CHAPTER TWELVE
I take to the sea, knowing I can’t keep my private things quiet any longer. I need Sam’s help, and I need to figure out how to ask for it.
“You look sore,” I tell Sam when he climbs slowly aboard the Rilla Brae. The sky has let go of the dark, the sun carving out the line of the horizon. I’m late getting on the water. It took too long to recover from the girl’s visit, the flower she left behind.
Sam leans back, one hand crooked against his hip, like a man four times his age. “I’ve never ached so much in my life.”
“First days on the water are tough.”
“You Mainers and your understatements.”
I offer him my thermos. “It’s meadowsweet and marshmallow root. It’ll help soothe your joints and muscles.”
“Do you have a vat of it, then?”
“There’s always more if you need it.”
He takes the hot tea as I put the Rilla Brae in gear, head out toward the first string. I watch Malaga until it slips behind us. Its shores are empty today, but I think the girl is here. In the sea below us? Watching me from somewhere I can’t see? A chill rakes my spine, and somewhere in my exhaustion I feel an unprecedented surge of pride for my mother. For her realizing that she needed help, and for seeking help. For dealing with her slippery thoughts the only way she knew how. Maybe she needed help to protect what was real: me, Dad, her mother. In this flutter of pride I think maybe she walked away to spare us, save us. In this moment I’m grateful to her. In this moment I begin to understand how walking away could have equaled love. Protection.
“So I woke up with the profound desire not to slow you down today,” Sam says.
“You didn’t slow us.”
“Again. Mainers and their understatements.”
“Okay, maybe yesterday was a little slow. But that only makes us even.”
“How do you figure?”
“I didn’t get you back to the island like I promised. You missed a whole day of scientisting.”
He gives a deep, full laugh. “Scientisting, huh? Real serious stuff.” He blows at his thermos cup. “I didn’t feel like I was missing out on anything yesterday. It’s important to me that your gram knows she can trust me out here, even if I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“You’ll know more in eight hours. We’ve got a hundred traps to haul and rebait.”
“Then what are you waiting for?” Sam sets his mug onto the console and pulls on Dad’s rubber overalls. I’m oddly comforted by the enthusiasm in his voice, and the rubber boots on his feet.
I navigate around the buoys in this swath of water, careful not to catch a line in my propeller. Settled by the fact that Old Man Benner’s buoys aren’t anywhere near my strings today. There are a few boats already pulling pots. I don’t miss the way each lobsterman’s chin raises at Sam, trying to get a better look at this stranger from away.
We haul and reset most of my traps by late afternoon, and though I’d love to get another dozen in the water, I head to the wharf.
“Calling it a day?” Sam says.
I maneuver my boat against the wharf. I throw her into neutral, cut the engine. “I don’t want to be the captain that doesn’t keep her promises. I need to get you out to Malaga.” But it’s my need that draws me to Malaga.
“Aye, aye.” Sam hops off the boat, gives Hoopah a high five as if he’s been doing it for years.
I let Sam do the off-loading. He’s a fast learner, and that’s everything I need right now.
“Good ta see ya, Rilla.” Hoopah climbs aboard, leans his back against the wheelhouse.
“It’s good to be seen.” I toss the remnants of the chum buckets overboard. The gulls screech, their long wings and fierce beaks fighting each other for the bloody fish that coat the water. I spray the bait containers semi-clean, tuck them back into place.
“Good day on the water?”
“Getting there.”
“Looks like ya help’s working out.” He throws a nod in Sam’s direction. “I remember the first day ya helped ya dad at sea. Never seen a man with more pride.”
I was barely four and remember it only from pictures. “A long time ago.”
“Time’s a tricky thing, Rilla. Feels like yesterday ta me.”
Time is the trickiest of things. The way the girl reaches me across time, across death. The way it feels like maybe I’ve known her before.
“Ya need to stay on the water.”
“How’s that?”
“Old Man Benner’s got his eyes on ya fishing grounds.”
I clean the chum knife with a rag, hang it next to the ruler. “I’m aware.”
“Then ya know ta be careful.”
“I will, Hoopah. I appreciate you looking out for me.”
“I owe your fathah a hundred favors or more, Rilla.”
And I see the loyalty in his eyes, that spark of remembering, of never forgetting. I want to know if the girl had someone looking out for her too. Or is she asking me to remember? Because no one else has?
“He’d appreciate it, Hoopah. You know he would.”
“Hope so, Rilla. Hope so.”
Sam reboards the boat, hands me today’s weigh-in slip. Four hundred and eight pounds. “Not bad.”
