AFTER
Sam holds me as we sit on Fairtide’s wharf. We share one of Gram’s old wool blankets while we watch the University of Southern Maine researchers arrive for work on Malaga. The morning is cold for late August. Fall tugs at the leaves on the trees, its chilly breath already weaving a nip through the wind. Six boats arrived at the island the day after Sam and I witnessed the raid. Members of the university. The county coroner. Me and Sam. Many more reporters showed up but were banned from coming ashore.
Sam and I led the USM team to the burial site. Twenty-two people sifted at the place where Agnes was forgotten. The earth she was buried under had thickened with time, the winds kicking dirt over her as if to protect her for us.
When the head archeologist excavated the dirt around her skull, Sam and I were asked to leave. It was time for the police and officials and a murder investigation.
“Thank you for this discovery.” It was the professor. The lead archeologist. I forgot his name in the whirl of introductions, but I wouldn’t forget the round of bone I saw in the earth, the way Agnes’s skull was turned toward Fairtide, watching us. The way her jaw was open just a little. Enough to slip a Flame Freesia bloom through the space there. As if a song were still on her lips. I stood quickly then. I didn’t want to see anything more. Sam took me home, the only man to ever captain the Rilla Brae besides my father.
My dad used to say that he loved my mother unconditionally, even after she left both of us. They were bonded, he said. He brought me into the world with her and they would forever be attached, the way Agnes brought her child into the world. I understand it now, sitting with Sam. I helped to bring Agnes back to the world because she and I have always been forever connected.
It’s strange to be at the dock without Dad, without the Rilla Brae. She’s pulled from the water now, her season cut short by the University of Rhode Island’s orientation, which begins the day after tomorrow. My boat’s in dry dock, her fuel lines already prepped for winter storage. Hoopah promised to give her a new coat of bottom paint. She’ll be ready when I need her. And the pettiness of Old Man Benner’s threats seems like nothing in the wake of all that’s happened.
I wish my dad were here to see the work on Malaga unfold, to see me off to school. I wish for a lot of things that will never be. Maybe that’s just all part of getting on with the business of living, as Gram would say.
Sam convinced me and Gram to have our DNA tested by an online service. He’ll have access to the DNA they gather from Agnes once he returns to school, and he’s promised to tell me if they’re a match. I know they will be. I don’t need a lab to tell me where my grandmother came from, where our family’s roots are set deep.
I can feel the settledness of Agnes in my bones. Gram feels it too. She paints in the living room now, the oils and her cooking raising up competing smells. We are both proud to be descendants of Malaga, the hardworking community of people who should never be forgotten. We are glad the shame is lifting from this tragedy, that other Malaga Island descendants are using social media to come forth, to claim their heritage. Even people with family members who went to the state asylum, the ones labeled “feeble-minded.” The news of the body found on Malaga has reached far beyond Malaga and our peninsula. I’ve been messaging with other descendants. They are my family. The same DNA lives in our bones, and I’m proud to claim this new heritage. I think of the fiercely independent Eliza Griffin, the child who couldn’t identify a telephone, the old woman in her rocking chair. I carry them with me. In me.
I will likely never know the name of the man Agnes was married to. I can assume only that he was white because of his Irish ancestry, and the color of his skin was a trait he passed to Gram, something that helped her find safety in the aftermath of a brutal attack.
I hope Agnes will be buried on Malaga.
I hope all other island residents buried at the former Maine School for the Feeble-Minded can be returned to Malaga, put to rest under stones with individual names. The islanders buried their dead on Malaga so they would forever be part of the soil. I hope the state of Maine will finally do right by Malaga’s people, my people, and bring them home one day.
Agnes’s grave won’t say that she was a wife or a mother. The grave will probably not bear her name. These are things that Sam and I know because they are part of the most private thing we share together. And today, next to the water, with Agnes and Malaga and the history of the island in capable hands, that seems like enough.
It’s like our whole world has let out a deep breath. The peninsula is quiet, focused on the hard work of getting by.
My sleep has been dreamless.
Maybe the quiet will reach all the way to my mother, bring her peace.
I find I miss messages on the windowsill.
I find I miss my dad less some days. More on others. I think he would have been proud of my great-grandparents for bringing an orphan under their care, giving her family. Taking Gram in would have been an enormous risk in the days and years following the men with their torches.
Gram was chosen, in the same way Sam was chosen, and that still feels like something more than a miracle. And Agnes was no different from me. A fisherman’s daughter. I hope I will be a fierce mother the way she was a fierce mother. Someday.
I hope Agnes can know peace now.
Sam and I head inside the kitchen, where Gram has made entirely too many cupcakes for my going-away party, as if she couldn’t decide which flavor to bake. I pull up one that I think is butterscotch under its chocolate frosting. Gram gives me the evil eye, but she can’t swat my hand away from the dessert since she’s busy lugging her record player to the deck. Brenda Sherfey is right behind her, a stack of The Who records in her arms. Sam helps them with their loads.
I lick the frosting and my mouth floods with the sugary wave. The house is covered in balloons and streamers, and Hattie’s still not done plastering the kitchen’s thick, low beams.
“I’m going to miss this.” Hattie’s intent on the end of the streamer she’s taping to the ceiling and doesn’t meet my eyes.
“You and Gram can throw me a send-off party next year too if you like.”
“So you’re definitely going, then?” She jumps off the wobbling chair and unrolls a few additional feet of the crepe paper.
“Ha-ha.”
Hattie winks. “Just don’t forget about us little people.”
