Mistwalker

by Saundra Mitchell

  Hurrying to the next, I trailed my fingers along the hood. Suddenly, a Klaxon sounded, and I very nearly screamed. Hurrying away from that, I kept my admiration to examination by gaze alone. There were so many motorcars, as if each house on the street had at least one.

  At the end of the block, I found a rusted horse cart. Motorized, I presumed, since it was branded with FORD on its rear. I’d been gone a century, but even I recognized that name. Circling it, I marveled at its width and breadth. Then I stopped short when I saw a different face from mine in the front window.

  Inside, a man rubbed drowsily at his neck, sleeping soundly. When he shifted, a shotgun slid down the seat beside him. Those hadn’t changed greatly in the interval either. The black barrel gleamed; the wood stock shone with polish.

  Trembling, I backed away from the cart, then turned to hurry up the street. I was new and freshly living again. I didn’t care to enrage a man who traveled with arms in the open. I passed houses and listened to the strange sounds issuing from them as I walked.

  I reached the edge of town, where I found an establishment with a flickering-light sign outside; it promised a vacancy at the inn.

  When I pushed open the glass doors, I had to shield my eyes. The lights were unbearably bright in the lobby. Moving pictures played on a box on the counter, not quite like my computer, but similar. A floral scent overwhelmed me, and when I approached, I quite frightened the young man behind the counter.

  “I need a room for the night, one with a washbasin,” I said. I reached for my portfolio and ignored the lying birth date on my portrait card.

  “Jesus, dude,” he said, slowly taking to his feet. “Where the hell did you come from?”

  Considering the question, I offered him my card. And then finally I told him, “Oh, it’s best if we just say another place. Another time.”

  “Whatever,” he muttered, and reached for a key.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Willa

  When I finally set the mist free, I collapse. What’s strange is, though my knees clang against the gallery floor, I don’t really feel it. There’s an echo that almost feels like pain, but I’m too tired to examine it. Time is different here. I hope I smothered Broken Tooth long enough.

  I think it’s night, but I’m not sure about that, either. Rising, I find the staircase waiting for me. All I want is sleep, or rest, or whatever. I have a lot to learn about being the Grey Lady. As much as Grey thinks he told me, there’s a metric buttload to still figure out.

  The one thing I do remember is that I get a present at breakfast. That I get to wish for what I want to fill my plate. The staircase rattles, then opens into my bedroom. It’s exactly the same as before. White net canopy, green witch balls in the window . . . pictures of my family on the wall. Of the Jenn-a-Lo. Of my used-to-bes.

  Straightening the picture of me and Levi on the boat, I make my present wish. Breakfast can be whatever. Pancakes and sausage and home fries, I guess. But when I wake up, I want proof that my father, my family, is okay. I want to know that I did the right thing. A little proof that it was a good trade, my forever for my father’s present.

  I lie on the bed, my feet still on the floor. I don’t feel my heart beating. I breathe, but I think that’s only because I want to. When I stop, my chest doesn’t fill up. I don’t get hot. Or panicked. My throat doesn’t tighten, and I’m not struggling to inhale.

  This is real. I really did it.

  I close my eyes. I do not dream.

  When I woke, morning sunlight streamed through the window.

  My witch balls were gone. My pictures. All the little things that made that room mine. I lay on the floor and shivered. The wood was rough and old. Chewing up my elbows, it groaned when I pushed myself to my feet.

  A splinter slipped into my palm, and I cursed. It was a small, bright pain. Kinda weird, all things considered. Kinda raw. As I headed for the door, I wrapped my arms around myself.

  I wasn’t sure what was going on, because Grey never said the lighthouse looked like this to him. Dilapidated and broke down. Mold on the walls. Spiders in the corners. My back was killing me, and my mouth tasted like somebody camped in it.

  I didn’t need a mirror to know my hair was a janked-up mess and my clothes were wrinkled from sleeping in them. That was the one thing about Grey that always fascinated me. How perfect he looked all the time. I thought maybe I was doing this wrong. Maybe it was like making jewelry. I could follow along, but it was obvious I wasn’t a natural at it.

