by Amanda Dykes
Bess pulls her out into the chill air. Ann opens her eyes to the fresh flow of it and finds herself looking straight into a pair of eyes as stormy and changeful as the Maine sky. She looks away from their intensity. If this man, who only minutes ago ordered her away from Bob’s table, wants her to be uneasy, he’s certainly succeeding.
He’s tall. Young, for these parts. And by the firm set of his jaw, clearly none too thrilled by her sudden appearance.
He’s wearing a blue-and-white plaid flannel shirt, unbuttoned just enough to show a gray T-shirt underneath reading Go Away.
Such a welcome.
“Annie, you remember Fletch.”
“Fletch?” She tries to keep surprise from her voice.
“Oh, I forget,” Bess says. “You both seem so much a part of this place, feels like you should already know each other.” She shakes her head. “Annie Bliss, this is Jeremiah Fletcher.”
It’s minuscule, his movement, but she sees it. The way he pulls back, narrows his eyes just a fraction.
“Annie.” He says her name slowly, like she’s a puzzle, and one he’s wary of. “You came.”
She straightens, trying to shake this feeling that she’s in an interview, every action being assessed.
“Yes,” she says. “As soon as I knew to come.” As soon as the words are out she wishes to snatch them back. Shouldn’t she have known right away? If she was a good relative? If she were as invested in Bob’s well-being as he had been in hers? Guilt crawls up her spine.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I feel like I should know you.” No one is explaining who Fletch is, why his name peppers every conversation connected with Bob. And he doesn’t even look like a Fletch. The name suggests someone charismatic, vivacious. This man is . . . well, Jeremiah Fletcher has the air of someone who’s been around since the beginning of time, and is as serious as that history, too.
She tucks these bits of him away in her mind, readying them to pull out when it’s time to unlock this man. She imagines people as combination locks, each bit of information a tick on the dial as she works to build up their story in her mind, to unlock them.
“Yeah, you probably should,” he says, and it’s clear he believes there’s a lot she should know, and doesn’t—and much she should be doing, and isn’t. He looks to her suitcase up against The Galley, where Bess has placed it. “Yours?”
“Yes,” she says, and goes to retrieve it, hating the way her heels click unnaturally against the dock. What she’d give for her old pair of L.L.Bean boots, worn leather and blue rubber and comfort and warmth.
“I guess you’ll be wanting to stay at Bob’s,” he says. His voice is distant.
“Of course she’ll stay at Bob’s.” Bess waves off Jeremiah’s question. “It’s as good as home to her. Isn’t that right, Annie?” She doesn’t wait for an answer and turns back to Jeremiah. “Anyway, I thought you could take her up the Weg and across the bay, seeing as how—”
“I’ll do it,” Jeremiah agrees, his expression even more unreadable as the sky grows darker.
“And to the hospital in the morning? I’d drive her over myself, but . . .” She glances at the restaurant, her meaning clear. In a one-restaurant town, and a one-employee restaurant, she can’t get away.
“Yeah,” Jeremiah says. Ann notices the absence of the Mainer ayuh of agreement, thinks of how in communities like Ansel, the breaking down of their colloquial language is often the first sign of a town in danger of “irrelevancy.” You lose the language, you lose the history. Sense of place. Tradition. Cultural Anthropology 101.
After saying good-bye to Bess, Jeremiah leads her down the wharf, to where a boat bobs in high tide. Bright Tardis-blue hull, white everything else. The words Glad Tidings are painted with precision over the blue.
Jeremiah’s frown deepens as he motions toward a fold-down jump seat inside the cabin. It’s a tiny space. Not the sort of confined quarters she wishes to share with a man who’s clearly less than thrilled at her presence.
“I’ll sit outside, if it’s all right,” she says, gesturing to a bench bolted to the deck just outside the cabin.
He shrugs, eyeing her thin layers. “Suit yourself.” He tosses her a sweatshirt from the back of the helm seat. “It’ll be cold once we’re on the water.”
