CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The next morning, I drop anchor off Malaga Island. I turn off the VHF, can’t hear Reed’s All in? I don’t know how I’d answer his call now, if he’d even make one at all. I haven’t answered Reed’s text, his apologies.
“You’re sure you don’t need to pull traps today?” Sam asks.
“I’m sure. I’d rather be out here, if that’s okay. My muscles could use a rest after the last few days.”
Sam nods like all of this—everything I’ve been through lately—is perfectly acceptable and sane.
He rows to shore and we unload, me with a backpack heavy with food and water, Sam with his shoulder bag stuffed with tools. We hike to the dig site, set down our belongings.
The sun is already warm above us, and the gulls are pecking at the water, darting with the retracting high tide. I tuck my fingers into my lower back and arch to stretch. My muscles are still calming after being dragged down through the ocean, then hauling such a strong catch yesterday. My eyes scan the forest edge, the rock face of the island. There’s no movement in the trees, no wind to bend them with its sway. I catalog all the things I know: the sea, the sky, the granite ledge beneath my feet.
And the things I don’t know: how the girl could be here still, how I can see her, hear her. “Could I ask you to walk up through the trees with me without sounding too weird?”
“Only if you tell me what you’re looking for.”
“That first day, I heard an infant crying. I saw the girl run into the forest. I think . . .” What do I think? That she could be camping here? Living here? “I think maybe she’s there somehow.” Somehow.
“Let’s go.”
It’s an easy invitation despite how strange this information must sound to him.
We walk to the woods, and I search the tree line, the low spruce branches that reach out, almost naked because they can’t get enough sun at their bottoms. I look for anything. Hanging wash. Caught fish. Blankets warming. Anything to tell me that my girl lives here, that she is human and not a ghost.
We hike the length of the forest but find nothing. Not a hint of campfire, no area of needles disturbed. No girl. No baby. When we round high on the cliffside of the island, we leave the dense forest at our backs. Sam points to a patch of ground. “That’s where the university wants to set up the next dig.”
“Why there?”
“We know from photos that a boatbuilder’s home sat on the ridge there.” He scrambles down to this future dig site, and I follow.
I can see Fairtide from here, my closed window, the trellis just below it. The skin along my spine pops with gooseflesh as if I’ve been here before. I feel the weight of memory like years sitting in my bones. Me, staring at Fairtide. Staring at the house’s windows as they flickered with candlelight. An instant stretches into years. And I am here, watching Fairtide’s green lawn, its dock. Me never taking my eyes from the house, the home, its people. It is a tsunami of a déjà vu.
And then it’s gone.
And I know the memory isn’t mine.
My legs feel shaky, unsure of their strength. My head spins, knowing this girl has watched my home for decades. She watched my mother here, maybe even my gram, the men and women of my family who came before. My flesh bumps cold, knowing that we are connected, me and this girl. But how?
Sam turns to walk to his dig site. I’m not ready to leave this spot. Not yet. “You go ahead. I’ll catch up.”
Sam leaves me where a craftsman made his home. The air feels thick in this place, pressing against me on all sides as if holding me upright. There’s an odd smoke that fills my lungs. I cough out the burn that sits in my throat, and the air around me smells of death holding its breath.
I pick up a stick from the ground and I write what I know. I scratch the two words into the dirt. YOU’RE HERE. I place the stick below the words, underlining them. Then I turn toward Sam. I move quickly, watching my footing over the uneven ground as I jog to him. The granite juts out in places, surrenders into bowls at other points. Sam’s whistling a tune only feet in front of me as I close the distant between us. It is unmistakably “Pinball Wizard.” Sam carries this bit of Gram and her eccentricities out here, lets her favorite song live in the wind. His footsteps seem carefree, childlike. Dad used to say that you could gauge a person’s happiness by the heaviness of their step. Did Dad ever walk on this island? Did his feet grip the hard granite underneath each step the way mine do now? Sam drops below my sight line as he makes his descent to the dig site. He takes his whistle, The Who’s song, with him.
I’m about to call to him, tease him for his choice of music, when I’m slammed to a stop. The wind pushes me, or something else. Hands. Two strong hands at my chest. They shove at me, thrusting me off-balance. Their push is hard and deliberate. I fall onto the hard rise of my tailbone and pain sears my spine. My eyes search the island, but I can’t see anyone.
Could it be my girl?
My heart thunders. I scramble to my knees, force myself upright. I step toward Sam, but the thick, hard hands rake across my throat, squeezing my air. I choke. These hands find my windpipe and press. Too hard. So hard. I try to pull away, but the hands rip at my shoulders, my hips, my hair.
