The Rattled Bones

by S. M. Parker

  Gram rocks me and the words become brighter, stronger.

  Electric.

  The words pound against my skull with their growing brightness, their electric taunt: FIND ME. DONT GO! Pulsing. Banging. Forcing pressure against my skull. I press my hand to my head to push back the searing pain.

  Then the words change.

  The letters morph into new shapes, the long sweeping sides rearranging themselves into something new, something different. They dart everywhere, a scramble in my mind. Until they reorder, settle into something new:

  IM HERE.

  The words the girl whispered to me. I dart open my eyes and the hallway pierces with a shiver—a winter cold that stings the flesh of my cheeks with its bite. The cold wraps me, sending a chill into my bones, ice into my blood. I try to stand, to warm, but my legs collapse under me. I am on the floor, Gram bending over me. Her voice joins me, her words dull and distant, taking a long time to reach me. Are ya okay? Are ya okay? I want to tell her yes. I want to be okay. But I can’t speak.

  The crack of the slamming attic door sends out a bolt of thunder. IM HERE scrawls upon the wood’s face in a yellow glow. The same blistering words pulse in my brain. How are they here? I reach up to touch the door, but Gram takes my hand and helps me to stand. She leads me to my room, stumbling. Because I can’t take my eyes from the attic, waiting for the girl to walk out. She’s here. I can feel her. Her cold breath. Her words. She is here with me and Gram, in this house.

  Gram guides me to my bed, settles me down.

  “Rilla. There is something not right.”

  “Something’s not right.” It is the closest I come to telling Gram the truth before my mind swirls with light, as if I stood too fast. The whole room swims with a scorching gold. It pulls at me, around me. Beats of sizzling light. Embers. The light is fire, singeing the air in my room with crackling whistles, popping embers from a blaze. The sparks zip past me, around Gram. I squeeze her hand, needing to keep her safe. She calls to me from a distant place, but I’m so far away. I’m in a room of flame. I let go of my gram. I reach for a spark, capture it in my hand. The fire is a burning cold. The ember squirms in my palm, morphs into IM HERE. These two words scrawl across my skin as my room pops with the crackling fire, the flames lighting the room orange.

  But there is no heat. Only cold. I shake the embers free from my palm, trying to erase their words. IM HERE. I want the girl to be here and I don’t. Not with Gram.

  Not now.

  The air’s too thick, too frozen. It’s hard to breathe. I call for Gram, and the words drop out of the flames, searing through the layers of my flesh and setting fire into my bones.

  IM HERE IM HERE IM HERE.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  When Gram wakes me, she has the doctor by her side. I sit up, see the sun fading from the day. The light is gone from the room, the air heavy warm with summer. I cast my eyes to the windowsill, to the rocking chair. I turn to the pillow beside me even as I know the girl isn’t here again.

  “Hello, Rilla.” Dr. Brower Walsh stands at my bed, all lean giant with his tidy haircut and wide brown eyes. Doc Brower makes house calls for only a few families, people his grandfather treated when he was the area doctor and traveled from house to house. “Your grandmother tells me that you had an accident.”

  My head throbs. “Yesterday.”

  “You gave her quite a scare.” He holds up two fingers, looks to my neck. “May I?” I nod and he sets his fingers above my collarbone, looks down as he counts to some number in his head. “Good. Good.” Two hands now—all fingertips maneuvering around the contours of my neck, ears, skull. “Any headaches?”

  I think of the burning light assaulting my brain, the strands of ember words searing there. That was no headache. “Earlier with Gram, I felt a little dizzy.”

  “Her eyes practically rolled into the back of her head.” Gram’s voice is twisted, worry making her words low and shaky.

  “Mmm-hmmm.” Dr. Brower removes a thin instrument from his bag. “I’d like to check your eyes. Follow the red light.” I do. My eyes track back and forth. Left to right. Right to left. “Do you happen to remember if you hit your head when you fell overboard?”

