by S. M. Parker
I wait until Hattie’s breath rises and falls with sleep before I open Sam’s notebook again, read every article he’s collected. Hattie and her grandmother’s failing mind were right.
Eight of the forty Malaga residents were abducted and forcibly committed to the state institution. One, a healthy infant. Three of them children. One because he couldn’t identify a telephone, something he wouldn’t have seen in his seven years of island life. For that this young boy was labeled “feeble-minded” and ripped from Malaga and the sea and his family and taken to an isolated place, where he died forty-three years later. Six of the eight people who were committed died at the institution.
There’s a Harper’s Magazine article from the time: THE QUEER FOLK OF THE MAINE COAST2—and recently, a website named for the island, its header: MALAGA ISLAND: A STORY BEST LEFT UNTOLD.3
But I can’t imagine any story being better for being silenced.
Researchers claim that a few islanders built simple rafts after the notice of eviction was served. They floated their homes to more hospitable shores. But the islanders’ biracialism and extreme poverty made them different, and difference is all anyone would’ve been able to see then.
I doubt there were more tolerant shores to find.
My community is no longer a peninsula with a proud fishing history; we are a peninsula whose fishermen rose up against other fishermen. And our discrimination was not quiet.
In newspapers, local grange halls, and places of worship, men shouted for the removal of other men, women, children. Their hatred shouted all the way to the statehouse, landing in the governor’s office. The governor wanted to build a hotel on the island, and so the scourge campaign began.
It’s the words in a recent article from the Portland Press Herald that break me: “The governor ordered the eviction of the community, and officials institutionalized eight residents, some for failing to identify a telephone. . . . Noobody has lived on the island since.”4
All that.
And nothing.
Nothing but loss.
I search the photos and articles for the girl with the brown skin and the white dress. The one who sang at the shore. The one who might know more about me than I know about myself.
But she is nowhere in these pages. A ghost.
CHAPTER NINE
The silver slice of moon cuts through the darkness. I’m on the solid deck of the Rilla Brae, the midnight sea surrounding me.
I hear my father in my head, his words reaching me from a great distance as an echo inside of an echo. “Bugs move at night, Rilla. Leave them be.” Fishermen know to let the stocks replenish.
Still, I’m fishing at night.
I know it’s wrong, and I head from the wheelhouse just as another voice soothes me, tells me that this is right. Come here, come here. Warmth spreads through my body, thickening. I look for the girl. My girl. The girl that holds more secrets than a midnight sea.
Is the song in my head, or is she here, singing?
I feel the buoy line in my hand, stretched across my palm. I tug at the rope, test its tautness. A trap pulls from the opposite end. I lean toward the water, drawing up the rope foot by foot. One hand over the other. Tendrils of seaweed cling to the braided twine, slicking through my fingers. The rope drags up the salt of the sea, the hard smell of fish and buried layers.
And then the line goes slack.
The frayed end of the rope is all that’s left in my grip. I stumble back, unsteady now on the deck of the Rilla Brae. I lean against the wheelhouse and stare at the shimmering black of the deep. My gear is gone. Lost to the sea, a ghost trap.
Until there’s a flicker of movement and a small splash as the trap’s metal corner cuts through the ocean’s surface. I peer over the side of the Rilla Brae. The trap is carried on the waves, impossibly floating—swimming—toward me. Crawling toward my boat.
Moonlight flickers at its wire edges. The trap bobs on a wave.
Under a wave.
On a wave.
Behind a wave.
Coming for me.
Then the sweet song of a voice that sings louder now: Come here, come here.
I stay.
Seaweed crowns the wire cage. It inches nearer. I flatten my hands against the boat’s fiberglass edge, lean over to greet this determined trap the way I have pulled thousands of traps before.
When it reaches me, the trap stops still, mere inches from my boat. My hands on the rail are heavy useless things. I can’t lift them.
