Whose Waves These Are

by Amanda Dykes

  “I won’t bother you.” He rushes forward. “Meet me at seven tomorrow morning out at the dock. Visiting hours start at eight.”

  “Okay,” she says. “Thanks . . .” She tries to call him Fletch, but it feels too familiar, something about it not quite fitting him.

  “Jeremiah,” he says, lifting his eyes to meet hers and hold them. Study her. He is direct. Maybe too direct. “Jeremiah Fletcher.”

  She gives a quick smile, a vestige of social niceties. “Jeremiah,” she says, taking his true name as a peace offering. Offering hers in return. “I’m Annie . . . Ann . . . Bliss.” Neither feels quite right. Besides, he already knows her name.

  “I know,” he says, and with a duck of his head, he’s gone. Out the front door, a click behind him. His footsteps recede into the night, and from where she stands at the front window she sees him, hands in jeans pockets, bent forward against a night wind until he vanishes onto the Glad Tidings.

  The day hits her hard then, exhaustion overtaking her limbs, her body, her soul. But the house is calling, memories tucked around every bend. She answers the call, surprised to find her feet remember which spots in the floor creak.

  Just inside the front door stands an old phone table, the sort with a bench attached to it. Bob even has an old black phone—the kind with a cone to hold to the ear and a mouthpiece mounted on a pole to speak into. The cord is cut, frayed where he’d severed it with a pocketknife years ago. “Who needs a phone,” he’d said. “If a body’s got something to say to someone, they should just go find ’em and say it.” She smiles at how vivid his gruff voice is—and how that gruffness always wrapped up the value of people.

  On the side table of the bench stands what looks to be a homemade receipt stake—the sort chefs use to spear their paper orders—but this one is just a long nail, hammered through a square of splintered two-by-four, pointed end protruding up. Staked upon the nail are not restaurant orders but envelopes. Each one bearing one name in Bob’s handwriting: Mr. Spencer T. Ripley.

  Down the hall and to her right is the kitchen, where they used to take meals at the little wooden table. She runs her fingers over its chipped red paint. Summoned by the sound of sizzling bacon mingled with the warm scent of fresh-baked biscuits, they ate here morning, noon, and night, never once setting foot in the formal dining room at the front of the house. A scan around the room shows it just as she last saw it, down to Great-Grandma Savannah’s copper pie plate that Ann had learned to bake the family’s famous hazelnut pie in, and the picture of Bob and his beloved bride, framed in silver, without a hint of tarnish. Except—there is one thing new. A framed document, beside the door to the back deck.

  Flipping on the light, she crosses the room to read it . . . and her stomach sinks.

  DARTMOUTH GRAD BRINGS PLAN FOR NEW LIFE TO ALPINE VILLAGE ON VERGE OF IRRELEVANCY.

  She remembers the article. They’d wanted to print ON VERGE OF EXTINCTION, but she’d felt the word extinction would dishearten the residents too much if they ever got wind of it.

  It still turns her stomach, eight years later. How she’d presumed to know how to save a Swiss village older than her own country. All its residents retired but the mayor, and houses sitting empty all up the mountainside. But she’d had that anthropology degree and a vision untempered by humility—a combination that caused her to promise them the impossible.

  Maybe Bob never knew that part of it. Maybe he’d only learned of this part—the hope-filled part. Please, God. Words she’d sent heavenward countless times, that somehow the hurt she’d caused in Alpenzell might be undone. Please.

  Pulling in a deep breath, she did what she’d had to do to survive the guilt—let the past stay boarded up in the past.

  Upstairs, she rounds the railing and peeks into her old room, which had been her father’s old room, and Bob and her grandfather Roy’s old room before that. She smiles, recalling how she’d holed herself up in the closet when the wind was up. To turn the closet light on, she’d had to pull a chain, and she’d loved the way it made her feel secure, clicking on audibly to her pull and nestling her close in that warm closet. Her own little sanctuary.

  She pulls the closet door open. But when she reaches up to pull that old chain—it isn’t there. In fact, the whole closet is stacked floor-to-ceiling and front-to-back with cardboard boxes of every shape and size. Each one with a number scrawled across it in thick black ink.

  “What on earth?”

