprised when he doesn’t laugh. It is hard to let the love of a friend soak in, but I try, imagining that I am swimming out into the middle of the loch, floating on my back, the sky murky above, the hills holding me in their hug. Let’s swim here one day, we decide, looking at the glassy surface.
“Would you want the child to know who the father is?” Conor asks me, and it is the first concrete detail I have had to think about. We do not have a language yet for this new kind of family we want to make.

“Yes,” I say, knowing only as I say it that giving my child black holes in their
family history is not how I want to bring them up.

“That’s good,” he says. “I’d hate to think of a kid not knowing where they
came from.”

*

It was two years after moving to the island that I met Conor, one morning in the cold, blue loch at a community winter swim. By then I knew almost everyone, either in-person or by the sight of their car. I had survived—this move to this lonely place, the stone house miles from anywhere and then the flat in the town, the losses I had incurred, that had continued to come as my life unravelled to its core. I had survived because of the network: the people who came to my rescue when I needed something fixed, when I needed something moved, or when I needed a face to remind me that I wasn’t alone. It was a couple more years before Conor took me foraging with him, first seaweed—maroon pepper dulse slicking the rocks—and then wild garlic: we fried the flowers and crushed the leaves into pesto. Then one year he took me to the woods for summer chanterelles, growing in the oaks above Loch a’ Chumhainn.

There was no reason to share his mushroom spots with me, but he did, sometimes writing them down, often texting me reminders, once leading me to the places out of season since he would be away when the mushrooms came. Someone should have them, he would always say. Often I provided competition to his own gathering of mushrooms, took home a bounty when he was confined after a COVID contact, or when he was away for work in Antarctica. If we went out together foraging, my own gathering diminished his, and if he collected more than I did, he would empty some of his basket into mine. He lives with an ethics and generosity that has often challenged my own ideas about myself.

What I worry about when I ask Conor if he will be our sperm donor is what I have worried about with anyone I have ever loved: that I have misunderstood what we have. I worry that I have asked too much, and that I have opened the door for a rejection that will cut me deeply when it comes. But when Conor guides me to a part of the island that I didn’t even know existed to forage for edible treasures, I am forced to believe the hardest and most impossible of things: that Conor does indeed love me, that I am someone to love. That I can be truly, uncomplicatedly, wholly and without motive, unbelievably loved.

*

The summer glimmers on, still no rain. The air feels wrong in my bones. Conor and his boyfriend come to my grandmother’s bothy for dinner. We eat a dish of last year’s dried mushrooms instead of fresh, and after dinner Nomi announces that we want to have a baby. She has had a little wine—we all have—but she has meant to broach the topic. I envy her this ease. I clench my muscles against it, set in motion my defenses against what will surely be a no, an I do not love you enough for this, the clotted mesh through which I have watched my entire life.

Conor looks uncomfortable and so I move the conversation into the general, take the spotlight off him. His boyfriend, who once nearly did this for his two friends, talks about how it felt for him to consider it all those years ago. We chat, I feel nauseated. I want the whole evening to end. “It’s definitely not a yes,” says Conor unexpectedly, his hands fidgeting in his lap. “But it’s not a no either.”

*

A few days later, Conor and I meet near the ferry to hunt for cep, mushrooms that from the top look like bread rolls, and with a dusty brown head capped on a stem the size of a curled-up fist. I find him sitting in his car filling his mouth with oatcakes, his long, lean body a furnace for food, his muscles consuming everything quickly and with heat. For the first time, I wonder what a child of his would look like. Would they have freckled skin and hazel greenish eyes, red curly hair like he did when he was young? Would the child’s head curve in the same distinctive way? I wonder whether they too would be able to run up mountains in the early morning to catch the sunrise, swim fast through a freezing ocean. Whether they would be kind, generous, and thrifty, viciously smart and laugh at rude things.

