The Rattled Bones

by S. M. Parker

  “I figured the only way to talk to you was to literally stand in your way. Or, lie down.” She gestures at the hall, sits up straighter. “I’ll sleep here every night if I have to. I’ll hold one-sided conversations. I’ll just sit out here being all stalkery. I’ll yammer on until you have to talk to me. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll talk only using quotes from The Princess Bride.”

  A laugh rises in me, but I pull it back.

  “It’s okay to laugh, you know.”

  But is it?

  “I’ve been really worried about you, Rills.”

  “Why? What specifically?” Because she doesn’t know the depths of what’s happening.

  “What aren’t I worried about? You’re out fishing all alone, and that shouldn’t be all on you. I know you’re freaking out about leaving for college, leaving your gram. But I know staying scares you worse.”

  My chest stutters over a hard breath, the kind that rises from the relief and fear of someone knowing you so well.

  “And I know you miss your dad more than I could ever understand. But I want to help, Rills. I’ll do anything. I could work with you on the boat, do whatever.”

  I laugh. It’s a beyond absurd offer. “You hate fishing.”

  “I do.”

  “So why would you off—”

  “Because I’d do it, Rills. I’d get on that smelly boat with you at the crack of every day’s ass. I’d drag those nasty creatures up from the bottom of the sea. I’d smile while I filled bait bags with rotting fish. I’d do all of that because I love you. And I’m here for you.” Her voice hushes with the weight of her promise. “I’d do anything for you, Rills. Anything.”

  “You’d smile while filling bait bags with rotten herring?”

  “If that’s what you need.”

  “I don’t know what I need.”

  “That’s fair.” She moves to my side. “I’m sorry, Rills. I’m sorry you weren’t with your dad that day.”

  “I should have been.”

  “I know.” She puts her arm around my shoulder. I’m grateful for the way her warmth spreads over me. “But maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference.”

  “It might have.”

  “Maybe. But you have to forgive yourself, Rills. What happened to your dad wasn’t your fault.”

  Grief rises in me. “It feels like it was all my fault.”

  “Your dad wouldn’t want you to feel that way.”

  “I know.” But still.

  “You need to find a way to forgive yourself.”

  That seems like the hardest thing in the world. “I’m not sure how to.”

  “We’ll figure it out.” Hattie pulls me closer, and I let her hold me for the time it takes the sun to rise. She lets me cry. Doesn’t tell me to hush or that everything will be okay. She just lets me be me.

  * * *

  When I’m out on the water, the VHF squawks with static. Then Reed’s voice. “All in, Rilla Brae?”

  I grab the mouthpiece. “All in.” I’m at sea. I love him. I’m all right. And I feel some normal fall around me. Hattie is back and the rocking chair doesn’t matter. Nothing matters beyond what’s real. Gram. Hattie. Reed. The waves under my boat.

  I haul fifty traps by midday, load them with bait and set them back into the deep. It’s a mere fraction of the hauling Dad and I would do together in peak season, and even though I’m proud of my catch, I’m aware that it isn’t enough. That I’m not enough. Maybe I do need Hattie out here.

  At the wharf, I hop off the Rilla Brae as Hoopah weighs my haul. One hundred and four pounds.

  “Not bad,” he says, tearing my slip from his receipt pad. But it’s not great, either. Hoopah knows I need a hundred pounds per trip just to cover gas and bait. Never mind the costs for maintaining the boat. If he sees the calculations race through my head, he doesn’t say.

  I’m about to step back onto the boat when Old Man Benner elbows past Hoopah to crowd my face. He reeks of dank cigar and bitterness.

  Old Man Benner condescends a nod at my boat. “Whatcha got there, girlie?”

  Girlie. I straighten my shoulders and pull up my sarcasm. “You’ve been fishing all your life and can’t recognize a day’s catch?”

  Behind me, Hoopah snickers. I stand taller, fully aware that my father wouldn’t have tolerated me talking to any elder this way. But I know he wouldn’t have tolerated Benner’s assholery either.

  Benner rips the slip from my hand, scoffs. “A hundred pounds ain’t come close to a day’s catch. Didn’t ya fathah teach ya nothin’?”

