August Isle

by Ali Standish

  The hairs on my neck stood up. I felt as though my heart was an alarm bell, pulsing a warning through my chest.

  I tore my gaze away and looked ahead, where a long wooden dock poked out into the water. Miraculously, Mr. Taylor’s boat was bobbing at the end of it. Relief swept through me.

  Soon, I had steered my boat close enough to reach out and grab the dock.

  I lifted myself up, and for just a moment, I let myself sit there, savoring the wood planks, dry and sturdy. I had sailed by myself from August Isle to Keeper’s Island. And I hadn’t drowned.

  Any other time, I might have felt so proud of myself, I could burst.

  But now I stood up, tied my boat to the moorings on the dock, and looked around uncertainly. I unclipped my life jacket and let it fall to my feet.

  “Mr. Taylor?” I called. Even though I knew he was my grandfather, it felt weird to call him anything else.

  There was no answer. His boat looked empty.

  I set off toward the beach.

  I walked slowly, because with every step I took, my dread seemed to grow. My eyes scanned the island. I could see the silhouette of the lighthouse looming over the trees beyond the beach. It looked like there was something else—some kind of hut—next to it, like a dog crouched next to its owner.

  Once I found myself standing on the sand, still warm from the day’s sun, I stopped. With a shiver, I remembered the story of the lighthouse keeper’s ghost. A trembling started in my heart and rippled out to my fingers and my toes.

  “Mr. Taylor?” I called again, louder this time. “Mr. Taylor? It’s Miranda!”

  When there was still no answer, I forced myself to keep walking, toward the trees.

  A sudden sound turned my head. A nearby clump of low palms began to rustle. I squinted, but I still couldn’t see what was making them move.

  “Mr. Taylor?” I called. My voice trembled now, too. “Is that you?”

  For a second, all was still. Then something emerged from the palms. Something that looked like a cloaked figure with its arms outstretched. Something that moved like no human I had ever seen. Something that began to shriek as it rushed toward me.

  I tried to scream, but the sound lodged in my throat. I found myself running back, back the way I had come. Except—where was the dock? I had run at a diagonal, and now it was too far to reach. If I wanted to escape, there was only one place to go.

  I hesitated for a single second. Then I darted straight into the surf. My scream finally found its way up, and as I ran into the black ocean, the sound of it filled the night.

  43

  I kept running until I was knee-deep in the water. Then my legs crumpled.

  Someone was pulling me, gripping my calves, tugging me out to sea.

  “No!” I cried. “Help!”

  A wave crashed over my head, filling my nose and mouth with seawater. My arms thrashed, my feet kicked, but I couldn’t seem to find my way to the surface.

  It kept getting farther away, and soon I felt myself growing tired. It was hard to make my limbs do what I wanted them to.

  After a while, they went still.

  For a long moment, I found myself cocooned in darkness. I somehow sensed that I was alone. Whatever had pulled me out into the water was gone now.

  A strange thought appeared in my mind.

  Wasn’t there something I was supposed to remember? Hadn’t I been trying to find something?

  The vision came to me from nowhere. A perfect starfish lying in the surf. I want that, I thought. It’s just like Cecil in the book!

  Don’t go into the waves, Miranda, said a voice. A boy’s voice. But whose?

  I was drifting, I realized. My thoughts were drifting. They weren’t making any sense. I needed to stay alert. To fight.

  But my lungs were burning, and I was already drifting again. Back, back, back . . .

  My hands shoot out through the water, but which way is up and which way is down?

  In my dream, it isn’t dark. It’s daytime, and I am pushing toward the light of the sun. I break through the surface, gasping for air.

  “MOMMY!” I bellow.

  Another wave overtakes me, swallowing me, gobbling me up in its frothy jaws. My chest feels like fireworks. I am weaker now. My eyes are closing. I am going to fall down, down, down to the bottom of the ocean.