Conor hasn’t brought our request up again and so Nomi and I still search for a donor, consider if asking a circle of friends on Facebook would be more or less crazy than picking from a bank full of strangers. We do email some friends, many of whom don’t answer, some of whom say they can’t. She and I are tracking our fertility, peeing on little expensive sticks. I am doing it because I have made a promise; she is doing it because she desperately wants to get pregnant. I cannot understand the desire to carry a baby, but I have agreed to be a backup host, my perhaps-fertile womb a home that can bring us a child, increasing our chances at these ages we have reached.

I cannot imagine what having a child would feel like but she has imagined it her whole adult life. In the end, neither of us has any real idea what it’s like; we are just lobbing fantasies into a void based on how much we loved, or didn’t love, being children. I imagine parenting to be tiring, expensive, monotonous, environmentally destructive, difficult, boring, frustrating, annoying, distracting, and the end of my writing career. Nomi believes it will be fun, beautiful, cozy, sweet, rewarding, jolly, enriching, and not the end of her writing career. We are both wrong, or we are both right. Either way, I am a deeply committed project manager, the person in the house who knows when our passports expire and where the thumb tacks were last seen. I am a doer and a money-saver and I desperately want to avoid IVF. Once getting pregnant by donated sperm is on my to-do list, it’s something I want to get done.

Conor and I set off along the stony track beside the ferry terminal. A portion of the forest has been cut down—this is a plantation where trees are grown for paper and fuel—and the cep begin where the fallen timber ends. These beautiful brown buns bloom here because the fallen trees allow sunlight in a place which otherwise would be dark. We see the forest’s naked side up ahead.

We thought the razing had finished, but today there is the growl of heavy machinery and we find a caravan of workers, bulldozers, and machines attached with chains marching on our forest. “Oh no,” says Conor, “not this part too.” We scramble up a gully, brambles tearing at our legs, dart to one side so that we are inside the edge of the forest, begin our ascent to the top of the gully. We look left and right, behind trees as we pass them, breathlessly hopeful for cep, baskets and baskets of them, more than we can eat, quicker than the machines can tear the forest down.

“Mine!” shouts Conor as he races up a steep ridge, skidding to his knees at a cep pushing through the loam. I take the chance while he’s distracted to look in the area he has abandoned. But his cep turns out to be rotten and he shucks slices and slices of it, each piece crawling with tiny, black-headed maggots, shavings that fall to the floor. It is the only cep we find all afternoon.

Conor and I do not talk about the request. Instead we walk miles and miles in the arid forest plantation finding acres of nothing but compacted needles, searching the hills and hollows of this weird, ugly land. I begin to lose a sense of place and turn this way then that, looking for the skyline then listening for the sea. My knife drops from my basket and we search for it, at first sure where I dropped it: in that area between the remnants of the stone wall and the row of spruce that keen towards the sea. But when I return to the spot, I am unsure and I do a loop, thinking I recognize the layout of stones, but then I see a similar configuration next to another leaning row of trees and I wonder if that’s the place instead. The forest looks identical and unrecognizable at the same time. We do not find my knife and head despondently back to the car, neither of us with mushrooms and me without my most treasured tool, to

*

Another few weeks pass and the dearth of mushrooms becomes chronic. The season is completely awry. Nomi and I continue to urinate on sticks until we have an accurate idea of when we are ovulating and at the start of September, with no further word from Conor, we decide that sperm will have to come from a bank. Although he hasn’t mentioned it, neither has it become an awkward thing between us. We are focused solely on mushrooms and their lack.

One afternoon, Conor and I are back at the ugly forest near the ferry and set off at a pace, past the machinery, along the gully, into the monochrome trees. The forest creaks in the wind. We dip our heads to avoid the low branches and spruce needles prickle my skin.

“I’m starting foraging tours,” he announces. “I’ve my first one tomorrow.”

I bristle—this is our forest. It feels as if someone is stealing from me.

“I won’t show them this spot,” he says, eyes pinned to the ground. “But I’d like to take them to that lower part, near the road. Maybe we can give that a miss today, you and I?”

