After two more rounds between a bottle of Prell and the residual honey, I gave up. I shook out my hair before pulling on an old sweatshirt and opening a small pouch tucked inside a case of sketching pencils to check on my Yemaya Stone. I didn’t know if my father had had his with him when he left or not, but I had scoured our house looking for it and come up empty. Pulling the tiny satin strings until the mouth of the satchel puckered closed, I tucked it deep into the corner of my back pocket before stuffing Grandma Jo’s map on top.
In the dining room, I cocked my head, listening for any signs of life. When I was sure my mother and Grandma Jo were still fast asleep, I rummaged in my mother’s purse, slithered two Merits into the pouch of my sweatshirt, and crept into the morning with Luke at my side.
I was just stepping off the front drive when Remy bounced down the lane toward me in Mr. O’Malley’s taxi, maneuvering it into puddles so that sprays of mud splashed every which way from under the Purple Monster. With each splash, Luke barked, scurried out of the way, and then dove back in to nip at the droplets. I could not help but admire the way Remy played with the world without caring one hoot if anyone was looking or not. When she saw me, she cranked down the window and leaned through it.
“So, you came through last night still attached to your head.”
I nodded, giving her a shrug.
“Good, because I could really use you to help us get ready for the Yemaya Festival. There’s a mountain of work left to do. That reminds me.” Remy stuck her head into the backseat and rummaged around before popping back into the day. “Here.” She stuck a folded flyer through the window. “The flyers came in for the festival. By the way, you’re off the hook for cleaning up Herman’s window today. Merchant’s can’t get the glass ready until the day after tomorrow, so Mr. Herman doesn’t want to knock the pane out yet. Says the bugs will get through the boards.” Remy laughed, shaking her head. “But since you’ve found yourself freed up for the day, maybe you have time to help me with apple pie baking later?”
I nodded again, sticking the flyer into my sweatshirt beside the cigarettes.
“It’s sort of a family tradition. Right?” Remy glanced in the backseat as if speaking to someone. I ducked to glance in the back, too, but it was empty. “My mom and I have baked for the festival since I was toe high to a fiddler crab. Never missed a year yet.”
Standing back up, I drew my eyes across the backseat of the car but still came up empty.
“Maybe your grandma would like to come along. I’ve got to head down to Salva’s Market soon as they open on a butter run. They’re a little pricier than Herman’s, but what I spend in pennies I’ll save in aspirin.” I felt my cheeks warm with embarrassment. “Then I’ll be back to drop that bike by.”
I nodded with a wave, stepping back as she gunned the accelerator, taking aim at another large mud puddle and roared toward it, sending Luke into another yapping fit. When I could no longer hear the great Purple Monster’s muffler, I ducked down the path leading to Witch’s Peak. A hundred yards down the path the peak pulled into view and I headed toward it before tripping over an irrigation pipe that nearly sent me face-first into the dirt. Settling under an apple tree, I wiggled the flyer and a Merit free from my pocket.
That people would be surprised I smoked was the very thing I liked most about it. Sometimes it even surprised me. And I liked that, too. The habit came on when Libby and I were thirteen and got the idea to smoke our first cigarette after sneaking the remnants of a bottle of Smirnoff from the cabinet, intent on catching up with the rest of Tuckertown in one fast night. The act was not one of full-fledged rebellion, so much as a last-ditch effort not to be left behind by the normal kids. Or maybe we just wanted to feel normal for once. The alcohol didn’t take, but the dizzying rush of inhaling too fast and deep was a feeling I’d warmed to. I drew hard on the filter, sending the cherry canoeing into the tobacco, and laid my head against a knot in the tree’s root before unfolding the flyer from Remy. To my surprise, she’d used my sketch of Yemaya for the cover.
The Yemayan legend honors the goddess as keeper of the secrets of the universe. In Yorubian culture, each star is believed to hold the luck of a newborn child. It is said that many years ago a great storm broke the sky in two, sending the stars tumbling to Earth as a million small stones until the children of the world were buried beneath them. For a hundred years, Yemaya walked the four corners of Earth, balancing on her hip a kelp basket and gathering them back up. The legend claims she then cast the stones into the valleys of the world, burying them in water, and watched over them until their luck was restored. This gave her the titles of the Great Mother and Mother of Seven Seas. To this very day, the Yoruba believe every time a sea stone washes to shore it is a gift of luck.
