The Rattled Bones

by S. M. Parker

  “It was stupid not to radio in. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

  Gram pats my knee. “Ya just focus on being a kid, Rilla. Don’t worry about the rest.”

  “But—”

  “Ya know I hate that word.” She nods toward my cup. “Drink up.”

  Drink the skullcap. Cap my skull. Gram’s way of telling me I need calm. I take a sip, let the hot liquid warm my insides.

  “Are ya storing your traps on the island?” It’s a fair question. A few local fishermen stack traps there for the off-season.

  “No. There’s a guy out there. Doing an archeological dig of some sort.”

  “The English language is so limited that ‘a guy’ is the only way ya can explain this person to me?” She tsks in her way.

  “Sam. His name is Sam. He’s a USM student working on a summer internship.”

  “What’s he looking to find?”

  “Beats me.”

  She gives me that look that tells me to use my language with more respect. “He didn’t give ya any idea?”

  “He mentioned a schoolhouse.”

  This makes Gram’s eyebrows rise. “On Malaga?”

  “My reaction exactly.”

  “Sounds like that boy’s digging in the wrong island dirt.”

  I laugh. “I wanted to tell him that same thing. He’s not so great with boat navigation, so it’s plausible.”

  “He’ll figure out his mistake soon enough.”

  “Sam said locals would know more about the island’s history than the researchers. Told me I should ask Dad about it.”

  A crease in her brow, a question low in her eyes. “He doesn’t know about your father?”

  “He’s from away. I didn’t exactly feel like telling him anything about our private lives.”

  “Saying a thing can be hard.”

  The hardest.

  “So this school?” Gram’s raises her tea to her lips, her question telling me that the subject will be changed.

  “Sam says the state took it away in 1931.”

  “Impossible.”

  “I know.”

  “Ya know what else is impossible?”

  “What’s that?”

  “That flower there.” Gram nods to the petals sitting primly on the table, like it’s offended her, like it’s here just to make her uncomfortable. “It’s native to Africa and has no earthly business blooming in Maine in June.”

  This again? It’s just a flower. I know Gram’s a master gardener, but even experts can make mistakes, right? “I double promise I’ll ask Reed where he got it.” And how he was quiet enough to sneak onto my boat. I look out at the Rilla Brae—the circle of rocks still on her dash—and another memory catches, flashing quick as bee wings. My mother, walking the shore in the sunlight. Me next to her. My small feet, her larger ones. Making footprints in the wet sand and then running when the tide lapped high enough to erase our steps, drag them out to sea.

  “Rilla?”

  “Yeah, Gram?” I shake my mind free.

  “Ya okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Where did ya drift off to?”

  I’m not sure. I can’t say if it’s an actual memory or something my brain pieced together from the stories Gram used to tell about my mother. “I remembered . . .”

  Gram watches me, doesn’t press.

  “Running in the surf with my mother.” Your daughter. The first person we both lost.

  Gram straightens, clearly not expecting me to bring up my mother, which is zero surprise. For my eleventh birthday, I told Gram my wish—that she’d stop telling happy stories about Marin Brae. I know Gram thinks my mother’s problems aren’t my mother’s fault, and she wanted to keep her daughter alive for me in some positive way. But it wasn’t my mother’s struggles that made me sad—it was the fact that she chose to stay away. I couldn’t have those stories in my life if my mother didn’t want to be in my life.

  I rub my thumb and forefinger together, feel the ghost grooves of the rough stone’s surface. That stone from the boat, the way it felt too familiar. I mean, of course it did. I’ve picked up a million rocks. But sitting here now, watching the sea with Gram, something more falls into place.

  “We’d try to outrun the tide, see how long our footprints would last before being washed away.” And how my mother would pick up tiny stones even then, tell me how they were once giant rocks before the sea made them small.

