by Jenn Bennett
Chapter 18
Lucky was right: Rapture Island is small. Very small.
It’s a little rocky on both ends, with trees in the middle. Among those trees, I can make out a few old buildings—or what remains of them. Just stones, really. And at one end of the island, near a weathered pier, a white-and-red lighthouse beckons like a finger into the water.
Not a single human being in sight.
Just the two of us.
Our own private getaway.
Lucky pilots us to the pier by the lighthouse, shutting off the motor to startling silence. And as he moors the boat, I exit it and tread onto old, gray boards stippled with white bird droppings. The boards bounce like rubber with each step.
It smells good out here, like saltwater and cedar, and as I approach a boxy, gray clapboard dock house on the sandy land at the end of the pier, the sweet scent of shrubby beach roses drifts from beneath its dusty windows.
A painted sign stands between the empty dock house and a footpath that splits between the lighthouse and farther into the island. It reads:
RAPTURE ISLAND
FIRST SETTLED BY THE NARRAGANSETT TRIBES.
SOLD TO EARLY AMERICAN PATRIOT, ROBERT HART.
HAS BEEN: TRADING POST, PIG FARM, RELIGIOUS COLONY.
RAIDED BY THE BRITISH IN 1776.
DESTROYED BY THREE HURRICANES.
SETTLED BY FORK-TAIL ROCK SWALLOWS IN 1969.
MINDFUL HUMANS MAY VISIT THE RAPTURE BIRD SANCTUARY FROM APRIL THROUGH OCTOBER. PLEASE PAY FEE TO TOUR THE ISLAND INDEPENDENTLY TO THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER.
NO OVERNIGHT STAYS. NO FIRES. PICK UP YOUR TRASH. DON’T PICK ANY VEGETATION OR FEED ANIMALS. STAY ON THE DESIGNATED TRAILS.
PEACE BE WITH YOU.
“Oh my God,” I whisper as Lucky trudges up behind me. “How did I not know this was out here? This should be a huge tourist attraction for Beauty. This is … amazing.”
“Yeah?” he says, hefting the strap of the cooler across his chest.
“Yes.” I swing around, trying to take it all in. “Look at all this. Everything.”
“Everything?”
“Like, okay, first of all—I love beach roses. They’re better than garden roses, because they’re the outcasts of the rose kingdom, and wherever we’ve lived up and down New England, there they are, like a good luck sign that smells amazing,” I say, smiling.
“Never thought about them that way. My mom calls them trash roses.”
“My mom says they’re magnets for bugs. See? Outcasts of the rose kingdom.”
He nods. “I can get behind an outcast.”
“And second, the website for the island isn’t half as weird as this sign, so now I’m totally intrigued about what’s here. But, oh my God. This sign! Wow!”
He shrugs. “Told you.”
“Lucky.”
“Was I right, or what?”
“You were so right. Hold on a second. I need to set up some shots from different angles,” I tell him, and he agrees, cheerful and patient, watching me work as I capture the strange sign. He even helps boost me up by my waist, letting me stand on his bent knee, so that I can get a better shot from above.
How could all of these things exist on one tiny island—the Narragansetts’ settlement, the religious colony, the pig farming, wars, hurricanes … all of that, only to be deserted and forgotten? It’s as if it’s one big time capsule of humanity’s successes and failures, and all that’s left is a marker of what happened. A marker, a sign, one last communication: Don’t forget us.
The best sign in all of Beauty.
Maybe the best sign in my entire collection.
“It’s so weird and beautiful,” I tell Lucky after I change out my film.
“Just you wait. This place gets weirder, if you’re interested in exploring?”
“Well, I didn’t come all the way out here to get back on the stupid Narwhal, I’ll tell you that. You promised me a colonial ghost town.…”
“Did indeed,” he says, looking upward. “Wish the sky looked a little better. The forecast said the storm passing over Connecticut should miss us, but those clouds are starting to worry me. Should probably ask the lighthouse keeper about them. No one knows weather patterns like sailors and lighthouse keepers.”
