Mistwalker

by Saundra Mitchell

  Closing my eyes, I sank into the bed. Breathing Bailey’s perfume, still tasting the buttery-salty-sweet of the cookie dough in my mouth. This room was familiar as my own; maybe more than mine. This is where I spilled my secrets, and I was safe enough to let my heart lurch here. The breaking up was ugly; the being together had been good.

  There was more of the latter than the former, so I said, “I don’t want him to be.”

  “Uh, Denny?”

  “I’m not happy,” I clarified. “I just wish things were different.”

  Agreeably, Bailey nodded. She looked to a faraway place, probably one where senior year and two different colleges weren’t looming. She plucked at the seam on my jacket, fingers working without thought. “I liked it better when we had everything planned out.”

  Didn’t we all? Sometimes, it seemed like it should be possible to give up now. To reboot back to fourth grade, when we were old enough to have our own minds but young enough that nothing mattered. It seemed like it should be possible, but it wasn’t.

  Everything ended: fishing season, summer break, fourth grade . . . There was no comfort in that. So I reached back to pat her awkwardly. Then I picked the one thing that I knew would make her recoil.

  “At least nobody cuts the crusts off your tuna fish anymore.”

  Spasming, Bailey elbowed me in the gut in her hurry to flail off the bed. “Gah, I hate that! I hate it! If you cut the crusts off, it’s a goo sandwich! It’s just goo, Willa! Augh!”

  Yeah, it was inconsequential, but it was nice to know that some things did stay the same.

  All around me, the world was a secret.

  Every door in Broken Tooth led to a story I was never gonna know. Walking home in the dark, I glanced at houses, familiar addresses. There had been enough block parties and co-op parties and Christmas parties that I knew what plenty of those foyers looked like.

  But the lives behind them: mysteries. I felt like a mystery too. As much as Bailey and Seth knew me, they didn’t know me. Likewise me for them. It was the kind of talk I usually walked away from at the bonfires. You got the Jewett twins high and they were regular philosophers.

  “What if we’re somebody else’s dream?” Amber asked once.

  Ashley’s eyes went wide, and she held out her hands. Like they might suddenly disappear on her or something. Staring at them, she murmured, “What if they wake up?”

  Then Nick dropped a SweeTart down Ashley’s top. That was real enough that they stopped worrying about being the spark of an idea in a space alien’s brain. It seemed to me like Levi smoothed that over. I didn’t remember how. He was subtle.

  My brother was subtle. And sweet. And starting to go hazy in my memory.

  I hadn’t been to his grave since the funeral because he wasn’t there. I’d been in his room a hundred times. Mom had sent me up there to get his leftover laundry, so she could wash it and donate it.

  It never got washed. It was still sitting in a basket in our basement.

  Levi’s books, I thumbed through, then gave to Seth and Nick. The manga, I gave to the school library because he always complained they wouldn’t buy any of the good stuff. His CDs, I parceled out; some I kept. Posters, I packed, along with his ribbons from school science fairs. The trophy he got for a Washington County talent show. The stack of report cards he kept in his desk, because he was actually proud of his grades.

  Those went to the attic. I made his bed. I left the curtains half open, all his drawers completely closed. And I stacked his sheet music on his desk.

  Levi wasn’t coming back. Every time I went in there, I went in knowing that. He didn’t need his Death Note figures anymore. He wasn’t gonna screw up the alphabetical order on his shelves ever again. He didn’t care if I made his bed wrong; it made no difference if I arranged his shoes with the right one on the left.

  He wasn’t at the graveyard, and he wasn’t in that room anymore.

  Still, sometimes, it felt like he should have been somewhere. Alone, outside, at night. That’s when I missed him. That’s when I felt absence, the presence of nothing. The first couple weeks after he died, I dreamed him. We were always outside. Walking to the wharf. Climbing down in the caves. Watching the harbor seals on the shore.

  When I dreamed him ordinary like that, it hurt when I woke up. It was an ugly trick of the brain. Dreams resurrected Levi; waking put him back in the grave.