  But then the current tumbles me up for a brief moment, lifting me almost to the water’s surface.

  It’s my last chance, I know. I shoot an arm up out of the water.

  And someone takes hold.

  I am being pulled up, up, up.

  The first breath is like coming back to life. I cough, choking on water as I try to take a second, and open my eyes to see my rescuer.

  Not Mommy.

  A man.

  His name comes to me.

  Uncle.

  My uncle’s cheeks are red, his eyes screwed up with the effort of freeing me from the current. He is shouting at me to hold on, so I do.

  I cling to his neck. I look over his shoulders to see another wave heading toward us, baring its thousand white fangs. He looks back and sees it, tells me to hold on tighter.

  But he doesn’t see what’s out there beyond the wave. He doesn’t see the boy floundering in the blue, blue, blue.

  I tug at my uncle’s shoulder. I have to make him see. He’s going the wrong way. I start to yell the boy’s name—but the ferocious wave has reached us now, and the last thing I know is that I am being swallowed by a monster. And then . . . and then . . .

  I felt a strong hand take hold of mine, raking me through the water, yanking me up so fiercely that a searing pain shot through my elbow.

  I was suddenly free from the ocean’s clutches, gasping for breath. Someone was holding me, someone with a scratchy beard, and I was clinging to his neck as we waded back to the dark beach.

  Except we were going the wrong way. Because Matthew was still out there in the waves, wasn’t he?

  But that’s not what I called him, was it? Everyone else called him Matty, but I couldn’t quite manage the M sound, so when I said it, it came out “Batty.”

  He had eyes like Mom’s; I remember that. Blue-gray, like the sea, like the color of something that’s always slipping through your hands.

  Wasn’t I always trying to catch him? Wasn’t he always running just out of arm’s reach?

  “Wait for me, Batty!”

  A little scar above his ear. A telescope, the color green, a jar of fireflies. When I grow up, I’m going to be an astronaut. That was all I remembered about the boy who had gone into the sea.

  “Wait,” I sputtered. “Stop. Batty—Matty—he’s still out there!”

  When we didn’t stop, I began to flail against the man carrying me. “You’re going the wrong way!” I cried. “We have to go back for Matty!”

  “No, Miranda,” said the man gently. “Matty’s not out there.”

  And I realized that he was right. It was nighttime now, not day, and it was Mr. Taylor carrying me, not my uncle. I could hear a dog barking from shore. I was not the little girl I had been a moment ago. I was all tangled up in memories—ones I didn’t even know I had—like a fish squirming in a net.

  Time was moving in strange lurches, and when I opened my eyes next, I was lying on the sand, looking up at a heavy sky of stars. Mr. Taylor was staring down at me, his eyes wide with panic, the light of the moon like a halo around his head.

  “You’re my grandfather,” I said groggily.

  He breathed a sigh of relief. “I am,” he replied.

  “And I have an uncle? So Matty is my cousin?”

  My grandfather nodded.

  “What happened to them? Where’s Matty?”

  He brought a clenched fist to his mouth and made a strange, wounded sound. “He’s gone, Miranda. Matty’s been gone a long time.”

  “But I just found him,” I murmured. Then my stomach gave a violent twist, and I turned on my side and sputtered out more seawater as my grandfather gent
ly stroked my hair.

  44

  When I could finally stop coughing, I sat up. The motion sent pain radiating from my elbow. My lungs felt like they were smoldering. Mr. Taylor had tied some kind of cloth around my knee to stop it from bleeding, but it still throbbed.

  My grandfather sat next to me on the sand, face grave, beard dripping seawater. On his other side, Slug stared at me, thumping his tail twice when my eyes met his. Mr. Taylor handed me a canteen of water, and I drank.

  “There was something,” I gasped, suddenly remembering why I had gone into the water in the first place. “Something chasing me.”

  “Safira,” Mr. Taylor said, pointing back up toward the trees. “It was just Safira. She can be very intimidating when she has her wings fully stretched.”

