by Amanda Dykes
twenty-four
Bess’s words travel with Annie down to the landing. Twilight is turning to dark, and the whole landing is lined with patio lights strung aloft, like an Italian street café. A huge screen stands upon the length of the landing, and like magic, it has pulled boats she’s never seen into this harbor. There, mingled among the hardworking lobster boats, are yachts and luxury houseboats, taking care around rowboats and kayaks and canoes.
Hugging the box to her, Annie breathes in the delight of the scene. The screen flickers with Columbia Pictures arched over the woman with the torch, triumphant music striking vintage-film enchantment into the air. The opening credits to It Happened One Night give way to another ocean scene.
“Hey!” The loud whisper snatches her attention—Jeremiah over at the sea wall. She shakes herself back to reality and hurries over.
“Trying out a new career?” He’s keeping his voice low, as if they were in a real theater.
“I think it suits me,” she says, grinning.
His eyes are smiling. “Agreed. Want to help out tonight?” He opens an arm toward an awfully cozy rowboat. “Your chariot awaits.”
Her first instinct is to run. From the boat, and from more time with him. But something about the way he waits, the flicker of hope that steals across his features . . . it beckons her in.
Once seated in the boat with the popcorn nestled safely in the hull between them, he reaches up and flips a switch. Above them, a metal sign mounted from the boat lights up with round bulbs in old-world marquee letters spelling Fresh Popcorn.
“Where did you get a sign like that?”
“From Rich. A gift to the town.”
“Ah.”
Jeremiah rows in between boats, pulling up to anyone who flags them over. Annie’s job, apparently, is to balance in this thing while offering up bags full of popcorn without spilling them—or herself.
Up on the screen, Claudette Colbert stumbles back on a bus, losing her balance. Annie laughs at the look on her face, and a swell comes up under the boat just high enough to tilt it, causing her to pull her own Claudette.
Jeremiah’s hand catches her wrist, bracing her before she falls entirely. His touch is strong but gentle, sending a jolt through her.
“Thank you.” Annie gives a halfhearted laugh. “Guess my sea legs are still finding me.”
Jeremiah waves off her thanks, and the mirth on his face morphs into concern.
“You still haven’t told me,” he says.
“Told you what?”
“The sea.” He dips his oars in, pulling them gently back into motion. “What happened, that it makes you . . .”
“A blubbering scaredy-cat?”
His laugh is kind. “Nervous, I was going to say.”
That was a nice way to put it. She feels the pull to tell him, but at the same time, a roll of stubborn pride blocks her. Why should she give him more of herself, when he will not let her in? And a harder question—why does he care?
“I . . .” The words want past this tug-of-war inside her. Just tell him.
“I read your letter,” she blurts. Her hand flies to her mouth. That was not what she intended to say. “I mean . . . I didn’t mean to, but that first day on the boat, a letter fell from a book and I read the first line.” She hates the way guilt is fighting to be released into confession, seeking forgiveness, but it also is coming out fighting, pushing him away. As a weapon. Challenging him to tell her. Who was the letter from? Why did that person think he wouldn’t want to read the letter for a while? Why was he so distant, always? For a brief second, something ugly overtakes her, wanting to challenge him. See? I know something about you. Wall or not.
He looks away. Plunges his oars in deeper, to where she can’t see their tips in the black water beneath them.
Remorse sweeps over her, all feeling of retribution gone. “Oh, Jeremiah.” What has she done? “I’m so sorry. I should have just put it back in the book without looking. It was just the first line, but—”
“So why are you sea-scared?” He looks at her then. Blazing right past what’s just happened.
“What?”
“Listen, you don’t have to tell me. People shouldn’t be forced to explain before they’re ready.” He’s talking about more than the letter. “But if you want to tell me . . .”
Annie sighs. “It’s silly,” she says. “It was a long time ago.”
He waits. Paddles. Listens. Takes a piece of popcorn and eats it, as if he’s settling in for a good story. The tension falls away.
