The Rattled Bones(25)

Hattie barks a loud laugh.

“What?”

“Um, pay attention to this dude’s hair much?”

I groan. “You’re ridiculous.”

“Maybe so, but is he single?”

“No. He has eleven wives.”

“Only eleven?”

“So far.”

“Har-har.”

“I know what I know and that is”—I count on my fingers—“he’s from the desert, a fact that may make him useless on the ocean, but we’ll see; he’s a student at USM; he likes my gram’s biscuits; and he’s researching Malaga Island for his archeology department.”

Hattie goes to my bureau, pulls out a T-shirt, and strips down.

“You staying the night?”

“Of course.” Her head pops through the bright blue tee with a whale on the front, a souvenir from a tacky shell-filled gift shop on Cape Cod. “I told Reed tonight was my night.”

She must have really wanted to be here; talking to Reed has never been high on her list of favorite—or even tolerable—things to do. “Glad you two are managing my evening social calendar with such flair.”

Hattie climbs under the covers. I prop my pillow behind my head and knock the journal free.

“What’s this?” Hattie says, tapping at its edges. I’ve always liked that about Hattie. How she never grabs for anything, never assumes she has the right to share in a thing unless it’s offered.

“It’s a bunch of Sam’s research.”

“And you have Sam’s notes tucked under your pillow because you looooooove him?” She smiles her deliciously brilliant off-kilter smile.

“You are so hilarious! How did I not notice this until now?”

She waves me off. “Whatevs. Show me the goods.”

“It’s nothing. Just Sam’s notes.”

She squints. “Does Sam have a last name?”

“Probably.”

“Okay, you’ve hired a dude whose last name you don’t know to go out into the middle-of-nowhere ocean with you where there is exactly zero cell service and no one around to witness if he chops you up into little bits and tosses you overboard. Do I have this right?”

“Um, gruesome.”

“Gruesome or truesome?”

“Not truesome. He’s good people.”

“I need to know exactly how you know about him being good people.”

So I tell her. I tell her about my three visits to Malaga. I tell her about Sam and his archeological dig, our lunches on the island, Sam’s instalove for Gram’s biscuits.

I don’t tell her about the other reasons I’m drawn to Malaga. Or my random visions. Hattie doesn’t need to worry more. Or maybe I don’t tell her because saying the words would make my hallucinations too real.

“So this book is his research and he just gave it to you?”

“I’m only borrowing it. To learn more about the island.”

Hattie plops back on her pillow, stares at my ceiling. “Why?”

“Because it’s interesting.”

“Why would you want to dig any of that stuff up, Rills?”

“No pun intended?”

“It was punintentional.” She turns to face me. “But, Rills. That shit needs to stay in the past where it belongs. It was awful then, and it’s awful now. No amount of you knowing about it is going to change what happened.”

I sit straighter. “Wait. You know about Malaga?”

“?’Course.”

“How do I not know this?”

“It’s not like I’d just go around chatting about it. It’s horrible what happened to the people out there. They were evicted from their homes, some locked up in an insane asylum.” Hattie stops, looks at me, her eyes searching for forgiveness. “Rills, I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

Hattie—like nearly everyone on Maine’s Mid Coast—knows my mother spent years in an asylum in Upstate New York. I would often picture her with scalp-short hair. So short that even lice didn’t want to live in it. Because that’s what they do in institutions, right? Cut off all your hair and put you in a white room where the only person who talks to you wears only white and hands you a tiny white paper cup with a tiny, bright red pill in its center. The dressed-in-all-white nurse removes the all-white cup and tells my mother to swallow the all-red pill and she does. And sometimes the pill makes her rock back and forth in a corner and sometimes it makes her stare out a window without being able to see anything at all.

This is, of course, pure fabrication by my runaway brain.

Gram and my dad both tried to convince me of her reality, how my mother went to the hospital after that particularly bad night when she walked into the water. Then voluntarily checked herself into a facility where she could take walks on sun-fed grass and talk to professionals that helped her quiet her demons. The rational side of me knows the woman who gave me to the world is in a good place, but it’s the small pushed-away part of me that thinks she must be in an ancient asylum, caught in restraints and medicated hazes. Because if she’s trapped in a place where she can’t think straight or talk out loud, then I forgive her for not coming back for me. But if her feet are free enough to feel the warm green grass push up between her toes each spring, how can I forgive her for all the seasons she stayed away?