“And meteorologists, maybe.”
“I suppose,” he says, smiling. “Come on. Let’s check in.”
Problem is, we can’t. When we hike to the lighthouse, there’s a sign on the door that cheerfully informs us where the keeper is: GONE FISHIN’. It doesn’t say when this person will return, or even what to do about the fee. So Lucky runs back to the boat and finds a pen and paper, writes a note with our names and the time, and sticks it under the door with money for our fee.
“Hope that’s good enough,” he says gruffly. “Would it kill them to have someone on duty here during the summer? I mean, come on. This is peak tourist season. Not to mention that the pier is about to collapse. They need to put some damn money into this place. Why isn’t anyone here?”
Wow. Bad mood descending and fast. What’s up with that?
“Well, we did just sort of show up here without telling anyone,” I remind him. “They had registration online.”
“Fair point,” he concedes, still gruff.
“Should we walk around the island? We don’t need a lighthouse keeper to give us permission for that, right?”
“Guess not,” he says, looking a little less grumpy.
“Besides, we’re supposed to be being a little bad. At least, that’s what someone told me, I don’t know.”
His shoulders relax. “All right, Saint-Martin. You win. We’re outlaws today. We do as we please.”
Whew. Crisis averted.
Inside a little plexiglass holder that squeals when I lift the lid, there’s a small stack of tri-folded maps. They show a walking path around the island and point out several colonial buildings, including a church and a “burying ground.”
I crane my neck to kiss him lightly on his lips. “Take me to the burying ground. I want to snap a million pictures.”
“What about the haunted trading post?”
“It’s hard to decide. But wait. You didn’t even notice something.”
“What?”
“I didn’t get sick once on the way out here. Does that make me an official water rat, or what?”
“Well, damn. It certainly does.” He fist-bumps my hand and then grabs me around the waist and half-kisses, half-tickles my neck, making me shout out in surprise. And after I nearly fall over laughing, we settle down and stop fooling around, and he takes over map duties. Then we begin exploring the island.
Under gray skies, we hike down a sandy path bounded by tall grasses and more beach roses to the first historical site, set away from the coast at the edge of the woods. The settlement of Rapture—religious colony, pig farm, trading post—was torn apart by war and weather, so what remain are merely the outlines of where buildings once stood, stone labyrinths in the dirt that hint at rooms and the spines of fallen fireplaces.
As the skies darken, we loop around the other end of the island—pausing to take pictures of gravestones—and when we’re halfway down the opposite coast, we stop to eat a late afternoon snack at something called the Stonehenge of New England. It’s a mysterious standing stone circle—rather, what was lauded as one in the 1920s, before the last hurricane wiped out several grand summer homes that had been built here by a few pioneering rich people who thought Beauty was too crowded. Those were the last people to live on Rapture Island: One of those survivors admitted later that he built the stone circle as a hoax.
“It’s a pretty good hoax, you have to admit. I would’ve been fooled,” Lucky says. He’s picking up the remainders of our picnic near one of the stones that’s less standing and more leaning while I finish snapping another roll of film. “I think the fact that he built it inside an actual stone wall that’s hundreds of years old added to its veracity. Sort of a fool-the-eye thing. He shouldn’t have
told anyone and let the mystery stand.”
“I wonder if guilt finally ate away at him,” I murmur from behind my Nikon. I’m getting a lot of spooky shots out of this trip. It’s getting darker out here, though, with the line of storms veering closer. Not sure how this roll will turn out. I bump up the ISO as far as it’ll go and say, “Speaking of guilt … I broke into my grandmother’s closet.”
“Whoa. Really? You did?”
“I found something. My mom’s old yearbook. And I think I found an inscription from her mystery navy lover. It said, ‘It’s finally over. Only palm trees and white, sandy beaches on the horizon now. Our future is bright and sunny, and I can’t wait for the two of us start it together.’ ”
“Interesting …” He says this like someone who knows way more than he’s letting on, and that frustrates me to no end.
