What the Waves Know (16 page)

Mrs. O'Malley hadn't shown up yet, and Grandma Jo and I glanced awkwardly at one another.

Remy shoved a chair under a bookcase, set aside a copy of Erica Jong's
Fear of Flying
, and climbed up, removing a small wooden statue from the top shelf before clamoring back down to set it in front of me.

“Have you read that yet?” Grandma Jo nodded at the book. “It's fabulous. You'll never think of sex the same way again.”

I looked up at her, wide-eyed.

“Not yet,” Remy said, letting her eyes flick toward the book. “But I'm sure as hell going to now.” She made her way back to the counter with the statue. “You know what this is?”

Grandma Jo glanced across the pile of apples.

Scraping the dough from my fingers first, I picked up the figurine, surprised that I did know what it was: a statue of Saint Agnes of Assisi. Back when my parents were doing all that fighting, and I was doing all that praying, I'd sent a million winged prayers to Saint Francis for the simple reason that Reverend Mitchell had once read us a story about God ordering Saint Francis to restore peace to God's House. I was so young I thought it was an actual house with a winding staircase and dirty living room, and that if Saint Francis could fix God's house, fixing mine should be a cinch. So when I was nine and we had to write an essay for Sunday school about a religious figure, I'd chosen him as my subject. In the essay, I'd copied a picture of him giving a habit to Saint Agnes, charging her to look over the poor.

That was a long time ago, though, and somewhere along the way, I'd grown tired of waiting for an answer and forgotten about him altogether.

“It's Saint Agnes,” Remy said, taking a fork to the pie crust. “There's this religion, sort of, called Santeria that the slaves practiced. Slave owners and missionaries forced the slaves to worship the Christian saints and god. But
the slaves already had gods of their own. Flip it over,” she wagged her head at the statue, “go ahead.” On the bottom of the statue was the figure of a small woman caught in a shell. Remy picked up the crust and flopped it into a pie pan, busying herself with pinching the edges. “It's Yemaya. The slaves didn't want to abandon their own gods, so they carved symbols and pictures of them into the bottom of these statues and worshipped them, instead, all the while. The whole time, the slave handlers thought they were praying to the saints. Cool, huh?”

“Very,” Grandma Jo agreed.

I nodded, running a hand over the carved figure at the base of the statue.

“My mother got me those when I was around your age from an antiques store over on the mainland.” Remy waved her hand at the empty stool.

I set the statue down, watching it while I measured out three more cups of flour, tossed it into the sifting can, and gave the crank a spin. The powder flitted through the screen with the grace of winter's first snow.

“If you really want to know about Yemaya, you should check out the library down on Chestnut Street. They had a bad fire a few years back—space heater on the second floor—but they've been able to save a lot of stuff and what they couldn't has mostly been replaced. They have a whole display set up for the walking tour. As a matter of fact, if you're interested you could drop a bundle of festival flyers off at the desk, and this.” She crossed the room
and pulled a book from the shelf. “It's overdue. Tell them I'll pay with pie at the festival.” She laid the book beside me and opened the oven to peek inside.

It was seven
o'clock when Remy finally set the last bowl in the sink. “Well, I guess that about does it for tonight.”

The darkness beyond the kitchen window, and Grandma Jo at my side, erased any chance I might have had to sneak back up to Witch's Peak to look for my Yemaya Stone.

“I'll see you bright and early to bring you down to Herman's,” Remy said.

I pushed the stool, which I had managed to cover with flour, under the butcher's block and began to shove in the one beside it when Remy stopped me. For a fleeting second, her eyes seemed to burn right through me, then the look was gone and the lilt returned to her voice, leaving me wondering if my mother was right about Remy being a raving lunatic.

“Here.” She shoved three fives and five ones into my hand. “Give your mom fifteen dollars toward Mr. Herman's window.”

I held up the five ones questioningly.

“Those are for you.” She closed my fingers around the money, looking over at Grandma Jo. “Josephine, maybe you'd like to bake some of your biscuits for the festival? The ones without curds.”

“It would be my honor. But only if you promise to try the macaroni and cheese I brought you.”

Remy lifted an eyebrow then sighed. “Fine.”

