Fingerprints of Previous Owners

by Rebecca Entel

  Andre was still visiting and trying to convince Hebbie to move to the capital with him, now that their ma was getting sick enough to need the hospital there anyhow. Andre always with a new idea for contacts, settling, living. Hebbie’s humming back to lining my ears. Let their voices, let the smell of his cologne, settle onto me till Andre started describing how they’d live: Hebbie bunking in Troy’s old bed. Took my step backward from the wooden slats of the porch to the bar’s linoleum floor. Felt a soft wall behind my back and turned to see I’d backed right into Lem.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled.

  Surprised like I always was at how slight he looked out of his resort jumpsuit. Only about a week past the yellow paper sticking out of his pocket that I’d well enough put there. He looked over my shoulder at the others. Just wanted to get by. His T-shirt looked like one of Andre’s, shiny navy with a black arrow traveling around his back and coming front again. I could see the creases where it’d been folded. Must’ve come in on the mail boat that’d docked just that morning. When his eyes came back to me, I saw the bitterness softened away. But also gone: the owing-ness, the willingness. He nodded and stepped off onto the pier.

  “Here’s our other bredda that will be coming with us, too!” Andre shouted. Clink of bottles behind me. Neither of us going back to the resort, then.

  Realized I’d thought of Lem like Junkful, like Thiflae, like Troy’s beach sculpture: always waiting where I’d left them.

  “Really, Lem?” Christine’s voice sounded full of the same thick surprise that clogged my own throat.

  “Not going back to a job they don’t trust me to do no more,” he answered. Another clink of bottles at my back. My yellow paper of overtime, his of demotion.

  Mr. Ken gestured for me to sit at the bar with him. I stayed past closing and helped him pick up empties. Walking home, I watched Queen Isa’s low shadow swimming in and out of the brush alongside me. After I stepped off the road at our house, she went on toward the road to the landfill; she’d find her sleeping spot in Lionel’s three-sided shed, mostly out of the wind.

  In school we’d learned to smile at anyone who visited our country, to conceal its pains like an old dog passed off as a puppy. I was not a hostess. No matter what, I was glad never again to stand on that western beach as the boats of tourists came in.

  Yet I could stand for hours these days on Junkful Beach, stare down the east. Wait for whatever the ocean saw fit to bring in to me. Some of it skipping up onto the sand and staying there, some of it washing in only to be immediately pulled back out. The ocean deciding whether to bring me some luck. That’s what all of it seemed like: choosing or un-choosing my luck. But it was just the ocean.

  Even when a drizzle rose up and the water was roughed by a cold, cold wind, I was willing to stand there. Stand there and stand there while frigates with their steeled wings thrummed overhead. Kept imagining, no matter how hard I tried not to, one more arrival: the book washing up at my feet.

  No one marching around the resort with their clipboards and their corporate pens could tell me what had happened to the book Claudia had confiscated the night I’d been fired. Had they sent it off the island with Jasmine Manion’s husband or with the nanny? Had they shipped it, with all of the Manions’ stuff, on a flight trailing the helicopter that came for her? No one knew. Blamed the confusion on Claudia’s departure.

  Except Lionel and me, not a single person on this island even knew the book had ever existed. And no amount of online searching turned up a trace of another copy. Like a ghost, that book came out of the darkness and then disappeared just when you were looking for it.

  Lionel agreed with a futile shrug to keep an eye out for it in all the resort’s mountains of garbage. Agreed not to bury it in a day’s work if he could help it.

  He grumbled: “Why do you want that thing anyway? Just master’s voice in there, master’s picture of the world only.” Which was all true, yet I still wanted it.

  According to Mother, the book wasn’t really what I was looking for. They were just words that pointed to the words that weren’t there.

  “But that’s just it,” I said.

  “Anything and everything gets lost eventually, Myr-na,” Mother said, “and so often lost to the sea.”

  But no matter how wrecked by water it might be, even if all the pages had by now washed away to white, I kept dreaming of the book coming back to me as flotsam. Washing up from everywhere and nowhere.

