Sanctuary

by Jennifer McKissack

  “Care to go for a walk?” I asked.

  I brought him to my beach. I took off my shoes, although Eli kept his on, and we climbed up the small cliff. The sea looked so inviting I was tempted to jump in for a needed swim.

  I caught Eli watching me as I struggled with my hair in the wind. “Why are you looking at me like that?” I asked, smiling under his gaze.

  “No reason,” he said with a smile.

  “What is it?” I prodded.

  “You are … very … I am … ,” he said, his cheeks turning pink. “Your voice is … just enchanting,” he said finally. “I’ve never heard another like it.”

  My cheeks grew warm with pleasure, and I lost my words. I looked at my bare feet. If only I’d had more exposure to the outside world, and to young men, and to what a girl was supposed to say to them. But this giddiness filling me lifted me up high and sweet, like I was flying. When I looked back at Eli, he was smiling, so it was all right after all.

  “Would you like to see something else?” I asked, wanting to include him in my secrets, to bring him closer, hoping that showing him a part of me would do that.

  “Yes,” he said eagerly.

  I took a glance at the sea below and then back at Eli.

  “You’re not going to jump?” he asked in disbelief.

  “I do it all the time,” I said, taking the hem of my dress and pulling it up.

  He was stunned into silence, his eyes fixed on me. Then he seemed to breathe easier when I discarded my dress. “You’re wearing a swimsuit.”

  I walked to the edge of the cliff and looked back at him.

  “It’s too high, too dangerous, Cecilia,” he said in alarm, stepping toward me.

  “It’s fine,” I told him, putting my arms over my head and diving into the air.

  “Cecilia!” I heard him yell.

  The water felt good and sweet against my skin. I came up out of the water and waved to Eli. I couldn’t see his face, but he didn’t wave back. Instead, he made his way quickly down the cliff. I met him on the beach.

  His face was white. “Here are your dress and shoes,” he said quietly, then left me on the beach to put them on. Once dressed, I joined him on the path back to the house, but tried to stop him.

  “Eli.”

  He kept walking.

  “Eli, please stop. I’m sorry.”

  When he turned back to me, I saw the concern on his face. “Why did you do that? Do you know how much that frightened me?”

  “I do it all the time,” I said, reaching for his hand, grasping it in my own. It was cold and shaking.

  Suddenly, he drew me in, placing his forehead against mine. I could still feel him shaking. “Cecilia, please be careful.”

  “Don’t worry, Eli,” I whispered. “I’ve jumped off that cliff more than a thousand times. I know what I’m doing. I won’t be hurt.”

  “Cecilia,” he said, pulling back to look at me, rubbing his hands up and down my arms. “You can’t give the appearance of …”

  “Of what?” I snapped, pulling away from him.

  He hesitated.

  “You think I’m crazy,” I accused.

  “I think you’re kind and brave,” he said. “But please think about how others perceive you.”

  “I don’t care what others think of me.”

  He looked off, almost speaking, then stopping, finally saying, “You’re not eighteen, Cecilia.”

  “I’m almost eighteen.”

  “Just be careful,” he said again.

  “Do you know something you’re not telling me?” I asked him directly.

  He shook his head. “I’m … just worried about you.” He held out his hand to me.

  I stared at him for a moment, but he kept his hand out. Finally, I took it. “Don’t worry about me, Eli. I’m quite all right.”

  We walked back up the path, hand in hand, and returned to our library. When I sat at my desk, he looked at me from his place on the love seat. “Will you sit beside me?” he asked.

  I nodded and took my books over to where he was. We spent the rest of the day like that.

  In the evening, we went for a moonlit walk on the beach, looking at the stars.

  “ ‘Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art,’ ” Eli quoted.

  “You like Keats,” I said with a smile.

  “Do you know his poetry?” he asked, obviously surprised.

  “He’s the only poet I read anymore. My mind flits about when I try the others.”

