TWO
Willa
Since she was caught up worrying about the SAT instead of paying attention, Bailey stepped on the back of my shoe again. I stopped in the middle of the walk. As I expected, she kept going and crashed into me.
All betrayed, she asked, “What?” like I’d pulled a gun and rolled her for her iPhone.
“We’re not sitting the test until May,” I told her.
“But I have to be ready by then. You don’t just waltz into the Ivies, Willa. I have to think about it now.” Bailey waved her hands. “I don’t even have a subject. I need one for apps, and you know I suck at essays. I don’t get along with them, Willa! I choke!”
I stepped to the side so she could walk with me to school. “Write about lobstering. Or growing up all quaint and whatever. Hell, write about being the only lesbian in a fishing village!”
“I’m not the only one,” she said.
“Cait lives in Milbridge,” I replied.
Folding a stick of gum into her mouth, Bailey shook her head. “It’s not interesting. Dear Harvard, I’m unique and not a soul is bothered. Boo hoo hoo. Love, Bailey.”
I wrinkled my nose. “You’re not applying to Harvard.”
“That’s not the point!”
With a huff, Bailey picked up the pace. I gladly followed, because we were both going to be late the way we were dawdling. It’s not like it was a long walk. The Vandenbrook School was our town school. K through 12 went there, to this Victorian mansion perched on a hill.
Mom said when she and Dad went to Vandenbrook, they had to climb uneven granite stairs set into the dirt. Talk about a mess of fun in the winter. Sometimes it would get so cold, the earth would spit one out like a baby tooth.
But right before I started kindergarten, the town trust paid to pave the walk. They even put warmers beneath the concrete to keep it clear. Come December, we’d be tromping through knee-deep snow to get anywhere except school.
Everybody argued about why they did it and how they found the money for it. But I guess people were making noises about busing us to Narraguagus, and pride set in. Like everything else in Broken Tooth, it came down to tradition—we always had schooled our own, and we weren’t about to stop without a fight.
I liked it. I liked that I could find the place my dad scratched his initials in the old servants’ stairs when he was seventeen and sick of school. My granddad had done the same, and his father, too, back when it was just ten boys taking lessons with the rich owner’s son.
That wood contained one slice of me, the same way the Jenn-a-Lo claimed one, and the coast, and the jack pines, and the sea. I had planned to wait until graduation to add my initials. Instead, I broke in this past summer, the day of the funeral, to do it. It was too sunny outside, but nice and dark in the back hallway.
Bailey snapped her fingers in front of my face. The crack dragged me out of my thoughts, and I cooled my cheeks with my hands.
“Sorry.”
“Where’d you go?” she asked. She clasped the back of my neck and pulled me in roughly. It wasn’t a hug. It was a good shake, but it meant the same thing. I leaned into her, long enough to get her perfume on me, then threw my shoulders back.
“I’m all right.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” And to prove it, I tugged my bag onto my shoulder and said, “I think you should write about worm digging to pay for college. Make up some stuff about how cuts and worm bites get you good and tough. Ready for the world.”
“Yeah, right.”
“It doesn’t have to be true,” I told her, and started up the stairs. “It just has to get you by.”
Some days pretended to be normal.
Because our school was a mansion once, it had good places to sit. The elementary kids hung out in the solarium. They were allowed to run in there and get their ya yas out. Plus, it let them soak up what little sun made it through the trees up here.
The foyer was for us, the high school kids. When I walked in, Seth had already staked out our favorite corner. The far edge of the window seat, where the light was the warmest. Great, weighted oaks cast their shadows, and by lunch, the foyer was dark. In the morning, though, it was quiet and kinda pretty.
Sliding into Seth’s lap, I looped his arms around me the way I always had. Solid and warm, he melted to match me. He rested his chin on my shoulder, brushing his nose behind my ear. Everything fit.
“Morning,” he murmured. His voice buzzed on my skin.
“Yessir, it is,” I replied.
Seth smiled. He always did when I played literal with him. Holding me tighter, he fell quiet. He shifted and twitched beneath me. Fighting back a smile, I let him squirm. He was waiting for me to ask how it went with Daddy, and I wasn’t about to. It was a sore subject, and anyway, he was going to tell me whether I asked or not.
“Yesterday was good,” he finally said.
Reaching back, I trailed my fingers through his hair. “Catch anything?”
“Nope.”
It wasn’t a surprise. The traps had been out too long. Yesterday was an exercise in baiting and dropping, a chance for Daddy to get used to a sternman who wasn’t a Dixon. I tried to push that aside. Twisting to look at him, I asked, “Everything run smooth?”
There was a hitch in Seth’s answer, a little hesitation. “He kept coming on deck. I know how to gaff a buoy, but he kept wanting to show me.”
Secretly, that made me feel good. When I was on the Jenn-a-Lo, Dad barely slowed down between traps. It was up to me to keep up. And I had no problem doing it. There was nothing better than hauling a string in record time. Well, if the pots were all full, that made it a little bit better.
