CHAPTER THIRTEEN
When I return home, I shower and get a text from Hattie: Did any Coast Guard hotties board your boat today?
Me: sadly, no
Hattie: What a waste
Me: why do I even bother going out to sea?
Hattie: IKR? Unless you can lick the face of one of those GORGE boys, what’s the point????
Me:
It feels good to joke with Hattie. Do the normal things like everything is normal.
I brew St. John’s Wort for mental clarity.
I ask Gram to the small front parlor so she’s away from her kitchen, the chores that keep her busy in that space. I need her full concentration.
Our parlor was created when formal visits were customary. I know the walls have heard their share of difficult conversations. Births, deaths, hardships, and celebrations. Maybe even discussions on the fate of Malaga Island residents. Did my ancestors support profit or humanity? I want to think the latter, but I know it’s naive. Every early Maine settler fought hard against the harshness of the climate. I’ve always believed that the struggle against the elements was enough to unite us along the coast, even today. But Malaga’s history tells the opposite truth.
Gram joins me, takes a seat in the wingback chair. I grew up knowing the story of each one of our well-used antiques, but that chair was different. I was young when it arrived from Portland, brought by an elderly man who drove it to our doorstep saying Gram’s grandfather had saved his family from starvation when that old man was a small boy. I remember the story not making sense: How could the thin, wrinkled man with his missing tooth and heavy limp have ever been a young boy?
That man told me and Dad and Gram about the winter my great-grandfather stocked his family’s shed with salted cod and crammed their cellar with potatoes. I want to believe my family helped the islanders in a similarly charitable way. Or maybe the islanders helped my family.
The old man said he could never repay the debt, but wanted to give us a chair he’d crafted with his own hands nearly sixty years ago. And his chair was beautiful. My small fingers traced the carvings on the dark wood arms, followed the lines of intricate fish forever swimming upstream within that wood. It was a year later when I found my great-grandfather’s name carved into the inside of one of the legs. NATHANIEL IKABERTH MURPHY: SAVER OF MEN. I’d been under the chair looking for a rogue Lego but I’d found a piece of my family history. I never told Gram or Dad about his name being carved there. I liked thinking I had a secret tucked away in my very own house.
Now I think my family has always had secrets.
I pass Gram her mug, and she settles against the rise of the handcrafted chair. “Let’s get to your business, Rilla. I’m not growing younger.”
“I need you to tell me about our finances.” Counting other people’s money—making assumptions about what they can and can’t afford—is something Dad raised me never to do. But now I’m asking after his money, what he left. “Can we even afford to send me to school?”
“You earned your scholarship. No one is going to take that away.”
“But the other stuff ? Paying the bills. Keeping the boat and the house.”
She puts up her hand. “We’ve got enough to keep the boat and the house in good repair. We’re not the richest folks, but we’ll be all right.”
“What does ‘all right’ mean?”
“It means ya need to remember that your scholarship is merit based, Rilla. The University of Rhode Island is offering to pay your tuition because they want you. Have ya ever known anyone in our family to steer off course once they set their mind to its particular coordinates?”
My mother. She steered way off course. “No, I haven’t.”
“Ya got a mind that’s smarter than any I’ve come across yet. It seems to me ya already know the right thing to do.” Her future is so tied to the choice I make. She’ll have to survive more loss if I go.
“But how can it be that simple?”
“Nothing simple about it, Rilla. Ya leaving for Rhode Island will change everything.” She stares at me with determination. “But we can handle change. Nothing we haven’t done before.”
“You’ll be okay, like, we can afford the house? Hattie’s mom can’t keep the lights on most months.”
Gram nods. “Well, Hattie’s circumstances are . . . well, they are what they are. Our concerns are different.”
“You can keep the lights on if I’m not fishing?”
She tsks. “I can read by candlelight if it means the first person in our family going to college.”
“Gram.”
She waves me away. “Ya know what I’m saying, Rilla. I won’t be around forever, and I’m not leaving this earth until I see ya with your next diploma. Ya hear me?” She shifts in her seat, leans forward. “My grandfather built this house before mortgages ever existed. I’ve got enough to pay my share of taxes to the government and keep the water flowing. I find I don’t need much more than that. Your scholarship will cover your books and you’ll have to earn your spending money same as always.”
