CHAPTER SIXTEEN
As Reed and I walk the lawn to Fairtide, he reaches for my hand. I let his fingers spider into mine, but he squeezes me too tight. “I’m sorry about what I said, Rilla. About your mother. I shouldn’t have called you selfish either; I didn’t mean it.”
I know. “I know.”
“It’s just that you’ve been different lately.”
I stop, turn to him. “How so?”
“I had to hear at the wharf about your accident? Word is, you got really hurt.” His free hand balls into a fist at his side. “The old Rilla would have wanted to see me, tell me about it in person.”
“I didn’t call you because I was exhausted. I didn’t have a chance to talk to anyone.”
“You had time to be with that guy.”
I uncurl my fingers from his, cross my arms at my chest. “I won’t have this conversation again.” Reed grabs my arm too hard, and I swat him away, whip fast. “Do not grab at me like that.”
He throws up his palms. “Sorry.” He rakes at his hair. “Sorry.”
Reed and I promised tenderness between us always. Reed’s house is filled with people pushing loved ones too hard, throwing things that don’t want to be thrown. “Let’s just go inside so I can see Gram, and then we can talk, okay?”
“Okay.”
He lets go a deep breath. Reed reaches for my hand again. I’ve held Reed’s hand so many times in the aftermath of his father beating on him. Or his grandfather. Reed never talked about the bruises that showed up on his face, ribs. It was like he couldn’t talk about what had happened even if he wanted to, and he didn’t want to. Holding his hand seemed like the only comfort I could give him, even the most recent times, when his knuckles were raw from fighting back. I don’t forgive the way he’s treated me lately, but we have two years between us, our lives overlapping. I bend my fingers into his.
Gram is at the deck table sorting bulbs. “Flames.” She holds up a cluster of tubers. They’re only dirt-caked roots now, but they’ll grow into the thick orange bloom I found on my boat.
On the girl’s tongue.
On my sill.
“My mother had these in her garden nearly a hundred years ago. Every year she’d dig them up and store the plants in our cellar.”
“Like mother, like daughter.”
Gram winks. She separates a dirty clump of roots, splitting the plant, which will double the blooms. “These were some of my mother’s most precious plants.”
She has my full attention. “How come?”
Gram shakes her head but doesn’t raise her eyes from her task. “They were a gift from someone she’d lost.”
“Who?”
Gram considers. “She never said.”
I think of the old woman with the Flame Freesia in her crude raised beds. She could have known my great-grandmother. Did they exchange garden secrets? Plants? Did my great-grandmother mourn for the nameless woman who disappeared from history?
Gram wipes her forehead with the back of her gardening glove, leaving a swipe of earth over her eyebrow. “When I was a young girl I was too busy thinking about me. I missed my chance to ask my parents about the things that were most important to them.” She sets the plants in her basket, readying to set them into the earth. She’s still considering the plant when she tells me, “I’m surprised to see ya back so soon.”
“Reed said you wanted me home.”
Gram looks to Reed, her eyes quizzical. “I think I said something closer to the fact that I wish ya were resting.”
“She will now.”
Gram looks up at me like she’s peering over glasses, even though she refuses to wear any. “I’m glad to hear it. Can I fix ya anything?”
“No. I’m good. Thank you.” I bend to kiss her on the cheek. “Reed and I are just gonna go upstairs so I can lie down.”
“Just so long as only one of ya is doing the lying down and Reed knows he needs to use the door from now on. No more climbing down my rose trellis.”
A blush rises on Reed’s neck. “No, ma’am. I mean yes, ma’am.”
Gram waves him off. “Don’t ya ‘ma’am’ me.”
Reed and I head inside, upstairs. I’m only two steps into my room when my annoyance bubbles over at Reed making me leave Sam and Malaga for nothing. “Gram wasn’t looking for me at all, was she? Why did you make me come home?”
“Because I needed to see you.”
“So why didn’t you just say that?”
“Because I wasn’t sure if you’d care.”
