CHAPTER FOUR
“Rill?” Reed’s warm breath sweeps across the back of my neck, and I open my eyes to the settled dark of the pre-morning. “You awake?”
Reed is behind me, his torso snug against my back, his knees tucked into the bend of mine. His toes press against my underfoot, wordlessly reassuring me that everything is the way it used to be. In this early slip of time before dawn colors the sky, all I know is the softness of our shared sleep. But it is only a moment. Maybe not even a full minute before my grief awakens, ripping through me with its gale-force reminder that my father won’t be in this day. Or any other.
“I’m awake.”
“You okay?”
“I am.” Lie. Lie. Lie.
He rounds one hand over my hip, pulls my body tighter against his. His fingers play at my neck. They trail along the path to my shoulder. A familiar warmth spreads under and along my skin. I want to lose myself in Reed’s touch.
Except.
“Don’t. Please.” I pull the sheets around me as I turn to him. His eyes drop with sadness or confusion. Maybe both. The sharpness of his cheekbones will never stop amazing me; they are too beautiful to sit on a boy. I stroke his face, first one side, then the other.
“Don’t kiss you?”
“No, I like the kisses. It just can’t be . . . more.”
His body hardens, pulls away. It’s a fraction of movement that cuts a ravine between us.
“I’m sorry.” I’m not sure that’s the truth. “My head’s too messed up.” Full truth.
Reed props himself against my headboard made of forgotten picket fence. When he stuffs a pillow behind his back, a draft creeps into the space between our bodies. He stares out at the water, even though there’s nothing but blackness. “Whatever you need,” he tells me. Like always.
“I’m not sure what I need.” Full, full truth.
He gathers me to his chest, my ear coming to rest over the steady thump of his heart.
He whispers “It’s all good” into the tangle of my hair, kisses me through the curls. “You’re my moon, Rill.” My heart hitches, reminding me that there is still space in my chest for something other than grief and doubt.
The first time Reed told me that I was his moon, we were only months into hooking up. It was sophomore year, and a part of me was still convinced we were doing what we were doing as a kind of taunt against our families. Asserting our independence and all. We’d been watching the stars from the deck of his boat and he told me, “The way the moon pulls the tide, you know. I feel like that when I’m with you. And even when I’m not . . . it’s like I’m forever getting pulled to you.” It was the closest Reed ever came to poetry, and that was okay. Better than okay, if I’m being honest.
But sometimes the moon and her tides can fool you. When the sun and moon sit at right angles to each other, they bring a neap tide that will soothe the ocean, making it hard to tell the difference between high tide and low tide.
Like me now, having a hard time telling the difference between what’s real and what’s imagined.
I sit up, throw my legs over the side of the bed to stand. “You need to get going.” This is our deal. Reed sneaks out before sunrise, before Gram and Dad wake up—just Gram now.
He rises from my bed, slides his jeans onto his long leanness. How is it possible that his sun-blond hair can be so bright even when the day is still dark? Reed comes to me, nestles his lips against my neck. “Countin’ the minutes,” he says. His signature send-off.
“Love you,” I whisper.
“Love you more.” Then Reed is out the window, dropping spiderlike along the steps of the trellis. He disappears into the yard as morning pours across the sky in the distance, making Malaga’s trees look like a shadowy mountain and a mirage all at once.
I slip on leggings and a tee and tiptoe down the hall. I want Gram to get the rest she needs, but it’s zero surprise to see her bedroom door already open; we’re a family used to waiting on the sun. My stomach rumbles, asking me if I think Gram might be making French toast with sliced hothouse tomatoes, but then I see the pool of electric light seeping from underneath the attic door where she paints. I leave Gram to her place of repair—her words—knowing that the attic door will be locked. It’s always locked. That was Gram’s request after I was born and my parents came to live in the house where my mother was raised. My family could call Fairtide home, but Gram needed the attic as her private place. I respect her privacy always, the way Dad taught me.
