The Rattled Bones(75)

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO


I make tea. Chamomile, lavender, linden, skullcap, and rose petals. I don’t know a recipe that can calm a haunting, so I throw it all in there. Anything to help the mind.

“Why did you paint her? Only her?” For years. “There were hundreds of paintings of the same girl. Why?”

Gram looks down at her hands, palms flat against the kitchen table, her cup between them. “She lived in my fingers. When she wanted to come out, I would put her on canvas.”

“She’s real, Gram. That girl you paint. She lived when you were very young. She lived out on Malaga before the islanders were evicted. Our family knew her. Your mother knew her. She laundered our family’s wash. She came to this house.”

“How do ya know this?”

The bees pollinating our stories.

The sea carrying a song.

“I’ve met her. The girl,” I say, and my gram’s face washes with white.

“That’s impossible. Ya said she lived on Malaga. That girl would be older than me now.”

“She’s real. Well, maybe not real, but she’s here.” I tell her the story of the island girl and her song, how she sang to me at the shores, how she sang to me underwater.

“What ya saying sounds like a ghost, Rilla.”

“I can’t say what she is, Gram, but she’s here. She can scratch messages into the wood on my windowsill and she can leave a flower in her wake. She can come to you so strongly that you need to put her to canvas. I can hear her song. That song can pull me to the sea, speak to me when I’m underwater.” I don’t tell her how she took me back to the past or how I know her name. I think too much might be too much for Gram.

“Rilla. The way ya are talking . . . ya sound like . . .”

I know who she’s comparing me to, just like I know she’d never make the comparison out loud.

“I know I do. At least, I think I can imagine.”

“Ya can’t imagine, Rilla. Ya can’t know how much you’re scaring me.”

“I don’t want to scare you, Gram.” I reach for her hand, sandwich it between mine. “I want to be done with being scared.”

“Tell me how ya do that, Rilla, and I will help. I promised your mother the same thing a lot of years ago.”

“I think something happened to that girl a very long time ago.” I remember the way her head was indented when she was waiting on my pillow, the seaweed caught in her curls. “Something terrible. She needs our help. I think she’s been trying to reach out to our family for a long time.”

“Why?”

“Because I think she’s kin.”

“Kin?”

“I’m pretty sure.”

Static churns on the VHF downstairs. I hear Sam’s handle scratching through the wavelength, calling to me.

“Go,” Gram tells me.

I head to the downstairs hall and pick up our VHF receiver. “Fairtide to USM research craft. Switch to channel sixteen. Over.”

I turn the dial, wait on channel sixteen.

The rain has thinned now, bouncing off the ocean. I watch raindrops play at Malaga’s beach, its granite mound. The drops turn to sparks as they hit the ground. These wet, trailing rains make fire as they connect with the soaked earth. Just a spittle, enough to drag at my sanity. I pop the receiver off its base and run outside. Rain flutters onto the lawn around my feet. Cool, wet rain. Until the raindrops ignite as they pluck against the grass. Each with a small pop of fire as if the grass and rain are stones rubbing sharply against each other. Sparking.

I radio Sam again and listen as static comes across the channel. The only response. Then it’s not static in the air, but the sound of fire sizzling against the waves. Thousands of crackles, each one a dancing flick of flame. Smoke from the snuffed sparks rises gently along the ocean, coats the water with a thickening fog. No, not fog. Smoke. Smoke from a fire that cannot possibly sit on top of a salted sea. The hot raindrops turn to rain again, the regular kind. I radio for Sam as I bend to the earth, press my hand against the wet grass. The soil holds heat, too much heat. I have to pull my hand away before the burn penetrates my skin. There’s no mistaking the thick charred smell that lifts from the ocean, carried on the current, lifted by the air. Smoke and fire mixed with salt.

And that smell of death holding its breath.

Then a light. The spotlight from a boat just off Malaga’s shores.

I know it’s Sam. I fear it’s Sam.

I run to the Rilla Brae, turn on her VHF. “This is the Rilla Brae to USM research craft. Over.”

Sam’s light illuminates the back of his boat, brightening its entire deck. I watch him, fearing the worst. I am a child again, watching my father go to sea without me. I am my great-grandmother watching her husband brave the ocean for fish, for lobster, for food to put food on their table. I am six watching my mother try to give herself to the Water People. I am Gram watching me come home that day with Dad in the wheelhouse, his slumped body too heavy for me to move from where he’d fallen. I am grief and hope and generations of fishing people, all tied around one beating heart.

I crank my key, push my engine hard.

The spotlight on Sam’s boat casts a spray of white onto the black waves and spins around him as if the bulb is set to rotate. I set my binoculars to the bridge of my nose, squint my eyes to separate the dark sea from the dark night. It is then I see that the bulb isn’t rotating; it’s the boat that’s spiraling.