The Rattled Bones

by S. M. Parker

  I don’t scream. I can’t scream.

  I want to run from my room.

  But I want something more.

  Something bigger than my fear.

  I want her to tell me who she is, what she wants from me.

  I memorize her every feature. Her braids long and black, as shiny as deep-water seaweed. They fall around her shoulders as if she were underwater. Except in one place. One side of her hair is matted, like she spent the night sleeping on that side. No, not matted. Flattened, smashed. One side of her skull is sunken. There’s a scrape along the flesh of her bottom lip, a deep cut that will take a long time to heal. Her mouth opens. I hold my breath, waiting for her words. Waiting for this girl to speak. Waiting for madness to take me. My body tightens with the need to yell at her, tell her to go away, but the word that forms is “Please.”

  She turns and drops down the trellis. I bend through the window, my eyes tracing her every step as she disappears under the still dark space under the maple tree, tendrils of her dress fading, vanishing.

  Even though I feel her here still. Panic sends me to my bedside, searching the pillowcase where she’d lain her head. I’m careful with my movements, precise not to disturb the blankets. I scan the pillow. See a tangle of the girl’s few long hairs. The clump is thin and wavy but with something stuck to its end. Dirt? It flakes off when I touch it, caking apart like dried blood.

  She is real.

  The girl.

  Or, she was real.

  I return to the window. Slam it closed. I shut my room tight so it’s only me and my memory of the girl.

  And that’s when I see the orange bloom she’s left behind.

  But it’s not the flower that chills my nerves. It’s the words scratched into the wood of my windowsill.

  FIND ME

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I take to the sea, knowing I can’t keep my private things quiet any longer. I need Sam’s help, and I need to figure out how to ask for it.

  “You look sore,” I tell Sam when he climbs slowly aboard the Rilla Brae. The sky has let go of the dark, the sun carving out the line of the horizon. I’m late getting on the water. It took too long to recover from the girl’s visit, the flower she left behind.

  Sam leans back, one hand crooked against his hip, like a man four times his age. “I’ve never ached so much in my life.”

  “First days on the water are tough.”

  “You Mainers and your understatements.”

  I offer him my thermos. “It’s meadowsweet and marshmallow root. It’ll help soothe your joints and muscles.”

  “Do you have a vat of it, then?”

  “There’s always more if you need it.”

  He takes the hot tea as I put the Rilla Brae in gear, head out toward the first string. I watch Malaga until it slips behind us. Its shores are empty today, but I think the girl is here. In the sea below us? Watching me from somewhere I can’t see? A chill rakes my spine, and somewhere in my exhaustion I feel an unprecedented surge of pride for my mother. For her realizing that she needed help, and for seeking help. For dealing with her slippery thoughts the only way she knew how. Maybe she needed help to protect what was real: me, Dad, her mother. In this flutter of pride I think maybe she walked away to spare us, save us. In this moment I’m grateful to her. In this moment I begin to understand how walking away could have equaled love. Protection.

  “So I woke up with the profound desire not to slow you down today,” Sam says.

  “You didn’t slow us.”

  “Again. Mainers and their understatements.”

  “Okay, maybe yesterday was a little slow. But that only makes us even.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “I didn’t get you back to the island like I promised. You missed a whole day of scientisting.”

  He gives a deep, full laugh. “Scientisting, huh? Real serious stuff.” He blows at his thermos cup. “I didn’t feel like I was missing out on anything yesterday. It’s important to me that your gram knows she can trust me out here, even if I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  “You’ll know more in eight hours. We’ve got a hundred traps to haul and rebait.”

  “Then what are you waiting for?” Sam sets his mug onto the console and pulls on Dad’s rubber overalls. I’m oddly comforted by the enthusiasm in his voice, and the rubber boots on his feet.