  He’d always been one door over from me, even when he was brand new. There was a picture of me, all of two years old, on an ugly couch that moved to our garage a couple years back.

  Somebody had put Levi in my arms—I was a little kid, and he was a big baby. He filled my whole lap. My hand rested on his downy head, and he dozed away, unafraid. I was nothing but a pink triangle of a nose and a fall of hair.

  I didn’t know him then. And I didn’t know him the last time I held him either. Like all the doors on Thaxter Street, his was closed. I knew the foyer, but the rest was a mystery. It always would be.

  Instead of going home, I walked down to the water. Fog drifted in, and the lighthouse beam cut through the night. Sitting on the rocks, I shivered in the dark. It wasn’t comfortable, and I was gonna have to bolt sooner rather than later. But I wanted a minute. Some quiet.

  If I’d told Levi about Grey, he would have believed me. Probably would have written a song about it. Maybe even waited for me after school to ask more questions that would have turned into a comic book. He probably would have named the character in the book Emma, though. He’d had the hots for Emma Luchies since second grade.

  Covering my face with my hands, I breathed heat onto my own skin. Levi was gone, but parts of him remained. Shadows, glimmers—unmade memories built on expectations. For just a moment, I wasn’t alone. And then, just as quickly, I was.

  Waiting for the light to pass overhead again, I wondered if I could sleep in a town without a beacon at night. Nick said it took him forever to get used to Broken Tooth because he didn’t have train tracks behind his house.

  It was funny, the things you could live with and the things you learned to live without.

  THIRTEEN

  Grey

  The fog comes and goes on its own now. I feel its currents. I could direct its tide. I won’t. I’m not. Instead, I stand in the lantern gallery and watch the shore. All those flickering lights, just out of my reach. All those flickering lives, going on and on without me.

  One hundred years.

  I asked for evidence of myself once. I wanted proof that I had been someone before Susannah’s kiss. That my life was no imaginary thing. And this after I had loathed it so much in the living. After hating my father and his dreams for me. After hoping to flee my mother at the very first opportunity. I wished for evidence of it; I no longer believed I’d been real.

  The curse provided. Inside the gold-wrapped gift at my breakfast that morning were two slips of newsprint.

  My father’s obituary was a plain affair. He passed fifteen years after I surrendered my soul to the mist. He died in his sleep, the memoriam said; he was survived only by his beloved wife.

  A grainy photograph immortalized my mother in her obituary. So claimed the caption. The woman depicted there was decades older than I remembered her. She wore black; she looked past the camera.

  When I saw it, I felt only numb. I studied the angles of her face. Surely I should remember the sound of her voice. At least one thing she’d said to me. Perhaps the texture of her hands—had they been cool and soft?

  The color of her eyes remained clear in my memory, but time had shaved away the rest of her details. After the description of her good works, the obituary said she was survived by a son, missing since 1913.

  Until the end, she had hope. Until the last of her, she refused to believe in the last of me.

  All the while, I sat on this hellish island. A century past, and I am no better, no greater, no more finished, than I was then. Here I sit, staring at an unfinished music box, suffering an existential crisis.


  I’m a frigid, prisoned Hamlet—I have no choice but to be. But I am haunted by the awareness that I cannot be. There’s but one in the world that could acknowledge me. The same one that would make me real again.

  Longing breaks through my ice; it’s painful and bloody. I press my hands to it. Though I know it will mean nothing at my plate in the morning, I wish for the impossible. I wish for Willa. I wish for her to come.

  Another voice in this tomb is sometimes enough.

  FOURTEEN

  Willa

  I went to school. Not because I cared, but because I had nowhere else to go.

  My mother had the day off. I’d missed the low tide. Somebody had bought the boat in Milbridge, and Daddy left before dawn. Landlocked, it was easier for me to avoid looking to the lighthouse. I could bury myself in make-up work.

  The air was molasses, thick and hard for me to walk through. Usually, the halls at Vandenbrook echoed like crazy. If you turned the right way in the English room, you could hear math lessons drifting up from the first story. Since it was a mansion once, it only seemed right. Couldn’t have a gothic mystery in a house that was soundtight and echoproof.

