The Rattled Bones(27)

“But this is our home, Hattie. Our history.”

“That’s exactly why it should stay in the past.” She turns her head to face me. “Ever since we were kids, you’ve had one foot in another place, Rills. Your future, your college away, traveling. I always knew that would happen for you. Just like I knew it would never happen for me.”

“Hatt—”

“Let me finish.” She holds up her hand. “I have to live here, Rills. I’ll never live anywhere else. So I need to see the good and only the good.”

I get it. Hattie’s always joked about being a statistic, even though I know it kills her to think of herself that way. She’s got a barely present mom who had her when she was fourteen. Hattie’s mom lives off aid from the state, if you could call the life Hattie’s mom provides living. And Hattie’s so bound to her dependent mother, no matter how many times she forgets to buy food or pay the heating bill. No matter how many of Hattie’s dreams her mom has shattered.

“I’m here too, Hatt. Maybe even for good now.”

Her eyes go steely. “Don’t you ever let me hear you say that, Rilla Brae. If I have to boot you hard enough to get your too-smart-to-stay-here ass to Rhode Island, I will. I’m not above it and you know it.”

Hattie’s belief in me has never faltered. I wish she could have a future with more choices, but for all her wanting to leave our small peninsula, I know Hattie could never abandon her mom. And Hattie is the strongest person I know. “I’m so sorry you couldn’t tell me and that I wasn’t there for you. But I get it.”

“You do?”

“Of course.” Families. Love. Truth. All so complicated. “Would you go with me? To see the graves?”

Hattie’s face pales. “Aw, come on, Rills. Don’t ask me to do that.”

“I can go alone.”

“No. I’ll go if that’s what you really want. I just don’t see what good it will do.”

“It probably won’t do any good, but I have to see for myself.”

“Then I’ll be the Thelma to your Louise.”

I squeeze her hand. “I’ve missed you,” I tell her. I’ve missed my sister.

“Same.” She drops her head to the pillow, stares at my ceiling. “But you need to remember that all that matters is you, Rills. You and your future. Getting to college. Getting out of here.”

She’s right. And wrong, too. Because the truth of Malaga matters. The fate of Malaga residents isn’t just something that happened to innocent people. It was a tragedy inflicted on innocent people by other people—the families that still populate these shores. Maybe even my family.

“Sometimes I think hell isn’t a consequence, Rills. It’s not a place you go to if you mess up bad enough on earth. I think hell might be here. In our every day.”

She’s talking about her own life now, how she’s rarely seen her mother smile. And I know she’s ashamed that her mother has never worked a job. Hattie doesn’t know what it’s like to have pride in her family, and I think she’s never been able to conjure that pride in herself. Not after years of being told that she’s the reason their home life is crap. Hattie says it’s the alcohol that makes her mother say things like that, but I hear the fear that sits behind Hattie’s words. Like maybe she knows that’s how her mom really feels and cheap beer only loosens her tongue enough to say the truth.

“But tomorrow’s another day, right, Rills?”

“My dad always said tomorrows arrive lighter.”

“You’re lucky you got a dad like that.”

I pull her hand to my side. “I know, Hatt. You deserve better than what you got.”

“I got you, Rills. That’s enough.” She slinks down into the covers. “I need sleep. See you in the morning?”

“You getting up at five?”

“Um, that would be a hell no.”

I give a small laugh. “Figured. I’ll be quiet when I leave.” I place the moleskin on my shelf and turn out the light. “Thanks for coming over.”

“Thanks for being kickass.”

“Thanks for showing me how.”

Hattie’s body is warm next to mine, so close, but I can’t help how her story distances us in a new way. There’s a hunger in me to know what Alice Barter regretted in the last days of her life. I want to know the whole story of Malaga Island, everybody’s version. Even the version that’s the horrible truth.

“Good night, Hatt.”

“?’Night, Rills.” Hattie rolls tighter against me, like we did when we were little. Back when Dad would slip us candy to eat in bed and we’d wake with Junior Mints and gummy worms stuck in our hair, Gram always there to wash and comb out the sugar.

I wait until Hattie’s breath rises and falls with sleep before I open Sam’s notebook again, read every article he’s collected. Hattie and her grandmother’s failing mind were right.

Eight of the forty Malaga residents were abducted and forcibly committed to the state institution. One, a healthy infant. Three of them children. One because he couldn’t identify a telephone, something he wouldn’t have seen in his seven years of island life. For that this young boy was labeled “feeble-minded” and ripped from Malaga and the sea and his family and taken to an isolated place, where he died forty-three years later. Six of the eight people who were committed died at the institution.