What the Waves Know

by Tamara Valentine

  “Sit back and relax.” Remy laughed. “That old hovel belongs to me. The Booth House is at the very end of Knockberry Lane.” Remy must have noticed the corners of my mouth change direction, because she gave my knee a quick squeeze, adding, “But I have high hopes that you’ll visit. Lord knows I could make good use of two more hands bringing in the cabbages and carrots. If I don’t get ’em harvested just as soon as they’re ready the wildlife around here will have them for supper. That crazy old Goliath in the front seat has a history of putting out salt licks. Now every form of cotton-tailed rodent on the island lives in my back orchard. There used to be gardens all through here. My mother would save her potato shavings all winter long and at the first thaw, she’d be out seasoning the soil. Priming the pot, she used to call it.” Remy laughed again.

  My mother jerked around in her seat, locking eyes with Remy, and for a long second not a peep came from anyone. I looked back and forth between them curiously.

  “Anyway . . . ,” Remy finally said. “Well, they aren’t so grand anymore, but the damn deer seem to like them just the same.”

  There came a chortle from the driver’s seat, followed by the muffled chhh of a match striking against Thomas O’Malley’s jeans. He dragged the flame to the pipe bowl in slow motion and touched it to the ball of tobacco, setting Remy to shaking her head again, the thin red ringlets at her neck bobbing like miniature Slinkys.

  “Go ahead, grill your damn lungs. But don’t think I’m feeding those rabid mongrels you’re so damn fond of when you drop over gasping for air,” she grumbled.

  “My lungs are just fine. It’s my ears that are aching.” He chuckled, smiling at her in the rearview mirror. The statement said “Go on and zip your lips,” but the way Mr. O’Malley wrapped it all up sounded a lot more like “I love you, too.”

  I glanced down at the journal in my lap. That was the problem with getting a phrase to sing the way you wanted it to. You could get the words all straight and neat between the lines, but the meaning was in the way they zigzagged toward a person when you gave them life. Mr. O’Malley and Remy tossed words into the space between them like a father tossing a child in the air and spinning around until both were laughing great big belly laughs. They could say, “You’re a big old pain in my ass,” and know it really meant “You are the sparkle in my stars and the wind in my wings,” because each knew no matter how dizzy the universe got, the other would never let them hit the ground when it went off kilter.

  The small stone inside my front pocket grew heavy, and my throat tightened. During the last eight years, I had rubbed its edges soft. In my back pocket, the corners of Grandma Jo’s map poked into my hip and I wondered, not for the first time that day, where my father was, if his fingers missed the feel of my hair running through them.

  For months after my father left, I slept in my parents’ bed with my mother on one side of me and Grandma Jo on the other, my face buried in my father’s pillow. The fact of the matter is, I knew in the darkest crevices of my heart that he was gone, even if I didn’t say so. In the middle of the night, I would wake with the cold fingers of that knowledge strangling me until every last memory of him was squeezed out of me, and the only way I could get them back was to bury my nose in the pillow, searching for the smell of him.

  Inking in the final pearl, I held the sketch of Yemaya out in front of me, looking at it. Sea witches were supposed to be old hags, ugly creatures with snakes for hair who had been banished to darkness. But Yemaya was not. The sketch was clumsy, but even in its awkward state you could see the love in her eyes, the way she longed to let the arms of the ocean wrap her up in them. I knew precisely how she felt.

  “What’ve you got there?” Remy’s eyes rested on the picture in my hand. “Hey, that’s not half bad. Can you make me one like that?”

  Tearing the page from my notebook, I handed it to her.

  “You know how she came to be our matron witch?” Remy tilted the sketch, studying it while she spoke.

  I shook my head, closing the pad.