  I remember so much, the moments playing in slow motion in my brain. The bubbles spraying around me as I was plunged into the deep. The race to cut through the rope binding my ankle. The girl yelling for me, telling me not to go. The underwater squeezing my lungs. The darkness that stretched on forever. “I didn’t hit my head.”

  “No other issues since your spell in the water?”

  “Not that I can think of.” Not that I can talk about.

  “She had a fight with Reed just before she collapsed.” Gram is reaching.

  “Ah.” Dr. Brower nods, checks the range of all my joints. Elbows, knees, ankles, wrists.

  “How are you sleeping?’

  “Not great.”

  He presses the stethoscope behind my ears. “And your diet?”

  “Good.”

  He looks to Gram for confirmation. She nods. “No changes.”

  He surrenders his stethoscope to its perch around his neck and takes my hand, his touch pressing gently against the burn that’s still healing at my wrist. “Is there anything else going on that you want to tell me about, Rilla?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “What happened here?” He taps at the very edge of my bandage.

  “It was an accident. I singed it on my engine.”

  “May I take a look?”

  I nod, knowing he’s looking for signs of self-harm.

  He removes the bandage slowly. “Yes, that’s healing nicely.” He wraps my wrist gently, expertly, before resting my arm at my side. “I think you may have experienced a stress-induced anxiety attack, or panic attack. That dizziness you felt, was it accompanied by a racing heart? Sweaty palms?”

  “Yes.” Even though I know this isn’t anxiety. I’ve had a panic attack before, when my entire body filled with my heartbeat and I wanted to flee from my own skin. This isn’t that. This is my brain trying to make sense of something that isn’t as natural as the fight or flight instinct.

  “I’ll prescribe you some antianxiety medication. You can take one when you feel like you’re getting overwhelmed. They do tend to make people drowsy, though, so I don’t recommend that you use them while out at sea, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  He takes out a small pad, scribbles some words before tearing off the top leaf of paper. “This medication might also help you sleep because it can calm the mind.” He pats my leg. “Take one only if you need it.”

  Gram reaches for the prescription and I don’t see a hint of argument in her eyes, which scares me more than the visions. Normally Gram would argue that lavender or chamomile would be enough to calm my mind. Instead, Gram clutches the prescription to her heart, letting me know we are both in out of our depths.

  Doc Brower throws closed the clasp on his traveling medicine bag, its leather worn enough to have been inherited from his grandfather’s practice. “A good night’s sleep is critical, Rilla. Especially after losing your father. The death of a loved one is one of the greatest stresses that the human mind can endure. Be easy on yourself. Try not to do too much.”

  “I’ll try.”

  Doc Brower reaches for my hand. “We need you to be good and healthy before you head to college and make this peninsula proud.”

  His words are so close to something my father would say that they make sadness shoot through my core. “Yes, sir.”

  He squeezes my hand. “Take care, now. You can call if you need anything at all.”

  I need so much, but nothing the doctor can help me with.

  Gram walks Doc Brower out of my bedroom and switches off the overhead light as she leaves. She doesn’t return until she has my prescription bottle in hand. She sets down a fresh glass of water before twisting at the medicine’s cap. She taps out a small green pill. She sets it under my bedside lamp. Then she kisses
me on the forehead and leaves a stamp of warmth there. “Ya need your rest, Rilla. I’ll be right here if ya need me.”

  “I’ll be fine, Gram.”

  She pats at my hand. “I know ya will.”

  Gram sits on the rocking chair, her worry forcing her back so straight. I roll the pill in my hand. It is small and round and chalky. It’s green, not red. Did my mother start with the green pills? My mother. Reed’s angry words swim at me, joined by the ember words scrawling across the attic door, filling my room. The memory of being pulled into the deep.

  I take the pill, swallow it without water.

  I lower my head to my pillow and my mind races with Dad’s funeral, Malaga’s history, the girl with the song. Gram’s attic and the wood grain that rearranged to tell me IM HERE. And then. Then the scenes quiet. My mind fogs with some internal lullaby. The bombarding images turn to black. An all-consuming black. Soothing. So opposite the institutional place I’ve always feared. I walk into this blackness knowing I’m safe. Knowing the blackness is there to hold me. Comfort me.