  He smiled into my eyes. And we had this moment of pausing there and nothing happened but us looking at each other. I’d never had these feelings before, of wanting someone to look at me like he was looking at me now, of wondering what it would be like to kiss someone—no, not just someone, to kiss him, to kiss Eli.

  Did a girl have to wait for the boy? As I watched him now, I couldn’t think of why that would be.

  I STOOD BEFORE THE GATE, KNOWING I WOULDN’T GO IN. COMING BACK, I thought I was strong enough to face her again. But I knew I wasn’t.

  I didn’t see her, but I saw the fireflies. One of the lights broke off from the others and floated toward me. I followed it into the graveyard. The firefly hovered before my eyes, this small bright light, and I held out my palm. It drifted down into my hand, filling me with sadness and yearning when it touched my flesh. I closed my eyes against the pain. When I opened them, the light, all the lights, were gone.

  I realized I was standing on Tess’s grave. I felt the loss of my sister, a deep well of emptiness inside of me where she had once been. It hadn’t been only my mother’s attention I’d sought. It’d been Tess’s too.

  Had Tess seen Amoret? I tried to think back and remember. But the harder I thought the more slippery the memories became. My friend Elizabeth suggested to me once that I blocked them out, that it was all too much—the loss of mother, father, sister, grandmother, aunt, and the loss of home.

  But I thought I hadn’t been paying attention, that my childhood was defined only by what I saw. Everything else—conversations, ghosts, feelings, voices, strange tales of the past—slipped through my mind as easily as a breeze through a field of summer grass. I hadn’t latched onto it. I’d just let it slip away.

  But I was beginning to remember. When I was eight, I thought the books greeted me in the morning. At night, I would take turns sleeping with different ones so the others wouldn’t get their feelings hurt. On my tenth birthday, I asked to blow out my candles in the kitchen because the dining room didn’t feel quite right to me. Many times, I woke from the same ending of my dream, that a woman was leaning over me, a woman with flowing black hair.

  But I hadn’t seen her then. Not like I saw her now. I had never seen her in the graveyard, no matter what Tess said. Amoret had been the woman in my dreams, an elusive, hazy creature that I barely remembered when I woke and that drifted quickly into Sanctuary’s air as I bounded out of bed.

  Had Amoret pulled my grandmother, my aunt, and my mother to the island? Was it no coincidence that Aunt Laura married the man who owned the estate?

  This would all be much easier to figure out if I still had the journal. I was determined to search the house for it in the daylight. Sanctuary sat there, in all its glory, taunting me with its size. It wouldn’t be easy to search.

  Maybe there was someone in Lady Cliffs who knew the history of the island. I doubted it, but I could try to find out.

  OUR NEIGHBOR MR. LAFONTAINE AND HIS CELESTE DIED YESTERDAY. AS THE SEA took their bodies, Maman’s eyes brimmed with anxious tears. “Your sister will do something,” she tells Aimée. But I don’t know what she thinks I can do.

  I am frantic for a place to quiet my own heart so she won’t see my doubt. There’s no place like that on this ship. So I bite my fist at night in the dark where she cannot see. Fear creates more fear. Papa taught me that.

  The captain struts by on his long legs, lashing out at his crew. We are his cargo. He is angry when we die. I heard one of his men say the captain
will be paid by the number of Acadians delivered.

  Aimée struggles with a deep cough and pain in her chest. I tell her she is so brave. I watch Dr. Clemson, who is kind to her, to all of us. Still, he is one of them, friends with the captain. I don’t trust him.

  He feeds my sister hot chicken soup. I think he steals it from the kitchen, saying it’s for himself. He is trying to get Aimée to smile by telling her a ridiculous story about a pig in a lady’s hat and a goat that always checks his pocket watch. I am pulled into their foolery too—despite the watch, they are late for everything—listening intently. I have suspicions that Dr. Clemson is making up the story as he goes along.

  Behind us, two of my friends are talking about the captain. I shush them. But it is too late. Dr. Clemson has heard the name we call Winship: Jambes du Diable.