Hoopah lets out a laugh that soars up from his middle. “Ya right about that, Sam Taylah.” He wags his finger at Sam but says to me: “Ya got yourself a good sternman there, Rilla, and I’m glad ta see it.” He shakes his head like he’s letting the last bit of laughter break free. Then he sucks his lip between his teeth, lets out a whistle that calls his dog to his side. “See ya tomorrow, Rilla.”
“Tomorrow.”
“See ya.” Sam waves, still enthusiastic, even though every inch of him must ache.
I navigate away from the dock, and Sam moves to the back of the boat, readies our lines for tomorrow’s run. When I near the shores of Malaga, I put the engine in neutral, let the tide slide us toward the University of Southern Maine boat. My mouth plays with the question that’s been on my mind since reading the girl’s plea. “Sam?”
Sam’s rinsing his hands overboard, wringing the day’s work from his fingers. “Rilla?”
“How would it be if I helped you on the island?” This is the easiest way to ask for help that I know—by offering it.
“Malaga?”
“Are you digging on another island?”
He laughs. “No.” He slips off his coveralls, hangs them in the wheelhouse. “It’s just that . . . I don’t know . . . You always seem like you’re kinda in a rush to get off the island.”
“Maybe.” Definitely. “But not anymore. Not since I read your research.”
Sam reaches overboard to grab his skiff, drops over the edge and into his boat. He waves me aboard. “I’d dig it if you worked in the dirt with me, Rilla Brae.” He gives me a soft wink and I laugh.
I wish I were brave enough to tell Sam about the girl, her request. And how I think she was from here. That I think the island might have more than artifacts buried. That secrets are restless on the island. I drop anchor, strip off my Grundens, and join Sam in his boat.
At the site, Sam hands me a trowel no different from the kind Dad used for masonry work around our property. He shows me how to carve out small sections of earth with a gentle hand, then screen the dirt for remnants of buttons, glass, tobacco pipes, anything that wouldn’t come by the dirt naturally.
Maybe to find the answers, I need to know everything Sam knows, the truths that might exist outside of photographs and articles and the eviction notice. Then maybe I’ll be able to tell him about the girl’s visits, her song. I want the whole puzzle of the story, so I start with one piece as I sift a small dollop of earth against the thin metal lines of a screen.
“My best friend, Hattie . . . her grandmother remembered what happened out here.”
Sam leans back from the edge of the site, rests his forearms on his thighs. “Tell me.” His eyes are hungry.
“Hattie’s nan told Hattie about the islanders being taken to Pineland.”
“ ‘Taken’ is a nice way to put it; ‘forcibly committed’ is more accurate.”
“Yes, right.” The faces of the children crowd my head. Which one didn’t know what a telephone was? Who was that boy who spent four decades locked in an institution because he couldn’t identify an object that had no function in his island life? The girl would have known that boy, all the children. They would’ve been family, in the way of island living. “Hattie’s nan told her she regretted it, what was done to the people here.”
Sam’s eyes narrow. “Regretted it how?”
My screen empties of dirt and I let it hang from my grasp. “She told Hattie she was sorry she didn’t have more love in her heart. I can’t let that go, you know? That she was sorry, like it was a personal regret.”
“What are you thinking?”
I sculpt out another small chunk of earth, easy with my blade as I slice. “I’m thinking Hattie’s nan knew what was happening on these shores and was complicit, or her family was complicit. I think she was basically telling Hattie that maybe if she had had more love in her heart, she might have tried to stop what happened out here. At least, that’s what I want to believe.” I see Hattie’s nan hovering over me, straightening my uniform, always making triple certain I looked proper for Brownies—even though she knew Gram already did the same for me before I left the house. “She would’ve been really young then, though. Maybe ten or twelve years old.” I want her youth to exonerate her from the crimes that were committed.
“The population here was pretty small then, and word would have traveled by gossip. She likely heard about it at a community gathering.”
“Or over supper.”
He nods.
Everyone on the mainland would have known what was happening eighty years ago. The news articles didn’t print themselves, and they were too salacious to have gone unread. And what about Gram’s parents? Did they want the islanders gone? Dad always taught me to judge a person by their capacity for kindness and nothing else, but this was an entirely different generation of men.
Men who evicted other men. And their families.
“I think most mainlanders wanted the island cleared by the time the order of eviction was served. Malaga became a local embarrassment after Boston papers started running articles and photos. But I don’t think it was always that way.”
“It couldn’t have been. Malaga residents were left in peace for decades, no different from other island communities around here.” I sift the dirt clear of the excavation site, watch small bits drop through the fine screen.
