What the Waves Know (22 page)

She may have been ranting, but I knew what she was really saying, she was just saying it in Remy and Mr. O'Malley's language. She didn't want me to leave.

A few minutes later, Grandma Jo came back into the kitchen with a towel, a strip of fabric hanging over one arm, and two oregano leaves in her hand.

“This should do the trick!” She fanned them in the air. “See? There is use in spending time with a medicine man!”

“That's my good shirt!” My mother lifted the fabric off Grandma Jo's arm.

“
Was
, darling. That
was
your good shirt,” Grandma Jo corrected, drying Luke with the towel. “Like all that old wood you spend your days around, sometimes a thing just wants to be put to good use.” She lifted a corner of the fabric, shaking her head at the dull cotton button-down. “Or out of its misery. The nature of healing is all in letting go.”

“Not for my shirt!” My mother's eyes widened.

“Well, healing the soul is a higher priority.” My grandmother laughed, crushing the oregano leaves and packing them against the cut before wrapping Luke's paw in the remnants of my mother's shirt. “I'm sure your shirt is happy to die for a good cause.”

“Okay, can we go to bed now?” My mother yawned.

I nodded.

“Do I need to put bells on the doors, or are you in for the night?”

I let a sparkle settle into my eyes, the way I'd seen Grandma Jo do a million times when my mother spun into orbit, and watched her go into her room without bothering to shut the door behind her. She was already out of sight when I realized both of my hands had settled onto the small shelves of my hips the way hers always did.

“You missed a spot.”

Wiping the sweat from my brow with the back of my forearm, I looked over my shoulder at Mr. Herman, who put on his spectacles to inspect the frame around the front window.

“Right here.” He pointed to the spot where the two pieces of wood met at the corner. “You gonna get that?”

I nodded, pushing back my hair and leaving aqua streaks behind from the paint on my hand.

“See to it,” he said, going back inside.

I'd already been working for two hours on a day unnaturally hot for October, and in that time, Mr. Herman had shuffled out to check on me on at least eight occasions. Half of those occasions were to make sure that I wasn't screwing anything up, but a few times I had the feeling he was looking for company. I know it sounds
crazy, but I'd been watching him through the window for a while and all I ever saw him do was stand in the corner with his arms folded over his chest or sweep. It looked lonely, and in all the brushing back and forth to make sure I'd filled in the nail holes I started thinking about his crotchety tone. Remy had told me he didn't have family, and nobody seemed to really like him. This is what I came to: he'd barricaded himself behind a big wall of grump and grudge to keep people from getting in. He never said much—he just complained to push people away. His nastiness was his silence, his way of disappearing inside himself, where nobody could ever get in. That was a thing I understood. I had done the same thing; it's true. And so had my mother and father in their own ways.

I ran the paintbrush down the seam of the frame one more time. I had another hour before I had to go back to the pier to help Remy unload the passengers she was carting over from the mainland. She'd abandoned me earlier to help Mr. O'Malley, concerned that the ferry would be brimming to its masts with tourists making their way to Tillings for the festival.

I climbed down off the ladder and dipped the brush into the paint can before slathering the corner with aqua. After examining it from every angle humanly possible to be sure it was covered, I climbed back up to finish the top plank. Ten minutes later, I heard his voice again.

“You get that missed spot?”

I nodded, not bothering to look back at him. Satisfied that Mr. Herman would not find one speck of the wood's natural grain, I climbed down and was surprised to find a cold bottle of cola waiting for me beside the bottom rung. Picking it up, I looked through the front window to where Mr. Herman was bagging up groceries. When he glanced up, I smiled, and he gave me a sharp nod.

Across the street, the owner of a small boutique called Jasmine's stood staunchly at the door while a stream of tourists washed in, poked at the trinkets, and filtered back out onto the sidewalk. Around the corner, the high squeal of a child's laugh broke through the muffled murmur of voices of those sitting outside the White Whale. Electricity seemed to be pulsing across the island in anticipation of the festival. I recalled what Mrs. Mulligan had told me about the magic in the air, that it could pick you up and carry you away. I wondered if she would ever make it to the festival again, to the statue where her husband first kissed her. We had chosen to be alone: Mr. Herman, my mom, and me. Even my father had chosen it before he left with the
tap, tap, tap
of his typewriter and trips. But not everyone got to choose.