  She reaches up, feeling above the top layer until she finds the cord coiled up. When she gives it a tug, the whole thing takes on an eerie silhouette, backlit like another world is behind it.

  She itches to look closer, to open a few of them up—but something turns her back. Human decency, maybe? This isn’t hers. She has no right to search through any of it.

  Quickly, before she can change her mind, she reaches to shut off the light and retreat. But her watch snags on a box on the way down, causing it—and two others—to tumble down. Pain shoots from her toes, where one of them has landed. She winces and bends to pick up the offending box. As she retrieves it, the contents tumble out on the ground.

  Is that . . . ? But that makes no sense.

  Kneeling, she confirms that it is, indeed . . . a rock. Gray and unassuming, angular on one side and round everywhere else, it’s just a lump of hard earth, released from its cardboard prison.

  She eyes the closet once more. There must be at least fifty other boxes in there. Are they all . . . rocks?

  With care, she replaces the opened box and the two other boxes as well, noting the slow and heavy roll inside one of them.

  It sure feels like a rock.

  “What are you up to, GrandBob?” she whispers into the emptiness, but the rocks tell her no secrets.

  eight

  Sleep doesn’t care for places outside normal. Cloaked in the scarlet afghan her great-grandmother Savannah had knit, Ann curls up in Bob’s library, thoughts playing chase with slumber. Counting moonlit books filling shelves floor-to-ceiling around the empty brick fireplace, she pictures Bob reading them, aching that he’s not reading them now. She can’t stop thinking about the closet of rocks, troubled at their presence and wondering what they might mean. But finally her bleary mind registers the waves—breaker after breaker upon the shore—as the familiar Chicago wind and carries her off to sleep.

  And then a deep-throated rumble grabs her awake. Rushing to the window, she spots a light bobbing in the dark at the end of the dock. Her thoughts are heavy, sluggish as they try to catch up to where she is, who that is, what’s going on—and the fact that something is not right.

  That is Jeremiah Fletcher’s boat . . . and she is late.

  Clutching the blanket around her, she’s off into the predawn.

  “Wait!” she shouts, but he’s pulling away from the dock already. Had she overslept? Not heard the alarm? “I’m coming!” Bare feet fly over frost-cloaked grass, crunching and jolting her further into awareness. “I’m here!” But he’s too far out to hear, his back to her as he plows the Glad Tidings into the dark.

  Her feet collide with the dock, and she slides like a puck on ice, arms flailing as she scrambles for balance and grabs it none too soon. Breath coming in quick white puffs in front of her, she shivers. “Great. Thanks for nothing, Fletch.” The name the locals say with such fondness comes out bitter. And that’s when the sound of the alarm jangles from back in the house. Five o’clock.

  Oh. She flushes warm, her mistake clear as the coming dawn. And where twenty seconds ago she was loathing him for not hearing her, she is suddenly thankful. She takes herself back inside and spends the next two hours keeping busy in the too-quiet house, where creaking floorboards, the ticking grandfather clock, and poets of the ages are her only companions.

  Seven o’clock on the dot finds her dangling her feet over the dock into the morning sea smoke, watching as the Glad Tidings curves around the islands and back to the dock.

  “All aboard who are coming aboard,” Jer
emiah says, and she stands. The moment of truth. It had taken her almost a whole summer to feel comfortable crossing the deck of Bob’s boat . . . and she doubted it was like riding a bike. She couldn’t just get right back on the boat as if twenty years hadn’t passed and her dream wasn’t just as vivid as back then. She grips the rail as Jeremiah waits. He checks his watch.

  “Hey,” she says. “I’m not the one who’s late here.”

  “Nope,” the man says, arms crossing in front of his gray-and-white baseball T-shirt. “I’d say you were about two hours too early.”

  Indignation rises in her, and she clambers up until she’s standing right in front of him, arms folded to match his. “You heard me?”

  He shrugs.

  “You could’ve said something.”

  “Didn’t think you’d hear me above all that hollering you were doing with that shawl thing around you.” His mouth pulls up on one side into a dimpled half smile. He’s not so scruffy today, his face clean-shaven.

  “Shawl?” The man, with his Mariners baseball hat shadowing his eyes, doesn’t look like the type to volley words like shawl. She feels it—the click of the first wheel of the Jeremiah lock turning. “You mean the blanket.”