“And the people probably would have been left alone if the island itself wasn’t so desirable. It seems like all the research agrees on that one point in the end—that the racial and economic tensions regarding Malaga really boiled down to the fact that the mainland saw a chance for developing tourism to the island.”
“That’s the shameful part of this whole story. That an entire culture could be erased so someone could build a hotel. It feels like the shame should sit with the state, the developers, the mainlanders—not the people of Malaga or their descendants.”
“Power of the press, right?” Sam uses a brush to smooth away dirt from the exposed wrought iron.
The grate looks so familiar to me now. I recognize it. My adrenaline rushes, bringing satisfaction for connecting one small piece of this island’s history.
“Sam.” I’m not sure why I didn’t make the connection before. I grab his moleskin from my pack, open it to the photo of the empty schoolhouse decorated for Christmas. I point to the child’s desk in the foreground, its ironwork legs identical to the ornate metal Sam excavates.
“I know. Pretty cool, right?”
“You’re not surprised?”
He shakes his head.
“But you said you didn’t know what it was.”
“I don’t. I won’t know for absolute certain until it’s above the earth.”
A not-so-small part of me deflates. The part that was hoping I could discover some long-forgotten piece of this island’s story. “I hope that’s what it is. I want some part of the school to survive out here.”
“Hope is an important thing, Rilla. I think the missionaries who raised money for the school had a lot of hope. The school probably represented hope to the residents.”
“Until it was taken away.”
“Yes, well, I’m not sure the school or the islanders could have suffered a different fate.”
I feel cold breath on my neck, the same biting cold that joined me in bed this morning. I turn to see the girl, but there’s no one. Still, the shiver climbs inside of my bones. “Why do you say that?”
“Discrimination is discrimination. Racism is racism. There’s no getting it right when one group thinks they’re inherently superior to another.”
“But the islanders were institutionalized. That’s the part I can’t get my mind around. Why take their freedom away? Why lock up innocent people?” Why lock them in a place where people were sent to be forgotten, and worse?
“Malaga Island residents weren’t innocent, Rilla. They were immoral, living out of traditional wedlock. Shiftless. You read the articles.”
“You can’t possibly believe that propaganda.”
“Of course not, but it’s important to contextualize our findings in this field. And back then, difference was unacceptable. Mainstream society didn’t know how to look at the poor or disabled any other way. So they built warehouses—institutions—to store people away. They believed they were removing a danger to middle-class values.”
“But the middle class was the danger. The islanders probably knew that on some level, don’t you think? That’s why they lived off the grid.”
“Probably.”
“So how could no one from the mainland dissent? Your research doesn’t include even one document that defended the rights of islanders to stay on Malaga.” It was their home, where generations buried their dead.
“I’m certain many people objected, but their voices didn’t make headlines. The summer residents—the people so invested in clearing the island—had more money and power than all the families on the peninsula put together.” He pulls back his brush, looks to me. “And think about it. If you’re sold a picture of what progress looks like—a shiny new hotel on the private Malaga shores, and this hotel will bring jobs for furniture builders, housekeepers, maintenance workers—well, that all sounds appealing. The hotel would be crammed with foreign visitors hungry for the freshest seafood. It would have been a pretty easy sell to get most people on the mainland to support that iteration of progress.”
“They just had to clear the obstacles in their way.” People. Families. Generations.
“Exactly. And what better way to dehumanize people than science? Eugenics boasted scientific evidence that proved poverty and degeneracy were heredity. We’re talking about a time when the government legally sanctioned sterilization to stave off the spread of birth defects, immorality, poverty. Consider the particular racial makeup of Malaga residents during a time when interracial marriages were illegal by state law—these were all signs of depravity to many people back then. People who had more political and economic power than the islanders.”
“People who had all the power.” My strainer catches something. A shard. “Sam. I think I found something.”
He sets down his brush, comes to my side. “Pottery.”
It’s a sliver of brownish-red glaze, the kind of earthenware Gram uses for floral vases. One-gallon jugs that once held milk, rum, syrups. I shake free the loose bits of dirt around the finger-length shard. Sam pulls tweezers and a plastic Baggie from his messenger bag.
He plucks the chip with the tweezers, rubs the remaining clay away with his thumb and forefinger. One side is dull gray, the interior of the pottery. The other, red and shiny—the glazed exterior. “See there.” He points to a blue printed curve, the remains of a circle.
“The maker’s mark.”