She doesn’t know about my family’s connection to Malaga. I visited the graves at Pineland without her, those five lonely stones nearly disappearing into the earth and grass. I walked the grounds and saw the large, recent memorial marker acknowledging the plight of Malaga residents. But the marker, the bodies. They’re still in the wrong place. Too far from Malaga.
“I’ll visit,” Hattie says. “Check out all the cute guys with the big brains.”
“I’ll expect it.” I know Hattie won’t be down to Rhode Island. More than half the families on this peninsula will never leave the county we live in, the county they were born in. Still, it’s good knowing Hattie wants to come. And who knows? Maybe she’ll surprise me. It wouldn’t be the first time.
I move the chair next to Hattie and stand on it as she hands me the crepe streamers. She rips off a piece of tape, and I affix the decoration to the ceiling. “Four years is no time at all, Hattie. And it’s really just ten months if you think about it. Hell, its two months till I’ll be home for Thanksgiving and then again for Christmas. Then spring break, then summer. You’ll practically be sick of me by then.” I jump down.
“Not possible.”
We move to the next random spot, and I tape up another loop of paper streamer.
“It’s hard knowing that you won’t be coming back.”
“But I wi—”
“I mean, I know you’ll be here. You’ll physically come back, but you’ll be different, Rills. You know it. Like how we always talked about the ways we wanted to change the world.” She hesitates, and then, “And how we wanted the world to change us.”
Hattie and I would often dream of a train station in Anywhere, Europe, and how the songs of a dozen languages would dance around our ears. How we’d walk streets where no one looked like we did. Visit a village in the Andes and let the newness of food and thin air wake our senses.
“It’s the way it’s supposed to be, Rills. College will change you. You’ll come back thinking our tiny peninsula is backward and tired. You’ll hate that we have no diversity. You’ll miss the foreign foods.”
“I’m only going to Rhode Island, Hatt.”
She lowers her eyes before drawing them up to meet mine. Her gaze is wet, already mourning. “You know what I mean.”
I do. Everything will be different once I leave because leaving a place always changes a place.
Hattie hugs me then, holds me for longer than she’s ever held me. We press together, all eleven years of our laughter, our tears, our fears, and our dreams. They melt between us, our stories.
There’s a knock at the door.
“You go ahead and get that. I’ll finish up.” Hattie waves me off and I open the door to guests. The house fills quickly, and our company overflows to the grass, the deck. Reed hasn’t showed, and I’m not sure he will, despite my invitation. It’s strange to love someone so deeply and then not be a part of their lives. Still, his love is in me, like each of my gathered stories.
Gram comes to stand beside me as I step outside. The sun is high, and the breeze is chilled. The long green lawn fills with people from all over the peninsula with drinks in their hands and Malaga in their sights. It’s hard not to hear a group chatting about the discovery out there last month.
“People will be talking about Malaga for a while.”
“Only seems right.” Gram takes my hand. “It’s the forgetting that’s wrong.”
I lean against my gram and her strong shoulder, the way she stands still and straight and as dependable as a lighthouse. “I’m gonna miss you.”
“I’ll miss ya too, Rilla. I can’t think of a finer feeling than loving someone so much that ya miss them.”
I smile and let out a small laugh. My gram. “You’re one of a kind.”
“I should hope so. How boring would a world full of Eleanor Murphys be?”
Not so boring, I think.
* * *
After everyone left last night, the peninsula returned to its quiet rhythms of the sea lapping, the gulls calling. I wrote a letter to my mother. I told her about the girl discovered on Malaga, but I didn’t tell her my role in any of it. Instead, I wrote about going to school, how good Gram is doing. Keep it light—that’s what kept going through my head. Maybe because I hope we’ll have time to talk later. Or maybe we’ll exchange letters for a while. Exchange stories.
Gram meets me in the driveway, hands me a small box of bottled herbs, which I settle onto the middle of the bench seat in my dad’s old truck. For strength, for adjustment. Gram, watching out for me always.
Gram hugs me, short but sweet. I know she’s not big on good-byes. “See ya soon,” she tells me.
“Can’t keep a seal from the sea.”
She smiles then, her full smile.
It’s a good smile.
“This is the last one.” Sam places the final cardboard box into the Chevy’s bed.
“You sure you’re up for this road trip?” I ask.
“Haven’t got anything better to do.” He winks and goes around to the passenger side. The creak of the pickup’s old door is as familiar as my father’s voice. Sam has so much work to do when he gets back, has school of his own to return to. Even though the USM boat fire was deemed an engine malfunction due to exposed wiring meeting with gasoline, I know Sam feels obligated to work twice as hard to try to repay the university for the craft that was destroyed.
He’ll drop me off at my freshman dorm and return Dad’s truck to the peninsula. Next year I’ll be allowed a car on campus and I’ll take Dad’s pickup with me, as planned. “The closest I’ll ever get to college,” Dad used to joke.
I get in the driver’s seat, behind the wheel, and turn the key. The motor coughs out its dependable rumble.
Sam has his phone out, scrolling through tunes for our long drive down the coast. He puts on “Won’t Get Fooled Again” loud enough for Gram to hear. She stands in her garden, her hands on her hips. She raises an arm and waves. I press my hand to the glass for what seems like a long time.
When I put the truck in drive, we bump along Fairtide’s gravel driveway. In the rearview mirror I see Gram surrounded by the bulging blooms of white hydrangea bushes, the sea at her back, Malaga behind her.
I turn onto the highway that stretches along the coast, heading due south, straight for my future.
A bee darts across my windshield, carrying a story.