This Is the Story of You

by Beth Kephart

  came back

  About her bow he’d dive and play,

  And keep with her right to the bay

  And all on board would cheer and say:

  ‘There’s Pelorus Jack.’

  Pelorus, Pelorus, good Pelorus Jack

  Pelorus, Pelorus, brave Pelorus Jack

  Everyone cheered whenever he appeared

  Pelorus, Pelorus, good Pelorus Jack.

  For years he’d meet the ships like this,

  good Pelorus Jack

  It seemed as though he’d never miss, any

  vessel’s track

  He surely was a jolly sort, and everybody as

  they ought

  Declared he was a real old sport; Good

  Pelorus Jack.

  One day a ship came home again, poor

  Pelorus Jack

  The people looked, but looked in vain, for his

  shining back

  And now as day goes after day, the folks all sigh

  in mournful way

  ‘Old Jack is gone,’ they sadly say; Poor

  Pelorus Jack.”

  Shhhhh, shhhhh, shhhhh. Her voice sounded like that. It sounded like the waves at night. It sounded like going under, going in. She sang the whole song, the whole silly song, and I closed my eyes not against it, but within it, and the tide was coming in and my feet were sinking deeper, and in the crumble of the sand I remembered that song, where I had heard it before, the faraway place of a night back then, the night when I was drowning. I felt myself going under. I felt myself buoyed up. I felt two hands beneath my head, heard someone singing. This was the song that had saved me. Hers were the hands. Hers were the feet in the sand.

  Old Carmen.

  “You were there,” I said. “Weren’t you? Back then?”

  She lifted her shoulders.

  She let them fail. Maybe she confessed.

  She stuffed the rod between her knees. She touched my hand. “Look,” she said. Because the dolphins were even closer now. Because if I reached out I could touch them. Because if I had asked, they’d have lent me their fins—to the sun and back, from here to Main, and also back again.

  Safe passage home.

  The sun was full and gold by the time we left the sea. The people on the beach were rising, stretching, shaking off the night and the ruins of Haven. There was a single fish in Old Carmen’s bucket—an early striped bass, Morone saxatilis, its dorsal fin like Viking sails, its olive skin fading to silver fading to white, its stripes like paper. Old Carmen did the humane thing. She would sizzle it later over the fire.

  Sterling was walking the perimeter of the rock, like the good guard dog she’d become. Circling Eva’s pink-bowed cactus, Old Carmen’s black box with its infinite drawers, the radio with its battery power, the smoking embers. She leapt into my arms when I came near. She purred, and I heard her words. Gillian is gone. Her dark hair, her long earrings, the wrap of that tattoo, my aunt’s fake crystals, the hermit crab in the Day-Glo cage.

  Gillian was gone.

  Sterling said so.

  Those footsteps in the sand.

  I needed fresh socks for the damp Skechers I’d been wearing since the storm. I needed to rub the salt crust from my legs. I needed to be ready for whatever would be next, Deni-style, and so I dug deep into the canvas bag Gillian had packed. Replenishments, I thought. Damn her, I thought. My hand knocked against something solid and smooth. Something wood, I realized, and glass.

  Something stolen.

  I pulled it out, and there it was—the face of my aunt in the frame she had left, a crack in the glass, the thing Gillian had come for. The story of you, I thought.

  I thought of how well my aunt’s clothes had fit the castaway. I thought of the crystal toe rings. I thought of the footprints, the words: What belongs to me. I thought of Gillian at ease in the bed, and how she wouldn’t say her last name, refused to. I thought of everything a storm blows in and takes away and how we fight so hard through each reclaiming. I thought and then I felt a shadow. Old Carmen, on the rocks, watching me.

  “Go,” she said, “and find her.”

  I wouldn’t have believed I could run anymore, and yet: I could have gone end to end, even Mode-less.

  I found her on my bed, I found her crying. Photos tossed like a quilt around her, the crab in its cage on the pillow, the whole place more damp and crooked and dangerous than it had ever been. It would all slide away soon, give up its ghosts, fall on its knees, crumble, but Gillian didn’t care. Not about the danger and not that I was there. She didn’t defend herself or argue.