I packed up the paint, stuck my brush in a plastic container, and carried them in to Mr. Herman at 1:30
P.M.

“You'll be back to glaze it tomorrow?” he yelled after me.

I nodded before kicking the stand up on the Schwinn and walking it across the street to Jasmine's.

“Do you want
it wrapped?” the woman at the register asked as I dug four of the five dollars Remy had given me from my pocket

I nodded, laying the bills neatly on the counter and admiring the hand-blown glass wind chime I'd asked the woman to retrieve from the window. Swirled through in blues and greens like a wave rolling onto the beach, it was stamped with cowry shells and had a silver sea star dangling in the center.

“There you are.” She pushed the box toward me gently, tidying a pink bow about the package. Carrying the box outside to lay it carefully in the bike's basket, I headed for the wharf.

Telly was busy helping Riley move crates of supplies for the festival off the cargo deck with a forklift when I pulled up. Remy and Mr. O'Malley were still onboard. When the last crate had been set in line with the others, Riley hopped off the machine, tossed a replacement rope over his shoulder, and sauntered over to me with the clipboard.

“Remy'll be down in a minute. There's an extra run for the next seven days, so they're bleeding the fuel lines. Here.” He handed me the clipboard. “If you get stuck I'll be in the ticket booth.” He started to walk away but stopped, sticking his hand in his front pocket.

“This yours?” He stepped back in front of me holding out a folded flyer, crisp with hardened mud.

I stared, almost afraid to open it.

“Yes?”

I nodded, holding my hand out. Riley made a move to drop it in my hand, paused, and looked straight at me. The green T-shirt he was wearing picked up every green fleck in his eyes, which seemed to ignite when he looked at me.

“What does someone have to do to get you to talk? Stuff their head in a pipe and try to drown themselves?”

The comment caught me off guard and images of water creeping up, folding over a person until the life choked out of him, teetered the world around me before I pushed it back, back, back . . .

I stared right back at him and actually thought about trying to speak.

But before I could, he dropped the flyer in my hand and walked away. I watched him go, running my fingers over the hard bulge in the flyer's fold and knew without question that it contained my Yemaya Stone.

When the last
passenger was off, I grabbed a can of Comet and started up the deck.

“We don't have time.” Remy waved a hand. “We have to turn this boat around. If I don't see you tonight, make sure you meet me tomorrow morning before the eleven o'clock run. It should only take an hour to get that window glazed, and then we need to start setting up for the festival.

I waved back, stepping aside as Telly wrenched up the ramp, and watched as the
Mirabel
slid from view.

I took the long way home, passing my turn and swinging down Laurel Lane instead, stopping just beyond Mrs. Mulligan's house. I crept up the steps with the pretty package from Jasmine's in hand, thinking about the things Mrs. Mulligan had told me about meeting her husband at the festival. Sometimes, I could no longer pull my father's face fully into view, could no longer recall how far down his face the freckles cascaded or remember the scent of him. I barely knew her, but I didn't want that to happen to Mrs. Mulligan. Every time the taste of her first kiss faded and the memory got mushy as cornmeal, I wanted a soft breeze to surround her in the tinkling of chimes until it all came tumbling back to her. I wanted her to remember until the Nikommo called her back to her husband for real. I set the box with the pink ribbon on her mat, hopped back on my bike, and spun up the lane toward home.

Coming through the front door, I met Grandma Jo wearing her yoga leggings and carrying a sea grass mat.

“I'm off to the cove. Do you want to come along?” She waved the mat in the air. “I'll share.”

Nodding, I ran to change out of my clothes, which were speckled as a robin's egg after a day of painting. Luke scampered along beside me.

“Izabella's coming with me!” Grandma Jo called.

“'kay,” my mother's voice filtered in.

By the time I made it back downstairs, my mother had moved outside and was perched cross-legged on the porch with a sheet of paper and a collection of oil paints scattered around her. Biting a paintbrush in her teeth, she looked up at the sound of the door squealing open. I raised an eyebrow at the picture she was struggling over: a landscape of the cliffs with Witch's Peak looming in the right-hand corner.

