Mistwalker

by Saundra Mitchell

  “That’s real helpful.”

  Like he was placating me, Grey reached for me. Then he curled his fingers back at the last moment, taking his touch away so I couldn’t avoid it. “I think there’s something primal about this island. Something we’ve never named and never known. To the beginning of humanity, perhaps.”

  This was going nowhere. He knew what I wanted to know, but he kept veering away from it. It could have been I was asking the wrong questions. There wasn’t a guidebook for interrogating a ghost. Or a curse. Or . . . I still didn’t know what he was. Since origins got me nowhere, I tried another way of asking.

  “Okay, fine, there’s always been a Grey on the island. Fine.” My fingers tightened on his arm. “So what do you mean, you got tricked?”

  Grey slowed as we approached the clearing, the highest point on the island. He let my hand slip from his elbow and turned his face to the sky. With arms spread, he turned a slow circle, his hair wisping around his shoulders.

  “I was a fool. I imagined myself in love with an illusion. And like a fool, I offered myself as a sacrifice to that love.”

  “In English?”

  The edges of Grey’s manners slipped. He scowled, his black eyes cutting past me furiously. “My true love asked if I would die for her. And when I said yes, she kissed me and conferred all the glory you see before you. She walked away in her flesh and left me as nothing but mist.”

  The constellations shifted. I didn’t notice it at first. I had more on my mind than tracking time by the skies. I forgot that time moved faster on Jackson’s Rock. That a cup of cocoa could pass an entire day. The forest darkened around us, lights twinkling above as the cold came in.

  Wrapping my arms around myself, I circled the edge of the clearing. I didn’t want to sit down with him. Get comfortable. Forget that I came for a reason. Stopping against the shadow of a great oak, I asked, “Why am I the only one who can think about Jackson’s Rock without getting a splitting headache? Why am I the only one who can come here?”

  Grey’s hesitation wasn’t uncertainty. The answer seemed to fly to his lips. But he held it there, and I wasn’t sure why. When he said it, he spoke carefully. Like he was afraid he would say it too fast and it would dissipate. “You’ve been chosen. I think; I believe this: you came here because you wanted an escape.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Warming, Grey approached. His fingers fluttered when he talked; the tips of them evaporated into faint contrails. “The night I pulled you from the water! You couldn’t leave because there was something you didn’t want to face on the shore. In your heart, you wanted to stay!”

  My court date, I thought. Out loud, I said, “I don’t think so.”

  “This place, this . . . gift. It’s everything you’ve ever wanted, Willa. You love the sea. You love these waters. Not just any beach. Not just any cliff. This place, it’s your legacy. And it could be yours eternally. You could be the Grey Lady. The one who steers the ships home. Or keeps them in the harbor when a storm is coming. You wouldn’t be one girl here for one short lifetime. You’d be greater than your flesh. Mistress of the light, and the lives onshore.”

  Silence fell in the forest. Even the wind stilled. Grey was so animated, so excited. He sounded like a brimstone preacher, believing every single word of his gospel. Uneasy, I considered him. Then I asked, “Why would you think that?”

  “You told me!” He pointed at the lighthouse. “Your room there, it told me everything. The witch balls in the window—you’ve been longing for a little magic in your life, Willa. And all the rest is the sea. I can give you that.”

  My mouth dropped open. That’s how he’d figured it? With a disbelieving laugh, I told him, “Witch balls turn away the evil eye. Like the glass beads in old nets. They’re not about wanting magic. They’re supposed to keep it away.”

  Grey’s face fell. “But this is your destiny.”

  “Yeah, no, it’s not.” Pushing off the tree, I met him in the middle. “I lost my brother this summer—I told you that. You really think I want to walk away from the rest of my family? From my friends? It’s been a lousy couple of months, but no. Just no.”

  Confused, Grey pulled a tiny box from his pocket. It was silver, blue glass laid into its sides. When he turned the key, plaintive notes trickled out. They twisted on a new wind. Each note echoed in its own way; it took me a minute to recognize the tune.