“Know anyone in town named Drew who was once in the navy?”
“Drew …” He scrunches up his face, and I can’t tell if he’s actually thinking about this or pretending to. That’s weird. He wouldn’t be lying to me … right? The one person in my life that I trust not to lie to me for any reason. Especially for no reason. And some random guy from my mom’s past definitely seems like a silly reason to lie.
So maybe it’s just my imagination.
Maybe I’m projecting all my mom’s lies onto him. It’s getting confusing.
The wind’s blowing pretty hard, and I can hear waves breaking just over a shrubby line of pink beach roses past the circle. “See, that’s always been her big dream, to move to Florida. The endgame. Everything’s better in Florida—that’s what she’s told me constantly for the past few years. That’s why we’re here right now in Beauty, in fact. So she can save money and we can move to Florida.”
“But you aren’t going with her,” he points out. “LA is a long way from Florida.”
My chest squeezes as I lower my camera. “A very long way.”
“If your mom is convinced that she’s going to settle down in Florida and stay put there, then why don’t you just go with her instead of moving to LA? Do you not trust that she’ll stay in Florida?”
It takes me a long time to answer. “Remember how the Summers & Co store window was before I broke it?”
“Much the same as it is now, only it was a lot filthier back then.”
I huff in frustration. “What I mean is, remember how they had all the beautiful Christmas displays, and people would stand outside on the sidewalk and press their faces against the glass and stare at the pretty, sparkly things inside the display window that were just on the other side of the glass, just out of reach, but they couldn’t touch?”
“Sure?”
“That’s what it’s like, living with my mom.”
He shakes his head, confused.
“She’s beautiful and sparkly, but just out of reach. I’m just a stupid bird that sometimes flies into the glass and gets hurt.”
His brow lifts. “Ah … She’s got an invisible wall up.”
“You know,” I say, peering at him thoughtfully, “I think she really might. And if I had to guess, it went up after the big fight with Grandma, when we left Beauty five years ago. And to tell you the truth, I’m not sure it will ever come down. Not for me, not for anyone.”
“You never told me what that fight was about. What caused the neighbors to call the police all those years ago?”
I shrug. “The funny thing is, I don’t even know most of it. Some of it, I think I’ve blocked out, and some of it, I just couldn’t hear clearly. I was in my bedroom—they wouldn’t let me come out—and they were in the kitchen. I heard a lot of swearing and shouting. I heard my name, so I know some of it was about me. About Mom getting pregnant with me in college and decisions she made. Maybe she regrets keeping me, I don’t know.”
“Aw, come on,” Lucky chastises. “Winona adores you. Anyone can see it. She brags about you nonstop to every customer that walks in the shop.”
This surprises me. So much so, that I’m not sure I believe him. “Well, I didn’t say the entire fight was about me, but like everything else, Mom won’t talk about it. Forbidden subject. And if we can’t talk about it, how can we get past it? So maybe you’re right about the invisible wall theory. You and I, we’re okay now, because we let down the wall. But Mom and me? I’m not sure we can ever be fixed. If there’s a permanent wall up between us, blocking any communication, the only way it’s coming down is with a bomb—see? That’s why that fight with Grandma happened.”
“Which is why you won’t go to Florida with her,” he says, finally understanding.
“It would be like flying smack into the Summers & Co window. Only pain and heartbreak for us little birds, not palm trees and sand.”
The skies darken dramatically. It smells like rain. It almost feels as if I could have conjured it with my guilt.
“Did you hear that?” Lucky asks, head tilted.
I still, listening. I hear nothing. Wind? Waves? What happened to the birds? The dark sky lights up blinding white and a terrible crack strikes the island—so loud, it startles me. My foot slips on the rocky ground, and I drop my Nikon.
“My camera …” I check it quickly, but it seems to be fine. I quickly close the lens and stow it away in its leather case as Lucky brushes dirt off my shirt. “That was lightning?”
“Yeah, and it definitely hit something nearby,” he confirms. “Maybe a tree or the lighthouse. It’s the tallest thing around. That’s what it’ll go for.”
