The Summer of Lost Wishes

by Jessa Gabrielle

  “You ready?” Rooks asks, taking his keys from the ignition.

  We leave everything behind, even the truck key that Rooks hides in the rim of his tire. It’s just us, presenting ourselves to Shark Island, hoping to find an answer that can set Seth and Hanna free, prove Seth’s innocence, and shed some light on why anyone went to Shark Island on that fateful night.

  Hector’s boat hums against the ocean, chugging along against the livid waves. I hope the weather holds off just a little longer. I can take the light drizzle. It’s humid enough that the rain is actually welcomed. A bright moon glows in the sky, finding its way out of the dark clouds that keep trying to consume it.

  “Why did you want to come out here?” Hector asks, looking back toward us briefly.

  I glance at Rooks but take the reins. “I live in the house they were supposed to live in,” I say, which isn’t even a lie. “I guess I want to pay respect to them, to let them go, even though I’ve only been here a short time. All I ever hear about is how that would’ve been their home and they would’ve built a future there. Going to a cemetery isn’t the same when you know there’s no casket in the ground.”

  “Makes sense,” Hector says. “Maybe this will give you a little closure. I should bring Nat’s mom out here. She needs some major closure in her life.”

  The lighthouse comes into view in the distance. We’re almost there. A wave erupts at the peak of the rocks, splashing into the air like a leaping dolphin. A long wooden bridge has been built into the rocks, where the fishermen stood all those years ago pulling their crab traps over the rocks. I bet no one has walked on those planks since 1965.

  Hector steers the small boat toward the lowest section of rocks. He throws a long chain onto a rock and shrugs. “Makeshift anchor,” he says. “I’m going to stick close to the boat so this storm doesn’t throw it back out to sea.”

  He gets off the boat, though, and climbs the rocks, guarding the chain. Rooks thanks him and tells him we’re going to walk down to the lighthouse. Hector nods and says for us to take our time.

  “It’ll only take a few minutes,” Rooks assures him.

  I walk along the wooden bridge, hoping the flooring doesn’t collapse under me. This is sacred ground, a place that has been off-limits since the search and rescue crews declared their recovery mission unsuccessful. The closest anyone gets now days is via boating tours, which still keep a pretty safe distance. And here we are – walking along Shark Island.

  The lighthouse stands as the only remaining witness to what happened that night. I wonder what it would tell me if it could speak. That looming tower saw it all – the boat, the people, the sharks. I hope it’d tell me that they were taken quickly, with little to no suffering. I hope it was instant for all of them.

  We trudge along carefully, watching our steps because this pier is probably more likely to fall in than we are to be eaten by sharks. I think it’s sort of special that shark nets are still in place out here, even though the area has been abandoned for so long. It’s symbolic that Coral Sands does care, that they never want this to happen again.

  A boat’s engine roars behind us. I look back to see who else is crazy enough to be out on the water tonight, but there’s no other arrival. It’s Hector – leaving.

  “Hey!” Rooks shouts, running back toward where Hector had docked his boat. He doesn’t even seem concerned about the possibility of rotten wood. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “You want Shark Island? It’s all yours!” Hector yells back, motioning toward the lighthouse. “But you’re leaving my grandmother out of this. You’re not ruining my family!”

  The next thing he yells is eaten by the screaming winds. His boat waivers in the water, shifting with the changing tides. I don’t know what he knows, but he clearly knows that we know something about Rosa and thinks we’re out to ruin her or his family.

  “Hector!” Rooks calls out.

  “No!” Hector calls back. “No one is going to care about what happened fifty years ago because they’ll have a new tragedy to mourn now!”

  His boat spins in a half-circle before he takes off across the black water, disappearing into the night. The winds howl around us, sloshing water in big waves against the rocks. Rooks runs back to me and wraps his arms around me. I bury my face into his chest, but the rain still stings my skin.

  “So this is it? We’re just going to die out here too?” I ask.