  The stairs scared me. Rusted, the frame gaped away from the wall. Old bolts scraped in the holes, sending a dusting of plaster snow to filter to the floor. The planks that made up the steps—the ones that were still there—looked eaten up. Termites or time or something. I couldn’t believe it, because this was supposed to be all me. All my wishes and dreams.

  A falling-down deathtrap? That was what the lighthouse decided I wanted? I wondered if there was a union I could talk to. A Monster and Faery Local 223, where I could complain about the condition of my haunt.

  I laughed, and it echoed. Like the place was empty, that kind of echoing. And I slowly made my way downstairs, where the kitchen should have been. Or the music-box room. Or whatever room ought to be there at that particular minute. But there was nothing. Just an empty lighthouse.

  Old gauges and pipes clung to the wood pillars, rust tears streaking beneath them. Broken windows let a constant, cold stream of air inside. That wind whispered, going around and around, echoing all the way to the top. Again, that echo, hollow and evacuated.

  When I tipped my head back, the stairs stayed put. They spiraled up. Even when I turned my back to them and stole a look from the corner of my eye, they were there. Creeping to the door, I reached for the knob, then hesitated.

  It didn’t seem fair that Grey got everything he wanted and I got a tore-up lighthouse that looked its age. None of it seemed fair, actually. That he got stuck here because he was a fool for love. That I’d be stuck here for trying to save my family.

  Not that superstition had to do with fair. Legends, either. That was the point, really, of all those once-upon-a-time stories—to warn us. To save us from quirk and whim and random chance. Happenstance. To protect us from things beyond our control.

  It was bad luck to let a woman or a pig onboard; you’d sink a boat if you set the deck hatch upside down. Eat a stranger’s food, spend half the year in the underworld. A poison apple means you sleep forever.

  Twisting the knob, I threw the door open and saw a whole new Jackson’s Rock. Into the forest, I shivered at the cold—but only the cold. Everything smelled fresh—the balsam firs and jack pines sweetened every step. As I walked the clearing path, I heard just what I would have expected to. Birdsong. Leaves rustling as squirrels and raccoons traipsed through.

  At the peak, I stopped. Above me, clear blue sky stretched above the naked, nearly winter trees. Below me, just down the western side of the island, I made out a blueberry barren. That would be something, come summertime.

  Walking again, I picked up a few of the tiny shells that littered the path. They cut my thumb and jingled in my pocket. When I broke through to the other side, the sun shone like new gold. It capped the stony shore, gleaming across its expanse.

  The terns we always thought lived on the island were there, their nests anyway. A couple of petrels stretched twig-thin legs and skimmed across the water. When they landed, they waddled a few steps across the cobble beach and looked my way. Their masked faces showed no surprise or concern.

  Before, Jackson’s Rock had been a dark, dead place. Now it lived. Approaching the water, I wondered if I would shear apart if I stepped into it, the way Grey described. What were my limits now? How much of this world was mine to have, and how much of it could I only watch?

  Wading out, I found the water so cold, it burned. My skin tightened and ached. It spread to my scalp; it made my ears ring. I kept going deeper, until I had to swim. Until I had to catch my breath.

 
Had to.

  The blast of a horn startled me. Splashing back toward shore, I threw my hair out of my face as a Coast Guard cutter streamed closer. A loudspeaker came on—usually a sound a lobsterman didn’t care to hear. But the woman’s voice that crackled over it was beautiful.

  “Stay right there. We’re coming to get you.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Charlie

  After two days cocooned in my inn, I had to get some air.

  Surrounded by electricity, lit by a moving-picture box, I gorged myself on visions of the world as it had become. I sat beneath hot running water that never seemed to fade. The rhythm of motorcars and people coming and going lulled me to sleep.

  But I’d been asleep a hundred years. I’d had enough of it. The realization that I had no one left pained me more in skin than in mist. It was an agonizing solitude. And a hundred dollars didn’t last nearly so long as it might have done once.

  My only thought was to catch a boat headed for Boston. There, I could search for the remains of my life interrupted.

