Mistwalker (2 page)

They were our freshman home-arts project: uneven gingham monstrosities that would have made our grandmothers roll in their graves. Our aprons were thin and threadbare. Even if they weren’t, fact was, nothing was going to keep us clean.

Snatching up our rakes and buckets, we started down the rocky incline to the shore. Low tide had taken the water out, leaving a gleaming expanse of grey mud. Thin-boned pine trees sheltered us from the wind; this cove was a good place to go digging because of that. With the tree break, the cove stayed a little warmer a little longer. If we were lucky, we’d have until the end of October.

Mussel shells decorated the flat, black and white bouquets that could cut as clean as a knife. Bailey walked down a few yards so we wouldn’t get in each other’s way, and we got to work. Piercing into the mud with my rake, I flipped it and reached in with bare hands. Nothing. Breath frosting in the air, I moved up and started a new row.

“First!” Bailey cried.

I looked over, and she held a bloodworm high, presenting it to me with a smirk. The little monster twisted on itself, trying to get its black teeth into her wrist. Bailey dropped it into her bucket and said, “That’s what you get for changing the subject. I win, you lose.”

“I like how classy you are,” I replied. “All class, that’s you.”

Slapping her own butt, Bailey left a handprint. “Kiss it, Dixon.”

I flicked a handful of mud in her direction, then went back to digging. Bloodworms didn’t look like much, but on a long low tide, we could each pull three hundred. At a quarter apiece, that added up. For Bailey, her college fund. Lately, for me, the bills my parents couldn’t manage.

“So . . .” Bailey dared again, because she was my best friend and knew she could get away with it. “How far out are they gonna have to go, do you think?”

“A ways.” Cutting mud and pulling worms, I didn’t lift my head, but I did raise my voice so Bailey could hear me. “Looks like those mokes on Monhegan aren’t the only ones on winter lobster this year, I guess.”

“You remember that one girl?” The
from Monhegan
was implied.

I pulled a worm, dumping it in my bucket. “Yep. Crazy like everybody else out there.”

“You ain’t lying,” Bailey replied.

And then, because I could, in the middle of a mud flat, just the two of us and nobody else, I dared to say a wish out loud. “After this summer, we need a good season.”

Bailey hauled her boots from the mud and moved to a new patch. Invoking casual magic, she said, “Ask the Grey Man. It can’t hurt.”

A ghost, or a revenant, maybe a cursed sailor or faery—who, or what, the Grey Man was was up for debate. People couldn’t even agree that it was a man. Some of the old-timers insisted it was a Grey Lady.

But we all agreed that he lived in the lighthouse on Jackson’s Rock, and if you could get him on your side, you’d have the best fishing of your life.

It was a lot like the Norwegians biting the head off a herring, or throwing the first catch back for luck. Chewing on anise and spitting on the hooks. Leaving women behind and never setting sail
on a Friday. Old rituals we kept to guarantee the impossible: all good weather, no bad days.

But in our bones, we knew it was blizzards and nor’easters and squall lines that sank ships. Draggers and trawlers and people from away stealing our catches and leaving nothing for our pots. Government dopes making us trade float line for sink line, twice as expensive, lost twice as much.

In lobstering, nothing was certain—except the lighthouse on Jackson’s Rock. And that was automatic and empty. If there was
a Grey Man, he had lousy taste in real estate. No one went to Jackson’s Rock and likely no one ever would. Just thinking about it made my head hurt.

Then again, maybe he was right where he meant to be—where no one could ask him a favor. Where he’d never have to grant one. Like most faery stories, the price was probably too high. My family had paid enough for our calling this year.

We couldn’t spare anything else.

After selling my catch at the worm cellar, I wasn’t ready to go home yet. The ocean flowed with new colors, crimson and gold. Sunset transformed the shore. It called the sailors and the fishermen home.

Pushing my hands into my back pockets, I walked down the dock. It was easy to tell who’d gone far out, past the island, halfway to Georges Bank. Nothing held their berths at the pier but short, choppy waves. No sign of Daddy and Seth yet either.

Lobsters liked warm water—that’s why summer fishing was easy. As the seasons changed, they marched to the depths. They were safer away from shore. The rest of us, not really. Cold, open waters, waiting for drowning storms . . .

I wasn’t gonna think about that. Once everybody came home safe, that would be the time to think dark thoughts.

Lifting my face to the wind, I walked over warped wood. Maybe it was crazy, but I loved the way it tilted beneath my feet. Being able to walk over it without looking filled me with a strange sense of pride. Like it was proof I belonged there. That this was my place and my destiny.

“That you, Willa?” Zoe Pomroy asked.

I couldn’t see her, but it was easy to follow her voice. Turning down her slip, I approached the
Lazarus,
following the scent of coffee to the teal and white boat all the way at the end. That was the only place it fit.

Zoe had one of the bigger ships in our fleet. Fifty foot, with what amounted to an apartment inside. She had a kitchen and a head, a cabin and a guest room. When the weather was good, Zoe lived aboard. Daddy liked to give her hell about fishing from a yacht, but I admired her.

Leaning over the rail, Zoe grinned down at me. “I got something good today.”

“What’s that?” I asked, already climbing aboard.

