Mistwalker

by Saundra Mitchell

  So what was there to cry about?

  TWO

  Grey

  Sailors used to mark the edges of their maps Here There Be Monsters.

  They weren’t entirely wrong. Monsters don’t have claws, they have eyes dark as molasses and hair white as a new dime. They have soft petal lips that whisper the sweetest promises.

  I can say with absolute authority that one doesn’t notice a cloak of fog if one is too entirely entranced with the creature wearing it.

  It’s the thing beneath, the thing you cannot imagine, that captures you.

  Susannah had delicate fingers; she liked to pull them through my hair. I would close my eyes and exist under her hand. My heart beat for her touch. My blood ran for a single flash of her lashes. Not once did I question the mist at her feet. It seemed ethereal at the time.

  My father’s boat was fast; he had a talent for cutting ice. We sailed up the shore from Boston thrice weekly, buying lobster today to sell tomorrow while the beasts still waved their claws and curled their tails.

  It was an idiotic profession. One he intended to press on me when I was of age to captain my own ship. He assumed I wanted it. That I would be no happier than at the moment I reflected him completely. But I stood on the deck of his ship and loathed him.

  The man was gentle enough—many found him convivial company indeed. But I detested the cream he rubbed into his hands. As if any tincture might soften them and let him pretend to be a gentleman. I’d always wondered if he realized he stank of lobster. Even after a boiling bath with flowers and fresh soap: then he smelled of lavender and lobsters. It was no improvement.

  I had bigger plans for myself. A life of adventure, one lived on rails and on horseback. Through cities and deserts. Oh, especially deserts—I fantasized about them. To bask in the heat all day long, to warm my feet in the sand. To spend not a single moment soaked with salt water. Whatever the hook that bound my father with the sea, I didn’t possess it. And I had my plans to abandon it eternally.

  Working the lobster line with my father offered me little entertainment, so I had to make me own. The island in the Broken Tooth harbor, that fascinated me. The villagers said it was abandoned, dangerous, haunted.

  When my father and I sailed in, I studied its forbidding shape, wondered about its secrets. On our departure, I did the same, gazing and gazing at Jackson’s Rock.

  And it was in such contemplation that I saw Susannah for the first time. She stood on the island cliff in the bay, her hair unfurled, long locks tossed by the wind. With a pale cloak and gown, she seemed made of the mist.

  Leaning over the side, I stared at her—I wondered earnestly if this was a siren. If she would open her mouth and sing. If she would draw our ship into the rocks beneath her feet.

  Instead, she waved.

  Her fingers bloomed like a peony bud, and there was a weight to her smile that I longed to lighten. She shrank as we slipped away on good winds. Soon she was nothing but a star on the horizon, and then nothing at all but a memory.

  My thoughts troubled me: Was she the lighthouse keeper’s daughter? Was she there alone? It was the shape of her smile that drew me back. In my ship’s bunk, and in my bed at home, I invented in that expression a damsel that only I could rescue.

  Certainly, her father had locked her away from the mainland; undoubtedly, her stepmother had made her a servant. She was a nymph or a princess, Snow White or Cinderella. She was Rapunzel, and in my fever, I felt certain that if I only asked, she would let down her platinum hair.

  She did.

  While my father attended to business in the village, I rowed to the rock. My shoulders burned, and the sun—so mild to just stand in it—spilled fire all across me. In dreams, I was dashing in my rescue, crisp in linens. In truth, I landed on the shore with my shirt soaked through and damp hair clinging to my face. The ocean. Always the godforsaken ocean.

  “You shouldn’t be here.” Susannah stepped from the trees, a pale apparition.

  Already lovesick from memory, the fresh sight of her only stoked the fever. Leaping ashore, I approached, hands out as if she might startle like a doe. I told her, “I came for you.”

  “Why?”

  With every bit of foolish sincerity I had in me, I replied, “Because I love you.”

  In retrospect, I should have been surprised that she let me kiss her. That she threaded her fingers in my hair and whispered exactly the right words in my ear to entice me back. Our stolen moments were painted in romantic shades, in the bronze twilight beneath towering pines.

