by Amanda Dykes
“Roy’s rock,” she says. “He kept it. From the place he almost . . . from the place you saved him, in that storm when we were kids.” She lets her hands remain there, hers wrapped around his wrapped around a piece of earth his brother pulled from darkness.
As she pulls her hands back, he turns the stone in his hand. Its russet surface is smoothed by the waves. “He went back for this?”
Jenny nods. “He told me he kept it . . . to remember what courage looked like.”
That sounds like Roy. Even the kid version of him, an old soul.
“Courage,” Robert says. “I wish he could tell me what that looks like.” Robert could use a dose of that right about now.
Jenny tilts her head and takes in the sight of him. “You really don’t know?”
“Know what?” The stone is warming in his hands.
“He said courage looked like you. Reaching out. Pulling him up. And he said that’s what you’d always do, because it is just in you.”
She puts a hand on his arm and gives a gentle squeeze. “I’m thankful you saved him that night, Robert. I always will be.” The wind picks up, snatching her gaze away to the horizon. “You know Roy.” She speaks of him in the present tense, and it feels good. “Do something remarkable with it, Robert Bliss.” Those blue eyes pierce him, and he knows she’s talking about the rock, but so much more, too.
He smiles. “Minnesota’s got another thing comin’ with you, Jenny Bliss.”
She pulls her hands away, waves off his words. “We’ll see.”
When he leaves, promising to return later to see them off, he points the Savvy Mae home to Sailor’s Rest. But the rock is heavy in his hand. Before he can think, he turns toward the island instead.
“Do something remarkable with it.”
Ashore, he sheds his waders from on top of worn jeans, pulls on his saltwater boots, cinches up their leather laces, and hoofs to the top of the trail.
Something is stirring here. A rising up inside him.
He tosses the smooth stone in his hand. A step away is the graveyard of rocks he and Roy left. He picks one up, granite rough against his skin, catching light among its white flecks. He thinks of what it represents—life yet unlived, life Roy would have dared Robert to live if he’d been allowed to that night, before the war crashed into their island.
He picks another one up. And as though he’s lifted a key, it’s unlocking a memory. Looking into the USO dance, seeing the spotlights on the ceiling, the way they created beams and the couples danced through them. Light falling on soldier, sailor, captain, lieutenant. Each one lit, smiling as they pass through, dancing their way to the battle-streaked future they would soon face. Immeasurable courage beneath those smiles.
Three rocks now nestled in the crook of his arm, and he picks up another. It’s as if he’s picking up bread crumbs and they’re leading him somewhere. He’s stepped into some otherworld, and this thing leading him is no small force.
He sees a sea of sailor faces. This time standing erect in salute on the deck of the destroyer. He hears the measured, reverent gun volley, the lone trumpeter lifting his brass, last rays of sun gleaming in it as it lays his brother to rest with the somber notes of “Taps.”
Shards from the Victrola dot the clearing, and he tries to think of the song it last played, but a different one floods his mind. His mother’s singing the night she found Robert here, gathered him up, wept with him. He rowed her home that night, towing her boat behind them, slipping through those midnight waves with numb pain. And though they’d each gone to bed, he knew neither of them slept.
When first light began to ease the dark, he’d heard his mother’s voice. She had a lovely voice, like silver—but that night it had been raked over grief. Yet the song she offered up was all the more beautiful in its wavering and brokenness. Courageous, an offering. The laying out of her broken heart before her God.
“‘On Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand . . .’”
Words reaching through her dark, gripping truths she could not see.
On the cliff top he continues until his arms are full of rocks. This gathering up makes no sense, and yet it makes all the sense in the world. It’s an urging-on so strong and sure, he cannot dream of resisting. And so he continues, stone by stone, memory by memory. Each one a weaving of light, of rock, of sacrifice and strength, until he can carry no more.
He stands in the middle of the clearing. The ocean before him, the mountain wall of the island behind him.
“What now?”
