The Rattled Bones

by S. M. Parker

  I open the hatch. “One or two.”

  “Ayuh. Mind if an old man takes a look?”

  “Have at it.”

  Hoopah boards the Rilla Brae like the good co-op owner he is and unloads my catch onto the scale. He rips me a receipt for the two hundred and sixteen pounds I deliver. He doesn’t ask after how I’m doing, because he knows the answer. I’m surviving.

  When I head out of the harbor, Reed’s boat is approaching the wharf, but I don’t wait for it to dock. Instead, I meet Reed on the water and we quiet our engines.

  “Good catch?” he calls over the waves.

  I nod. I don’t tell him how the sea felt different today, a stranger.

  “Just bringing mine in now. Pick you up for the quarry later?” Reed asks. It’ll never not amaze me how his face is so often filled with hope, like everything is possible in any moment. I want to be the girl who swims away the afternoon with him, but it’s already hard to remember the version of me that had the freedom to do anything so indulgent.

  “Don’t you have class? For your GED?”

  “I’ll head over there tomorrow. Gotta help my granddad, and then I need to chill. Come with?”

  “Meet you there.” I know this is a lie—I’ll never go to the quarry again. But he’s lying too. It’s always tomorrow when it comes to school.

  “Countin’ the minutes.” Reed throws me two fingers, a peace sign.

  “Love you.” I tell him. The truth.

  I start toward home, but I just can’t.

  Instead, I drop anchor off the shores of Malaga. There’s no University of Southern Maine boat today, so I climb into my skiff and untie it from the Rilla Brae. I row to the rocky beach with my suspicions trained on the water, my ears perked open. But the water merely curls over itself, fixing its focus on the business of slapping waves. At the beach, I drag my skiff onto land and grab my pack. My eyes are alert, searching for that girl, her baby.

  I return to the highest part of the island and spot the USM research boat. It bobs off the south shore—if you can call the granite ledge a shore. My instinct leaps to protect the craft from the tangle of fierce currents.

  “Hey.” The voice comes from behind me, recognizable already.

  I turn and Sam’s hiking toward me, his face all smile. “Hey.”

  “Looking for me?”

  Not quite. “I came for lunch. I didn’t see your boat until just now. I can head home if I’m disturbing you. Or, you know, your work.”

  “Not at all. It gets lonely out here.” He jams his hands into his pockets. “It’s good to see you again, Rilla Brae.”

  His inflection tells me he’s referring to my boat, but the way he says my full name trips something in my gut. Like he knows a secret about me without knowing me at all. It makes me more than uncomfortable, so I focus on what I do know.

  The water around us.

  The pull of the currents.

  “So this may be none of my business, but you’re pretty new to the sea, huh?”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  Yep. “A little.”

  “It’s okay to be totally embarrassed for me.”

  Sam reminds me of my father in this instance, the way he invites me to my own opinion, encourages it.

  “I basically got a crash course in operating USM’s salty dog.” He nods toward the boat. “Wait. That’s the right word for a boat, right? Because I’m trying to act all cool, but I think I just blew it.”

  I smile at his rookie mistake. “Technically, a salty dog is a person who spends a lot of time on the ocean. I’ve never heard anyone refer to a boat that way.”

  “Figures.” He laughs, runs his fingers through his fine black hair, which is loose today and hangs to his shoulders like silk. This is a boy comfortable with laughing off his mistakes, like it means nothing for him to be wrong. Like he isn’t built to assert his manliness, his rightness. Honestly? After years of working with men who don’t know any other way but to be right, it throws me.

  “Would you be open to some advice from a salty dog?” I ask.

  “Advice me. I’m all ears.”

  “So.” I point to where his boat is. “You’re boat’s anchored on the south side of the island.”

  “Yep. South side.” He says it like cardinal directions are the easiest thing to know at sea.

  “The thing is, there’s a rip in those waters, and when the tide changes, it’ll be too dangerous to row back to your boat. The riptides are strong enough to drag an anchor across the sea bottom. You could lose your . . . salty dog.”