  Had I really almost drowned running away from Safira? Could the cloaked arms I saw reaching for me have simply been her wings?

  “But the thing . . . it was screaming.”

  “Yes, she gets restless around sundown, and then she can be quite loud. That’s why I like to bring her out here with me. Give her a chance to stretch her wings. I’m very sorry she frightened you.”

  I remembered then what Mr. Taylor’s neighbor had said about Safira screaming like an ambulance. That kind of scream would be loud enough to carry across the water, all the way back to the Isle. So it was Safira I’d been hearing all along. At another time, this might have struck me as funny.

  “We should get you back to the Isle,” said Mr. Taylor.

  “No!” I cried. “Please—I’m tired of waiting. I need to know what happened. I was on this island before, wasn’t I? And I got caught up in the current. I always thought it was a dream, but it wasn’t. It was a memory.”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Taylor. “It was. We never did find out how you ended up in the surf.”

  “There was a starfish,” I said. “I was just trying to get it.”

  “Ah,” breathed Mr. Taylor. “A starfish. Your uncle Ben saw you go running into the surf and—”

  My mind was spinning in every direction all at once. Ben wasn’t Mom’s friend. He was her brother.

  “What happened to him?”

  The moon traced a grimace on Mr. Taylor’s face. He reached for Slug and gripped his fur in one hand. Then he closed his eyes and sighed. “Perhaps,” he said, “we should start at the beginning.”

  Finally, Mr. Taylor was going to tell me his story.

  Finally, someone was going to tell me the truth.

  45

  Once, there was a young man who lived with his beautiful wife and two perfect children. Above all else, the man cared for his family. He himself had been poor as a boy, and he vowed that he would make a good life for his wife and children, that they would never want for anything. And in this he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

  But as his youth fell away from him, a change came over the man’s heart. Above all else, he cared for success and power. Always he thirsted for more. He spent most of his time away from his family and bought them beautiful things to make up for his absence: among them a grand sailboat and a great house by the sea.

  But these gifts made a poor substitute for a father and a husband.

  The years passed in this way, and one day, a knock came upon the door. A policeman told the man that his wife had been killed in a car accident. His children had long since grown up, and now the man was left alone. Then all the power in the world could not have eased his sorrow.

  He begged his children’s forgiveness and vowed upon his wife’s grave that he would return to the man he had been long ago, who cared for his family above all else.

  By that time, his son had become a father himself, to a little boy who started coming often to stay in the house by the sea. The man was proud of his grandson, who anyone could see had a hungry mind. He bought the boy a telescope, and he and his grandson spent hours looking up into the vast night sky together, pondering the mysteries of the universe.

  When the little boy grew sleepy, he would ask his grandfather to tell him a story. But the man knew none, for he had been too busy in life to notice things so silly as stories. He bought his grandson books to read instead.

  Next, a granddaughter was born, this time to the man’s daughter, who he knew had never quite managed to forgive him. Again, the man was proud of the girl, who anyone could see had a loyal heart. She watched the world with wide, quiet eyes, and she chased after her cousin with chubby outstretched hands.

  One afternoon, the man took his son and his grandchildren for a ride on his sailboat to a small island where they would explore and picnic until the sun went down and the stars came out. Then they would climb into the old lighthouse, peer up at the sky through the boy’s telescope, and count their lucky stars.

  As they walked, the man’s phone began to ring. You see, though he had vowed not to make the same mistakes any longer, he was never able to give up his work completely. Though he had money enough to last several lifetimes, deep in his heart he sometimes still craved the power he had once known.

  So, thinking he would be only a moment, the man turned away from his family to talk to a woman of great importance.

  But by the time the first scream shattered the calm afternoon, the man was already on the far side of the beach.

  The little girl, he saw, had been swept up into the current, and his son was rushing after her. By the time the man had sprinted the length of the beach, his son was crouching over the girl in the sand, where she soon began to sputter and cough.

