by Amanda Dykes
Ann thanks her, plucks up her fare, and navigates the maze of turns to the table no one else wants. From here there is no view of the buildings—buildings that wall her world in, though they are the key to her someday ticket to an actual field project, if she can work up the courage to try for such a thing again. Two college degrees, a heap of student debt dwindling at the speed of decomposing granite, and three years of unused vacation and sick days were all steps toward that elusive someday.
But for now, the view for Ann is right here, facing the people. They are the keepers of stories, after all. And on their preoccupied faces she sees questions. Even in the robotic roll-call voice of the girl behind the counter, she senses a reason for the flatness.
She is careful not to watch too long, just glancing every so often from her “Intel-blue” eyes, as Judy and Jim at her office have dubbed them. They, the resident tech whizzes at their renowned design firm, like to speak computer. For now, she is just the unlikely anthropologist, her current abstract dig site the corporate jungle of Chicago’s Loop. Instead of civilizations, she studies consumers. Buying habits instead of beliefs and traditions.
It won’t always be this way, she tells herself. And it’s a welcome position—a safe one—after her last job, which shackled her with a reputation she’s still trying to shake.
She reaches into her canvas shoulder bag and removes a laptop case. But following the computer’s tidy zip-zip-zap entry into the café buzz, a decidedly archaic rustle.
Newsprint.
Pressing each vertebra up and into the rigid lines of the bleached wood chair, she tucks a strand of auburn hair out of her face, lifts her cup, and sips her brew, warming herself.
As if her reading material, which flies to her apartment mailbox once a week, has brought the sea spray with it from away off in Maine, she closes her eyes, sees a little girl holding the hand of a weathered sailor.
She turns a page, and the sound draws a few eyes. Quickly, but with practiced grace, she flips the cover around back to hide the title: Rusty Joe’s Swap and Sell.
She bypasses the Community Bulletin Board section, the Miscellaneous section, the Animals, Automobiles, and Real Estate. Makes a pit stop at the Livestock section, and the corners of her mouth turn up as she reads: Wanted: Goats. Will trade lobster traps or surplus saltwater boots. Her smile is a mix of pride and delight, with a tinge of loneliness. Oh, Maine.
Flipping on, she finally lands at her destination section. Boats. But before she reads the four ads set in their rectangular boxes, she riffles through her bag and pulls out a paper rippled with glued-on news clippings, like a first grader’s art project. She reads a few of them and even laughs out loud once.
From four weeks back, Bob’s ad, with all the familiarity and humor of a grandfather:
Lost: Marbles. Somewhere in the boathouse. Help an old man find ’em?–B
From the week after that, hers:
Found: Old man’s marbles. Misplaced in a lobster trap. Will send certified mail.
And she’d sent him a bag of marbles, wrapped in a map she’d sketched for him of Ansel Harbor. She told herself that, technically, she was keeping her promise not to send him letters. She still didn’t understand the standoff between her father and Bob. But long ago, catching the grieved look on her father’s face whenever she slid a letter to Bob into the mailbox, she’d promised herself she’d find a different way to connect with her great-uncle. One that wouldn’t hurt people so much. Her ten-year-old self had taken on the weekly mowing of her neighbor’s lawn to earn the money to place the ads. She’d saved her seven dollars and fifty cents every two weeks and scrawled her first ad on a green index card, addressing it to Rusty Joe himself.
If there was any way to reach her great-uncle, she’d figured this was it. Next to his worn-out Bible, Rusty Joe’s was Bob’s most frequent reading material, despite his walls of books at home. And so it had continued, ads vaulting across time like Ping-Pong balls, right through that loophole.
His, from two weeks ago:
Wanted: Flatlander to get over here and dig up some clams. Enough of those citified scams.–B
And from last week, her own words:
Wanted: Sailor poet to stop rhyming ads. Poetry sows trouble in scads. (Egads.)–A
The messages went back and back, enough to fill two binders stuffed with pages back at her studio apartment. All from a relative she’d spent only a summer with, but who knew her better than anyone.