  “Jeez-us!” Sam’s face pales. “Like an undertow?”

  “Basically.”

  “Why didn’t you open with that? That’s a fairly important piece of nautical information.”

  “You’re okay. You’ve got another hour or so before the tide changes.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  Relief softens his shoulders. “Yes. Right, good.” His hand floats through his hair again. “That boat probably cost more than four years of tuition.”

  Much more. But it feels better not to disclose this fact. “If it were my boat, I’d move it now.”

  “I thought you said I had another hour?”

  “Never trust a tide.”  The words are my father’s.

  “Okay, now I’m panicked.” He points to the underside of his chin. “This face here? This is the face of panic. The real kind. The my-panic-could-kick-your-panic’s-ass kind of panic.”

  I let out a short laugh. “You’ll be fine. Just take caution is all.”

  “Okay.” He stop-signs one hand. “Let’s talk real here. I am now full-on scared shitless to get into a basically weightless rowboat to fix this situation. I read The World According to Garp. I know all about the Under Toad.”

  My heart flames with memory. “Did you just say ‘Under Toad’?” How old was I the first time my dad warned me about the dangers of the Under Toad, the creature that lived in the strongest of currents? The giant toad that lurked below the deep, always hungry for children, ready to pull them down.

  “Yeah, you know. From John Irving’s classic.”

  “ ’Course.” I didn’t know, but my brain clamps around this fact, a shell hoarding a pearl.

  “Look, at this point I think we can both agree that my best option is to build a meager shelter and live on the island permanently. Because now you’ve got me all kinds of freaked out, and I don’t want to move that boat and risk crashing it, because if I crash it I can’t return to school or home and I’ll have to live here permanently anyway.”

  I only half hear him. I’m too consumed with the fact that he’s given me the gift of a new detail about my father—how he learned of the Under Toad from a book. I’m so grateful to Sam in this moment, this stranger who will never meet Jonathan Brae.

  “Do you want some help?” My father taught me to repay a favor with two.

  “Yes. That is exactly what I want. No, need. Thank you.”

  “Happy to do it.”

  Sam and I climb into his skiff, and I row it to the larger boat. “The leeward side of any island is the protected side.” I talk to drown out the song if it returns. I can’t give anyone a front-row seat to the fallout of my hallucinations, even a stranger.

  “Leeward. Got it.”

  I pull back on the oars, cut through the top layer of water. “The sheltered side of any island sits out of the winds, away from the fierce currents.”

  “Keep away from fierce currents.” He draws a phantom check mark in the air. “Got it.” His grip returns to the side of the boat, the knuckles on his other hand already bone white as I guide us through the choppy waves.

  “I’m sure everything would have been fine.”

  “You weren’t so sure ten minutes ago.”

  “Well, worst case, your boat would have eventually washed up on the shore there.” I elbow toward Fairtide.

  “Why?”

  “That’s the way the current pushes here. Flot
sam always ends up along that shore.”

  “I’d like to be very clear that I don’t want my boat to become flotsam.”

  “Duly noted.” I don’t do a great job of hiding my smile as I turn to approach the research boat.

  We board, and I guide the larger vessel out of the way of danger. Sam is watching me too closely. I know he’s noting my speed, the way I navigate, but still. It feels like he’s seeing all the things in me that feel too messed up. When I anchor his boat next to the Rilla Brae, I nod toward home. “I should be heading out.”

  “What about lunch? Isn’t that why you’re here?”

  It is. And isn’t.

  “I could eat now that I know I won’t be shipwrecked. Join me?” He sweeps his arm in a wave.

  There’s a flicker of hope that Sam will give me another piece of my father, however small. “Okay.” I grab my bag for the second time today and hike up the island.

  “My site’s just over the ridge there.” Sam points toward the trees, and I follow. He talks as we make our way, but I don’t hear every word. As the trees come closer, they loom bigger than a stand of spruce. They form a forest box that holds secrets. They gather as a shelter for a disappearing girl. A screaming baby. Who knows what else?

