by S. M. Parker
I radio Sam again and listen as static comes across the channel. The only response. Then it’s not static in the air, but the sound of fire sizzling against the waves. Thousands of crackles, each one a dancing flick of flame. Smoke from the snuffed sparks rises gently along the ocean, coats the water with a thickening fog. No, not fog. Smoke. Smoke from a fire that cannot possibly sit on top of a salted sea. The hot raindrops turn to rain again, the regular kind. I radio for Sam as I bend to the earth, press my hand against the wet grass. The soil holds heat, too much heat. I have to pull my hand away before the burn penetrates my skin. There’s no mistaking the thick charred smell that lifts from the ocean, carried on the current, lifted by the air. Smoke and fire mixed with salt.
And that smell of death holding its breath.
Then a light. The spotlight from a boat just off Malaga’s shores.
I know it’s Sam. I fear it’s Sam.
I run to the Rilla Brae, turn on her VHF. “This is the Rilla Brae to USM research craft. Over.”
Sam’s light illuminates the back of his boat, brightening its entire deck. I watch him, fearing the worst. I am a child again, watching my father go to sea without me. I am my great-grandmother watching her husband brave the ocean for fish, for lobster, for food to put food on their table. I am six watching my mother try to give herself to the Water People. I am Gram watching me come home that day with Dad in the wheelhouse, his slumped body too heavy for me to move from where he’d fallen. I am grief and hope and generations of fishing people, all tied around one beating heart.
I crank my key, push my engine hard.
The spotlight on Sam’s boat casts a spray of white onto the black waves and spins around him as if the bulb is set to rotate. I set my binoculars to the bridge of my nose, squint my eyes to separate the dark sea from the dark night. It is then I see that the bulb isn’t rotating; it’s the boat that’s spiraling.
Sam’s boat whirlpools in circles, whirling and twisting.
The boat doesn’t move from the exact spot where it spins off Malaga’s shores. Has Sam dropped anchor? In my years at sea I’ve never seen a boat twist in a circle like this, and the impossibility of it stuns me. My suspicions jump to Reed or Old Man Benner. Could they have sabotaged Sam’s engine in some way that Sam wouldn’t know how to fix? Or maybe another family that doesn’t want the story of Malaga to be unearthed? I know for certain it’s not Agnes. Agnes isn’t interested in Sam. Only me and Gram. Possibly, my mother.
Then Sam blows the emergency horn, and it doesn’t matter what’s wrong, only that everything is wrong. The bleat of his air horn hangs in the air, bellows over the roar of my engine, over the thundering spasm of my heart.
When I near Sam’s craft, I call to him, “What’s happening? Is it your engine?”
“No! Everything’s shut down. I—I think I’m stuck.” His voice strains over the distance. “Is this a riptide?”
The Under Toad, the mysterious creature that lives under the water and pulls you down into his world, holds you there, all so he can have a playmate.
Sam’s boat spins and spins, slowly, playfully. Cruelly.
This is no rip.
The water here taunts Sam’s boat, swirls it, controls it. There’s only one creature I’ve met in the deep that could do these things. But I don’t want it to be Agnes.
“Sam!”
He comes to his rail, though I lose sight of him as the craft makes another round. Then I can only see the back, the engine. The motor’s turned off, sleeping, and yet a spark pops from its plugs. My body goes cold. Sam runs to the rear of the boat and another spark jumps out of the engine’s lines.
“Sam! Can you swim?”
“Yes!”
“You need to abandon your boat. Jump off ! Now! Dive and swim as far as you can as quick as you can!” Two sparks leap now, partners in their crime. “Can you hear me?”
“You want me to jump?”
“Now, Sam! Get as far from your boat as possible. Swim to shore.” I know he’s struggling to hear me through his fear and my own engine, but I can’t turn it off. I can’t take the chance of not being able to rescue him. “Dive now!”
Sam climbs to the front deck and flies into the night, a straight dive away from his boat, away from me. I nudge my throttle forward and maneuver past his craft, which is now spitting sparks in a waterfall. I can’t be too close when one of those sparks finds his gasoline engine. Or my deck. And just as I think the thought, Sam’s boat fires with a wall of flame rising from the motor, running along the broken lines of gas that spurt as his boat turns.
