This Is the Story of You

by Beth Kephart

  I stretched until the ache eased from my muscles. I touched the purple place above my heart.

  On her end of things Old Carmen was sharpening a knife on the face of the rock, making a nice percussion of sound. She looked up when I sat up. She said nothing for a while. She turned her head to watch the tide, the early people who were rising. Little kids running with sand in their hair. Parents shaking out blankets, rinsing out pots, unscribbling the piles they had slept with.

  “You get that dog home proper?” Old Carmen asked.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “That’s some good work,” she said. “Be proud of it.”

  I nodded. I was. We were quiet. We let the world wake up some more and then Old Carmen spoke again. “Time is running out,” she said.

  “What does the radio say?”

  “The radio says ‘patience.’ We’re going to need more than that, though. We’re going to need provisions.” It was like the saving of Mid was all on her shoulders. Like we’d voted her in charge, and maybe, somehow, we had. She looked beaten down a little, worn out, worried. She closed her eyes, put her chin on her fist, let the early sun fall against her million lines and wrinkles.

  I looked south, toward the cottage, no parts of it visible in the early mist. I thought of all I’d sheltered in the room high up on stilts, the note I’d left, the creepiness I’d felt. I thought of all I’d sheltered, too, and of how Mickey and Jasper Lee would want me to use it right, to share it now, to be that kind of greedy. And brave.

  “Will you keep an eye on Sterling?” I asked Old Carmen now.

  “Haven’t lost that cat yet.”

  “Okay,” I said. “All right. I’m going.” I climbed down off the rock. Did one huge body stretch.

  Through the mist Rapunzel came into view, hanging like a long blond braid. Next came the stilts, the deck, the parts of the house that the wind was blowing through. The sand went from firmer to softer as I walked, and then, at last, I was there. I reached for the rope and it held fast. I climbed with blistered hands.

  I hurtled myself over the edge of the deck. I turned and a dozen dolphins were out in the waves, slicing the rising sun with their fins. The scavengers and combers and cousins were distant, a gull leading them off on the chase. The fire rose from Old Carmen’s rock, a quarter mile off.

  On the deck the sand had blown into new ridges and cracks. Inside the attic the shadows were blue. The drawers I’d closed were open again. The path between the stacks of things seemed interrupted, somehow, disturbed, and I turned. There was someone on my bed.

  Like the waves had rolled her in.

  Like she hadn’t heard me coming.

  Someone. A girl.

  I stepped back, held my breath, watched from the shadows. She had a face of vaguely foreign angles and a sleeve of tattoos, earrings that squiggled down her neck, bare feet, chipped nails. She was lying on her side, my mother’s patchwork quilt pushed to one side, and she was dressed in the things she’d stolen: my aunt’s Marilyn Monroe T-shirt, her faux tuxedo jacket, the long red skirt I’d worn one Halloween. “What are you?” Deni had kept asking that year. “A gypsy,” I kept saying, though she wouldn’t believe me until we’d gone all the way to her house and she’d found me a pair of gold hoops and also a Rothko bandanna to tie on my head, because somehow the Rothko was gypsy. It was that skirt, the gypsy skirt, that the stranger had on, and below the hem of that skirt, on those dark, bare feet, were three of my aunt’s fake-crystal toe rings, taken from the drawer. I heard a scuffle on the floor and looked down. By the bed was a bright orange cage, the size of a clutch, and inside that cage was a painted hermit crab, the prettiest crab I’d ever seen, tiptoeing back and forth, waving one claw like a sign.

  There was a broom. I reached for it. Held it like a weapon. Heard Deni in my ear: Defenses.

  “Hey.”

  She didn’t open an eye. She didn’t stir. It was like she’d come, gone shopping, decided to stay—an overgrown Goldilocks with the darkly tanned skin, her eyelids like two dark hoods, her fingers twined into her fingers, like she was hiding something. I leaned across her, broom still high, pulled my mother’s quilt away, threw it over my own shivering shoulders, because right is right, she could not take that from me. Even in this bizarre fairy tale we were living.

