Beyond the Bright Sea

by Lauren Wolk

  From there, I couldn’t see the man, but I went, regardless, as far down the dock as I could to wait for the ferry. There was nowhere to hide here. But I was small, the world was big, and if I was still and quiet I could be invisible, as much a part of the dock as the pylons or the gulls that perched on them, watching everything with their flat yellow eyes.

  I watched, too, and never let down my guard for a moment until the ferry steamed again into port and it was time to board.

  But as I stood in line at the gangway, I forgot to be so careful, and when I glanced again down the dock I saw him there, standing square and tense, looking right at me.

  His face was a confusion of anger and surprise. Mine, I imagined, was one-hundred-percent fear.

  But he stayed where he was, watching, until it was my turn to board.

  By the time I made my way to the bow to look for him, he was gone.

  As before, there were only a few of us on the crossing, and there was plenty of room for me to sit by myself and let my thoughts sort themselves out.

  I was still as tense as an anchor rope in a current, and my mind churned with all I’d done and seen; but the farther we traveled, the more New Bedford seemed like another world, far away, that couldn’t touch me now. Not even the terrible man who was still somewhere over there, perhaps at this very moment on his way out of town, as spooked by the sight of me as I’d been by him.

  And I convinced myself that I would never see him again.

  Chapter 24

  Osh was waiting for me when the ferry docked.

  I saw him watching from the beach as I walked along the boardwalk with the handful of islanders coming home.

  He didn’t say a word when I joined him, but he put his hand on my shoulder and kept it there for a long moment.

  “Don’t ever do that to me again,” he said quietly. He sounded as if there were a fire in his chest and he was doing everything possible to contain it.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and I was.

  “You’ll need to say that to Miss Maggie, too,” he said. “She nearly swam over to New Bedford when we figured out you’d gone there alone.”

  “But not you?”

  He gave me a warning look. “You want to go off on your own, go ahead. But you should know that any harm that comes to you comes to me, too. And Miss Maggie. Real harm. Do you understand?”

  I nodded. “I’m sorry,” I said again. I sat down in the grass along the edge of the lane and took off my shoes. “I hated the city,” I said.

  He sighed. “Good.”

  I tied my shoes together and carried them by their laces as we headed up the lane toward Miss Maggie’s.

  We found her in the barn, which was hot and hazy with straw dust and pollen. She was on her knees alongside Cinders, feeling one of her fetlocks for heat, when Osh and I stopped at the open door to the stall.

  She climbed to her feet. I was used to some thunder in her face, but I’d never seen it so full of storm. “You will never do that again,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

  “No, I won’t,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “And using me like you did. Lying that I would be with you. What were you thinking?”

  I shook my head. “I needed to go to New Bedford. To look for Jason. I’m sorry that I didn’t wait until you could go with me.”

  Miss Maggie came out with us and shut the door to the stall behind her. “So am I,” she said. “Now come along. Osh and I were too scared to eat, and I, for one, am starving.”

  I hadn’t expected a Miss Maggie supper, and I was glad I hadn’t eaten much that day, but I wasn’t glad when she turned aside my offer to help in the kitchen. “No, go on and wait,” she said. “I’d just as soon do it myself.”

  So Osh and I sat outside, at the trestle table in the shade of her hornbeam tree, while Miss Maggie made our supper. Above us, a nest full of young crows cawed for theirs, too. I could see them leaning far out into the open air, hours from flight.

  “Why is that nest so high up?” I said. “What if the babies fall when they try to fly?”

  Osh tipped his head back and peered through the branches. “More than one answer to that,” he said.

  “Like what?”

  “They build it high up so it’s harder for hunters to get there.”

  “What about other birds? Doesn’t a high-up nest make it easier for a hawk to get a baby crow?”

  Osh shrugged. “They have to build their nest somewhere.”

  “And what’s the point of building it high up anyway if the babies fall and break their necks when they try to fly?”

  Osh shook his head. “They don’t try until they’re ready.”

  An answer that made my brain hurt. “But how do they know they can fly if they haven’t flown yet?”

  “I suspect they pay attention to what they know.” As he had told me I should.

  We looked long at each other, and I saw him soften a bit. “They’re the ones who know best when they’re ready to fly,” he said. He leaned close and took my hand. “But they don’t lie about it. And they don’t sneak off like you did.”

  His hand was terribly rough and hard, but he held mine as if I were made of petals.

  “I won’t do it again,” I said. “Next time, I’ll tell you.”

  I expected him to argue about the Next time, but he didn’t. Instead, he nodded. And I was both happy and sad about that.

  Perhaps that was how those young crows felt as they nestled in their warm and sturdy nest, yearning for the sky.

  Miss Maggie gave us lobster cakes, biscuits, and cool water with sprigs of mint.

  “You’ll eat first and then you’ll tell us every bit of it,” she said, sitting at one end of the table, Osh at the other.

  None of us said much as we ate. It was that good.

