CHAPTER SIX
It’s pre-morning dark when Reed leaves, sleepy and hungover, the smell of liquor clinging to him still. “See you out buggin’,” he tells me.
I nod, give him a kiss. It’s all he needs before slipping down the trellis.
I dress for a day on the water: leggings, T-shirt. I scan the room for moving furniture even as I tell myself that the icy cold of the wooden seat was stirred up from the fan cooling my room, the rocking of the chair pushed by an electric wind. Still, my brain won’t let go of some other possibility. Something not so easily explained away.
I don’t visit the old woman’s photo before heading downstairs. I don’t go to the window to see Whaleback Ridge or Malaga Island to the north. I don’t dare press my hand to the rocker. I focus on my day. The ocean. The things I know.
I open my door and trip over the body lying in the hall.
Her brown hair with its purple tips tumble over the rug in the hall, brightened by the glow of the stairwell light. “Hattie?”
Hattie sits up, rubs at her eyes. “ ’Morning.” Her voice is throaty, scratched.
“What’re you doing out here?” I sit against the opposite wall and gather my legs against my chest. I feel the anger rising in that mixed tumultuous place where my love for Hattie has twisted recently.
“I came to see you last night, but Reed was here.”
“You slept in the hall?”
She nods, licks at her dry lips.
“Did you . . . ?” Come in my room? Sit in the rocking chair? It’s impossible to ask the question out loud. Because I know who I will sound like if she says no.
Hattie looks at me with so much suspicion, like she can see all the wrong in me.
“Why didn’t you knock, come in?”
“Honestly? I didn’t know if you’d want to see me. You haven’t answered my texts or voice mails.” Hattie looks tired. And thin. Like my absence has made physical pounds shed from her frame. I wonder if I look as worn to her.
“I let you have your space, Rills. But I miss you. Too much.” I hear the crack in her voice, the chasm of hurt that creeps around the curves of her syllables.
I miss Hattie too, if I’m being honest. Do I tell her how many times my thumb hovered over her name to respond to one of her texts? How much I wanted to reach out but couldn’t?
“I figured the only way to talk to you was to literally stand in your way. Or, lie down.” She gestures at the hall, sits up straighter. “I’ll sleep here every night if I have to. I’ll hold one-sided conversations. I’ll just sit out here being all stalkery. I’ll yammer on until you have to talk to me. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll talk only using quotes from The Princess Bride.”
A laugh rises in me, but I pull it back.
“It’s okay to laugh, you know.”
But is it?
“I’ve been really worried about you, Rills.”
“Why? What specifically?” Because she doesn’t know the depths of what’s happening.
“What aren’t I worried about? You’re out fishing all alone, and that shouldn’t be all on you. I know you’re freaking out about leaving for college, leaving your gram. But I know staying scares you worse.”
My chest stutters over a hard breath, the kind that rises from the relief and fear of someone knowing you so well.
“And I know you miss your dad more than I could ever understand. But I want to help, Rills. I’ll do anything. I could work with you on the boat, do whatever.”
I laugh. It’s a beyond absurd offer. “You hate fishing.”
“I do.”
“So why would you off—”
“Because I’d do it, Rills. I’d get on that smelly boat with you at the crack of every day’s ass. I’d drag those nasty creatures up from the bottom of the sea. I’d smile while I filled bait bags with rotting fish. I’d do all of that because I love you. And I’m here for you.” Her voice hushes with the weight of her promise. “I’d do anything for you, Rills. Anything.”
“You’d smile while filling bait bags with rotten herring?”
“If that’s what you need.”
“I don’t know what I need.”
“That’s fair.” She moves to my side. “I’m sorry, Rills. I’m sorry you weren’t with your dad that day.”
“I should have been.”
“I know.” She puts her arm around my shoulder. I’m grateful for the way her warmth spreads over me. “But maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference.”
“It might have.”
“Maybe. But you have to forgive yourself, Rills. What happened to your dad wasn’t your fault.”
Grief rises in me. “It feels like it was all my fault.”
“Your dad wouldn’t want you to feel that way.”
“I know.” But still.
“You need to find a way to forgive yourself.”
That seems like the hardest thing in the world. “I’m not sure how to.”
“We’ll figure it out.” Hattie pulls me closer, and I let her hold me for the time it takes the sun to rise. She lets me cry. Doesn’t tell me to hush or that everything will be okay. She just lets me be me.