“I was young. All I knew was that the sea . . . it was a friend. Something mighty but beautiful. Until one day, I was out swimming with my mom. I got too close to a jetty, and when she came to help me, a rip current got her.” Annie’s throat aches, and words rub it raw, trying to get out. She shakes her head. “I was a strong swimmer, but I thought that was it. Watching her disappear like that . . .” Hot tears prick her eyes, and she swipes at them. Jeremiah has stilled his oars, leaning forward in the gentle rock of the boat. Slowly, he takes her hand.
“She was lucky to get out. She was a diver in the navy. She’d trained for such things. Even so, that could have been it. She managed to break free, but the terror of that stayed with me.”
Jeremiah nods. “Some things never leave you.” These are words he owns, truths he knows deeply.
He waits. She feels too exposed and trivial to continue. Especially now, knowing what he has faced. But still, he waits.
“Over the years, the ocean did take her. And my father. Not forever, but far away. On deployments. Dad’s dad, Roy . . . well, you know about him. And Mom’s dad had been missing for years after that same war. They both vowed not to forget the way war marks a person—whether for good or for ill. They both joined the military themselves when it came time to honor that vow in the fullest way they knew how. They didn’t take the cost lightly, but counted the sacrifice worth it, in order to protect the family they hoped to have one day, and their country.”
Medals attested to their trailblazing courage over the years, though they never displayed them at home. “It’s my duty,” Dad often said. “Not something to brag about.” But Annie had. She’d bragged at school, whenever she had to explain why she lived with just one parent or the other, or when she needed to stay with a school friend for a couple of weeks at a time when her parents’ deployments overlapped. She’d pulled out those bragging rights to justify why she’d been left . . . again.
They did it for her, she knew. But that wasn’t always an easy thing for a young girl to wrap her heart around, when the heart was aching for them so badly. And over the years, that ache had turned into one of compassion for them. They each held so many stories she’d never know, held in the dark circles under their eyes after another sleepless night, or the way they’d let their gazes linger long over her, like they needed to be reminded why they did this as much as they needed air to breathe.
They were the first people she’d made a study of, on a heart level. The ones who first got her thinking of a career that could help others.
Annie brings herself back to Jeremiah’s listening ear. “I counted the days until their retirements. My mom took up painting, and my dad took to reading. I’d send paints and books, anything to encourage that. I loved seeing their hands at rest. Touching things untainted by war.”
She pulls in a deep breath. “But lately . . . it’s gotten strange. They take these trips to Florida. Dad says it’s consulting work, but he never gives any details.”
When she’d asked, he had tried to explain, but the conversation left more questions than answers. “It’s . . . an important project. Something I have to do, Signal-Ann. Something I’ve got to make right.” He calls her by the childhood nickname, coined when she’d play signalman on his boat.
She continues. “That’s where they are now. Otherwise, I’m sure they would have come to see Bob by now. Or at least . . . Mom would have. She tries to bridge the gap between those two. She’s the
one who sent me to live with Bob that summer. I don’t think Dad would have done that. But Mom and Bob had talked some over the years, and when Bob lost his wife . . .” Annie shakes her head. She remembers how a sorrow had settled in their home. Dad away, she and Mom reading Eva Bliss’s obituary in the paper. “I think she knew Bob and I needed each other that summer.”
“Your mom sounds wise,” Jeremiah says. “You talk to your parents often?”
“Yes. I called them as soon as I knew what happened to Bob. They should be home in the next few days, and Mom’s hoping to convince Dad to come up here to visit Bob.” She’d called with updates from the hospital whenever there was one, which wasn’t often. “We’re a hopeless bunch. I keep sending paints and books. They keep going to Florida to consult on whatever it is.”
She shrugs, sheepish. “Anyway, that answered way more than your question. I guess I just learned early on that the sea takes people away. It got inside me, that fear, until it was as much a part of me as the blood in my veins.”
“Things do that sometimes,” Jeremiah says.
Annie waits, hoping—praying—he might go on. He looks as if he might. But whatever is trying to break loose in there comes up against the Great Wall of Jeremiah and tumbles back into the shadows.