“I’m used to the cold and wind,” she says. “Chicago.” When he fires up the engine, she feels the vessel tremble beneath her feet and gulps. Cold and wind are one thing. Being out on the waves is quite another. She sits quickly, wraps her fingers tightly around the weathered wood of the bench.
He steers the Glad Tidings out into the dark, and Ann presses her eyes closed. No worse than an airplane, she tells herself. And promptly disbelieves herself.
She looks around the vessel, fixing her attention on the details, hoping to anchor herself to the truth that this is someone’s normal. They’re just crossing the bay, for heaven’s sake. Barely leaving shore.
Jeremiah mercifully takes it slow. He skirts the harbor a bit, guiding the boat past shingled buildings, white clapboard homes tucked up into the surrounding hillside, and docks capped with fishing shacks. Some homes are German-esque, like those in the town square. These, she knows, date back to when Josef Krause settled this place, his vision to fashion it after his hometown in the motherland.
Jeremiah eventually points the boat away from the harbor, weaving through anchored lobster boats all around. His boat is different, she realizes. It doesn’t have the same stout look as the lobster-fishing vessels. His deck is longer, his cabin taking up nearly the entire front half of the boat. Around his deck, lidded plastic bins sit squat and straight, roped against the metal railing. The vessel is devoid of the ropes and trawl nets she remembers from Bob’s boat. To her right, a mound of oddly sized clear plastic bags rattles in the breeze. She leans in for a closer look. There are boxes inside the bags, some small, some large, and a few in between. What is this? Mail? She fights hard not to look closer at the address labels. All her training—the drive to get to the bottom of the story—tells her to observe everything she can. But there’s this other side, the side she likes to hope bears some resemblance to a normal human, that tells her to respect the man’s privacy.
She turns, directing her gaze to the cabin. Inside, his light glows, and his eyes rove over the water. He grips the helm with ease and whistles a tune. Something slow in a minor key.
A stack of books sits on a case bolted to the wall, with railings at the bottom of each shelf to keep the books in on rough seas. She strains to see their titles. It’s not the same as the mail. Books, people know will be seen. Spines outward, on display. They are the best sort of clues to figure something out about a person. And judging by his remarks, he already knows way more about her than she does him.
The titles are alphabetical, she realizes. Advanced Emergency Care. Guitar for Dummies. Maritime Tradition and Lore. Microbes of the Sea. The Moonstone.
Well, his tastes were nothing if not eclectic. And perplexing. On the next shelf down, two books lay on their backs, faceup and dog-eared. Ann leans closer. These are the books he reads most, by the look of things.
A small Bible, its thin pages rippled and its spine long gone. Next to it, Postal Laws and Regulations of the United States of America.
She looks from the book, to the bins, to the bagged packages, and to the man at the helm, dark hair sticking out in slow curls from beneath a blue beanie.
“This is a mail boat?”
He gives her a sideways glance and fixes his stare back out on the water. “Mostly,” he says. “Sometimes it’s a ferry. Sometimes ambulance. Mostly a mail boat. Delivering packages and people to Ansel’s inland and islands since 1934.” He speaks as if he’s the droll narrator on a documentary. “The boat, that is. Not me.”
Ann swings her legs around to the edge of the bench to face him. “And when did you become a part of this delivery service?” She tries to reconcile Bess’s account of how Fletch found Bob, helped him.
H
e scoffs. “That depends on who you ask.”
“Well,” she says. “Let’s say I ask the town of Ansel.”
“Three years ago.”
“And let’s say I ask you.”
“Then . . . never.” His face pulls into a half grin. “I came up here for an EMT job. Turns out a town like this only needs a very part-time EMT, and since the fire station shares a building with the post office, I inherited the postal deliveries as part of my responsibilities.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Only in Ansel.” He shrugs one shoulder. “It’s not so bad. Keeps me out of trouble.”
She studies his scruff, the way he speaks little but sees much. He doesn’t seem the type to go about making trouble. Even so, there’s something going on below the surface in this man.
“That’s an interesting shirt.” She points at the bold black Go Away lettering.