  The lobster cakes were hot and buttery, brown and crunchy on the outside, sweet and white on the inside. She’d baked cheese into the biscuits and topped each one with a dab of pepper relish. For dessert, she brought out a dish of strawberries dusted with a little cane sugar.

  The breeze curtsied as it passed by.

  A chimney swift sketched a curlicue overhead.

  If there had been music, it might have been too much to bear.

  “I like it here better than in the city,” I said to Osh.

  “Of course you do,” Miss Maggie said.

  And then I told them about my day. Starting with the sailor who looked like me. Ending with the big man and the pawnbroker and how he’d seen me on the docks.

  Miss Maggie interjected now and then, as was her habit, but Osh listened carefully until I was through.

  “Not a wild-goose chase, then,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “The Jason from Penikese might still be around here, somewhere. Maybe even that sailor I saw. And Mrs. Pelham said I do look like him. So now I just need to know if I am that other baby. The one who didn’t really die.”

  We all thought about that for a moment.

  “The letter from the nurse might tell you if you’re that baby,” Miss Maggie said. “It should be here any day now.”

  “Good,” Osh said. “And then all this will be done.”

  “With that terrible man just across the water?” Miss Maggie said. “We need to send another message to those police officers.”

  “And you are just the one to send it,” Osh told her. “But you,” he said to me. “Will it be enough for you to know where you came from and how to find your brother, if you have one?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said slowly. “There’s still that ring. That letter that came with it. This . . .” I touched the feather on my cheek. “The lambs in the graveyard and in the cottage.” I couldn’t understand the impatience on his face. “I’ll bet you know a lot about your own history, Osh. What’s wrong with wanting to know min
e?”

  “My history is done and gone and better left that way,” he said. He stood up and carried the empty platters toward the house.

  “I can’t believe he doesn’t want to know about his family,” I said as we watched him walk toward the house. “Whether they’re all right. Where they are now.”

  She looked at me with a sad little smile. “He knows everything he needs to know,” she said. “You’re right here.”

  Chapter 25

  The next morning, as Osh and I worked dried seaweed into our garden, Miss Maggie appeared by the bass stands.

  “Your letter came,” she called as she crossed the mid-tide channel, her skirts held high in one hand, her shoes and a white envelope in the other. “From the Penikese nurse. Miss Morgan.”

  “We’re almost done here,” Osh said, so I worked on, faster than before, while Miss Maggie found a seat on the rocks and spread her skirts to dry.

  “Oh, for the love of Pete,” she said after a bit. “That seaweed’s not going to run off if you stop for just a minute, Daniel.”

  But he didn’t stop until we’d tucked every last shred of seaweed underground where it could do its work.

  As soon as we were done, Mouse crept out of the grasses and attacked a small hole in the soil, dragging out a strand of sea lettuce so she could properly subdue it. But the sea lettuce did not put up much of a fight, and after a moment Mouse decided to attack Osh’s bootlaces instead, rolling in the dirt until he lifted her up and tossed her gently aside.

  I leaned my hoe against the rocks and went to sit with Miss Maggie. Osh stayed where he was.

  She handed me the letter and watched as I opened the envelope carefully and unfolded the paper inside.

  I read it aloud to them both.

  Dear Crow, it began.

  I hope you can forgive me for being cautious. You sound like an honest person looking for answers, but I have learned that not everything is as it seems. And not everyone can be trusted.

  I made a face at Miss Maggie. “What’s she talking about?”

  “Keep reading,” she said.

  When Dr. Eastman showed me your first letter, I wanted to take the next train north to see you for myself. How else could I know for sure who had written that letter? And how can I know who wrote the second letter, the one that came to me directly, with that mysterious list of words?

  I remembered writing that letter, not trusting the nurse enough, afraid to spell out what I wanted to know. And now here she was, likewise suspicious.

  It may seem odd, I read, to be so careful, but I have reasons. The main one: a man I met here in Louisiana. A workman who had come to repair the roof on the hospital. Mr. Kendall. Mr. James Kendall. One day he asked me about a necklace I was wearing. Asked me if it was real—real gold, a real ruby in the pendant.

  He was charming about it. Said that it was very pretty but not nearly as pretty as I was.

  I was flattered. I admit it. I am not and never have been pretty. But it was nice to think that I was. And I told him, yes, the necklace was made from real gold. A real ruby. I told him that it had been a gift from my friend Susanna, a patient I’d treated on Penikese Island. At the leper colony there.

  I expected him to back away, like everyone else did, but he didn’t.

  And when I explained that she had found it while digging for cinquefoil root—which we used on open sores—he seemed quite interested.

  He asked me if I would like to have dinner with him some time, and I said yes.

  We went out together just a day later. It was so nice for someone to be unafraid of me. Most everyone else kept me at arm’s length. But not him.

  And here I stopped again, this time to consider what I hadn’t realized before—that the people who cared for lepers took more than one kind of risk.

  “Crow?” Miss Maggie said, and I returned to the letter.