“What remains of it.” Sam examines the pottery, bringing it close to his eyes. “This could be an early piece, Rilla. As early as the Civil War. You can tell by the glazing.” He drops the broken pottery into the small bag and seals it. He scrolls something across the bag’s top edge.
As Sam documents, I remember my mother gathering up the fragments of stoneware that washed up on our shore. Those broken bits of pots from the Water People were so precious to her. She collected them. Are they still in the house somewhere? Has Gram kept them?
“This is a great find, Rilla. I’ll send it to the university for analysis, but there might be more if we’re lucky.” He nods to the dirt, and I shape out another clump of earth, add it to my sifter. But my mind is elsewhere.
The Water People. I shake the dirt in my sifter until there are only small, jittery rocks popping across the screen. I sit back on my heels, my breath so shallow, my heart racing. My mother looked for them when we’d walked the shore. But now I wonder if it was the Water People at all, or if it was one person. A Water Girl.
“I’m not gonna lie. Things like eugenics make me ashamed of the field of science. But that’s why it’s important to tell this story. It’s been buried too long.”
The girl. My mother. The Water People. Have our stories always been connected?
“This find could tell us something about the economic practices of the islanders, depending on where it was made. How the residents traded, bartered. We know the islanders were fishermen, but they were craftsmen, too. There was one particularly talented carpenter who worked on the mainland; another was a master mason. One islander was a pastor, or a deacon—we’re not sure which—and he would provide sermons off-island.”
Did my mother hear that same song? Come here, come here.
Is that what drew her to the deep on her last night at Fairtide?
“The people here never asked for handouts from the state.” Sam presses a long, plain wooden marker into the ground where I discovered the pottery. “The islanders were a self-sustaining fishing community and weren’t dependent on taxpayer support, so while they weren’t wealthy, they did have a system of economy.”
My dear, my dear. What are the words my mother called to the Water People while Gram held her? Did she talk to the Water People, or sing to them?
Did she repeat their song over the waves?
“Rilla?”
“Yeah? I’m here.”
“The only form of welfare they ever received was that school, and no one out here asked for it.”
I press my mind into the now. “Isn’t education a basic obligation of the state?” I sink my trowel into the earth, feel the way it slivers its path through dense clay and small pebbles. I pull back another scoop, add it to my strainer. Sam watches the excavated bit of earth as it sifts, excited to see what will spill free.
“Yes, well. The governor twisted the gift, called it charity and used it as a tool to show mainland taxpayers that their hard-earned money was supporting the ‘shiftless’ ”—he uses air quotes—“life of the islanders. The Malaga Island people had lived on this island for nearly a hundred years. The shell heaps out here tell us that they dug for mussels and ate what they caught in the sea. We have writing samples of the children, showing they were literate.” He scoffs. “Most of them had better penmanship than me.” He watches my strainer come up empty and he can’t hide his disappointment. “They were totally self-reliant. They’d survived almost everything. Slavery in the south, impossibly bitter winters.”
“Disease. Childbirth.”
“Exactly. Their community was strong enough, vibrant enough, to attract immigrants from Europe. People who wanted to live life with freedom in their bones, no matter how much hard work that entailed. They endured hardships that would be unimaginable to us.” His gaze drops to the marker in the ground before me. “But they couldn’t survive greed. That’s what it came down to in the end.”
A gull calls from the shore, her throaty screech rising over the waves. The sounds Sam and I hear are no different from what islanders would have heard, the timeless call of the sea.
“Would you mind if I dug here too?” Sam asks.
I shift a few inches, make room for him at my side. “Have at it. You’re the only one who knows what they’re doing here.”
He elbows me, a soft push. “I’d say you’re doing just fine.”
“Rill?” The voice comes from behind us, and I turn.
“Reed?” It’s hard to make sense of him in this place. “You’re here?”
“Good to see you, too.” Reed’s eyes dart from mine to Sam’s.
Sam stands, gives Reed a short wave and a “Hey, man.”
“Can I talk to you, Rill?” Reed looks at Sam. “Alone.”
“Of course. Sure.” I brush dirt from my knees and follow him to the beach.
When we reach the shore, Reed faces me, the rush of the lapping ocean biting near his heels. There’s a heat coming off Reed that reminds me too much of his grandfather. “So yeah, I’m here. Mind telling me what the hell you’re doing out here?”
I take a step back, search his face. “What’s with all the aggression?”
Reed runs his fingers through his sunlit hair, and I watch it shimmer back into place. Such a contrast to the tightness of his face, the hard lines that make his mouth sour. “How should I feel about crashing whatever this is?” He throws an annoyed gesture toward the dig site. “How much time are you spending with this guy, Rill?”