They pin me to the granite rock, a hulking mass pressing out all my breath. I try to choke out Sam’s name, but the words can’t make sound. I gag, try to breathe. Hands are on my shirt, pulling, tearing. I scream.
The scream ripping from me isn’t mine.
It’s from the wind, or the trees. So similar to the baby’s cry.
The screaming rises around me, magnifying. It drowns out the sea and the gulls. Fear pulses within my ears. I smell the thick tar of tobacco, dusty as if trapped in facial hair. The invisible man smells of rage and hate, and it makes my tongue burn. I beat at him with my arms, but his hips press too close to mine. He holds me down, my legs pinned, my one arm restrained. He wrestles me with his rabid strength. And there’s another scream. I want it to be Sam. I want him to be here, to help me. But it’s the baby’s wail. My ears fill with the wretched screech. My fingers find the man’s hands, and I claw at them. Flesh packs under my nails as I dig. Time slows, and I feel his blood trickle onto my own. The man traps my free arm, pins it. My wrists are bound by his strength, the skin on my hands scraping as they scratch against the coarse granite.
Then I see him.
His shoulders blocking the sun.
Wide shoulders, all muscle.
Sam’s shoulders. His hands are on me, his face searching mine. “Rilla!” he calls. “Rilla!” His voice is loud and echoing, as if he’s trying to wake me from a dream. I flail at him, my fists crashing against his chest, his head. My legs kick at his side. Sam falls to his knees on the ground next to me. “Rilla?” His voice is so soft now. I punch at his figure, scream at him until he’s washed of color, out of breath.
“What did you do?” I yell. “What was that?”
“You were screaming, so I came running, and then you attacked me.”
“I attacked you?”
He shakes his head, surrenders his hands. His palms are clean, unscathed. Where are the scratches I left? The blood I felt dripping down my arms? I search my own hands, looking for cuts. For proof. “Rilla. What happened?” His voice breaks with tenderness.
I bring myself to kneel. “I was pulled down. Something . . . no, someone knocked me down. Held me down.” My throat burns from the pressure there only seconds ago.
Sam gathers me in his arms, and I can hear his heartbeat thud. I let him hold me, his hands so different from the ones I felt only moments ago. “There’s no one here, Rilla. You’re safe. I promise.”
“It was so real, Sam.”
“I believe you.”
“How?” Anger rises in me for feeling so helpless. For another person’s weight stealing all my strength. “How can you believe me?”
“The way you were calling for me.” He takes a stuttered breath. “Like someone was hurting you.”
“They were.” I can’t explain it, can’t put it into words. “Something’s here, Sam. On this island. Something is trapped here.”
I press my gaze to Fairtide, to the color of Gram’s gardens. Gather what’s real.
“It’s okay now. Just breathe.”
The hands were on my chest, grabbing at my throat, my hair. I check my shirt for the rip I know I’ll find there, but the front is clean. My leggings too.
“Did you see someone?” Sam is careful with his words, like he doesn’t want to push me.
“No.” I shake my head. “I felt . . . there was . . .” I bring my hand to my temples. “It was more like a memory.”
“This happened to you before?”
“No. Not my memory.” I watch Fairtide, unsure how this spot can seem so familiar to me. “It was like I was trapped inside someone else’s memory. The girl’s memory.” I know how strange this sounds, how strange I must have looked. And yet.
“How is that possible?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure it is.” I rub at my wrapped wrist, the bones I felt scrape across the rocks. “But someone attacked me, Sam. I felt his weight on me, the smell of his tobacco. I didn’t make this up.”
He reaches for my hand. “I’m not saying you made anything up, Rilla. I believe you.”
My mind’s not slipping. I felt that attack. I felt the man’s strength. And more than that, I felt his anger, his intention. “I think he may have hurt her, Sam.”
“I’m just glad you’re okay.”
“Am I? Is this what okay looks like?”
Sam squeezes my hand. “We’ll figure this out, Rilla. I swear. But I promised your gram I’d keep you safe, and I’m pretty weirded out right now.” He scans the island. “Are you good to walk back to the site? You can sit, get some water.”
“Yes.” I stand, Sam helping me up. I steal one more look toward Fairtide. Its sloping lawns, the dormers in its roof, my bedroom window. We walk past the dirt patch holding the two words I inscribed there: YOU’RE HERE.
The invisible man is real.
The girl is real.
They are connected.
To each other. To me.
When we reach the dig site, Sam invites me to sit.
“I’d actually prefer to stand.” I pace the length of the excavated earth.
He rummages in his pack for a bottle of water and hands it to me.
I gulp at the water, still so cold. I wipe at my lips with the back of my hand, watch as a paddling of mallard ducks swim atop the rolling waves, their dark feathers buoyed against the sea-glass-green ocean. “I saw her here with you, Sam. The girl.”