Not always, I corrected. Looking up at Witch’s Peak, I dug into my back pocket, emptying it of Grandma Jo’s map and the small velvet blue satchel with my stone inside. For a long minute, I turned the items over in my hand one at a time, stacking them into a messy pile of paper, fabric, and rock. I knew beyond doubt that the path to finding my father was caught up in the heap somewhere, that if I could just choose the right item I could find my way back to him and make everything right again. The problem was this—it could have been one just as easily as the other. Picking up the Yemaya Stone, I turned it over and over, tumbling it lightly it in my fingers. I carried it with me everywhere. It had never really brought me luck, but I kept it with me just in case. Studying the waves rolling in over the reef, I folded the stone inside the flyer and set it beside me. The eight o’clock ferry was just pointing its nose for the break in the rocks that led to open water.
The night my father vanished, I remember thinking that I could not let him get back to the boat without me. After he’d left my mother and me upstairs with a bloody knee and a kicked-in door, I’d run down the hall leaving the floorboards whispering hurry, hurry, hurry with every step, and grabbed my pink ballerina backpack, the one Grandma Jo had given me the Christmas before. The fact that nothing had been in it except Berta Big Bear and a pair of Bugs Bunny pajamas hadn’t mattered to me. I had to catch him before he left and I would walk out in my underpants if I had to.
I’d dragged it thumping down the steps toward the front door, but my puny six-year-old legs would not move fast enough and somehow the strap on my backpack had snaked around the banister. Every tug to free it tightened the knot. The door was open and my father was already halfway through it when I’d called out for him to wait. But it was as though I had already disappeared from his sight. Even then I knew what was happening—he was leaving me behind.
Wait . . . wait . . . Take meee! The scream had hit the air, chasing after him into the night until every last ounce of noise had run out of me, too.
The scream was loud; I know it was loud. My throat burned for weeks. But it was the soft click of the front door that had been deafening. The statement was poetic, almost, delivered without comma or exclamation point, just one big period chock-ful of silence. There was nothing more to say, and as things turned out it was a good thing, too. Because that was the precise moment my voice died—five years, eleven months, thirty days, and twenty-three hours after it was born, as if those tears had simply washed all my syllables away.
In the background, my birthday cake lay uncut on the dining room table, six small burned candles melted into ugly pink puddles around my name.
Taking a final drag from my cigarette, I crushed it into the dirt beneath the apple tree and shoved the memory back.
“What are you doing here?” The sound of another person on the ridge nearly caused me to leap clear out of my skin, only to find myself face-to-face with the boy who’d stood by and watched Mr. Herman nearly kill me.
Here? On the island? Under the tree? It was hard to tell what he meant, but his tone was sharp enough to have meant the universe altogether. To be fair, I had turned that very question over in my head myself more than once. Riley was standing close enough for me to smell the must
iness of him, a muddled-up mix of sweat, salt, grease, and grass.
“You’re Izabella Haywood.” He stated it as fact, leaving me wondering if I was supposed to answer.
I nodded.
“This isn’t part of the Booth property.” His words were desert dry. “This is my grandfather’s field. Does he know you’re out here?”
Clearly, a stupid question, since I did not even know who his grandfather was.
“Uhg . . .” An ugly grunting sound tumbled out of my mouth. Surprised, I jammed my lips together, watching him.
“I thought you couldn’t talk.” Riley flipped Luke’s ear inside out, scruffing the soft underside just as Mr. O’Malley had. “You’re not supposed to be up here.” He glared. “This ridge winds in and out all the way along these parts. It’s plain idiotic to come around if you don’t know the way. More than one person’s disappeared over it.” There was a drawn-out pause and I swear I saw a flash spark in his eyes. “But I guess you already know that.”
