The Rattled Bones(38)

“Who are you?” My words are a desperate plea.

The girl—this real girl who is no dream—puts a finger to her lips. The skin around her nail is rough red from the abrasive sea, the battering cold. Dirt clings under her nails. “Shhh.” She whispers now, this soft command floating out from behind her raw finger.

I don’t scream. I can’t scream.

I want to run from my room.

But I want something more.

Something bigger than my fear.

I want her to tell me who she is, what she wants from me.

I memorize her every feature. Her braids long and black, as shiny as deep-water seaweed. They fall around her shoulders as if she were underwater. Except in one place. One side of her hair is matted, like she spent the night sleeping on that side. No, not matted. Flattened, smashed. One side of her skull is sunken. There’s a scrape along the flesh of her bottom lip, a deep cut that will take a long time to heal. Her mouth opens. I hold my breath, waiting for her words. Waiting for this girl to speak. Waiting for madness to take me. My body tightens with the need to yell at her, tell her to go away, but the word that forms is “Please.”

She turns and drops down the trellis. I bend through the window, my eyes tracing her every step as she disappears under the still dark space under the maple tree, tendrils of her dress fading, vanishing.

Even though I feel her here still. Panic sends me to my bedside, searching the pillowcase where she’d lain her head. I’m careful with my movements, precise not to disturb the blankets. I scan the pillow. See a tangle of the girl’s few long hairs. The clump is thin and wavy but with something stuck to its end. Dirt? It flakes off when I touch it, caking apart like dried blood.

She is real.

The girl.

Or, she was real.

I return to the window. Slam it closed. I shut my room tight so it’s only me and my memory of the girl.

And that’s when I see the orange bloom she’s left behind.

But it’s not the flower that chills my nerves. It’s the words scratched into the wood of my windowsill.

FIND ME





CHAPTER TWELVE


I take to the sea, knowing I can’t keep my private things quiet any longer. I need Sam’s help, and I need to figure out how to ask for it.

“You look sore,” I tell Sam when he climbs slowly aboard the Rilla Brae. The sky has let go of the dark, the sun carving out the line of the horizon. I’m late getting on the water. It took too long to recover from the girl’s visit, the flower she left behind.

Sam leans back, one hand crooked against his hip, like a man four times his age. “I’ve never ached so much in my life.”

“First days on the water are tough.”

“You Mainers and your understatements.”

I offer him my thermos. “It’s meadowsweet and marshmallow root. It’ll help soothe your joints and muscles.”

“Do you have a vat of it, then?”

“There’s always more if you need it.”

He takes the hot tea as I put the Rilla Brae in gear, head out toward the first string. I watch Malaga until it slips behind us. Its shores are empty today, but I think the girl is here. In the sea below us? Watching me from somewhere I can’t see? A chill rakes my spine, and somewhere in my exhaustion I feel an unprecedented surge of pride for my mother. For her realizing that she needed help, and for seeking help. For dealing with her slippery thoughts the only way she knew how. Maybe she needed help to protect what was real: me, Dad, her mother. In this flutter of pride I think maybe she walked away to spare us, save us. In this moment I’m grateful to her. In this moment I begin to understand how walking away could have equaled love. Protection.

“So I woke up with the profound desire not to slow you down today,” Sam says.

“You didn’t slow us.”

“Again. Mainers and their understatements.”

“Okay, maybe yesterday was a little slow. But that only makes us even.”

“How do you figure?”

“I didn’t get you back to the island like I promised. You missed a whole day of scientisting.”

He gives a deep, full laugh. “Scientisting, huh? Real serious stuff.” He blows at his thermos cup. “I didn’t feel like I was missing out on anything yesterday. It’s important to me that your gram knows she can trust me out here, even if I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“You’ll know more in eight hours. We’ve got a hundred traps to haul and rebait.”

“Then what are you waiting for?” Sam sets his mug onto the console and pulls on Dad’s rubber overalls. I’m oddly comforted by the enthusiasm in his voice, and the rubber boots on his feet.

I navigate around the buoys in this swath of water, careful not to catch a line in my propeller. Settled by the fact that Old Man Benner’s buoys aren’t anywhere near my strings today. There are a few boats already pulling pots. I don’t miss the way each lobsterman’s chin raises at Sam, trying to get a better look at this stranger from away.

We haul and reset most of my traps by late afternoon, and though I’d love to get another dozen in the water, I head to the wharf.

“Calling it a day?” Sam says.

I maneuver my boat against the wharf. I throw her into neutral, cut the engine. “I don’t want to be the captain that doesn’t keep her promises. I need to get you out to Malaga.” But it’s my need that draws me to Malaga.