  “Thank God,” said the man’s son. “Thank God she’s all right.”

  But the man was hardly listening. Because the little girl sat up now, and she pointed to the water.

  “Batty,” she sputtered. “Batty followed Uncle into waves.”

  The two men followed her pointing finger, and then the younger began to run once more. When he met the waves, he began to swim. After he met the shape of his son bobbing in the water, he tried to turn back, but the current only pushed them farther from shore.

  The older man scooped the little girl up and ran across the sand to his boat. They sailed back and forth across the waves, searching for the lost boys. Soon more boats arrived to help. One came to take the little girl back to her mother.

  Once more, the man found himself alone. He sailed on and on, until his hope dwindled away, until darkness fell. And still he sailed. He bellowed curses at the stars. He fell on his knees and wept. He sailed until, unbearably, the sun rose again in the sky.

  Even when he understood at last that his son and grandson had been swallowed by the sea, he continued to sail. Until one day, he decided to sail away.

  Why had he taken the phone call? Why had he broken his promise to his family? He no longer deserved the family he had left, and he could no longer bear to live in the house by the sea.

  The farther he sailed, the harder he tried to forget. He lost himself in new places, traveling by sea and over land, wishing to become a man with no memory. A man of no stories.

  Then one winter night, many months later, he lay on the deck of his boat, bobbing in the waves of a distant sea. And as he stared up at the stars, one of them whispered to him with a voice like a bell.

  “Please don’t forget me.”

  The man began to tremble, for he knew the voice he had heard. And he knew then that he had been wrong to try to forget his sorrows. Instead of forgetting, he would make sure his lost boys were remembered.

  He would tell everyone he met about the little boy who loved stars and stories, and the father who gave his life for his son, and the man who had turned his back on them both. In return, he would ask for stories that needed remembering, to add to his collection.

  And so he became a man of a thousand stories. Stories that he wished to tell his grandson. He hoped that somewhere, the boy heard them still.

  After the man had sailed to nearly every corner of the world, climbed mountains, and crossed deserts, he stood on the deck of his boat one evening, staring up
at the stars. And again, he heard one of them whisper in that familiar voice.

  “Please come home.”

  The man knew then that he had finally sailed for long enough. It was time to take his stories and his sorrows back to the house by the sea. And so he did, though he was afraid of what waited for him there.

  Then one night, not long after he arrived, he awoke to hear a noise in the empty house. He came downstairs to find a girl in his library. A girl who gazed up at him with wide, quiet eyes.

  He understood then why his grandson had called to him.

  And he was glad he had come home at last.

  46

  As Mr. Taylor finished his story, silent tears slid down my cheeks. Tears that had nothing to do with my burning elbow or throbbing knee.

  “Batty was real” was the first thing I managed to croak out.

  “What’s that?” Mr. Taylor said. The whole time he was speaking, he had been staring out at the moonlight that shimmered on the ocean like the tail of a great silver kite. But now he turned to me.

  “When I was little,” I said, “I had this imaginary friend. Or at least I thought he was imaginary. Named Batty. He was going to be an astronaut when he grew up.”

  A shadow of a smile flitted across my grandfather’s face. “You found your own way of remembering Matty, then.”

  “But my mom,” I said, “she told me I shouldn’t play with him anymore.”

  “Things weren’t easy for your mother after Matty and Ben died,” Mr. Taylor said, looking away again. “She and Ben were very close. That’s what happens sometimes in a family where one member is absent. The others grow closer to make up for it. She and Clare never went anywhere without Ben. When Matty came along, he was like a son to her.”

  It was like there was a pocket in my heart that had been sewn shut all these years, and now it had been ripped open. Inside were the few memories of Matty I carried, and the love I must have held for him, and the sorrow of losing a cousin and an uncle I didn’t even know I had. All of them were spilling into me at once.