What the Waves Know

by Tamara Valentine

  I packed up the paint, stuck my brush in a plastic container, and carried them in to Mr. Herman at 1:30 P.M.

  “You’ll be back to glaze it tomorrow?” he yelled after me.

  I nodded before kicking the stand up on the Schwinn and walking it across the street to Jasmine’s.

  “Do you want it wrapped?” the woman at the register asked as I dug four of the five dollars Remy had given me from my pocket

  I nodded, laying the bills neatly on the counter and admiring the hand-blown glass wind chime I’d asked the woman to retrieve from the window. Swirled through in blues and greens like a wave rolling onto the beach, it was stamped with cowry shells and had a silver sea star dangling in the center.

  “There you are.” She pushed the box toward me gently, tidying a pink bow about the package. Carrying the box outside to lay it carefully in the bike’s basket, I headed for the wharf.

  Telly was busy helping Riley move crates of supplies for the festival off the cargo deck with a forklift when I pulled up. Remy and Mr. O’Malley were still onboard. When the last crate had been set in line with the others, Riley hopped off the machine, tossed a replacement rope over his shoulder, and sauntered over to me with the clipboard.

  “Remy’ll be down in a minute. There’s an extra run for the next seven days, so they’re bleeding the fuel lines. Here.” He handed me the clipboard. “If you get stuck I’ll be in the ticket booth.” He started to walk away but stopped, sticking his hand in his front pocket.

  “This yours?” He stepped back in front of me holding out a folded flyer, crisp with hardened mud.

  I stared, almost afraid to open it.

  “Yes?”

  I nodded, holding my hand out. Riley made a move to drop it in my hand, paused, and looked straight at me. The green T-shirt he was wearing picked up every green fleck in his eyes, which seemed to ignite when he looked at me.

  “What does someone have to do to get you to talk? Stuff their head in a pipe and try to drown themselves?”

  The comment caught me off guard and images of water creeping up, folding over a person until the life choked out of him, teetered the world around me before I pushed it back, back, back . . .

  I stared right back at him and actually thought about trying to speak.

  But before I could, he dropped the flyer in my hand and walked away. I watched him go, running my fingers over the hard bulge in the flyer’s fold and knew without question that it contained my Yemaya Stone.

  When the last passenger was off, I grabbed a can of Comet and started up the deck.

  “We don’t have time.” Remy waved a hand. “We have to turn this boat around. If I don’t see you tonight, make sure you meet me tomorrow morning before the eleven o’clock run. It should only take an hour to get that window glazed, and then we need to start setting up for the festival.

  I waved back, stepping aside as Telly wrenched up the ramp, and watched as the Mirabel slid from view.

  I took the long way home, passing my turn and swinging down Laurel Lane instead, stopping just beyond Mrs. Mulligan’s house. I crept up the steps with the pretty package from Jasmine’s in hand, thinking about the things Mrs. Mulligan had told me about meeting her husband at the festival. Sometimes, I could no longer pull my father’s face fully into view, could no longer recall how far down his face the freckles cascaded or remember the scent of him. I barely knew her, but I didn’t want that to happen to Mrs. Mulligan. Every time the taste of her first kiss faded and the memory got mushy as cornmeal, I wanted a soft breeze to surround her in the tinkling of chimes until it all came tumbling back to her. I wanted her to remember until the Nikommo called her back to her husband for real. I set the box with the pink ribbon on her mat, hopped back on my bike, and spun up the lane toward home.

  Coming through the front door, I met Grandma Jo wearing her yoga leggings and carrying a sea grass mat.

  “I’m off to the cove. Do you want to come along?” She waved the mat in the air. “I’ll share.”

  Nodding, I ran to change out of my clothes, which were speckled as a robin’s egg after a day of painting. Luke scampered along beside me.

  “Izabella’s coming with me!” Grandma Jo called.

  “’kay,” my mother’s voice filtered in.

  By the time I made it back downstairs, my mother had moved outside and was perched cross-legged on the porch with a sheet of paper and a collection of oil paints scattered around her. Biting a paintbrush in her teeth, she looked up at the sound of the door squealing open. I raised an eyebrow at the picture she was struggling over: a landscape of the cliffs with Witch’s Peak looming in the right-hand corner.