She inhales and casts her eyes back to the latest edition of Rusty Joe’s. There are two ads with boats for sale, and stuck right between them, this:
Come home, Annie. Bess.
And suddenly Ann’s face is the one telling a story. A look tied to the breaking that can freeze the entire world in time.
No one had called her Annie in twenty years. And there was only one reason Bess would write to her this way. The only reason Bob would not write.
Something has happened that made it so he couldn’t.
The room mutes around her. She hears only her pulse and the paper rustling, distant, in a scramble of movements. Her hands somehow pack up her bag. Halfway out the door she turns back and puts her plate on the counter, hands trembling and feet not doing such a good job carrying her.
She fights the door’s vacuum to push out into the wind. There, between skyscrapers and asphalt, Ann Bliss numbly puts one foot in front of the other until she is on a plane, bound for Ansel-by-the-Sea, Maine.
four
Ann stares down the aisle of the behemoth bus as it pulls up to her stop. Perhaps this was what Jonah had felt like in the belly of the whale. Aching for release, dreading what awaited. Jonah’s exit certainly hadn’t been lined with lumberjacks all the way up the aisle. Some were bearded; most wore one shade or another from Maine’s color wheel of plaid flannel. All were bound for the great north woods after this final stop along the coast before the state’s boundaries tuck up into Canada.
Ann tugs at her pin-striped suit, wishing for the hundredth time that she’d stopped long enough yesterday to change before her flight. She’d tossed clothes and books and a smattering of toiletries into a suitcase but hadn’t had the presence of mind to trade in this shell of a uniform. So here she is, pin-striped suit and shattered heart, trying not to roll over the lumberjacks’ heavy boots with her suitcase as she exits.
At last she steps onto Route 191. The bus departs with a diesel groan, a spray of dust.
She watches it disappear, then closes her eyes and hears it—the distant wash of the ocean in the harbor below. She breathes deeply before turning slowly, opening her eyes.
And there it is. Down the green hill, the harbor curves in a smile. White houses dot the coast, where all is quiet, save the steady lap of waves. Offshore, a scattering of islands trail into the sea, right up to where the two peninsulas come together in a near-embrace around the protected cove. This is what makes this place a haven. Sailors seek it out as a “hurricane hole,” a place to anchor until fierce storms pass, protected as it is.
Making her way down the road and into the village, she feels her pulse skitter. She pushes past her nerves and looks at the islands, the way they point from sea toward the village. She could almost hear Bob’s friend Arthur telling of Old Joe’s famous voyage here. Lift your head, Josef Krause. The famous line that caused the founder of this town to lift his eyes in a storm, see the lightning pointing the way to what would become his home.
“Lift your head, Ann Bliss,” she whispers. She begins the walk down the winding road. Being here, even after all these years, feels more natural than returning to her loft in the city—and at the same time it feels like the most foreign thing in the world.
Once down to Main Street, she hesitates. She should go right and follow the trail around the harbor to Sailor’s Rest—Bob’s home. But she cannot. Not yet, not without knowing for certain. She’d had a cab, plane, and bus ride to think through every possibility, but it all comes down to this: Bess would never have written
on Bob’s behalf if he could have done it himself. No good news awaits her. She knows it in her deepest heart. Still, this tiny shred of hope lures her in. . . .
So she banks left and winds down the German-esque main avenue, the road pitted with potholes from a harsh winter. It’s an honest-to-goodness cobbled street, tossing her rolling suitcase this way and that to prove it. Its tradition and charm match that of the tall row of buildings facing a central green and sloping down to the sea. Like something out of a fairy tale, its white walls are framed in half-timber details, the wavy lines of a thatched roof capping it and black window boxes freshly planted with flowers in every hue.
Market Row, they call it, and it looks as if it should house haberdasheries, patisseries, and purveyors of whimsy itself. But the hanging tiles over the doors ground the place with a dash of salt-of-the-earth:
Joe’s Lobster Shack. The sign in the window says Hibernating. Back in June.
Pinch-a-Penny Thrift. The sign in the window says Shut.