I go to the window, the graffiti message carved into my sill. If Reed could lie to get me away from Sam, could he have carved a plea into the wood at my window? My mind reaches for anything that isn’t unexplainable. I lift the T-shirt to expose half of the scars etched there: DONT GO! I point to the words. “Did you do that?”
“Um, no, Rilla. I did not deface your window.”
“Someone did.”
“And it had to be me because it doesn’t have an apostrophe and I’m the dumb kid with no diploma, is that it?”
I feel my face twitch with shock. “No. That never crossed my mind. I thought it was you because you don’t want me to leave for school. I thought maybe you came by, you know. Maybe you were stoned and maybe you had your pocketknife with you.”
“I’ve never hidden the fact that I don’t want you to leave, but that”—he nods to the carving—“that’s crazy.” Crazy. The word he used to describe my mother. The terrible word all the kids used to yell at me on the playground.
“Who else has been in your room?”
I hear the question behind his question. “What is that even supposed to imply?”
“Hattie said that kid was sitting by your bed yesterday when she got here.” His eyes flicker with that same caged aggression they hold after he survives a fight at home.
“Sam. You know his name is Sam, and he was only here because he brought me here, Reed. He saved me from drowning. Gram probably thought he had the right to stay and make sure I was okay.”
I see how much rage Reed is trying to tame. The pulsing vein in his forehead, his fists pumping open and closed as if in rhythm with his heart valves. “You should’ve called me after.”
“The last time you were over made it seem like you wouldn’t want to hear from me.”
“It was a fight, Rills. That’s all.”
Reed has lived his life with fights surrounding him. They’re easier for him to shake, I think. “Maybe I should’ve, but I knew you’d be hauling today and I needed—”
“To see Sam.”
“Yes. To thank him. He. Saved. My. Life. Without him I wouldn’t be here talking to you right now.”
This seems to calm him some. “What happened?” He moves to the bed, invites me to sit next to him. I slide my shirt to hide the carving and join him.
I tell Reed about the rope around my ankle, how I’d been distracted, how the trap hauled me overboard and dragged me under. Nothing about this story is new to Reed or to any fisherman. It’s just that it was my foot. My accident. My trap.
He gathers me to him, so close, too tight. I have to pull away. “I’m still really sore.”
“Right, yeah. Sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“No. I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you. Yesterday. And before the accident. If I’d been on the boat with you that wouldn’t have happened.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I can, Rill. I’d do anything to protect you.”
A snicker slips from my lips. “You’re stoned every single time you go out on your boat lately.”
“So?”
“So you can’t think that’s safe.”
He stands, digs his fingers through his hair with both hands, scratching at his scalp. “I don’t want to talk about that, okay? I want to talk about you and me and fishing. Can we do that?”
“I’m good with the you and me part, but I won’t talk fishing.”
He shoves his hands in his front pockets. The motion tugs his jeans lower, showing the lip of his lean, tan stomach. “I think that has to change.”
“Why?”
“Because I think we should buy the co-op.”
“The co-op? I didn’t realize Hoopah was selling.”
“He’s not. Not now, but he will, Rill. He’s got to retire, and you know his kids don’t want it. We could buy it.”
“With what money?”
“If you stay, we can fish together, save up money. You don’t need school when you’ve got a future right here.”
I feel heat build at the base of my neck. This is why he pulled me off Malaga? This is why he interrupted my conversation with Sam? So we could fight about school? Again.
“It’ll be our family business, Rill. Something to pass on to our kids.”
“Reed, the conversation you’re trying to have is for, like, ten years from now.”
“I want to take care of you.”
How has Reed become a person who thinks I need someone to take care of me? It sounds like he’s saying I’m not strong enough to fish alone and it feels too much like his grandfather’s thinking. I stand to pace, my room suddenly feeling too small.
“Don’t you love me, Rill?”
“Of course.”
“Then stay. If you really loved me, you’d stay for me.”
I stop, search his eyes. “You don’t really think that?”
“I do.”
“It’s the opposite of the truth. I’m leaving because I love you. If I stay I’ll regret it, and I don’t want regrets.”