The trap bobs, holding its place despite the push of the waves. It doesn’t bang against my boat. The cage hovers close but not too close. I will my arm to move, and my hand is set free of an unknown weight. I reach for the trap. The seaweed shifts. Its tangled tresses swim in the moonlight. Slither to the side. The seaweed is twisted with something darker, finer.
Hair.
My fingers rake at the long, swimming hair just as the mass of tangles slip.
Off of a girl’s round face.
My girl.
Her face green with the sea now.
Washed with time.
Her body is slack, forever heaped over my trap. Her lifeless arms drag at the sides, fingertips brushed by the lifting ocean. Something like air gets lodged in my lungs, but it’s colder. Unwelcome. I scream, but the sound never comes. It is just me and a floating dead girl and the night and the cold and the sea and the moon.
I tell myself to fall back, fall away from the edge of the boat. Into my boat. Away from her. But I know the dead girl senses my retreat, my beat of cowardice, and she will not let me leave her.
The dead girl’s eyes dart open.
Her hand rises from the deep, a serpent. Dark. Scaly. Forgotten. Her cold fingers lock onto the skin of my wrist.
Fire burns under her touch.
She pulls me to her, her dark cracked lips preparing to croak a whisper into my ear. I scream so that I can’t hear her words. I scream to drown out her message. I scream as she pulls me down to the cold black sea that forces the weight of its water and salt into my lungs.
I dart upright in bed, my sheets soaked with a panicked sweat.
Hattie sleeps next to me.
I pull air into my chest and let my lungs fill. My fingers search the stillness of the mattress below me. I peel my mind from the dream, layers of fear still binding me in their thick wrap.
That is when I feel it, the burn at my wrist.
Raw and angry and on fire.
I’m careful not to wake Hattie as I switch on my light, rub the handcuff of skin that’s red, angry, screeching. The deep heat rages all the way through to my wrist bones, makes me curl into its pain. I tuck my arm into my stomach and try to still my mind. Try to erase the dead girl with the seaweed hair. She is not real. My eyes catalog the things that are: my books, my dresser, my bed. Me, in this room. My friend next to me. The girl from the sea was a dream, nothing more. Still, I can’t help think of the Water People, those mysterious people who called to my mother from the deep.
Maybe they were as real as the band of burn on my wrist.
Maybe they are coming for me, too.
* * *
I dress and tiptoe to the kitchen, where I rummage for the tin of Gram’s homemade calendula flower ointment. I smooth the salve over the charred skin, carefully dabbing, letting the thick balm sink its coolness into my skin. Gram enters the room cat-quiet. She grabs my hand, inspects my wrist.
“Where’d ya go and get a burn like that?”
I slide my hand from her grasp and lie. “The engine.” It’s the only lie I can remember telling my grandmother, but how can I tell her the truth? I’m distinctly aware that burns don’t manifest themselves from the dream world. And was it a dream? Its details cling to me even now, more like a vision. And when did I wake up? Before or after the vision? I shake my head quickly, still unable to make sense of time and place.
Gram’s harrumph tells me she suspects I’m hiding something. She knows the engine wouldn’t make a collar o
f a burn. “Best wrap that wound.”
She shuffles past me, setting a few jars of her jams onto the table, their glass lids tinking as I inhale the heavy yeast smell of rising bread. I tuck down my questions, my fears about the swell of my wrist, the girl from the deep. Or Malaga. Or both.
Are my dreams—my visions—where the dead and the living meet?
I conjure my best everyday voice, let it lift over the throbbing of the burn. “Smells amazing.”
“I should hope so, seeing as they are your favorite.” Gram piles biscuits into a wicker bowl lined with a red cloth napkin. “Reed not staying for breakfast?”
My heart stutters. “Reed?”
Gram fusses with the jams, sticking a small jelly spoon inside each clear jar. “You’re eighteen, Rilla. No sense having that boy sneak out any longer.” She mumbles something about him breaking his neck on the trellis, but I can barely register what she’s saying.
“You know Reed stays over?” How long has she known?