“What about us? Will it go for us?”
The skies darken again as if it’s midnight, not four in the afternoon.
Thunder rumbles, and it’s loud. More lightning strikes. White. Bright. Close. Very, very scary. But this time, it doesn’t crack the sky open. It just brings rain. Sudden, surprising, steady.
“Shit!” Lucky says. “Let’s go to the boat and head back to town.”
“Is it safe to be out on the water in this weather?”
“It’s not windy, and the lightning’s passed. Yeah. We’ll keep an eye on it.”
He seems remarkably unfazed. He knows what’s he’s doing.
Everything’s fine.
We quickly pack my camera case inside the cooler bag because it’s fairly water resistant, and then we make a run for it, jogging down the muddying path through a gentle but steady rain. It’s light enough to see, but not as well as I’d prefer. I spy the lighthouse up ahead, and Lucky says that’s a promising sign that it wasn’t hit by the strike—especially when we jog out of the woods and spot the little dock house with the fabulously weird Rapture Island sign and the fragrant beach roses.
Lightning flashes again.
I jump, startled. Lucky, pulls me toward the dock house, under the modest cover that the door’s overhang provides. “We need to stay here until the lightning passes,” he says, pointing to a metal stick jutting at an angle from the top of the dock house’s utility pole. “Nice, fat lightning rod. Better to let it strike that than us.”
“Yes, please,” I say as the rain comes down harder.
He pulls me closer and looks behind us. “In fact, maybe we should go inside.”
“Is that legal?”
“Do you see a sign, Miss Sign Lady?”
I … do not. The island will probably curse us, but what do I care? I’m already cursed.
The windows are dark, and the door’s barred, but it’s just a latch on the outside—no lock. I lift it, and the door pushes open easily. No light switch inside, but the utility light shines through the window in a slant, and it’s enough illumination to see one big, empty room. Wood floors. Wood ceiling. Wood walls with a few shelves and a built-in desk that looks as if it was once a ticket-window, maybe for a ferry that ran here at one time or another. A dinosaur landline telephone sits there, the rotary kind with a dial, but it’s not even plugged in; its cord is wrapped around it like a noose, and the panel where it fits into the wall is missing. The only other things in the small room are a wooden c
hair, a few old manuals, some mooring rope, and a multipack of lightbulbs—presumably for the utility light outside.
Most important: It’s dry, and there’s no lightning.
All the winning.
“Hey, sort of reminds me of the North Star,” I say.
He makes an amused noise. “Sort of does … only, there are four walls and no gnarly tree growing through the roof.”
“True. More like North Star’s luxury annex, then.”
“And look at us, breaking and entering it,” Lucky says, pushing wet hair that’s gone wildly curly out of his eyes as he throws our cooler on the floor to keep the door propped open.
“Oh dear … What will people say?”
“There go those darn vandals again, being wicked.”
“Better call the cops.”
He slings an arm around my waist. “I could make a citizen’s arrest, if it will clear your conscience.”
“Do you have the power to arrest me out here? I think we’re in international waters, or something. We could probably gamble and trade arms. Transport bricks of strange drugs. Something about maritime laws …”
“You really don’t pay attention in class, do you?”
“I definitely won’t in the fall, now that I’ve got me a perfect-SAT boyfriend,” I joke.
He lowers his face near mine, eyes glittering. “Am I?”
“Are you … ?”
“Your boyfriend?”
I still, heart racing, as rain pounds on the metal roof above us.
“Don’t do that,” he says in a raspy voice, sliding a hand behind my neck. “Don’t put up the invisible wall. Please, Josie. If you don’t want to answer the question, then I’ll go first.… So here’s the truth. You’re my friend. The only person I can talk to without censoring myself. You laugh at my jokes.”
“That’s because your sense of humor is as bad as mine.”
“Worse,” he confirms, pushing damp hair away from my eyes. “And when I see your face, it makes me feel like everything is going to be okay. Like maybe … like, sure I might be a little bit of a monster—”