  Packing my meager belongings took but a moment. Then I let myself out and smiled at the sun and the sky, at lungs that took real breaths. To be sure, bittersweetness ruled each moment. But I was alive again, and sometimes life was suffering.

  Turning myself to the shore, I hurried on my errand. It seemed entirely improbable, as I walked through the morning sunlight, that the first face I saw was Willa’s. Nevertheless, it was so. Not a memory of it, nor a replica. No hallucination or wishful thinking.

  It was she, standing on the wharf with a blanket wrapped round her shoulders.

  Some sort of uniformed officer put a hand on her back and guided her to the pavement. A deep-plucked emotion stirred in me, a bewildering concoction of both fear and longing. Past her, in the distance, the lighthouse cut a fine silhouette against a clear sky.

  There was nothing there anymore.

  If I said that I simply knew it to be true, it would be a lie. There were signs—I could gaze at Jackson’s Rock and had no inclination to look away. Once shrouded by mists, the island was clear and bright. Birds flew over it. Waters flowed to it. There was nothing there anymore.

  Rubbing at the ache in my chest, I turned to watch Willa. I’d been made flesh with her sacrifice. Humiliating, indeed, that she’d denied me until the end. But as I followed her with my gaze, I blushed. Shame, for my madness. My desperation. For failing to realize that every curse has a breaking point.

  True love’s kiss, or the tears of an innocent. Neither applied, in my estimation. Folding my hands behind my back, I watched as a woman leapt from a motorized horse cart. A man slid from the other side, and he was familiar indeed.

  Silvery hair, but shot with red, I’d seen him sleeping in that very horse cart, his shotgun at hand. Willa crashed into him, burying her face against his chest. His hands wavered uneasily, then finally fell on her back. The woman closed the circle around her.

  Reaching for a nearby bench, I had to sit down.

  This was Willa’s family.

  The one left gaping with her brother’s death, the one that drove her to beg at my feet to become the Grey Lady. In a hundred years, I hadn’t felt the pain of a knot in my throat. Nor the sudden burn of tears that somehow also occluded a good, deep breath.

  It was never the kiss or the tears that broke the curse. It was the pure heart behind them. A pure heart I’d never had. A selfless longing I’d never felt.

  Even at that moment, watching Willa’s reunion, I had not a bit of selflessness in me. I wanted her to raise her head so I could meet her eyes, and she, mine. She was the only soul left in the world who knew me.

  But she never looked back.

  Epilogue

  On my graduation day, I still had superstition, but I had hope, too.

  Vandenbrook always held commencement in the school’s ballroom. That was one of the nice things about going to an old Victorian mansion instead of some brick building built for learning: it had pretty touches.

  Stained glass that streamed colors over us, just twenty of us, as we sat in our caps and gowns. Bathed in scarlet and gold, we listened to the principal talk too long. Bailey’s valedictorian speech was just right.

  I wasn’t gonna tell anybody that her goodbye to senior year had done double duty as the essay that got her accepted into three different colleges, including the one she finally picked. UGA, down in Georgia—Cait decided on USC in Los Angeles. They were gonna try to make it work long-distance.

  We got our diplomas, and I posed with Seth and Bailey, for all three sets of our parents. Just like he promised, Seth was heading to Seattle. Not so much a guitar and a dream. Just a different life he wanted to try on. I kissed his cheek and sent him on his way.

  After the cake and punch and a couple of rounds of crying from my mom, Bailey took off with me. Her sad, broke-down truck had one last job to do before she consigned it to the truck graveyard.

  In the lot behind my house, my boat sat on a trailer. She was just a twenty-four-foot keel, nothing I could fish from. But I wouldn’t be fishing for a while, and that’s not why I bought her. It took a year and a half to clean her up and get her seaworthy, but she was finally there.

  Hooking the trailer to Bailey’s truck, I hopped in her cab for one last time. Her face was a little red from holding the parking brake back so hard.

  “You never were gonna get those brakes fixed, were you?”

  She blew me a kiss and dropped the brake. “Not for any woman, no ma’am.”