  I give over my trust.

  I surrender my independence.

  I let the black carry me off.

  * * *

  I wake from another world. The pill Doc Brower prescribed me knocked me out. I even slept through my alarm, apparently, since I feel Gram prodding me in the arm to open my eyes.

  “I’ve been trying to wake ya for nearly five minutes, Rilla. Are ya all right?”

  “Fine. Yes. All good.” I give Gram the reassurance she needs. “I just needed sleep, like the doc said.”

  Gram’s eyes are creased with worry. “Sam’s downstairs.”

  “I’m up.” I sit against my headboard despite the lasting ache trapped in my back.

  “How are ya feeling?”

  “I feel great.” I rub at the corners of my eyes. “I slept great.” No dreams, no interruptions.

  “That’s a balm for my heart.” Gram pats me on the shin. “The medicine helped, then?”

  “Definitely.”

  Gram squeezes my shin. “Ya feel like having some breakfast?”

  “I’m starving.” Gram has always equated an appetite as a sign of good health.

  “I’ll fix something. Can ya come down?”

  I nod. “Of course.”

  Gram smiles as she leaves, closing the door gently behind her. I wait until I hear her footsteps on the stairs before I go to the windowsill. The window is closed, locked from the inside. I move the shirt that clings to the sill. Just below the words FIND ME and DONT GO! are scratched two additional words. Familiar now. IM HERE

  FIND ME

  DONT GO!

  IM HERE

  I let my thumb trace the thin ridges of the words. I don’t know how the words are scrawled here, how the girl can visit me and mark my world in this way, but I know the words are hers. And I make a promise to find her.

  I look out at Malaga and hold my hand against the glass. “I know you’re here.” I press my forehead to the cool glass and give in. “But why?”

  So much of me doesn’t want her to answer.

  Too much of me needs her to answer.

  I exhale hard against the window, causing a spray of fog to spread across the glass. I raise my finger, write: WHO R U? into the circle of steam. I return my forehead to the glass, maybe waiting for an answer. Or maybe I’m just relieved the morning feels so still and my bones feel so rested. But there’s an emptiness in me that I know belongs to my mother. It’s the same emptiness I felt when friends had their mothers picking them up from school, throwing them birthday parties—an absence. For the first time since I was six, I wish my mother were here. I wouldn’t ask her to explain her choices, her leaving. I’d only ask her to talk me through what’s happening, let me know how close I am to the edge.

  * * *

  I dress for normal. White tee, black leggings. I pinch my cheeks so the red will rise. I stretch my face into a smile. Normal. Normal enough for Gram to let me slip out onto the boat.

  She’s with Sam, eating cubed watermelon at the table, by the time I get to the kitchen.

  “There’s your tea there.” Gram nods toward an empty mug next to the kettle, but keeps her eyes trained on me. I pour a cup, bring my mug under my nose, breathe in the clover leaf and orange rind. For clearing the blood and the lungs. I take a sip and let the hot liquid river its ways to my stomach.

  “Sam tells me ya two have plans to go buggin’ today.”

  “Have to. Some pots have been soaking for four days now.”

  “Is that a long time for a trap to soak?” Sam asks.

  I nod. “Ninety-two hours is the longest the law says a trap can stay in the water. Any longer than that and the lobsters won’t have any food to survive.”

  Gram tsks. “Maybe we should be thinking about your wellness, Rilla, not those bugs.”

  “I feel okay, Gram. Really.” I grab the jam from the fridge, the peanut butter from the shelf.

  “We already made lunch,” Sam says. “Egg salad with celery.”

  “My favorite.” I spear at a watermelon cube on Gram’s plate. “We should get going, then.”

  Sam nods. “Ready when you are.” He stands to clear the dishes.

  “Ya stay with Rilla at all times.” Gram folds her paper napkin, smooths it against the table.

  “You have my word.”

  “Around here that means something, Sam Taylor. Your word is a contract.”