“I’ll haul in the summers when I come home. Work during school breaks, even in the winter.”
Gram sets down her mug, crossing her hands over her middle. “Seems like you’ve got it all worked out.”
I don’t have anything worked out. “Far from it.”
“What is all this doubt ya have? Why are ya bringing this up now?”
“I miss him, Gram. I miss Dad. I know you do too, and I hate thinking of you here all alone.”
“Being alone doesn’t make a person lonely. You’ll still be with me. No amount of distance can change that.”
Gram’s words make me think of my mother, gone for more than a decade. And me being too selfish to let Gram keep my mother with us by telling stories of when things were good. “Do you miss her? My mother?”
Gram gives me a startled look. “Every single day.”
“Do you . . . talk to her?”
“She writes every now and then. I think it’s hard for her, knowing that she’s stayed away.” Gram searches my eyes. “Can I ask why you’re asking?”
So many reasons I never expected. “I was out on the island today, with Sam. I found a piece of pottery, the kind that washes up on our shore all the time.” I pull in a deep breath, let it out. “It reminded me of her. The way she’d talk about the Water People. That’s what she called them, right? The voices she heard.”
Gram nods. “Yes.”
“Did she ever tell you what the voices said?”
“No.” Gram lowers her head. “I just know they were enough to drive her away.”
“Did you ever hear the voices?”
Gram looks to me. “No, Rilla. That was a particular struggle only your mother had to deal with.”
“Does she still hear them?”
“I think things are better for her now.”
“Better now that she’s not here?”
“Yes. Hard as that is, yes.”
It’s a hard thing to hear.
“Was it . . . ?” I search for the words. “Did she always talk of them? The Water People?”
Gram leans back, her whole body shifting into memory. “No. She was a happy child, Rilla. I never had an ounce of worry beyond normal child-rearing concerns.”
“So then . . . when did she start to hear voices?”
Gram’s finger worries at her thumbnail. “Are ya sure ya want to know this, Rilla?”
“I’m sure.”
Gram takes a deep breath, lets it out slow. “I started noticing her losing track of time, walking along the water when she was pregnant with ya. I’d heard her talking to the waves.”
Pregnant with me? “What did she say?”
Gram shakes her head. “Different things. Nothing special. But it was her tone that always struck me. How she sounded like she was trying to soothe someone. At first I thought she was talking to ya while ya were growing inside her.”
“Was she?”
“Maybe sometimes. But other times I’d listen to her and I knew I was only hearing half of the conversation. She talked like there was someone answering her. I could only hear silence, but your mother was hearing something else. I was real worried about her in those days. Your dad and I watched her near ’round the clock.”
“Did she try to walk into the waves then? When I was inside her?”
A look of horror crowds Gram’s features. “Oh, no, child. Nothing like that. She loved ya, Rilla. She never would have hurt ya.”
“But she did hurt me. She left and never came back.”
Gram nods a quiet nod. “Yes, I’m sad to call that the truth. Things got worse for your mother in the years after ya were born. I saw her slipping away, and it was the hardest thing to watch.”
After I was born. While she was pregnant with me. Was I the reason the Water People came to her? Am I to blame? “Sam’s work out on the island, it makes me think how we’re all connected in ways that we might not even know.” In ways we don’t even understand.
“I believe we are.” Gram and her theory about bees pollinating our stories, our connectedness.
I’m about to tell Gram what I’ve learned about the history of Malaga, but how can I bring her any more sorrow? “You’re sure you’ll be okay if I go?”
“I’m an old woman, Rilla. I’ll be fine knowing that you’re living the life ya want to live.” She comes to me and puts her hand to my shoulder, squeezing her love down into my bones.
“I think that means leaving.” I place my hand on hers. “But not in the way she did. I’ll be back, Gram. You know that, right?”
“I want ya to live the best version of your life, Rilla. Nothing could make me prouder.”
I stand, hug my grandmother. We stay connected like that for a long time, neither of us knowing exactly what the future will bring, but each of us willing to take a chance on it anyway.