  I sit facing the forest, not willing to make my back vulnerable. It’s not until I have my pack pulled off my shoulders and the front pocket unzipped that I see the dig site, just down the hill. He’s roped off a twenty-foot section of earth, metal indicators and twine marking the area. The enclosed dirt sits lower, a few inches of topsoil meticulously swept away. To its side is a raised table, a screen stretched across the large, flat top.

  Sam follows my gaze to the excavated earth. “The old school grounds.” He sits next to me, but not too close. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t appreciate how he gives me my space.

  “Like a school school?”

  His smile curls. “That’s a lot of doubt for not a lot of words.”

  I unwrap my peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “It just doesn’t make sense. Why would there be a school here? It’s too remote. Who could get to it?” Here is the moment when I should relate my suspicions that his professor likely wants him to excavate another island. Maine has more than three thousand miles of coastline. It’s an honest mistake.

  Sam rifles in his bag, growing distracted.

  I take a bite of lunch, and the jelly is cold from being in my cooler. It wakes my mouth, and my hunger. Above me, a gull circles for scraps.

  Sam empties the contents of his bag onto a patch of grass. “Oh, come on.” His words are a huff.

  “Something wrong?”

  “I forgot my lunch.” He swats his forehead with his palm. “Must have left it on the counter this morning. I’m kind of spacy about stuff like that. You should know that about me.”

  “Um . . . okay.” I don’t tell him that this isn’t the first step in us getting to know each other, that I don’t need to be familiar with his idiosyncrasies. This is me looking for a girl. Not a boy. Still, I pull out my second sandwich, offer it to him.

  He waves me off. “No. That’s super nice, but you made that for you.”

  I didn’t. I made it for Dad. But Sam is the only person in the area who doesn’t know about my father’s death and I’m not about to change that. “My dad taught me that it’s rude to eat alone.”

  “Yeah?”

  I shake the sandwich. “Yeah.”

  He takes the offering and smiles. “I like your dad.”

  And just like that, Sam makes my father alive, right here in the present tense. I turn my head away, hide the choke in my voice. “So, this school . . .”

  “Oh, the school’s long gone,” Sam says, bread tucked into his cheek. “The state took that away in thirty-two. No, thirty-one. Technically. It was December, so, yeah, 1931.”

  “What do you mean ‘took it away’?” I turn to Sam. He has my full attention now.

  “Why does anyone take anything? It had value.”

  “That sounds like something my dad would say.” The minute the words are out of my mouth, I want to reel them back.

  “So your dad’s a smart man, huh? Genius-level IQ, no doubt.” Sam smiles a smile that can only be described as triumphant.

  “The smartest.”

  Sam’s eyes gather the island spread out around us. “So he probably knows all about the school . . . Malaga’s history. You should ask him about it. Locals always know more than researchers.”

  But I’m not so sure. Because it seems like this boy from away might know so much more than I do.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Lunch lasts longer than I realized. I board the Rilla Brae and pull up her anchor. I wave to Sam as he stands on the shore, and I can’t help but wonder if he really is camping on the island.

  Doesn’t matter. None of my business.

  I grab the key from the console and my eye catches orange. Sitting on the top of my GPS screen is a perfect bloom. A flower. Fat as an open rose. My fingers rub its citrus petals and feel how they are thick, bold. “How did you get here?” A smile spreads on my face, knowing Reed must have boarded my anchored boat, gifted this gorgeous flower. I raise it to my nose and it smells of spice. Pepper? I know this blossom. “Flame” something, a plant from a warmer climate. One of the plants Gram pulls up every autumn, tucks into storage in the cellar each winter. Did Gram give this flower to Reed? Was he reckless enough to pick it from her garden? I look for a note on the dash, but there’s only a small stone circle to hold the roundness of the bloom. I exchange the flower for one of the stones, rub the rock between my thumb and finger. It is deeply grooved where the water has spent centuries cascading over it, carving it. The rock brings the memory of my mother, plucking larger stones from the sea, weighing her skirt down.