  My teeth grind in hate, barely letting words move past their gate. How can this man possibly be related to Reed? “You don’t know a thing about my father.”

  “I know he’s gone now and Little Miss Fancy’s gonna need money for that uppity school ya so keen on running off ta.”

  “Easy now, Benner,” Hoopah says.

  I stare Benner down. “My work has exactly nothing to do with you, Benner.” But I hate that he’s right. I do need money, better hauls. Dad averaged close to five hundred pounds a day. Few families could survive on less.

  Benner flicks the receipt at my chest, and my reflexes snag it before it sails away in the air current.

  “Ya’ve got ya business done here today, Benner,” Hoopah says. He steps between me and Old Man Asshole so that their two chests almost touch. “Seems to me it’s time ya move it along.”

  Benner looks Hoopah dead in the eye. “Only one doesn’t have business being he-ah is that girl, and there ain’t a fisherman who doesn’t know it ta be true.” He lets his emphasis hold tight on the man part of fisherman. Benner spits his tobacco onto the dock and plunges his finger into Hoopah’s sternum. “Ya let girls fish and this whole industry’ll be ruined.” Benner clips his thumbs into the bib of his rubber overalls and slinks off. I try to breathe.

  Hoopah squeezes at the ball of my elbow. “Don’t ya mind him. He went and got a fishing hook caught up his arse years ago.”

  I force a laugh, like Benner’s words can’t penetrate my skin. “I should be getting home.”

  “Don’t ya be takin’ anything he says with ya, now. Ya leave his words he-ah on the dock where the gulls can shit on them, ya he-ah?”

  “I hear.”

  “Ya dad was a good man, Rilla. Ya come from good stock.”

  Do I? Everyone knows my mother left me and Dad, and now Benner makes me want to retreat, the same way she did. I can already hear the gossip I’d leave in my wake if I took my packed bags and headed due south for Rhode Island.

  Brae girl leaving her family behind, just like her mama.

  Brae women ain’t built for the sea.

  Always knew she’d run. Jonathan probably knew it too. Probably what made his heart give up right there in his chest.

  It’s that last bit of speculation that breaks me. I nod to Hoopah. It’s all the good-bye I can manage. Because if I open my mouth, I don’t know what will bubble up. A cry. A scream. Or some monstrous combination of both.

  As I navigate away from the dock, I don’t turn around. I can’t bear to see Hoopah staring at me. What if his eyes can’t hide the fact that he doubts me as much as I do?

  I turn toward home even though I know I’m not going home. I knew it hours ago when I stuffed my pack full of biscuits. Even then I knew I was headed to the island.

  This time, I’m not looking for the girl.

  I need an escape.

  I need to see Sam.

  I need to drown in the island’s story. The old woman’s story.

  Any story that’s not my own.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The USM research boat is anchored on the lee side of the island, which sends up a small flicker of pride in me as I throw anchor and toss my pack aboard my skiff. By the time I’ve rowed to shore, Sam is on the craggy beach waiting for me.

  “Hey.” He throws his greeting casually, like he expected me, which is unexpected. Sam extends his hands, nods toward my pack. I pitch it to him, and he
catches it easily.

  I tuck the oars inside my skiff and drag the open boat across the stretch of beach. The fiberglass scrapes over the sharp edges of the mussel shells and jagged rocks, sending up a dull roar that drowns out all other sound. I take a quick glance toward Fairtide Cottage. Home. Where I should want to be. Then Sam hands me my pack and I strap it across the span of my back. “You hungry?”

  His face turns up in a smile. “How’d you know?”

  “Forgot your lunch again?”

  “Judge me not by my culinary incompetence.” He smiles in a way that tempts mine, pulls it into being. “Wanna eat up at the dig site?”

  I do. So much. “Sure.”

  We hike the island’s granite face. I see the photo again, so clear—the old woman in her rocking chair in front of her meager home. I try to orient the past in the present, but all traces of her and her house are gone. There’s only untamed nature on the island now, sea grass sprouting between cracks of the granite, an island growing wild over its secrets.

  “I’m in the middle of a discovery.” Sam’s voice is high and happy, so much like a young child playing at the shore.

