The Rattled Bones

by S. M. Parker

  “That’s true, they did.”

  “She could have been on the mainland. Maybe that’s why there aren’t any photos of her.”

  Sam nods. “Possible.” Sam considers this reality like we’re not talking about a spirit that haunts me. “I’m not sure we’ll ever conclusively know everything about the settlement, Rilla. So much has been lost to time. But your girl could have lived here. There are discrepancies almost everywhere in the record keeping. Even today sources can’t agree on how many graves were removed from the island or how many residents were forcibly committed to the state asylum—and those are pretty major occurrences. The state failing to document a resident or two seems totally feasible,” Sam says.

  I think of another of Sam’s notes, how one of the bodies—the body of a child—was lost overboard when the state ferried the graves off the island. “Or two? You mean her baby.”

  “You say she has one.”

  “I’m not sure. I know I’ve heard an infant cry more than once. A terrible cry.” My skin burns with the heat of bruises setting into my skin, the attack with me still.

  “Maybe your girl gave birth after the census workers were here. Population was determined in July of 1931, but the evacuation didn’t happen until the following year.”

  “Plenty of time for a baby to be born.” My mind latches on to this possibility.

  “Except.” Sam’s face falls. “There was the threat of imprisonment if the residents didn’t show on the day the census was taken. Remember?”

  I do. The newspaper clippings in Sam’s research journal. The warning notice posted on the island and mainland weeks before the day of the census. Islanders would have feared that threat, same as any free person. What would cause the girl to defy the government? The law? “What if she couldn’t be here?”

  “Couldn’t?”

  “What if she had her baby on the exact day the census workers came?”

  “Then we’d have records of her and the baby.”

  “Unless she wasn’t here when the child was born.” The wind sings about my ear. FIND ME, it pleads.

  “You’re thinking she was in the hospital?”

  “No.” I quicken my pacing. “Malaga women would’ve had their babies at home. And with the hate building toward the residents, I’m not sure the hospital would’ve admitted her.”

  “So then . . . what?”

  What? I have no idea. “I don’t know. I’m only speculating. But what if she was a domestic worker and was on the mainland when her baby came? Or on her boat? An island woman would’ve been strong enough to endure childbirth alone.”

  “You think?”

  “Any girl would have seen a half-dozen babies born on the island during her lifetime. Girls would have helped with births—or at least the cleanup.”

  Sam considers. “It’s a good theory.”

  “But it’s just a theory.” I need more. The girl wants me to know more.

  Sam’s eyes drop with sadness. “A theory is likely as close as we’ll ever get to the truth.”

  The girl isn’t always with the child and I’ve never seen the infant’s face. Perhaps it’s something else she’s carrying. But then, no. I heard the child’s wailing. Even that first day I knew that cry was unmistakably that of a baby’s. “She had a child.” I know this as clear as I know my own name. “I think maybe that’s what she’s trying to tell me.” I stop, look at Sam. “Does that sound impossible?”

  He stands, comes to me, takes my hands in his. “I think everything that happened out here was unforgiveable. It’s honestly hard to get my head around it most days. But the scientist in me wants proof.”

  “Proof ?”

  He nods. “I wish we had something, Rilla. Anything to tie your girl to the island.”

  “You have me. Everything I’ve told you.”

  “Then that’ll have to be enough.” He lets go of my hands, and his absence makes my skin go cold. He bends at his knee and rests a palm to the earth, as if listening to its story. I imagine it vibrating with the hum of bees. “I was at a friend’s birthday party when I got my first kiss.”

  My head shoots up at the randomness of this information.

  “Johanna Light. I’ll never forget that kiss. She was so beautiful.” He gives a short laugh.

  “Sounds like a good kiss.”

  “It was the best. That first kiss. It ripped through me like a thunderbolt.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because the weird thing is that the kiss happened when I was living with my aunt. But when I was returned home months later, my mother knew about the kiss.”

  “Someone told her?”

  He shakes his head. “No. She said she saw it. Like watched it.”

  “Weird.”

  “No, Rilla. You don’t understand. There was a whole state between me and my mom then but she told me that she was on the couch, closing her eyes for a short summer nap, and she saw me kiss Johanna Light. She described everything—Johanna’s dress, the tree we stood under, the other kids fooling at the tire swing near the birthday table filled with chips and drinks. She even saw the yellow balloons tied to the table’s legs.” He steals a breath. “Man, I hadn’t remembered the yellow balloons until just now.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “My mom said that’s the way love worked. That when someone you love feels this ultimate joy—or sadness—the people you love feel it too.”

  I brush at the bumps rising on my forearms.

  “She said love meant our hearts and minds were connected even when we weren’t together.”

  I can’t help but wonder if my own mother has seen snippets of my life in her dreams.

  “It happened one other time, when my brother had to go to the hospital. She knew every detail of his accident. As if she’d been there.”

  “There aren’t a lot of people who would believe those stories.”

  “But you do, right?”

  “I do.”

  Sam smiles. “My mom always said my brother and I were born from her heart since she didn’t give birth to us, you know.”

  My heart skips with a lovely pain. “That’s beautiful.”