The red glow of light shows me Sam in the water, his head bobbing. He throws one arm up to call me to him. A wave smashes over him. I lose him to the crash of the black sea before he resurfaces and my heart restarts. I motor to him and slow when I get close. Close enough for him to climb aboard but not so close that I make the waves bigger around him. He is struggling already, his muscles surely tiring in the swells.
“Climb up! You’re going to be all right!” I need to believe this promise. I head to the back of the boat, readying my hand at the ladder.
He swims toward the Rilla Brae but stops. He struggles as if he doesn’t know how to swim, or can’t move.
The flames rage upon his research boat, the smoke rising in clean red stacks of blaze. The boat is engulfed and the water is freezing. I want Sam safe, onboard. “You need to hurry! I know you’re tired, but you need to swim now!”
“I can’t, Rilla.” Sam’s voice is muffled with something that sounds like confusion.
I know how exhausted a body can get from treading water in the ocean, but he has to try. “You can. Just a few more strokes. I’m here. I’ll help you up.”
“Rilla, I can’t. I can’t get closer.” Sam raises one hand, and his palm flattens against the nothingness that separates us. Except his hand is too still. It doesn’t move with the sway of the water. It’s as if he’s pressing his hand against an invisible glass wall, too similar to the invisible man who pinned me down.
“Sam?” This time his name moves over my lips with almost no sound. Why is this happening?
“Rilla!” Sam yells. The flames that engulfed his boat jump now. They spark on the surface of the ocean, one leaping ember and then another. The hot specks of fire don’t extinguish when they hit the water. They shimmer with coal-red heat.
“Sam.” I force my voice loud. “Can you swim to the island?”
Sam twists toward Malaga. He takes a few strokes and hope grows in my chest. Embers pop from Sam’s boat. Too many embers. I watch Sam slowly making his way toward Malaga, watch as the fire builds on the sea. “Sam! Swim faster!” The fire chases after Sam, each popping ember marking a trail along the water, pursuing him with its fiery length. Worry rattles within me. Then the fire on the water bursts, as if seawater itself is flammable. A wall of fire surrounds Sam, traps him.
Sam will die. He’ll be burned to death or drown. I am horrified and helpless.
But then.
The girl is on Malaga’s shore. Watching us. The fire around Sam. Agnes stirs the flames, building their intensity with her gaze. The same way she burned me when she rose from the deep with the seaweed in her hair and the fire in her touch.
Like that first day, I arc my arms above me. I call to her. “Agnes, stop! I’ll do anything! Anything you ask! Just leave him alone! He has nothing to do with this!”
The fire around Sam closes in. I can’t see him behind the height of the reaching flames.
I scream my bargain. “Save him and I will save you!”
The fire doesn’t cease. I search my brain for anything. Everything. The attic, her portraits, her calling to me underwater, waking next to me in my bed . . . and scratching her words into my sill: FIND ME. Find her. Find the girl who doesn’t show up on census records, whose name was never registered at the state asylum. The girl who has slipped from history’s memory.
“Save him and we will find you! I need his help! Please, I prom
ise you! I promise we will find you!”
The fire quells, softens into soft orange liquid before churning into the cool sea black of the waves. Impossibly, the sea becomes the sea once again. I know the sea.
I maneuver the Rilla Brae as close as I can to Sam and throw him a life float. He fits the ring over his head and uses his remaining strength to force his exhausted limbs to climb the ladder to my deck. He collapses there, a puddle of fatigue.
Agnes waits for us on the shore. For a split second I consider leaving, racing my boat all the way to the edge of the horizon and beyond, but I couldn’t leave Gram behind, and a part of me knows that Agnes would find me, follow me. Or she would haunt Gram in a new and terrible way that I can’t allow. Sam coughs up seawater as I edge us closer to Malaga. I help Sam into the dingy and row the small boat ashore.