  For an entire summer, again and again, I returned to her rock, to her pale and spectral kisses—until I swore I would do anything for her. I would die for her.

  And then I did.

  I was an idiot, and a fool, and I have had a century now to shame myself for mistaking lust for love. Every time I look in the mirror and see my dime-silver hair and my eyes dark as molasses—every time I look across the water to Broken Tooth, hoping that the girl thinking of me will soon come to my shore—I’m reminded of my stupidity.

  And I hate myself only a little for hoping she’s just as unwise.

  THREE

  Willa

  I wasn’t that late, but when I came in the back door, I was caked in mud and smelled like low tide.

  Not a thing changed on Ms. Park’s face when she saw me. With one of our chipped coffee cups in her hands, she looked over her case folders and said, “I’m glad you could make it.”

  She wasn’t even sarcastic about it, but my mom raised an eyebrow anyway.

  “Sorry. I was working.”

  “Bailey was here,” Mom said.

  Guilty, I dumped my gear on the porch and went straight for the sink. I needed a shower, but it could wait. I turned the water on hot and then flipped the switch for the garbage disposal. “I’ll see her tomorrow.”

  Gargling furiously, the disposal swallowed sand and silt as I pretended not to notice the prosecutor. Only, I knew the longer I looked away, the longer she’d be there. Waiting. Head down, I asked, maybe not even loud enough to be heard, “What do you want, anyway?”

  Ms. Park cleared her throat, then twisted her chair around. Its wooden legs screeled against the linoleum, and I felt her move closer. “We need to go over your grand jury testimony.”

  Digging mud from beneath my blunt nails, I said, “Don’t you have what I told the police?”

  “Of course I do,” she replied. She sounded smooth, creamy even. The chair squeaked again, and then I could see her from the corner of my eye. “But I can’t have any surprises when you’re on the stand. You’re the only eyewitness we have, Willa.”

  My tongue felt like liver, thick and heavy and useless. Everything I knew about courts and stuff came off TV, and it so happens that none of those shows get it right.

  It’s not neat and clean, talking to the detectives, then going to trial, the end. No, I talked to the Coast Guard and Marine Patrol and then the police the night Levi died. And the next day, a detective totted up in a suit came and took notes.

  When they arrested Terry Coyne, I talked to the detective again. My dad stood at my shoulder during the lineup. Even that wasn’t the same as TV.

  They gave me a book of mug shots, rows and rows filled up with forty-year-old men with the same beaky nose and chickeny chin. It was scary, how much those pictures looked alike. I didn’t know until way after that I picked the right guy.

  Now it was going to a grand jury. They had to decide whether there was enough evidence to indict him—whether there was even gonna be a trial. All the police had were two bullet casings that matched a box they found in Coyne’s trunk, and me. My eyes. What I saw. It was down to two bullets and my memory whether he’d ever stand trial for murdering my brother. If that wasn’t enough, he’d go free.

  Cold, hard knots formed in my chest. “All right, what should I say?”

  Ms. Park brushed her smooth black hair behind one ear and insisted, “I’m not here to put words in your mouth.”r />
  “Then what do you want? I already told the police everything.”

  “Everything?” Ms. Park let that question hang a minute. Then she went on. “Because I’m going to ask you about the gear war. It’s the only way this murder makes sense. And if you say nothing . . .”

  “There wasn’t a gear war,” I said flatly.

  “We know Mr. Coyne put his traps too close to yours. We know your father complained to the council about it.”

  I shrugged. This, this part was Broken Tooth business. Ms. Park could ask all around town. Nobody would say gear war, because there wasn’t one. It was one lobsterman, me, taking care of business. Our waters were ours, our rules our own. Levi wouldn’t have told. He wouldn’t want me to either.

  All we did was cut and dump. We went easy on Coyne. Last year, in Friendship, somebody sank Lobstah Taxi and Fantaseas in the middle of the night. Couple years before that, it was a scuttling in Owls Head and a shooting in Matinicus. You got up on a fisherman’s waters and he had to retaliate.