  It wasn’t a long drive to the shore, though backing the trailer to the water was more exciting than it had to be. For a minute, I thought we were gonna commit Bailey’s truck to a sea burial. She managed to stop it at the last minute, then cut the engine.

  “There’s a coast in Georgia,” she said as she hopped out. She came around to help me with the chains. “I don’t know how far it is from Athens, but I’m probably going to buy a car when I get down there.”

  Grinning at her, I steadied myself against the hull. “With brakes?”

  “When’s the last time I told you to kiss it?”

  With a laugh, we both moved at the same time to set my boat in the water. I had new plans to sail the coast. To see more of the world than Broken Tooth, Maine. I’d come back in the springtime, to help Daddy get the traps ready for the season, and to teach his temporary sternman how to do my job.

  And when I got my license back, I’d take my place. These waters were my waters; this village was my home. The legacy still mattered. I was gonna work the stern of the Jenn-a-Lo until Daddy retired. Then I’d step into the wheelhouse, her new captain.

  I’d be able to do it knowing that I had seen other places and lived other lives and still chosen this one. Three hundred years of Dixons had fished these waters; three hundred more waited. I didn’t want my initials to be the last set on the banister at Vandenbrook.

  “I’m not crying for you,” Bailey informed me, wiping her face.

  I hugged her, and bumped our foreheads together. Then I pinched her as I let go. “That’s to give you something to cry about.”

  That night, we had a bonfire on Jackson’s Rock. The whole senior class, and let’s be honest, most of the juniors and sophomores, too. Nobody could remember why we’d never done it before.

  Since you could only sail onto the south side of the island, we were hidden in the cove. There was plenty of downed wood to burn, and instead of cold, damp caves for secret kisses, there was an abandoned lighthouse.

  I stayed until the stars shifted to midnight. Until the waters were clear and smooth and I could see the mainland shore glimmering in the distance. Setting off across perfect seas, not on a Friday, I was whole. Happy. Alive.

  Hours slipped by, and as I passed the cliff over Daggett’s Walk, I could have sworn I saw a figure standing on the shore. He was a pang and a light—I squinted to try to make him out.

  Somebody was there, for sure, leaning against a truck, while someone else waited in the ca
b. The watcher’s face was familiar but not familiar. Impressions of shadows that came together to shape a thin mouth and keen eyes. I couldn’t know him for sure. But for some reason, I thought I might.

  It was only a moment, and I sailed on by. I had too many things to think about to lose myself wondering. To spend time adding up an expression, matching it to a memory. I was my own captain, and I had to think about the stars and the seas and my path through them.

  But if I hadn’t been imagining things—if he really was that ghost I’d known in the lighthouse—it was all right. I didn’t have to stop or wave. No need to say hello. I wasn’t sure I’d ever need to speak to him again.

  I was changed, and he was necessary, but it wasn’t that kind of magic. Not gold ink calligraphy swirling across the page, a delicate, transcendent the end. But he was something.

  A boat’s name was its charm. It was full of superstition like everything else—remembrance, penance, prayer. In our fleet, there was the Boondocks, where Mal Eldrich hailed from. The Jenn-a-Lo, for my daddy’s wife. Lazarus belonged to Zoe Pomroy, and she sure as hell had brought it back from the dead when she bought it off the side of the road for fifteen pounds of blueberries.

  The night was sweet with lilac blooms; clear skies over clear waters. Singing with my engine, the wind wound through the trees and crept into my cabin. My belly was full; I was warm. I had a direction. The whole world waited.

  I sailed on to my destiny on the Levi Grey.

  Acknowledgments

  Professional thanks to Julie Tibbott—never was there a finer editor—and my wonderful agent, Jim McCarthy. Though we have yet to watch a good show together, I remain ever hopeful.

  Foundational thanks to Mandy Hubbard for helping me find the high in the concept, LaTonya Dargan for bringing the legal science up in my house, and Colonel Joe Fessenden from the Marine Patrol for clarifying the consequences of cutting gear and not getting away with it.