* * *
When I’m out on the water, the VHF squawks with static. Then Reed’s voice. “All in, Rilla Brae?”
I grab the mouthpiece. “All in.” I’m at sea. I love him. I’m all right. And I feel some normal fall around me. Hattie is back and the rocking chair doesn’t matter. Nothing matters beyond what’s real. Gram. Hattie. Reed. The waves under my boat.
I haul fifty traps by midday, load them with bait and set them back into the deep. It’s a mere fraction of the hauling Dad and I would do together in peak season, and even though I’m proud of my catch, I’m aware that it isn’t enough. That I’m not enough. Maybe I do need Hattie out here.
At the wharf, I hop off the Rilla Brae as Hoopah weighs my haul. One hundred and four pounds.
“Not bad,” he says, tearing my slip from his receipt pad. But it’s not great, either. Hoopah knows I need a hundred pounds per trip just to cover gas and bait. Never mind the costs for maintaining the boat. If he sees the calculations race through my head, he doesn’t say.
I’m about to step back onto the boat when Old Man Benner elbows past Hoopah to crowd my face. He reeks of dank cigar and bitterness.
Old Man Benner condescends a nod at my boat. “Whatcha got there, girlie?”
Girlie. I straighten my shoulders and pull up my sarcasm. “You’ve been fishing all your life and can’t recognize a day’s catch?”
Behind me, Hoopah snickers. I stand taller, fully aware that my father wouldn’t have tolerated me talking to any elder this way. But I know he wouldn’t have tolerated Benner’s assholery either.
Benner rips the slip from my hand, scoffs. “A hundred pounds ain’t come close to a day’s catch. Didn’t ya fathah teach ya nothin’?”
My teeth grind in hate, barely letting words move past their gate. How can this man possibly be related to Reed? “You don’t know a thing about my father.”
“I know he’s gone now and Little Miss Fancy’s gonna need money for that uppity school ya so keen on running off ta.”
“Easy now, Benner,” Hoopah says.
I stare Benner down. “My work has exactly nothing to do with you, Benner.” But I hate that he’s right. I do need money, better hauls. Dad averaged close to five hundred pounds a day. Few families could survive on less.
Benner flicks the receipt at my chest, and my reflexes snag it before it sails away in the air current.
“Ya’ve got ya business done here today, Benner,” Hoopah says. He steps between me and Old Man Asshole so that their two chests almost touch. “Seems to me it’s time ya move it along.”
Benner looks Hoopah dead in the eye. “Only one doesn’t have business being he-ah is that girl, and there ain’t a fisherman who doesn’t know it ta be true.” He lets his emphasis hold tight on the man part of fisherman. Benner spits his tobacco onto the dock and plunges his finger into Hoopah’s sternum. “Ya let girls fish and this whole industry’ll be ruined.” Benner clips his thumbs into the bib of his rubber overalls and slinks off. I try to breathe.
Hoopah squeezes at the ball of my elbow. “Don’t ya mind him. He went and got a fishing hook caught up his arse years ago.”
I force a laugh, like Benner’s words can’t penetrate my skin. “I should be getting home.”
“Don’t ya be takin’ anything he says with ya, now. Ya leave his words he-ah on the dock where the gulls can shit on them, ya he-ah?”
“I hear.”
“Ya dad was a good man, Rilla. Ya come from good stock.”
Do I? Everyone knows my mother left me and Dad, and now Benner makes me want to retreat, the same way she did. I can already hear the gossip I’d leave in my wake if I took my packed bags and headed due south for Rhode Island.
Brae girl leaving her family behind, just like her mama.
Brae women ain’t built for the sea.
Always knew she’d run. Jonathan probably knew it too. Probably what made his heart give up right there in his chest.
It’s that last bit of speculation that breaks me. I nod to Hoopah. It’s all the good-bye I can manage. Because if I open my mouth, I don’t know what will bubble up. A cry. A scream. Or some monstrous combination of both.
As I navigate away from the dock, I don’t turn around. I can’t bear to see Hoopah staring at me. What if his eyes can’t hide the fact that he doubts me as much as I do?
I turn toward home even though I know I’m not going home. I knew it hours ago when I stuffed my pack full of biscuits. Even then I knew I was headed to the island.
This time, I’m not looking for the girl.
I need an escape.
I need to see Sam.
I need to drown in the island’s story. The old woman’s story.
Any story that’s not my own.