  One fisherman against another, that was personal. When a whole town did it, orchestrated and arranged—that was a gear war. So I said nothing, and cast my gaze past Ms. Park.

  She went on, barely ruffled. Working the sarcasm, she said, “Then, coincidentally, Mr. Coyne just happens to find you and your brother minding your own business on the wharf at two in the morning. Right after he discovered somebody cut all his trap lines, there you are. But it’s not related.”

  “It wasn’t a gear war,” Mom snapped.

  “Then what was it?” Ms. Park snapped back.

  My mother thrust herself between us, reaching for the potato scrubber. She took it to my fingertips, rasping them mercilessly. She hadn’t done that since I was little; I could clean up after fishing and worming just fine on my own.

  Still, she soaped and scoured, her thin fingers pressing hard into my palm. “Where’re you from, Ms. Park? Concord?”

  Unamused, Ms. Park said, “Boston.”

  Mom scrubbed a little harder, hiding the ugly sound she made. The one that called the prosecutor a Masshole, after Mom had tried to give her an out by asking if she was from New Hampshire.

  Back stiff and voice steely, Mom pulled my hands under the tap and said, “A gear war’s something we’d vote on, in the village. It’d be all of us doing it, not just one kid, one night.”

  “Ma!”

  Snapping her head up, she looked at both of us hard. “I’m not gonna let that bastard get off scot-free because she doesn’t understand how things work here.” Turning her attention to Ms. Park, she went on. “If you say ‘gear war,’ nobody on that jury’s gonna listen to you.”

  “Then somebody needs to tell me what actually happened.”

  My head felt full; my ears ached, like I’d slipped too far under water. It wasn’t a crime anymore to cut off somebody’s gear, but I could lose my license for it. Three years before I could get it back. Three years when Daddy would have to pay a sternman to work the deck; all that time with money running out instead of flowing in.

  I could fight it. Claim I didn’t know anything about the cut gear. I could ask for a civil jury to decide it. If they found me liable, I’d have nothing. My family would have nothing.

  Though I could keep worm digging, it wouldn’t be enough. And the thought of watching the rest of the fleet sail without me, the prospect of standing on land instead of waves—that felt like dying.

  But all that was if they found me liable. They probably wouldn’t. Juries were our people. They understood you had to protect your waters. Turning their eyes the other way, they’d shake their heads. Shrug. They’d probably let me off. Probably, probably.

  Could they, if I got in front of the grand jury and admitted it? I didn’t know. Would Coyne get indicted if I didn’t? I didn’t know that either. My chest got tighter as I tried to balance the right thing with the way things were supposed to be.

  Expectant, Ms. Park said, “Well?”

  When I looked past her, I saw Dad sitting in his truck on the street. Orange light suddenly illuminated him. He was smoking again. Drawing on the cigarette, he sat back in the glow of the embers. He’d quit for Levi. That he was back on them, guess he thought we were already lost. Nothing was balanced, and I broke.

  “I did it, all right?” I faced Ms. Park, clutching the edge of the sink behind me. “He kept dropping his gear on ours, and nobody’d do anything about it. He’s not even from here. What’s he doing fishing our waters?”

  Ms. Park opened one of her folders. “Start at the beginning.”

  “You already got the beginning,” I said.

  I closed my eyes and listened to the sea in my memories. That night was so clear, I felt it on my skin. Cool wind and hot blood and the way my world ended in slow motion.

  I didn’t know it was ending, not at first. My laughter echoed across the deck of the Jenn-a-Lo, a little eerie and removed. A few minutes before, the night was bright and clear—a black sky spattered with stars, hung with a fat, silver moon.

  But pearly silk fog suddenly blotted out the sky, the shore. I couldn’t hardly see Levi in the wheelhouse, and he was three steps away. No one else could have seen us in the swirling haze, and that was good.

  “How many are we going to do?” Levi asked. The question floated out to me, disembodied.

  “All of them,” I said.