  I look down at the pink dress. Great. My ‘ghost outfit’ will be a flamingo costume. That’s not exactly the legacy I wanted to leave behind.

  “Oh God,” I mumble. “I’m going to be a dead flamingo in the water.”

  “No,” Rooks says, tightening his grip. “We’re not dying. We’ll stay right here, away from the water, until someone finds us. Your mom and my dad will be looking. Your mom will have every law enforcement officer out there searching. They’ll find us. We’ve just gotta get through this storm.”

  He keeps a tight grip on me as we battle the wind to seek refuge closer to the lighthouse. I wonder if this is what happened to Seth and Hanna, if they huddled together hoping to outrun the storm – or survive it.

  “We need to stay low, keep grounded,” Rooks instructs me. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you, okay?”

  “Okay,” I say, even though I feel like this is destiny.

  This is our fate. We played with the sharks, and now we’re going to get bitten. We tempted the ghosts of the past, and we dug into a treasure chest that was meant to be sealed for eternity. Now we’re going to pay the ultimate price. Seth and Hanna won’t be the legendary couple who died at Shark Island anymore – we will.

  Gusts of wind force against the lighthouse, calling into the night like a merciless phantom vulture circling its soon-to-be-dead prey. The sharp rain turns into larger drops, splashing off of the ground around us and quickly forming puddles. The ocean grows angry, tossing waves over the wooden barrier.

  “We’re not going to be here in the morning,” I say, trying not to panic. “The water is going to rise. We’ll be swept out to the sharks.”

  Rooks inhales and exhales deeply, his chest moving slowly. He says all of the right things, but he knows as well as I do that this isn’t going to end as we hoped. Seth and Hanna will finally rest in peace because Rooks and Piper will take their place. Everyone will blame my house, saying that the Calloway Cottage is cursed. Mom will sell the place and move away from here, and Mr. Carter will become a hermit who no one ever sees. Frank will no longer be the renowned downtrodden victim. Blake Carter will.

  “Piper, look,” Rooks says, easing forward. He points to a boat in the distance, its light dimly sparkling. “Maybe he had a change of heart. He knows he can’t leave us for dead.”

  The boat slows down as it eases toward the rocks. We stand and hurry down where a lower level of rocks sits. I don’t dare step down onto the rocks in this wind. Maybe that’s why Hector’s coming back. He wants to lure us away from the lighthouse, thinking we’re being rescued, when in reality, he’s luring us to our deaths.

  Rooks shields his face with his hand as the boat draws nearer, blasting its light in our direction. I’m not sure I even want to get back on the boat with Hector. If he’s realized the storm won’t kill us, he may plan to do it himself.

  “Rooks?” a voice calls out from the boat.

  “Mac!” Rooks calls out in relief. His tightened muscles relax. “How did you know we were here?”

  “No time for that,” Mac calls out, steering his boat toward the rocks. “We have to get out of here. This storm isn’t on our side.”

  We walk down to the lower level of rocks as Mac eases over, bumping his boat against the jagged edges. Rooks places his hand on my back and nudges me forward.

  “You go first,” he says, grasping onto my hand to help me balance myself. Waves gush over the rocks, soaking them with salty water.

  Mac reaches over the boat for my free hand, tightens his grip to ensure the rain won’t interfere,
and helps me onto the small boat. Rooks follows closely behind me. Heavy raindrops jump off of the deck of the boat. I refuse to watch Rooks step over the rocks. A shiver spreads over my skin, leaving chill bumps in its wake.

  “How did you know we were out here?” Rooks asks once he finds his footing on the boat. “Did you follow us?”

  Mac steers away from the rocks, leaving Shark Island behind us for good. “I knew you would end up here before it was all over with,” he says. “It was only a matter of time after you found those letters in the wall.”

  My breath catches in my throat. I can’t speak. I can’t even breathe. Raindrops stream down my face as the wind slaps us for our stupidity tonight.

  “How do you know about the letters in the wall?” Rooks asks. He eases closer to me, wrapping his arms around me protectively.

