CHAPTER NINE
The silver slice of moon cuts through the darkness. I’m on the solid deck of the Rilla Brae, the midnight sea surrounding me.
I hear my father in my head, his words reaching me from a great distance as an echo inside of an echo. “Bugs move at night, Rilla. Leave them be.” Fishermen know to let the stocks replenish.
Still, I’m fishing at night.
I know it’s wrong, and I head from the wheelhouse just as another voice soothes me, tells me that this is right. Come here, come here. Warmth spreads through my body, thickening. I look for the girl. My girl. The girl that holds more secrets than a midnight sea.
Is the song in my head, or is she here, singing?
I feel the buoy line in my hand, stretched across my palm. I tug at the rope, test its tautness. A trap pulls from the opposite end. I lean toward the water, drawing up the rope foot by foot. One hand over the other. Tendrils of seaweed cling to the braided twine, slicking through my fingers. The rope drags up the salt of the sea, the hard smell of fish and buried layers.
And then the line goes slack.
The frayed end of the rope is all that’s left in my grip. I stumble back, unsteady now on the deck of the Rilla Brae. I lean against the wheelhouse and stare at the shimmering black of the deep. My gear is gone. Lost to the sea, a ghost trap.
Until there’s a flicker of movement and a small splash as the trap’s metal corner cuts through the ocean’s surface. I peer over the side of the Rilla Brae. The trap is carried on the waves, impossibly floating—swimming—toward me. Crawling toward my boat.
Moonlight flickers at its wire edges. The trap bobs on a wave.
Under a wave.
On a wave.
Behind a wave.
Coming for me.
Then the sweet song of a voice that sings louder now: Come here, come here.
I stay.
Seaweed crowns the wire cage. It inches nearer. I flatten my hands against the boat’s fiberglass edge, lean over to greet this determined trap the way I have pulled thousands of traps before.
When it reaches me, the trap stops still, mere inches from my boat. My hands on the rail are heavy useless things. I can’t lift them.
The trap bobs, holding its place despite the push of the waves. It doesn’t bang against my boat. The cage hovers close but not too close. I will my arm to move, and my hand is set free of an unknown weight. I reach for the trap. The seaweed shifts. Its tangled tresses swim in the moonlight. Slither to the side. The seaweed is twisted with something darker, finer.
Hair.
My fingers rake at the long, swimming hair just as the mass of tangles slip.
Off of a girl’s round face.
My girl.
Her face green with the sea now.
Washed with time.
Her body is slack, forever heaped over my trap. Her lifeless arms drag at the sides, fingertips brushed by the lifting ocean. Something like air gets lodged in my lungs, but it’s colder. Unwelcome. I scream, but the sound never comes. It is just me and a floating dead girl and the night and the cold and the sea and the moon.
I tell myself to fall back, fall away from the edge of the boat. Into my boat. Away from her. But I know the dead girl senses my retreat, my beat of cowardice, and she will not let me leave her.
The dead girl’s eyes dart open.
Her hand rises from the deep, a serpent. Dark. Scaly. Forgotten. Her cold fingers lock onto the skin of my wrist.
Fire burns under her touch.
She pulls me to her, her dark cracked lips preparing to croak a whisper into my ear. I scream so that I can’t hear her words. I scream to drown out her message. I scream as she pulls me down to the cold black sea that forces the weight of its water and salt into my lungs.
I dart upright in bed, my sheets soaked with a panicked sweat.
Hattie sleeps next to me.
I pull air into my chest and let my lungs fill. My fingers search the stillness of the mattress below me. I peel my mind from the dream, layers of fear still binding me in their thick wrap.
That is when I feel it, the burn at my wrist.
Raw and angry and on fire.
I’m careful not to wake Hattie as I switch on my light, rub the handcuff of skin that’s red, angry, screeching. The deep heat rages all the way through to my wrist bones, makes me curl into its pain. I tuck my arm into my stomach and try to still my mind. Try to erase the dead girl with the seaweed hair. She is not real. My eyes catalog the things that are: my books, my dresser, my bed. Me, in this room. My friend next to me. The girl from the sea was a dream, nothing more. Still, I can’t help think of the Water People, those mysterious people who called to my mother from the deep.
Maybe they were as real as the band of burn on my wrist.
Maybe they are coming for me, too.
* * *
I dress and tiptoe to the kitchen, where I rummage for the tin of Gram’s homemade calendula flower ointment. I smooth the salve over the charred skin, carefully dabbing, letting the thick balm sink its coolness into my skin. Gram enters the room cat-quiet. She grabs my hand, inspects my wrist.
“Where’d ya go and get a burn like that?”
I slide my hand from her grasp and lie. “The engine.” It’s the only lie I can remember telling my grandmother, but how can I tell her the truth? I’m distinctly aware that burns don’t manifest themselves from the dream world. And was it a dream? Its details cling to me even now, more like a vision. And when did I wake up? Before or after the vision? I shake my head quickly, still unable to make sense of time and place.
Gram’s harrumph tells me she suspects I’m hiding something. She knows the engine wouldn’t make a collar of a burn. “Best wrap that wound.”
She shuffles past me, setting a few jars of her jams onto the table, their glass lids tinking as I inhale the heavy yeast smell of rising bread. I tuck down my questions, my fears about the swell of my wrist, the girl from the deep. Or Malaga. Or both.
Are my dreams—my visions—where the dead and the living meet?
I conjure my best everyday voice, let it lift over the throbbing of the burn. “Smells amazing.”
“I should hope so, seeing as they are your favorite.” Gram piles biscuits into a wicker bowl lined with a red cloth napkin. “Reed not staying for breakfast?”
My heart stutters. “Reed?”
Gram fusses with the jams, sticking a small jelly spoon inside each clear jar. “You’re eighteen, Rilla. No sense having that boy sneak out any longer.” She mumbles something about him breaking his neck on the trellis, but I can barely register what she’s saying.
“You know Reed stays over?” How long has she known?
She turns, hand on her hip. “You’re old enough to know I’ve got my eyes open, Rilla. Now sit.” She pushes a plate in front of me. “Ya tell Reed to use the front door when he leaves in the mornings. My roses shouldn’t have to bear the brutality of his clodhoppers after today.”
I reach for a too-hot biscuit.
“Don’t ya look so shocked. I might be old, but I still see things.” Gram splits her flaky roll with the push of her thumb, pours honey along the exposed insides.
“D-did Dad know?”
She knits her brows in my direction. “Ya know I’d never be that careless with his heart.”
Her words freeze me. There were times I was careless with my dad’s heart, when I yelled at him, throwing blame for the most insignificants bits of living. My curfew. Getting up so early.
I massage the skin above my wrist, the burn stinging deeper now, almost familiar, comforting. “Hattie stayed last night, not Reed.”
Gram looks pleased. “I’m glad to hear it. Ya two girls are the opposite sides of a clamshell, made to be stuck together. And has Hattie had the pleasure of meeting your sternman?”
“Not yet.”
“You’ll bring Sam by tonight, yes?”
“Yes.”
Gram packs biscuits in a warmer, part of the deal we made before I went to my room last night. Gram promised to make extra biscuits if I brought Sam to Fairtide to meet her. “I’m packing enough for the both of ya.”
She means Sam, but I hear the familiar words: The both of ya. Me and Dad. He is everywhere with us still. His life is woven into this kitchen, into our habits. And I can’t ignore the way my heart thunders with the suspicion that my mother is here too, her madness visiting me with a power all its own.