  I return the stone to its circle and shake off the fear that still haunts me after my mother’s last night at the shores of Fairtide.

  I head home to find Gram coaxing her trumpet vines around the pergola posts on our deck. Their eager green stems are long and healthy. Soon they will bloom with sun-bright yellow flowers that will look exactly like mini trumpets, heralding the official arrival of summer. Gram wears long sleeves when she’s training these vines, because for all their beauty, they set a rash across her skin that she considers traitorous. I look around her feet, expecting to see a carpet of the flower I hold in my hand, but there’s no orange in the garden this time of year.

  “Rilla! I expected ya back hours ago.” Gram plucks off her dirt-soaked gardening gloves, flattens them against each other before placing them onto her gardening stool. She walks to me, her eyes trained on the flower I’m carrying. “Where did ya get that?”

  “Reed.”

  She lifts the stemless bloom from my hand, twists it slowly to spin a look at its edges. “Where would Reed get a Flame Freesia?”

  “You didn’t give it to him?”

  Gram eyes the flower with a suspicious stare, as if she wants to ask it questions directly. “It’s not from my garden. Flames don’t bloom until August.”

  “Maybe a florist shop, then?”

  Grams harrumphs. “Reed at a florist?”

  She’s right. I can’t picture Reed in a small store crammed with cut flowers. Reed’s too wild, and he likely picked the flower from the wild. “Want tea?”

  “A cup would be great.” A bee lands on the Flame Freesia. Then another. Their buzz is electric as they disappear into the bloom’s orange heart.

  In the kitchen, I set the kettle to heat and walk my fingers along the shallow shelves of bottled herbs. I choose skullcap and shimmy the cork from the tiny bottle’s neck. Its earthy fragrance wakes my senses.

  Gram has her face turned to the high sun when I meet her on the back deck. The lone Flame Freesia sits on the table between our chairs. I don’t even have the tea set in front of her before she turns to me, gives me an approving look. “Interesting choice.” She reaches for her mug. Skullcap is named for its ability to put a cap on the
mind that thinks too much. Also known to calm a person who is facing intense life changes. It’s possible I should have brewed an ocean of this stuff.

  “Was it a good day buggin’?”

  I nod. “Not my best, not my worst.”

  “Can’t be ungrateful for a normal day.”

  “Nope.” Except we both know today’s normal isn’t our normal.

  We sit with our tea warming our hands, even though the day is already warm. But this ritual has always been my favorite, staring out at the sea for a few quiet minutes with Gram before the day bends into night.

  “That flower. When did Reed give it to ya?”

  The bees are gone now, the air a soft wind. “He left it in my boat.”

  “Mmm-hmm. Today?”

  I laugh. “Yes, today.” It’s zero surprise to see Gram obsess over a flower, but usually not one she already has growing in her garden.

  “You’ll ask him where he got it, won’t ya?”

  “Of course.” And then it dawns on me that maybe Gram is feeling pushed aside. Is it possible she could doubt how much I need her, appreciate her? “Thank you for the heather you left for me. I hung it in the wheelhouse so it can stay with me all season.”

  “I’d give ya all the heather in the world if I could, Rilla.”

  To keep me protected. To help my wishes come true.

  “I’d do the same for you.” Maybe it’s superstition to think a flower can protect you, but I could have hung sprigs in Dad’s wheelhouse every day. Something. Why didn’t I ever think to do more to keep him safe?

  “Can’t say it didn’t worry me when ya didn’t come home earlier.”

  “I’m so sorry.” The words race out of my mouth because I know what it’s like to wait on the return of the boat. And wait. How could I do that to Gram? How could I be so selfish? “Gram, I wasn’t thinking. I should have radioed to tell you that I was safe, that I was on the island.”

  “Island?” She turns to face me now.

  “Malaga.”

  She nods the slightest nod, something clicking into place. “I thought that might have been your boat out there, but ya know these eyes of mine are as dependable as a storm.”