by S. M. Parker
“Sam Taylor,” he says, nodding.
She waves Sam through the doors and into the kitchen as if they were old friends and introductions are a bother. “The suppah sides are all prepared and the water’s waiting. Just set them in there, Sam, and I’ll do the rest.”
“Smells delicious in here.” Sam’s chest expands with his deep breath. “I might never want to leave.” It’s possible Sam will ask Gram to marry him because the air really is thick with culinary temptations.
“We should go wash up and change.”
Sam tugs at the side of his dirty T-shirt. “Good idea, but I’m seriously underprepared.”
I point toward the bathroom door behind the kitchen. “There’s soap, and you can grab a fresh hand towel from under the sink. I’ll find you a shirt.”
“Perfect, thanks.”
I head to my room and strip off my work clothes. I pull on an identical uniform of a T-shirt and leggings, the clean version. I go to the upstairs bathroom to splash fresh water on my face and scrub the salt from my hands and forearms. My stomach rumbles with a deep hunger now that it senses Gram’s cooking is near. I grab an ancient, oversize black Ramones concert shirt from my drawer and hand it to Sam when I reach the base of the stairs.
He pinches the shoulders of the shirt between his thumbs and forefingers, lets the fabric hang. “Respect.”
My dad would have liked Sam.
I join Gram in the kitchen as Sam changes. I pour milk for Sam, set out Gram’s mug and mine and take a quick inventory of the table. I add a large open bowl for the broken shells, lobster crackers for all of us, and pour the melted butter into three individual warmers. I can’t help but wonder if Gram felt the same strangeness as she set out three plates tonight, but I don’t ask. Instead, I run my hand along the length of her back as I pass her at the stove, letting her know I’m here, that I am close and I’m not going anywhere. Maybe the gesture is more for me than her.
Gram removes the bread from the oven and nods toward the boiling water on the stove. “Bugs are ready.”
I grab two potholders and sidle up to the large soup pot just as Sam joins us in the kitchen. “I’d love to help with that if you’ll let me.”
It’s not a Here, let me get that or an I’ve got this. It’s an offer of assistance, but not because he’s a man asserting his strength. He asks because he’s a guest and wants to help. I don’t miss how Gram’s eyebrows raise at this same realization. I pull the pot holders from my hands and pass them to Sam.
“Great. Just drain the water in the sink.”
“Slowly,” Gram warns as she slices through the tender top crust of fresh-baked oatmeal bread. “It’s boiling.”
“Trust me, I’m all about the slow.” Sam carries the pot to the sink and empties the water in a smooth, steady flow.
I pull out the steaming lobsters left at the bottom, their shells bright red now, their claws still bound by the thick blue elastic band we applied after pulling them from the sea.
Sam brings the platter of lobsters to the table, places them in front of Gram. “Can I get anything else?”
“Nonsense.” Gram waves him to his seat. “The food’s getting cold waiting on all your politeness.” I love the hint of a smile that seeps out with Gram’s words.
Sam takes his seat, Dad’s seat. Sam is smaller than Dad, with slimmer shoulders and a quieter voice. My dad filled a room with his laughter and his bulk.
Sam spreads his napkin across his lap and scoops roasted potatoes and garden snap peas onto his plate. When he adds an ear of corn, he inhales the steam. “Is that sage?”
Gram nudges my hand, clearly approving. “Nothing better to season early corn than sage butter.”
“Couldn’t agree more, Mrs. Murphy.”
“Don’t ya ‘Mrs. Murphy’ me, young man. I’m Gram in this house, and if you’re in this house, then I’m Gram to ya, too.”
Sam smiles a grateful grin. “That just might be the best thing anyone has ever said to me.”
“Well, then, son, you’ve lived a boring life and ya need to get out more.”
“Gram!”
“No.” Sam laughs. “She’s right. I do need to get out more. Don’t we all?”
Gram gives him an admiring nod. “Tell that to Rilla here.”
“Something tells me Rilla makes her own choices.”
I feel a blush rise in me, the way its heat is stirred by his compliment.