  Mac sighs and glances over at us. “Because I hid them in the wall,” he says. “At the time, it was the best possible hiding place. No one was going in that house, and they definitely weren’t going to look in the walls if they did.”

  “But how did you even have Seth’s letters?” I ask, finding my vocal chords again.

  Mac looks across the water and then back at us. “Because I wrote them.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Mac-intosh,” Rooks says, shaking his head. “It was seriously right there in front of us the whole time.”

  Literally. He was standing in my yard, fixing our driveway, boarding up the broken window, and conversing with me about how he wasn’t here in 1965 when the great Shark Island tragedy occurred. He’s been right here the entire time, living among the locals who mourn his death every year.

  “How is this even possible?” I ask.

  And then all of the speculation and gossip and theories rush back through my mind. Rooks was always suspicious of Seth and his motives and what really happened. Maybe he had a right to be. If Seth got away, everything we ever thought we knew about that night is wrong. And the guy I’ve been defending from the day I arrived is actually the man who just saved my life.

  “As soon as we’re out of this rain and somewhere safe, I’ll tell you what you want to know,” Mac tells us. “But I want to avoid another tragedy.”

  “Well, you seem to be pretty skilled in that department, so I have all the faith in the world you can do it again,” Rooks says. Even in a moment like this – the biggest moment in Coral Sands since 1965 – Rooks finds a way to bring wit and sarcasm to the table.

  Not another word is spoken until Mac pulls into the docks, his boat choking as he kills its engine. Rooks rushes toward dry land, hoisting me onto the deck with him. But he doesn’t make a mad dash for his truck. He stays, waiting for Mac to give us answers.

  I shiver from the cold rain that’s been beating down on us. Mac grabs a blanket from inside the boat and tells Rooks to wrap us up in it. Instead, Rooks wraps it around me and pulls me into his arms.

  “If you’ll come back to my house with me, we can talk,” Mac says, motioning toward his truck.

  It may not be the best idea to get in a vehicle with a man who is supposed to be dead, but I trust Seth, therefore I have to trust Mac. Rooks opens the truck door but gets in first, making sure he keeps me safe in case his theories have been right all along. Mac turns on the heater, which is as crazy as his true identity given the time of year, and drives us back to his house.

  Rooks and I sit at Mac’s dining room table in the glow of a candle. The power is out, and thunder booms outside, rattling the window panes. Lightning streaks across the sky in flashes, giving us brief moments of eerie lighting.

  Mac double checks to make sure we don’t want anything before he guzzles half a glass of water. Then he pulls up a chair across from us.

  “I met up with Hanna that night to end things, just like I told Rosa I would,” he begins. “I knew it was going to be bad because our moms had already picked out the wedding location, and Hanna had been shopping for a dress. I don’t know if it was love for Hanna or if it was just what was expected of her and she was content with it. She was a sweet girl, and had I not met Rosa, I would’ve married her and done all the things that were expected of me.”

  I angle my chair toward him, ready to soak it all in like the rain that’s still soaking into my clothes beneath this blanket.

  “When did you get the final letter?” I ask, wanting to better see the timeline.

  “That morning,” Mac says. “I knew I could fix it, though. I just had to prove myself. We walked down to the docks that night to talk about our future. Hanna was asking me about the design for the wedding invitations, and I told her we needed to talk about this wedding.”

  He describes the moment her face fell solemn, the way the color drained from her skin and left her pale like a fish lying on the pier.

  “I might as well have hooked her in the heart,” he says, shaking his head. “She told me it was just cold feet, and once we were married and in our new home, everything would fall into place.”

  Our new home. Their new home is my new home. I wonder if Hanna had picked out paint colors yet or if she had planned on a particular theme for the home.

  “Had you been in the Calloway Cottage yet?” I ask.

  Mac shakes his head. “I refused to see it. I told Hanna I wanted to wait until it was ready for us to move in, but really, I never wanted to step foot in there. I felt like if I did, it’d be an omen. I avoided it completely. I never had any plans to live there.”