  “Who are you?” I asked at last.

  “Gillian,” she said, from a sobbing place. “Gillian. I told you.”

  She looked at the bed, I looked at the bed, the sea of pictures. They were gray and white and faded colors. They had scalloped edges, curled-in faces, shining places that had rubbed down dull, black ears on some of the corners. The pictures were Haven, Main on Haven, Uncle Willy’s and Malarky’s Pub and another version of How to Live and the Beachcomber with fake palm trees, and the beach itself, wider than I’d ever seen, the rocks in the right places, the cottage without its window boxes. They were two girls playing in ruffled bikinis, on a picnic bench, on a pleather trunk, in the sparkle of two pairs of wings. Two girls playing, and a bucket in one’s hand, and a fishing pole with a little blowfish dangling. Two girls in every picture. Every single one.

  “Gillian?” I said.

  “My mother.” She pointed to one girl.

  “Your mother.” She pointed to the other.

  She showed me again.

  Her mother. My mother.

  My aunt. My Mickey.

  In picture after picture, there they were.

  “My mother’s dead,” she said.

  I couldn’t answer. Could not say one word. Reached for Gillian’s hand. Held it. The only words I had.

  “All the stories she told, when I was a kid, were of this beach,” Gillian was saying, her voice soft, a whisper. “This house. This sea. This attic. Everything she loved was Haven. She’d left everything behind, she said. She hid her photos behind that panel,” and now Gillian pointed to a broken place in the broken wall, a secret cove I’d not noticed before within the messy ruin. The wall was torn open and the space behind it was empty. All the photos my aunt had hidden in that secret cove were spread across the bed. “She told me where,” Gillian said. “The last thing she said. Before she passed away.”

  What belongs to me, I thought.

  What belongs. A note I was only meant to find if I hadn’t discovered Gillian herself, asleep in my bed, covered by a blanket of sand. The words of an interrupted confessor.

  I was desperate to understand; I couldn’t. I understood only enough to try to imagine. Mickey’s sister, the one who went away. Mickey’s loss, before we had the science on Jasper Lee. She was my vanished aunt and Gillian’s mother and these were the childhood stories Gillian needed, the proof she wanted of her mother’s history, and now I thought of how I’d lived all these years with my mother’s truest history stashed behind a wall beside my bed. How my mother lived with it just this close. Nothing was what it had been, but it had been. We were all castaways, looking for a part of the big confusing kingdom to call our very own, and to protect. There are no true words for how I felt right then. No words that I could tell you.

  “So it was you,” I said at last. “The day of the storm. Before it got crazy. It was you down there in the dusk.”

  Gillian shook her head, slow. She bit her lip. “No.” She sat straight up. She turned toward me.

  “It was Johnny,” she said. “Johnny, looking for memories of our mom. My brother.”

  “Your brother?”

  “Twins,” she said. “Night and day, my mother called us. Nothing the same about us, ex
cept for the day we were born and the stories our mother told. Stories about this place. Stories from exile. That’s what she said.”

  “Exile.”

  “How she called it.”

  “Exile. Jesus. Gillian. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m your half sister,” she said. “Johnny’s your half brother.”

  And now I was shaking my head, stuck on the word, half. On the idea of steps and partials. Half. I couldn’t get the word to fit. I couldn’t keep up with how fast the world kept changing.

  “Your mom and my mom,” she said. “Don’t you see? Best friends. Best friends and perfect sisters, until this shit came around, this Vacationeer, my mom called him, this guy who loved them both, or acted like he did, left them pregnant, weeks apart. Your mom was the angry one. My mom was the one who left. They never spoke again to one another. But my mom—she was always talking about Haven. Calling it one e shy of Heaven. Saying to find out for myself. To find my mom’s one sister. To find you. When she was dying, that’s what she said. Go find your family. Mira, I had to.”

