The Rattled Bones(67)

“Rilla.” Sam reaches for my hand. I feel his warmth wrap my fingers.

“My gram called an ambulance, and they brought her to the hospital. But she’s stayed away for twelve years. Maybe she never wanted to be with me at all.”

“I can’t believe that’s true.”

I did. All these years. Until now.

Sam squeezes my hand.

“Now I think maybe she wanted to protect me from her, or maybe my mother thought she took the Water People with her—you know? To keep me safe.” Protected. “But I think she saw my girl. I think my mother was trying to find my girl.”

“Same as you.”

Same, but different, too.

“Just promise me you won’t walk into the sea like that.”

“I won’t.” I would never. But maybe my mother thought that once too.

*

At home, I research everything about the boatbuilder’s family. There’s a photo of him and his wife at the front door of their small one-room house, two children at their feet. Their clothes are clean but worn. The children are shoeless. The man has his arm around his wife’s waist, as if to protect her. UNIDENTIFIED CHILDREN, the photo says. Like so many others. I wait for the song to rise, but its melody never fills the air. I wait for some connection to speak to me, but there’s nothing.

Only the hard wind churning up from a swelled sea.

I fall asleep with the images of Malaga all around me.

I dream of swimming.

I poke my seal-slick head from the water, and an old dory coasts along the waves. The girl’s inside, rowing from the peninsula to the island. I swim behind her. The sides of her boat are low like the one Sam described from the book he discovered when he was twelve in the desert, low enough to scoop fish from the sea. I swim my head higher and see the fat bundle on the empty seat at the back of the boat. I think it’s the girl’s baby until I see the rounded cloth tied at her breast, the child at her heart. As the girl pulls the oars against the sea, she leans back, her infant rounding toward the moon. And in the spray of light that the moon lends the surface of the sea, I notice the blooms of the Flame plant, their bright orange flowers like fire in the boat, its bulbs and roots wrapped in burlap as if the uprooted plant were a gift.

When I wake I go straight to Gram’s front garden and let my fingers stroke the soft emerging bud of the Flame plant—the plant named for fire. I break off a flowering stem to show Sam. Because it’s in this garden that I realize I shouldn’t be looking for a girl.

We need to be looking for a plant.





CHAPTER NINETEEN


I want nothing more than to search the island for the Flame Freesia at first light, but I have to haul traps. Sam sets the gaff hook on the first buoy in our string and starts to pull. Immediately I know something is wrong. There’s no tug at the opposite end of the line. The rope slicks too quickly through the pulley, pulling up only seaweed.

“What happened?”

“We lost a string.” One string, three traps.

“How?”

I pull up the rope, fan my thumb over the sprig of tufted rope that sprays wild as a snipped braid. “Someone cut the line.”

“What? Why?”

“Happens all the time. It’s a shitty way to settle a dispute.” I scan the sea for other boats, one that might be watching too closely, but of course there’s no one. Cowards never stick around.

“You think it was Benner? Retaliation for what you did to his traps?”

“Most likely.” But a small worry grows inside of me that this sabotage could have been Reed because of the things he said—the argument that may have been too harsh for us to come back from. I shake off the thought. “There’s no better way to tell someone they don’t belong on the water.” I set my course for the next buoy, my rage building toward Benner. “We need to check the next string.”

The next string is fine. The next thirty strings are fine. Sam and I band the keepers and it’s almost a good enough haul to calm my anger for anyone messing with my traps. Until Sam pulls a slack rope at the end of our run.

“Rilla?”

I join him at pulley. The last line is cut, just like the first line.

“This isn’t a coincidence, is it?”

“I’d say that’s about as far from a coincidence as you can get.” It’s Benner telling me girls don’t belong at sea. I know it the way any lobster fisherman would know.

“What happens to the traps?”

“They’re ghost traps now. They’ll sit on the bottom of the sea forever.”

“With lobsters inside?”

“The tiny ones might crawl out, but the big ones get stuck in there.”

“And they die?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes the trapped lobsters attract new lobsters to climb in and one cannibalizes the other. No one really knows how long something like that can go on.”

“Not good.”

“Arizonians and their understatements.” I toss the buoy into the back of the boat to join the severed line from the first string. “The sea bottom is littered with ghost traps.”

“I’m sorry, Rilla.”

I thrust forward on the throttle. “Nothing you need to be apologizing for unless you’re the one who cut my line.”