I looked at him, stunned, wondering if maybe he was crazy.
With his free hand, he pushed the shag of bangs straight back over his head then shook them loose again. The gesture trembled something inside my gut, but before I had a chance to decipher what it was, he pointed back to the path and the tremble faded to embarrassment at being ordered out of his company like a small child. Had he not been staring at me with the very definition of dislike, he would have been deeply handsome in a rough, farm boy sort of way.
Turning down the path, I hurried toward Knockberry Lane with Luke romping beside me, my mind racing to figure out what Riley’s problem was. For no good reason he seemed to hate me.
“You shouldn’t have come back here!” he called, leaving me with the feeling that he was not just talking about the field.
If anyone had grounds to be mad, I decided, it was me. After all, wasn’t he the one who could talk, but had stood right there saying not one peep while Mr. Herman blamed me for the whole thing with the stupid rock? As curious as I was, I didn’t want to be alone with him five thousand feet up a cliff.
Safely back on the lane, I looked behind me in time to see a gull dive from sight, leaving the ffffrrrreeee ffffreeeee of its screech caught on the wind. Moments later, it swept back up with a crab in its beak and lighted on Witch’s Peak. I remembered the look in my father’s eyes on Anawan Cliffs that day. Someday we’re going to fly like that.
Fffrreeee, fffrrreeee, the gull screeched. Or maybe it was fffllleeee, flee.
That is the problem with words.
CHAPTER NINE
When I came in, my mother was standing in front of the French doors in the living room with both hands laid flat against the glass pane as she stared out at the sea. The sight of her there, searching a horizon filled to the brim with emptiness, tugged at something familiar and deep inside me. I knew what she was doing. I had done it a million times. I had just never seen her do it. She was wishing him back, bartering with the universe.
I’m embarrassed to say that in all the years since he left, I’d never really considered she might be aching, too. Maybe it was because she just seemed pissed off with the world and my father. And maybe she was, maybe she was pissed that he left her behind, too. I wanted to tell her that I knew that feeling. I wanted to grab her and tell her not to follow him, the way she’d told me, but I didn’t. If I said I wasn’t afraid of what I would find inside her eyes, wasn’t scared to death of the truth hiding there, I would be lying plain as day. Letting that fear disappear into a foamy sea of distance was easier.
So I turned away to look for Grandma Jo to ask if she wanted to come bake pies. I went to the kitchen and, finding it empty of everything except a plate of untouched toast tossed in the sink, headed for her room, letting my eyes fall to the sharp points of my mother’s shoulders beneath her blouse as I passed. Drawn tight with a belt, the fabric of her jeans bunched at the waist like a brown paper bag.
“Grandma Jo went down to the beach again to do yoga. She said she’d be back in an hour.” My mother’s voice was still. She didn’t push Luke down from her knee when he trundled over to snuffle her pant leg.
Grabbing a banana, I headed toward the stairs behind her to put my hair up before going to Remy’s.
“I know how much you loved him, Iz. I loved him, too.” The statement seemed to tumble down to her feet and break into tiny bits.
I stopped and turned around, tracing her shoulder blades, following the thin rails of her arms out to her fingertips.
“Do you remember anything about the night he left?”
Roses. Fireflies. Praying. Stairs. The candles—I hate you, hate you, hate you.
I shook my head, but she never turned around; she wasn’t really asking.
My stomach twisted into a knot as I wrestled the memory back into its shackles. Luke must have sensed something come over me because he left my mother’s side and was nudging at my ankle to be picked up. Holding him close, I let him lick my face until it was so wet I couldn’t feel the tears running down my cheeks.
“I do. I remember everything. It was the grayest day I have ever seen. But it’s funny, every time I think of that morning, I remember it as bright and sunny. It was the first chance we had to get away for a little while since I’d started school. With my schoolwork and his . . . traveling and writing, it was like we lost each other in the chaos, and man, did I miss him. I missed us, all of us. So that day felt like the brightest day ever when we got on the boat to come here even though the weather sucked. The rain wasn’t falling, just hanging in the air like a veil. Like the universe knew something bad was about to happen.
