The Rattled Bones(15)

“Ya two were always playing at the shore.” Gram doesn’t say more, and I realize for the first time that she hasn’t been able to talk about her daughter for years. All because of my selfishness.

“And you’d watch us from the deck.” We searched for the smoothest rocks, the ones that had been rolling in the ocean so long they had lost all their sharp edges. We used them as money, pirate booty. My mother made smiley faces in the sand, long sweeping smiles made of quarter-sized stones. It’s a strange thing to remember safe moments with my mother by the shore. Like opening a book and being reminded that it was your favorite from forever ago.

“I can’t remember a time when I didn’t watch ya, Rilla.” Gram stares at the lapping waterline. “They are some of my best memories. The two of ya walking the shore, how ya were always in step. She taught ya how to skip rocks, and you’d spend hours hunting for the perfect flat stones. You’d jump with excitement every time she made one of those slivers jump off a wave.”

Do I remember that, or is it another story I heard so many times when I was little? The real and imagined are blurred together from those years. I feel sick at the thought of losing even one memory of my dad.

I bring the mug to my lips.

“Your mom and ya were so happy each time your dad returned from fishing. You’d run into the water as deep as ya could to meet hi—” Something steals the rest of Gram’s story, the last memory of my mother at the shore, probably. The night that’s etched deep into my story, carving out a Before and After. The night my mother chose the Water People over me. Over Gram. Over Dad. Gram watches the ocean, and her face flattens gray.

I was wrong to bring up my mother. I don’t have room for any more darkness.

“I should head up, take a shower.” I pluck the Flame Freesia and cup it in my palm. I breathe in its scent of pepper, and it jolts something deep inside of me, deeper and farther away than my mother’s memory. For a moment I am underwater again, the sounds of the everyday world drowned out, a song rising too clear through the seaweed, the black ocean. Come here, come here . . . The bloom turns hot as fire in my hand and I drop it to the table.

“I think Reed would want you to have this.”

I head to the kitchen, away from the ocean and its songs. Away from any reminder of the night my mother filled my heart with fear.

*

In my room, I set a fresh cup of orange-leaf tea on my nightstand, chosen for its ability to boost awareness. I balance my laptop across the bridge of my thighs and Google “Malaga Island.” There are only a few hits, some from USM’s research. I click on the first image and it pulls at me. The picture is yellowed in the way of ancient photos.

An elderly woman sits in a high-back rocking chair in front of a home—a shack, really. Her long white hair is coiled in a thick braid pulled to rest over her heart. She has more years on her than Gram—maybe decades more—and yet there’s a matchstick straightness in her shoulders, the black sheen of the woman’s eyes trapping knowledge. I try to quiet the bumps that rise along the back of my neck as I study the cracks in her skin, each deep and weather-beaten line a year at least. She is Passamaquoddy maybe, or Abenaki? This area has shell middens heaped along stretches of coast by indigenous people—giant piles of carefully layered oyster shells, dirt and animal bones that date back to Maine’s first fishing families.

I can’t know if the old woman is Abenaki, but I’m certain her stare is untrusting. I squint at the white scrawl in the bottom corner of the photo: 1931. Did she dare the cameraman to steal her soul with his flash? Did she challenge his thievery?

A knock rattles the window. I jump as Reed pokes his head into my room, laughing. “Nervous, much?”

I ease my laptop shut.

“Watching porn?” Reed asks, his smile playful.

“Yes. Tons of porn. I’ve been up here for hours, trolling the web for porn.”

Reed plops on my bed, his weight heavier than usual. No, dense. It’s drunk weight. His wasted fingers play at the corner of my computer, teasing the cover open.

I slide my laptop to the nightstand.

He nestles his head against my neck. His hand falls flat to my stomach. “You didn’t come to the quarry today.”

“I didn’t.”

“Why not?” His warm skin smells of sun and sweat and hard liquor.

“I wasn’t feeling it.”

“I missed you.” Reed burrows deeper against me, his fingers twisting the longest of my curls.

I let the quiet shape us into one. Then, “You really threw Gram today, with that flower you left me this morning.”

Reed laughs. “Your Gram? Thrown . . . as in confused?”

“Yep. She wanted to know where you got it. Like you have some connection to the seedy underworld of foreign plants.” I nudge him. “Get it? Seedy?”

“Funny.” Reed sits up. “What plant, now?”

“That flower you left. Gram says it’s from Africa, doesn’t grow here.”

“I’m lost. I didn’t leave any flower.”

“You didn’t?” I watch something like anger grow in Reed’s features, tiny embers turning orange. “What? You’re the jealous type now?”

“I am if someone’s giving you flowers.”

“I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”