  But on the day before my court date, the halls sounded hollow. Voices wound around me, sounding like they’d been shouted down a pipe, miles and miles away.

  “Where have you been?” Ashley Jewett asked. She peeled off the wall to walk with me.

  With a shrug, I said, “Around.”

  Eyes darting, Ashley leaned in close. “Have you talked to Seth lately? You know me. You know I don’t like to start drama. But . . .”

  Though it wasn’t a lie in the standard way, it wasn’t true, either. Ashley loved drama. She got all the tabloids online, she had Oh No They Didn’t on permanent scroll. You could tell when it was a bad signal day for cells if Ashley was leaning out a window with her phone.

  For twelve seconds in ninth grade, she tried to get a gossip site about Broken Tooth going. Everybody knew it was her, and it wasn’t like we didn’t catch most news as it happened. She shut it down and rededicated herself to going person-to-person instead. It was tradition, and it worked. Mostly. She seemed to have skipped a link on my personal chain.

  “We broke up,” I told her.

  Visibly deflating, Ashley pursed her lips. She was going to salvage something out of this. “For real, or just on a break?”

  As if it was that neat. He still had my DVDs. I still had a bunch of his shirts. We hadn’t signed a contract. We hadn’t even really said it was over. I just knew it was, and so did he.

  Rather than scent the water with blood, I caught Ashley’s hand and squeezed it gently. “If you saw him with somebody else, it’s all right.”

  It wasn’t. My stomach soured; not that I wanted to go back, but I didn’t want to see him dating Denny. If he wanted to get his flirt on, he could go to Bangor. Hang out in front of a movie theatre, show off by throwing popcorn in the air to catch in his mouth. He got plenty of attention doing it when I was there. Without me, it would be a silver bullet.

  Didn’t matter, though. Ashley shook her head. “No! Is he seeing someone else?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “So weird. Because I was just wondering why he got into it with your dad at the co-op. Do you know?”

  Veering toward a wall, I backed against it, out of the way of traffic. The wall held me up as I pushed a hand through my hair. Twisting it tight, I suffered a strange, cold roll in my belly. It took me a minute to get my words together.

  Seth didn’t have words with people, let alone my father. Daddy got mouthy when he needed to, but what would he need to go at Seth for? Mismatched emotions competed for my attention, confusion winning out.

  “As a matter of fact,” I told Ashley, “I do not.”

  Ashley flumped next to me. It was obvious she was disappointed. “Ohh. I thought you would.”

  It made sense, didn’t it? My ex-boyfriend, my father—I should have known. Just another gap in my life. Another silence where sound would have served me better. Holding up my hands, I tried to set Ashley free. The best way to do that was to put her on another subject entirely.

  “Sorry. I heard Nick was getting his student license, though. Maybe that’s got something to do with it?”

  Brightening, Ashley nodded. “It might. That’s a good . . . I bet you’re right.”

  “Glad to be of service.”

  Before she pushed off the wall, she leaned her head on my shoulder. We knew each other; it was a small town and a small school. But we’d never been close, so it was kinda weird.

  Then she made it a little less weird by patting me as she pulled away. “Sorry about you and Seth. I thought you guys were getting married for sure.”

  I felt a twinge. “It happens. You know.”

  As soon as she headed down the hall, I started for the far end of the building. First half hour, before school started, Seth used to hang out with me. My best guess was that now he was trying to get as much space between the two of us as he could. I wound through the halls, down to the servant’s entrance and the porch out back.

  Fully expecting to find him on the other side of the door, I threw it open. But it revealed nothing but empty forest. The leaves were falling in earnest now. Bright gold and copper lights flickered down. When I held my breath, I heard them land. Little whispers that went on, deep into the shadows, and beyond my sight.

  Summer was over. Now autumn. Winter loomed, and I couldn’t imagine spring. I thought there might be a murder trial then. Bailey’d get early admission somewhere. I wouldn’t be running new rope or knitting bait bags or scrubbing barnacles from traps—or if I was, it wasn’t because I’d be heading out to fish.

  Come spring, unfathomable spring, the rest of my life in Broken Tooth would drift away.

