The Rattled Bones(43)

“Can I come by tonight?”

I almost say yes, but I don’t want anyone visiting but the girl. I won’t be afraid this time. I’ll listen to her. Maybe ask her if she knew my mother, if she knows the Water People. If she is a Water Person. “Tomorrow would be better.”

“Not for me.”

I tickle him at his ribs. “This isn’t all about you.”

Reed separates us, but holds my waist at arm’s length, a sly smile at his lips. “Why not? Why can’t it all be about me?”

I smile.

“You’re sure this”—he thumbs toward Sam’s site—“isn’t anything to worry about?”

“I promise there’s nothing to worry about.” I tell Reed this full truth. I don’t want to hold Sam the way I’m holding Reed. Still, I’m hungry for the way Sam makes the world new for me, the way he’s my only connection to the girl right now. And maybe, to my mother.

Reed sets another kiss to my forehead. “Your moon?”

“Always.”

When I return to the dig site, Sam’s working the area of soil that held the small piece of redware. “Everything okay with the boyfriend?”

“More than okay.” But is this really true? Why have I been holding so much back from Reed?

“Is it me?” Sam’s rolling the earth on his screen so that the loose pebbles circle the edges.

“No. And yes.”

“Complicated?”

“What isn’t?”

“Too right.” Sam gives a short chuckle. He stands, comes to my side. He smells of the sun and the sea and the salted earth, so much that’s familiar. “But us spending time together complicates things more for you? Because I kind of get the vibe that there’s a lot that’s complicated for you, and I don’t want to be the person who adds to that.”

“You’re not.” Reed is. I am. This island, it’s history.

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“That’s good to hear, because I would totally lose in a fight with that dude.”

A soft smile spreads across my face. “It won’t come to that.”

“My ego thanks you.”

“Sam? I do need to get home. There’s this . . . well, I need to talk to my gram.” There’s only six weeks until the start of school.

“About Malaga?”

“No. A private thing.”

He takes a step back, nods me toward Fairtide. “Then what are you still doing here?”





CHAPTER THIRTEEN


When I return home, I shower and get a text from Hattie: Did any Coast Guard hotties board your boat today?

Me: sadly, no

Hattie: What a waste

Me: why do I even bother going out to sea?

Hattie: IKR? Unless you can lick the face of one of those GORGE boys, what’s the point????

Me:

It feels good to joke with Hattie. Do the normal things like everything is normal.

I brew St. John’s Wort for mental clarity.

I ask Gram to the small front parlor so she’s away from her kitchen, the chores that keep her busy in that space. I need her full concentration.

Our parlor was created when formal visits were customary. I know the walls have heard their share of difficult conversations. Births, deaths, hardships, and celebrations. Maybe even discussions on the fate of Malaga Island residents. Did my ancestors support profit or humanity? I want to think the latter, but I know it’s naive. Every early Maine settler fought hard against the harshness of the climate. I’ve always believed that the struggle against the elements was enough to unite us along the coast, even today. But Malaga’s history tells the opposite truth.

Gram joins me, takes a seat in the wingback chair. I grew up knowing the story of each one of our well-used antiques, but that chair was different. I was young when it arrived from Portland, brought by an elderly man who drove it to our doorstep saying Gram’s grandfather had saved his family from starvation when that old man was a small boy. I remember the story not making sense: How could the thin, wrinkled man with his missing tooth and heavy limp have ever been a young boy?

That man told me and Dad and Gram about the winter my great-grandfather stocked his family’s shed with salted cod and crammed their cellar with potatoes. I want to believe my family helped the islanders in a similarly charitable way. Or maybe the islanders helped my family.

The old man said he could never repay the debt, but wanted to give us a chair he’d crafted with his own hands nearly sixty years ago. And his chair was beautiful. My small fingers traced the carvings on the dark wood arms, followed the lines of intricate fish forever swimming upstream within that wood. It was a year later when I found my great-grandfather’s name carved into the inside of one of the legs. NATHANIEL IKABERTH MURPHY: SAVER OF MEN. I’d been under the chair looking for a rogue Lego but I’d found a piece of my family history. I never told Gram or Dad about his name being carved there. I liked thinking I had a secret tucked away in my very own house.

Now I think my family has always had secrets.

I pass Gram her mug, and she settles against the rise of the handcrafted chair. “Let’s get to your business, Rilla. I’m not growing younger.”

“I need you to tell me about our finances.” Counting other people’s money—making assumptions about what they can and can’t afford—is something Dad raised me never to do. But now I’m asking after his money, what he left. “Can we even afford to send me to school?”