Tucking the money into two separate pockets, I picked up Remy's book and the stack of flyers, glancing once more at the stool Remy had nearly bit my head in two for touching, and walked out the door. By the time Grandma Jo and I made it to the Booth House, my mother was locked in her room, dictating prices into her handheld recorder:

“Bradley Museum Cavanaugh Collection. Oil-based, fair condition. Eighty-five hundred dollars.. Michael Scott Lasser sculpture, fifteen hundred dollars.”

I laid the fifteen dollars on the counter and slipped upstairs to wash the dough from under my nails in the bathroom. Flicking on the light, I stared at the girl watching me in the mirror with an expression of curiosity on her face. The honey had mostly washed free of my dark strands, but the curls still spiraled down to my breasts in smooth loose springs that reminded me of coils of chocolate shaved from the brick. Maybe Remy was right, that honey was conditioning, or maybe it was the best hair spray in the universe.

Running the water until it warmed, I used one nail to scrape the piecrust paste from the other until tiny clumps littered the porcelain then splashed my face. It was almost as pale as the basin, as if God forgot to color it in altogether, then realizing his mistake, tossed a handful of
freckles across my nose just to make sure people could see me. It would be easier, I often thought, if they could not—if I could just slip from shadow to shadow through the universe, unseen and unheard. Even my eyes were lacking real color. The dim tint of a perfect storm, that's what my father used to say. But, really, they were the pale gray of a day that a pending storm had snuffed all the light from.

For a splintered second, I couldn't tell if I was studying the girl in the mirror or if she was studying me, and I thought Grandma Jo might be wrong about me not being insane. Did I get the best of my father? I couldn't say. One minute the memory of him was sharp as a razor. The next it was all mushy around the edges and lacking form. Tipping my head upside down, I shook my hair to knock the flour from it and went back downstairs.

I found Grandma Jo in the kitchen making her famous tofu macaroni and cheese.

“Just in time,” she chirped when I came back into the kitchen. “I was looking for a tester.”

I took a bite and rolled my eyes heavenward. It was divine.

There is my mother's pasta, and then there is Grandma Jo's macaroni and cheese, made with Vermont Cheddar so sharp it stings your tongue. I did not even mind that it was whole wheat, or that she always snuck tofu crumbles into the pasta.

“Shoot!” Grandma Jo pulled her hand back from the
casserole, sucking on her finger. “That's hot.” The memory of my mother shoving her bloody thumb in her mouth flitted back to me, and I couldn't help but notice how much they sometimes resembled one another.

“Can you put the wineglasses on the table for me?”

Pinching the rims together, I clinked my way to the table.

“Zo, dinner!”

“Busy,” my mother called back from her room. “I'll eat later.”

“You'll eat now, or Izabella and I will come in there with the food and eat on your bed.” Grandma Jo's voice was warm but firm as concrete.

My mother shuffled into the room and began filling water glasses with ice. I followed behind her, setting the plates.

“Pie turn out okay?” She gazed up at me. Aside from my mother telling me she missed my father, too, we hadn't really spoken since the argument about Mr. Herman's window and I recognized the question for what it was: a white flag.

Laying a bread plate down, I nodded, trying to remember the last time we'd sat down to eat together. The scent of baking bread began to waft through the house.

“Maybe you and Grandma Jo can explore the island tomorrow night while I work.”

“Maybe you can finish your work another time and we can go together,” Grandma Jo offered as she pulled the
bread from the oven, grated fresh Parmesan on top, and set it in a basket for me to take to the table. My mother sighed. I knew Grandma Jo drove her nuts, but I wondered, too, if she saw the way Grandma Jo prodded her back into herself. The cracks seemed to fill in when my grandmother was around, not perfectly, but noticeably.

Grandma Jo padded into the dining room barefoot carrying a candle and matches. She set a plate on the floor for Luke, who scampered up to sniff it. Maybe it was a result of what I had overheard the night before, or the way the puzzle pieces were shifting slowly into place. Maybe it was the smell of autumn roses in the air, or the flickering of fall's last fireflies in the yard. Whatever it was, I did not see it coming. Grandma Jo lit the candle. There was a burst of light, like a flashcube I had not closed my eyes to.

A cake. Six pink candles.
Let go . . . let go . . . let go
. And then the world went white.