“With me?”
“She followed you up to the dig site when I went home with Reed the other day. She was behind you.”
He rubs at the skin on his forearms. “That’s creepy.”
“I realize, believe me.” I look behind me, fearing my attacker. Not that I’d see him, but still. “Sam? Is it possible the girl lived on the island but wasn’t here when census workers came? There’s that note in your journal about how some islanders worked on the mainland.”
“That’s true, they did.”
“She could have been on the mainland. Maybe that’s why there aren’t any photos of her.”
Sam nods. “Possible.” Sam considers this reality like we’re not talking about a spirit that haunts me. “I’m not sure we’ll ever conclusively know everything about the settlement, Rilla. So much has been lost to time. But your girl could have lived here. There are discrepancies almost everywhere in the record keeping. Even today sources can’t agree on how many graves were removed from the island or how many residents were forcibly committed to the state asylum—and those are pretty major occurrences. The state failing to document a resident or two seems totally feasible,” Sam says.
I think of another of Sam’s notes, how one of the bodies—the body of a child—was lost overboard when the state ferried the graves off the island. “Or two? You mean her baby.”
“You say she has one.”
“I’m not sure. I know I’ve heard an infant cry more than once. A terrible cry.” My skin burns with the heat of bruises setting into my skin, the attack with me still.
“Maybe your girl gave birth after the census workers were here. Population was determined in July of 1931, but the evacuation didn’t happen until the following year.”
“Plenty of time for a baby to be born.” My mind latches on to this possibility.
“Except.” Sam’s face falls. “There was the threat of imprisonment if the residents didn’t show on the day the census was taken. Remember?”
I do. The newspaper clippings in Sam’s research journal. The warning notice posted on the island and mainland weeks before the day of the census. Islanders would have feared that threat, same as any free person. What would cause the girl to defy the government? The law? “What if she couldn’t be here?”
“Couldn’t?”
“What if she had her baby on the exact day the census workers came?”
“Then we’d have records of her and the baby.”
“Unless she wasn’t here when the child was born.” The wind sings about my ear. FIND ME, it pleads.
“You’re thinking she was in the hospital?”
“No.” I quicken my pacing. “Malaga women would’ve had their babies at home. And with the hate building toward the residents, I’m not sure the hospital would’ve admitted her.”
“So then . . . what?”
What? I have no idea. “I don’t know. I’m only speculating. But what if she was a domestic worker and was on the mainland when her baby came? Or on her boat? An island woman would’ve been strong enough to endure childbirth alone.”
“You think?”
“Any girl would have seen a half-dozen babies born on the island during her lifetime. Girls would have helped with births—or at least the cleanup.”
Sam considers. “It’s a good theory.”
“But it’s just a theory.” I need more. The girl wants me to know more.
Sam’s eyes drop with sadness. “A theory is likely as close as we’ll ever get to the truth.”
The girl isn’t always with the child and I’ve never seen the infant’s face. Perhaps it’s something else she’s carrying. But then, no. I heard the child’s wailing. Even that first day I knew that cry was unmistakably that of a baby’s. “She had a child.” I know this as clear as I know my own name. “I think maybe that’s what she’s trying to tell me.” I stop, look at Sam. “Does that sound impossible?”
He stands, comes to me, takes my hands in his. “I think everything that happened out here was unforgiveable. It’s honestly hard to get my head around it most days. But the scientist in me wants proof.”
“Proof ?”
He nods. “I wish we had something, Rilla. Anything to tie your girl to the island.”
“You have me. Everything I’ve told you.”
“Then that’ll have to be enough.” He lets go of my hands, and his absence makes my skin go cold. He bends at his knee and rests a palm to the earth, as if listening to its story. I imagine it vibrating with the hum of bees. “I was at a friend’s birthday party when I got my first kiss.”
My head shoots up at the randomness of this information.
“Johanna Light. I’ll never forget that kiss. She was so beautiful.” He gives a short laugh.
“Sounds like a good kiss.”
“It was the best. That first kiss. It ripped through me like a thunderbolt.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because the weird thing is that the kiss happened when I was living with my aunt. But when I was returned home months later, my mother knew about the kiss.”
“Someone told her?”
He shakes his head. “No. She said she saw it. Like watched it.”
“Weird.”
“No, Rilla. You don’t understand. There was a whole state between me and my mom then but she told me that she was on the couch, closing her eyes for a short summer nap, and she saw me kiss Johanna Light. She described everything—Johanna’s dress, the tree we stood under, the other kids fooling at the tire swing near the birthday table filled with chips and drinks. She even saw the yellow balloons tied to the table’s legs.” He steals a breath. “Man, I hadn’t remembered the yellow balloons until just now.”