  I navigate around the buoys in this swath of water, careful not to catch a line in my propeller. Settled by the fact that Old Man Benner’s buoys aren’t anywhere near my strings today. There are a few boats already pulling pots. I don’t miss the way each lobsterman’s chin raises at Sam, trying to get a better look at this stranger from away.

  We haul and reset most of my traps by late afternoon, and though I’d love to get another dozen in the water, I head to the wharf.

  “Calling it a day?” Sam says.

  I maneuver my boat against the wharf. I throw her into neutral, cut the engine. “I don’t want to be the captain that doesn’t keep her promises. I need to get you out to Malaga.” But it’s my need that draws me to Malaga.

  “Aye, aye.” Sam hops off the boat, gives Hoopah a high five as if he’s been doing it for years.

  I let Sam do the off-loading. He’s a fast learner, and that’s everything I need right now.

  “Good ta see ya, Rilla.” Hoopah climbs aboard, leans his back against the wheelhouse.

  “It’s good to be seen.” I toss the remnants of the chum buckets overboard. The gulls screech, their long wings and fierce beaks fighting each other for the bloody fish that coat the water. I spray the bait containers semi-clean, tuck them back into place.

  “Good day on the water?”

  “Getting there.”

  “Looks like ya help’s working out.” He throws a nod in Sam’s direction. “I remember the first day ya helped ya dad at sea. Never seen a man with more pride.”

  I was barely four and remember it only from pictures. “A long time ago.”

  “Time’s a tricky thing, Rilla. Feels like yesterday ta me.”

  Time is the trickiest of things. The way the girl reaches me across time, across death. The way it feels like maybe I’ve known her before.

  “Ya need to stay on the water.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Old Man Benner’s got his eyes on ya fishing grounds.”

  I clean the chum knife with a rag, hang it next to the ruler. “I’m aware.”

  “Then ya know ta be careful.”

  “I will, Hoopah. I appreciate you looking out for me.”

  “I owe your fathah a hundred favors or more, Rilla.”

  And I see the loyalty in his eyes, that spark of remembering, of never forgetting. I want to know if the girl had someone looking out for her too. Or is she asking me to remember? Because no one else has?

  “He’d appreciate it, Hoopah. You know he would.”

  “Hope so, Rilla. Hope so.”

  Sam reboards the boat, hands me today’s weigh-in slip. Four hundred and eight pounds. “Not bad.”

  Hoopah lets out a laugh that soars up from his middle. “Ya right about that, Sam Taylah.” He wags his finger at Sam but says to me: “Ya got yourself a good sternman there, Rilla, and I’m glad ta see it.” He shakes his head like he’s letting the last bit of laughter break free. Then he sucks his lip between his teeth, lets out a whistle that calls his dog to his side. “See ya tomorrow, Rilla.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “See ya.” Sam waves, still enthusiastic, even though every inch of him must ache.

  I navigate away from the dock, and Sam moves to the back of the boat, readies our lines for tomorrow’s run. When I near the shores of Malaga, I put the engine in neutral, let the tide slide us toward the University of Southern Maine boat. My mouth plays with the question that’s been on my mind since reading the girl’s plea. “Sam?”

  Sam’s rinsing his hands overboard, wringing the day’s work from his fingers. “Rilla?”

  “
How would it be if I helped you on the island?” This is the easiest way to ask for help that I know—by offering it.

  “Malaga?”

  “Are you digging on another island?”

  He laughs. “No.” He slips off his coveralls, hangs them in the wheelhouse. “It’s just that . . . I don’t know . . . You always seem like you’re kinda in a rush to get off the island.”

  “Maybe.” Definitely. “But not anymore. Not since I read your research.”

  Sam reaches overboard to grab his skiff, drops over the edge and into his boat. He waves me aboard. “I’d dig it if you worked in the dirt with me, Rilla Brae.” He gives me a soft wink and I laugh.