  Gram looks anxious, likely because this subject has been dangerous territory since I turned eleven. When things were good, Gram used to say about my early, early days. But I rarely remembered when things were good. I couldn’t stop remembering that last night, when my mother tried to walk into the water and away from me. How she left in an ambulance. Gram’s stories reminded me how my mother has chosen to be somewhere else ever since her last night here. That fact seemed the most important thing to know. Then.

  “Ya two were always playing at the shore.” Gram doesn’t say more, and I realize for the first time that she hasn’t been able to talk about her daughter for years. All because of my selfishness.

  “And you’d watch us from the deck.” We searched for the smoothest rocks, the ones that had been rolling in the ocean so long they had lost all their sharp edges. We used them as money, pirate booty. My mother made smiley faces in the sand, long sweeping smiles made of quarter-sized stones. It’s a strange thing to remember safe moments with my mother by the shore. Like opening a book and being reminded that it was your favorite from forever ago.

  “I can’t remember a time when I didn’t watch ya, Rilla.” Gram stares at the lapping waterline. “They are some of my best memories. The two of ya walking the shore, how ya were always in step. She taught ya how to skip rocks, and you’d spend hours hunting for the perfect flat stones. You’d jump with excitement every time she made one of those slivers jump off a wave.”

  Do I remember that, or is it another story I heard so many times when I was little? The real and imagined are blurred together from those years. I feel sick at the thought of losing even one memory of my dad.

  I bring the mug to my lips.

  “Your mom and ya were so happy each time your dad returned from fishing. You’d run into the water as deep as ya could to meet hi—” Something steals the rest of Gram’s story, the last memory of my mother at the shore, probably. The night that’s etched deep into my story, carving out a Before and After. The night my mother chose the Water People over me. Over Gram. Over Dad. Gram watches the ocean, and her face flattens gray.

  I was wrong to bring up my mother. I don’t have room for any more darkness.

  “I should head up, take a shower.” I pluck the Flame Freesia and cup it in my palm. I breathe in its scent of pepper, and it jolts something deep inside of me, deeper and farther away than my mother’s memory. For a moment I am underwater again, the sounds of the everyday world drowned out, a song rising too clear through the seaweed, the black ocean. Come here, come here . . . The bloom turns hot as fire in my hand and I drop it to the table.

  “I think Reed would want you to have this.”

  I head to the kitchen, away from the ocean and its songs. Away from any reminder of the night my mother filled my heart with fear.

  * * *

  In my room, I set a fresh cup of orange-leaf tea on my nightstand, chosen for its ability to boost awareness. I balance my laptop across the bridge of my thighs and Google “Malaga Island.” There are only a few hits, some from USM’s research. I click on the first image and it pulls at me. The picture is yellowed in the way of ancient photos.

  An elderly woman sits in a high-back rocking chair in front of a home—a shack, really. Her long white hair is coiled in a thick braid pulled to rest over her heart. She has more years on her than Gram—maybe decades more—and yet there’s a matchstick straightness in her shoulders, the black sheen of the woman’s eyes trapping knowledge. I try to quiet the bumps that rise along the back of my neck as I study the cracks in her ski
n, each deep and weather-beaten line a year at least. She is Passamaquoddy maybe, or Abenaki? This area has shell middens heaped along stretches of coast by indigenous people—giant piles of carefully layered oyster shells, dirt and animal bones that date back to Maine’s first fishing families.

  I can’t know if the old woman is Abenaki, but I’m certain her stare is untrusting. I squint at the white scrawl in the bottom corner of the photo: 1931. Did she dare the cameraman to steal her soul with his flash? Did she challenge his thievery?

  A knock rattles the window. I jump as Reed pokes his head into my room, laughing. “Nervous, much?”

  I ease my laptop shut.

  “Watching porn?” Reed asks, his smile playful.

  “Yes. Tons of porn. I’ve been up here for hours, trolling the web for porn.”

  Reed plops on my bed, his weight heavier than usual. No, dense. It’s drunk weight. His wasted fingers play at the corner of my computer, teasing the cover open.

  I slide my laptop to the nightstand.