  “I’ve always thought so. But everything my mother taught me about love makes sense here, too. Maybe this girl’s heart is connected to yours somehow. Maybe that’s why you can see her.”

  I think it.

  I fear it.

  I know it.

  Want it.

  The crisp whine of a calling gull cuts through the silence that settles over us.

  “And you . . . ?” Sam stops, waves away the thought. “Nah, forget it.”

  “What? You can ask. Nothing is too weird now.”

  “You’d mentioned maybe your mother saw the girl too?”

  I sit, pull my knees closer to my chest, holding this possibility in my heart. It is a reason for my mother leaving. A reason that isn’t me. “I think maybe she did.”

  “Do you think your mother was attacked? That hers is the memory you felt?”

  “No.” I know this even if I don’t know how I know. “It was the girl’s memory. But I think the girl visited my mother somehow. My mother used to call them Water People, the people she thought lived in the ocean. But maybe there was only one Water Person.”

  One girl reaching out to my mother.

  “The last time I saw my mother, she was collecting stones from the sea.”

  My mother’s hands so delicate.

  “I watched her in the surf, how she filled her pockets with those stones. I remember being so excited for her to bring me all her treasures.”

  Rocks trampled by dinosaurs, squeezed by continents of ice.

  Broken glass from a pirate ship, purple and exotic.

  “She used to collect broken bits of clay from the shore and tell me tales of how the Water People left their pots behind.”

  “Whoa.”

  “But on her last night here those discarded pieces weren’t enough. My mother a
dded rocks to the pockets of her skirt. Small ones at first. I was only six when I watched her walk straight into the waves, carrying so much extra weight. I knew she was going to the Water People, and I’d never been so scared.” My breath hitches. “I knew she wanted them more than me. She was choosing them over me, and all I could do was watch. She was leaving me behind, and I didn’t know how to make her stay.”

  “Rilla.” Sam reaches for my hand. I feel his warmth wrap my fingers.

  “My gram called an ambulance, and they brought her to the hospital. But she’s stayed away for twelve years. Maybe she never wanted to be with me at all.”

  “I can’t believe that’s true.”

  I did. All these years. Until now.

  Sam squeezes my hand.

  “Now I think maybe she wanted to protect me from her, or maybe my mother thought she took the Water People with her—you know? To keep me safe.” Protected. “But I think she saw my girl. I think my mother was trying to find my girl.”

  “Same as you.”

  Same, but different, too.

  “Just promise me you won’t walk into the sea like that.”

  “I won’t.” I would never. But maybe my mother thought that once too.

  * * *

  At home, I research everything about the boatbuilder’s family. There’s a photo of him and his wife at the front door of their small one-room house, two children at their feet. Their clothes are clean but worn. The children are shoeless. The man has his arm around his wife’s waist, as if to protect her. UNIDENTIFIED CHILDREN, the photo says. Like so many others. I wait for the song to rise, but its melody never fills the air. I wait for some connection to speak to me, but there’s nothing.

  Only the hard wind churning up from a swelled sea.

  I fall asleep with the images of Malaga all around me.

  I dream of swimming.

  I poke my seal-slick head from the water, and an old dory coasts along the waves. The girl’s inside, rowing from the peninsula to the island. I swim behind her. The sides of her boat are low like the one Sam described from the book he discovered when he was twelve in the desert, low enough to scoop fish from the sea. I swim my head higher and see the fat bundle on the empty seat at the back of the boat. I think it’s the girl’s baby until I see the rounded cloth tied at her breast, the child at her heart. As the girl pulls the oars against the sea, she leans back, her infant rounding toward the moon. And in the spray of light that the moon lends the surface of the sea, I notice the blooms of the Flame plant, their bright orange flowers like fire in the boat, its bulbs and roots wrapped in burlap as if the uprooted plant were a gift.

  When I wake I go straight to Gram’s front garden and let my fingers stroke the soft emerging bud of the Flame plant—the plant named for fire. I break off a flowering stem to show Sam. Because it’s in this garden that I realize I shouldn’t be looking for a girl.

  We need to be looking for a plant.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I want nothing more than to search the island for the Flame Freesia at first light, but I have to haul traps. Sam sets the gaff hook on the first buoy in our string and starts to pull. Immediately I know something is wrong. There’s no tug at the opposite end of the line. The rope slicks too quickly through the pulley, pulling up only seaweed.

  “What happened?”

  “We lost a string.” One string, three traps.

  “How?”

  I pull up the rope, fan my thumb over the sprig of tufted rope that sprays wild as a snipped braid. “Someone cut the line.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Happens all the time. It’s a shitty way to settle a dispute.” I scan the sea for other boats, one that might be watching too closely, but of course there’s no one. Cowards never stick around.

  “You think it was Benner? Retaliation for what you did to his traps?”

  “Most likely.” But a small worry grows inside of me that this sabotage could have been Reed because of the things he said—the argument that may have been too harsh for us to come back from. I shake off the thought. “There’s no better way to tell someone they don’t belong on the water.” I set my course for the next buoy, my rage building toward Benner. “We need to check the next string.”