I kick the moss-slicked sticks at my feet and wonder how I can be so ungenerous. These are his spots, I remind myself again. And with COVID, he needs the work. He never had to give them to me. And what have we asked of him? We have asked of him something so vast that now I can’t even bring myself to talk to him about it—something that may, or may not, produce a biological desire that he will have no chance to act upon. What if, Nomi and I have imagined, he sees the child and wants them to be his? What if, and we have taken legal advice about this, we both die and his parents want to take the child for their own? What if, when he holds the child, sees how they look at him, he feels a desolation that will rip him to shreds right then and there? What if what we have asked of him alters his life for the bad?

“Of course,” I tell him. “Take them where you want.”

Deeper we tread, and high on the bank we find some nubs of cep. They are the size of the smallest Russian doll. We scramble on our bellies towards them, calculate that in a couple of days these will be pickable. Conor wants to save them for later—does he want them for his mushroom tours? I want to take them now. My lack of generosity astounds me. We leave them to swell on their own.

Two days later, I text Conor and ask him if he wants to go back to the forest to check on them. Mushrooms can bloom overnight. He’s on the other side of the island with a tour group, he replies, a whole day’s hike to find otters and eagles. I drive back to the forest and for the first time here set off alone, adrenaline pounding through me as I already know where and what my finds will be. I feel guilty but soothe myself with what Conor always says: it’s better for someone to have them than for the maggots to have them.

And clumsily, my fingers not working as fast as my legs want to carry me, I dig into the gritty soil with my fingertips, burrow down until I can feel the bottom of the cep’s fat stem, curl my fingers around it. I wrench it from the earth and use my less-good knife to scrape off loose soil, hold it up to the light to study its blemishes, and then slice it from the base of its stem toward its cap, its silky resistant flesh splitting perfectly apart. I take a photo, load it into a text for Conor, then delete it. I don’t want him to feel bad. But when I don’t tell him, it’s as if I’m hiding it from him. I don’t know what to do. I don’t send him anything, not even when I gather a whole basket of cep, twenty, fat, tall, long, wide, and stumpy mushrooms of all sizes, none of them maggotty, all of them perfect. I drive home feeling triumphant, and bad.

That evening, Conor texts me a photo from the fishing pier in the town. Dinner? he asks. We meet outside on the street and I lay down my basket. He lays down his mackerel. We trade, a grip of mushrooms for a fist full of fish, the burnished silver bodies headless in my basket. I feel sheepish about my finds. “The maggots will only eat them,” he says. “I’m glad you got them first.” I return home quiet, feeling like an arsehole. “That man,” I say to Nomi as we crackle the salted fish in the searing heat of a pan. “I sometimes don’t think I can love him any more than I do.” I realize, only then, that Conor is the first good man I have ever loved.

*

In mid-September, the weather breaks. A thunderous rain lashes at the windows, drenches the tourists miserable in their colorful rain jackets. Conor and his boyfriend come to dinner at our flat, their handsome faces already in the hallway when we hear their chirrupy voices. Conor has a surprise clenched in the palm of his hand: my mushroom knife.

“I was out with a tour group,” he says, “in our forest.” It feels good and warm in my palm. In his other hand is a basket: billowing potatoey caps.

“Cep!” we all chime. We scatter them in the pan with garlic and parsley from his garden, tumble them around with spaghetti. We open wine, watch the boats from the window. The sun sets early, the sky inky above the boats’ clacking masts. Summer is closing in. The season of autumn mushrooms will soon be here. Conor pulls a sheet of paper from his pocket, his neat scientist’s handwriting—tiny precise letters—descending in a list.

“I have some questions,” he says, his voice a little shaky. “What would be my obligations medically? What about genetic testing for abnormalities? What if the child feels that the father didn’t want to be involved because he or she wasn’t loved?”

I am so surprised; I had no idea he was still thinking about it. Nomi and I look at one another, stunned.

“These are good questions,” I say, my voice trembling.