To soothe Seth, I turned in his lap. Draping my arms over his shoulders, I tugged at the short hairs on the back of his neck. I kissed his downturned mouth and ignored it when one of the Eldrich boys hooted from the stairs.
“You did good, though.”
“Think so?”
I nodded, our lips skimming when I spoke. “I do. And when you go out Wednesday, just tell him to get his ass back in the cabin where he belongs.”
Seth snorted. “That’s gonna go over.”
“It will with me.”
He’d known me my whole life. So he knew when he could pick me up. Picking up meant spinning. Used to be, I’d press my face against his neck. Breathe his after-shave and get my thrills from the smoothness of his smooth skin. All of a sudden, though, whirling in the foyer seemed like too much.
“Stop. Enough,” I said, and I wasn’t laughing like usual.
To his credit, Seth did. He tipped me so I could hop to my feet again. There was a space between us, one I filled by brushing my hair back and staring at the floor. In all the spots inside me that happy tried to fill, guilt pushed it out. I couldn’t be playing at school. Laughing and copping feels. I just couldn’t.
Looking past Seth, I stared down the hall. It was full, and one of the kindergarteners, Kenzie Fisher’s kid sister, skidded along the slick floor. She crashed into Kenzie’s legs. Without warning, Kenzie hauled her up and tossed her over her shoulder. Fat cheeks turned red, and the little Fisher’s eyes bugged out.
There was only ever two years between me and Levi. I couldn’t have held him upside down if I wanted to. But stupid me, stupid, irrational me—right then, I wanted to, so bad. Seth’s rough hand skimmed across the back of my neck. Leaning over, he kissed my hair. He turned me, subtly, because he knew me too well.
“It’s okay,” he murmured.
It wasn’t, but I said “I know” anyway.
With a pair of metal cutters in one hand, I turned my bead tray with the other. Somehow, I was supposed to turn a spool of wire and about fifty million little glass spheres into a bracelet, one with “depth” and a “point of view.”
No idea what that meant, so I started with blue beads and figured I’d throw some silver ones in to go with.
If anybody asked, I was going to say it represented the Milky Way. The way it looked on a lightless, cloudless night, when we were halfway to Georges Bank. There, surrounded by sea and not a thing else, you were a real tiny slice of infinity. From there, you could see the shape of galaxies, silver and flickering, forever out of reach.
“Are you using those needles?” Brennan asked.
His voice dragged me back to class, and I shook my head, handing the needles over. There were only six of us in Metalwork and Jewelry, and it was obvious everybody else wanted to be there.
They swirled their fingers through bowls of lamp-work beads, choosing another color, caring what came next on their wire.
When they twisted their pliers, their base wires became luxurious shapes, half-moons or Greek squares. They managed to suspend cheap seed pearls in loops and whorls. When they clamped off the clasps, no ragged edges remained.
Mrs. Baxter had demonstrated all of that in the first week. Mechanical technique she called it. I didn’t have it.
Give me sink rope or claw bands. Give me zip ties and bait bags. I knew what to do with those. I could drop a lobster pot like it was a French-hook earring; it was elegant, even. But with delicate little pretty things, I was hopeless.
Don’t get me wrong, I liked wearing it just fine. For my last birthday, Seth gave me a pair of silver wraps that held on to the top of either ear. I wore those almost every day, just like the silver stud in the curve of my nose.
I couldn’t do rings or necklaces or anything that dangled—too easy to rip off when I was working the boat. But what I could wear, I liked. I just wasn’t artistic when it came to making it.
And it’s not like I didn’t know that. I was supposed to have Forensics during third period. The school was so small, we had only two electives a semester. Solving fake crimes with the double-duty science teacher sounded like more fun to me than beading necklaces.
I don’t know who changed my schedule. Could have been the principal (also, the dean and guidance counselor). Or my parents. I guess they decided that after Levi died, the last thing I needed was twelve weeks of dead bodies and the torment people put them through.
They were protecting me. And maybe they were right. At least Mrs. Baxter didn’t expect me to be good at beading. I had a solid C for turning everything in on time, and she never asked me to explain my vision on critique days.
The class turned out to be soothing, in a way. We were allowed to talk, but we didn’t much. It was all soft patter, pass me that knotter, and could I have that clamp? It sounded like distant rain, so many beads being poured from tray to tray, slipping easily on wires. They whispered, and so did we.
When Bailey opened the door, it disturbed the rain. We all looked up at the same time.
“From the office,” Bailey said, and crept to my table. She touched the coiled mess of my project and said “pretty” before getting to the point. Smoothing a note onto the table, she told me what it said. “Your mom tried to text you, but you didn’t answer.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked. I took a quick look at my phone, but it was blank. No big surprise. There was only one cell tower and nothing but rock and cliff for miles. We were lucky when we got a signal at all.
Bailey fished through the beads, pulling out a red and purple one to roll between her fingers. It would disappear into her pocket any time now; those were Cait’s favorite colors. “You have to go home straight after. The lawyer’s coming.”
Not my lawyer, the prosecutor. I didn’t bother to correct her. Instead, I brushed her hand away so I could pretend to work on my bracelet. Staring down at the silver loops, I said, “All right.”