He speaks the question and listens—and somewhere in between the cry of the gulls and the sound of the buoy bell in the distance, a single word is chiseled on his soul. Unmistakable.
Build.
He listens, strains to hear more. But that’s all there is. He sets the stones down in a neat pile, steps back. Plants his fists at his sides and considers them, the lives, the light. “There’s a whole lotta light,” Roy had said. “Go there instead.”
He knows what to do.
He crosses the clearing to the overhang where he and Roy kept their chest of tools and boyhood loot. Its aged wood is stenciled with block letters—INE TEA. They’d always joked about the missing letter f—that ine tea must be a step down from fine tea. Sliding the lid off, he pulls out an old notebook. It’s warped, the pages dimpled from fog and time, but it is here, and that’s all that matters. He brings out a pencil, sharpens it with his pocketknife. Words begin to line up, pour right through, like someone turned on a faucet and he’s just trying to catch them. They’re not his, not really, he’s just the one scratching them out.
Several lines in, he stops. Pushes his eyebrows together. Living? Giving? It rhymes. Oh, brother.
And on cue his brother’s voice pipes up from the past. “Rhymes won’t kill you.”
Robert shakes his head, lets out a dry laugh, continues on. And when three short verses have spilled themselves, he rips the paper out and takes it straight back across the harbor. He marches into the square, over to the newspaper office of The Pier Review. It’s locked. Before he can stop himself, he slips that paper through the mail slot and doesn’t look back.
Late that night, sleep eludes him once again, and he begins to replay the whole string of events. It’s as though he was in a trance, and he can’t deny that something beyond himself was leading, guiding. He was nothing more than an instrument. And that single word—build—tells him he’s going to have to keep on being an instrument. For a long while, maybe. With any luck, Gus will run his words—a call for rocks, a way to honor Ansel’s fallen sons—in the town paper. And in a few weeks, maybe a few months, this will all be over. An anonymous poem, a small island lighthouse to build—a way for the lives given to continue to shine on, save others.
It’s a simple plan.
And it will all be finished soon.
twenty
JUNE 2001
If townspeople were soldiers, Ansel’s residents would be the innocently masquerading guard of the most classified secrets. Pulling the door shut behind her as she leaves the Bait, Tackle, and Books, Annie is convinced that, though this town may have quaint streets and endearing people—the makings of a modern-day Mayberry—that was only one side of it. In secret, she was sure, they’d linked arms in some indelible promise to guard Bob’s story at all costs.
Everywhere she goes, she is met with smiles . . . until she brings up Bob’s poem or the ruins on the island—which apparently are growin’s. Though from her place on Jeremiah’s boat when they pass each morning on the way to the hospital, they look for all the world like the ancient, crumbling ruins of a castle.
Pulling her hair back into a ponytail, she savors a breeze cooling the surprising heat of early June. There’s hope in the air—perhaps sown by the doctor’s encouraging words about Bob this morning. His vitals are good, returning to a steadiness, and the doctor spoke of weaning him from the medication to see if he wakes from his coma.
She’s standing in t
he middle of a puzzle of her great-uncle’s life, praying she can put some pieces together and have something warm to welcome him home with when the time comes. His rusting key burns a hole in her pocket, cinching urgency around her mission.
With no one willing to shed light on any of her questions, she’s left with one hope—that the land will speak where the people will not.
That afternoon, she summons all her courage and every bit of boat know-how she can pull from the recesses of her mind. She fastens a life vest around herself—a hundred decibels of screaming orange—unties Bob’s old rowboat from its place bobbing at the dock, climbs down the ladder, and hops in, telling herself every step of the way that she is not stepping into a great abyss. She is simply stepping into a lovely wooden vessel that will skim over waves and bring her the answers she needs. Molecules, she reminds herself. She dips her oars in, closes her eyes, and pulls with all her might.
Something’s wrong. Her eyes fly open, to see the dock post fast approaching. Her pulse hammers and she quick reverses the direction of her oars.