  Sitting on the porch, I bowed my head and just listened.

  When Daddy banged into the kitchen, right after sunset, I sprang to my feet.

  “What’s going on with you and Seth?”

  With rolled eyes, he brushed past me. He was dirty and wearing new bandages. I could tell all he wanted to do was heat a can of soup and watch some football. The last thing he wanted to do was talk to me.

  Still, I followed him. “Must have been some blowout. Ashley Jewett knew all about it.”

  “Then why’re you asking me?”

  It was the perfect question. Not to please or defuse me; to drive me rabid instead. There was logic, and then there was Daddy logic. The kind with teeth and sarcasm, and just enough reason to it that it made me feel stupid and furious at the same time.

  Cutting in front of him, I leaned against the pantry. “Because I want to hear it from you.”

  Daddy looked me over. Then, with a sigh, he reached past me and pried the pantry open. He slid me out of the way like I was a sack of potatoes. Mumbling as he ducked in after his can of soup, he said, “Sorry you’re gonna go away mad, then.”

  Briefly, I considered closing the door on his head. Instead, I snatched up my coat and slammed the back door as I headed into first evening. When he talked down to me like that, it made me feel melodramatic. Worse, I hated that. I liked being even. Quiet. I liked things just so.

  All this too-big raging gave me the adrenaline shakes. Raising my voice, slamming up stairs, that was about as dramatic as I got. Walking real hard into the night. Maybe if I had a soundtrack, it would have seemed like a montage or something.

  No personal soundtrack, though. I heard my feet and my heartbeat and the sea calling me back. My court date waited in the morning. My father waited at home. Not for me, just to suck up all the air. So I walked to my real home. To the wharf. To the water.

  And this time, I didn’t wait for some mystic boat to show up for me.

  Nothing was in my control anymore, and I wanted just one thing. The water and me. The ocean. This place between land and heaven that had been my home as long as I could remember—I wanted to master it one more time. I told myself that after court, I�
�d stay off the Jenn-a-Lo for good.

  Right then, though, I boarded her proudly.

  The cabin stank of cigarettes, and I’m pretty sure of beer, too. The whole thing was sour, like somebody else’s sweat. There was a Post-it on the dash, slashed with Daddy’s familiar handwriting. 42 pounds. Not even enough lobster to pay the light bill.

  Stroking my fingers beneath the dash, I pulled the extra key from its hidden place and started the engine. One last time, out on the boat that raised and made and ended me.

  It purred, mechanics sending a velvet vibration through the hull. I turned a light on long enough to maneuver past the rest of the fleet. Then I cut it and sailed into the dark. The lighthouse warned me away from the shallows and the shoals. Sailing into the night, I put Broken Tooth and Jackson’s Rock behind me.

  When I cut the engine, a perfect quiet came in. Waves whispered, but no one spoke. No birds cried. I stepped onto the deck and turned my face to the sky. A storm raged on open water, miles away from me. A delicate lace of lightning unfurled. It touched the water and the sky at once. It was electric, and I vibrated with it.

  A heavy wave rolled in, raising the Jenn-a-Lo, then dropping her. It wasn’t much of a lurch, a kiss from the storm in the distance. Dark clouds pressed black against blue, but where I sat on the water, they parted for the moon. It was bright and hung low, wearing a faint halo. That meant rain or snow soon, a near-perfect prediction.

  Another wave swelled against the horizon, a brush of moonlight gleaming on its peak. It wasn’t a storm wave, nothing like. It didn’t chop or crash. It rolled, like a giant had dropped a boulder into the ocean. The swell skimmed toward me. It was slow. It looked lazy. But it burrowed beneath the boat and tossed her.

  The hauler bashed the cabin wall. I slid across the deck and nearly went over. All I saw was black water. Felt the spray of it on my skin as the Jenn-a-Lo righted herself.

  Grabbing the rail, I held on tight through the next wave. My heart beat too fast, making up for breaths that were too shallow. When a boat rolls, everything you see is wrong. The ocean above you. The sky underneath. Water slapping on the deck, looking like it flowed backwards.