“Do you want me to come?” she asked.
Did I? Not really. “You can.”
Rubbing her shoulder against mine, Bailey reached for another bead. “I’ll do community service with you.”
“Good,” I said, frowning when my sight wavered, hot with tears. “’Cause I’ll probably need a ride.”
“I’m not getting my brakes fixed for you, princess. Just so you know.”
“Who asked you to?”
She flipped me off behind Mrs. Baxter’s back, and left. I was glad she hadn’t looked too close. If I could get a couple breaths in, I could seal myself up. I wouldn’t break down in the middle of class. They already knew I was guilty and nobody blamed me, anyway.
So what was there to cry about?
TWO
Grey
Sailors used to mark the edges of their maps Here There Be Monsters.
They weren’t entirely wrong. Monsters don’t have claws, they have eyes dark as molasses and hair white as a new dime. They have soft petal lips that whisper the sweetest promises.
I can say with absolute authority that one doesn’t notice a cloak of fog if one is too entirely entranced with the creature wearing it.
It’s the thing beneath, the thing you cannot imagine, that captures you.
Susannah had delicate fingers; she liked to pull them through my hair. I would close my eyes and exist under her hand. My heart beat for her touch. My blood ran for a single flash of her lashes. Not once did I question the mist at her feet. It seemed ethereal at the time.
My father’s boat was fast; he had a talent for cutting ice. We sailed up the shore from Boston thrice weekly, buying lobster today to sell tomorrow while the beasts still waved their claws and curled their tails.
It was an idiotic profession. One he intended to press on me when I was of age to captain my own ship. He assumed I wanted it. That I would be no happier than at the moment I reflected him completely. But I stood on the deck of his ship and loathed him.
The man was gentle enough—many found him convivial company indeed. But I detested the cream he rubbed into his hands. As if any tincture might soften them and let him pretend to be a gentleman. I’d always wondered if he realized he stank of lobster. Even after a boiling bath with flowers and fresh soap: then he smelled of lavender and lobsters. It was no improvement.
I had bigger plans for myself. A life of adventure, one lived on rails and on horseback. Through cities and deserts. Oh, especially deserts—I fantasized about them. To bask in the heat all day long, to warm my feet in the sand. To spend not a single moment soaked with salt water. Whatever the hook that bound my father with the sea, I didn’t possess it. And I had my plans to abandon it eternally.
Working the lobster line with my father offered me little entertainment, so I had to make me own. The island in the Broken Tooth harbor, that fascinated me. The villagers said it was abandoned, dangerous, haunted.
When my father and I sailed in, I studied its forbidding shape, wondered about its secrets. On our departure, I did the same, gazing and gazing at Jackson’s Rock.
And it was in such contemplation that I saw Susannah for the first time. She stood on the island cliff in the bay, her hair unfurled, long locks tossed by the wind. With a pale cloak and gown, she seemed made of the mist.
Leaning over the side, I stared at her—I wondered earnestly if this was a siren. If she would open her mouth and sing. If she would draw our ship into the rocks beneath her feet.
Instead, she waved.
Her fingers bloomed like a peony bud, and there was a weight to her smile that I longed to lighten. She shrank as we slipped away on good winds. Soon she was nothing but a star on the horizon, and then nothing at all but a memory.
My thoughts troubled me: Was she the lighthouse keeper’s daughter? Was she there alone? It was the shape of her smile that drew me back. In my ship’s bunk, and in my bed at home, I invented in that expression a damsel that only I could rescue.
Certainly, her father had locked her away from the mainland; undoubtedly, her stepmother had made her a servant. She was a nymph or a princess, Snow White or Cinderella. She was Rapunzel, and in my fever, I felt certain that if I only asked, she would let down her platinum hair.
She did.
While my father attended to business in the village, I rowed to the rock. My shoulders burned, and the sun—so mild to just stand in it—spilled fire all across me. In dreams, I was dashing in my rescue, crisp in linens. In truth, I landed on the shore with my shirt soaked through and damp hair clinging to my face. The ocean. Always the godforsaken ocean.
“You shouldn’t be here.” Susannah stepped from the trees, a pale apparition.
Already lovesick from memory, the fresh sight of her only stoked the fever. Leaping ashore, I approached, hands out as if she might startle like a doe. I told her, “I came for you.”
“Why?”
With every bit of foolish sincerity I had in me, I replied, “Because I love you.”
In retrospect, I should have been surprised that she let me kiss her. That she threaded her fingers in my hair and whispered exactly the right words in my ear to entice me back. Our stolen moments were painted in romantic shades, in the bronze twilight beneath towering pines.
For an entire summer, again and again, I returned to her rock, to her pale and spectral kisses—until I swore I would do anything for her. I would die for her.
And then I did.
I was an idiot, and a fool, and I have had a century now to shame myself for mistaking lust for love. Every time I look in the mirror and see my dime-silver hair and my eyes dark as molasses—every time I look across the water to Broken Tooth, hoping that the girl thinking of me will soon come to my shore—I’m reminded of my stupidity.
And I hate myself only a little for hoping she’s just as unwise.