I glance back at Fairtide, fearing this is the last time I’ll see my home. The lawn is quiet, dark. Sleeping. All the homes on the peninsula are dark. Too dark. I squint, trying to find light along the shore, among the trees, but the homes are pitched into a blackness that feels wrong. Around us, the air is as dark as death.
Agnes reaches for my hand. She cradles a bundle in her opposite hand. I think it is the baby, but the infant is too quiet. Whatever she holds is wrapped like a package, a gift. Agnes pulls me up the open-air stairs that connect the beach to the highest part of the island now. Sam follows, his steps stumbling from exhaustion.
There are homes on the island. Fishing shacks with small front porches. The same ones from the photographs. There are vegetable gardens, plants reaching for the sun that will rise with tomorrow. We pass the school with its straight lines and shingled roof. I turn to Sam. “Do you see? The homes everywhere?”
“No.”
“Take my hand.” Sam wraps my grip with his, and something electric passes between us. He squeezes my fingers as we step onto the beach.
He gasps. “I see it now.”
“You see her?”
“I see everything.”
I hold tighter to him, Agnes leading us both now. I don’t want to break our connection. I need Sam to see what I see. What Agnes needs us to see.
The island is asleep, the homes visible only because of the spray of moonlight casting Malaga in a soft glow. There are no lights in any of the homes, no candles burning in the windows. Only smoke lifting from the chimneys, small rivers of gray rising up to the clouds.
Then there’s movement behind us, a sound.
Footsteps crunching shells.
So many footsteps.
Silent men slip up the beach. Agnes stops when the men and their quiet feet reach the top of the island. Three men stand in front of each home. The men are coordinated, this whole night planned. Then the island fills with bursts of light as torches flame in front of the homes. Each man lights his torch, a whoosh of fire against the night. There’s the smell of burning hay. Then the men and their flames duck inside the meager houses.
All at once the screams fill the air. Women. Children. Their screeches so loud they burn my ears. But I can’t block it out. I can’t put my hands to my ears. Agnes wants me to hear the cries. It’s why she holds my hand so tight. And I don’t dare let go of Sam, because he needs to be connected to me. I can’t survive this alone.
The way Agnes has had to survive this alone.
Terror sweeps across the island as the men move through the houses like a storm, tearing the residents from their beds, setting fire to the emptied shacks. Each home is set ablaze. The fire burns too close to my skin. Sam grips my fingers as if he’s trying to hold on to my bones.
Men order barked calls. “Get up!” “Get out!”
A woman pleads. Children call for their mothers.
Agnes pulls us across the island, and the voices rise, the cries of panic drowning out all words. She wrenches us past the house with a rocking chair ablaze in the front yard, the red reaching flames rocking backandforth, backandforth, backandforth. The old woman, already gone.
“Tell us how we can help you,” I beg, even as I fear Agnes won’t tell. She drags us farther across the island, the night lit by fire and terror and the ghostly cry of islanders.
I want to run to the men with their torches and drown their flames and their hate in the sea. I want to talk to Agnes. I want her to tell us her story, all the reasons why we are here. And then we see her.
Agnes is at the south side of the island, on a dark pocket of granite. So far from us now. Yet Agnes holds my hand still. She is more real than ever and she watches this other Agnes so near to us.
The Agnes at the water settles her bundle into an old skiff. The skiff from that first day, the dory with its flaked paint and sturdy lines.
The bundle cries. The same cry as that first day. It starts as a stutter at first, as if the infant is not sure what sound to make. The cry grows to a howl. Loud enough to drown out the shrieks from the other side of the island, the wretched screams that rise into the night. Agnes unties the boat from its hitch and drags the dory into the sea. She lifts her white dress around her ankles and raises her foot into the boat. She sings to her baby, trying to soothe her screeching child. Come here, come here, my dear, my dear, won’t you co—
Agnes has one foot in the skiff, the other raising. But she’s ripped back from the edge of her dory, and it is only then that I see the hulking man nearly two times her size. His shoulders are wide and strong, and he snaps Agnes out of the water as if she is no heavier than a flower.
