“Maybe you couldn’t see her,” I said as another wave of cold went through me. “Maybe I was covering her from…from that angle. You don’t know. I know what I saw. I saw her well. Blue eyes. Ashy hair, messy, long, weird old shirt, like Victorian era or something. No shoes.”
“There’s no one else on the island, Perry.”
“You don’t know that. Have you looked?”
“No, but I was just at the boat. It’s still there and it’s still alone. Unless someone came by kayak, there is nowhere else to anchor your boat. If they aren’t at that beach, or at this beach, they aren’t here.”
“Maybe they came by kayak then.”
“Kiddo. Listen. Listen to yourself. There is no one here. If anyone came in this weather by kayak, they would die. You almost died out there and you were only at your waist. No one can come here in this weather. You know no one can come here in practically any weather.”
“They could have been here before, they–”
“There is no one else on this island Perry, except you and me and bunch of psycho raccoons and flash mob deer.” He said that with as much conviction and force as I had heard so far.
I thought it over. “Then what did I see? Are you calling me crazy?”
He sighed and slumped his head down, shaking it at the ground.
“What?” I asked defensively. “It’s a fair question. I say I saw someone. I know what I saw. You say it’s not possible. Then what did I see?
“I don’t know.”
“A ghost then,” I told him.
“A ghost of what?” he asked, finally looking up at me. “There were no kids on this fucking island.”
“There was a woman.”
“Yeah, and?”
“She died,” I said softly, almost feeling inexplicably sorry for her at that second, like I was talking about someone I knew.
“I know,” he said. “I read about it. She died of pneumonia or whatever, like less than a year after being on the island. There was no kid. There were only lepers and coffins and opium and some religious idiot who thought he could ease their suffering when all he did was add to it.”
I didn’t get far enough into the reading about the Reverend to know what Dex was talking about but I didn’t want to ask either. That wasn’t the point anyway. I know what I saw. Whether it was an actual ghost or a child, something had just drowned itself off the beach outside our tent and that realization was slowly working its way through my body. I felt the tears coming, and I was tired, sad and very confused.
Dex saw this too, because he let out a much softer sigh and moved on over to me. He put his cold hand on my forehead and held it there, his eyes looking into mine.
“Just rest for a bit. I’m going to get warm and dry. I’ll fix something to eat. Get some more coffee going. Have a bit of a nap, get warm. Then we’ll get you dry and we’ll talk about all of this. OK?”
I couldn’t bring myself to agree. He lowered his face to mine. I could see the yellow and red pin pricks of color that snaked across the brown in his eyes.
“There is no one else here. OK? If you saw anything, Perry, you saw a ghost. I know that’s still not an awesome thing but just please don’t think you saw an actual child drown out there because I know you didn’t. And I think you know it too.”
He tenderly brushed a piece of hair off of my forehead and gave me a fleeting, close–lipped smile. Then he gathered up some clothes of his, left the tent and left me alone with my thoughts, which evolved from poignant to abstract to nothing at all.