The first thing he’d said to me was this: “Where’s your coat, Miss? Colder than Satan’s ball sack out there. You’ll catch your death if you step foot outside wearing that flimsy thing.” He hadn’t seemed all that impressed with the oversized woolen sweater Mom had made me carry on the plane just in case I had gotten cold. I’d been too tired to argue with him, to tell him I was fairly warm blooded and I wasn’t going to need a jacket, especially if we were just going from the airport to the car, so I’d just unzipped my luggage and pulled out the thick, hulking coat I’d brought with me. Overkill, I’d thought. Way too much fleece lining, and the hood was just plain ridiculous.
Ridiculous until I’d followed Carrick outside and the frigid wind had tried to suck the air right out of my lungs, that is. How cold had it ever gotten in Manhattan Beach in winter? Fifty-five degrees? Maybe in the forties, though that seemed unlikely. The wind cutting across the concourse at the tiny Knox County Airport could barely have been more than ten degrees. Lower, probably. It stabbed through the swaddling of my jacket like a hot knife through butter, instantly chilling me to the bone. I’d been frozen by the time I’d climbed into the back of the fat, oddly shaped taxi waiting for us a couple of hundred feet away, and Carrick had chuckled under his breath.
Not much passed between us by way of conversation—a fact I was glad of, since I could barely understand a word he was saying. Sleep seemed like the most reasonable course of action.
An indeterminate period of time later, I was shaken awake by rough hands. Carrick shot me a toothy, mirthful smile and said, “We’re here, Miss. Don’t want to miss this boat now.” Out of the window now, weak light was cutting through a swollen bank of dirty gray, weighty-looking clouds—thunderheads, Mom called them. A sure sign of a storm. An age worn coastline stretched out to the left, grass sprouting in between the cracks and crevices of huge tors of stacked rock. Even in the pale, half-hearted dawn, the hills rolling off into the distance looked incredibly green and lush, way brighter, fatter and more vibrant than anything I’d ever seen by the beach. Beautiful. It was truly beautiful.
Carrick had parked the taxi in what appeared to be the parking lot of a dock. The concrete underfoot was cracked and buckled all over the place. Small two-man boats lay on their keels in a makeshift dry dock close by, rusting, sprouting shoots of ryegrass out of their hulls and weatherworn decks.
I’d lived by the beach all my life, and yet I had never smelled anything like this before. The air was filled with salt and brine, raw and powerful at the back of my nose.
“You’re on the six-forty crossing. I’ll carry your bags down to the boat, Miss. Do you think you’ll be fine from there? Better for me to get going back to the city, see.”
Thanks to the fresh, snapping breeze that was tearing in over the water, I was wide-awake, but my brain slowed down so rapidly that it felt like it was almost in reverse whenever I tried to understand the words coming out of Carrick’s mouth. I nodded, throwing my purse strap over my head. “Of course. Thank you.”
The boat service to Causeway Island was more fishing trawler than ferry. Wet plastic seats. Slick deck, with diamond plate panels drilled to the floor for grip. Rusted handrails, painted over so many times that a rainbow of colors were visible in the lengths of steel that had been scraped here and there—festive bruises to the ship’s décor that made me smile.
The old guy captaining the ship was surly, toothless and unfriendly. He didn’t say a word as I got onto the boat, and he still didn’t speak as we sat there, pitching to and fro while he apparently waited for more passengers who never came. It was close to seven o’clock by the time he abandoned his post and gunned the boat’s engines, pulling out of the tiny harbor. Port Creef disappeared behind us, to be replaced by a swathe of gunmetal gray water, frosted with white peaks.
The ride was short and choppy. God, I felt so sick. Turned inside out, to the point that I considered leaning over the side of the boat and puking at one point. Wouldn’t have gone down well, though. The wiry guy behind the wheel at the front of the boat kept casting shifty glances in my direction, as though he was expecting half as much from me and was prepared and ready to throw me overboard if he needed to.
The Causeway emerged on the horizon, a smudge of color, dark and black. The island wasn’t a charming swathe of land that rose gracefully out of the ocean like the arched hump of a whale; it was the angular bunched muscle, tendon and bone of a clenched fist, punching its way toward the sky with a defiance that seemed at odds with the lazy, quiet way the people who occupied its surface generally went about their day (according to Google). The color of the sky was still bleak and promised rain, but in spite of myself I couldn’t help but find a savage beauty in the place.