A tear crept to her eye. Holly wiped it with one finger, determined not to cry. They sat for a while, finding their way back to equanimity.
“I have a confession to make,” Miss Tiramaku said. “My parents died when I was quite young, and I went to live in an orphanage run by the nuns. Too old for adoption, everyone wants a baby. But I was also considered a bit too odd. Lost in the clouds of my own mind. They didn’t say Asperger’s syndrome in those days. This was almost sixty years ago, you understand. The diagnosis was much more pointed, and the treatment severe, but it made no difference for me. No psychiatrists ever came to the orphanage. I was just a special case, a little girl apart from all the other little girls. I kept to myself, stuck in my mind. Truth be told, I was a difficult child, but, praise the Lord, the nuns did what they could for me.”
Holly cradled the gift in her lap.
“Don’t be sorry, my dear. That was a long time ago, and look at me now. I’ve found a place in the world. Here with Father.”
“Nobody understands Jack,” Holly said. “He’s what they call high functioning, but that’s misleading, isn’t it? It was hard enough before he developed his fear of the outdoors. And lately, he’s been even harder to reach. Just the other morning, I went to wake him, barely laid a hand on his shoulder, and he woke up in a terror and hit me.”
“You may have knocked on a door that he thought he had shut.”
“Nobody knows what it is like.”
“I do,” Miss Tiramaku said. “Maybe that’s what drew you here. I’d like to meet him. Your son. That’s partly why the gift of the tea. A little ruse. Father Bolden was going to drive me over this evening.”
The brick of tea atop the wrapping paper looked like an altar. Holly smiled at the deception. “I’ll take you now if you like, and you can meet Jack. And then I can run you back, it’s not far.”
Miss Tiramaku stood at once. “Let’s go.”
On the drive, they chatted about her life in the rectory, the pastor’s quirks and quiddities, and how they had both arrived in Maine from faraway places. How he took her in, gave her a job and a place to stay, and how they grew closer over the years. When the ocean came into view along Shore Road, Miss Tiramaku asked if they might stop for a while. Holly pulled over into the verge and left the engine idling. From their vantage point they could see a wide swath of the Atlantic, the breakers rolling white cotton across the gray sea.
“I never tire of this view,” Miss Tiramaku said. “Sometimes I think that people born on islands are never completely content without the smell and sound of the ocean.”
“I love it,” Holly said. “We settled here—in our dream house—just before Jack was born. Though I still feel as if I’m an outsider to a degree, never completely accepted by the locals.”
“We are not from heah. We’re from away.”
Holly laughed at the localism. “Outsiders. We could live here for a hundred years and still be from away. It’s like a secret society all its own.”
On the silvery water, the wooden ship bobbed along, sails full, the sailors on deck in their antique costumes manning the lines and skipping up the rigging, Captain Purcell hollering orders from behind the wheel. A woman made her way from aft to stern, holding the rail to keep her balance, a small boy in tow. Doomed, they went about their tasks unaware of their fate. Holly would save them if she could, even knowing that the ship, the crew, the woman and her son, and all the other passengers were but a moment’s hallucination. She was drawn to them, pulled by the vacuum of their sinking. In the seat next to her, Miss Tiramaku stared vacantly at the same distant spot.
Holly reached into her bag and pulled out her notes. “When I first came to Father Bolden, he told me the story of that painting in your dining room. The Wreck of the Porthleven. Ever since, I can’t shake the image of those poor drowning people. They were outsiders, too, looking for a new start, only to come to a bad end. So this morning, I went to the Maritime Museum to research the story, and I found a list of the dead.”
Flipping through the pages, she handed over her notes of the ship’s manifest. “People on the shore came to take those who washed up from the sea. But some bodies were never found.” Holly pointed in the direction of where she imagined the phantom ship. “I think I may have heard them out there. Voices on Christmas eve. And I’ve been hearing other things banging and knocking, and cries on the water, late at night.”
“You poor thing.” Miss Tiramaku turned to face her. “You may have heard the funa-yurei.”
“Tell me more about these ghosts,” Holly said. “These yurei.”
“Father would not want me to say.”