That night, long after Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable have had their triumphant last moment on screen and the marquee lights have been turned off, they row home together. In the smaller vessel, they can glide closer to shore than usual and are skirting the edge of Everlea Island. Annie wants to sneak a peek just to see if she can catch any signs of Sully, concerned about how the woman is after her sudden exit from The Galley. But the house is dark, the island silent.
Across the narrow stretch of sea, Ed’s island stands equally dark. But as they pass beneath a tree that hangs over the sea from Sully’s place, a glimmer of silver light flashes. Moonlight, reflecting from something metal.
She points toward it, a questioning look toward Jeremiah. He rows closer, and as they pass beneath it, she sees a chandelier of individually strung silverware. Fine and Victorian—presumably the ones that Sully had been bent on finding a useful purpose for with her attempts at scone-baking. Delicate filigree twirls as a breeze picks up, swaying forks and spoons of every size, until they strike up into a silvery symphony. Carrying across the water in a westward drift . . . right to Ed’s island.
A tall figure moves among the trees on his rocky beach. Annie holds her breath, not wanting to ruin whatever is at play here. He is bending, lifting something. Fiddling with it until . . . there.
His light shines once more. He adjusts it, pointing it right toward the sound of the homemade wind chimes. And there in the old Victorian house, Annie could swear she sees a curtain in one of the upstairs windows pull aside . . . and linger there.
Annie motions to Jeremiah. As quietly as they can, he rows. Gliding away from this waltz of light and wind and music, and whatever else is budding between the two islands.
twenty-five
JULY 1950
The tides in Ansel are some of the greatest in the world. Surging twelve feet above its low-tide mark twice a day and rolling back again to reveal a hidden landscape. And like those tides, the rocks come in swells and pulls. A city across the country latches on to the Words, a new flood of boxes come. Jim transfers them to the shed behind the post office, and Robert and his plucky, beloved wife move them to their boat, lug them up the path on the island.
For years, it has gone like this. Months with not a package, then an influx, slowing to a trickle, and another lull. Bob and Eva layer them, life upon life, until they run out. And then they wait.
It is during one such lull, four years after the poem first ran, that Bob lays down the trowel, offers his arm, and escorts Ma and Eva into town for the Independence Day festival.
Ansel-by-the-Sea has always known how to work hard, rest hard, and celebrate with abandon. But since the war, this celebration in particular has taken on new extremes. Somberness and glee, both. The day begins and ends with a prayer, followed by a moment of silence as the fallen sons are remembered. And in between . . . oh, how they celebrate the freedom that was not promised, the freedom they’d wondered if they’d lose. It’s as if a long fuse on a firecracker is lit that day, burning in increasing fervor until the evening.
The town square is bedecked in bunting, swags of red, white, and blue. The high-school band—if seven kids with time-worn instruments could be called so—plays from the gazebo. Patriotic tunes put people in the spirit to loosen their purse strings for the pie auction. After a picnic, during which everyone partakes of everyone else’s pies, Anselites sprawl on their picnic blankets in the sun, awaiting the highlight of the day—the crate races.
Everyone lines the shore from Joe’s Landing to Mel’s dock. Strung from the end of the piers, a line of wooden lobster crates skims the surface of the frigid ocean water, waiting for men to dash across them as if they are lily pads, challenging them to make it from one wharf to the other in record time.
The mayor opens the event, inviting “anyone brave enough among you lot” to take to the crates. A quiet hush settles over the crowd as they await the inevitable Melvin Buck.
The man steps forward, red baseball cap fronted in white, looking for all the world like a performer taking to the stage he was made for. “All right, all right. Twist my arm, why don’tcha? I’ll go first.” A chuckle rolls through the crowd. Melvin always goes first.
He takes to the wharf in shorts and his striped button-down shirt, lunges and holds his arms over his head like an Olympian stretching.
“Ready,” Mayor Boone says. He holds his gold pocket watch high. “Steady . . . go!” And Melvin is off, wobbling to and fro as the crates do their best to toss him overboard. He makes it past the halfway point and two more crates beyond before the crate beneath him lists, throwing what little balance he had. And he’s in the drink, bobbing up with a victorious shout.