  “We’re sisters?” I said.

  “Half sisters,” she said.

  “I have another brother?”

  “Half.”

  She made room for me on the bed. I crumpled beside her. She showed me pictures, one by one, and I told her the side of the stories I knew, the way I’d imagined it was. I thought of the bigness of Mickey’s heart and the bigness of this sorrow, and how anger ruins everything, and how much chance in life is lost.

  “My mom missed your mom,” I said. “I know she did.”

  “My mom missed your mom. Always.”

  “I wish—“

  “Yeah,” Gillian said. “Me, too.”

  And then we were there with the breeze twirling in, looking for the past inside the pictures. We were looking back at the glamorous sisters in The Isolates’ world. Carving their names inside picnic tables. Ordering Slurpees. Looking for swans. Promising Springsteen.

  “So you weren’t lying?” I said, finally.

  “I wasn’t lying.”

  “But.”

  “Johnny,” she said, anticipating my next thing, the question she’d never really answered, the part of the puzzle that still didn’t fit. “It was Johnny who had come to your house before the storm blew in. He was scouting for a way up and in.”

  “How do you know? For sure?”

  “Because he told me his plan, because he was always full of plans—always doing things I’d never have done. We came to the island and I watched the sea, walked down here sometimes just to look up at you, see your mom and your brother, your friends on the beach, the deck where my mom would have been. Came and watched and walked away because you were here and this belonged to you and I couldn’t figure out a way in. But Johnny—he wasn’t afraid. He never was. We came and he became a part of Haven. Night and day, like my mother said. That day Johnny was going out, and he was saying he’d be back, and then the storm blew in. And—”

  She covered her face with her hands.

  “I know,” I said, “I know,” tears up and through me, too, because some things you can finally understand.

  A storm is the universe speaking. A storm is science. A storm takes everything away. Batters the rooftops, crashes the windows, tears up the gardens, sends the stop signs spinning. The walls are gone, the giraffe floats out to sea, the fawn shows up in the mist of dawn, and everything that was private isn’t anymore. Lives are inside out, histories are, everybody has a confession.

  We make our own order.

  I had what could be rescued from an island smashed to pieces: A cat named Sterling. My little brother’s stories. My mother’s past. Old Carmen’s trust. Deni at North and Eva, who would open her eyes in a day or two. Eva, who would not vanish. I had—now, new—a half sister named Gillian and a half brother named Johnny and pictures of my mother, young—pictures that I’d never seen and would never have seen if my aunt hadn’t sent her children back to Haven.

  Only thing in this world isn’t replaceable is people.

  Find your family.

  Gillian and I spent a long time looking, a long time crying, a long time wondering what could be next, until finally we slipped the photos inside the box where they’d been stowed, and stood. We put the capsules of sand inside there, too, my mother’s favorite bracelet, the smallest ceramic lady. We went hand under hand down Rapunzel, the continental shelf of the deck shifting above our heads and the attic creaking on its stilts. We had Sarah with us, my aunt’s last pet, painted like no monster of the sea.

  We had each other. Take away the half.

  It would be another thirty-six hours before the Coast Guard would come. Before the bulldozers and the Porta- potties, the medics, the Red Cross, the soup kitchens, the planners, the Humvees, the governor, the president—everything and everyone coming on barges, and no private boats allowed. Help came, and with the help came rules.

  It would be two days before the news on Old Carmen’s radio shifted to something new—epistles, that’s what we called them. Messages from the mainland to the people stranded on Haven. Messages of love, and hope.

  “Rahna,” there is room for you.

  Cammy Vaughn, we send our love.

  Mr. Friedley here. Mr. Friedley on Main. O’Sixteens, send up a signal. Tell us how you are.

  Ms. Isabel, I thought. He doesn’t know yet. Mr. Friedley left the island. He doesn’t know.

  And then one hour in an early morning, the radio on Old Carmen’s rock was talking straight to me:

  Mira Banul, it said. This is your mother and your brother. We’re fine. We’re really fine. We will find our way to you.