  He nestles his head against my neck. His hand falls flat to my stomach. “You didn’t come to the quarry today.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Why not?” His warm skin smells of sun and sweat and hard liquor.

  “I wasn’t feeling it.”

  “I missed you.” Reed burrows deeper against me, his fingers twisting the longest of my curls.

  I let the quiet shape us into one. Then, “You really threw Gram today, with that flower you left me this morning.”

  Reed laughs. “Your Gram? Thrown . . . as in confused?”

  “Yep. She wanted to know where you got it. Like you have some connection to the seedy underworld of foreign plants.” I nudge him. “Get it? Seedy?”

  “Funny.” Reed sits up. “What plant, now?”

  “That flower you left. Gram says it’s from Africa, doesn’t grow here.”

  “I’m lost. I didn’t leave any flower.”

  “You didn’t?” I watch something like anger grow in Reed’s features, tiny embers turning orange. “What? You’re the jealous type now?”

  “I am if someone’s giving you flowers.”

  “I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”

  “How’s that exactly?”

  “Someone must have left it because”—there’s a choke in my throat, but I push past it—“my dad. Paying their respects, or whatever.”

  Reed settles, his face softening. “Oh.”

  I don’t tell him about the rocks placed in a circle, ceremoniously. Reverently. The way a child would mark the grave of a dead animal.

  “Was your boat docked here?”

  “What?”

  “At Fairtide. Were you home? When you found that flower thing?”

  “No.” Reed’s fishing for who boarded my boat without permission. “I was out at Malaga.”

  His eyebrows squint. “Malaga? Why?”

  “I needed to think.”

  “That’s why you blew off the quarry?”

  I shrug, the only energy I’m willing to commit to the subject of the quarry. “Hey, have you ever heard of anyone living on that island?”

  Reed laughs. “Ah, no.”

  “I know, right? But the thing is”—Sam, the Google images. They can’t be wrong, can they?—“someone from the University of Southern Maine is out there on an archeological dig, looking for artifacts from when people lived out there.”

  “A billion years ago?”

  “Eighty, but so close.” I twist at a stray thread on my comforter. “There’s this guy, Sam—”

  “Sam?” He tries his best to look suspicious, but I can tell he’s losing steam. “Maybe he gave you the flower.”

  “Not even.”

  “Let me guess. Sam’s from away.”

  “Think so.”

  Reed settles his head onto the pillow, hangs his leg over mine. “ ’Course he is. People are always coming to Maine looking to change something around here. Now they’re digging up our past? Lives are too boring where they’re from.”

  “Maybe, but this is the university.”

  “Groan.”

  I roll my eyes and elbow his side. “You cannot possibly be so close-minded to all educational institutions.”

  “Oh, but I can.” He laughs, like all of this is so easy to dismiss.

  “He’s just an intern, so maybe that says something, like they don’t take the dig all that seriously. Who knows.” I don’t. I don’t have a clue how research works, who’s in charge, who foots the bill. “But there must be something to it. I Googled the name of the island. I think he might be right.” I tell him about the elderly woman with the wise shoulders, the daring look in her eye. I tell him about the schoolhouse, how Sam says the state took it away.

  I don’t realize Reed’s been asleep until his foot kicks out violently.

  I throw off his leg and his breathing stutters, churning to a low snore. I grab my computer and find the woman once again, her skeptical eyes almost waiting for me. “Aren’t we a pair?” I whisper. “You skeptical of me. Me skeptical of life on Malaga.”

  In the distance of the photograph, a rock ridge bulges from the earth. The ridge is too smooth against all the hard jagged rocks on the coast. The stone rounds like the back of a surfacing whale. I know this granite ledge. I rub my thumb over the outcropping on my screen. Whaleback Ridge. Its name is on every nautical map of these waters. Since I was a kid, I’ve thrown this whale a nod as I pass in the Rilla Brae. Because, why not?

  I turn off the light, slip out of bed, and move to the window, where Whaleback Ridge swells in the moonlight. The rock whale juts from the earth, the sea below her.