  “Hey,” I said again.

  She sighed. Straightened one leg. The gold on her toes flashed with the sun. The rest of her was quiet.

  I touched her shoulder now, the tip of the broom to the seam of the Marilyn tee, the place beneath the squiggle of her earring. I nudged, pushed harder, wondered, for a moment, if she was dead, but she sighed again, and now she opened her eyes, and her eyes were like seaweed, caught in a dream, in the haze. Eyes without a trace of shame.

  “I knocked,” she said. “Nobody answered.”

  I tried to picture that—this girl, she seemed my age, climbing the rope, crossing the deck, knocking on—what? The open sliding door? The shadows? I pictured her looking around and deciding to stay, because of course she’d been there before, the hours ahead of the storm, and later, leaving her footprints through the narrow path from the bed to the room’s two doors. She’d been here before, it had to be her, and she’d knocked? She’d looked around and stayed? Helped herself to the clothes she found? Brought along a crab in a cage? I pictured her coming and going, searching and staying, placing her crab by my bed. She wasn’t just some girl. She had come before. She had a reason.

  “Nobody was home,” she said.

  There were puckered places beneath each eye, like she’d been crying. There were shadows on her ankles, but when she moved, they moved with her. Bruises, I realized. Hurt, like the rest of us.

  “Who are you?”

  She shook her head.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Gillian.” Her words were sleepy, slow.

  “You’ve been here before. You keep coming back. What do you want?”

  She looked up at me. She was good with a lie, seemed to be; that’s how I read her.

  “Dusk before the storm,” I said. “Hours before it got crazy. You were here.”

  She shook her head no. “Wasn’t me.”

  “What’s your last name, Gillian?”

  She shrugged.

  “Why are you lying to me?”

  “I’m not.”

  “If you were from here, I would know you, but I don’t know you. What do you want?”

  She looked away from me like I had hurt her. Like I was the one who had trespassed here, like who she was and why she’d come were none of my business. “Look around,” she said, after a while. “Everyone’s a refugee. No one belongs anywhere, not anymore.”

  “This is my house, and I don’t trust you.”

  Still the broom between us. Still the girl lying to me.

  Beyond the room and the deck, the sky was blue and clouds were puffing in, and in the sea the dolphins had disappeared, but the giraffe was riding in with the tide. I heard her breathe three times, like yoga breaths. I heard her start to talk, but it was hard, at first, to find any sense in the story she told. She was from far away—that is what she said. Had moved to Haven in July and stayed, a castaway, that’s what she said. Johnny Carpenter, she said. Did I know him? Down by the trailer park?

  That park being gone, she said. Johnny being gone. Did I know it? Did I know him? That’s where she’d come from.

  “I don’t know a Johnny Carpenter,” I said.

  “He lived in the park,” she said. “Like I did.”

  Afternoon of the storm, she said, Johnny went out. Be right back, he’d said, but he didn’t come back, and then the night came in, and then the storm came in, and her name was Gillian, and she’d been up and down the beach looking for Johnny, calling his name, until it was time gone by, and she was cold and wet, and when she saw the rope, she climbed it. />
  “That is all,” she said. “Sorry. End of story.”

  “Rapunzel,” I said.

  “Rapunzel?” She shook her head.

  “Name of the rope.”

  There was sand in her hair. There were bruises on her ankles.

  “Nobody was home,” she repeated.

  “Not exactly the safest domicile,” I said.

  She’d knocked. She’d called out. She’d gone downstairs. Tried to, but the stairs had melted, did I know that, and there were fish down there on the floor—dead fish and seaweed, a TV flat on its back, a carton of eggs; that was the smell, or part of it. Nobody home, and so she came back upstairs, and she was so tired, she said, that she had found the quilt and slept.

  “Start at the beginning,” I said. “The afternoon before the storm. What is your story for then?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, and she began to shiver, and if Mickey had been home, if the place were still a home, she’d have brought this girl tea, and if Jasper Lee had been near he’d have shown her sand, and if Eva had been found, she’d be sitting on my bed, holding Gillian’s hand, and if Deni were with me, she’d have said, We’ve got a brigade up at North. Room enough. Food.