“Eat up,” Gram orders. We do. As Sam and I eat to calm the hunger born from a long day at sea, Gram exercises her expert interrogation. She asks the questions behind the questions. She never asks outright if Sam can handle himself on a boat, if she can trust him with my life. Instead she asks if he has siblings (a brother), if he’s close with him (very). How he feels about being so far from the desert and the friends he’s known all his life. Gram is unearthing his morality. His core. Because all the boat stuff can be learned. Gram is trying to determine if Sam is someone who will have my back if there’s danger. Someone to trust, rely on, in good and bad weather. Sam answers every question with grace, and to Gram’s credit, she makes it all seem like good, wholesome conversation instead of her intent fact-finding mission.
“Can I ask you something now?” Sam says to Gram as he sets a bright red lobster onto his plate, removes the blue claw bands with his fork after watching me do the same. “How do I do this?” He taps his fork against the shell.
“Do what, now? Eat a lobster?”
“Yes. Exactly that. Fresh seafood isn’t exactly a staple in the desert.”
Gram lets out a laugh so loud and quick that her head jolts back. “Rilla, we’ve got ourselves an honest-to-goodness landlubber at our table.”
“Maybe so,” Sam says, his smile as bright as Gram’s. “But I’m a big fan of the lobster, and I’d be a bigger fan of it being in my stomach. The question is, how does one make that happen?”
Gram leans forward, squints her eyes at Sam. “You’re a funny one, Sam Taylor.” She sits back, stares at him. “I like funny.”
Sam’s smile has actual wattage.
“Want some help?” I ask.
“I would be very grateful for some help.”
“Follow my lead.” I grab my second lobster from the serving dish and crack the body from the tail, letting the hot water drip into the bowl, over my fingers. Sam copies me. He mimics every move I make as I extract the meat from the lobster, and it feels oddly intimate. Gram watches my wrist, the bright white bandage there.
After dinner, Sam gives Gram a hug and Gram gives Sam a heaping plate of leftovers and a whole loaf of fresh oat bread. Sam and I walk down to the Rilla Brae. The light is leaving the sky, but a deep blue still clings to the horizon, even as it’s determined to turn black.
When we reach the dock, Sam says, “I didn’t realize you could see Malaga from your house.” His expression tells me there’s something he’s not saying.
“I’ve got a bird’s-eye view from my bedroom window.”
“Is that your clever way of saying that you’re spying on me?”
I push at his shoulder with mine and he laughs.
“I know. Hopeful thinking. I get the very clear sense that you have more important things to do than spy on me.” He gestures toward the lip of the dock, asking if we can sit. I do. Sam joins me. He takes off his sneakers and socks and tosses them behind him onto the grass. “I should wear boots tomorrow.”
“You should.”
“My sneakers smell like chum.”
“They do.” I smile, find the rising paper moon. “I hate to tell you, but those sneakers will never not smell like chum now.”
“That’s unfortunate. A tragic end to a trusted pair of Chucks.” He dips his feet into the cold ocean water, and the waves bounce against his shins. “How do you not spend every second of your life out here?”
“I basically do.” I remember thinking how much I’d miss this shore when I was set to go to Rhode Island. I pull my knees to my chest and concentrate on
the waves lapping against the pillars of the dock, the way their white foam sprays up, reaching. There’s no fog tonight. Only a fair wind.
“This is how I pictured it would be, you know. Maine. The shore. But it’s actually more beautiful than I imagined, and it’s just your backyard, like it’s no big deal, like it’s not the most magical place on earth.”
His words make the familiar new.
“Your grandmother is great too. Good family is important.”
“You miss yours, huh?” A fact Gram unearthed.
“Sure. They’re the best.” He liberates a small pebble from between the aluminum wharf boards and rolls it along the cup of his palm. “I’m adopted.”
“Lucky.” Just as I say this word, I want to pull it back. Who am I to say he’s lucky when I know exactly zero about what lucky would look like for him?
“Huh.” He looks at me, his eyes wide. “Not the usual response when I tell people I’m adopted.”
“There’s a usual response?”