In the kitchen, I brew tea and test the powers of the lemon, still dubious about their mood-lifting capabilities. I fix two sandwiches while I eat an apple. I don’t see Gram’s note until I reach for my boat’s keys. She’s left me a spray of white heather. And a note:
For protection.
For making wishes come true.
Love, G
I lift the dried heather to my nose, breathe in the echo of its confident earthiness. I grab my keys and head to my boat, sputter past sleeping Malaga Island to my traps and wonder what my wishes are. Because the one, the big one—having my dad back, my family—is impossible. And it’s hard to want anything else. Except I do. A part of me hopes Gram’s heather will give me protection from that dark place that stole my mother. Because I can’t help fear that these visions make me too much like her.
* * *
The docks at Yankee Fishermen’s Co-op sway with activity by the time I arrive, my tanks filled with today’s catch. It’s the start of the busy season, when tourists cram around lighthouses and feast on lobsters. I wait on the Rilla Brae as lobstermen haul their catch to the scales, one by one in the order we arrive, fishermen forever loyal to fishing’s egalitarian principles.
When it’s my turn, I put the Rilla Brae in gear and coast her starboard side to the edge of the wharf.
Hoopah—Neal Hooper in any other part of the country—ties the dock lines to pull my boat in snug. “Ya got some bugs in there, Rilla?”
I open the hatch. “One or two.”
“Ayuh. Mind if an old man takes a look?”
“Have at it.”
Hoopah boards the Rilla Brae like the good co-op owner he is and unloads my catch onto the scale. He rips me a receipt for the two hundred and sixteen pounds I deliver. He doesn’t ask after how I’m doing, because he knows the answer. I’m surviving.
When I head out of the harbor, Reed’s boat is approaching the wharf, but I don’t wait for it to dock. Instead, I meet Reed on the water and we quiet our engines.
“Good catch?” he calls over the waves.
I nod. I don’t tell him how the sea felt different today, a stranger.
“Just bringing mine in now. Pick you up for the quarry later?” Reed asks. It’ll never not amaze me how his face is so often filled with hope, like everything is possible in any moment. I want to be the girl who swims away the afternoon with him, but it’s already hard to remember the version of me that had the freedom to do anything so indulgent.
“Don’t you have class? For your GED?”
“I’ll head over there tomorrow. Gotta help my granddad, and then I need to chill. Come with?”
“Meet you there.” I know this is a lie—I’ll never go to the quarry again. But he’s lying too. It’s always tomorrow when it comes to school.
“Countin’ the minutes.” Reed throws me two fingers, a peace sign.
“Love you.” I tell him. The truth.
I start toward home, but I just can’t.
Instead, I drop anchor off the shores of Malaga. There’s no University of Southern Maine boat today, so I climb into my skiff and untie it from the Rilla Brae. I row to the rocky beach with my suspicions trained on the water, my ears perked open. But the water merely curls over itself, fixing its focus on the business of slapping waves. At the beach, I drag my skiff onto land and grab my pack. My eyes are alert, searching for that girl, her baby.
I return to the highest part of the island and spot the USM research boat. It bobs off the south shore—if you can call the granite ledge a shore. My instinct leaps to protect the craft from the tangle of fierce currents.
“Hey.” The voice comes from behind me, recognizable already.
I turn and Sam’s hiking toward me, his face all smile. “Hey.”
“Looking for me?”
Not quite. “I came for lunch. I didn’t see your boat until just now. I can head home if I’m disturbing you. Or, you know, your work.”
“Not at all. It gets lonely out here.” He jams his hands into his pockets. “It’s good to see you again, Rilla Brae.”
His inflection tells me he’s referring to my boat, but the way he says my full name trips something in my gut. Like he knows a secret about me without knowing me at all. It makes me more than uncomfortable, so I focus on what I do know.
The water around us.
The pull of the currents.
“So this may be none of my business, but you’re pretty new to the sea, huh?”
“Is it that obvious?”
Yep. “A little.”
“It’s okay to be totally embarrassed for me.”