  “Same difference.” He motions her in, and she steps forward. She’s dressed practically, ankle jeans and a T-shirt, her favorite hunter green cable-knit sweater draping around her to help keep the bite in the air at bay. But even so, she freezes just before boarding the boat.

  “Ah,” Jeremiah says. “It’s got you.”

  “What’s ‘got me’?”

  “You’re sea-scared,” he says. “Don’t worry. It’s pretty common. Navigating the bay is doable for most people, but something about the open sea feels different.” He puts on a voice he probably intends to be soothing, but it sounds condescendingly slow to Ann. Her blood begins to boil accordingly as he continues. “I’ll tell you what I tell the kids from the school when I ferry them over to their islands. Just take a deep breath, close your eyes, and—”

  Her feet want to root down deep, remnants of an old nightmare resurrecting, but she blows past Jeremiah, lifting those leaden feet and planting them firmly on the Glad Tidings. Satisfaction surges through her, and she spins in triumph to face the man who’s staring, brow furrowed.

  “Ready,” she says with a smile, trying to shove the shakiness from the cheerful proclamation.

  Jeremiah moves slowly toward the cabin, leaving wary eyes on her. “As you wish,” he says, like he’s Farm Boy from The Princess Bride. “Just . . . try not to break my boat?” He nods at her fists, which grip the railing for dear life, despite the smile she’s plastered on.

  She removes her hands quickly and clasps them in front of her, feeling her face go hot. As the boat pulls into the bay, those hands fly right back to the railing. She thinks she hears a low laugh coming from that man, but when she looks, Jeremiah Fletcher has his eyes fixed on the ocean out in front of them.

  Once out of the bay and into the open water, she inches closer to where he stands checking the screen of his plotter.

  “So,” she says, “are you from around here?”

  He looks at her, and she feels as if they have come to a moment of reckoning. Not the same measuring-up that the other people of Ansel seem to be doing, but some kind of looking-in.

  She takes a step back.

  “I’d say I’m as much from around here as you are,” he says at last.

  What kind of answer is that? She’s about to follow up, but he beats her to it.

  “You’ve been here before,” he says. It’s a statement, but it feels like an invitation. Warning bells go off. She doesn’t know him. He couldn’t have that part of her, not yet. So she gives an answer about as good as his was.

  “Ayuh,” she says, using the local word for impact. “It was a long time ago.”

  “. . . with Bob,” he says, filling in at least one of the blanks.

  She nods.

  “Listen, Annie . . .” He uses the name everyone around Ansel knows her by. But it’s different with him. He’s new, not from that world. Yet there’s something in hearing him speak it that feels . . . right. He’s looking at the water again, and the pause is so long she wonders if he’s forgotten to finish his thought. He blows his cheeks out, releases a breath. “When you see him . . .”

  She swallows, curls her fingers around the door frame. There is true pain on his face, so much so that his heaviness fills the cabin and overflows, wrapping around her, too.

  Jeremiah seems stumped, unsure of how to go on. His jaw works, and he looks her straight in the eye.

  “A man who can take on the world, like Bob . . . to then see him unconscious to that world . . . I don’t want it to shock you. He’s changed.” There’s a gentling in Jeremiah’s eyes. “But he’s still the same inside. You’ll see.”

  The boat blows on, and the waves part into a wake behind them. At last she speaks. “It’s kind of you to visit him like this.”

  Jeremiah shakes his head. “It’s the least I can do. He’s done more for me than I can ever repay.”

  Ann wants to ask what he means, feels another round of clicks go by as she works to unlock what drives this person before her. He bristles, perhaps sensing her studying him.

  “He just . . . got me through some stuff when I first came here,” he says.

  He stiffens, his vague words a wall going up between her and whatever “some stuff” is.

  “Stuff he’d been through before,” Jeremiah says. He’s still standing at the helm, but he’s a thousand miles away.

  He remains so as they dock in Machiasport, taxi all the way to the Northwest Regional Hospital, and ride the elevator. The orange light lands on floor three, dinging as Ann reads the corresponding words. Intensive Care Unit. Jeremiah’s long strides take him across the waiting room quickly, to where he speaks in hushed tones with a receptionist perched behind a light oak desk. The woman flashes Ann a glance, and her face softens. She nods to Jeremiah and reaches beneath the desk. A loud click sounds behind her, the unlocking of the double doors, and she motions them through.