She turns, hand on her hip. “You’re old enough to know I’ve got my eyes open, Rilla. Now sit.” She pushes a plate in front of me. “Ya tell Reed to use the front door when he leaves in the mornings. My roses shouldn’t have to bear the brutality of his clodhoppers after today.”
I reach for a too-hot biscuit.
“Don’t ya look so shocked. I might be old, but I still see things.” Gram splits her flaky roll with the push of her thumb, pours honey along the exposed insides.
“D-did Dad know?”
She knits her brows in my direction. “Ya know I’d never be that careless with his heart.”
Her words freeze me. There were times I was careless with my dad’s heart, when I yelled at him, throwing blame for the most insignificants bits of living. My curfew. Getting up so early.
I massage the skin above my wrist, the burn stinging deeper now, almost familiar, comforting. “Hattie stayed last night, not Reed.”
Gram looks pleased. “I’m glad to hear it. Ya two girls are the opposite sides of a clamshell, made to be stuck together. And has Hattie had the pleasure of meeting your sternman?”
“Not yet.”
“You’ll bring Sam by tonight, yes?”
“Yes.”
Gram packs biscuits in a warmer, part of the deal we made before I went to my room last night. Gram promised to make extra biscuits if I brought Sam to Fairtide to meet her. “I’m packing enough for the both of ya.”
She means Sam, but I hear the familiar words: The both of ya. Me and Dad. He is everywhere with us still. His life is woven into this kitchen, into our habits. And I can’t ignore the way my heart thunders with the suspicion that my mother is here too, her madness visiting me with a power all its own.
CHAPTER TEN
When I step aboard the Rilla Brae, my legs remember how they steadied against the rolling waves as the dead girl crept toward me. The girl bringing death the same way the universe brought Dad’s. Dark. Horrible. Unexpected. The sea spreads its secrets around me, its depths another world.
Today is the first time I hesitate at the Rilla Brae’s ignition. I can’t remember ever pausing before bringing the engine to life, but now I fear what I’ll pull from the sea, as if the dream were a premonition. And it’s the second time in as many weeks that I’ve feared the water.
But I hear Gram’s advice about never setting a place for fear at your table. I turn the key and calm with the familiar vibration of the boat. I slip into my rubber coveralls and focus only on fishing. The ocean refuses to accommodate doubt. “All it takes is one wave, Rilla. One wave and one moment when you aren’t paying attention. Survival on the ocean is fragile.” Even then Dad warned me of the slip of time between life and death. In those days I never imagined we’d exist on opposite sides of the divide.
I throw the engine in gear and head to sea. I channel between Whaleback Ridge on my port side, Malaga at starboard. The island is a mere mound of rock, unprotected from the violent sea, its former residents unprotected from violent judgment. Alone in the wash of water. I slow my speed, raise my gaze to the shadow of the island’s crest. I picture the old woman in her rocking chair, rising to tend her gardens. The men at sea in their open boats, vulnerable in ways they may not have known. And was the girl there too? With her song?
“Did you know people lived on Malaga?” I ask Dad, and maybe my mother too. Because maybe they are here. With me and the sea.
I’m relieved when I don’t get an answer. I was only six when the ambulance took my mother away. I remember the sirens that screamed at the end of my mother’s last night at Fairtide, how they were loud and screeching and frightened my heartbeat. It took a lot of years for me to understand what a psychiatric hospital was, and how the Water People sent her there. Now I want to know how the hallucinations started for her, the slipping of her mind. Because maybe I am more like her than I thought.
I press against the throttle, gaining speed. I give the sea my full attention.
Sam’s on his boat when I arrive, anchored off the lee side of Malaga. Even in the predawn dark, I can see his eager wave as I approach. I cut my engine when I’m close enough to yell to him: “You wanna jump in your skiff, row to me?”
“Nah. Come closer. I can make the leap.”
My money’s on him going in the drink. But Gram says that bravado is the only thing a man can master without a woman’s help, so I let Sam have his.