“I’ve been thinking about it for seven weeks. I wanted to make sure I knew how
I felt before I talked to you about it. But I’ve made up my mind. I want to do it.”

*

Summer closes in: long, warm days bleed into the dark wet of autumn. Water is everywhere. At night, the bedroom windows rattle in their frames and the wind flings rain at the glass. The forests stream with peat-stained burns. The air smells as it should. Conor and I take the small ferry to the mainland, a remote peninsula with even fewer inhabitants than the island.

“My favorite duck!” he points, his binoculars to his face, eiders bobbing black and white on the drizzling sea. We drive for a long time along a single-track road, neither of us talking about the sperm, the achingly green moor just beginning to flush with crimson and peach-blossomed heather.

Around a bend in the road, just beyond a small bridge and a sign for deer antlers, we park and trek away from the car into a thick forest of spruce, birch, oak. The ground is liquid and uneven—mossy clumps, hidden streams, footholds that give way to water and send us up to our knees in bog. I can’t imagine what we’re going to find here, but Conor knows this land. He leads me around a bent-double oak, above a clump of rhododendrons, and then stops.

“This is the place,” he says, pointing at a patch of long grass. “I’ve only ever seen this mushroom once in my life, and in this one spot.”

We pull away the grass and there, underneath the forest detritus, are yellow leafy flourishes, long brown limbs and floppy wet heads.

“Yes!” he shouts. “Northern chanterelle!” We gather handfuls of them, wet and buttery, snipping them with our thumbnails. We clamber excitedly, forgetting our bodies, falling on rocks and into the bog, the rain drenching our heads and the ground soaking our legs. Brambles scratch at our skin. We gather full baskets while I try to remember the place—over the bridge, park at the antler sign, right at the big bent oak. But I am unsure of how much ground we’ve covered while we were chatting. I’m not sure I could find this place on my own.

While our heads are dipped, I muster the courage to bring up the donation.
Even as the words leave my lips, I worry that I have misinterpreted this thing he’s said he will do.

“Thank you,” I say. “For your openness to this.”

“I’m not using it,” he says, but I know he doesn’t take it lightly.

“Nomi and I could do it at home,” I say, “or insemination in a clinic. We’d need you to go to Glasgow for that, to make the donation there.” I ask it as a question, assessing his appetite for logistical labor. But his face betrays nothing.

Perhaps I want to give him a way out.

“Look,” he says, making eye contact below our rain-soaked hoods. “I’m
interested in this in a biological sense, and in how queer families are made.
Beyond that, I don’t care how you do it. I’ve decided to help you, and nothing
is going to make me change my mind.”

*

In late September, Conor and I climb to the top of the waterfall at Aros, rain dripping from the tips of our noses. “Nomi is ovulating this week,” I tell him. “And me next week. We might do DIY at home. Will you be here?”

We walk along a path I know well, past an abandoned stone hut where Conor disappears into a wet rhododendron bush, and I follow. Suddenly mouse-brown parasols spring from the moss: winter chanterelles, more of them than I have ever seen in one place.

“I’ll be here,” he says.

That night, Nomi and I google the right way to insert semen and she orders a box of needle-less syringes, the kind you use to give medicine to kids, and a menstrual cup to keep the sperm in. When the syringes arrive, there are one thousand inside and I imagine having to use all of them, each one a tiny disappointment that will eat up five hundred months of our lives. Nomi covers the cup in lube and when she tries to insert it into herself, it slips from her hand and springs across the room. We know of one person who got pregnant this way, but they were younger, and lucky. The chances of one of us getting pregnant like this is less than five percent, a doctor told us. But at least we will have tried.

*

The morning after I inseminate, I go alone to the woods at Knock where we used to swim in the river as kids. The air has a crispness to it, a clean, thin quality that stings my nose, and the ground is covered in a blanket of bronze birch leaves. I imagine the sperm inside me, the warm, milky liquid that I sucked into the syringe and shot into my cervix the night before, and I wonder if I feel anything about it.