  The corridor is dim, lights low like the voices from the nurses’ station. Jeremiah glances back at her, pulling one side of his mouth into a sad smile. There’s a tenderness there that she doesn’t want, for it can only mean that what’s coming will be hard.

  “You can do hard things, Annie.” She hears the encouragement in Bob’s voice from decades past, sees his blue eyes crinkled at the corners.

  Jeremiah slows near the end of the hall and places his hand on the doorknob. Room 308. He pulls the door open and holds it for her. She takes a deep breath. Everything around her seems to slow—except her heartbeat, which is racing. She steps through, but something stops her. Jeremiah’s hand. Just a quick clasp around her hand. It is warm. Reassuring.

  Inside, the morning sun slips through open blinds. The smell is sterile. Clinical and empty. Every possible opposite of Bob.

  And then she sees him there on the bed, attached to machines and lying still but for the slow rise and fall of his broad chest. Her hand flies to her mouth, stilling the cry threatening to escape.

  At his side, she studies his face etched in kindness, and she knows those etchings did not come easily. She does not fully know the stories but has heard rumblings enough to know this man has lived through loss deeper than she can imagine. And yet it’s his laughter that echoes in her mind.

  Early in her summer visit, she, a scrawny girl of ten squinting past the freckles she wasn’t yet old enough to despise, plopped down next to him on the end of his dock. He sat in an old Adirondack chair and raised an eyebrow at her. He didn’t know what to do with a gangly girl any more than she knew how to live with a relative she did not understand her relation to.

  “Mister,” she said, “what do I call you?”

  “Well, you better stop calling me mister—that’s for sure.”

  “What, then? Are you . . . my granddad?”

  He let ou
t a slow exhale, as if she’d asked the meaning of life. “Now there’s a question.” He paused, never in a hurry. “Let me ask you this. What’s a granddad do?” He said it as if he were wrangling a wet sheet through a laundry crank.

  She screwed her mouth to the side. “I don’t know. Cook grilled cheese grinders. Play cards. He looks a little wrinkly, maybe.”

  That made him hoot. “Well, that sounds about right. Tell you what. I’m your great-uncle Bob. And my brother, Roy, was your dad’s father, your granddad. He’d have busted his buttons for the chance to know you, and I’m honored to have the chance. How ’bout you call me . . . grandguy?”

  Annie laughed. “Nah, how about Grandpa?”

  “Gramps?”

  “That makes you sound grumpy.”

  “Well, aren’t I?”

  “Only when the wind’s up.”

  “Okay, then. You pick a name.”

  She’d pondered a bit. “I like GrandBob.”

  He’d turned to her. She turned right back at him.

  “GrandBob,” he said, spreading his hand across the sky as if seeing the name in lights on Broadway. “That’ll do.” And suddenly Ansel had felt a little more like home.

  Here in the hospital room, Jeremiah approaches, bringing her out of the memory. “They say you can talk to him, that it’s good for him,” he says.

  Annie nods, unsure of what to say to the man who knows her best, here in the presence of a near-stranger. Everything about it feels wrong. But the silence ticks on, and at last she speaks.

  “Hey, GrandBob.” Her voice feels too big in the stillness of the room. She darts a glance and sees Jeremiah has moved to the corner, pulling a book from a stack on the table. Backyard Boat Building. A further look around shows a plant on Bob’s bedstand, his jacket hanging in an open closet as if he’s just come in from one of his “blusters down the beach.” And in the corner to her left, the dull gold gleam of the knob of a cane shines from a barely open storage closet. She reaches for it, smiling.

  Even twenty years ago Bob had spoken with longing of having a turn with this cane, ebony with its hand-engraved gold knob from over a century ago, inscribed for the town’s oldest citizen. It has been in the town’s possession since The Boston Post gifted them to New England towns lucky enough to receive them back in 1909. Ansel’s, she knows, is one of the few canes still present and accounted for, holding up the tradition of supporting the lives that for so long had supported the town. But something doesn’t quite add up. Bob is only seventy-four . . . not the oldest citizen by a long shot, if she isn’t mistaken.