  “What was your plan?” I said.

  “I was tired,” she repeated. “I’m not staying, am I?”

  She said it like a question. Hung it on the line between us. I heard the waves, the slap of the surf. I listened to her breathing. She was a refugee like the rest of us. A minor thief, but maybe not a liar. She was just a girl, not much older than me. She had been looking for Johnny. She had bare feet, no boots. She had a crab in a cage like a purse. I was losing track of who had come, and how often. Of what had been said and what was true.

  She sat and I stood. She moved and I didn’t. I asked her what she knew about Mid Beach and she said nothing at all. “This is as far as I got,” she said, “looking for Johnny.” I said a quarter mile up there was a rock and a fire and Old Carmen, a working radio.

  “Radio?”

  “Battery-operated. Gets the news.”

  “What’s the news?” she said.

  “Big storm. No bridge. Patience.”

  “Patience?” she said. “Patience?”

  “Haven is on its own,” I said. “For a while. That’s the news.”

  She started to cry. Big tears on wide cheeks. She put her hands on her face and her tattoos swirled up her wrist and disappeared into that shirt and ended just below her chin.

  “I don’t know anybody,” she said. “Just Johnny, and I can’t find him. The whole place blew. It’s all on its side down there. I can’t find Johnny.”

  Sometimes you have to decide. I decided. Sometimes you don’t know, so you tell yourself you do; you choose. I chose to believe that she was who she said she was—a Gillian looking for a Johnny. I lay down the broom. I crossed the narrow channel of the room. I sat with her. I took her hand in mine.

  “Nobody even knows I’m here,” she said. “I’m no one without Johnny.”

  “Do you cook?” I asked, after a while.

  She sniffed. “A little.”

  “Can you fish?”

  “Johnny taught me. I’m not so bad at it, when the fish come around.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Then it’s decided.”

  I pulled a new shirt from the closet, a new sweater, new jeans, and changed. I reached for bags that hung from the hooks in my aunt’s closet, reached for the shirts, the skirts, the pants, the robes this woman I had never met once wore. There were three canvas bags and a wheely suitcase. I found them. I stuffed them. I’d decided, and it was like Gillian knew what to do, where things were, how to pack endless stuff into three bags and a suitcase, how she could help.

  This? she’d ask.

  This, too?

  She told me the name of her crab: Sarah. Why Sarah? It’s a pretty name. It fits her. Asked had I seen the deer on the beach, and I told her that I had, and had I seen a kite, or was that smoke. If it was South it was a kite, I said, if it was Mid it was smoke, Old Carmen’s smoke, and yes, there was a girl in glitter wings; I had seen her, too. Into three canvas bags and one wheely suitcase we packed—my aunt’s clothes, her binoculars, the patchwork quilt, a pair of knives, filleting tools—anything that could help the people of Mid, anything that could answer Old Carmen’s call, until at last there was nothing more to pack and Gillian changed into a pair of jeans and a shirt that my aunt must have worn twenty years ago. They fit her like a glove.

  “What’s next?” Gillian asked.

  “We toss it,” I say. “We haul it to the people at Mid.”

  “Toss it? Like grenades?”

  “Like grenades. I’ll show you.”

  I dragged an overstuffed bag down the thin alley between things, over the sliding-door threshold, down the slope of the deck, to the rail. I hollered out and I tossed the thing and it went bomb-blasting down.

  “All right,” she said, as if she had to think about this. She dragged a bag of her own through the banks of sand to the edge of the deck, hoisted it above the rail, threw it down. A minor bomb blast. Two more tosses and we’d be out of there, but now in the corner of my eye, I saw another paper bird lift off in the breeze and float. Gillian turned in a mega instant and reached. I reached first. Grabbed the paper bird and unfolded its wing. Stared down at the page.

  Tell me who you are, and what you’re taking.