The Bait, Tackle, and Books. Gone Fishing. The BTB will BRB, their sign says. Looks like Ansel-by-the-Sea, though far from the center of technology, has managed to pick up on modern acronyms nonetheless.
Starboard Home Realty, a one-stop shop for anyone looking to purchase barns, blueberry barrens, seaside shanties, or historic captains’ homes is dark, telling her no one’s home.
Ann bumps along the cobbles, a sense of eerie emptiness chasing her as she passes each shop. It’s not just the lifeless shops. It’s too quiet everywhere. Not a person out walking a dog, fixing a truck, painting a boat to ready it for the high season—for both tourists and lobsters.
Feeling the need to establish some sort of connection, she pulls out her mobile phone. Not even a glimmer of reception. So much for keeping a link to the outside world.
Looking out onto the harbor again, she is relieved to see a string of boats passing through the natural gates, weaving through the bay’s buoys.
She checks her watch. Just after five thirty. It seems a little early for the lobstermen to be coming home from the day’s haul, especially on a clear day like this. And certainly not one after another like that.
At the water’s edge, long piers are piled with rectangular wire lobster traps. There should be two or three people on each pier, mending the traps. But other than the men piloting the approaching boats, not a soul appears.
White gulls circle in a bright blue sky, their calls chasing a bit of her concern away. A breeze picks up, delivering the smell of Gretel cakes and maple syrup, like medicine for her soul. Maybe that’s where everyone is.
With a thunk-thunk-thunk, she wearily rolls her suitcase down the last and longest pier reaching into the harbor and lands, finally, at The Galley door. With a deep breath, she pushes it open to the ring of the ship’s bell.
But no row of old sailors occupies the counter. No tourists are packed in. She turns toward the corner table, half expecting to see Bob there, raising his hand quick in a static wave and slapping it back down on the table to usher her in with those smile lines around his eyes. Always, the smile lines.
But it, too, is empty. Her eyes sting. It hurts to breathe.
She steps toward her and Bob’s table, tilting her head when she spots the envelope in the center next to the tin can of geraniums. The white paper is scuffed, like it’s been stepped on, and a few drops of dried coffee dot the corner. Just as she reaches out to flip it over, a voice sounds from the back.
“Come in,” it says without its source appearing. “Glad you’re here.” The voice does not sound glad. “Anywhere but the corner table.”
Ann snatches her hand back, scanning the ceiling for surveillance cameras and finding only a few old buoys in chipped blue, green, yellow, and red hanging for decoration. How had the voice known which table she stood at?
She takes a seat at the next table over, back to the harbor. A woman appears, and the sight of her brings Ann the first true smile since she read the ad. Bess Stevens.
“How many orders can I get you,” Bess asks of her one-item menu. She looks older, of course. Her wild black curls peppered with silver strands are held back just like always by a bandana kerchief. Bess always had a rugged beauty. Strength tempered with a jagged sort of kindness. Like Ansel itself.
From the moment Ann had stepped in here as a shy girl in a new place, Bess had chased her loneliness away with steaming plates of comfort and pointed words of wisdom. “Pay no mind to the old coots, girl,” she’d say about the fishermen at the counter. And then she’d lean in and whisper and wink. “Well, maybe listen every once in a while. They do know a thing or two. Don’t tell ’em I said so, though.”
She’d given Ann a place to belong when she had none in the world. And her first job. Flipping Gretel cakes had been Ann’s very own miracle that summer.
Bess is waiting with pen poised over notepad and finally looks at Ann. “One order of cakes?”
Ann shakes herself loose from the memory. “Yes,” she says, casting a quick glance out the window to the end of the peninsula the flapjacks take their name from—Gretel Point, just beyond Sailor’s Rest. “Thank you. And . . .” She falters. What should she say? I’m here about the ad in the Swap and Sell?
“Yes?” Bess is scrutinizing her now, eyes narrow. No flicker of recognition crosses her face. Ann’s heart sinks. But why should she recognize her? Their friendship was a lifetime ago. A world away, when she was a gangly girl in cutoffs.