I set off along a track that lines a gloomy forest of pines, looking for a branch in the path that Conor once showed me, searching for a patch of winter chanterelles. When the path forks, I look for the exposed roots of an elm, wondering if this is the place, or this the place, or this. Mushrooming with Conor is always so much better.

I don’t find anything that day and the month moves along in much the same manner; I go everywhere I have ever found mushrooms and I explore new places too. I try not to count the days of my cycle. But the ground is still bare, the rain having come too late. I panic at the thought that the season is nearly over; winter, when nothing grows, is on its way.

At the end of September I hike to the top of the waterfall where horn of plenty, birch bolete, and winter chanterelles usually stud the moss in a clearing overlooking the lake. My period is one day late. A sheet of rain falls, dripping under my hood and down my clammy face, obscuring the sky, the lake, the hills.

I take a run-up at the narrow burn that plunges to a cascade below and leap to the other side. For a while I see nothing but gold on the ground—sticks and leaves and the rotten thrall of autumn. And as I tune my eye, slow my steps to a speed where I can catalogue every single thing, the ground comes into focus: the heads of winter chanterelles, plump with rain, the thing I’ve been waiting for all season. I can’t wait to share the news with Conor.

I feel wet between my legs. Oh no, I think; it didn’t take. The disappointment rushes through me, a tremendous sense of loss over something I never had and didn’t even know I wanted. I reach for my underwear and slip a finger into myself, feel the wet, and imagine the blood on my fingertip. But when I hold it to the light, the liquid shines clear, not the blood I had dreaded. Excitement, not loss. I have not lost it yet.

*

Conor is the first person we tell that I am pregnant. I am laughing in shock that it was me; Nomi is crying in sadness that it wasn’t her. Conor cries too—surprise, happiness, delight. And then, when I begin to bleed fat, thick clots, and Nomi has gone to the U.S. see her family, it is Conor who takes me to the early-pregnancy clinic on the mainland, a five-hour car and ferry journey away. It is late October, the hills are bronzing with died-back bracken, and I am sure the fetus is dead.

Conor arrives before the sun does at my door. “I’ve checked all the tires,” he says, “and put washer fluid in the car. The headlights and oil level seem fine.” Without telling him, I have packed an overnight bag. I suspect that there might have to be some kind of procedure, a sucking away of what’s left inside. On the way to the hospital, we stop for mushrooms on a steep bank above the road, but the bank is a river of rain and the clods of toilet paper left by tourists caught out in the vast distance between towns. He stops at a petrol station so I can buy a prawn sandwich, the only thing today that I can bear to eat.

At the hospital, he drops me at the clinic door. Neither of us assumes he will come inside. “Is the father with you today?” the nurse asks. She lathers my stomach in a cold gum, and I turn my head away, fat tears dripping on the paper sheet.

“There it is!” she says, spinning the screen to show me: a white pinprick thrumming inside my womb. “That’s the heart.” She lets me take a video for my wife who is wide awake in a hotel in Washington D.C. I sit in a small windowless room at the hospital and heave heavy tears.

In the carpark, Conor is brewing coffee on his camping burner. “Let’s get you home,” he says. I eat another petrol station prawn sandwich and watch the video of the heartbeat the whole way along the banks of Loch Lomond.

*

And then it is spring again, but not the island: now, Texas, inhabiting a life I did—and didn’t—choose, in many complicated ways. In the early morning, our dog curled on the couch, I scavenge for whatever clothes I can find in the dark and stumble, dressing myself, to the kitchen for coffee. I manage to wake no one. The baby. mercifully, sleeps.

I haven’t seen Conor in four months and, before that, eight. He’s in New Zealand, he told me in a text, hiking with his sister, but when I look for him on Instagram I see he’s now in the Falkland Islands, and I scroll through photos of fat-beaked albatross, southern right whales, emperor penguins sliding down icebergs, willing myself to comment, to say something I mean that isn’t Help, I miss you, I am unrooted from my life. A striking photo of sea smoke—a fog that occurs when the ocean and air temperatures are wildly off—sears through me in the dawn kitchen while the coffee splutters on the stove.