  And Mr. Kendall listened to me! I read. No one had ever listened to me the way he listened to me.

  He asked me a lot of questions about Penikese and the leper colony and my friend Susanna.

  I told him, and I am telling you now, that although she’d been savaged by her awful disease, she was a beautiful woman. Kind. Sweet. So smart.

  I told him all about her and our friendship. How brave she was. How hard she worked to help the other patients, no matter how much she herself was ailing.

  And I answered his questions about life on that island.

  I thought he was my friend.

  But soon after that, the necklace went missing from my room at the hospital, and the man disappeared, too.

  What a fool I was.

  I can’t be sure that he took it.

  I also can’t be sure that you aren’t that man, writing to see if I know anything more about all this.

  In fact, I do know more. But I won’t put it into a letter.

  If you are, indeed, that terrible man, then shame on you.

  If not, these words I have written in response to the ones you sent me should mean quite a lot. I hope so.

  On the second page, Nurse Evelyn had written my list of words and, next to each one of them, something of her own.

  I held the page out so Miss Maggie could see it, too. But I read it aloud for Osh to hear.

  Baby, I had written.

  You, she had replied.

  For Skiff, she had written, It was an old one that no one missed for weeks. And then I told Dr. Eastman that it had drifted away on the tide.

  Next to Ring, a line that made my heart hurt: Susanna wore this. And then, something more mysterious. It is your inheritance. I think there may be more.

  “What’s an inheritance?” I asked Miss Maggie.

  “It’s what someone leaves behind when she dies,” she said. “A gift.”

  For Little feather, Nurse Evelyn had written: The mark by which I would know that you are hers.

  And for Lambs: Another way you’ll know what she wanted you to know.

  And finally, Bright sea.

  My name, she had written. Morgan. Which is Celtic, like me. It means “bright sea.” And your mother gave it to you, too. Which was also her gift to me, better than the necklace.

  After that, Nurse Evelyn had written, Someday, I hope to take that train north to look for you.

  And she had signed it,

  Evelyn Morgan

  But below that was a postscript. And it, too, helped answer a question I’d been asking myself.

  If you are who I think you are, she wrote, I hope you will forgive me if I’ve made mistakes. Not long after you were born, someone sent a letter to Penikese, asking questions about a baby who had washed up on one of the Elizabeths. I fetched the mail that day. The letter wasn’t addressed to anyone in particular. Just the hospital. So I opened it. And I burned it. Susanna and your father had chosen to give you a chance at something other than Penikese or an orphanage, and that letter meant you had arrived safely in a better place. That was all Susanna wanted. So that’s what I gave her.

  I folded up the letter and tucked it back inside the envelope.

  “Susanna was my mother,” I said.

  Miss Maggie nodded. “She was.”

  “And now I know for sure that I do have a brother, whether he’s that sailor or not.”

  “Yes, you do,” she said.

  “And Elvan is my father,” I said. “Or was.”

  At which Osh put aside his hoe and went into the house.

  Miss Maggie followed him. And I followed her, Mouse at my heels.

  Chapter 26

  Osh went straight to his easel, where he’d been working on a painting of Mouse curled up in a lightship basket, her tail hanging over the rim.

  I once asked him why he’d never painted my portrait. He said, “I have. Over and over again. Every time I paint the sea.”

 
At the time, that answer—the idea that I’d come from the sea, that I was like the sea—had made me feel strong and unusual. And I still loved that answer. But it was not the only true thing about me.

  “You’re upset, aren’t you, Osh?” I said. “Because I said Elvan was my father. But he was. That doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

  He put down his brush and turned to me. “You’re right, it doesn’t,” he said. “And I’m glad that you know what you wanted to know.”

  “So am I,” I said. “I’m not surprised to know they were my parents. I’ve learned that, bit by bit, for a while. But now that I know for sure, all of it, I feel . . . like I make more sense than I did before.” I frowned at the look on his face. “Is there something wrong with that?”

  Osh sighed. “You’ve always made sense to me.”

  “You’ve known me longer than I’ve known myself,” I said.

  Osh nodded. “So are you finally done now that you know what you wanted to know?”

  I shook my head slowly. “I mean to go out there again. To Penikese.”

  Osh turned back to his painting. “To look for your inheritance? So you can buy things I can’t buy for you?”

  But that wasn’t it. “No, and you know that’s not what I want.”

  I went outside and sat in the sand by the door. Mouse came to join me. She climbed in my lap and rubbed her chin against mine. Her claws always came out when she was happy, and I knew I’d have tiny red wounds from how she was kneading me, purring, her eyes looking earnestly into mine.

  I could hear what Miss Maggie was saying. She was angry, which made her loud.

  “That was cruel, Daniel. You know better than that.”

  A pause. Then, “Why do you call me Daniel?”

  Again, a pause.

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  I heard the scrape of his chair as he stood up. “In all the years I’ve known you, you’ve never asked me my name. You just decided to call me Daniel.”