  I leaned on the rail. Dark waters stretched out all around me. They murmured against the side of the boat, sea whispers that lulled me to sleep at night and called me to fish in the morning. They taunted me when I was stuck in school. Better than anywhere in town, I could see the harbor from school.

  One day, Daddy was gonna retire. I’d be captain then. And my kids or Levi’s, they’d take up the stern. We’d been fishing in the shadow of Jackson’s Rock for three hundred years. If I’d had my way, it woulda been three hundred more.

  And that’s why Levi and I snuck out in the middle of the night. It’s why we stole the keys from Dad’s pocket and slipped away from the wharf without a word to anybody.

  Wielding the long, hooked gaff, I waited for the Jenn-a-Lo to glide up to the next green and blue buoy. I snagged it with the hook, and with a quick twist, I pulled it into the boat.

  I wrapped the buoy end of the rope into the block, then wound it into the hauler. The whole time, I hummed the same note the hydraulics did, and watched as the lobster pot rose to the surface. Two fat lobsters waved their claws from behind wire mesh.

  Sea spray stung my face; when I breathed, I tasted salt water and southwestern wind, and it was delicious. Trading the gaff for my knife, I cut the line between the buoy and the trap, then threw everything back in the water.

  The lobsters would slip free on their own, but the traps would be lost, and that was the point. That’s what this bastard from Daggett’s Walk got for dropping trawls in Broken Tooth waters.

  As the pot disappeared beneath the waves, I punched the air, burning on adrenaline. “Try hauling that!” I shouted.

  Levi sped the engine and said, fondly, “Shut it.”

  “Your face!”

  With that, Levi laughed too. “I refuse to upgrade to ‘your mama’s face.’”

  “No wonder you’re her favorite.” I grabbed the gaff and leaned over the side again. The Jenn-a-Lo cut through the night, steady and sure, toward the next pair of pots.

  It should have been hard to locate every line dropped by another lobsterman. After all, part of the captain’s job was plotting his own lines into the GPS so he could find them again later. And part of legacy fishing was having your own waters. Your own secret places, where nobody fished but you.

  But the interloper had found every red-striped Dixon buoy and dropped his gear right next to them.

  The first time it happened, Dad was willing to call it an accident. Piss-poor fishing by a piss-poor fisherman, he figured.

  We dragged his traps away from ours. That knotted up his traps underwater and left him a mess to clean up. It sh
ould have sent a message. And since we had plenty of water left in the season, we moved our traps closer to Jackson’s Rock.

  Not two days later, green and blue buoys bloomed beside our trawls again.

  This guy wasn’t just sneaking into waters that didn’t belong to him. He was outright stealing our catch and something had to be done.

  Dad asked around and finally figured out it was Jackie Ouelette’s cousin doing it. Carrying a six-pack and his calm, Daddy went up the hill to Jackie’s place to talk to her about it.

  Terry Coyne was there, and instead of talking, they had words. Coyne mentioned he was a boxer; Daddy pointed out he had a shotgun. Jackie got between them and sent my dad on home.

  Not surprisingly, that little talk didn’t fix anything. The next time Coyne’s traps showed up on ours, Dad reported it to the Zone Council. He made sure everybody at the co-op knew where Coyne’s lobster was coming from. They refused to buy his catch, but other than that?

  Nothing.

  Nothing happened, nothing stopped him. It added an extra hour to his day to sail to the next co-op, and they didn’t give a damn where the lobster came from. Back in Broken Tooth, we were hurting, and nobody wanted to do anything about it.

  So I bribed Levi to pilot the boat while I cut the lines on Coyne’s gear. Levi would have been happier at home drawing manga or sitting on the roof with Seth and Nick, talking about anime. He went along because I was his big sister. Because I asked him to. Because he liked being out at all hours of the night.

  But for me, it was payback, straight up. If nobody wanted to help, I’d help myself.

  The ocean agreed with me; the sea was on my side. It was smooth as glass that night. The fog wrapped around me; it felt like a kiss. Pulling twenty of Terry Coyne’s traps, I cut off every one and laughed the whole way.