He glances at it, then at her. He lifts his eyebrows, tipping his head toward her. His message clear, and only half-joking.
“Your wardrobe should learn some manners,” she mutters.
She’s about to turn away, let this guy sink into his own world, as he clearly wants to, when he makes a quick movement. He grabs a Sharpie from the bookshelf, uncaps it with his teeth, and holds the shirt out with one hand. With his other, he scrawls atop it, lettering carefully from his upside-down perspective.
PLEASE, he’s written at the top of the shirt.
Oh, this guy is rich. She does not respond to the look of smug victory he gives.
They’re pulling into the dark side of the harbor now, the night so black she can barely make out the silhouetted horizon of pines and mountains beyond. They pass a long, narrow island and enter the Weg. A stretch of sea that’s bordered by a string of islands on one side and the remote arm of the mainland on the other. Other harbors in Maine would call this a reach. Moosabec Reach, Eggemoggin Reach . . . and Ansel’s Weg.
The pronunciation was all wrong, she’d learned since leaving Ansel—the locals all said it with a true W—but it had a tale that brings a thrill to her soul still. “Old Joe,” as they called Josef Krause, was a humble fisherman who lived with his wife, three kids, and new baby in a tiny fishing shanty up near Saint John in New Brunswick. He had gotten swept down the seaboard after a heavy mist disoriented him and turned into a fierce night storm. With just him and the herring aboard, he had little hope of surviving. Seeing no sight of land, and having lost all hope, he fell to his knees and begged God to deliver him, that he might get the herring back to his little one’s bellies and live to see them another day.
His only answer was a deeper churning of the waves, which splayed him onto his belly, facedown, repeating his prayer. And then, as the story went, he’d heard a voice, stronger than audible, as if it were speaking straight into his soul: Lift your head, Josef Krause.
It was not a promise for deliverance nor an opening of the sea as for Moses . . . but Josef did it. He lifted his head, and in that very moment the sky lit with a blinding streak of lightning. Enough to see an island in the distance.
Scrambling to his feet, he took the helm and navigated as best he could to where that fleeting glimpse of an island had been. When he got nearer, the pounding in his chest echoed that heavenly voice again. Lift your head, Josef Krause.
He looked to the sky, another dash of lightning revealing the island looming large to his left, and another island ahead, and another beyond. The next bolt of lightning stretched long enough to show a whole string of small isles, dropped like bread crumbs to lead him to shore. One by one, flash by flash, he’d followed their path.
Come morning, he awoke where he’d sheltered himself once reaching the mainland: beneath a stalwart pine tree, looking out at a harbor blue and promising, its waves gentled. The storm had brought him here, the islands leading him like the bread crumbs from the fairy tale of his childhood. Here, he knew, he would live.
In the weeks that followed, he moved his young family down into Maine and named the one-family town Hansel. Hansel-by-the-Sea, which grew to be a place of safe landing for many a weary traveler, just as it had for Josef. He erected a hand-carved sign to spell out its name. In the decades that followed, the wind mischievously wore the H clean off that sign, and by the time anyone noticed, the newcomers had already started calling the place Ansel.
Ann smiles over the story as they turn to exit the Weg and cross to the far side of the bay. “The Weg.” She laughs.
“What’s that?”
Oh. She’d forgotten about Mr. Fletch.
“The Weg. I was just thinking of the old story. You know it used to be called the Weg von Blitz?” She pronounces it as Germans would, the W as a V. “The Way of Lightning.”
“I wondered,” Jeremiah says. “Weg seemed strange, even for up here.”
“They stopped saying it the German way during the war,” she says.
He nods, and she can’t tell if he’s bored or just focused. He’s steering the boat toward a dock in the dark shadows, and it’s a few seconds before she recognizes it.
“Oh my,” Ann breathes. “This place . . .” The old dock is the one she dangled her feet from a thousand times, laid back to watch the stars, scampered out on to bombard Bob with questions and ideas, finding a home for them in his listening heart.