When Gram disappears to the kitchen, the decision to leave feels too final, like there’s no turning back. Dad used to joke about the loneliness of an empty nest, but he never could’ve expected that Gram would be left alone in our nest. Would he really still want me to go if he knew she’d have no one?
When I hear Reed’s knock at the back door—three quick raps, like always—I jump. I try to see through the blur of time that fogs my days lately. Hadn’t I told him I wanted to be alone tonight? That was only earlier today, wasn’t it?
Then I fear something’s wrong, the way a similar unexpected knock sounded at our front door the day Dad’s boat was found at sea.
I dart to the kitchen, where Reed’s handing Gram a bouquet of wildflowers.
“You staying for dinner?” she asks.
“If you’ll have me.”
“Always a plate for ya at our table, Reed Benner.”
I go to him. “Everything okay?”
“ ’Course.” He smiles a sleepy, lazy smile, his cheeks red. Same as his eyes.
Reed turns to Gram as she’s perfecting tonight’s chowder, adding the flaked haddock in last so it stays tender in the creamy broth. He suggests we eat outside, so we carry the place settings to the picnic table on the lawn, where we devour Gram’s soup and watch the sun fade. The air is cool as it carries the breeze from the sea. Malaga sits in the distance, watching us. Sam’s boat is still at its shores, and I can’t help but wonder if she’s there too, the lost girl. I remember the way my mother used to look out at the ocean, as if she wanted to be a part of it. But maybe she was staring at Malaga. Reed catches my gaze, follows it to Sam’s boat, the island. I hate that I haven’t told him everything.
When Gram slides her spoon to the bottom of her empty bowl, she wipes at the sides of her mouth and stands. She gathers up the salt and pepper, their tiny glass bottles tinking as they marry in her grasp. “I’m going to paint and then retire.”
“Good night, Gram,” Reed says. “Dinner was delicious.” He heads to the fire pit just off the deck.
I stand, give her a kiss good night. “Thank you. For everything.”
“Being your gram is the most precious thing in the world, Rilla. Ya keep enough room in that head of yours to never forget that.”
“I promise.”
Gram goes inside and I clear our plates. When I return, Reed has already coaxed a quick, high flame from the dry pine kindling. I sit on the giant log placed fireside by my dad years ago.
“Everything okay?”
Maybe. I don’t know. “Fine, why?”
He shrugs, pokes at the flames with a long branch. “You seem distant.”
“You’re stoned and I’m distant?”
He laughs. “Fair point.” He adds a thick oak log to the flame, and the fire whooshes under the weight of the new, dense wood. “You were quiet at dinner is all.”
“I told you I was tired, that tonight wasn’t a good night to come over.”
“I missed you. Is that so horrible?”
“No. It’s just . . . dinner was hard.”
He sits next to me, his thigh pressing against mine. “How so?”
I lean my head on his sharp shoulder, feel the flame’s heat trapped in his shirt, the smoke already burrowed into the fabric of his tee. Still, there’s ice in the breeze, and I flatten my palms to the smoke of the fire pit, trying to warm my skin from the chill. “There’s a lot I’m going to miss. My gram. Things like this, sitting here with you.”
“Miss?”
“When I leave in August.”
I feel his shoulder tighten, his back straighten. “That again?”
“What again?”
“College. Rhode Island. All of it. I just don’t get why this place”—he gestures to the sea with his fire stick—“can’t be good enough for you.”
I sit up, meet his eyes. I don’t want to have the conversation we’ve had a hundred times. Reed’s never understood why I need to study business before applying my knowledge to the aquaculture industry here on Maine’s coast. He wants me to train locally, get hands-on experience at the oyster farms and fisheries that line our coastline. And I know I could. It’s just, I want to see more of the world, and is that such a bad thing? “Maine’s my home, Reed. It’ll always be the best place in the world.”
He takes my hand. “So stay.”
“You know I can’t.”
“You can, Rill.”
I shake my head. “I can’t. Not now.”
“Especially now. With your dad gone.” He swallows hard. “I want to see your gram looked after.”
“And I don’t?”
“ ’Course you do. It’s just . . . I don’t want you to go, Rill.”
