Her nose wrinkles, and she looks perplexed. “Let me see which one you’re talking about.”
I lead her down the back hall to the painting. Her rubber-soled shoes squeak on the floor. She gives off a faint scent of gardenia. When we reach the painting, she draws in a breath, tapping her chin with her index finger. “Gorgeous, isn’t it? I do know she was a real person. The café is fairly new in the picture, as you can see. Could be his wife, but she left the island some time ago. She didn’t want to live out here, or so the story goes. Nobody knows his background, so people gossip. He’s a bit reclusive.”
“But the paintings show how sensitive he is. He has an eye.”
“People aren’t always the way they seem to be, are they? We all have secrets. Rumors were that he was quite a handsome guy when he was young. He’s still handsome, but he’s gotten so . . . eccentric. One of the older librarians suggested that the woman in the painting was another island resident. A married woman. But that may have been idle gossip.”
“I’m curious about his relationship with her,” I say. “He mistook me for her. But if she’s still around, she must be much older than me.”
She looks from the painting to me and back again. “I see the similarity. He must still miss her after all these years. Maybe she’s your long-lost mother.”
I laugh. “Definitely not. I’m fairly sure my mother never came out to these islands. She passed away many years ago.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, dear.” Her eyes register sympathy, but to her credit, not pity.
“Thank you. I do wonder about this woman and who she was to him.”
“Did you ask him?” she says.
“I tried to—but he wouldn’t say more, and I didn’t want to pry.”
“I don’t know for sure, but word is, after his wife left, he stayed on for a reason. He might’ve fallen in love with this . . . femme fatale. But it didn’t work out. Sad story. Maybe that was why he kept to himself.”
“I would love to know more about his background and the mysterious other woman.”
“I could talk to the librarian who used to work here. She retired, but she knows a lot about the history of the island.”
“If you don’t mind,” I say.
“It’s no trouble at all. I’ll let you know what I find out.”
The current swirls around us, the water aglow in emerald light. We’re diving along a sea wall teeming with life—swaying yellow urchins and orange-tufted anemones. I’m pushed along faster than I expected. A tiny crab snaps at me, then withdraws its pincers. Striped fish dart in and out of the rock crevices. Lingcod, cutthroat trout. The variety of life forms clinging to the vertical rock face steals my breath away. Where are we diving? Strange, multicolored fish swim by in schools—they’re not like any real fish I’ve ever seen. Dream fish.
I wake in the dimness of dawn. Where am I? When? In the cottage, in the room I share with Jacob now. A half moon shines in through the window, casting a meager light on the bedspread. The clock on the nightstand reads 6:31 a.m. Nearly dawn. A soft wind slinks in from the sea. Jacob is snoring softly next to me, one arm flung over his forehead.
I turn on my side, facing away from him, away from the window. I close my eyes, but sleep eludes me. Jacob rolls over, rests his arm on my waist, and pulls me back toward him. “You okay?”
“Fine,” I whisper, settling against him.
“Diving dream?” he whispers in my ear.
“Everything was vivid this time.”
“How so?”
“I could see everything. We dove along this . . . solid, steep rock wall. There were so many anemones. White ones, lavender, orange. Tinted green from zoochlorellae—”
“Zoo what?”
“Zoochlorellae. Commensal algae. The word just came to me.”
“What the hell is that?”
“It grows inside the anemone. It’s a complicated symbiotic relationship.”
“I like the sound of that.”
“There was so much to see . . .”
His arm relaxes on my waist. He has drifted off. His breathing takes on a steady rhythm. I lie awake, playing back the dream, a calm precursor to something much darker and unremembered. My mind drifts back to yesterday, when I asked Jacob about our trip to the mercantile last week. We rode our bicycles and found the store closed, the downtown road deserted. Later, we returned to the store in the truck. He remembered Nancy stopping in, but he didn’t remember Douglas Ingram. Vaguely, maybe, he says. But we were young. We didn’t pay attention to the old survivalists who hid out in the woods. He was probably one of them.