  When the fishing was good, Daddy sometimes got on the radio and sang. Just a verse or two—a dirty song about ruffles and tuffles sometimes. Chanteys sometimes. But usually this song. “She Moved Through the Fair,” slow and haunting and dark.

  Shining with a light I’d never seen before, Grey smiled when the song wound down. The last note plucked, and he offered me the box. “I wished for something to make sense of you, and this is what I got. It’s a message.”

  “You know that song, Grey?”

  “I’ve heard it many times.”

  “Yeah, but do you know it?” I asked.

  The expression drained from his face. “Do you?”

  Fear crept through me because I knew something Grey didn’t. I knew all the words; I’d heard the song a hundred times. Uneasy, I glanced back to make sure the dory waited for me at the shore.

  Then, I turned to him and said, “She never comes back, Grey. He sees her once at the fair and spends the rest of his life missing her.”

  If it was possible, Grey paled. Closing the box in his hand, he stiffened. “She whispers in his dreams.”

  “It’s all in his head.” Though my heart pounded, I went on. “Whatever magic that works here, whatever gave you that music box? It wasn’t wrong. Because I’m not your escape.”

  He broke. I saw it in his eyes. In the trembling of his hands. It was like he’d been sleeping two sleeps, one of curses and one of fantasies. I’d just shattered the only beautiful one for him.

  When he said nothing, I moved toward the path. Still he said nothing, and panic bloomed in me. Until now, he’d never been at a loss for words. If some terrible, devil version of him existed, I didn’t want to see it.

  When my feet hit the path, he screamed. A plaintive wail, one that echoed longer than it had lasted. Then he called after me.

  “Don’t go! I’m alone. I’m going mad; it’ll take thousands of years to collect enough souls to get off this island!”

  It felt like he’d thrown a spear. Like I’d been split and pinned by it. My chest hurt, and my head, too. I knew there had to be something else. There had to be something he’d been sugarcoating. “Souls?”

  “I’m not a monster,” he raged. “I could have smothered your village’s fleet a hundred times by now. Lost them all at sea, collected every soul at once, and I never have! I’ve been a boon to Broken Tooth. I’ve kept you all safe! Kept you safe in particular, Willa. The night you and your brother went into the dark, I tried to protect you. To hide you!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Come with me,” he said. He held out a hand. It was pale, and in the moonlight, it looked skeletal. Suddenly, he was a long, gangling thing. Bones and angles, and it made my skin crawl. But I followed him, because I had to know. Because he had something inside his head, and it had to do with me, and Levi, and I had to know.

  It wasn’t the music-box room when we went through the door of the lighthouse this time. Not the kitchen, either, or any of the rooms I’d seen. It looked like a pantry, sort of. Wood doors lined the walls. A bitter smell wafted on the air, like old paper, or an unused closet. Grey opened one of the doors.

  Row after row of glass bottles lined the inside. Each hung in its own nook. Corked, they were empty. And they didn’t make sense. The jars weren’t much bigger than my thumb. They didn’t look like test tubes or like they were for spices. Light reflected on their rounded bottoms. I tightened my arms around myself because a chill came on.

  “I could have collected you the night of the storm,” Grey said. “I risked myself. I tore myself to shreds to get to you,
to save you! I am not a monster.”

  The jars tinked, shaking in their neat slots. It was like they were alive. Or something bigger than all of us was subtly shaking the lighthouse. My heart decided to quiver too. I felt sick and uneasy, but all I could do was ask questions.

  “How’s that, Grey? It doesn’t even make sense.”

  Closing one door, Grey opened another. Tilting his head to the side, like he was admiring art, he considered the three uppermost jars. They glowed, like each one had a firefly caught inside. When I stepped closer, Grey pressed himself between me and his precious jars.

  “There are two ways off this island. The first? Collect a thousand souls. Anyone who dies on the water, beneath my light . . . a tally in my book. This is a century’s worth.”

  All my blood drained away. I felt raw and cored, and I wanted to fall to my knees. If this was the truth, if any of it was real . . . My head split; it felt like Grey had dropped an axe instead of some words. Too many questions. Too many possibilities.