“Rookie,” she mutters, rowing hard until she’s a safe distance away. From there, it’s a tug-of-war between her and the sea, as she feels her way into some semblance of maneuvering this vessel. When she finally hits a rhythm, winded and muscles burning, she feels a surge of pride. She, Annie Bliss, the confirmed landlubber, is at sea. Just her and the waves, and she’s sure she can manage at least five more minutes of this rowing. Surely that will be enough to get her to Bob’s island.
A soft wind slows her, and she turns back to see how far she is from shore.
There, not fifteen feet away, is Sailor’s Rest.
She lays the oars over her lap, hangs her head, and laughs at herself.
The rumble of an engine draws close. The Glad Tidings, coming in to dock.
Annie’s face heats, and she digs her oars back in, rowing as hard as she can toward the island, trying to make it look like this is a breeze. But she knows the struggle must be painfully apparent.
The engine cuts as the Glad Tidings drifts closer to her.
“Need a ride?” Jeremiah looks like he’s straight off the page of an L.L.Bean catalog, hair blowing and eyes narrowing against the sun. Meanwhile, her ponytail is slipping down the side of her head, and she prays the sweat accumulating on her forehead doesn’t choose this moment to cascade down her face.
“I’m fine, thanks.” She keeps rowing.
“Where are you headed?”
“Just . . . out.” More words would take more breath, breath she does not have.
He looks from her to where her boat is pointed. He disappears, then re-appears with a bright orange bundle under his arm. “Take this, then.” He tosses it down to her and she catches it, unrolling what appears to be some sort of deflated diver’s suit.
“What is it?”
“Survival Suit. You go any farther in that thing”—he circles a finger around Bob’s rowboat—“and you’re going to need it.”
Ugh. The word survival pummels her, and she rolls the suit back up. Everything in her wants to just keep on rowing, to prove she can do this. But if she can’t reach the island . . . well, that thought wins out over her pride.
“You sure you wouldn’t mind? You’ve been carting me all over for days now, and—”
“Get in.”
Once the rowboat’s been hauled back ashore and Annie’s on board the Glad Tidings, she wishes she’d just asked him to begin with.
“Where to?”
Annie pulls the key out of her pocket, runs her thumb over its scratches—praying she’s bringing it back to its home. “Bob’s island.”
The island is unlike most of the others in the harbor. Not flat or with easy rises, it is more akin to a mountain right there in the sea. A small one, but still. Sheer granite makes finding a place to anchor difficult. They circle it twice, and Jeremiah gets as close as he can without endangering his boat. He points to a bench with a hinged top over near the stern, and she follows his instructions for pulling out and inflating the life raft inside. Together, they paddle ashore and find themselves on a small, rocky beach leading to an overgrown trail . . . guarded by a chain-link fence. A splintered piece of plywood proclaims No Trespassing. The gate is locked with a simple padlock.
The fence, the sign, the lock . . . Annie reminds herself that Bob left her this key. If it fits, it’s an invitation.
She hopes.
Annie lifts the padlock, letting the weight of its small form fill her palm and thrill her soul. This little mechanism is what stands between her and so many answers . . . or so many questions.
Jeremiah stays silent, perhaps sensing that this moment means much to her. Annie lifts her key, inserts it into the lock, closes her eyes . . . and turns.
Click.
Its inside mechanism releases, unseen. The lock itself takes some coaxing, having sat for who knew how long, but soon she is removing it entirely and tugging the gate open as it scrapes over the rocky earth.
Heart pounding, smile overtaking her face, she turns to Jeremiah. “Shall we?”
They step through the fence and, without a word, begin the climb up the path. Long grasses and weeds brush against Annie’s knees, as if whispering hush . . . hush . . . in sacred anticipation.
They reach the crest and enter a clearing. A fire ring lies cold, old coals nestled black at the base of the grasses trying to take over. A wooden box is tucked with care under a small rock outcropping, and an old ladder leans against the granite wall that backs this place.
