Theodore clears his throat and dusts sand off his pants, offering me a smile as Gina leads the child away. “I guess the old boy wasn’t hungry.”
A week passes, and a change takes place as gradually as the erosion of rock. Maris is without a pencil, and no one speaks up to offer theirs. Maris is without a reading partner, and not one child volunteers. Maris stands alone, eyes focused beyond where the children play to the churning of the angry sea.
“Why don’t you invite Maris to jump rope?” I ask two girls her age. Timidly, obediently, they do. That evening, I find the rope cut into bits too small for jumping.
“Why don’t you invite Maris to read?”
That night, I find a picture book vandalized—an ink-red X over each of Peter Rabbit’s siblings.
“She’s just having trouble adjusting,” Theodore says the next day. “Many young ones struggle in those early days.”
“You ought to ask the elders,” I say. “You’ve never raised a child before. You’re practically children yourselves.”
Gina says nothing at all as she leads the girl away. She is immovable where Maris is concerned.
“Maybe she should be raised with the others,” I say.
Theodore is silent as we watch them grow more distant, and I wonder: Has he thought the same? But when he finally responds, it’s to say simply, “Gina loves her.”
The following day, when the sea-bell summons the children from their play and two desks remain vacant, a bitter taste crawls from my throat. I know, instinctively, without calling roll, that one of the places is hers.
“Wait here. Keep the young ones busy.” Mackintosh in hand, I race out the door.
A sea breeze whips the spray into my eyes as I stumble across the dunes. Where could they be? Where would she have gone? I see in my mind all the craggy cliffs and bottomless pools—every place where someone unfamiliar with the island might wander. Every place where one who intends harm might lure another.
Ninety-seven voices join mine. Our feet traipse across the island. We search until darkness threatens, until I fear we’ve run out of places to search.
I hear them before I see them. A child’s voice trapped beneath stone. Along the shoreline, I scramble down slick rocks, each footfall thrown off balance by the persistent beating of waves. There are caves here, dozens of them that together form impossible labyrinths, accessible only at the lowest of tides. Though the boy’s words are muddled by echoes, in my bones, I feel his desperation to escape the water’s rise.
Together, our hands and feet and arms and voices pull the children from the darkness, extracting them one by one from the earth. And over Maris’s head, Gina’s eyes meet mine, and it startles me to find her expression is closed to me; I can no longer tell what she’s thinking.
“She thinks it’s her fault,” Theodore says, his arms full of books I’ve gathered for them borrow. When neither child would admit how they got to the cave, Gertrude deemed it best to keep them apart, particularly when she discovered fresh splinters embedded in the boy’s hands.
“She thinks you hate Maris because you’re jealous.”
I scoff, but long after Theodore leaves, the thought tears at me, banishing sleep. Each time I let down my guard, the accusation surges through my mind again. Outside, a growing storm echoes my dark inner thoughts.
I’ve lived with the knowledge of all that’s been taken from me: mother, father, sibling, home. And yet none is any more than what anyone else has lost. We’re children of equal misfortune.
And yet... The yellow-painted cottage. Her hands entwined in his. The looks, the whispers, the moments, the secrets that I’m no longer welcome to share. The chasm between us, deep and lonely. Each of their joys has been my loss.
I sit up in bed.
The scenes replay in my head, over and over. What if the egg had been cracked already? If the two children had simply become lost? What if I have been wrong, my judgment clouded by the wounds of my own heart?
Boots in place and lantern in hand, I set off for their cottage through the driving rain. I need to apologize, to let Gina know that wife or mother or whatever she becomes over the course of this life, she will always be my friend, my sister.
The sea roars before me, restless and riled, while the wind urges me back toward the safety of the schoolhouse. The cottage is dark, but beyond it is a light, bobbing on the shore. A shout, caught on the wind, whirls around me.
“Maris! Maris, where are you?” Lightning flashes, and I recognize Gina’s form, standing with the lantern, ankle-deep in the surf.
“Gina?” I yell and stumble ahead. These dunes are dangerous, even in the daylight, and to be out here on a night like this is inviting trouble. “Gina!”
The light bobs, as if she might have heard me and turned about, but she’s still too far off to reach.
“Gina!”
Another burst of lightning fills the sky, and in the moment before the world falls into a deeper darkness, I see something bobbing on the waves beyond her—something that looks like a raft. A raft, tied together with chopped-up lengths of jumping ropes and wood that would leave splinters in a child’s palms. A raft, which, while being constructed, would have been hidden somewhere grown-ups would never think to look. A raft, now carrying the lone silhouette of a girl farther and farther from the island that had claimed her.
Dropping my lantern, I clutch my nightgown in my fist and rush to overtake Gina, already in the shallows, where the water swirls about my waist and surges to my chest. She’s reaching outward, her body poised and ready to plunge, when I grab her by the arm to stop her.
“Loraine?” Her eyes are wild as they find mine. “What on earth are you doing out here?”
“Let her go, Gina. You must let the girl go.”
Beyond, the waves are tossing the raft like an eager child with a new toy. Gina’s gaze never wavers as she shakes her head. “What does it matter to you? You don’t care for her.”
“No, but I care for you. You’ll drown if you try to reach her now. I know you love her, but she’s made her choice.”
“But Theodore—”
“What about him?” My voice is shrill, and when she looks out toward that place between the shore and the raft and her eyes overflow, I know.
He’d have woken when Gina rose from their bed, when she discovered their child had gone missing. He’d have run more quickly than her across the sand dunes and would have arrived at the sea well before her. Maris’s raft would have been closer then, and he’d have seen her. He’d have thought he could reach her in time.
“He hates the water,” I say. “He can’t even swim.” He hates the water, but he loves Gina. He’d have done all he could to make her happy.
We stand there, watching the waves breathe their ragged gasping breaths, until the raft disappears and Gina’s arm goes limp in mine. Until the wind dies down and the waves turn glassy-smooth and the sky bursts pink along the horizon. And then I gently guide her backward, toward the safety of the cottage on the shore—far from the eddies and undertow; from the girl in the makeshift raft; from the man who, no matter how long we stand there staring, is never coming back.
I wake wrapped in a blanket on a chair in a sun-dappled cottage, surrounded by the swaying of broad-leafed vines. The sea is quiet now, a mere whisper across the rocks, and it’s bright in here, far brighter than when Gina and I stumbled inside and collapsed, our fingers barely brushing, each of us drowning alone in our grief. It’s only after I rub the grit of sleep from my eyes that I understand why it seems so bright. So empty. So lonely.
A gaping hole opens with a view to the sea where the yellow-painted lifeboat has been pried from rusted nails. Already, the wind has swept in a pile of sand, staking its claim on the abandoned place.
The villagers, no doubt, will wander in soon, assessing the damage and shaking their heads and gathering the useful things left behind. I’ll follow them back down to the village, to rebuild a life from the debris; for as much as I may wish it, I
’m not like Gina. I don’t share her bravery or her foolishness.
But when we take what we need from this place and relinquish the rest to be overwhelmed by dunes and creeping vines, I’ll hide away a yellowed scrap of paper, one I find tucked away beneath her pillow. One I haven’t seen in many years.
And in the ages that pass, when I dream of Before and my heart feels scraped out by the loneliness of lost children, I’ll hold that page up in the candlelight—an image of an infant destined to become a woman whose love was as fierce and consuming as the sea—and I’ll picture a reunion on some distant shore and pretend I believe it could be true.
© Copyright 2020 Wendy Nikel
Wendy Nikel - [BCS302 S02] Page 2