“I know.” Leaving Reed will be hard.
The warmth of the fire spreads along my face. I reach my free hand to it, let the flames heat my palm, and there is a hint of something at Malaga’s shores. A spit of fire.
“You don’t have to leave.”
“I have to leave.” Gram’s pride. Dad’s pride. My college essays: one about what it means to be a first-generation college student, the other on the economy of sustainable fishing and balanced oceanic harvesting.
Another spark of flame rises on Malaga’s shores. It multiplies, like tiny bursts popping up from the soil. I squeeze my eyes shut, knowing I’m tired, that the flames are warm and here and in front of me, not in the distance.
I hear Reed but don’t hear him. I catch only a few words. “It’s not the same, Rill.”
I press my mind back into the moment. “What’s not the same?”
“Look at you. You’re here and you’re not even here.”
“I am.” I use my elbow to pull his knee tighter against my leg.
“I don’t know where your head is lately, Rill, but it’s not with me. Ever since you started hanging out with that dude from away.”
Flames grow larger on Malaga. Dancing upward and across. The small fires spread to reach one another, like children joining hands. I shake my head, shake the scene. The distant fire won’t leave. The flames comb up the length of the shore, walk to the island’s peak. The fire rages at the edges of the water, heat pushing against the cold, wet sea. I look to Reed, how his eyes are fixed on the same island and yet he says nothing.
He can’t see what I see. The fire isn’t real.
“I’m the idiot for thinking you’d stay here with me, with your gram.”
“What?” It’s not fair to Reed, the way I only half listen. I stand to see the rising blaze on Malaga.
“What is wrong with you, Rilla? You can’t even listen to me for five minutes.”
“I’m listening. I’m here.” But I’m staring out at Malaga, Sam’s boat still anchored offshore. Sam, still on the island. “I gotta go,” I whisper. Check on Sam. Make sure the flames are only in my imagination.
“You said that. I just didn’t think you’d ever be selfish enough to leave your gram.”
“Wait, what?”
“You’re gonna leave the same way your crazy mother did. Except you’re worse because, if you leave, your gram will be all alone. Alone, Rilla. That’s some cold shit. I didn’t think you had it in you.”
My brain pushes away all distractions. The flames, Sam on the island. I see only Reed. Hear only his words, their accusation. I know he just wants me to stay, but still . . . the anger that fuels his words feels deep. Brewing. “I think you need to go.”
“Might as well. You’re not even here. You can’t stop fixating on that island for five fucking seconds.” He stands, flicks his stick into the flames, and storms off. His words kick at me. I watch his shape disappear into the darkness, his silhouette fading beyond the swell of Gram’s gardens.
I go to the dock, but there’s no longer a reason to reach Sam. The fire has disappeared, if there was ever a fire at all. I hear the distant churn of Sam’s engine, see his boat’s safety lights pop green, red, white. I stand at the shore for a long time, wanting the fog to rise. I wait for the girl to sing to me. Or the Water People to talk to me. Wait for Sam to dock at Fairtide. Wait for the sting in my heart to settle. But none of these things happen. I grab a bucket from the dock and fill it with water to douse the flames in the fire pit.
Why did Reed really come tonight, after I told him I needed rest? Because it feels too much like he was checking up on me, making sure Sam wasn’t here or something.
I wish he’d listened and stayed away. I wish he’d never gotten the chance to say his awful words, make me feel like I’m abandoning Gram instead of making her proud.
I go upstairs and press my hand to Gram’s attic door as I head down the hallway, the light from her studio gathering around my feet as I stop and say my silent good night.
* * *
Later, a summer storm arrives. The wind feels confused, blowing from every angle, howling against its own groan. Waves batter the shore. I read through Sam’s notes, looking still for my girl and maybe for anything that will help me make sense of what happened to my mother. What happened to the innocent fishing community of Malaga. I focus on Sam’s notation about one of Malaga’s residents:
Eliza Griffin was by all accounts a fiercely independent woman who made her home from a detached sea captain’s hull. She left behind many generations of wooden lobster traps, all in varying sizes and shapes. Archeologists use this as a map of lobster trap evolution.