  “I’m not very good.” She looked down at the paper. “It’s just to relax, really. I found these in the basement.” She tapped a tube of paint with the wooden end of her brush. “Then Grandma Jo showed me your sketch on the festival flyer, and after looking at a hundred paintings for the auction, I don’t know, I guess I just needed something to do.” I grinned, more at the child-like way she was defending her actions than the painting itself, which wasn’t half bad. “Have fun with Grandma Jo,” She called over her shoulder dipping the tip of her brush into the paint and scraping it deliberately against the edge to remove the excess.

  Grandma Jo and I walked down a narrow path a half mile from the Booth House until it spit us out onto a small sandy cove. Every six or seven feet spiky clusters of dune reeds poked through the beach like lonely strands of hair. I laid the sea grass mat on the beach and turned around to find a pile of clothes beside the water and my grandmother swimming in the inlet. Unlike my mother, the fact that my grandmother was half nudist didn’t bother me. It was just in her nature. I guess after years of wearing my silence, with shame crouching around every corner, I didn’t have enough left over to be embarrassed by other people’s choices.

  Balancing on a string of boulders jutting out one side of the inlet, I walked alongside her, sticking my toes in the cold water every few rocks to see if it had warmed up any in two seconds. By the time I’d reached the end, my pockets were heavy with sea stones I’d gathered along the way. None of them looked like mine, but I liked the idea of gathering luck wherever you could find it.

  “You want to come in?” Grandma Jo called out.

  I shook my head as she swam closer to the rocks.

  “Wow, look!” She reached down into the rocks and pulled up a bright orange starfish with a blue dot in the middle. I leaned over, letting her put it into my hand, and studied the tiny suction cups as they reached for solid ground against my fingers. “Isn’t it lovely?”

  Fifteen minutes later, Grandma Jo climbed to shore and, after wrapping a towel around herself, sat staring over the ocean. The sun had scooted behind a gray bank of cloud. I teetered back along the rocks to join her, watching the Moorhead lighthouse blink through the mist.

  “This is one beautiful island. I’d forgotten how serene it is.” She sighed. “Do you want to meditate with me? I always meditate before doing yoga. Touch your feet together sole to sole. Close your eyes. Ready?”

  I nodded.

  “Now, four cleansing breaths. One, two, three, four.”

  After a few minutes of relaxed silence, she opened her eyes. “Do you remember anything at all about coming here as a little girl?”

  The fog light winked.

  I started to shake my head, then looked at her and stopped. “Fireflies.” It was more of a whisper than a word.

  “In October?”

  Staring at Grandma Jo for several seconds then letting my eyes skim over the ocean, I considered the fact that I’d never seen a firefly that late in the season before, or since, but I remembered them. If I closed my lids, letting myself fall through the years, I could pull them clearly into focus, twinkling and tumbling in my mind.

  On the night of my sixth birthday, the last few fireflies of the season were skittling around the rosebushes outside my window screen, where an especially fat one had just come to rest. Another hung over
the ocean flickering on, off, on. I’d studied it carefully, considering the world outside and the unfairness of being born just to spend your life being eaten, squashed, or shooed. I had decided we were in the same bucket together, bugs and me. We were the smallest things in the world. And while it’s true I had been spared most of the eating and squashing, more and more often during that year when I walked into a room my parents fell into an awkward hush before shooing me back out with a distracted, “We’ll be out in a minute, Iz. We’re having a grown-up talk right now,” which even then I knew was code for “fight.” “Please, you need to take your medication,” I’d heard my mother tell my father. I knew, though, that was not true; he had told me so himself. With a tap of the screen, the fat firefly had zipped into the night, leaving me alone again.

  If Grandma Jo was surprised to hear a word fall out of me and into the afternoon, she didn’t let it register on her face. She turned back to study the shiver of ripples picking up speed until they rolled as a white tube against the shore and nodded without pressing the issue.

  “Fireflies,” she echoed. “That sounds like a good memory.” She pulled herself to her feet and spent the next half hour stretching into odd shapes I could not even imagine my body assuming.