  A book to help support the pedestal of the table where I took meals with Mother. A book that could sit atop and below the poetry books that I now knew—though I’d never witnessed her doing it—Mother bent down for, pulled to her bosom, read so deeply she let her three fingers stop marking out ailment and the measured tails of her sweater stop spelling messages for me. The cracked pedestal unmoved by her indulgence. A book I could pull out after we’d eaten dinner and remind myself of Tildy in the kitchen and, while I sat in my chair, Tildy on the bench. A book that could let my eyes go partly unfocused only scanning for Divvy, finding each corner of the estate he been found in or taken to. A book that could let me imagine some the pointed rock in his little hand as he found hiding places to press his ships into those stones.

  Each time Lionel joined us for dinner, he dragged behind him the non-news that the book hadn’t shown up at the landfill. Still, something about him choosing any chair he wished—no extra settings for Troy or Dad—made the air lighter. I asked whether he was bitter about his college girl flying home without him, and he shot me the slit of an eye. The same slit I gave him when he used to tease-tease me about Lem.

  “Wasn’t just like that. We were working on a business deal.”

  “You and who? An American?” Mother asked, laughter in her voice.

  “Katelynn was helping me work out the details with the American woman. That day I gave the American woman the tour, we had a whole plan going. When she saw Junkful Beach. You heard she had a junk shop, Myr.”

  The scheme: he’d export items from the landfill and from Junkful Beach for the American woman to sell from the nook in her consignment shop. She’d pay the shipping, plus he’d get consignment. It sounded silly to us, Mother and me, at first, but I knew Jasmine Manion was probably a sharp businesswoman if that nook alone paid for her family’s whole vacation at the resort. And Lionel assured us she seemed agreeable, too, and business savvy, when he told her they should consult Miss Patrice about the ins and outs of shipping merchandise between Cruffey and the States with the capital in between.

  “Not a living, but a piece of one,” Mother said, considering.

  “Mutually beneficial,” he kept saying the American woman had kept saying.

  Katelynn had promised him that Jasmine Manion’s customers would get excited about a boxful of our most common chipped or halved shells. True enough: we were all experts in marketing what Americans wanted from this island.

  It would be so good, he pointed out, to have some real island things arrive in and depart from that Out-of-the-Mind Nook. Way he talked so chest-puffed about it, as though he’d already stewarded that nook. Already packed up the slick brochures’ impossible beaches into cardboard boxes and wound them tight with tape that screeched like birds.

  “And by getting some garbage off the island, she’d be doing part of my job for me—and paying the shipping fees,” he joked. Or half joked.

  Mother laughed like it was a whole joke. “And? So? You gonna try to find out what happened to her after the accident, if she’s still running her shop and into this deal, then?”

  I couldn’t tell if Mother was convinced or skeptical. Most likely somewhere in between, as was her way.

  But we all looked down, thinking of the possible places she might be—the different hows she might be. Maybe she’d come home from the hospital and rehab with half her hair turned gray, the way Miss Philene’s had turned and stayed when Jimmy died. Maybe she’d come home walking with a cane. Maybe she’d be fine with the two-toned hair: it would show people
she was artistic. Maybe she’d chosen a purple cane, the color of the storybook birds of Quickly Island, so her little boy wouldn’t be as afraid of it. Reading her childhood book at night, the two of them, so the images of the pool deck could be replaced by the pictures of mysterious birds making it over the ocean. (Or maybe I was convincing myself of too much. Me, so often on the skeptical side of Mother’s in-between.)

  Lionel didn’t answer either way; went back to leaning over his dinner plate, eyes hidden by his braids. The three of us dined on in semi-silence. Books at our knees. Dad’s machete rested outside in the shed, awaiting gardening.

  And then the cardboard box arrived on the mail boat, so we knew she was out there. Full of pinecones. Addressed to L.—or Any—Cruffey on Cruffey Island in thick black marker, shaky letters. Crumpled corners from its travels but taped expertly. No return address but stamped Wisconsin, USA.