  We all become very still. My eyes blaze at the doctor, daring him to tell the captain. Instead, he laughs and says in English, “Legs of the Devil.”

  My shoulders relax. “It is a good name,” I say. His eyebrows lift. I turn away, angry with myself for revealing I speak English.

  Some days I want to climb onto the railing and return to the sea. My desire for Acadie burns so strong inside of me I think it would carry me home.

  The villagers say I came from the sea. Papa found me in the sand of a cave. “The waves brought her to me!” he tells anyone who listens. Cautious Maman always laughs and says loudly it’s a silly story. My parents most likely died. “It doesn’t matter,” she tells the neighbors. “We are Amoret’s parents now.”

  But I know I was abandoned or from the sea.

  Jambes du Diable has noticed me.

  I woke, straining to see in the darkness as if I were trying to find the sea’s horizon. I closed my eyes, waiting for the room to stop rocking. Poor Amoret, I thought as the dream faded. I had seen the way her mother had looked at her, the way she relied on her.

  These weren’t just dark dreams. Amoret was telling me her story. The need to know burned inside of me now. These supernatural happenings had been Tess’s domain. I’d push away her ghost stories and turn to things tangible and real. But now, I understood Tess’s obsession.

  I felt brave and reckless. I wanted the journal.

  Grabbing a flashlight, I took the service stairs down to the basement, a floor of the house I rarely visited. When I was a child, the servants had shooed me out of the rooms filled with laundry, bottles of wine, and boilers, and a large pantry that seemed to my child self a cook’s secret place of jars of jelly and herbs hanging from the ceiling.

  But the basement was also a man’s world too, with a dusty room crowded with rusty tools, cabinet hinges, and automobile parts. “Not a place for you,” I’d been told, but it was where everything happened, all the things that kept the household running. I’d been banished enough times that I’d grown used to not going down into the house’s darkest floor.

  I wandered through the rooms now, turning on lights and finding it dreary and sad, a reminder of how active the house had been so long ago. I searched high shelves and through dusty drawers, only coming up with dirty hands for my trouble. Two hours later, I was washing my hands at the kitchen sink, fighting off sleepiness.

  Forgetting myself, I walked through the dining room. I’d avoided the room, especially since I’d returned from Bangor. A black feeling came over me as my eyes were drawn to the head of the table, where my father used to sit. Uncle had deferred to my father, even though it was Uncle’s house, because it was my father’s money that kept Sanctuary afloat. Neither my uncle nor my father sat at the table now.

  The room seemed an otherworldly haze. I blinked twice, but the distorted images remained. At the head of the table was a man from another century, dressed in a long silk coat of dark green and black. Stained white lace protruded from his cuffs, matching the cravat sloppily tied around his neck. I recognized him from my dreams, from the portrait upstairs: Jambes du Diable. He was gripping the arm of someone. I felt like it was my arm, that I was the woman beside him, even as I stood there watching them. She yanked away, her cheeks wet, looking more vulnerable than she had in my dreams. Black circles rimmed her sea eyes, sunken in her pale face. Her despair took me aback. And her words dripped with hate: “I know you”—her voice caught and I thought she might not go on—“I know what you did.”

  Smug satisfaction curled up the edges of the captain’s lips as he took another bite from his silver fork.

  “Your own husband’s brother.” She spat out a French word that flamed the captain’s face with anger. He slapped her with the back of his hand, sending her head twisting on her neck. My hand flew to my own throbbing jaw.

  She jerked back straight, staring into his eyes, her hands still on the table before her. “We did nothing wrong.”

  “I saw,” he said. “I saw the way you looked at each other, and I knew. I know what women are.”

  Slowly, she leaned back in her chair. I wondered why she didn’t leave, but she seemed to be waiting for something.

  My arm was tender. I looked down and saw the bruise. When I looked up, I was alone in the dining room.