  He tells us how, while standing on the docks mildly arguing, they were interrupted by Warren.

  “He was at his family’s restaurant and heard Hanna yelling at me,” Mac explains. He props his elbows on his knees and stares at the floor. “He ran outside to see if she was okay. She told him that I was trying to call off the wedding because I was scared.”

  Oh, Hanna. Why did you have to do that? I was hoping maybe her final moments weren’t so awful, but knowing that she was hurt, angry, and yelling just made this story take a nosedive.

  “He told me I was being crazy and that it was just cold feet. I was so sick of people saying that,” Mac says, shaking his head. “Warren was a good friend of mine. I wanted to explain myself, without mentioning Rosa anyway, but Eileen and Raymond showed up a few minutes later to see where Warren had disappeared to.”

  He tells us of how Hanna was in tears, but she didn’t want to admit to Eileen that she was being dumped. Instead, she lied and said she was just upset because Eileen was leaving after graduation and they weren’t going to all be together anymore.

  “And that’s when Warren said we should take the boat out. Right now. Tonight. We were going to make one last memory together, and I figured why not? I could do that much for Hanna since she’d have to tell everyone the wedding was off the next day. She knew I was serious about it. So I gave in. One last joyride,” Mac says. He looks to the ceiling and sighs. “One last joyride.”

  I take half a second to glance over at Rooks. My eyes haven’t left Mac since he started telling this story. Rooks has loosened his shoulders, seeming relaxed in his soaked button-up shirt.

  “Was Shark Island part of the plan?” Rooks asks. “Like ‘let’s go to the most dangerous place we can’ kind of joyride?”

  Mac shakes his head immediately. “No, not even close,” he says. “The storm threw us off course. We weren’t even headed in the direction of Shark Island, but Warren couldn’t get the boat to steer back toward the restaurant.”

  His expression turns fearful, like he’s seeing Shark Island come into view all over again. “We slammed into the rocks once, but the tides pulled us back. Warren was certain he could get us turned around, but the currents just kept spinning us, slamming that small boat into the rocks again and again.”

  I wonder if Hector made it back home tonight. I’m so pissed – like angry shark kind of pissed – but I don’t want Rosa to lose her grandson, no matter how much of an asshole he is. I care about her more than I hate him, even if he left me to be a dead flamingo.<
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  “The girls were scared and screaming, and Hanna yelled that this was all my fault,” Mac tells us, placing a hand on his chest to somewhat accept responsibility. “It was chaos after that. Hanna was crying over the break up, and Eileen said I deserved to burn him hell. Warren kept screaming for them to shut up. Raymond never said a word.”

  And that’s when Mother Nature stepped in. The storm was tired of the teenage drama and took matters into her own hands. Grabbing waves, wind, and rain, she threw them into the boat, killing the engine and shattering the propeller blades.

  “The whole boat jolted, like an electric shock, and we were thrown,” Mac says. “Eileen went over first. She didn’t come up for a few moments. Water was rushing into the boat, flooding the deck. We knew it was a matter of minutes. Then we slammed up against the rocks again. Raymond went overboard next.”

  I tighten the blanket around my shoulders to fight the chill, but it’s useless. Lightning cracks outside while the thunder claps at the earth. Mother Nature definitely has a way of telling people to get off of Shark Island. I feel like she’s replaying the very storm from that night, just to make a point.

  “Warren and I were trying to lasso a rope around a rock to pull us over,” Mac says. “We thought if we could get to the rocks, we could climb up to solid ground, wait by the lighthouse until morning, and the fishermen would find us. But then Raymond yelled that he couldn’t swim. He’d injured his leg. Even now, I don’t know if he cut it or broke it or…” Mac’s voice trails off. “He was bleeding, though. ”

  That feeling I got when I read Rosa’s final letter engulfs me again. I know how this ends – sort of – and I just want to pretend I don’t know. I want to be oblivious, although I know the deaths of his friends are inevitable.