“Anyway,” she cleared her throat, “I thought you should know that. He was impossible, and impetuous, and moody, and he drove me crazy. But, I loved him despite all that or maybe because of all that. I was alive when I was with him. He taught me how to live. He gave me you. You probably don’t get that, but . . .”
Time seemed to slow to a crawl, and I didn’t quite know what to do, so I just stood there watching her tap the windowpane with her bandaged thumb, lost, in her own memories. The nails on her hands had been chewed low, leaving angry raw crescents of pink in their wake. She was wearing my father’s wedding band on her middle finger.
The memory of her leaning against my father’s study door returned to me, his back turned to her. I saw the sadness and betrayal in her eyes, her finger brushing his cheek in their wedding picture as she climbed away from him to an empty bedroom.
Yes, I thought. I get that.
“When you were little, he used to drag you along on these adventures to get you out of Sunday school: to the cape, or the Thimble Islands, or Potter’s Creek. Said Reverend Mitchell might be able to fill you with God,” I heard her voice catch, “but it was a father’s job to fill you with magic.” My mother laughed, tilting her head. Still staring out the window, she tapped my father’s wedding ring rhythmically to the pane of glass. Tick, tick, tick . . . like the hands of a clock struggling to move forward but finding itself stuck between moments.
I looked down at my hand, which had tightened instinctively around the banana, splitting the peel so that white goo oozed through my fingers.
“Do you remember?”
I did remember somewhere deep inside. My heart ached from all the remembering, actually ached, as though it, too, would split right down its seams like the banana, until I pushed the thoughts down to my toes to keep them away.
Just then, I remembered something else. I put Luke down, shoving my one dry hand into my pocket, rooting around for my stone. It was gone; so were Grandma Jo’s map and the flyer. The vague memory of setting them on the ground under the apple tree rushed back at me. My heart sank at the possibility of Riley snatching them. Clearly, he didn’t like me, and there wasn’t much chance of him dropping by to return them if he found them. He’d probably show them to his stupid friends, too. My mind was churning to put together a plan to zip back to the bluffs to get them when Remy Mandolin’s voice ba
rreled into the room, ending any chance of racing back to Witch’s Peak.
“Ready to make pies?” she called.
My mother turned around, a confused look on her face. “Excuse me?”
“Pies,” Remy repeated, grabbing a pear from the bowl on the dining room table. “You know, flaky round pastries you stuff with fruit and serve with vanilla ice cream.”
“I know what a pie is.” My mother sighed. “Why would I be making them?”
“You wouldn’t,” Remy quipped. “Not unless you were the award-winning pie baker of the Yemaya Festival four years running who didn’t want to disappoint her public.”
“Which I am not.”
“Because I am.” Remy bit into the pear and wiped its juice from her chin with her sleeve.
“Don’t you ever eat at your own house?”
“I do. Pie. Which your daughter has kindly agreed to help me bake. Right?” She looked at me for confirmation. I nodded, wishing I could make some excuse to rush back to Witch’s Peak, but even if I had, the truth of the matter was that I was afraid Riley might still be lurking around. “Your grandma coming?”
“She’s still out doing stretches, or meditating, or whatever it is yoga fanatics do to find peace in the universe,” my mother gibed.
“Maybe you ought to try that,” Remy suggested. “You know, rid yourself of all that stress.”
“Ha!”
I walked behind Remy with the remains of the banana I’d mutilated, tossing it into the garbage and wiping my hand off before grabbing my jacket.
“By the way, I told Izabella I’d let her use that bike in your drive. It got me to thinking. You’ve got to pay Mr. Herman for damages, right?”
“Right,” my mother answered coolly.
“With the taxi and ferry and trying to get ready for the Yemaya Festival, well, things are just a little crazy. I could use a spare set of hands. I thought maybe they could belong to Izabella. You know, when she’s not working down at Herman’s to clean up. And how long could that take? I could pay her three dollars an hour, and she could hand it over to you to help pay for the window. I know I don’t have kids, but it’s the sort of thing my mother used to do.”
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