  Couldn’t hardly wait until the mail boat staff had moved it off the platform, kids were already tearing at the tape. Wrenching the mouth of the box open and then untangling the knotted neck of the garbage bag inside to reveal the mound of pinecones. Pulling one out and the next and the next and the next and the next and the next. Passing them around the group. Every one of those kids, the wetness of their eyes and mouths quickening with sunshine.

  Like I was floating in the sky watching myself the way I conjured my own arrival happening. First the sea spitting out a book at my feet, waterlogged and unrecognizable. Then my face exploding into a smile when I saw this was it, the book, my eyes busting big as potholes. Same as the kids gnashing at the box that came all the way from Wisconsin.

  “Just look to me like short haulback branches fattened up,” Miss Philene had said about that hoard of pinecones. She’d shaken her head at the grabby kids, perplexed by their joy.

  That’s how I’d be, too. Joyful. Perplexing.

  In the meantime, I waited on Junkful Beach, trying to shore up a little luck.

  Lionel found me there one day, nudging crude ships into the wet sand around Troy’s sculpture with my toe. I didn’t sit on the sand; I stood like the sculpture that never keeled no matter how hateful the storm. Like Troy himself standing, still and bent, waiting to be airborne—the last time I saw him after Dad’s funeral. Like Troy the way Andre had seen him freeze, last time he was standing at all. Standing and seeing what made him need to run to the end. Stood and stared at that sculpture like maybe I’d understand the sensibility of its maker.

  That day I was tracing with my foot the kind of boats my brother’d taught me to make when I was little: a triangle sail, a smile running beneath, both connected with a line straight as can be. I drew them all facing out, departing.

  Saw Lionel before I heard him, waving something in the air. The book?

  Then he got closer, and I saw it was just a letter—a letter from the capital fulfilling his requested grant to implement the landfill’s next ten-year plan. He’d spend a year and a half in the capital, with Lem, being trained in the latest engineering and both of them learning to build the new cells. Less headroom needed for the liner of each new cell, he explained, giving us the space we needed to contain it all.

  “If the resort stays at its current dump rate,” he said, his face more hopeful than the sarcastic way his lips pressed out if. A year-plus of training, then they’d come back and start the expansion.

  Lionel renamed the Landfill Engineer. Me: the new Site Manager. I’d get my paycheck from the guy on the mail boat, who would bring it from the public works office in the capital.

  Lionel and I both looked down—marveled—at an unshattered lightbulb washed up with its filament intact.

  First Andre and Lem floated to the key and then boarded the plane to the capital. Few weeks later, Hebbie and her mother. Already gone for the boat when I, misjudging their flight time, showed up at their house to say good-bye. Looked through the window at their bare table, kitchen cupboards all closed, a single sponge in the sink.

  Few weeks more, I waited with Lionel for the boat to the airstrip. Different swarm of bags at his feet. Our good-bye went the way leaving-for-the-capital good-byes always seemed to go: saying a jumble of things like we were parting for a short time and a long time both. Whichever it took. Tugged on Lionel’s braids in exchange for the weeks he’d driven me to crazy hill while he trained me. His cloudy eyes looked almost childlike-scared.

  I knew he wouldn’t go looking up his father. For all I knew, if Lionel was finally so willing to go there, his father wasn’t in the capital anymore. He pocketed the note I handed him from Mother, asking him to go looking up where Dad and Troy were buried without markings. Under a tree like they told me?

  Tide highest of the day as the boat pulled in. Would drain away soon enough, I knew, like always. Lionel had driven the two of us in his truck, and I drove it back alone.

  And then Queen Isa and I reigned over the landfill.

  Lionel and Lem in the capital learning how best to seal away toxins and make room for more. While I spent my days saving as much as I could from having to be sealed, from taking up room. Every phase of the resort’s renovation marching on, every arrival of the mail boat, every littered wave crashing onto Junkful, even every lingering item on a shelf in Miss Patrice’s store, had me wondering what would alchemize soon enough to garbage and lengthen my days at work.