  “The British were the first to arrive on Tillings. But settling an island is a whole lot of work, and let’s be honest, have you ever known a Brit who liked getting dirt under their fingernails? So they brought slaves from Africa to do it for them, and those slaves brought Yemaya. Turns out, she liked it here, and to this very day she protects the island and everyone on it. Anyone who doubted the fact came to believe it was so in 1920, when Hurricane Gilbert leveled every one of these barrier islands then set its sights on Tillings. It was barreling right for it, and then stopped—just stopped—four miles out, did a forty-five-degree turn and went right back out to sea without knocking a single branch off one tree. Old-timers, like the one up there,” she waved toward Mr. O’Malley, “say Gilbert came close enough to get a good look at Yemaya’s eyes and thought better of it.

  “Then there was Captain Booth, who built this property. He swore until his dying day he’d been rescued from the sea by her in the spring of 1936, when his ship went down on the ledge rock out there.” She pointed vaguely toward the ocean beyond the cliffs. “Legend says when he cast his line, Captain Booth pulled in the biggest marlin anyone here had ever seen. He drew the harpoon back with two hands, ready to put it out of its misery. But when he looked in that fish’s eye he couldn’t kill it, claimed God’s hand reached down and stopped him in his tracks a split second before he ripped through the fish’s heart. I know it sounds crazy. . . .”

  Not to me, I thought. The memory of the dead salmon bobbing pathetically onto its side in Potter’s Creek drifted back to me.

  “Anyway, he cut the line just before his skiff ran against the reef, ripping it in two. Every single man on deck drowned. But not Captain Booth; they found him two days later half-conscious on the beach mumbling about a marlin who’d taken the shape of a beautiful woman and carried him home. The islanders say she fell in love with him when he spared her and couldn’t bear to see him drown. They say she watched over him for the rest of his life, that you can still see her pacing the cliffs up here on stormy nights watching for him to come home.” I squinted out the window toward the cliffs of Knockberry Ridge with a sting in my chest.

  For an instant, the purple nose of the taxi headed straight for the ocean, looking as though it might plummet right off the edge of the cliff. Then twenty yards before reaching it, the car rounded a bend where a driveway veered to the right.

  “You see there?” Remy was poking her finger toward the cliff where a proud pointy-roofed Cape sprouted right up from the hill. Small white bricks littered the lawn on all sides. “That house’s where Mr. Audubon up front resides. Do you see those white blobs scattered all over his lawn? Salt licks! Brunch for all the deer and fox and rabbits on the island; and I am here to tell you every last creature on this island has moved into our backyard. When they come cart me away to the hospital on a stretcher paralyzed with Lyme disease, you be sure and tell them to send the bill to Mr. Thomas O’Malley, the old fool on Knockberry Ridge!”

  She was joking, I’m pretty sure. However, something in the underbelly of her words was not, and I knew if any sane woman on the planet could be driven to loathe a hunk of salt I was sitting beside her. A mighty puff of sweet smoke billowed into the air from the front, followed by a deep chuckle.

  “And behind that house is a corner of the property you’d do very well to steer clear from. There’s a hundred-and-twenty-foot drop lined up with the corner of a reef, which has made a widow out of many a sailor’s wife. If you walk the basin from below, you’ll see the sand is the color of chestnut husks due to the smashed-up hulls of whaling ships. They get caught in the currents and dashed into the rocks.” Her story seemed to be gaining steam, when she caught my eye and suddenly deflated, adding quietly, “There’s nothing up top to keep you from the dive. So explore all the other edges of the property you like, but leave that one alone, okay?”

  A certain gravity took hold of Remy’s words, slowing them to a snail’s pace, and I noticed my
mother eyeing the ridge with a faraway look in her eyes. The normally faint crow’s feet around her lips had pulled into tight creases. Beside her in the front seat, Thomas O’Malley’s wavy white head nodded in silent agreement all the way past an overgrown field spattered with fruit trees and a thick hedge of evergreens.

  A moment later, the Thunderbird’s purple hood pointed in the direction of a huge white house with large black-shuttered windows and a rickety widow’s walk peeping out over the Atlantic. The cottage looked to have been empty since the beginning of time, except I knew that wasn’t true. I had been here before. The clapboards, the windows, the stairways, were all stuffed with the secret of what had really happened to my father. My stomach churned violently at the thought of going inside.