“I'm not very good.” She looked down at the paper. “It's just to relax, really. I found these in the basement.” She tapped a tube of paint with the wooden end of her brush. “Then Grandma Jo showed me your sketch on the festival flyer, and after looking at a hundred paintings for the auction, I don't know, I guess I just needed something to do.” I grinned, more at the child-like way she was defending her actions than the painting itself, which wasn't half bad. “Have fun with Grandma Jo,” She called over her shoulder dipping the tip of her brush into the paint and scraping it deliberately against the edge to remove the excess.

Grandma Jo and I walked down a narrow path a half mile from the Booth House until it spit us out onto a small sandy cove. Every six or seven feet spiky clusters of dune reeds poked through the beach like lonely strands of hair. I laid the sea grass mat on the beach and turned around to find a pile of clothes beside the water and my grandmother swimming in the inlet. Unlike my mother, the fact that my grandmother was half nudist didn't bother me. It was just in her nature. I guess after years of wearing
my silence, with shame crouching around every corner, I didn't have enough left over to be embarrassed by other people's choices.

Balancing on a string of boulders jutting out one side of the inlet, I walked alongside her, sticking my toes in the cold water every few rocks to see if it had warmed up any in two seconds. By the time I'd reached the end, my pockets were heavy with sea stones I'd gathered along the way. None of them looked like mine, but I liked the idea of gathering luck wherever you could find it.

“You want to come in?” Grandma Jo called out.

I shook my head as she swam closer to the rocks.

“Wow, look!” She reached down into the rocks and pulled up a bright orange starfish with a blue dot in the middle. I leaned over, letting her put it into my hand, and studied the tiny suction cups as they reached for solid ground against my fingers. “Isn't it lovely?”

Fifteen minutes later, Grandma Jo climbed to shore and, after wrapping a towel around herself, sat staring over the ocean. The sun had scooted behind a gray bank of cloud. I teetered back along the rocks to join her, watching the Moorhead lighthouse blink through the mist.

“This is one beautiful island. I'd forgotten how serene it is.” She sighed. “Do you want to meditate with me? I always meditate before doing yoga. Touch your feet together sole to sole. Close your eyes. Ready?”

I nodded.

“Now, four cleansing breaths. One, two, three, four.”

After a few minutes of relaxed silence, she opened her eyes. “Do you remember anything at all about coming here as a little girl?”

The fog light winked.

I started to shake my head, then looked at her and stopped. “Fireflies.” It was more of a whisper than a word.

“In October?”

Staring at Grandma Jo for several seconds then letting my eyes skim over the ocean, I considered the fact that I'd never seen a firefly that late in the season before, or since, but I remembered them. If I closed my lids, letting myself fall through the years, I could pull them clearly into focus, twinkling and tumbling in my mind.

On the night
of my sixth birthday, the last few fireflies of the season were skittling around the rosebushes outside my window screen, where an especially fat one had just come to rest. Another hung over the ocean flickering on, off, on. I'd studied it carefully, considering the world outside and the unfairness of being born just to spend your life being eaten, squashed, or shooed. I had decided we were in the same bucket together, bugs and me. We were the smallest things in the world. And while it's true I had been spared most of the eating and squashing, more and more often during that year when I walked into a room my parents fell into an awkward hush before shooing me back out with a distracted, “We'll be out in a minute, Iz.
We're having a grown-up talk right now,” which even then I knew was code for “fight.” “Please, you need to take your medication,” I'd heard my mother tell my father. I knew, though, that was not true; he had told me so himself. With a tap of the screen, the fat firefly had zipped into the night, leaving me alone again.

If Grandma Jo
was surprised to hear a word fall out of me and into the afternoon, she didn't let it register on her face. She turned back to study the shiver of ripples picking up speed until they rolled as a white tube against the shore and nodded without pressing the issue.

“Fireflies,” she echoed. “That sounds like a good memory.” She pulled herself to her feet and spent the next half hour stretching into odd shapes I could not even imagine my body assuming.

But she was wrong; it was not a good memory.

She didn't ask if there was more, and I didn't say because the memory had screwed the lid tight on my vocal chords like the rusted-up top of a mayonnaise jar.

So I grabbed my journal and sketched until Grandma Jo finished her yoga. When she looped a towel around her neck, plopping to the ground beside me, I slipped it onto her lap and watched her study the words quietly before staring across the sea as though searching for an answer.

Was he crazy?