She treads with care, overwhelmed by the feeling that she’s slipping into a slumbering story.
And then she sees it. Or rather, she steps into its shadow and feels it. The cool of its looming shade, the call of its mortared seams.
A tower, there between the clearing and the cliff. Stones in every hue, nestled together as if they have been carved with care to fit one another’s crevices. Rising cylindrical, like a turret right before her.
“Oh . . . my.”
Jeremiah draws near, his presence warm in the shadow. “Whoa.”
They stand together, wrapped in the place where words have no use.
A doorway, arched and empty, yawns with shrouded invitation. She shivers. It’s the same feeling she got when standing in the ruins of Rievaulx Abbey in England during her semester abroad. This sense that time stretches so far beyond her, the walls holding life and a thousand tales.
Only these aren’t ruins. They are growing. She sees it now. In place of the telltale piles of crumbling rocks lying here and there amongst ruins, here there are small groupings upon the ground. Rocks placed like jigsaw pieces, laid out in preparation for their addition to the tower.
The growin’s.
But . . . what are they? Whatever they are, the “growing” seems to have come to a standstill some time ago. She steps forward, and Jeremiah steps back. He’s headed toward the alcove, and she can almost hear his mind clicking with questions and theories.
But for her, there is no room for the hypotheses hammering to get into her consciousness. Not amid this stirring beckoning her in.
With caution, she moves to the doorway and stands on the dividing line of darkness and light. Looking in, she gives her eyes a moment to adjust and, shadow by shadow, begins to make out more of this giant mosaic. Round walls, a staircase of the same patchwork stone winding round and round against the inner wall. At the top, the sky beams in as through a long telescope. No ceiling. A makeshift wooden platform, with a wishing-well-type wooden roof, but open otherwise.
A single leaf drifts in on a breeze, spiraling down through the shafts of light as Annie stands there in the center of it all.
“What is this place?” she asks, and her voice echoes against the damp walls.
“Annie?” Jeremiah calls, excitement in his voice.
She turns and nearly collides with him. He’s carrying the wooden box she’d seen in the alcove.
“You need to see this,” he says. His e
yes spark as he sets the box on a nearby boulder and carefully lifts the lid.
At first it looks like any boy’s treasure trove. A stub of a pencil sharpened roughly with a pocketknife. An old Dick Tracy comic book. A pad of paper . . . and a rolled up, larger piece of paper. Jeremiah takes it out and hands it to Annie.
It’s yellowed, rigid. Unrolling it gingerly, she spreads it out on the flat top of the boulder. Jeremiah stoops and grabs four stones, placing them on the corners.
And together, they stare at what appear to be precise hand-drawn blueprints. For a tower, yes—but there, at the top, is the answer.
A lens. Like a glass crown topping the tower, transforming it into . . .
“A lighthouse.” They both speak it, hushed.
Jeremiah pulls something more from the box. A scrap of newspaper, most of it scorched away, the edge blackened and still smelling of smoke. Gothic print reads PIER before it drops away into nothingness, and a few lines of print read:
So send your rocks
And raise your hearts
And set to the work—
There it stops, the rest of it consumed by flame in a black jagged edge. Annie’s breath swells within her, too big for her lungs. “Is this . . . Bob’s poem?”
Jeremiah slips his hand behind hers, so they’re both holding it. “There’s one way to find out,” he says.
twenty-one
The Pier Review building is locked, a hand-printed sign hanging on the window reading Closed. No News Is Good News. Jeremiah fishes in his pocket for a quarter and goes into the pay phone on the corner of the square. It is a relic. Three walls of paned glass, framed with chipped black paint. It’s missing its door, and Jeremiah exits after only a few seconds. “The editor’s not answering his phone.”
Annie plants her hands on her hips, turning to survey the buildings about. All closed so late in the day. But there is one light on, there, above Starboard Home Realty.
“Spencer T. Ripley.”