  My legs shaking so much I could barely walk, I made my way to my sanctuary. I sank down onto the love seat, not able to think or move for quite some time. Finally, I realized I was rubbing my arm, remembering the feeling of being grabbed, only to find there was no longer a bruise there. My eyes fluttered closed, as I tried to recall the sensation of seeing Winship in the dining room. Was it possible that he was here, in this house? Sanctuary was seeping into me, even deeper now, anchoring me to it whether I wanted it to or not.

  A splitting of the mind.

  I shook my head. The only way is forward, I thought.

  These images and odd things were very real. As much as my mind tried to reason against it, it was the only explanation. I could leave again, desert Ben, leave Eli behind. Abandon my mother to Dr. Brighton. Just start anew, afresh. Like my mother had tried to do in New York. But I couldn’t do that. I loved them all. I understood how Amoret felt about taking care of her mother and her sister. I felt that too.

  Sanctuary was holding me fast. I felt responsible for its past, its future. I felt complicit in its tragedies. I felt guilty for still being here, when so many of my family were gone.

  Slowly, I got up and began to take the books out and look through them. I was consumed with the need to understand, the need to know. As quietly as I could, I went through all the shelves, looking for books hidden behind books or notes tucked into pages. The physical certainty of the thick covers and delicate pages brought back not exactly my confidence, but at least a feeling of being on solid ground.

  “What are you doing here?” asked Patricia, poking her head through the door.

  “Dusting the books,” I said, showing her the rag in my hand.

  She rubbed her eyes. “At this hour? The sun’s barely up.”

  “What are you doing awake?” I asked.

  She laughed a sleepy laugh. “That is probably the greater riddle. I couldn’t sleep. Want some coffee?”

  I put down the rag. “Sure.” I was ready for company, wanting to be in the presence of people.

  I was quiet, but found our morning breakfast calming after all the strange things that had been happening to me. Mary chattered on about something while Anna bustled around as usual in the background. I was distracted, but tried to join in the conversation. Jasper nestled against my feet. When Eli joined us, I gave him a happy relieved smile.

  Our party was broken up by Uncle coming through the door. I immediately got up, taking a sweater off the hook, and went outside, Eli joining me.

  WE HEADED TO THE SOUTHEASTERN TIP OF THE ISLAND, A PLACE I RARELY visited. The village, the cemetery, and the docks were located on the northern part of the island, the smaller “half.” I thought of the island as halves, with the house in the middle. The southern portion was much fatter and wilder. The farther we walked from Sanctuary, the more I felt the dark, heavy feelings leave
me.

  All I thought of now was Eli.

  “What are you smiling at?” he asked playfully.

  I shrugged, not saying I had many reasons not to smile, but being with him made me happy, giddy almost. Even after only three hours’ sleep, I felt invigorated, like I could do anything.

  I could feel something on the island trying to rush me, pressing on me as if time was precious and I shouldn’t be wasting it with Eli. But I ignored the feeling.

  “Are you all right this morning?” he asked. “You look tired.”

  I just nodded at him, giving him a reassuring smile.

  We traipsed through the dying grasses of the meadow. Winter would soon be here, and this walk wouldn’t be as pleasant. Plunging into the shadows of the thick eastern forest made me shiver. The trees stretched high and full over our heads, darkening our path, which had now begun to rise upward.

  There were no wide, cleared trails here, so we carefully made our way through scratching branches and bushes. The forest was peaceful, though, with the rustle and calls of its creatures.

  We came to a place where the trees weren’t so close and tight. As we walked side by side over a soft carpet of pine needles, Eli took my hand, as if we did this all the time. We continued to walk together as my skin tingled. I wanted him closer, as close as I could get him. The feeling was intense and scary. I didn’t want to be parted from him, ever. I squeezed his hand, wishing for more. In response, he smiled at me, and in his eyes, I thought I glimpsed my own feelings.

  “Do you ever want to go home?” I asked.

  He was surprised by the question. “To my parents?” he asked. “You mean to live?”

  “To live.”

  “No, not really.” He thought for a moment. “There are times when I feel a strong desire to see my family, and I miss them very much. And then,” he added, “when I’m home, I look out across our land and it’s …” His voice drifted off.