“Whoooo!” No one can call Melvin a sore loser. “Two past last year’s mark!”
Someone shouts that at this rate, he’d get to the end in twelve years’ time.
“Twelve years, here I come!” Melvin shouts, as he clambers up the ladder at the end of the wharf.
Several more men go, most nearly reaching the end, and Tall Reuben doing so in record time.
“That’s the time to beat, folks!” The mayor tries to hold Reuben’s arm in the air, but his fully extended one only gets Reuben’s to an awkward halfway point just over the mayor’s head. Reuben glows red, shuffling his feet.
Eva turns to Robert, looking expectantly at him. “You going to give it a go, sailor?”
He raises an eyebrow at her. “Not on your life.” Last time he’d competed was on a dare from Roy, and he’d learned then how the ocean is colder with an audience, more unforgiving with the whole town watching one’s failure to stay upright.
“Maxwell Yost!” one of the young men calls from the crowd. He repeats it, and again, getting two or three of his boisterous young friends to join in the chant. “Maxwell Yost! Maxwell Yost! Maxwell Yost!”
They’re calling for Mr. Max, the oldest man in town. Ninety-seven years old, Maxwell chimes in from his wheelchair. “Hear, hear! Let old Maxwell give it a try.” He raises his stick—a gift from The Boston Post to be bestowed always upon the town’s oldest citizen. One of a few hundred such sticks throughout New England, they’d had a hard time fitting the whole of Ansel-by-the-Sea in the scrolled script on its brass knob. But the crowded letters don’t bother Mr. Max, and he lowers it back to his lap as the boys continue to call for him to give the crates a go.
Ire rises in Robert. He knows this jest that the oldest among them might try the hazards of the slippery crates is meant in good fun. But for pete’s sake. Eighty-seven years ago almost to the day, Mr. Max was young Max, the eleven-year-old drummer boy who’d laid aside his instrument and taken up a cannon at Gettysburg when called upon. Doesn’t he deserve more respect than this?
Robert lets go of Eva’s hand, and she sends him a look that’s both questioning and conspiratorial. “Go get ’em,” she says.
A slow walk takes him to Mel’s wharf and, on the way, past Mr. Max.
He leans in low to the man’s ear, and says, “This one’s for Gettysburg.”
“Hear, hear!” Mr. Max shouts. “Make way for Young Bob!”
Robert grins at the use of his name. The whole town has taken to calling him by Roy’s name for him. It feels nice. And kind of Mr. Max to call him young, too, for he does not feel so young anymore. Twenty-three, and it feels like he’s lived ten lifetimes in the past five years.
On the mayor’s cue, he leans his hands onto one extended knee. “This one’s for Mr. Max!” he shouts, and the whole town erupts. The man is beaming, thrusting his cane into the air.
The crates drift about like a snake in the water, daring him to cross.
“On your mark,” the mayor shouts. “Get set . . . go!”
With a leap and a splash, he’s in. Pounding from crate to crate, sea swallowing his feet with every impact. Arthur rows along at a distance, ready to lend an oar if he should slip and fall, but there’s an intricate dance of speed and muscle carrying him.
Breath coming hard and face splashed with ocean, he is six crates from the end. Five crates. Four—three—
His foot hits the second to last, victory surging through him. But just as quickly, a wash of cold reaches to snatch it back, crate tilting, set on casting him off. He’s going fast and going hard. He thinks of Mr. Max and that doggone last crate, and in a thrust of gravity defiance, pulls his leg from the water, plants it firmly on that last crate, and falls headlong onto Joe’s Landing. The finish line.
Jim claps him on the back, says something that’s muffled among his own thrumming pulse in his ears and the cheering crowd on shore.
Jim grabs Robert’s wrist and thrusts it into the air. “That’s a record!”
The band pipes up, brassy in the distance, and the folks gather around to pump his hand, clap him on the shoulder. This, he could do without.
