If I'd Killed Him When I Met Him…

MACPHERSON &HILL
ATTORNEYS-AT-LAW
DANVILLE , VIRGINIA

(Pardon the stolen stationery. Elizabeth.)

Dearest Cameron:

I’m back in Virginia, instead of in Scotland, because the remnants of my family still seem to need the presence of a sane person, and since we aren’t related to such a being, I am having to impersonate one. It’s probably good therapy for me anyhow. There’s a very earnest psychiatrist named Freya (no wonder she went to med school: intellectual parents) who insists that no matter what my feelings are, I do not need solitude right now. She uses words like brooding and self-pity and clinical depression. I have pills to take, but they might as well be Reese’s Pieces, because they certainly aren’t cheering me up any. But I take them anyhow, in case they happen to be working, which means I’d be even worse without them. At least I have things to keep me occupied here.

Besides, there’s a limit to the amount of time one can stand on the shore at Cramond, staring out at the dark water of the firth.

Freya says it’s all right for me to write to you. Therapeutic, she called it, in that smug little way of hers. It must be wonderful to be a shrink. I can’t think why I became a forensic anthropologist. Anytime you disagree with Freya, she just smirks and says that you are “in denial,” and therefore she gets to be right all the time. It’s maddening-which drums up more business for her, I suppose. Why do the rural good old boys bother to stage cockfights when they could put two psychiatrists in a pit and watch a real bloodbath?

I’m going to try to stick to what’s going on here, instead of writing analytical and/or maudlin letters about Us. I don’t need to belabor points about missing you, or being paralyzed with worry, because if everything turns out all right, these letters will look ridiculous, and if it doesn’t, I couldn’t bear to have a record of my sorrow. So I will make this a running journal of family life as I observe it.

The first observation, of course, is that there’s damned little family life to observe. I feel more like a war correspondent. Mother and Daddy are still in the process of divorcing, despite the best efforts of Bill and me to reconcile them. Now they aren’t even speaking to each other! We are obviously no great shakes as mediators, my brother Bill and I. If the UN sent us to the Middle East as peacekeepers, we could probably pull off Armageddon in a matter of days.

Bill is still eking out an existence in his Danville law practice with his partner A. P. Hill (who resembles her namesake, the Confederate general, except that she’s much more stern and commanding). I don’t know that I like her all that much, but I admire her for being such a force to be reckoned with. If I were five-foot-three-inches and blonde, I’d have gone for perky and cute, but A.P. somehow manages to be terrifyingly competent.

Since I haven’t had the peace of mind to go out looking for a job in my field, Bill and A.P. have sort of hired me (although I have more money than both of them put together) to be an “investigator” for their law firm, at an hourly wage that is laughable, especially considering that I have a Ph.D. But they mean to be kind, I know. They want to keep me busy. But so far there hasn’t been any call for an investigator’s talents (even assuming I had any). All their clients have either taken the plea bargain or agreed to work through their divorces without resorting to storm-trooper tactics.

That word again. Divorce.

At least you and I were spared that.

Sometimes I think that there is a great war going on between men and women. There is so much dislike and distrust in the air. Prenuptial agreements; kamikaze divorces; lawsuits over emotional matters: how very unromantic. The monasteries should be packing them in. Not that I care, personally, because at present I am a noncombatant. I am, as I said before, a war correspondent, writing sad communiqués to someone behind enemy lines.

I have no quarrel with you, dear Cameron. Except that you were selfish enough and stupid enough to go sailing away into the wild North Sea on that stupid, antiquated little boat. And so, goodbye for now, my dear. I must close.

If I knew where you were, I’d mail this.

Love,

Elizabeth