  My hand shaking, I pointed. “What is that?”

  “All that remains.”

  I lunged past him, trying to grab the bottle. It was like hitting a wall. Icy, immovable. When I lunged again, the pantry shifted. It was there, then I took a breath, and it was gone. All that was left was music boxes. All of them, keys ticking. Notes playing. Each one played a different song, none of them in tune. In time.

  Throwing myself at Grey, I grabbed his shirt. I shook him. “You let my brother die!”

  “No, Willa,” he said, newly, coldly calm. “You killed your brother. I only kept what was mine.”

  I tasted bile, but I wasn’t gonna turn myself inside out for Grey. For that thing. For all I knew, it was a hallucination. Another lie. There was nothing left of Levi. He was dead and gone. Gone.

  Shells and stones ground beneath my feet, because I walked away. I ran. Putting my back to him, to that lighthouse, I dared him to do something about it. I wasn’t gonna be a part of this. Everything on the Rock would become myth again for me, I hoped forever.

  “I promised to be honest with you, Willa! You can’t hold the truth against me. Your brother was one more toward a thousand, it’s true! But he was a happy accident. One I tried to prevent, one you engineered!”

  Biting my own lips, I held in a reply. I held in everything: my gaze, my voice, my churning belly. If I could have made it a mile in icy water, I would have swum home instead of getting into that cursed boat.

  Instead, I sat at the bow, staring into the sea. Staring at the shore. Looking everywhere but behind me.

  I was never going back to Jackson’s Rock, not even with my eyes.

  NINETEEN

  Grey

  When the Big Dipper is upside down, it will rain for three days.

  My father believed that—he, long dead now. My mother didn’t; she, too, molders in the earth. Every home I ever knew is ashes. Every street I ever walked, paved over. No one I knew by name, who could greet me with mine, remains aboveground.

  The stars are all turned, and it hasn’t stopped raining since Willa left. Cold, ice rain that makes me glad I only imagine my body. I think I save myself from the worst of mundane realities. I feel cold, but I don’t go numb with it. I feel heat, but I never sweat.

  Because I’m dead. A remnant. A revenant.

  She’s not thinking of me.

  I’ll never be free.

  TWENTY

  Willa

  Every time I started to look toward the Rock, I distracted myself. It was hard, because the weather went crazy. Well, not the weather so much. The fog.

  It rolled in and out, wildly random. The horn blared constantly, sometimes for ten minutes, sometimes for four hours. It was like a strobe light in slow motion. White, then clear. Clear, then white.

  But distraction didn’t come too hard. The way my parents saw it, I’d disappeared for three days after court. Long enough that they reported me missing. Long enough that a patrol car came to our house when I turned up.

  I sat in the living room. Head hanging, I suffered through the lecture Scott Washburn gave me. He talked like I was supposed to forget he was my lazy-eyed cousin just because he was wearing a badge.

  “That kind of irresponsible behavior, you set people to worrying,” Scott said. “There’s been enough trouble in Broken Tooth this year, don’t you think?”

  Stepping on my own toes, I didn’t even lift my head. “I know. I said I was sorry.”

  With a suddenly sympathetic face, Scott stared at me real hard. “Where have you been? You in some kind of trouble?”

  “I’ve been around.”

  Dad made a disgusted sound. My mother echoed him with irritated precision. “Around.”

  “I haven’t been fishing, if that’s what you want to know.”

  “You’re just making this hard on yourself,” Scott said.

  “I hear that a lot,” I snapped. Cutting a look at my parents, I spread my hands. “I hid out in Uncle Toby’s cabin, all right? It was quiet. I wanted some time to think.”

  They all relaxed. That’s why it was a perfect lie. Uncle Toby’s cabin was an old hunting lodge up in the woods. Surrounded by blueberry barrens, hidden in the trees—it had been abandoned in the fifties. We all sort of owned it, and most everybody in Broken Tooth had spent a night or two there. It was full of graffiti and other people’s first times.

  “That place is dangerous.” Scott had to say it; nobody believed it.