“So now I’m a regret?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t. I feel like I don’t even know you anymore. Like you’re gonna go to Rhode Island and not come back.”
“I’m coming back.”
“What if I don’t trust you to come back?”
What? “You don’t trust me to come home to the only family I have left?”
Something snaps in him. Something buried too long. “No. I don’t trust you, okay?”
“Um, no. Nothing about that is okay.”
The lines in his face grow deeper as they gather anger. Or suspicion. Maybe both. “I don’t trust you with Sam”—he slurs his name—“or with remembering any of us after you go away and fill your head thinking you’re better than the people you left behind. You’re not better than me, Rill. You don’t get to judge me because I didn’t finish school. So what if I chose work instead? So what if I like to get high?”
“Where is this coming from? I don’t think I’m better than you.”
“Bullshit.” Reed paces now. “You’ve always thought you were smarter than everyone on this peninsula, with college and your scholarship.” He spits these words like they’re terrible things. “But you’re the one with the crazy in your family, Rill. Not me. I’m offering to take care of you. I’m telling you not to run off the way your fucked-up mother did. Stay here. Where you belong.”
I take a big step back. “My fucked-up mother?” Anger rises. Is this for real?
“You know what I mean, Rill. Come on. She’s in a nuthouse. Or she was anyway.”
“Reed, you need to go.”
“If I leave now, I’m gone for good.” He’s making me a promise now, this boy built of anger and fear and something else. A need to control? This boy has a part of him that hates me. Has it always been this way? I scrub at my arms, rubbing off the sting of his callousness.
“If that’s what you have to do.” I move to the door.
“So you’re just off to Rhode Island, then, no matter what I want? You’ll just run away. Fuck, Rill, you’re as nuts as she is. How did I not see it before now?” He shakes his head at me. Like I’m ridiculous. Like I’m missing the obvious thing right in front of me.
And maybe I am. Because Reed’s anger toward me can’t be new.
“Whatever.” He huffs, climbs out the window, his sneaker stepping right over my shirt and the words etched into the wooden sill.
Gone, just like that.
I text Hattie: I think Reed and I broke up
Hattie: For reals? *hides smile*
Me: Think so. He stormed off hating me so . . .
Hattie: So he’s an ass
Hattie: I’m coming over
Me: Maybe not tonight
Hattie: You okay?
Me: Think so
Hattie: You’re better without him
Maybe she’s right. Because everything Reed said tonight feels too wrong.
When I hear Reed’s boat fade into the distance, I need air. I leave my room and see Gram sitting on the bottom step of the attic stairway, the door wide open. The perfume of oil on canvas mixes with the salt air that always lurks close to my home. The paint smell is as familiar as my childhood, the way I’d find its echo on Gram’s fingers. The oils are heavier here. Concentrated. I steal a look up the plain wood stairs, so steep and narrow. The room upstairs is as magical as Narnia to me, and my curiosity about the space is as strong today as it was when I was little. I catch only a glimpse of a canvas, its visible edges darkened with greens and blues. It is the sea in our attic.
“Sit.” Gram pats the narrow, worn step next to her, and I do, turning my back to the mysteries of the third floor.
“Did you hear?”
“I did.”
“I don’t know where it came from. It was like he’d been holding on to all this resentment and then just exploded.”
“Sounds like the truth.” Gram takes my hand. “Hearing distrust between two people is never easy. But I think he’s right, Rill. Ya two aren’t kids anymore. Maybe ya both needed to say the things that were said.”
“You think he needed to compare me to my mother?”
“No. That was unnecessary, and I’d bet on Reed realizing that right about now, if he hasn’t already.”
“Do you think he’s right? That I’m like her? That me leaving makes me like her?”
“Your mother left to protect ya, Rilla. She didn’t run away. The deepest love is a mother’s love, and your mother knew she couldn’t care for ya. She needed to get herself right first.”
“But she never came back.”
She strokes my hand. “Maybe that just wasn’t possible. Ya won’t find a thing on this earth more complicated than humans, and it’s not our place to judge one another. People have to deal with their particular complications the best way they know how, even when their actions hurt us most of all.”