  I wish I were brave enough to tell Sam about the girl, her request. And how I think she was from here. That I think the island might have more than artifacts buried. That secrets are restless on the island. I drop anchor, strip off my Grundens, and join Sam in his boat.

  At the site, Sam hands me a trowel no different from the kind Dad used for masonry work around our property. He shows me how to carve out small sections of earth with a gentle hand, then screen the dirt for remnants of buttons, glass, tobacco pipes, anything that wouldn’t come by the dirt naturally.

  Maybe to find the answers, I need to know everything Sam knows, the truths that might exist outside of photographs and articles and the eviction notice. Then maybe I’ll be able to tell him about the girl’s visits, her song. I want the whole puzzle of the story, so I start with one piece as I sift a small dollop of earth against the thin metal lines of a screen.

  “My best friend, Hattie . . . her grandmother remembered what happened out here.”

  Sam leans back from the edge of the site, rests his forearms on his thighs. “Tell me.” His eyes are hungry.

  “Hattie’s nan told Hattie about the islanders being taken to Pineland.”

  “ ‘Taken’ is a nice way to put it; ‘forcibly committed’ is more accurate.”

  “Yes, right.” The faces of the children crowd my head. Which one didn’t know what a telephone was? Who was that boy who spent four decades locked in an institution because he couldn’t identify an object that had no function in his island life? The girl would have known that boy, all the children. They would’ve been family, in the way of island living. “Hattie’s nan told her she regretted it, what was done to the people here.”

  Sam’s eyes narrow. “Regretted it how?”

  My screen empties of dirt and I let it hang from my grasp. “She told Hattie she was sorry she didn’t have more love in her heart. I can’t let that go, you know? That she was sorry, like it was a personal regret.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  I sculpt out another small chunk of earth, easy with my blade as I slice. “I’m thinking Hattie’s nan knew what was happening on these shores and was complicit, or her family was complicit. I think she was basically telling Hattie that maybe if she had had more love in her heart, she might have tried to stop what happened out here. At least, that’s what I want to believe.” I see Hattie’s nan hovering over me, straightening my uniform, always making triple certain I looked proper for Brownies—even though she knew Gram already did the same for me before I left the house. “She would’ve been really young then, though. Maybe ten or twelve years old.” I want her youth to exonerate her from the crimes that were committed.

  “The population here was pretty small then, and word would have traveled by gossip. She likely heard about it at a community gathering.”

  “Or over supper.”

  He nods.

  Everyone on the mainland would have known what was happening eighty years ago. The news articles didn’t print themselves, and they were too salacious to have gone unread. And what about Gram’s parents? Did they want the islanders gone? Dad always taught me to judge a person by their capacity for kindness and nothing else, but this was an entirely different generation of men.

  Men who evicted other men. And their families.

  “I think most mainlanders wanted the island cleared by the time the order of eviction was served. Malaga became a local embarrassment after Boston papers started running articles and photos. But I don’t think it was always that way.”

  “It couldn’t have been. Malaga residents were left in peace for decades, no different from other island communities around here.” I sift the dirt clear of the excavation site, watch small bits drop through the fine screen.

  “And the people probably would have been left alone if the island itself wasn’t so desirable. It seems like all the research agrees on that one point in the end—that the racial and economic tensions regarding Malaga really boiled down to the fact that the mainland saw a chance for developing tourism to the island.”

  “That’s the shameful part of this whole story. That an entire culture could be erased so someone could build a hotel. It feels like the shame should sit with the state, the developers, the mainlanders—not the people of Malaga or their descendants.”

  “Power of the press, right?” Sam uses a brush to smooth away dirt from the exposed wrought iron.

  The grate looks so familiar to me now. I recognize it. My adrenaline rushes, bringing satisfaction for connecting one small piece of this island’s history.

  “Sam.” I’m not sure why I didn’t make the connection before. I grab his moleskin from my pack, open it to the photo of the empty schoolhouse decorated for Christmas. I point to the child’s desk in the foreground, its ironwork legs identical to the ornate metal Sam excavates.