Lamps illuminated the cabin. Everything inside gleamed, dark wood polished to a sheen. From the stern, I could make out the galley and the table. The rest of Zoe’s floating condo required an invitation.

“I’ve been pulling traps for damn near thirty years,” she said, opening a cooler on deck. She reached inside, hefting a lobster out with her bare hands. Its claws were already banded, so the worst it could do was wriggle at her. “And I’ve never seen one of these.”

In the dimming dusk, it was hard to make out what kind of wonder she had. The lobster was kinda big, but nothing special.

Then Zoe dipped him into the light that spilled from the cabin. A spark of excitement raced through me. He was blue. Not kinda sorta, if you squint at a green lobster, you might see some bluish spots. No, this was a deep shade, halfway to navy. Midnight freckles and powder blue joints, even his eyes were a hazy shade of midnight.

“Hot damn, Zoe, that’s something else.”

“Isn’t it?”

More than a little irritated—he’d probably been passed around to half of Broken Tooth by now—Old Blue the lobster curled his tail under. Flailing his claws, he wanted to pinch me. He just couldn’t. I trailed a finger down his segmented tail and hefted him in my hand. He was eight pounds, easy.

“You taking him back?” I asked.

Nodding, Zoe leaned against the rail. “Yeah. He’s bigger than legal, but I wouldn’t have kept him anyway.”

She didn’t have to explain. Lobsters like these, we shared them. Took pictures, handed them around. Then we gave them back to the ocean. It balanced things; it reminded the water gods and the universe that we appreciated all of it. That we weren’t so greedy to keep every last creature we pulled in our traps.

And it meant somebody else might find him later. Nobody knew how old a lobster could get. In fact, left alone, they might live forever. Every year, they shed their shells and grew a new one. Nothing limited how big they could grow.

Up in Nova Scotia, they found one that weighed forty-four pounds. Forget losing a finger to a lobster—that thing could break arms with its claws.

So if we gave back the big ones, the blue ones, the ones that were special, there was a little bit of immortality attached to it. In two days, or two hundred years, somebody else might haul it up. Take pictures, pass it around. Past to present, lobsterman to lobsterman.

I watched Zoe put Old Blue back in the cooler. “You see Dad and Seth out there today?”

“This morning,” she said. Straightening, she dried her hands on her jeans. Nodding toward the cabin, she invited me inside. “Past the Rock, heading on out. You want some coffee?”

Back home, the house sat empty. Mom was at work, and Daddy was still out. There was nothing in that house but unnatural quiet, so I took a cup of Zoe’s coffee, and another one after it. Just to stay on the water a little longer.

Just to be close to the sea.

ONE

Someone out there is thinking about me.

I feel it, as surely as I feel the wrought-iron stairs shake beneath me. It’s a quickening, a bright silver sting that plays along my skin. It bites, it taunts. I measure my breath and hurry downstairs in spite of it. Or because of it. I don’t know anymore.

The brick walls around me weep, exhausted from keeping the elements outside, but it’s only fair. I’m exhausted too. I hold off a great deal more than wind and salt spray.

As ever, the table is set with linens and silver. As ever, the candles are lit. My prison is an elegant one. I don’t remember when that started to matter.

When I was alive, I hated shaving each morning. I hated vests and breakfast jackets, cuff links, tie tacks, looking presentable. Now they’re ritual. Acts I perform as if I could walk back into my world at any moment. And I can’t. I never will.

Not even if she
is
thinking about me.

Sinking into my chair, I tell myself very firmly: stop wondering about her. Her thoughts aren’t formed. They aren’t real yet. She’s not a possibility; this is not the end. And if I’ve learned one lesson in one hundred years, it is this: anticipation is poison.

So, instead, I consider the wrapped box at my place. It, too, is elegant—gold board, gold ribbon, a sprig of juniper berries for color. There’s a clockwork movement inside, the heart of a music box.

If I assemble it correctly, it’ll play the “Maple Leaf Rag.” Carved lovers will spin around each other; silk maple leaves will wave. A merry addition to my collection.

I put the gift aside. And between blinks, my plate fills with salt cod and cream. This is my least favorite breakfast, and it’s my fault I’m having it. Some girl and her unborn wishes distracted me, so I forgot to want baked apples and oatmeal. Or broiled tomatoes on toast. Or anything, really—birthday cake and shaved ice, cherries jubilee, Irish coffee and hot peppers.

Tomorrow, the gift box will have silk leaves in it, and galvanized casing nails so I can finish my music box. The day after, four new books on any subject, none of which matter, as long as I haven’t read them before. They’ll appear on my plate, then make way for my breakfast. This will happen again at noon and at five. Lunch and dinner.

They’re regular as the clock I built, a mechanical sun chasing the moon across its face. It never slows. It never stops. I hear it toll every hour of every day as it marks the minutes to the next meal, the next box filled with nearly anything I desire.

And it doesn’t matter that, lately, I let those boxes pile up in my study, unopened. Nor does it matter that I take one bite and wish my plates away. Sighing, I unfold my napkin and consider my silverware an enemy.

In the end, I’m afraid, it’s a curse to get everything you want.

TWO

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.