The Rattled Bones(78)

The bundle cries. The same cry as that first day. It starts as a stutter at first, as if the infant is not sure what sound to make. The cry grows to a howl. Loud enough to drown out the shrieks from the other side of the island, the wretched screams that rise into the night. Agnes unties the boat from its hitch and drags the dory into the sea. She lifts her white dress around her ankles and raises her foot into the boat. She sings to her baby, trying to soothe her screeching child. Come here, come here, my dear, my dear, won’t you co—

Agnes has one foot in the skiff, the other raising. But she’s ripped back from the edge of her dory, and it is only then that I see the hulking man nearly two times her size. His shoulders are wide and strong, and he snaps Agnes out of the water as if she is no heavier than a flower.

Agnes struggles but doesn’t scream. She kicks at him, flails her one free arm. The man drags her up the shore. He pins her to the earth, his hands locked over her wrist. My body blazes with the same memory. The man on top of me. His smoky smell. His weight. His rage.

“Ya filthy thing. Trying ta escape, were ya?”

He claws at her hips and arms and legs. I feel the attack in my bones. I remember the attack in my bones.

He tries to bind her arms with the rope he pulls from his waist. She struggles; her dress rips.

The man reaches to tie her arms and his weight shifts. Agnes wrestles free. She scrambles to the shore, her feet tripping from her speed. She reaches the water. The infant in the open boat. “I am here,” she says. “Do not worry, my dear. I am here.”

The man is at the water in seconds, his fine shoes soaked with the sea. He yanks Agnes by her long braids. He tosses her to the shore as if she is weightless, as if she is nothing. The boat slips deeper out to sea, and the child wails louder for her mother.

The man pushes Agnes to the ground, her skull splitting against a rock. I hear the crack, see the way her head spills to the side, her eyes rolling to watch her child disappear with the currents.

I want to scream. I want to rescue the child. Sam feels me tug away from him, and his grip tightens around my hand. Stay, it tells me. There is nothing you can do, it tells me.

We watch the blood drain from Agnes’s wound as life leaves her eyes. She is dying. She reaches toward the sea with her raw, clawing fingers. They are bloody, caked with dirt. She sings a song, Come here, come here, my dear, my dear, but the boat is caught in the current, drifting from the shore, drifting to the open black sea.

Blood pools around Agnes’s head, crawling into her braids. Light washes from her face.

The man tosses Agnes over his shoulder, her lifeless body no different from a sack of grain. The man kicks at the ground, driving his heels against the grass until he’s unearthed a large slice of stone. His adrenaline rakes the stone along the earth, digging away the soil and removing hunks of stone until he has formed a thin pocket of earth. He drops Agnes into the hole. Her hair cascades around her face, seaweed gathered in the tangles of her hair.

The man kicks dirt and stones over Agnes.

And he turns on her shallow grave.

He runs. Toward the burning homes, the islanders imprisoned on boats.

I say her name. “Agnes.” It’s the only word that seems big enough in this moment. No other words will do.

I turn to tell Agnes that I’m sorry, that I finally understand what she needs, but she is gone. The hand that brought me here has vanished.

As are the fires that consumed the island only moments ago.

The screams have disappeared.

There is only one small voice that rises out over the waves. The small cry of a small voice. A child. Set to sea alone.

Eleanor.

I look to Sam. I want him to tell me this has all been a dream. He shakes his head, and I know this wasn’t a dream.

By the time we return to Fairtide, I’m not willing to let Sam go. We sit on the dock and hold one another through the entire night. We watch Malaga. We listen to the waves lick the shore, the water flowing toward us but then retreating, as if it decided it would rather be at sea. We sit under the all-seeing moon.

We say all the words that pass between us, all the words that could never change what happened.

Before the sun rises, I stand. “I need to talk to my gram.”

He nods. “I’ll be here if you need me.”

“I’ll need you.” I stand, face him. I’ll need him to process all of this. To make sure I always remember this story. To make sure it always lives in the world. “I’m certain of it.”

Sam kisses my forehead. He stamps his warmth there, and it feels electric. Like the buzzing of bees.

I go inside and throw on the light in the stairwell. I walk slowly up each step. I study my ancestors to see their resemblance passed down through generations to Gram, me, my mother. But the old photos are grainy and will never tell me what I need to know.

I kneel next to Gram’s bed and watch her sleep. The sun begins to rise outside, and the soft light spills across her room. It is when I see Gram’s face in its purest calm, lost in the depths of sleep, that I see Agnes. The shape of her mouth, her high cheeks and soft jaw. Gram’s skin looks so brown in the hesitant light. Dark like Agnes. And that is when I know for certain.

The baby in the boat.

Agnes haunting the women in my family for decades.

The screaming infant was Gram.

Her unmanned boat made it to the shores of Fairtide that night. Brought by the currents that always deliver the sea to our door.