“Izabella, honey!” I was surprised to find my body upright, my hands clutching the ladder-back chair with enough force to numb my fingertips. “Honey?” Grandma Jo's voice sifted through the white light from a distant land. “Here, sit down.” Grandma Jo held me from the front while my mother tilted a glass of ice water to my lips. As I slowly touched down, their faces drew into focus, breaking through the blaze of white.

“Sip.” My mother poured water down my throat.

“What is it?” Grandma Jo held my hand.

“Probably the heat from baking all afternoon. It's warm in here.”

I nodded in agreement.

“Do you want to lie down?”

I shook my head, mopping the clamminess from my brow and getting to my feet.

“Better?”

I nodded, knowing for a fact that it wasn't true. Something in this place was sending all those memories I'd spent eight years burying bobbing to the surface inside me like land mines dislodged from the ocean floor. There was no avoiding them, no telling what might bump into one, setting it off.

When I woke curled up on the couch the following morning, autumn had pounced on Tillings Island with both feet. Sometime in the night, my mother had come to cover me with a quilt and Luke had squirreled his way underneath, sticking a wet nose under my chin while he slept.

“Are you feeling well enough to go with Remy today?” My mother shuffled into the living room carting a clean load of laundry. The nod escaped before I thought better of it, remembering I was due at Herman's in half an hour.

“All right, then you'd better get yourself up and dressed before she comes blaring that godforsaken horn.”

Untangling myself, I tossed the quilt aside, sending Luke flopping over with a sleepy snort, and went upstairs to throw on a clean shirt. I left on the old pair of jeans I'd slept in, since I was going to be painting anyway. A strapping frost the night before had left the leaves outside the window dipped in shades of molasses and cranberry
red. Just looking at them made me hungry for a tall stack of Grandma Jo's flapjacks and homemade maple syrup, which I could smell cooking downstairs. Pulling on one of my father's old sweatshirts with a shiver and letting it hang clear down to my knees, I stuck my hair up in a curly mop and darted downstairs.

“I'm glad to see you're feeling better.” Grandma Jo set a second pancake on my plate and patted my shoulder.

After wolfing it down, I tossed my plate in the sink and headed for the front door.

“Freeze.” My mother came through the kitchen door clutching a mug of coffee. “Where in the world do you think you're going? Remy'll be here any minute to get you.”

Tell her to wait
, I scribbled on a brown paper bag from Salva's that was sitting on the table.
I'll be right back.
I'd just made it to the door when I remembered the strange way Remy had acted the day before and turned around, picking up the pencil again.
Do you know Mrs. O'Malley?

“She used to drop preserves and biscuits by whenever we came,” my mother answered after a calculated pause. “That sort of thing.”

Why hasn't she
? The lead on the pencil had worn below the crest of the wood and I was forced to scratch the last word into the smooth side of the bag. My mother leaned over, trying to decipher it, sloshing coffee on her chest as she did. For the craziest of seconds, it looked as though she'd done so on purpose. She leapt back belatedly.

“Shit!” she cussed, swiping at the stain with the ban
dage on her thumb. “That's hot. Do me a favor and leave the door unlocked in case Remy comes while I change. Okay?”

I'll be right back
, I promised.

“You'd better be!” she called, bustling out of the room while holding her shirt away from her skin in a small stained tent. “I'm not going to sit here and listen to her go on while you lollygag about.” Bolting out the door in a race to get back before Remy showed up, I barely noticed Luke scrambling out at my heels to make off after a rabbit in the side yard.

I ran down the lane as fast as my feet would move, and after making sure Remy wasn't coming down the road, cut into the path. Within three minutes, I was staring at Witch's Peak trying to remember where I'd set down the map and flyer and stone. Dropping to my knees, I raked my fingertips through the mud, letting the stones sift through my fingers until I hit the soggy edge of a folded piece of paper under a rotted apple core. Grandma Jo's map was dirty and wet, but at least it was whole. After ten more minutes of shuffling through the dirt I knew the Yemaya Stone was gone along with the flyer. Either they'd been brushed into the thickets by one of Mr. O'Malley's deer, probably the one who'd left the apple core rotting on my map, or Riley had taken them. Either way, I would never get them back.

