The Rattled Bones(2)

I go because I have to.

Because it’s what my father would have wanted.

I steer toward the swath of ocean my family has fished for generations while the GPS bleeps out navigation points. I silence the machine and its piercing electronic pulses because I don’t need technology to find the string of lobster traps my father set into the deep three days ago—his last day on earth. The watery pathway leading to the Gulf of Maine is an artery I’ve traveled since before I could crawl. Its inlets are as recognizable—as memorable—as the laugh lines that track around my father’s eyes.

Tracked.

The VHF radio above my head wakes with static before I hear Reed’s voice. “All in, Rilla Brae?”

I pull down the mouthpiece and press the side button to talk. “All in.” It’s the same response I always give Reed when he checks in on my fishing. All in. These two words let him know I’m on the water. That I’m all right and that I love him—things you need a code for when talking over a public channel.

A wave of static and then, “Charlotte Anne, out at Lip Gulley, watching for you, Rilla Brae.” The voice is Billy Benson’s, captain of the Charlotte Anne—a vessel named for his wife—and I’m not sure if he’s watching for me or my boat or both. I don’t have time to respond before Emmet Teale’s call comes across the wire: “Maddie Jean, good to hear ya on the line, Rilla Brae.”

“Heavy seas today. Keep beam to.” George Mank, telling me to keep my boat perpendicular to the swells, even though I know what he’s really telling me. How all the fishermen are using their own kind of code to say the hard things.

I press the VHF button and ask: “You boys gonna tie up this channel all day with this lovefest?”

Being a wiseass might be the most sacred language among us on the water. It tells the men that I’m okay, even if I’m not.

The radio chirps with a lighter chatter about weather and bait prices as I slow near a green-and-orange buoy bobbing with our family’s fishing colors. Dad, Gram, and I spent the winter painting all eight hundred of our Styrofoam buoys—a thick horizontal stripe of orange crossed with a thin vertical strip of green. The specific colors and design mark our traps. My traps now. Every fishing family knows each other by the colored pattern of their buoys. Just as every fishing family knows it’s forbidden to set one’s traps in another family’s fishing grounds. It’s a hard thing to think I’m a fishing family of one now. Well, me and Gram. But Gram doesn’t go out on the water anymore.

I flick the throttle to neutral and step outside the wheelhouse to cast my hook, spearing the buoy rope on the first try. I pull the lobster line manually—old-school—straining the muscles in my arms and back to coax the metal crate from the bottom of the sea. It rises inch by inch through the layers of water as I work the wet rope through my hands.

My arms tire quickly.

The soggy, slack rope curls into a sleeping snake behind my feet as the corner of the first lobster trap breaks the water. Its green metal edge winks against the gray waves as it sloughs off excess water. My heart stutters as I hold the trap at the waterline, unable to let it fully break the surface.

“This is the moment,” he’d say, and I’d watch my dad’s frame swell with hope for the catch, each trap a new gift. “What treasure will the sea bestow upon us?”

I want to hold the trap suspended like this for the rest of time, feel my father’s enthusiasm here with me. But of course I can’t. I reach for the trap, insert my gloved fingers into the wire mesh, and wrestle the cage onto the deck.

And then a smile crests on my lips. A pop of laughter jumps from inside of me.

Because the trap is full and it feels like a gift from my dad.

I cast my eyes to the sky to thank him, even if I wasn’t raised to believe in heaven or happily ever afters.

*

By the time I reset my string of a hundred pots and deliver my catch to the fisheries co-op, the sun has bullied away the fog and swallowed every drop of cool air. I shed my heavy rubber overalls and strip down to my everyday uniform of leggings and a plain white tee. I turn my course toward home, where Gram will be waiting.

Only Gram.

I raise my face to the sun to let its warmth reach inside of me, stretch into my bones. I keep my hips pressed against the boat’s steering wheel, coasting in the sea that has calmed now. My reliable engine hums as I watch the sleek missile dive of an oil-black cormorant. The bird retrieves a fish from the water and spreads her wings against the blue-and-white marble sky as she flies off with her breakfast.

Life and death in a heartbeat.

The bird disappears into the thick green tree line of a nearby island just as my boat lurches to a violent stop, pitching me forward. My hip bone slams against the corner of the instrument panel and pain sears along the length of my body, hot as fire. At the back of the boat, my engine misfires with a shotgun blast that raises thunder in my heart. Then the engine dies.

Leaving me bobbing, alone at sea without power.

Every mariner’s nightmare.

I scan the console, but it’s darkened to black. No electricity. No VHF. I throw the motor into neutral and crank the key. The engine doesn’t speak. The boat tumbles with the sway of the waves. I try the key again. Nothing. And no cell reception along this waterway.

I draw in a deep breath. I know this boat. I’ve got this.