There’s no photo of Eliza Griffin, just a picture of the old ship’s hull she’d made into a home. I think Gram and I would have liked to know Eliza Griffin.
I wonder if this fiercely independent woman is buried in a mass grave now.
I try to focus on more of Malaga’s history, but I keep hearing Reed calling me selfish, accusing me of abandoning Gram. Being too consumed with the island just offshore and the flames I clearly hallucinated. I Google “grief and hallucinations,” “grief and schizophrenia.” Anything that could give me a reason for my mind lately. But all I can hear is Reed criticizing me for being cold, his words repeating like a lash. And there’s the ever-present fear that my brain is slipping. How can I even go to college if I’m losing my mind?
And then there is the tapping . . .
Tapping
Tapping
The maple tree’s branch against the window. The glass is closed, doing its best to trap the whistling wind outside. Still the air in my room is swollen from tonight’s rain. The light on my bedside table flickers on and off, on and off, before the generator’s gas-fed engine rumbles to life on the lawn.
The limbs of the maple tree scratch against the panes as if asking—no, begging—to come in. I turn off the light to save power and read my screen until the scratching becomes relentless, thrashing against the glass so hard I think it will break the panes. I go to the window, and the moonlight shows me the gray bark of the wood, so thin and grizzled and yet thumping—slamming—against the window. I grip the sill, and my fingers crawl over the bumps in the grain, one groove leading into another. I know without a doubt what those cuts in the wooden windowsill say: FIND ME. But there’s more. The grooves are too many. The markings in the wood call to me. Come here, come here. My fingers feel wet as they trace the indents. The sill gives off a warm heat, like steam from boiling water.
I gather my flashlight and train its light on the scratch marks.
There are new words scored into the wood.
DONT GO!
Fear rakes my spine, blanketing my bones with cold. Was the girl listening to me and Gram? Me and Reed? How is she everywhere and nowhere?
Is she here now? Watching me with her oil-dark eyes and seaweed braids? Or is she in her white dress, the way she appeared to me at the shore?
My heart races for this stranger being in my room. For the dragging lullaby that whines on the wind, for the thin, reaching tree limbs that tap at my window. Tap. Tap. Tap. The long gray branches extend to scratch the face of the window. But then, something more.
A branch at the bottom, one that doesn’t rise or fall with the gusting wind.
Tap, tap, tap.
These wispy limbs are steady. Too steady. I take a step toward the window.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
And I see the fingers.
Five reaching fingers, drumming against the glass. Each nail caked with dirt, with cuts on the knuckles, the flesh.
It’s impossible to pull breath into my lungs. My skin fires with the need to open the window. I take a step forward, my hand raised for the task. Something—or someone—is unsettled. Do I have the power to settle it? Make it right? But why me?
Tap. Tap. Tap.
I jump back, scramble to the opposite side of the room. I grab my phone, call Hattie. “Can you come over?” My voice is so loud, trying to drown out the tapping.
I pace the room as I wait, my eyes trained on the sill. I know Hattie won’t judge me. She can tell me what’s real, what’s imagined. She can help me because I need help.
By the time Hattie arrives, the tapping has grown louder.
“Geez. Fierce storm.” Her voice is so nonchalant.
I can’t stop pacing. I watch Hattie’s eyes, try to see if she can see the fingers, see if the tapping is overwhelming her, too. “I’m freaking out, Hatt.”
“Over a storm?” She plops onto my bed.
Maybe. “Everything. This night. Staying. Leaving.” Ending up like my mother. Now that Hattie’s here, I can’t make the words come. I can’t admit my visions, my slipping mind.
“Tonight’s nothing but wind. As for the other stuff, you’re smarter and stronger than a hundred fishermen. You’ll figure it all out. Besides, you’re psyched you’re not at sea during this storm. You can hang with me and let it pass. You just need to chillax.”
But I need so much more.
I need to show Hattie the carved words. I need to tell her who wrote them. But I can’t see the look of doubt cover her face if I were to let the full truth slip.
“I’ve never know a storm to freak you out so bad,” she tells me.
Even though I know this is so much more than a storm.
The fingers tap against the glass, reminding me.