  “I know. Pretty cool, right?”

  “You’re not surprised?”

  He shakes his head.

  “But you said you didn’t know what it was.”

  “I don’t. I won’t know for absolute certain until it’s above the earth.”

  A not-so-small part of me deflates. The part that was hoping I could discover some long-forgotten piece of this island’s story. “I hope that’s what it is. I want some part of the school to survive out here.”

  “Hope is an important thing, Rilla. I think the missionaries who raised money for the school had a lot of hope. The school probably represented hope to the residents.”

  “Until it was taken away.”

  “Yes, well, I’m not sure the school or the islanders could have suffered a different fate.”

  I feel cold breath on my neck, the same biting cold that joined me in bed this morning. I turn to see the girl, but there’s no one. Still, the shiver climbs inside of my bones. “Why do you say that?”

  “Discrimination is discrimination. Racism is racism. There’s no getting it right when one group thinks they’re inherently superior to another.”

  “But the islanders were institutionalized. That’s the part I can’t get my mind around. Why take their freedom away? Why lock up innocent people?” Why lock them in a place where people were sent to be forgotten, and worse?

  “Malaga Island residents weren’t innocent, Rilla. They were immoral, living out of traditional wedlock. Shiftless. You read the articles.”

  “You can’t possibly believe that propaganda.”

  “Of course not, but it’s important to contextualize our findings in this field. And back then, difference was unacceptable. Mainstream society didn’t know how to look at the poor or disabled any other way. So they built warehouses—institutions—to store people away. They believed they were removing a danger to middle-class values.”

  “But the middle class was the danger. The islanders probably knew that on some level, don’t you think? That’s why they lived off the grid.”

  “Probably.”

  “So how could no one from the mainland dissent? Your research doesn’t include even one document that defended the rights of islanders to stay on Malaga.” It was their home, where generations buried their dead.

  “I’m certain many people objected, but their voices didn’t make headlines. The summer residents—the people so invested in clearing the island—had more money and power than all the families
on the peninsula put together.” He pulls back his brush, looks to me. “And think about it. If you’re sold a picture of what progress looks like—a shiny new hotel on the private Malaga shores, and this hotel will bring jobs for furniture builders, housekeepers, maintenance workers—well, that all sounds appealing. The hotel would be crammed with foreign visitors hungry for the freshest seafood. It would have been a pretty easy sell to get most people on the mainland to support that iteration of progress.”

  “They just had to clear the obstacles in their way.” People. Families. Generations.

  “Exactly. And what better way to dehumanize people than science? Eugenics boasted scientific evidence that proved poverty and degeneracy were heredity. We’re talking about a time when the government legally sanctioned sterilization to stave off the spread of birth defects, immorality, poverty. Consider the particular racial makeup of Malaga residents during a time when interracial marriages were illegal by state law—these were all signs of depravity to many people back then. People who had more political and economic power than the islanders.”

  “People who had all the power.” My strainer catches something. A shard. “Sam. I think I found something.”

  He sets down his brush, comes to my side. “Pottery.”

  It’s a sliver of brownish-red glaze, the kind of earthenware Gram uses for floral vases. One-gallon jugs that once held milk, rum, syrups. I shake free the loose bits of dirt around the finger-length shard. Sam pulls tweezers and a plastic Baggie from his messenger bag.

  He plucks the chip with the tweezers, rubs the remaining clay away with his thumb and forefinger. One side is dull gray, the interior of the pottery. The other, red and shiny—the glazed exterior. “See there.” He points to a blue printed curve, the remains of a circle.

  “The maker’s mark.”

  “What remains of it.” Sam examines the pottery, bringing it close to his eyes. “This could be an early piece, Rilla. As early as the Civil War. You can tell by the glazing.” He drops the broken pottery into the small bag and seals it. He scrolls something across the bag’s top edge.