The Rattled Bones(11)

“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.”