  He nods his understanding. “You have my contract. Rilla will not be alone on the boat today, and we’ll be extra careful.”

  “Do I get to weigh in on this at all?”

  Gram stands, steadies her hip against the table. “Not right now ya don’t. Ya just focus on keeping your feet on that boat today, keeping your mind clear. Can ya do that?”

  “I can, Gram. Promise.” I kiss her on the head, then pull the Rilla Brae’s keys from their holder. Today Gram has threaded a wisteria vine around the chain. For love and longevity. I double back, kiss her again. “Thank you, Gram.”

  “Ya come home safe.”

  “Always.”

  Sam and I head across the lawn. Today’s waves barely break into rolling whitecaps. There is only a soft wind. The air seems still, like it too is recovering.

  “So . . . did you really pass out last night?”

  “Um, no. Is that the story Gram’s selling you?”

  “The long and short of it.”

  “I had a headache, that’s all. But then I slept like a rock. I feel good.” It’s not entirely untrue. We reach the dock and I climb aboard. Sam unties the ropes from their cleats.

  “Did it have something to do with that girl? Did you see her again?”

  I freeze. It’s strange hearing Sam talk about my girl, but I don’t overthink the consequences of letting the fullest truth swim out: “Yes.” I can’t say how she conjured the blinding embers of light or how she wrote more words in my sill. I know only that she’s here. Somewhere. “I need to find her, Sam.”

  “We will.” He looks toward the house where Gram is on the deck, arms planted at her hips. “But first we fish, okay?”

  “Okay.” It takes me a second to start the engine. It seems like an impossible gift that Sam will help me find the girl, that he doesn’t judge me or doubt me. Then there’s a movement on the shore, a hovering. A blue heron sweeps down to the water, her prehistoric wings parting the air with grace. She lands, stands statue still in the shallow tide, waiting for her prey.

  “Did you know that the heron is a bird of the in-between?”

  I turn to Sam, my eyes all question.

  “Herons prefer to hunt at twilight, which is a symbolic time of ‘in-between’ since it’s not night, not day. And the heron’s at home on earth, in the water, and in the air. Some American Indians see this as a sign of liminality—of easily crossing into the space that is neither here nor there.”

  The heron’s head twitches, her gaze finding us. “My dad taught me that blue herons were l
ucky.”

  “That too.” Sam unties the final rope, gathering it into a circle hung at his wrist. He lays the bundle on the dock, steps over it to board the Rilla Brae. “Maybe it’s a sign that we’ll have luck with the in-between.”

  The heron pushes upward and lifts to the bluest sky, her wings finding their glide. “I hope so.”

  * * *

  Something in our first pot is flailing when Sam hauls it to the rail. “What is that?”

  I move to the trap, spring the coils. “Puffer shark.” I grab for the small fish and toss her to the deep. “Gotta get her back in the water before she takes a gulp of air and blows up like a balloon.”

  “Would it really do that?” He moves to the lobsters, throwing out three tiny ones without even measuring.

  “In the ocean they swallow water to blow up four times their size. To ward off predators.” I measure a keeper, band her, and toss her in the tanks. “If a puffer shark’s out of the sea too long, they’ll breathe air, and then they can’t swim for hours. They just float on the surface in a helpless ball.”

  “Does it hurt them?” Sam rebaits the trap.

  “Dunno for sure. I’ve seen young kids who keep them out of the water for fun so they can watch them bob, but it was always my dad’s basic rule that we don’t kill or harm anything we’re not here to catch.”

  “I like your dad.”

  Still present tense. Even now. “Me too.”

  Sam and I catch a good rhythm, and we’re through with all of our pots by early afternoon. A lot of hungry lobsters found our cages in the time they soaked, and we head to the co-op, where Sam unloads with Hoopah.

  “Rumor has it ya fell in the drink,” Hoopah calls to me as I dump the bait bucket, the screeching gulls diving for remnants.

  “I may have taken a little swim.” It’s best to make light of what happened yesterday so no one gives it too much thought. It may be fishing superstition, but we all know it’s better not to call too much attention to the near misses at sea.