“I don’t want you to ever think I’d leave you the way she left me.”
Gram coaxes my head to her shoulder. “I know ya will come home, Rilla. You’re my seal.”
“Do you think Dad trusted me to come home?”
“Your father trusted ya with his life.”
“Maybe he shouldn’t have.”
Gram pulls me from her, gets a good look at my eyes, which are watering now. “Why would ya go and say a thing like that?”
“Because I couldn’t save his life. If he’d trusted someone better, more reliable than me, then maybe he’d still be here.” The sadness of this truth fills my chest.
“That’s the last time you’re allowed to say that, Rilla Brae. And you’re not allowed to go on thinking it. Your father died because it was his time. He died at sea doing work that he loved and was still strong enough to do. Few men can say they’ve been gifted that privilege.”
“There’s no privilege in death.”
“Not in death, Rilla. But in living life the way ya want to live it. Keeping your heart filled with enough joy to share it with everyone ya meet.”
“I didn’t feel a lot of joy in Reed’s heart.”
“No.”
“How can he think that’s love? Wanting me to live a life he plans for me?”
“Reed hasn’t had a lot of good role models when it comes to love.”
She’s right. And I know that’s all I should be thinking about as she holds me to her warm shoulder, but I can’t stop seeing Reed escape through the window, stepping on the words carved into the wood in my bedroom. FIND ME. DONT GO! I burrow deeper against Gram. She hums a song under her breath. I recognize it as The Who, “Behind Blue Eyes.” I close my eyes to the whisper of her tune, so familiar, so Gram. In the dark space behind my lids I see words painted there. FIND ME. DONT GO!
Gram rocks me and the words become brighter, stronger.
Electric.
The words pound against my skull with their growing brightness, their electric taunt: FIND ME. DONT GO! Pulsing. Banging. Forcing pressure against my skull. I press my hand to my head to push back the searing pain.
Then the words change.
The letters morph into new shapes, the long sweeping sides rearranging themselves into something new, something different. They dart everywhere, a scramble in my mind. Until they reorder, settle into something new:
IM HERE.
The words the girl whispered to me. I dart open my eyes and the hallway pierces with a shiver—a winter cold that stings the flesh of my cheeks with its bite. The cold wraps me, sending a chill into my bones, ice into my blood. I try to stand, to warm, but my legs collapse under me. I am on the floor, Gram bending over me. Her voice joins me, her words dull and distant, taking a long time to reach me. Are ya okay? Are ya okay? I want to tell her yes. I want to be okay. But I can’t speak.
The crack of the slamming attic door sends out a bolt of thunder. IM HERE scrawls upon the wood’s face in a yellow glow. The same blistering words pulse in my brain. How are they here? I reach up to touch the door, but Gram takes my hand and helps me to stand. She leads me to my room, stumbling. Because I can’t take my eyes from the attic, waiting for the girl to walk out. She’s here. I can feel her. Her cold breath. Her words. She is here with me and Gram, in this house.
Gram guides me to my bed, settles me down.
“Rilla. There is something not right.”
“Something’s not right.” It is the closest I come to telling Gram the truth before my mind swirls with light, as if I stood too fast. The whole room swims with a scorching gold. It pulls at me, around me. Beats of sizzling light. Embers. The light is fire, singeing the air in my room with crackling whistles, popping embers from a blaze. The sparks zip past me, around Gram. I squeeze her hand, needing to keep her safe. She calls to me from a distant place, but I’m so far away. I’m in a room of flame. I let go of my gram. I reach for a spark, capture it in my hand. The fire is a burning cold. The ember squirms in my palm, morphs into IM HERE. These two words scrawl across my skin as my room pops with the crackling fire, the flames lighting the room orange.
But there is no heat. Only cold. I shake the embers free from my palm, trying to erase their words. IM HERE. I want the girl to be here and I don’t. Not with Gram.
Not now.
The air’s too thick, too frozen. It’s hard to breathe. I call for Gram, and the words drop out of the flames, searing through the layers of my flesh and setting fire into my bones.
IM HERE IM HERE IM HERE.