  I picked up Sterling. I held her close. I raised her paw and started weeping. And then I stood on Old Carmen’s rock and waved as wide and high and hard as anybody would.

  “He’s alive,” I said, “my little brother,” and Gillian, who was there for good, who was family, who was part of me and part of Mickey, stood up on that rock and waved, a long, slow, heartbreaking wave that was also a goodbye to Johnny. She said she thought she could see Mickey and Jasper Lee in the distance. She thought she could see her brother.

  “Prettiest part of the sky,” she said. “That’s Johnny.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I see him.”

  She took my hand. She held it.

  There was no half between us.

  Family.

  Eva opened her eyes, I was there. I saw. We were telling her stories about Haven. Old Carmen and the crabs she caught and how the meat was fire-roasted sweet. Cinnamon Nose and his peg-legged walk and the cat that I’d named Sterling. We told her about Deni’s mom and the brigade and the meals they made, about Andra to the rescue, about Dr. Edwards, whose hair had gone white in the wink of so much ruin, and who was reading every book he’d salvaged.

  Someone had found the picnic table with our mothers’ Cupid arrows carved into it. Alabaster was standing straight with a six-foot water line. Kites were flying, built and rippling out of crazy, weird, wild things, and a little girl was dancing around with a pair of glitter wings. The sand was the streets and the streets were the sand and you could pull a sled down Main, and there was good news everywhere: people getting found, birds getting free, a spotted fawn and a bright white swan down by the sanctuary.

  We didn’t talk about Ms. Isabel.

  We didn’t say lost.

  We said nothing about Gillian or the boy named Johnny Carpenter. About the regrets that were coming fast, or the past we could not fix.

  We kept it whole. We kept it simple. That was the plan, our way of shoring Eva up. We talked about our Project Flows and how much more we’d have to say when we wrote our books for the future.

  “Open your eyes, Eva,” we said, until finally she did. They were bluer than the sea in the shining of the sun, bluer than a bucket. They were
blue, and Eva was ours, and some things cannot be stolen.

  She told her story slow, in twisted pieces, but only after a while. Only after we’d held her head so she could drink, the tiniest sips—nutrition overseen by First Aid Andra.

  Give her time, Andra had said.

  Ask for nothing.

  Wait.

  Cinnamon Nose was lying beneath Eva’s table-for-a-bed, keeping her safe and protected. Sterling was curled in my arms; I’d brought her with me. I’d left Gillian to fish the seas beside Old Carmen, where, earlier in the day, we could see the help coming in the distance—a fleet of boats, a barge of provisions, a bridge of human beings—mainland to Haven. Soon again and forever Haven would change. Our brigades would change, our makeshift everythings, the way we kept time by the sun. Old Carmen’s rock would become just a rock. Her fires would get smaller. People who didn’t know any better wouldn’t know who she was. In time there’d be water without salt and toilets that actually flushed and shelters with roofs that weren’t stars and meals that weren’t scraped up from a wreck or the sea and no sling on Deni’s arm. There’d be power and machines and trash trucks and Humvees. There’d be civil servants and private guards. There’d be the governor of the state, TV anchors, and TVs. There’d be the people we loved returning and the people we’d lost remembered, and Vacationeers threatening to join us, and next year, when the time was right, The Season, the O’Sixteens would come together to build again a sanctuary Ms. Isabel would have loved, a sanctuary suited to a great blue heron and all other perfect birds. Everything would change soon. Everything was on the verge, and everyone was everywhere, getting ready. Everyone except for Eva and Deni and me, three best friends forever.

  “It’s my fault,” Eva said, her voice so small.

  We thought she was confused, still dizzy. We asked for nothing, waited. We brought water to her lips, and then a cup of warm bouillon. Sustenance, a little at a time. Nothing hard to swallow.

  “You don’t have to talk,” Deni told her.

  “I want to,” Eva said, her voice so crinkled and her heart so broken. She closed her eyes and went so deeply still that we thought we had lost her again.