  I apologized, and they didn’t have to know I wasn’t sorry. I hadn’t meant to disappear like that. Time on the Rock was different. Somehow I forgot that at the worst possible moment. I wondered if I was three days older. If my molecules had kept the time, or if I was just stopped when I was there.

  A real important question Grey needed to answer, since he wanted off that rock so bad. He might be happy to stay there if he knew he’d crumble to a hundred and seventeen years’ worth of dust if he left.

  “Am I dismissed?” I asked, because I wasn’t thinking about Grey. I wanted to get out of the house.

  Scott shrugged at my parents. Mom stepped right in; at least she was a warden I was used to. “You’re leaving this house to go to school and back, period. I’ll walk you if I have to. This nonsense stops today.”

  I shrugged. “Okay.”

  Since they didn’t know what to do with compliance, Mom and Dad fell quiet. Since Scott was her side of the family, Mom followed him to his car and saw him off. Daddy pushed the curtains back. He watched her stop on the walk to talk with Scott, then finally turned to me.

  “I figured you needed a year off.”

  Though I knew he was talking to me, I guess it didn’t sink in exactly. It was so unexpected, I didn’t know what to do. I stared up and realized he’d gotten so old. Not just the grey in his hair or the lines in his face. He seemed shorter, shoulders slanted. His cheeks were hollower. The circles under his eyes deeper. And his voice was soft, gruff, as he sat in the rocker by the window.

  “Didn’t intend for you to stay off the boat forever,” he said. “I figured, come next summer, you’d be all right.”

  Unsure what he meant, I leaned forward. “Daddy, I’m fine.”

  He waved a hand at me, brushing that claim aside like it was a black fly. “I think not. Nobody’s fine. There’s nothing to be fine about. It’s my place to protect you. You and Levi both. I did a piss-poor job of it with Levi . . .”

  An ache consumed me, and I was quick to cut him off. “It wasn’t your fault, Daddy. We all know . . .”

  “Look,” he said. He rocked the chair forward and perched there. Hands knotted up, they flickered as he dredged up more words for me than he ever had. “You’re a Dixon. We’re nothing like your mother’s people. You go on and take the blame, ’cause there’s no getting through that hard head of yours. But I’ll take it too, for the same reason. It is what it is, Willa.”

  My eyes burned, tears spilling over. “What are we going to do until I get my license back?”
>
  Closing back up, Daddy let the rocker go. “I’ll mind my business. You mind yours.”

  “Daddy.”

  “I expect you to graduate on time.” Tugging a cap over his eyes, he pretended that he was going to nap. “So you’ve got a whole lot of work to make up.”

  He faked drifting off just in time for my mother to sweep back into the house. She slammed the door and cut me with a look. Then, because she apparently thought just sitting there wasn’t punishment enough, she pointed at the kitchen.

  “You get in there and do the dishes. I’m too mad to look at you.”

  Peeling myself from the couch, I made my way to the kitchen. And though I didn’t have Levi to rinse or to elbow me or to squeeze the soap bottle until tiny bubbles floated around our heads, things in my house felt almost normal. Not quite settled, but heading that way.

  They weren’t.

  Music blared from my computer, and Bailey’s notebooks covered my bed.

  It was kind of terrifying how much junk she kept stuffed in her backpack. She took beastly notes for every class, wrote down every assignment, knew when everything was due.

  Basically, she treated school like a contact sport, and by God, she was gonna win at it. All that organization was good for her scholarship prospects. And good for me, trying to figure out if I’d accomplished anything since the first day of classes.

  “I know you didn’t do this,” Bailey said. She spread a photocopied sheet in front of me. “Because it’s group work, and I know how you are.”

  Cussing under my breath, I looked over the requirements. “Well, I can’t do it now.”

  “Just finish it yourself.”

  Rolling my eyes at her, I put that sheet aside. “Uh huh.”

  “You’re grounded,” Bailey said. She snatched the page up and flattened it in front of me again. “You don’t have anything better to do. And in case you forgot? I’m the boss of you.”