  But she was wrong; it was not a good memory.

  She didn’t ask if there was more, and I didn’t say because the memory had screwed the lid tight on my vocal chords like the rusted-up top of a mayonnaise jar.

  So I grabbed my journal and sketched until Grandma Jo finished her yoga. When she looped a towel around her neck, plopping to the ground beside me, I slipped it onto her lap and watched her study the words quietly before staring across the sea as though searching for an answer.

  Was he crazy?

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Grandma Jo never answered my question directly, though I had tossed and turned with her answer in my head well past midnight.

  “You were the light of his life.”

  The statement shouldn’t have vexed me beyond all reason, but it did, and all the tossing just jumbled it up more. My father had spent his entire life chasing after the light, and it never brought him home to me. It had never been enough, no matter how hard I tried to make it shine. I could not blot out the stars that led him away, could not compete with the pull of the moon.

  I can’t say exactly when I finally dozed off, but I was jolted to, still sleepy, by the bleeping of my alarm clock at seven.

  I waited outside Herman’s for Remy for a full half hour, holding a tube of glazing in my hand for the window with not one idea what to do with it. Just after ten, the Purple Monster pulled up to the curb at breakneck speed and skidded to a stop. Riley got out of the driver’s seat, shut the door with a thud, and sauntered over.

  “Remy’s tied up at the pier.” He took the tube from my hand. “I’ve got to get back on down there to help out, but I’ll get you started.”

  Pulling a penknife from his back pocket, he slit the tip from the tube and wriggled it into a metal contraption with a long trigger, giving it three solid pulls until a clear gluey strand eased out the tip.

  “Here, hold the gun like this.” He propped it in my hands and turned me toward the glass. The scent of sweet smoke and cloves filled my nose. I figured he’d probably been cleaning either the boat or the taxi stand with Mr. O’Malley, but it reminded me of what I had thought about Remy’s cottage the first time I’d seen it—sugar cookies and warmth.

  Placing both arms around me and guiding my hands, he squeezed the trigger slowly. “Now just pipe it out all the way around the edges.”

  I turned my head to brush a curl out of my face with my shoulder, glancing at him, then hurried to turn away when he glanced back. He was still talking, but I was busy picturing him racing down Remy’s back hill on a toboggan and letting out a laugh. I had never seen him laugh.

  “Once you’re done, take this cloth and run it over the line to push it between the glass and wood. Got it?”

  My heart was thrumming at the speed of light. I nodded, but the truth is I barely heard a word he said. I wanted to hate him; at least I had thought I wanted to. He had made it clear that he didn’t like me. But every time he came close, my hands started to sweat and shake. I’d been carrying around the memory of his face in the picture from the library since I first saw it and, even though it didn’t make sense, I felt connected to him in a way I couldn’t shake. There was that. And there was this, too: he had the greenest eyes I had ever seen. They reminded me of stars in a pitch-black sky and there was a depth that said they understood the ways of the moon.

  “Good. Remy says she’ll pick you up at three o’clock to help set up the square.”

  As he climbed back into the driver’s seat and spun off, I considered it a good thing that I didn’t speak because whenever Riley was around my words jumbled up in my brain anyway.

  “Don’t forget the inside, too.” I’d been working on glazing the window for forty-five minutes when Mr. Herman appeared at the bottom of my ladder carrying another cold soda. After handing it up to me, he pulled his spectacles from the breast pocket of his grocer’s smock and hooked them over his ears, following the line of glaze from start to finish.

  I sat on top of the ladder watching him until he’d checked every inch.

  “I guess it’ll do.” Pulling the wire-rimmed glasses back off, he hobbled inside, leaving me sitting on my perch, wondering. It was the kindest thing Mr. Herman had ever said to me and I was willing to bet it was the nicest thing he said to anybody that day.

  Main Street was already brimming with tourists smushing their noses against windowpanes and wandering around with paper cups of frozen lemonade. A young girl skipped down the street past the White Whale with an ice cream cone in one hand and carrying a stuffed doll of Yemaya under her other arm. Finishing my soda, I picked up the glazing gun and went inside.