Part of her aches to return. And part of her can’t stand the idea of finding Sailor’s Rest standing cold and silent and empty.
“Something else, huh?” Jeremiah slows the boat, and a gentle bump against the wharf says they’ve arrived.
Her suitcase rolls behind her, click-clacking across boards until she hits land. Soft earth, the path leading up to the Sailor’s Rest.
She freezes.
Tucked up in the trees, steps turn and climb to the old Victorian captain’s house. And it’s anything but cold . . . or silent . . . or empty.
The lights are on inside.
seven
The doorknob is ice in her hand. And yet a light from the window—there, to her left, where she used to sit on the window seat and watch for Bob’s boat every evening—washes her with warmth. A perfect collision of past and present. Pulling in a deep breath, Ann pushes through the entryway, nearly two hundred years creaking in protest with the old hinges.
A step inside feels like she’s trespassing, the house assessing her every step as if to say Who . . . are you . . . ? Full of inquisitive accusation. She is Alice, the house is the caterpillar, and every creaking step she takes is a step through a ring of smoke. The house does not know her. She is an imposter—gone too far, too long.
A hand is on her shoulder then. She jumps nearly out of her skin, whirling to find Jeremiah, three logs of firewood under his other arm. He pulls his hand back as if he’s been burned, and for the first time, she sees something softer than hard steel on his face.
“Sorry,” he says. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”
“You didn’t.” The words come out like a defensive swing. “I just . . .” She has no way to finish that sentence. “W-why are the lights on? Is someone here?”
Jeremiah’s face goes grim again. He points through an open door on the left, to her favorite room. “The couch is through there.” He steps through to lead the way.
This is all sorts of wrong. She’s Bob’s only remaining relative. Well, the only one speaking to him, anyway. But this man she’s never laid eyes on before is the one walking around this place making introductions.
And who’s to blame for that? The voice of reason shames her.
Jeremiah stacks the logs next to the cold brick fireplace. This was a sitting room, once upon a time, but Bob . . . well, he was never much for sitting. He lined the shelves of this room with books upon books, a rainbow of muted colors from bygone ages. A globe sits on its stand in the corner, right where she used to spin it, close her eyes, and open them at Bob’s bidding, to see where she might live someday. He’d taught her how to dream, how to think of the world beyond her. There’s a piano on the wall by
the door, and sandwiched between bookshelves, her window seat. It had been her ship, taking her to a thousand shores those hours she lost herself in books when she was too afraid to step on a real boat. But Bob had coaxed her even from that fear, eventually. Mostly.
The memories are sparking like fireflies all around her, leaving her breaths shallow and quick. She runs her hand over the sofa, the softness of flannel draped over it. It’s only then she realizes that blanket is moving, sliding right out from under her fingers.
Jeremiah is standing opposite her, pulling a sheet toward himself. He freezes, scratches his beanie uncomfortably. He finishes wadding the flannel under his arm. “Blankets are there.” He points to a cupboard back out in the hall. He grabs the pillow—a bed pillow, she realizes—from the couch and snatches a replacement for it from a crate in the corner, giving it a whack to release dust.
“There.” He tosses it onto the couch. “All yours.”
She eyes the mangled bundle under his arm. “You were sleeping here?”
For a second he looks like a kid caught red-handed, boyishly sheepish at six feet tall.
He shrugs. “It didn’t feel right,” he says. “This house empty.” That’s the only explanation he gives before striding across the room. He pauses in the doorway, then faces her. “There’s some food in the kitchen. Not a lot, but some. And . . . well, I guess you know your way around.”
“It’ll come back to me.”
He pauses, as if deliberating about whether to tell her the next bit. “Bob . . . he lets me dock my boat out there.”
Ann nods, trying to follow. There seems to be something else he’s trying to communicate. It’s endearing, a little, the way he stumbles around his words. A man after Bob’s own heart, wherever on earth he came from.
“It’s a houseboat.”
He waits, watching for understanding to click.
Ah. He . . . lives here. Just a stone’s throw from the front porch.