Sam reminds me of my father in this instance, the way he invites me to my own opinion, encourages it.
“I basically got a crash course in operating USM’s salty dog.” He nods toward the boat. “Wait. That’s the right word for a boat, right? Because I’m trying to act all cool, but I think I just blew it.”
I smile at his rookie mistake. “Technically, a salty dog is a person who spends a lot of time on the ocean. I’ve never heard anyone refer to a boat that way.”
“Figures.” He laughs, runs his fingers through his fine black hair, which is loose today and hangs to his shoulders like silk. This is a boy comfortable with laughing off his mistakes, like it means nothing for him to be wrong. Like he isn’t built to assert his manliness, his rightness. Honestly? After years of working with men who don’t know any other way but to be right, it throws me.
“Would you be open to some advice from a salty dog?” I ask.
“Advice me. I’m all ears.”
“So.” I point to where his boat is. “You’re boat’s anchored on the south side of the island.”
“Yep. South side.” He says it like cardinal directions are the easiest thing to know at sea.
“The thing is, there’s a rip in those waters, and when the tide changes, it’ll be too dangerous to row back to your boat. The riptides are strong enough to drag an anchor across the sea bottom. You could lose your . . . salty dog.”
“Jeez-us!” Sam’s face pales. “Like an undertow?”
“Basically.”
“Why didn’t you open with that? That’s a fairly important piece of nautical information.”
“You’re okay. You’ve got another hour or so before the tide changes.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Relief softens his shoulders. “Yes. Right, good.” His hand floats through his hair again. “That boat probably cost more than four years of tuition.”
Much more. But it feels better not to disclose this fact. “If it were my boat, I’d move it now.”
“I thought you said I had another hour?”
“Never trust a tide.” The words are my father’s.
“Okay, now I’m panicked.” He points to the underside of his chin. “This face here? This is the face of panic. The real kind. The my-panic-could-kick-your-panic’s-ass kind of panic.”
I let out a short laugh. “You’ll be fine. Just take caution is all.”
“Okay.” He stop-signs one hand. “Let’s talk real here. I am now full-on scared shitless to get into a basically weightless rowboat to fix this situation. I read The World According to Garp. I know all about the Under Toad.”
My heart flames with memory. “Did you just say ‘Under Toad’?” How old was I the first time my dad warned me about the dangers of the Under Toad, the creature that lived in the strongest of currents? The giant toad that lurked below the deep, always hungry for children, ready to pull them down.
“Yeah, you know. From John Irving’s classic.”
“ ’Course.” I didn’t know, but my brain clamps around this fact, a shell hoarding a pearl.
“Look, at this point I think we can both agree that my best option is to build a meager shelter and live on the island permanently. Because now you’ve got me all kinds of freaked out, and I don’t want to move that boat and risk crashing it, because if I crash it I can’t return to school or home and I’ll have to live here permanently anyway.”
I only half hear him. I’m too consumed with the fact that he’s given me the gift of a new detail about my father—how he learned of the Under Toad from a book. I’m so grateful to Sam in this moment, this stranger who will never meet Jonathan Brae.
“Do you want some help?” My father taught me to repay a favor with two.
“Yes. That is exactly what I want. No, need. Thank you.”
“Happy to do it.”
Sam and I climb into his skiff, and I row it to the larger boat. “The leeward side of any island is the protected side.” I talk to drown out the song if it returns. I can’t give anyone a front-row seat to the fallout of my hallucinations, even a stranger.
“Leeward. Got it.”
I pull back on the oars, cut through the top layer of water. “The sheltered side of any island sits out of the winds, away from the fierce currents.”
“Keep away from fierce currents.” He draws a phantom check mark in the air. “Got it.” His grip returns to the side of the boat, the knuckles on his other hand already bone white as I guide us through the choppy waves.
“I’m sure everything would have been fine.”
“You weren’t so sure ten minutes ago.”
“Well, worst case, your boat would have eventually washed up on the shore there.” I elbow toward Fairtide.