  Those were my words.

  What belongs to me.

  Those were not.

  I looked at her. I squinted hard.

  “What?” she said.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  I stood in the lamp of the sun and read again. My words and the other ones, in spidery blue-green.

  “I trusted you,” I said.

  “You can trust me.”

  “Show me how you write,” I said.

  “How I write?”

  “Yeah. Write. Don’t move.” I trudged back through the sand, reached for a pen that I’d tucked into a housecoat pocket, turned the paper over and handed her the ink, like ink was a weapon.

  “Write your name,” I said.

  “You have to trust me,” she said.

  “I need proof.”

  “I’ve told you who I am.”

  We stared at each other, the longest time. A ray of sun got in my eye. I tried to think or to somehow reason. She was a castaway looking for a boy she’d lost. She’d climbed Rapunzel and found a bed and slept. She was who she said she was, or else she wasn’t.

  What belongs to me.

  Own the words, Gillian. But she wouldn’t.

  “There are libraries on the beach,” she said. “Leashes are empty. A Honda Civic parked into the tide. What isn’t strange anymore?”

  She was just a girl, and the storm had changed us. She had nothing. That was her story. She had written words she wouldn’t confess to, or maybe she hadn’t, and I had to stand there and decide.

  “Come on,” I finally said.

  She hooked the purse of the hermit crab cage over one wrist. Went down first, hand over hand.

  I watched the part in the dark of her hair.

  It was Deni up ahead. Deni, who’d been waiting for me at the rock and had started running as soon as she’d seen me, then pulled up short when she realized that the tall girl in the borrowed getup wasn’t just near me but with me. The glasses on Deni’s head reflected the Brillo Pad clouds. She’d traded her brother’s sweatshirt for a nubby pink turtleneck her mother used to wear on Sundays. Her combat boots were dark with ocean and mud. She extended her good hand like the minister’s daughter she was. She had something to tell me about Cinnamon Nose; I knew it. She had news of another kind as well, and it wasn’t news for strangers.

  “Deni,” she said.

 
“Gillian,” Gillian answered.

  “I found her,” I said. “In my room.”

  Deni’s eyebrow arched high. She was beside me as we walked toward the rock, Gillian just a little behind and the key around my neck beating the bruise. A toaster. A chaise lounge. The spinning wheel Darlene kept in the front of her house. The music stand that Mr. Friedley used for important all-school occasions. The green awning that Cammy Vaughn rolled out each spring, so that she could sit and test the inaugural mint juleps of her crowd. The birdbath that had sat outside the How to Live store for as long as I could remember.

  The things on the beach weren’t only things.

  They had once been somethings to someones.

  Deni had something to say, and even then, after that storm, some things were private.

  I glanced over my shoulder. Gillian walked, her eyes cast down. She was cautious among all the shards and splinters.

  At the rock Old Carmen looked up, shielded her eyes from the sun, took a long, startled look at Gillian—a head-to-toe look, saying nothing. She looked at Deni and she looked at me and then she stood up and rearranged the rock so that the castaway would have a place on it. Just like that. Special privileges for a girl who’d shown up in my bed. Like Old Carmen had done for me, she was doing for the girl. Deni got that look on her face. The kind that said, Whoa. Hold on. Be careful.

  “Gillian,” I said, furthering the introductions. “She fishes.”

  “That right?”

  “Yes, ma’am. So she says.”

  “You a fisherwoman, Gillian?” Old Carmen asked.

  Gillian shivered. She nodded. Deni rocked back and forth in her ocean-squeaky boots. She crossed her arms across her chest, barely holding on to her news now, hardly polite anymore, eager for us to get away. Just the two of us. The bright sun of morning had not yet returned. We were little people under a gray-blue Brillo Pad. I told Old Carmen I had business with Deni, and Sterling, pacing the edge of the rock, took an all-flying leap into my arms and licked my cheek with her sandpaper tongue.

  “Hey,” I said. “What did I tell you, Sterling? Jealous looks good on no one.”