“I don’t get it.”
“My mom said that’s the way love worked. That when someone you love feels this ultimate joy—or sadness—the people you love feel it too.”
I brush at the bumps rising on my forearms.
“She said love meant our hearts and minds were connected even when we weren’t together.”
I can’t help but wonder if my own mother has seen snippets of my life in her dreams.
“It happened one other time, when my brother had to go to the hospital. She knew every detail of his accident. As if she’d been there.”
“There aren’t a lot of people who would believe those stories.”
“But you do, right?”
“I do.”
Sam smiles. “My mom always said my brother and I were born from her heart since she didn’t give birth to us, you know.”
My heart skips with a lovely pain. “That’s beautiful.”
“I’ve always thought so. But everything my mother taught me about love makes sense here, too. Maybe this girl’s heart is connected to yours somehow. Maybe that’s why you can see her.”
I think it.
I fear it.
I know it.
Want it.
The crisp whine of a calling gull cuts through the silence that settles over us.
“And you . . . ?” Sam stops, waves away the thought. “Nah, forget it.”
“What? You can ask. Nothing is too weird now.”
“You’d mentioned maybe your mother saw the girl too?”
I sit, pull my knees closer to my chest, holding this possibility in my heart. It is a reason for my mother leaving. A reason that isn’t me. “I think maybe she did.”
“Do you think your mother was attacked? That hers is the memory you felt?”
“No.” I know this even if I don’t know how I know. “It was the girl’s memory. But I think the girl visited my mother somehow. My mother used to call them Water People, the people she thought lived in the ocean. But maybe there was only one Water Person.”
One girl reaching out to my mother.
“The last time I saw my mother, she was collecting stones from the sea.”
My mother’s hands so delicate.
“I watched her in the surf, how she filled her pockets with those stones. I remember being so excited for her to bring me all her treasures.”
Rocks trampled by dinosaurs, squeezed by continents of ice.
Broken glass from a pirate ship, purple and exotic.
“She used to collect broken bits of clay from the shore and tell me tales of how the Water People left their pots behind.”
“Whoa.”
“But on her last night here those discarded pieces weren’t enough. My mother added rocks to the pockets of her skirt. Small ones at first. I was only six when I watched her walk straight into the waves, carrying so much extra weight. I knew she was going to the Water People, and I’d never been so scared.” My breath hitches. “I knew she wanted them more than me. She was choosing them over me, and all I could do was watch. She was leaving me behind, and I didn’t know how to make her stay.”
“Rilla.” Sam reaches for my hand. I feel his warmth wrap my fingers.
“My gram called an ambulance, and they brought her to the hospital. But she’s stayed away for twelve years. Maybe she never wanted to be with me at all.”
“I can’t believe that’s true.”
I did. All these years. Until now.
Sam squeezes my hand.
“Now I think maybe she wanted to protect me from her, or maybe my mother thought she took the Water People with her—you know? To keep me safe.” Protected. “But I think she saw my girl. I think my mother was trying to find my girl.”
“Same as you.”
Same, but different, too.
“Just promise me you won’t walk into the sea like that.”
“I won’t.” I would never. But maybe my mother thought that once too.
* * *
At home, I research everything about the boatbuilder’s family. There’s a photo of him and his wife at the front door of their small one-room house, two children at their feet. Their clothes are clean but worn. The children are shoeless. The man has his arm around his wife’s waist, as if to protect her. UNIDENTIFIED CHILDREN, the photo says. Like so many others. I wait for the song to rise, but its melody never fills the air. I wait for some connection to speak to me, but there’s nothing.
Only the hard wind churning up from a swelled sea.
I fall asleep with the images of Malaga all around me.
I dream of swimming.
I poke my seal-slick head from the water, and an old dory coasts along the waves. The girl’s inside, rowing from the peninsula to the island. I swim behind her. The sides of her boat are low like the one Sam described from the book he discovered when he was twelve in the desert, low enough to scoop fish from the sea. I swim my head higher and see the fat bundle on the empty seat at the back of the boat. I think it’s the girl’s baby until I see the rounded cloth tied at her breast, the child at her heart. As the girl pulls the oars against the sea, she leans back, her infant rounding toward the moon. And in the spray of light that the moon lends the surface of the sea, I notice the blooms of the Flame plant, their bright orange flowers like fire in the boat, its bulbs and roots wrapped in burlap as if the uprooted plant were a gift.
When I wake I go straight to Gram’s front garden and let my fingers stroke the soft emerging bud of the Flame plant—the plant named for fire. I break off a flowering stem to show Sam. Because it’s in this garden that I realize I shouldn’t be looking for a girl.
We need to be looking for a plant.