“You got it.” The current is choppy and carries my boat closer to the USM craft. I worry about marking up the sides of his pristine boat. The Rilla Brae is an old, working boat and bears her share of scars. A new scratch would have plenty of company. I throw the fenders out along the side, let their Styrofoam cushion keep a few inches of distance between the crafts. “Grab the rail, but don’t bend too far. One wave can pull away your balance.”
“Aye, aye, Captain.”
Captain. It’s the word I used for my dad when we were out on the water. A word used everywhere on the sea. But today it feels wholly mine.
Sam leaps onto the Rilla Brae, and I’m impressed.
“I didn’t think you were gonna make it.” I train the floodlight ahead of us. “Gravity and balance are entirely different animals out on the sea.”
“Lesson one, huh?” Sam joins me in the wheelhouse.
“Nope.” I thrust the Rilla Brae in gear. “Lesson one”—I give his bare legs the side eye—“is never wear shorts for lobstering.”
“What’s wrong with shorts?”
“You’ll see.”
“I didn’t bring anything else.”
I nod toward the back corner of the wheelhouse, where my dad’s rubber overalls hang. “Put those on. You’re gonna need them.”
Sam reaches for my father’s Grundens, and in this small space, Sam’s body feels too close to me. I press my pelvis into the wheel, trying to create distance between us. I’m grateful when he steps to the back deck to slide the coveralls on. But when he returns, wearing my father’s uniform, my heart flattens in my chest.
I drive hard to the first buoy and then slow. I hand Sam my extra pair of gloves and the grapple hook. I nod toward the buoy. “That one’s ours. The green stripe intersected by orange. They’re all painted the same. That exact combination lets the other fishermen know that this is the Brae line. Each one bears our license number. Never try to pull a pot that doesn’t have a buoy with our colors, our license.”
“Why not?”
“That’s the way wars start out here. Men shoot men for that treachery.”
“For real?”
“It’s about as real as it gets.”
Sam gives me a short salute. “Got it. No wars.”
“The line sits under the buoy so you have to snag it, pull it up.”
Sam follows the halogen light as it reaches over the frothing waves. He throws the hook, submerging it before he pulls back nothing but seawater. He tries again. And again. “There is a rope, right?” He’s smiling. I’ve seen other newbies begin to look nervous
by now, try to convince me of their manliness. But Sam’s humble, and humble is a good passenger to have on a boat.
“There’s a line.” I wait through six more attempts before he snags its length. The morning sun drags its color into the sky.
He pulls the swollen rope up from the water, but as he turns to me in his excitement, the line slips from the hook. His smile only grows. “Let me guess, that’s not supposed to happen.”
“Not.”
He thrusts up his hand like a stop sign. “Okay, okay. I got this now. Hook the line, but don’t let it slip from the hook.”
“You catch on fast.” We should have hauled at least two strings, three pots each, in the time it takes Sam to drag up one, but my father was patient with me whenever I was learning anything new and I extend the same courtesy to Sam. “All we need is one good pot for supper, so let’s try for that.” They’re the words I tell Sam, exactly as my father said them to me when he first let me use the grapple hook. I was eight and my arm hurt from thrusting that long wooden stick into the water. I slept with a bag of frozen peas on my swollen shoulder that night, but I never told my dad how much pain my first day on the hook had caused. The pride I felt for doing the work on my own was the closest thing I’d ever felt to flying.
“Where’d you go?” Sam asks.
I shake the memory from my head. “I’m here.”
“Check it.” Sam shows me the hook, the thick rope tucked into its steel claw.
“Well done.” I tie the rope to a metal cleat at the rail. “Normally, we’d set the line into the pulley, but your first pot is a special one. All first pots are pulled by hand on this boat.”
“Like this?” He works the line through his gloves, hand over hand.
“Just like that.”
His back struggles against the weight as the trap nears the surface. His stance widens with the strain of the task. Then the surface of the water changes, pops.
“Holy crap. Is that it?”
“It is.” My breathing waits on its contents, like always.