“Unfortunately, the follow-up question rarely varies. People ask where my real parents are.” I feel his weight shift beside me, how uncomfortable it is for him to say those words. “So I’m kind of fascinated to know why you think I’m lucky.”
I stare out at Malaga, the mound of earth darkened by night. “Your parents chose you. Out of all the kids, they chose you. Maybe you weren’t old enough to choose them, but—”
“I was twelve when I was adopted. Three when I met my mother, but twelve when it all became official and legal and forever.”
I smile. “Twelve was quite a year for you.”
“You have no idea.” He tosses the pebble across the waves, where it disappears.
“So you got to choose your mom and dad?”
“I did.”
“See? Lucky.”
A low grin spreads on his face. “Can’t disagree.” He throws another pebble and it kerplunks before disappearing into the waves. “Even after everything I wouldn’t want it any other way.”
I want to ask after his “everything,” but I’m not ready to share my own.
“Your grandmother would get along great with my mom. She’s a little”—he searches for the word—“nontraditional. An eccentric-artist type. But she’s superwarm. Like your gram.”
“My gram’s a painter.”
“Yeah?” He turns to me, crooks one leg between us. “What does she paint?”
I shrug. “I have no idea. It’s kind of her private thing.”
Sam nods, full of knowing. “Everybody’s got one, right?”
“One what?”
“Their private thing.”
I think of my “private things”: Dad’s death. My mother’s struggle with sanity. My hallucinations, which might make me too much like her. Then there’s the guilt over wanting to leave the only home I’ve ever known. And the desire to know if my family forced Malaga residents off their island.
Sam throws another stone. “My dad’s a sculptor, makes things with recycled junk.”
“Your parents sound cool.”
“They are. Tucson is kind of a mecca for cool. Musicians, artists, sunshine. It’s a mix that makes some parts feel more like a commune than a municipality.”
“I can’t imagine. Most Mainers can trace their family back ten generations on the same land. Mainers aren’t big on leaving Maine.”
“What about you?”
“I’d planned to go away for school, but I always knew I’d come back.” Even as much as I tire of gruff men barking over property lines and fishing grounds, this place is in my blood. “Hard to leave what’s in your blood.”
“Hence no one leaving.”
I laugh. “Exactly.”
Sam pulls his other foot from the water, sits cross-legged. “You still plan to leave for college?”
“I don’t know. The answer is kind of wrapped up in my private thing. It’s one of my private things anyway.”
“Fair enough.” He turns back to the sea, dangles his feet. “You know how I told you that ancient book was the reason I came to Maine, to Malaga?”
“Of course.”
“Well, that wasn’t exactly truthful, or at least not the whole truth.”
I find I want to know Sam’s whole truth. I want to know if he holds back parts of the truth because he’s protecting pieces of him, no different than me.
“My family is the real reason I’m here.”
“Are they from Maine?”
He laughs. “No, no. Nothing like that. It’s complicated and kind of wrapped up in my one private thing, so . . .”
“So . . .”
We let the ocean stretch and pool and breathe around us while we kick our feet in the cold tide. We let the starlight watch us. We guard all our private things under the moon’s steady gaze. Something about the quiet night brings me peace. I don’t need to think about Dad or Malaga or school or the wound at my wrist. Right here, right now is all that matters. Tomorrow can cram its worry into me. But tonight I allow calm to reach inside of me.
* * *
My eyes open to the dark just before my alarm clock has a chance to bleat its five a.m. call. I feel Reed behind me, his limbs tucked against all my curves. I bask in his heat. I’m sorry for lying to him, and I press my weight into his frame, enough to feel his warmth spread against mine but not enough to wake him. Not yet. No part of me wants to separate from his rest just yet. In a few minutes we’ll both need to get up, get out on the water.
