The Rattled Bones(71)

I remember Reed’s anger, how it overwhelmed him the last time he was in my room. The fisherman in me wants to ask him if he cut my traps. But the girl in me knows it doesn’t matter.

Two years.

So many private things.

“You said a lot of things when you were here last, and maybe that’s enough.” Even as I know it’s time to move on, I want to go to him and hold him, the same way I’ve done so many times. But the space between us feels too distant to close. “I’ll expect a copy of your diploma, of course.” I try for light, supportive. I try to remember all the good things I love about Reed.

“So that’s it? We’re done?”

I search his eyes. I can’t ever forgive him for the things he said about me or my mother, and I hate the way I suspect his capacity for becoming too much like his grandfather. But mostly, I don’t have the energy to fight with Reed anymore. “I think that’s the way it has to be. I think it’s what you want too, if you’re really honest with yourself.”

“It’s not what I want.”

“It’s what I need.”

Reed nods, a small one. He walks behind me to the door. Not the trellis, the door. “Will I see you around?”

I turn. “Of course.”

He lowers his head and steps out into the hallway. I hear his words as he walks away: “Counting the minutes.”

Sadness rises in me. And relief, too. My thoughts wrestle somewhere between my past and future. An in-between place, Sam would say.

I go to the window and stare out at Malaga.

I press my hand to the carved messages Agnes left for me. I watch for any sign of her, but she doesn’t come. She lets the quiet settle around me. She lets me let go. Of Reed. Of pieces of my past. Of fear.





CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE


Sam’s car arrives right at five o’clock the next morning. I dress, pull my hair into a messy ponytail. I head down the stairs, past the black-and-white photographs that hang along the stairwell. My ancestors peer at me through the sepia-toned edges of the past.

Sinclair and Thomas Murphy in their WWII uniforms before they left for Normandy. My frail great-grandmother at the water’s edge, Malaga behind her in the middle distance. The photo of my gram, the earliest photo I’ve ever seen of her. She’s an infant, bundled near the fire, her face satisfied with sleep. There’s a small Christmas pine on the table behind infant Gram, presents wrapped with plain paper, twine bows.

I stare at her photo now as I did last night, knowing she’s the connection to Agnes. Did my great-grandmother name my gram after the child from Malaga? Did something so terrible happen to Agnes’s infant that my great-grandmother wanted to honor her memory? Or could Agnes have given birth to my grandmother?

I squint to the photograph, notice a carving on the button set at the bonnet’s neck. Only three lines are visible, the horizontal lines of the E.

For Eleanor.

The black-and-white photo is too deteriorated to know for sure if my grandmother wears the same bonnet my great-grandmother gifted the child Agnes held in her arms.

I go to the kitchen, where Sam waits with Gram. The room is a fog of steamed oats.

“How ya feeling this morning?” It’s a question Gram can’t stop asking, and I really can’t blame her, considering.

“Right as rain.” I kiss Gram on the cheek and feel the warmth of her soft skin. Her skin. What was it that her mother said about the infant Eleanor’s skin? A blood endowment for the youngster in this hateful climate. Gram’s mother knew about the racial tension building toward Malaga residents. The awfulness of everything that happened to the islanders swarms me. It’s why my great-grandmother wouldn’t open the door to Agnes. Because of the color of her skin. And the growing intolerance toward the people of Malaga.

There’s so much I want to tell Gram, ask Gram. But how? How do I tell her anything when I only have questions? And how would she feel about the possibility that our family—the Brae and Murphy lines that she’s so proud of—might not be our blood family at all? Our ancestors—Sinclair and Thomas Murphy, everyone who came before—what if we aren’t blood kin? Because that’s our story if my gram was the infant tucked so close to Agnes’s heart.

And if Gram was the infant in Agnes’s arms, who brought her to Fairtide? And why?

“Be safe out on the water today,” Gram says.

Be safe. They are the same words my great-grandmother told Agnes.

They’re the words every fishing family extends like a prayer.

I grab the keys to the Rilla Brae, and Sam follows me to the dock. The mist is low on the water today. Its haze creeps in front of us, summoning us toward the island, the same way fog brought the Water People to my mother. Called her to the Water People.

My grip tightens on the wheel of the Rilla Brae, prepared now for the unexpected. I scan the sea around me, a gray and unyielding mass. There is so much more underneath, not just the ecosystem I’ve studied my entire life, but the otherworldliness that lurks just below the surface.

The just-waking sun guides us to the shores of Malaga. The dawn, a time of the in-between. The tide is low and our boots get pulled by tidal mud, each step suctioned by the grabbing, wet earth. The air is layered with the smell of clams and salt. I pull it into my lungs, my blood, letting it wake all my senses.