The Rattled Bones(28)

There’s a Harper’s Magazine article from the time: THE QUEER FOLK OF THE MAINE COAST2—and recently, a website named for the island, its header: MALAGA ISLAND: A STORY BEST LEFT UNTOLD.3

But I can’t imagine any story being better for being silenced.

Researchers claim that a few islanders built simple rafts after the notice of eviction was served. They floated their homes to more hospitable shores. But the islanders’ biracialism and extreme poverty made them different, and difference is all anyone would’ve been able to see then.

I doubt there were more tolerant shores to find.

My community is no longer a peninsula with a proud fishing history; we are a peninsula whose fishermen rose up against other fishermen. And our discrimination was not quiet.

In newspapers, local grange halls, and places of worship, men shouted for the removal of other men, women, children. Their hatred shouted all the way to the statehouse, landing in the governor’s office. The governor wanted to build a hotel on the island, and so the scourge campaign began.

It’s the words in a recent article from the Portland Press Herald that break me: “The governor ordered the eviction of the community, and officials institutionalized eight residents, some for failing to identify a telephone. . . . Noobody has lived on the island since.”4

All that.

And nothing.

Nothing but loss.

I search the photos and articles for the girl with the brown skin and the white dress. The one who sang at the shore. The one who might know more about me than I know about myself.

But she is nowhere in these pages. A ghost.





CHAPTER NINE


The silver slice of moon cuts through the darkness. I’m on the solid deck of the Rilla Brae, the midnight sea surrounding me.

I hear my father in my head, his words reaching me from a great distance as an echo inside of an echo. “Bugs move at night, Rilla. Leave them be.” Fishermen know to let the stocks replenish.

Still, I’m fishing at night.

I know it’s wrong, and I head from the wheelhouse just as another voice soothes me, tells me that this is right. Come here, come here. Warmth spreads through my body, thickening. I look for the girl. My girl. The girl that holds more secrets than a midnight sea.

Is the song in my head, or is she here, singing?

I feel the buoy line in my hand, stretched across my palm. I tug at the rope, test its tautness. A trap pulls from the opposite end. I lean toward the water, drawing up the rope foot by foot. One hand over the other. Tendrils of seaweed cling to the braided twine, slicking through my fingers. The rope drags up the salt of the sea, the hard smell of fish and buried layers.

And then the line goes slack.

The frayed end of the rope is all that’s left in my grip. I stumble back, unsteady now on the deck of the Rilla Brae. I lean against the wheelhouse and stare at the shimmering black of the deep. My gear is gone. Lost to the sea, a ghost trap.

Until there’s a flicker of movement and a small splash as the trap’s metal corner cuts through the ocean’s surface. I peer over the side of the Rilla Brae. The trap is carried on the waves, impossibly floating—swimming—toward me. Crawling toward my boat.

Moonlight flickers at its wire edges. The trap bobs on a wave.

Under a wave.

On a wave.

Behind a wave.

Coming for me.

Then the sweet song of a voice that sings louder now: Come here, come here.

I stay.

Seaweed crowns the wire cage. It inches nearer. I flatten my hands against the boat’s fiberglass edge, lean over to greet this determined trap the way I have pulled thousands of traps before.

When it reaches me, the trap stops still, mere inches from my boat. My hands on the rail are heavy useless things. I can’t lift them.

The trap bobs, holding its place despite the push of the waves. It doesn’t bang against my boat. The cage hovers close but not too close. I will my arm to move, and my hand is set free of an unknown weight. I reach for the trap. The seaweed shifts. Its tangled tresses swim in the moonlight. Slither to the side. The seaweed is twisted with something darker, finer.

Hair.

My fingers rake at the long, swimming hair just as the mass of tangles slip.

Off of a girl’s round face.

My girl.

Her face green with the sea now.

Washed with time.

Her body is slack, forever heaped over my trap. Her lifeless arms drag at the sides, fingertips brushed by the lifting ocean. Something like air gets lodged in my lungs, but it’s colder. Unwelcome. I scream, but the sound never comes. It is just me and a floating dead girl and the night and the cold and the sea and the moon.

I tell myself to fall back, fall away from the edge of the boat. Into my boat. Away from her. But I know the dead girl senses my retreat, my beat of cowardice, and she will not let me leave her.

The dead girl’s eyes dart open.

Her hand rises from the deep, a serpent. Dark. Scaly. Forgotten. Her cold fingers lock onto the skin of my wrist.

Fire burns under her touch.

She pulls me to her, her dark cracked lips preparing to croak a whisper into my ear. I scream so that I can’t hear her words. I scream to drown out her message. I scream as she pulls me down to the cold black sea that forces the weight of its water and salt into my lungs.

I dart upright in bed, my sheets soaked with a panicked sweat.