“Why?”
“That’s the way the current pushes here. Flotsam always ends up along that shore.”
“I’d like to be very clear that I don’t want my boat to become flotsam.”
“Duly noted.” I don’t do a great job of hiding my smile as I turn to approach the research boat.
We board, and I guide the larger vessel out of the way of danger. Sam is watching me too closely. I know he’s noting my speed, the way I navigate, but still. It feels like he’s seeing all the things in me that feel too messed up. When I anchor his boat next to the Rilla Brae, I nod toward home. “I should be heading out.”
“What about lunch? Isn’t that why you’re here?”
It is. And isn’t.
“I could eat now that I know I won’t be shipwrecked. Join me?” He sweeps his arm in a wave.
There’s a flicker of hope that Sam will give me another piece of my father, however small. “Okay.” I grab my bag for the second time today and hike up the island.
“My site’s just over the ridge there.” Sam points toward the trees, and I follow. He talks as we make our way, but I don’t hear every word. As the trees come closer, they loom bigger than a stand of spruce. They form a forest box that holds secrets. They gather as a shelter for a disappearing girl. A screaming baby. Who knows what else?
I sit facing the forest, not willing to make my back vulnerable. It’s not until I have my pack pulled off my shoulders and the front pocket unzipped that I see the dig site, just down the hill. He’s roped off a twenty-foot section of earth, metal indicators and twine marking the area. The enclosed dirt sits lower, a few inches of topsoil meticulously swept away. To its side is a raised table, a screen stretched across the large, flat top.
Sam follows my gaze to the excavated earth. “The old school grounds.” He sits next to me, but not too close. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t appreciate how he gives me my space.
“Like a school school?”
His smile curls. “That’s a lot of doubt for not a lot of words.”
I unwrap my peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “It just doesn’t make sense. Why would there be a school here? It’s too remote. Who could get to it?” Here is the moment when I should relate my suspicions that his professor likely wants him to excavate another island. Maine has more than three thousand miles of coastline. It’s an honest mistake.
Sam rifles in his bag, growing distracted.
I take a bite of lunch, and the jelly is cold from being in my cooler. It wakes my mouth, and my hunger. Above me, a gull circles for scraps.
Sam empties the contents of his bag onto a patch of grass. “Oh, come on.” His words are a huff.
“Something wrong?”
“I forgot my lunch.” He swats his forehead with his palm. “Must have left it on the counter this morning. I’m kind of spacy about stuff like that. You should know that about me.”
“Um . . . okay.” I don’t tell him that this isn’t the first step in us getting to know each other, that I don’t need to be familiar with his idiosyncrasies. This is me looking for a girl. Not a boy. Still, I pull out my second sandwich, offer it to him.
He waves me off. “No. That’s super nice, but you made that for you.”
I didn’t. I made it for Dad. But Sam is the only person in the area who doesn’t know about my father’s death and I’m not about to change that. “My dad taught me that it’s rude to eat alone.”
“Yeah?”
I shake the sandwich. “Yeah.”
He takes the offering and smiles. “I like your dad.”
And just like that, Sam makes my father alive, right here in the present tense. I turn my head away, hide the choke in my voice. “So, this school . . .”
“Oh, the school’s long gone,” Sam says, bread tucked into his cheek. “The state took that away in thirty-two. No, thirty-one. Technically. It was December, so, yeah, 1931.”
“What do you mean ‘took it away’?” I turn to Sam. He has my full attention now.
“Why does anyone take anything? It had value.”
“That sounds like something my dad would say.” The minute the words are out of my mouth, I want to reel them back.
“So your dad’s a smart man, huh? Genius-level IQ, no doubt.” Sam smiles a smile that can only be described as triumphant.
“The smartest.”
Sam’s eyes gather the island spread out around us. “So he probably knows all about the school . . . Malaga’s history. You should ask him about it. Locals always know more than researchers.”
But I’m not so sure. Because it seems like this boy from away might know so much more than I do.