House of Horns

One

At that very moment, Nella knew the big orange circle of the sun would have been slowly sliding behind Texas. Her home state would have been dried and crackled by late August, the air rippling with the heat of the past day. And you would've still been able to come up with a pretty decent batch of fried eggs and bacon simply by dropping them on the pavement - or cookies by arranging the dough on the dashboard of your car, like in that one YouTube-video.
     Scotland, however, was nowhere near the same.
     Even if 'Geek's Complete Guide to Scotland' had playfully declared August as the warmest month in the 'tartan country', Nella didn't think the 65 degree weather on the other side of the rain-speckled car window constituted as 'warm'. The window wipers of Howie Cornfield's red Chevrolet Tahoe had worked over time for the past 6 hours they'd been driving. The sheets of rain where getting so thick Nella was starting to think that in order to get where they were going, her father's beloved SUV would have to grow a set of fins.
     The drive had taken the Cornfield family deeper and deeper into the rural parts of Scotland. And the green hilltops and misty, rain stirred lakes were growing more and more postcard-esque by the passing hour. The last form of life Nella had been able to spot, in addition to her family, were the sheep that had smeared in the Chevrolet window 2 hours ago. So, to say that the entertainment provided by their new country of residence was sparse, was a very generous way to go about it. Especially in the mind of Nella's older sister Courtney, who sighed dramatically.
     "Christ," the way she pressed the 'I' made it sound like someone would have sat on her halfway through the word. "I hate to sound like Nella, but are we there yet?"
     Nella threw an offended glare at her sister's tanned houstonian profile and stuck her tongue out, even if Courtney was too preoccupied with the latest issue of Us Weekly to acknowledge her. Nella couldn't, however, stay mad at her for long, because she had just addressed what at least 50% of the SUV had been thinking for the past 3 hours.
     "Any moment now," Nella moved her brown eyes to the yawning face of her mother, who was wrapped into a blanket in the front seat. "When you start seeing the ocean, it's only a matter of-"
     At that moment, Howie Cornfield let loose a victorious 'hah'. When Nella jutted her head to better see her father, she saw how he was holding his index finger above the steering wheel and was pointing at something outside the front window. The view was broken by the raindrops smashing into the glass, but there was no mistaking it. A grey sliver of ocean was peeking from behind two hilltops.
     "-minutes,"
     "Well, would you look at that," sung the thick southern drawl of Nella's father, as he straightened his back for the first time in hours. "I didn't think I would be happy to see more water, but maybe we'll actually make it to that Brass Castle of yours before we all start growing old and gray."
     The sharp, blue eyes of Alison Cornfield smiled at Howie from across the front seats knowingly.
     "It's the Glass Castle, dear," she corrected him, the remains of her British roots showing in her interesting hybrid of an accent.
     "You can make dishes out of both!"
     "There's led in brass, dad," Courtney interrupted with her best take on the 'I'm-a-bored-teenager-who-knows-better-than-you'-tone. She turned the page of her magazine with the same agitated force she had spoken with.
     Her father just chuckled at her teenage guff
     "Well, I didn't say you should." 

 

The ocean eventually landed on the left side of the SUV, as the car started to drive along the ocean cliffs, towards North. Nella touched the sharp little bump on her forehead while still reaching to look outside, but now from her own window.
     Before, Nella hadn't even known where her mother's accent originated from. And with Alison Cornfield avoiding the discussion of her origins beyond 'being from the UK', Nella had always just placed her roots somewhere between London and Manchester - mainly because those were the only British cities she knew the names of.
     Now, this whole thing with the horn had forced Nella's mother to finally come clean about her heritage, but the most shocking thing about it wasn't that it could be traced back to Scotland. That was actually the bit Nella would have been able to let go with a shrug. Even the part where her ordinary, nine-to-five working mother was suddenly a descendant of some sort of a shape shifting clan, Nella could have imagined being OK with, after digesting it properly. The part she had had the most problems with was the one where she was what her mother had described as 'the last of their kind'.
     And saying that Nella 'didn't quite understand the situation yet' wouldn't even have begun to describe the hurricane of questions that tore her epicenter. However, while Nella had been raining constant questions on her mother like a big droopy storm cloud, her answers had been in very short supply.
     "We'll have to go there, they can tell you more," she had said, after she had closed the cap of her empty jar of answers. "They can teach you."