“Sam. His name is Sam and he’s my sternman and we’re spending an appropriate amount of time together.”
“Appropriate? You two looked pretty tight.”
I cross my arms over my chest. Everything about Reed’s attitude feels too harsh, too angry. “Do you want to save us both time and get to whatever it is you’re actually accusing me of doing?”
He turns to the sea, the rainbow tips of lobster buoys speaking such an easy language, one we can’t conjure between us now. “I’m jealous, Rill. Is that what you want to hear?”
“No, of course not. You have exactly zero reason to be jealous. I just needed . . .”
“Someone else.”
“No. You know it’s not that.”
“Then what is it?”
I see the sadness in his eyes now, the need. I see my Reed, the person I used to trust with all of my private things. I take a deep breath and then let most of the truth escape. “I feel like home and routine and expectations are crushing me. My dad is everywhere, but he’s not here anymore and there isn’t anything I can do about it and that crushes me too.”
He reaches for my hand. “I know.”
“Coming here is just different. Sam doesn’t know about my dad, so . . . I don’t know . . . I guess I get to step out of my grief for a little bit. I know it’s selfish, but I also know I need a little selfish right now.”
“I get it. It’s just . . . It’s messing with my head, Rill.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s the pot.” I try a smile.
“No. Actually, it’s you being here with another dude. A dude I don’t even know.”
“Then get to know him. He’s nice. I need Sam’s help since my dad—”
“Fuck. I know. I’m a shit.” Reed rakes his hand through his hair again, lets out a shaky breath.
“You’re not a shit. You’re just jealous when there’s no need to be. Coming here is an escape, that’s all. It’s temporary.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“You still love me?” Reed’s eyes plead.
“I still love you.”
“You’re my moon, Rill. I want to be the one to help you.”
“You can. You are. I just need a little space. Things are . . . complicated. You know.”
“With fishing?”
Fishing. School. Grams. The girl who wants me to find her, the one who may have reached out to my mother and plays with my sanity now. The girl who might have the deepest connection to Malaga. “Fishing’s part of it.”
“Then let me help you.”
“You know you can’t.” Our pact. No talking politics or fishing between us. I move my finger back and forth between our chests. “What we have wouldn’t survive if we mixed in business. We both know that.”
“Maybe.” He hugs me to him, kisses the top of my head, his lips warm. “I just miss you, Rill. We barely hang out anymore.”
I realize for the first time that I haven’t told Reed that I’m considering deferring college, maybe not leaving Gram at all. Why haven’t I told him? There is so much I haven’t told him. “I miss you too.”
“Can I come by tonight?”
I almost say yes, but I don’t want anyone visiting but the girl. I won’t be afraid this time. I’ll listen to her. Maybe ask her if she knew my mother, if she knows the Water People. If she is a Water Person. “Tomorrow would be better.”
“Not for me.”
I tickle him at his ribs. “This isn’t all about you.”
Reed separates us, but holds my waist at arm’s length, a sly smile at his lips. “Why not? Why can’t it all be about me?”
I smile.
“You’re sure this”—he thumbs toward Sam’s site—“isn’t anything to worry about?”
“I promise there’s nothing to worry about.” I tell Reed this full truth. I don’t want to hold Sam the way I’m holding Reed. Still, I’m hungry for the way Sam makes the world new for me, the way he’s my only connection to the girl right now. And maybe, to my mother.
Reed sets another kiss to my forehead. “Your moon?”
“Always.”
When I return to the dig site, Sam’s working the area of soil that held the small piece of redware. “Everything okay with the boyfriend?”
“More than okay.” But is this really true? Why have I been holding so much back from Reed?
“Is it me?” Sam’s rolling the earth on his screen so that the loose pebbles circle the edges.
“No. And yes.”
“Complicated?”
“What isn’t?”
“Too right.” Sam gives a short chuckle. He stands, comes to my side. He smells of the sun and the sea and the salted earth, so much that’s familiar. “But us spending time together complicates things more for you? Because I kind of get the vibe that there’s a lot that’s complicated for you, and I don’t want to be the person who adds to that.”
“You’re not.” Reed is. I am. This island, it’s history.
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“That’s good to hear, because I would totally lose in a fight with that dude.”
A soft smile spreads across my face. “It won’t come to that.”
“My ego thanks you.”
“Sam? I do need to get home. There’s this . . . well, I need to talk to my gram.” There’s only six weeks until the start of school.
“About Malaga?”
“No. A private thing.”
He takes a step back, nods me toward Fairtide. “Then what are you still doing here?”