I stir the porridge and I scroll and I scroll, trying to remember when he told me he would be back home so that I can talk to him at length on the phone. He has limited time to send messages on the ship and, when he does, he sends them to his boyfriend, who we helped him to find. We wanted him to have this boyfriend, and we wanted for ourselves a baby. Everyone has everything they want. How lonely, to find that these things have driven me askew.

In the lightening yard, a cardinal flashes red through the trees, and a tufted titmouse whistles from the garage roof. I didn’t care for birds until I met Conor; I don’t think I even noticed them. Our son stirs in his room, a snuffling and rooting, then the sound of the crib creaking as he pulls books into his bed. Animals are his favorite—iguanas, owls, snakes, octopuses, hyenas, whales. He has mimicked their sounds since before he could say “milk” or “mama.”

“Cock-a-doo,” I hear him cry out, finding his book about the farmyard. “Woof,” he says in the dark, and then “ssssssss” as he imagines the snakes we saw last week at the zoo. “Agh-agh-agh” comes the sound, mimicking gorillas now, beating his fists on his chest. How tiny, this life; how tiny and powerful and mine.

When our son is at daycare, I send a message to Conor. “Having an eighteenmonth-year-old is hard,” I confess. “I know I chose this and I don’t regret it, but I do struggle with it.”

I’m embarrassed by my woes because he gave this life to us. I don’t tell him about my post-partum depression, how I battle with the lack of freedom, and how hard it is to have a thought, a breath of my own, how much I want to go hiking for a day and not tell anyone when I’ll be back. I do tell him how much I miss mushrooms, and forests and woodlands—our island—but I omit how I grieve for my old life: my tethers, my freedoms, my roaming the forests with him.

“Hey,” comes a message quickly back. “I’m on shore for a couple of hours. I just got your messages. Thank you for your honesty about parenting. And don’t worry,” he says. “We’re halfway to cep season. Hang in there.”

In the laundry room, I clean peas from the washing machine. Conor hasn’t gone anywhere, but I have. It’s my life that is uprooted, now tethered, instead, in a thousand different ways to people I could not live without. But the inside of me—I’m floating. I’m floating, and I don’t know how to come down.

*

That afternoon, when our son gets home from daycare, he wobbles to the back door of the house and smacks his fist on the glass, screaming “out-side, out-side, out-side.” I look down at his fair skin, his almost still-bald head, its distinctive shape that mirrors Conor’s. A curl of red leaps from the nape. I bury my head in it and breathe in the scent of his skin. “Let’s do some digging,” I say.

On the porch are some ginger rhizomes that I have soaked, sliced, and dried, and I hold out a piece for my son as I unleash him from the house. In the garage we find our trowels and search out a piece of the yard that is not yet growing something we can eat.

“Diggit! Diggit!” he clamors at my knees, and we spoon the rotted compost into a hole, add handfuls of bone and blood meal, alpaca manure from a friend. And then we look for the good eyes on the ginger and lay each piece in the soil. The eyes point upward to the sun. We smother the ginger in the dark.

And there it will sit, and when it is ready, it will grow. The rhizomes will multiply sideways, rooting and reaching in the terrible heat of a Texas summer. It will grow toward the light. And then we will dig the ginger up, Nomi, the baby and me, and we will grate it into soup with dried mushrooms from a jar. We will eat it, these gifts from the ground, the three of us together: this family we have made.

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Rose Skelton is a writer from Scotland. She is working on her first book, Easement, about queer parenting, radical gardening, and surviving gun violence in Texas. Homescar, a collection of short stories-in-progress, won a Larry Levis Fellowship and an Elizabeth George Foundation grant. Her work has appeared in Four Way Review and Waxwing, and her essay, “Little Starts” was a Pushcart Special Mention. She now lives and gardens in Texas.