  Three stories high, a stone chimney climbed out of the cottage at one end. A tall proud turret poked into the sky at the other with leaded windows sparkling on all eight sides. Four gables pointed upward from the straight lines of the second floor like fat arrows pointing to heaven. At the foot of the second story, the roof slanted sharply away from the home like a hoop skirt covering a full-pillared porch wrapping around the entire base of the house.

  “Is there anything you’ll be needing to settle in tonight?” Mr. O’Malley asked, eyeing my mother gently.

  “We’ll have to make a run to the market tomorrow, but I think we have everything we need.” She looked at him thoughtfully with a nod before glancing at Remy and adding, “Except a vehicle.”

  Remy ignored the comment and studied my face, as if she knew inherently that was not true, as if she understood that the very reason we had come to this place was because we had nothing that we needed to keep us going. What we needed was love baked into our walls and the sound of laughter, and there was not a market in the world that could fix it.

  Mr. O’Malley unlatched Luke’s crate and scruffed the fur behind his ears. Luke gave a thank-you wag, poking his snout into the air for a sniff.

  “Out with ya, then.” Thomas O’Malley’s voice was soft and gravelly, an utter contradiction to the enormity of him—like one of those Saturday-morning cartoons where Tweety Bird pipes up from the depths of Sylvester’s stomach. I liked the sound of him, and so did Luke, who lapped at his open hand before bounding into the yard, tumbling over his own legs. I clamored out of the backseat while Remy flipped open the trunk, placed the suitcases at my mother’s feet, and turned back to the larger steamer trunk. She took hold of the handle with the authority of a woman fully prepared to level a great sequoia armed with nothing more than an emery board.

  “This one yours?”

  I shook my head.

  Remy looked my mother in the eye and plopped the trunk on its side no less than an inch from my mother’s toe, thereby clarifying what was to become the terms of their acquaintanceship. Taking up the smaller trunk and my art case, she headed down the walk toward the arched French doors. To picture Remy Mandolin as anybody’s servant was a difficult image to conjure, and yet there was something about her determination that whispered she’d been down that road once before—and blown it to smithereens behind her.

  My mother planted both hands on the shelves of her hips, watching Remy stroll to the door with my trunk in hand. There was not one thing bony about Remy. She had a Betty Boop body and walked with the swagger of a woman carrying a basket of fruit atop her head.

  Two weeks ago, the black-eyed Susans at home had crumpled up into brown papery sacks, sad as spit wads upon their stalks, but here the lawn beyond the porch was speckled with them. Luke barked and I followed him around the corner of the house, sending him racing in lopsided circles around the yard. Overhead a gull screeched, sailing below the cliff and unexpectedly taking my stomach with it. My legs froze right up solid, refusing to go even one inch closer. The gull soared back into sight, tipped its wings, and dove again. In the distance, the cliff swam in and out of focus and the world tipped dizzily off its axis. It was still daylight, but over the waves the evening star winked above the clouds. It wasn’t really a star. I had learned that when my mother forced me to make a model of the universe out of grapes and oranges tacked together with toothpicks. It was the planet Venus, named after the Greek goddess of love. The honest truth is, I didn’t remember a lot about it. But I remembered this: it didn’t have a moon to dance with or throw the tides off balance—just a field of stars to spin inside.

  “Someday I’m going to catch you a star.” My father and I had been lying in the field behind our house watching the Perseids. Resting my head in the pit of his arm, I blinked sleepily as meteors zipped overhead, pulling trails of white across heaven. The bonfire behind us sizzled at the remnants of a marshmallow, which had wriggled free of my stick and been broiled to a bubbling blob, sending a sugary sweetness into the night air.

  I don’t recall dozing off, but I awoke to my father dancing and darting through the field in nothing but his tighty-whiteys, chasing lightning bugs.

  “Be look, stars.” He laughed wildly. “I got you one. I caught you a falling star.” He shook a mayonnaise jar in the air, setting a tiny green light flickering inside.

  The commotion must have woken my mother, too, because she’d come jogging out in her robe and sent me to bed.

  The next morning I found him in my bedroom jiggling the jar sadly as the small dead bug slid around the base. “It went out.” I remember his voice as that of a child. “The light went out.”