“A cup of coffee, please?” She refrains from ordering a miracle on the side—the only thing, she’s convinced, that will make Bob appear.
Bess nods and retreats to the kitchen. Ann turns her sights back out to the harbor, where the boats are now anchored and bobbing their farewell to the lobstermen headed toward the piers in their skiffs. With Ansel’s tides that rose and fell a dozen feet twice a day, no lobsterman would bring his boat any closer to shore. With the speed they were moving, they must be using outboard motors. Bob had always rowed, and eventually taught her to, as well. She remembers the odd comfort and mingled terror it gave her, being in control of where she was going for the first time in her life.
One of the skiffs nears, disappearing from view over the edge of this very pier. Another joins it, then a third. It seems the whole pack is intent on doing the same. Stopping in to gab after the day’s haul over coffee, no doubt, as was their way. Ann gulps back a wave of nerves. The sudden urge to flee overtakes her. She can’t do this, can’t bear the thought of meeting a pack of people who may or may not recognize her, still not knowing what’s happened to Bob.
The back door beckons. She digs in her purse, leaving enough cash on the table to cover her order. A head appears at the end of the pier, right where the ladder down to the water is. A man climbs up and stands, offering a firm grip to another, pulling him up. And that man turns and does the same for the man behind him. As the gathering grows, so does her panic.
She crosses the room to the back door quickly. Grips the doorknob, turns it.
A shriek halts her, along with the sound of metal clattering.
Stashing her suitcase against the wall outside the kitchen, Ann dashes around the corner. “Are you all right?”
Bess whirls—her eyes, blazing blue amid the redness of pooled tears, narrow. “I’m fine. I’ll have your coffee out soon.” She removes her hand from the sink’s streaming water and grabs for a clean white coffee mug, only to wince and release it with a second clatter.
“Don’t worry about the coffee.” Ann shakes her head. “Is it a burn?” She dips her head toward Bess’s hand, taking a step toward her and ignoring Bess’s warning look, as she’d learned to do long ago.
“I’m fine,” Bess repeats.
A distinct scorched smell overtakes the tiny space, smoke wafting from crisping puddles of batter on the griddle. Bess lunges for a spatula on the floor, but Ann beats her to it.
“Here,” she says. “Let me help.” And before Bess has time to protest, Ann has removed the burnt cakes
to a plate and pointed Bess back to the still-running faucet.
Bess is speechless, but that won’t last.
Swiftly Ann moves to the corner cabinet next to the black rotary phone on the wall. If she’s remembering right . . .
Eureka. She pulls out the metal first-aid kit and finds a bandage roll, bundles some ice from the dented steel freezer chest below the counter into a bag.
“How’d you know where to find that?” Bess’s brows furrow, keen eyes sparking. Ann doesn’t know if she’s ready to be found out.
She purses her lips, letting the question linger as she reaches for Bess’s hand. The woman extends it warily, wincing again as she unfurls her fingers. The skin is red, the burn clearly painful but not critical. Ann gently places the ice against it and begins winding the bandage to bind it.
The woman rubs her temple with her good hand. “Thank you,” she says. “It was a stupid mistake. I haven’t been burned in years. My mind isn’t where it should be today.”
Ann glances up into Bess’s face. “Oh?”
“Worst timing, too. Got a heap of folks coming any minute now.”
Right on cue, the bell rings.
Bess jerks her head up. “They’ll be wanting their cakes. I promised . . .” She picks up the coffeepot with her good hand—sets it down and goes for the batter bowl. “I can’t let them down.”
“Here.” Ann reaches for the bowl. “Let me.”
Bess pulls back on it. “Kind of you. But there’s a trick to that old griddle.”
“You have a burn to tend.” Ann softens her voice. “Give me a try on it? I’ll help you through your rush. They sound hungry.”
It’s true. The voices are low, but their intensity grows each time the bell rings. This is no ordinary dinner rush.
“Fine.” Bess grabs the coffeepot and heads out.
Ann spots the stick of yellow butter and slides it back and forth across the black rectangular griddle, then ladles batter into sizzling circles. She arms herself with a fresh spatula.