  “Cedric,” Mr. Herman said, wagging a finger at the boy bagging groceries. “Go get the ladder for her. It’s heavy.”

  The boy stuck chips into the bag and disappeared, coming back with the ladder dragging behind him.

  “Pick it up! You’re going to scratch the floors,” Mr. Herman snapped and sent the boy reeling under the weight of the unruly ladder, trying to accommodate his boss.

  After another hour, Mr. Herman gave his final stamp of approval and I walked out of the market, giving the window one last glance before heading home.

  “You want to ride along, Josephine?” Remy stood in the doorway waiting for me to pull on my shoes. The Purple Monster was parked out front, pulling a trailer chock-full of collapsible tables and chairs.

  “I could use a little break,” Grandma Jo said, walking straight out and climbing into the Purple Monster without bothering with shoes.

  “Me, too,” my mother said, setting a file down on the dining room table. She plucked a pear from the fruit bowl, tossing it to Remy as she passed.

  Remy looked at her as though she’d sprouted green hair. “Really? You don’t have to work? Are you feeling okay?”

  “Just fine,” my mother lobbed back sarcastically, following Grandma Jo out to the taxi. Remy bit the pear and watched her get in.

  There was already a gaggle of people in the town square by the time Remy came to a stop, and I unfolded myself from the car. White tents lay on the grass waiting to be propped into the day.

  “Okay, unload the tables first! It comes together like a jigsaw puzzle. Here’s the diagram of what goes where. Once the tables are laid right, we’ll stack the chairs beside them and throw a tarp over the whole shebang,” Remy barked. “Izabella, grab the tablecloths.”

  Two dozen people hustled back and forth moving furniture, planters, and tents around the square. Grandma Jo and Mr. O’Malley busied themselves setting the poles for the tents while my mother handed chairs off the trailer two at a time. I don’t know if it was the fact that she was relaxing or Grandma Jo’s cooking, but the bones along her shoulders had softened and I had caught her smiling
several times over the last day or two.

  “Get outta the way or get smushed!” Remy called. “They’re bringing in the statue. Dillon, Jim! Help unload it.”

  I stepped behind the sheriff to clear a path for the men to carry the statue of Yemaya into the center of the square.

  “You hear the way she speaks to the law, Jim?” Officer Dillon lifted a brow at Remy, shaking his head woefully.

  “She is the law. It’s best just to accept the fact and move on.” The sheriff landed a soft cuff on his deputy’s arm.

  “That means you can’t give her a court order or something to make her go out with me?”

  “Sorry, kid. You’re on your own.” The sheriff laughed.

  “That’s all right. I’ve dealt with hardened criminals. I’m not scared of her.”

  “Hardened criminals,” Remy scoffed, putting her hand on her hip and crinkling up the diagram as she did so. “What hardened criminal have you dealt with, Dillon Baxter? You have lived on Tillings your whole blessed life, and there is not one hardened criminal on this island. Ha! Hardened criminals.” She shook her head. “And let me tell you what: even if you had dealt with hardened criminals, they’ve got not one damn thing on me!”

  “Told you,” the sheriff whispered before heading for the center of the square, where Telly was coming in with the church’s statue of Yemaya loaded on the front of the forklift. He drove to the center and climbed down to loosen the straps as five men scurried up to help.

  “Riley, grab that table!” Remy hollered. “This one needs to go in front of the church. Izabella, get the other end. Then you two can set those stones into a ring for the fire dance right over there.”

  “Great,” sputtered Riley, who had arrived with Telly. “Now Dillion’s got my aunt all fired up and the rest of us are gonna pay for it.” Riley followed me over to the table, lifting his end with ease. “Maybe you could teach him to shut up.” He smirked and began moving the table, stringing me along on the other end.

  From across the lawn, I saw Lindsey walking toward Remy with a large sandy-haired man. She looked at me, said something to the man, and started to turn the other way. The man grabbed her by the wrist, giving her a shake. His face was red, and for a minute, I thought he might slap her before he let her go with a shove and she slipped through a row of hedges on the opposite side of the square.