  Out on the island, the moon rakes its yellow over the tips of the trees, throws its shine to the edge of the water. I wonder as to the exact spot where this old woman sat in her long dark skirt and high-neck white blouse. I want to know where her house was, with its small roof and the tiny window that looked out over vegetable gardens vining out of crude raised boxes.

  The small shingled home looked too frail to withstand another winter, but the woman—the woman appeared as strong as the Whaleback.

  I grow hungry for her story.

  Was she an island resident? Did she send her grandchildren to the school? Did she help build the school, tell the men where to position the structure so the most light could cascade in through the windows?

  My room beats with the push and pull of my standing fan as it gathers and twists the air. I press my eyes closed, conjuring this woman in the sunlight, rocking in her chair. Little ones from the island scrambling around her feet.

  What stories would she tell? Did she see lantern light at Fairtide after Gram’s grandfather built this home? Did our families know one another, fish the seas together?

  The sway of her rocking chair mixes with the air moving in my room, back and forth, back and forth. Then her soft breath travels against the base of my neck, the heat of it sending my pulse racing.

  My skin warms. My heart darts.

  I open my eyes and turn around, but there’s only Reed and his rumble of a snore.

  Shadows shift in the far corner of my room.

  My own rocking chair sways.

  The steady tick-tack-tick sound of wooden rails slaps the floor. Ticktacktick. Ticktacktick. Back and forth. A slowing metronome. The chair glows gold in the moonlight as it creeps to a rhythmic stop. I rub at the skin on my neck, trying to quiet my fear. I dare to kneel before the rocker, even as I’m afraid it will move again. Afraid that there really is more than air in this room with Reed and me.

  My heart thumps against my chest as I hover my palm over the seat, terrified that I’ll feel something other than the frame of the chair. But there’s only wood when I press my hand flat against the surface.

  Wood, and the unearthly cold that’s trapped there.

  I pull my hand back, my nerves thundering.

  CHAPTER SIX

  It’s pre-morning dark when Reed leaves, sleepy and hun
gover, the smell of liquor clinging to him still. “See you out buggin’,” he tells me.

  I nod, give him a kiss. It’s all he needs before slipping down the trellis.

  I dress for a day on the water: leggings, T-shirt. I scan the room for moving furniture even as I tell myself that the icy cold of the wooden seat was stirred up from the fan cooling my room, the rocking of the chair pushed by an electric wind. Still, my brain won’t let go of some other possibility. Something not so easily explained away.

  I don’t visit the old woman’s photo before heading downstairs. I don’t go to the window to see Whaleback Ridge or Malaga Island to the north. I don’t dare press my hand to the rocker. I focus on my day. The ocean. The things I know.

  I open my door and trip over the body lying in the hall.

  Her brown hair with its purple tips tumble over the rug in the hall, brightened by the glow of the stairwell light. “Hattie?”

  Hattie sits up, rubs at her eyes. “ ’Morning.” Her voice is throaty, scratched.

  “What’re you doing out here?” I sit against the opposite wall and gather my legs against my chest. I feel the anger rising in that mixed tumultuous place where my love for Hattie has twisted recently.

  “I came to see you last night, but Reed was here.”

  “You slept in the hall?”

  She nods, licks at her dry lips.

  “Did you . . . ?” Come in my room? Sit in the rocking chair? It’s impossible to ask the question out loud. Because I know who I will sound like if she says no.

  Hattie looks at me with so much suspicion, like she can see all the wrong in me.

  “Why didn’t you knock, come in?”

  “Honestly? I didn’t know if you’d want to see me. You haven’t answered my texts or voice mails.” Hattie looks tired. And thin. Like my absence has made physical pounds shed from her frame. I wonder if I look as worn to her.

  “I let you have your space, Rills. But I miss you. Too much.” I hear the crack in her voice, the chasm of hurt that creeps around the curves of her syllables.

  I miss Hattie too, if I’m being honest. Do I tell her how many times my thumb hovered over her name to respond to one of her texts? How much I wanted to reach out but couldn’t?