I close my eyes to his breathing, its steady rise and fall. In and out. The warmth of his lungs expelling and falling into my hair. In and out. Push and pull. I focus on it so singularly that his breathing is the only sound that fills my ears until his breathing becomes louder. Deeper. It’s not a snore, but something fuller, greater. As if the very room expands with his breath, retreats with his inhale. I dart open my eyes. The white noise of his breathing crams my ears. Reed’s snoring is never this loud. No one’s breathing can be this loud. I reach my hand down to his arm slung over my waist and want to shake him awake. Stop the noise. Quiet the room, my head. But my hand slips over his skin and feels the cold of him. The shocking, blinding cold. Cold in the way no living skin has the right. I turn in my bed to face him, shake him, wake him. But it’s not Reed who lies against me.
Her eyes dart open as if I’ve woken her, as if I’m the one who startled her. The girl is next to me. The one from the shore, the one from the deep. Her black eyes stare at me, asking a question I can’t answer. She smells of the sea, this girl. Her coarse black braids hold the sweet scent of the wind, the salt of the ocean. My heart thuds in my chest and my brain struggles to make sense of my room, my bed, this girl here with me. My fingers rake at the sheets, trying to find the edges, trying to free me from the bed. My legs kick. My frantic arms push distance between us. Then she speaks.
“I’m here,” she tells me. Her voice is gravel and water. It holds a slippery hoarseness that shakes the words she pushes over her full pink lips. In her breath is something more, the dank earth, the smell of rooted plants. She opens her mouth wide and on her tongue sits the perfect blinding orange cup of a Flame Freesia.
I scramble out of bed, throwing my covers over her as I rip free from my sheets. The scream in my chest won’t rise or gather sound. Because something about me trusts her. Wants to know why she’s here. Wants to know: why me? I press my back to the corner of my room, the windows and the sea behind me, the lump of this strange girl in my bed. Her body and face are hidden by the mess of my blankets, but her dark braids swim over the stark white of my pillowcase. They are seaweed and earth and hair, plaited together.
“Who are you?” I whisper, daring her to speak again. Daring my brain to make this real. I press a hand to my head, try to keep my mind from slipping. As if it is that easy.
Questions race as I wait in the silence for her response. Nothing comes. I fill the quiet with a mantra, the repeated youarenotreal, youarenotreal, youarenotreal. Is this how it happened for my
mother? Uninvited, persistent hallucinations that grew into something bigger, harder to push away?
I shove the heels of my palms into my eyes, pushing away the vision of the girl in my bed, pushing away any connection to my mother’s lost grip on reality. This has to be a dream. I just need to wake up. I stand, force my dream self to press harder against the wall, my fingers clawing at the plaster, as if I can escape this room and this nightmare by sheer force. The room quiets. The house quiets. The only breath is my own, so I squeeze closed my eyes. I open them. Slowly, carefully.
The girl is gone. I force a small step toward the bed and hover my hand over the impression her body made. My heartbeat thunders under every inch of my skin. I slip my hand along the comforter, the places where her outline still shows. The quilt is cold. Winter cold, and I shiver. I rip the cover off my bed, let it collapse into a heap on the floor.
I step back. My hands reach behind me, feel for the lip of the window seat, and I lean against its dependable wood. I force my breathing to calm, try to pull myself back to reality. It was another dream. It had to be a dream. I grab harder to the seat’s sill, trying to ground myself in the now, wake myself from a nightmare.
I pull in my breath, force it out. Pull it in, out. I listen to the waves, the tide rolling and receding, rolling and receding. I match my breath to that of the sea. I pull the wet air into my lungs, remind myself that this is home and I am okay.
Behind me the sea calls, its force beating at the shore.
It was nothing but a dream.
Light begins to stream into my room from the rising sun. Just a soft wink of pale yellow at first. The waves grow louder, churning harder. I turn to see the whitecaps pounding into the shore and then I tumble back.
The girl is here.
In my window.
Perched on the trellis the way Reed has done so many times. She is all head and shoulders, her legs unseeable on the rungs of the ladder. My heart thumps loud as the exploding waves, but I don’t move.
“Who are you?” My words are a desperate plea.
The girl—this real girl who is no dream—puts a finger to her lips. The skin around her nail is rough red from the abrasive sea, the battering cold. Dirt clings under her nails. “Shhh.” She whispers now, this soft command floating out from behind her raw finger.