  “What sort?” A physical ache of hunger tightens my stomach, so intent on knowing what Sam’s discovered.

  “Come see.” He takes my wrist and tugs me closer to his worksite. My step quickens to match his gait, his excitement. I don’t even think Sam realizes he’s pulling me, so singular is his eagerness. He stops when we reach the excavated layers of earth. He lets go of my wrist, points to the far corner of the exposed dirt with its low, twine rope fence. “There.” A slice of wrought-iron metal peeks above ground. There’s a pattern etched deep into the metal. The detailed ironwork flows like the vine of a thick, creeping flower, scrolling and lifting in circles and sways. It is beautiful, even as its grooves are caked with the clinging clay soil.

  “Is this not the coolest?”

  “What is it?” It takes all my restraint not to jump inside the excavation site and claw away the earth with my bare hands. There’s so much urgency to discover the truth about the people who lived here, and I’m not surprised when the whispered song rises from my memory like a low-clinging fog: Come here, come here. My dear, my dear.

  “Dunno.” Sam shrugs. “That’s the best part. It could be anything. Anything at all.”

  It’s an elaborately flourished piece of metal. It was special to someone. Someone rowed it all the way out here, hauled it to the island’s peak.

  Someone.

  Someones.

  A gust of wind rakes through the trees, bending the spruce boughs at their tips. It hits me all at once that Malaga really was inhabited, and not that long ago. Its residents left pieces of their lives behind, echoes of their existence. “You must have some theory, though? Maybe it was a gate”—but then I remember the crude structure the old woman called home—“though maybe too ornate for that?”

  Sam watches the exposed black metal as if his stare can protect it. “I’m not a fan of speculating until I’m sure of a thing. I’m the same way with people.” He turns to me, lifts his eyes quickly to meet mine. “What I do know at this stage is that this object is a window to the past, Rilla. It’s remarkable because it’s here and we found it and it doesn’t need to be lost again. It has a singular story, a language, a poetry all its own.”

  The iron grate poking from the earth is similar to the six-burner cast-iron stove Gram uses to cook our meals and heat our home. That stove is heavier than a steamship, and no one from Gram’s side of the family has dared moved it in more than a hundred years. I used to think our antiques made us look like we were poor, like we couldn’t afford a trip to the Home Depot appliances section. Now I like that I can find my great-great-grandfather’s woodworking expertise in the curves of our nineteenth-century dry-sink-turned-bookshelves. And my great-grandmother’s embroidery in our home-sewn flag from 1944, which hangs in our living room, wide as the wall. She sewed it the same year Sinclair and Thomas Murphy—Gram’s uncles—gave their lives on the beaches of Normandy. The red stripes are faded now, the blue square of stars almost purple from time bleeding its color. Still, the blue reminds me of that ocean in France when my great-uncles arrived with their guns and their bravery. And the red reminds me never to forget the color of the sea after too many lives had been lost in the surf. Sam’s words revisit: It has a singular story, a language, a poetry all its own. “You sound more like a poet than a scientist.”

  “Can’t I be both? There’s so much beauty in our buried history. Pain, too. If you ask me, that’s the stuff of poets.”

  I think of my dad, buried now but not forgotten. Grief grabs at my chest.

  “It seems too simple”—Sam extends his hands, palms up, then down—“that our mere hands can unearth this small part of our collective past.” He squats before the site, turns his ear to the ground as if he can hear it whisper the story he seeks. As if excavation isn’t done with his tools, but with his every sense. I wonder if he hears the same pull of the girl’s lullaby: Come here, come here.

  “That’s what all this is about. Bringing the forgotten back to life.” He stands now, traps his hair back with the snap of a band. “The people . . . you know. Their stories.”

  I want to tell him about my father’s story, how I’m one of only two people who can keep it alive now, but I don’t. The way Sam honors his discovery makes me know this moment is for something bigger than us and our individual stories.

  He gestures to a flat rock nearby. “I’ve got a long way to go here yet. This dig will go on for years and probably without me. But first, sustenance. Yes?” His energy is welcoming and safe, a world apart from Benner and his unapologetic sexism.