Pulling myself to my feet, I adopted Remy's disdain for Mr. O'Malley's stupid salt licks and nursed my own for Riley. The stone was the one thing I had never lost from
my father and a sick emptiness opened up inside me. I felt tears sting the corners of my eyes but pushed them away with the heels of my palms. Brushing the dirt off my knees, I walked back to the Booth House, miserable.

The Purple Monster was parked in the drive, and inside the house my mother was making a check out to Remy since Mr. Herman wouldn't take one from the mainland. Remy plucked it off the table and counted out five twenties from her own pocket, stuffing them in her shirt pocket to give to Mr. Herman before taking a plate of pancakes from Grandma Jo.

“Where were you?” she asked, shoving a bite in her mouth and glancing in my direction.

I grabbed the paper bag and wrote,
out.

“I was just being polite.” She gave me a sidelong look while she chewed. “I didn't really want to know anyway.”

Still plotting the many ways I could torture Riley until he coughed up my belongings, I stared back at her with an empty face.

“Jeez, someone's in a tizzy this morning,” she said, piling one more bite of pancake into her cheek before turning for the door. “Since you're already grouchy, let's go pay Mr. Herman his money and break up a window.”

“Did you remember to pick me up flowers, Remy?” my mother interjected.

“No.”

“But I asked you,” she retorted. “Can you bring some back with you?”

“Let me see. While you were still sleeping, I hunted down goggles, gloves, and mallets to take care of knocking that window out. Now I'm going down to face off with an old grump who's already pissed as a grizzly about a broken window and help Izabella take care of the mess she left behind. Then I need to go scrub toilets on the ferry and make sure the deck's clear of puppy puke. After that, I'm steering a boat across the ocean to pick up a group of pushy tourists and coming back to cart those same tourists to every corner of this blessed island. In the ten minutes I may find for myself by midnight, I might, I don't know . . . pee or eat or something crazy like that. So, no.”

“Well, I'm
so
sorry. But maybe if I had a car—”

“You don't need a car; you need a damn servant. Come on, Izabella, before Mr. Herman blows out an artery. Thanks for breakfast, Josephine.”

I sighed, looking at my mother.

“Go on,” she said, but there was a hint of gentleness in her voice that I wasn't used to. “Just stay in the car while Remy gives him the money. He'll be okay after that. And be sure to wear the goggles and gloves Remy brought.”

Remy held the door wide, letting me stomp on by.

“And don't forget to do your social studies work. Remy has your book,” she yelled after me.

Outside, I stood by the door waiting for Remy while my mother barked final instructions at her.

“Make sure he gives you a receipt. The last thing I want
is to be stuck on this island for eternity taking care of a lawsuit.”

“Trust me,” Remy lobbed back. “That's the last thing any of us wants.”

“And make sure Iz stays in the car until he's paid so he doesn't yell at her all over again. For God's sake, don't let her anywhere near those girls.”

“Anything else?” Remy asked. “Maybe she could just sit in the car and I could fix the window for her, too.”

“You know what I mean. I just don't want—”

“Good God, give the girl a little credit. She's not built of sand,” Remy said. “Now, if you're done, I've got one for you. Get your sorry ass out of this house. Take a walk, for Pete's pity! Lord knows you could use a little fresh air. You're starting to look like a vampire.”

“The girl's got a point,” I heard Grandma Jo yell from inside.

“And while you're out get your own damn flowers. There are about a thousand rosebushes on this property and a field of black-eyed Susans and daisies. Clippers are in the shed. Figure it out. I've got better things to do than run around trying to match petals to your sofa cushions.” She came through the front door shooting me a quick wink, and when I looked over my shoulder, I was surprised to see the faintest glint of a smile turning up the corners of my mother's mouth before she spun around.

“Now,” Remy glanced at me once we were in the car and she'd thrown it into drive, “you have your pen and pad?” I
fished around inside the pocket of my father's sweatshirt and nodded. “Good. Then you want to tell me what storm cloud parked its rear end over your head this morning?”

I flipped my pad open and wrote,
nothing.

“Right. And I'm gonna romp around this island to get your mum flowers tomorrow. Now that we're both done telling big fat lies . . .”

The back-and-forth between Remy and my mother was becoming my surest source of entertainment, better even than seeing how many of my mother's cigarettes I could steal before she thought she was losing her mind. But something had shifted between them. What began as sheer pissiness had softened into almost a sort of game.