  Days there were often as long as working overtime at the resort. Some evenings the bridge of my nose rippled with tiny sun blisters, and most mornings some different muscle-of-the-day let its complaints be known. Some days like my body was still their Maid. But my mind: free of ID tags, papers. Just Hyphen Hands deciding which detritus should be buried under our feet and which reinserted into our homes. Standing up there on the landfill cells, had to remind myself I wasn’t just walking around on a natural hump of the earth. It was a sediment hilltop we’d grown ourselves. Anything and everything gets lost eventually. Disintegrated into sand we walked on. Unremembered but carried in the soles of our shoes.

  Came home each night to gossip Mother had heard floating around. She reported, through Miss Minnie, that Amerie had offered Lem a janitor’s job at the vet clinic where she worked, and so he’d decided to stay out there. I’d known that he probably would.

  Lionel went on learning the engineering, planning on arriving back. Plenty of folks would be looking to take Lem’s place building the new cells for everything on this oval we—and the resort—had cast off. But Lionel was living with Dr. Amerie and his e-mails sounded all-through airy about it. Some nights my body buzzed above the mattress like a ship on the waves as I dreamed he never came home, never expanded the landfill. Only up to me to keep the oval from being swallowed up by everything we’d collected. Mother didn’t object when I scraped out the pots and pans for Queen Isa after dinner. Left Mother to her poetry books while I sat on the steps watching Isa scarf and swallow. Waited for her to be done so she’d climb up next to me and nudge her snout onto my knee. She started sleeping on that broken step each night. Inside, Mother in her room, and Troy’s room now mine. Moonlight peeped in and out of the dish towel curtains, like always. Each morning I found Isa waiting on that doorstep for me like a tourist beguiled by broken glass. Off to work we went.

  Days I worked the hardest, Isa pouted around by the office shed. But sometimes kids came round to run with her along the landfill’s swooping corridors. Watching them from afar, looked like marbles dropped into a big, shallow bowl. Isa’s second person after me was Angelina, Lem’s kid sister. Manny and Gussie and some others would come say hello and good-bye after their playing, take swigs of water from me, or see if I’d salvaged anything interesting from the resort’s bags. But Angelina didn’t edge too near the Site Manager who’d gotten her brother a yellow paper write-up and, with it, a one-way plane ticket off the island. Only half waved from afar. If Angelina’d come close enough, could’ve told her what I knew of a scrunched heart when a brother had gone off to the capital. What I knew of a heart not un-scrunched enough to br
ing one home. In the expanse between us, growing piles of water bottles that moved in the light and moved the light around them. I hadn’t figured out yet how to pallet them and send them back in through the truck entrance without Lem.

  I started putting the box together without really thinking what I was doing. Just tossing into an old box in the shed:

  One, the small yellow mitten she’d found on Junkful, with its winds bringing flotsam and its myths bringing luck, and had left in the erasable art studio at the resort. Two, the plastic shampoo bottle with Portuguese labeling. They’d both come back to me, dumped by the resort. Three, a whole mess of sand dollars. Most of their shoulders crumbled like sugar, but two were pristine. I taped a label saying For Nathan to one, For Katelynn to the other. And, four, her cloth bag. I’d kept her brushes wrapped, clean and dry, inside. She was going to want them, I thought, no matter what her life had become.

  I didn’t put in a note asking if she had the book, missing pages and all. Had no way to ask for it, after everything.

  Miss Patrice let me use the store’s computer—fastest Internet on the island outside the resort—to look up “Manion Cottage Consignment, Wisconsin.” Once I had the address, I toggled to the satellite image of her house. Lionel had told me the shop was inside her house, a converted garage. Her garage door was the same blank white staring at the street as every other house on their block, hiding what was behind: the shop, the nook, whatever had happened to Jasmine Manion, who seemed well enough, at least, to send us her northern version of shells. I waited until a month when the shipping cost wouldn’t press on us so much. Then off it went, northwest past Quickly, past any landscape I’d seen with my own eyes.

  Maybe her scissors stalled against the tape as she considered whether she ever wanted to see anything from this island ever again. Maybe once the box was opened, she’d taken her bag of brushes into her lap the way I’d seen her son hold tight to his blanket.