The Rattled Bones(80)

It’s like our whole world has let out a deep breath. The peninsula is quiet, focused on the hard work of getting by.

My sleep has been dreamless.

Maybe the quiet will reach all the way to my mother, bring her peace.

I find I miss messages on the windowsill.

I find I miss my dad less some days. More on others. I think he would have been proud of my great-grandparents for bringing an orphan under their care, giving her family. Taking Gram in would have been an enormous risk in the days and years following the men with their torches.

Gram was chosen, in the same way Sam was chosen, and that still feels like something more than a miracle. And Agnes was no different from me. A fisherman’s daughter. I hope I will be a fierce mother the way she was a fierce mother. Someday.

I hope Agnes can know peace now.

Sam and I head inside the kitchen, where Gram has made entirely too many cupcakes for my going-away party, as if she couldn’t decide which flavor to bake. I pull up one that I think is butterscotch under its chocolate frosting. Gram gives me the evil eye, but she can’t swat my hand away from the dessert since she’s busy lugging her record player to the deck. Brenda Sherfey is right behind her, a stack of ?The Who records in her arms. Sam helps them with their loads.

I lick the frosting and my mouth floods with the sugary wave. The house is covered in balloons and streamers, and Hattie’s still not done plastering the kitchen’s thick, low beams.

“I’m going to miss this.” Hattie’s intent on the end of the streamer she’s taping to the ceiling and doesn’t meet my eyes.

“You and Gram can throw me a send-off party next year too if you like.”

“So you’re definitely going, then?” She jumps off the wobbling chair and unrolls a few additional feet of the crepe paper.

“Ha-ha.”

Hattie winks. “Just don’t forget about us little people.”

She doesn’t know about my family’s connection to Malaga. I visited the graves at Pineland without her, those five lonely stones nearly disappearing into the earth and grass. I walked the grounds and saw the large, recent memorial marker acknowledging the plight of Malaga residents. But the marker, the bodies. They’re still in the wrong place. Too far from Malaga.

“I’ll visit,” Hattie says. “Check out all the cute guys with the big brains.”

“I’ll expect it.” I know Hattie won’t be down to Rhode Island. More than half the families on this peninsula will never leave the county we live in, the county they were born in. Still, it’s good knowing Hattie wants to come. And who knows? Maybe she’ll surprise me. It wouldn’t be the first time.

I move the chair next to Hattie and stand on it as she hands me the crepe streamers. She rips off a piece of tape, and I affix the decoration to the ceiling. “Four years is no time at all, Hattie. And it’s really just ten months if you think about it. Hell, its two months till I’ll be home for Thanksgiving and then again for Christmas. Then spring break, then summer. You’ll practically be sick of me by then.” I jump down.

“Not possible.”

We move to the next random spot, and I tape up another loop of paper streamer.

“It’s hard knowing that you won’t be coming back.”

“But I wi—”

“I mean, I know you’ll be here. You’ll physically come back, but you’ll be different, Rills. You know it. Like how we always talked about the ways we wanted to change the world.” She hesitates, and then, “And how we wanted the world to change us.”

Hattie and I would often dream of a train station in Anywhere, Europe, and how the songs of a dozen languages would dance around our ears. How we’d walk streets where no one looked like we did. Visit a village in the Andes and let the newness of food and thin air wake our senses.

“It’s the way it’s supposed to be, Rills. College will change you. You’ll come back thinking our tiny peninsula is backward and tired. You’ll hate that we have no diversity. You’ll miss the foreign foods.”

“I’m only going to Rhode Island, Hatt.”

She lowers her eyes before drawing them up to meet mine. Her gaze is wet, already mourning. “You know what I mean.”

I do. Everything will be different once I leave because leaving a place always changes a place.

Hattie hugs me then, holds me for longer than she’s ever held me. We press together, all eleven years of our laughter, our tears, our fears, and our dreams. They melt between us, our stories.

There’s a knock at the door.

“You go ahead and get that. I’ll finish up.” Hattie waves me off and I open the door to guests. The house fills quickly, and our company overflows to the grass, the deck. Reed hasn’t showed, and I’m not sure he will, despite my invitation. It’s strange to love someone so deeply and then not be a part of their lives. Still, his love is in me, like each of my gathered stories.

Gram comes to stand beside me as I step outside. The sun is high, and the breeze is chilled. The long green lawn fills with people from all over the peninsula with drinks in their hands and Malaga in their sights. It’s hard not to hear a group chatting about the discovery out there last month.

“People will be talking about Malaga for a while.”

“Only seems right.” Gram takes my hand. “It’s the forgetting that’s wrong.”