The Great Purple
Monster of Millbury skidded to a stop in front of Merchant's, nearly bumping the car in front of it in the process. I stared out the window praying hard that Mr. Herman would not choose this very moment to come sweep the front stoop. We sat there for the slowest minute in all of history before my eyes dragged away from the storefront to find that Remy had set the cash on my lap and was flipping through the
Mirabel
's passenger list, pen in hand. Another minute crawled by with all the speed of a garden slug before she glanced up.

“You can't go until you actually open the door.”

I stared at her wide-eyed, grasping at the frayed ends of the conversation between my mother and Remy not fif
teen minutes earlier regarding my designated post as car ornament while Remy paid Mr. Herman and got a receipt. Her disobedience toward my mother quickly lost every ounce of entertainment value. I shook my head, shoving the money across the seat, only to have her stare at it blankly.

“Izabella, even if I wanted to—and let's be clear about this, I don't—I do not have time to sit here all day while you crawl under the front seat of this car and hide from a thousand-year-old grocer who hasn't strength or sense enough to knock a rat off a garbage tin. In four hours, Mr. O'Malley will be pulling the ferry up to the wharf, at which time we have thirty minutes to scrub down five restrooms and swab two decks before we turn the boat around to the mainland.”

I'm supposed to wait here until he's paid
, I scribbled.
Remember?

“Trust me, Mr. Herman's not gonna run you to the hills when you're handing him cash. He's just an old man. It takes him forty-five minutes to hobble down Main Street to open the store. Go on.”

But you told my mother

“I lied.”

But

“Now listen here, Izabella, this is your debt, not mine, and you've got about two minutes to decide if you're going in there to settle it or not. Your mum may be worried about him raising his voice to you, but I'm not. You're
not going to crumble to dust by someone being upset. Now, today was Mr. Herman's deadline. You choose. Fix it, or let him press charges. You want to call it off? I've got plenty of other things I could be doing other than smashing out a window.”

No!
I scribbled before tossing the pen across the seat and putting my notepad away to let her know I was serious about the issue.

“Have it your way,” she said, firing up the taxi. “But I'm going to tell you right now . . . you can't have it both ways. If you want this world to take you seriously, you'd better stop hiding under your mum's skirt when things get hairy. You'd rather run off and sneak around than stand up and be counted for your choices. And that's just fine—if you plan on living in everyone else's shadows for the rest of your life.”

Glaring at her, I snatched the money off the seat, opened the latch, and made my way into the store with my heart trying to thump its way free of my chest.

Mr. Herman was standing just inside as if he had been watching us argue the whole time. “I hope you've come through that door with my money.”

I handed over the fold of money, feeling the slippery skin on the back of his fingers brush against my wrist as he plucked it from my hand. Mr. Herman tallied the bills as slowly as possible, counting them off in his most booming voice to be sure the whole store heard him.

“Forty . . . sixty . . . eighty . . . one hundred. Well,
at least it'll pay for a new glass. Probably not the same quality.” He drew the moment into infinity to be certain every last customer noted the level of injustice I'd inflicted upon him.

When he was finished, I gave him a meek smile.

“Make sure you don't damage the wood when you're breaking out the old pane,” he barked. “I need this storefront shipshape before the festival begins.”

Outside, I found Remy already suited up with a pair of goggles and gloves reaching clear up to her biceps. One black rubber hand was holding out a set for me, too. While I pulled them on, she fetched two rubber mallets and a large roll of duct tape and marched over to the window.

“Here.” She handed me the loose end of tape. “Start with this corner while we wait for Jim to bring his pry bar. We've got to pull these boards and finish taping it off before we can start hammering.”

Busy taping, I did not notice the police cruiser pull up behind the Purple Monster until the sheriff sauntered over to us. Riley was at his side clutching a steel bar in his hand. My stomach teetered, sending a flush over my cheeks at the sight of him. I wondered if he realized I knew he'd stolen my Yemaya Stone. But the truth I refused to admit was that anger wasn't the only emotion kicking around in my gut.

“Morning.” Remy brushed the sheriff's cheek with a kiss before patting Riley on the back. “Thanks for bringing the crowbar. I'm couldn't find mine anywhere.”

“Not a problem. I think that one may be yours from
when I fixed my porch. I was bringing Riley down to the pier anyway.”