Agnes struggles but doesn’t scream. She kicks at him, flails her one free arm. The man drags her up the shore. He pins her to the earth, his hands locked over her wrist. My body blazes with the same memory. The man on top of me. His smoky smell. His weight. His rage.
“Ya filthy thing. Trying ta escape, were ya?”
He claws at her hips and arms and legs. I feel the attack in my bones. I remember the attack in my bones.
He tries to bind her arms with the rope he pulls from his waist. She struggles; her dress rips.
The man reaches to tie her arms and his weight shifts. Agnes wrestles free. She scrambles to the shore, her feet tripping from her speed. She reaches the water. The infant in the open boat. “I am here,” she says. “Do not worry, my dear. I am here.”
The man is at the water in seconds, his fine shoes soaked with the sea. He yanks Agnes by her long braids. He tosses her to the shore as if she is weightless, as if she is nothing. The boat slips deeper out to sea, and the child wails louder for her mother.
The man pushes Agnes to the ground, her skull splitting against a rock. I hear the crack, see the way her head spills to the side, her eyes rolling to watch her child disappear with the currents.
I want to scream. I want to rescue the child. Sam feels me tug away from him, and his grip tightens around my hand. Stay, it tells me. There is nothing you can do, it tells me.
We watch the blood drain from Agnes’s wound as life leaves her eyes. She is dying. She reaches toward the sea with her raw, clawing fingers. They are bloody, caked with dirt. She sings a song, Come here, come here, my dear, my dear, but the boat is caught in the current, drifting from the shore, drifting to the open black sea.
Blood pools around Agnes’s head, crawling into her braids. Light washes from her face.
The man tosses Agnes over his shoulder, her lifeless body no different from a sack of grain. The man kicks at the ground, driving his heels against the grass until he’s unearthed a large slice of stone. His adrenaline rakes the stone along the earth, digging away the soil and removing hunks of stone until he has formed a thin pocket of earth. He drops Agnes into the hole. Her hair cascades around her face, seaweed gathered in the tangles of her hair.
The man kicks dirt and stones over Agnes.
And he turns on her shallow grave.
He runs. Toward the burning homes, the islanders imprisoned on boats.
I say her name. “Agnes.” It’s the only word that seems big enough in this moment. No other words will do.
I turn to tell Agnes that I’m sorry, that I finally understand what she needs, but she is gone. The hand that brought me here has vanished.
As are the fires that consumed the island only moments ago.
The screams have disappeared.
There is only one small voice that rises out over the waves. The small cry of a small voice. A child. Set to sea alone.
Eleanor.
I look to Sam. I want him to tell me this has all been a dream. He shakes his head, and I know this wasn’t a dream.
By the time we return to Fairtide, I’m not willing to let Sam go. We sit on the dock and hold one another through the entire night. We watch Malaga. We listen to the waves lick the shore, the water flowing toward us but then retreating, as if it decided it would rather be at sea. We sit under the all-seeing moon.
We say all the words that pass between us, all the words that could never change what happened.
Before the sun rises, I stand. “I need to talk to my gram.”
He nods. “I’ll be here if you need me.”
“I’ll need you.” I stand, face him. I’ll need him to process all of this. To make sure I always remember this story. To make sure it always lives in the world. “I’m certain of it.”
Sam kisses my forehead. He stamps his warmth there, and it feels electric. Like the buzzing of bees.
I go inside and throw on the light in the stairwell. I walk slowly up each step. I study my ancestors to see their resemblance passed down through generations to Gram, me, my mother. But the old photos are grainy and will never tell me what I need to know.
I kneel next to Gram’s bed and watch her sleep. The sun begins to rise outside, and the soft light spills across her room. It is when I see Gram’s face in its purest calm, lost in the depths of sleep, that I see Agnes. The shape of her mouth, her high cheeks and soft jaw. Gram’s skin looks so brown in the hesitant light. Dark like Agnes. And that is when I know for certain.
The baby in the boat.
Agnes haunting the women in my family for decades.
The screaming infant was Gram.
Her unmanned boat made it to the shores of Fairtide that night. Brought by the currents that always deliver the sea to our door.
