The Rattled Bones(29)

Hattie sleeps next to me.

I pull air into my chest and let my lungs fill. My fingers search the stillness of the mattress below me. I peel my mind from the dream, layers of fear still binding me in their thick wrap.

That is when I feel it, the burn at my wrist.

Raw and angry and on fire.

I’m careful not to wake Hattie as I switch on my light, rub the handcuff of skin that’s red, angry, screeching. The deep heat rages all the way through to my wrist bones, makes me curl into its pain. I tuck my arm into my stomach and try to still my mind. Try to erase the dead girl with the seaweed hair. She is not real. My eyes catalog the things that are: my books, my dresser, my bed. Me, in this room. My friend next to me. The girl from the sea was a dream, nothing more. Still, I can’t help think of the Water People, those mysterious people who called to my mother from the deep.

Maybe they were as real as the band of burn on my wrist.

Maybe they are coming for me, too.

*

I dress and tiptoe to the kitchen, where I rummage for the tin of Gram’s homemade calendula flower ointment. I smooth the salve over the charred skin, carefully dabbing, letting the thick balm sink its coolness into my skin. Gram enters the room cat-quiet. She grabs my hand, inspects my wrist.

“Where’d ya go and get a burn like that?”

I slide my hand from her grasp and lie. “The engine.” It’s the only lie I can remember telling my grandmother, but how can I tell her the truth? I’m distinctly aware that burns don’t manifest themselves from the dream world. And was it a dream? Its details cling to me even now, more like a vision. And when did I wake up? Before or after the vision? I shake my head quickly, still unable to make sense of time and place.

Gram’s harrumph tells me she suspects I’m hiding something. She knows the engine wouldn’t make a collar of a burn. “Best wrap that wound.”

She shuffles past me, setting a few jars of her jams onto the table, their glass lids tinking as I inhale the heavy yeast smell of rising bread. I tuck down my questions, my fears about the swell of my wrist, the girl from the deep. Or Malaga. Or both.

Are my dreams—my visions—where the dead and the living meet?

I conjure my best everyday voice, let it lift over the throbbing of the burn. “Smells amazing.”

“I should hope so, seeing as they are your favorite.” Gram piles biscuits into a wicker bowl lined with a red cloth napkin. “Reed not staying for breakfast?”

My heart stutters. “Reed?”

Gram fusses with the jams, sticking a small jelly spoon inside each clear jar. “You’re eighteen, Rilla. No sense having that boy sneak out any longer.” She mumbles something about him breaking his neck on the trellis, but I can barely register what she’s saying.

“You know Reed stays over?” How long has she known?

She turns, hand on her hip. “You’re old enough to know I’ve got my eyes open, Rilla. Now sit.” She pushes a plate in front of me. “Ya tell Reed to use the front door when he leaves in the mornings. My roses shouldn’t have to bear the brutality of his clodhoppers after today.”

I reach for a too-hot biscuit.

“Don’t ya look so shocked. I might be old, but I still see things.” Gram splits her flaky roll with the push of her thumb, pours honey along the exposed insides.

“D-did Dad know?”

She knits her brows in my direction. “Ya know I’d never be that careless with his heart.”

Her words freeze me. There were times I was careless with my dad’s heart, when I yelled at him, throwing blame for the most insignificants bits of living. My curfew. Getting up so early.

I massage the skin above my wrist, the burn stinging deeper now, almost familiar, comforting. “Hattie stayed last night, not Reed.”

Gram looks pleased. “I’m glad to hear it. Ya two girls are the opposite sides of a clamshell, made to be stuck together. And has Hattie had the pleasure of meeting your sternman?”

“Not yet.”

“You’ll bring Sam by tonight, yes?”

“Yes.”

Gram packs biscuits in a warmer, part of the deal we made before I went to my room last night. Gram promised to make extra biscuits if I brought Sam to Fairtide to meet her. “I’m packing enough for the both of ya.”

She means Sam, but I hear the familiar words: The both of ya. Me and Dad. He is everywhere with us still. His life is woven into this kitchen, into our habits. And I can’t ignore the way my heart thunders with the suspicion that my mother is here too, her madness visiting me with a power all its own.





CHAPTER TEN


When I step aboard the Rilla Brae, my legs remember how they steadied against the rolling waves as the dead girl crept toward me. The girl bringing death the same way the universe brought Dad’s. Dark. Horrible. Unexpected. The sea spreads its secrets around me, its depths another world.

Today is the first time I hesitate at the Rilla Brae’s ignition. I can’t remember ever pausing before bringing the engine to life, but now I fear what I’ll pull from the sea, as if the dream were a premonition. And it’s the second time in as many weeks that I’ve feared the water.

But I hear Gram’s advice about never setting a place for fear at your table. I turn the key and calm with the familiar vibration of the boat. I slip into my rubber coveralls and focus only on fishing. The ocean refuses to accommodate doubt. “All it takes is one wave, Rilla. One wave and one moment when you aren’t paying attention. Survival on the ocean is fragile.” Even then Dad warned me of the slip of time between life and death. In those days I never imagined we’d exist on opposite sides of the divide.