  The next string is fine. The next thirty strings are fine. Sam and I band the keepers and it’s almost a good enough haul to calm my anger for anyone messing with my traps. Until Sam pulls a slack rope at the end of our run.

  “Rilla?”

  I join him at pulley. The last line is cut, just like the first line.

  “This isn’t a coincidence, is it?”

  “I’d say that’s about as far from a coincidence as you can get.” It’s Benner telling me girls don’t belong at sea. I know it the way any lobster fisherman would know.

  “What happens to the traps?”

  “They’re ghost traps now. They’ll sit on the bottom of the sea forever.”

  “With lobsters inside?”

  “The tiny ones might crawl out, but the big ones get stuck in there.”

  “And they die?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes the trapped lobsters attract new lobsters to climb in and one cannibalizes the other. No one really knows how long something like that can go on.”

  “Not good.”

  “Arizonians and their understatements.” I toss the buoy into the back of the boat to join the severed line from the first string. “The sea bottom is littered with ghost traps.”

  “I’m sorry, Rilla.”

  I thrust forward on the throttle. “Nothing you need to be apologizing for unless you’re the one who cut my line.”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  “There isn’t a lobster boat captain alive who would joke about ghost traps.”

  We deliver our haul to the co-op, and it’s decent. Four hundred and six pounds. “I’m gonna go grab a check for this.” I wave the sales slip at Sam. “Mind waiting on the boat?”

  “I’ll hose her down.”

  I nod and head toward the office.

  Hoopah’s smile welcomes me inside. “Good ta see ya.”

  “It’s good to be seen.”

  “Whatcha got there?”

  “Today’s slip. Just need to get paid out today.”

  His brow creases. “That’s not like ya. Don’t want the check sent to ya account?”

  “Not for this haul.”

  He nods toward my slip, and I hand it to him. He studies the value. “Ayuh. A good day, Rilla.” Hoopah flips the checkbook open to a new page and uses a calculator to multiply my catch weight by today’s price per pound.

  “Make it out to Sam Taylor.”

  Hoopah nods. “If that’s what ya want.” He writes out a check and signs his name. He tears it off, hands it to me. “You’d make any father proud, Rilla.”

  I fold the check, slip it in my coveralls. “You haven’t heard any chatter on the docks, have you?”

  “Nothing but chattah.”

  “Two of my strings were cut today.”

  He narrows his eyes. “That so?”

  I nod. “I know you likely won’t hear anything, but just in case.”

  He scratches at nonexistent facial hair on his chin. “I’ve got my suspect.”

  “Me too.”

  “Ya watch ya’self now.”

  “Always.”

  He nods. “Ayuh.”

  On my way back to the wharf, I see Reed and his grandfather stacking new traps onto his grandfather’s boat. They’re shining green and don’t carry a lick of clinging seaweed. I stare at Reed, know he sees me. And I don’t mistake how he doesn’t wave, doesn’t even raise his head in a nod. I hate the way my suspicion flares for Reed being partly responsible for my six traps being lost to the sea.

  I go to my boat, where I slip Sam his pay.

  “What’s this?” He unfolds the check. “Good God, that’s a lot of money. Why are you giving me so much money?”

  I turn over the engine. “That’s a payche
ck, Sam Taylor.”

  “That’s a ridiculously big paycheck.”

  “You got lucky. The next time might not be the same.”

  “How do you mean?”

  I throw the Rilla Brae into gear and leave Reed and his grandfather and the docks behind. My angry suspicions won’t leave me. “My dad always paid me on the seventh day of work. The full price of the seventh-day haul. On a good seventh day, you make more. On a bad seventh day, not so much.”

  “This is too much.”

  “It won’t feel like it next time when you get half of that.” I putter through the No Wake Zone and head toward Malaga. “Besides, that’s the way it’s done on this boat, and you’re on this boat. A lot of other captains will average out the week’s catch and give the sternman a fixed percent. But my dad was different.”

  Sam slips the check into his jeans pocket. “Rule number one: Captain’s always right, right?”

  “There’s a lot I’ve been wrong about. But I’m hoping today I’ll get something right.” I tell him about my dream and the flower and my hunch.

  My body is electric with hope as Sam and I scour the island for the Flame Freesia. My dream had to mean something, the girl transporting the very plant that Gram’s mother held so dear. It connects my family to the island in a small way. Connects my family to the girl, even if it was just a dream.

  Though it feels too much like bees carrying their stories. This flower, carrying a story.

  We grid the surface of the island with our footsteps, no different from how Sam grids his dig sites. We walk normally at first, our excitement not wanting us to be slow about the search. When our hunt turns up nothing, we get down on our hands and knees, scour again.

  “I don’t know how this can be.” I’m exhausted. Deflated. I sit with my knees pulled against my chest. “I really thought we’d find it.”

  “Finding the echoes people leave behind isn’t always easy.”

  “But I was so sure. Really sure.”

  “My professor tells us not to expect anything from the earth so we’ll be that much more rewarded by what we do find. She says hyped digs can be the most disappointing.”

  “Like today.”

  “But there’s always tomorrow,” Sam says.