  I was brought back by the chatter of Mr. O’Malley and Remy around the corner of the house. Occasionally, my mother’s voice cut in to ask about the oil tank or firewood or, for the millionth time, when Remy intended to deliver her car. Inching away from the cliffs and toward the clapboards of the house, I put on my best eavesdropping ears.

  “So it should be here by Thursday,” my mother stated more than asked.

  Remy ignored the question outright. “Does she remember?”

  “No.” My mother had lowered her voice.

  “Did you ask her?” Remy and my mother were talking like they’d known each other all along now.

  “Her doctor thinks she needs to come back to it on her own. So I don’t try to talk about it anymore and I don’t want anyone else to, either.”

  “I do not meddle in other people’s business,” I heard Remy say.

  Mr. O’Malley let out a chuckle of amusement that said he didn’t believe her.

  “But if you ask me—”

  “I didn’t.” My mother cut her off short.

  “Right. But if you did, I might say that sometimes a situation calls for a good old-fashioned honest heart-to-heart.”

  “She’ll come to it on her own.”

  “In this lifetime?” Remy lobbed back. “Because forgive me for saying so, but your method seems to really suck. I mean, eight years—you can become a damn doctor in eight years and cure yourself.”

  “Let me know when you’ve done that, and then we’ll talk. I’m not sure why the hell you care, anyway. Don’t you have someplace you need to go?”

  “Not really. And maybe I know something about all this,” Remy’s voice challenged.

  “You’re not her.”

  I patted my hand to my knee, calling Luke back, and came around the corner in time to see my mother disappear inside with Remy hot on her heels.

  Thomas O’Malley propped his huge frame against the purple Thunderbird, causing the red cursive letters to read T _ _ I, the word’s middle lost under the expansive girth of his waist, and shook his head, letting the corners of his mouth tilt up.

  “Izabella, come see your room.” Remy was leaning out the front door, craning her neck around a porch pillar, apparently having won yet another round with my mother, who was climbing back down the steps to haul in the last of the luggage.

  Luke bounced through the door with me behind him. The living room of the Booth House was scattered with Oriental rugs, big splashes of red and blue against the white room. There were two staircases, one that climbed to the second floor from the living room, a
nd a second, narrow utility staircase from the back of the kitchen. A beach-stone fireplace took up one entire wall. From the corner of my eye, I could see my mother pretending to unload a bag of food as she watched me.

  “Upstairs,” Remy hollered from the top floor.

  Luke bounded clumsily up one flight of steps, disappearing around a corner. Two seconds later, I heard the pitter-patter of puppy paws up another flight. When I caught up with him, he was parked inside the doorway, tail drumming back and forth against the jamb.

  “Boy, I haven’t been in this room in a long time.” Remy pushed open a window.

  The room was tucked right inside of the turret and shaped like a huge stop sign, only instead of arrest-me-red it was Pepto-Bismol pink: pink wallpaper, pink quilt, pink rugs, and heavy white velvet curtains to hold it all in. There was no lightning bolt of memory, just a soft tickling déjà vu, as though the walls were trying to whisper something to me in a voice too low for me to hear. Luke sat upright and cocked an ear politely in her direction. I came up close behind Remy to peek out the three-story-high window, keeping the pillowy crescent of her hips between it and me.

  “Look at that. Ocean view on six walls!”

  She was right about that. From the middle of the room, every window seemed filled up with water like a huge tank.

  When my fifth birthday rolled around, my father’s apology about the trip to Potter’s Creek had materialized in the way of a tank of fish to call my own. While they were not dancing salmon, it’s true, my father had filled the tank with as many fish as it would hold and covered the whole thing with a sheet and bow. The morning of my birthday, I’d run to unwrap it with thoughts of angelfish dancing in my head. Instead, I was greeted by ten golden bellies bobbing grotesquely across the surface and not one living fish. My father, having failed to take into consideration the radiator behind the tank, had cooked the whole lot of them into the here beyond. With the last flush of the toilet, my father had turned and plodded downstairs.