  “Sustenance it is. You’re not the first person to make Gram’s biscuits a priority.”

  “Biscuits? Ah, come on. You never said anything about biscuits. You really do need to work on your openers, Rilla Brae.” Sam takes a few loping strides and drops onto the ledge, settling into an easy cross-legged position. He pats the granite next to him, inviting me down. I sit and see Whaleback Ridge in the exact position of the old woman’s photo. This is near the spot where she gardened from her small porch, rocked in her tall chair. My curiosity burns. Did that ornate metal piece belong to her? What story does it hold?

  I pull off my pack and sit opposite Sam. “I asked my gram about Malaga.” I unload the plastic containers, spread them out between us.

  His eyes fire. “Should I get my notebook? She must know a ton.”

  “Just the opposite.” I pop the top from the biscuit bowl, hand it to Sam.

  Sam raises a biscuit to his nose, draws in its butter scent. “Heaven.” It is a murmur, as if he’s talking to himself.

  I take a biscuit and it’s dense with cold, almost heavy in my hand. I set out the jar of jelly, place a spoon into its thick boysenberry center. “My gram didn’t know anything about the island.”

  “Bummer, but not too much of a surprise, I guess.”

  “How so?”

  Sam looks out at the distant sea. “There’s a lot of shame surrounding what happened out here, Rilla. People aren’t in a hurry to claim the shameful things.”

  I think of the old woman, the suspicion in her eyes. What happened to her?

  “When I first arrived in town, I had to get my mail forwarded. The postmaster was making small talk, asking me what my summer would look like. When I told him about the university’s dig, he was very clear that I had no right dredging up the story of Malaga.”

  Allen Hilton, the postmaster with his grizzled gray beard. He’s old but not old enough to know about Malaga firsthand. Eighty years is a long time. Anyone who might remember was only a kid then.

  “When I told him I had a job to do, he warned me that the island was haunted.”

  “Haunted?” A shiver crawls up the ladder of my spine. Haunted? I think of my vision of the tidal wave. The rocking chair. Is a ghost trying to make its secrets known?

  He shrugs. “I think it wa
s an attempt to scare me off. Or maybe it’s a way for him to make sense of the senseless—name it something impossible.”

  Impossible.

  “But I think this island holds more history than the university could ever uncover. And there are endless ways for secrets to slip out into the world.”

  “You mean ghosts? You’re talking about ghosts now, right?” The girl singing at the shore. Her disappearing boat, the way her dress vaporized into the trees.

  “I will say that I am by nature an unflinching optimist. This world has never once stopped reminding me that it holds infinite possibilities.” He takes a bite of biscuit, chews it down. “But ghosts? No. I’m a pragmatist and a scientist, if they are even separate things. I believe secrets can be recovered from the ground.” His gaze returns to the crisp blue field of ocean. “And people. I think secrets find their way out of people when the time is right.”

  Did a ghost make the water rise in a tidal wave that claimed our lawn one second and was gone the next? Could a ghost have been in my room, rocking in the chair behind me? Is the girl singing to make her secrets known?

  I wish I had the nerve—or the trust—to tell Sam about the girl I’ve seen on the island, her song that reached me under the weight of water. But my dad is gone and I don’t want to admit out loud that my loss has made my mind bend, possibly enough to resemble my mother’s. “You’ve never seen anything out here . . . you know, suspicious?”

  Sam laughs a laugh that is so quick and full, it almost scares me. “Well, there was some questionable behavior displayed by a couple of mating harbor seals on the beach last week. Other than that, nothing I’d classify as otherworldly. I haven’t exactly had a hand reach out from the earth and grab me or anything.”

  Chilled bumps blanket my skin. “Creepy much?”

  He shrugs. “A hand from the ground is like Creepy 101. The universally worst ghost fear. Like, when you were a kid, did you look under your bed before going to sleep? Afraid something would grab at your ankles?”

  I shake off the memory of the rocking chair, the ice cold trapped in the seat. Me, searching for a girl who may be haunting me on land, calling to me in the sea. “Most nights I was too scared to look under my bed, so I’d leap from my desk chair to my mattress.”