Chapter Three #3
He blinked, water making puddles at both of our feet.
“Ye need to get warm.” He nodded at my shaking hands, then took several steps toward the kitchen table, hefting one of the chairs and placing it beside the woodstove.
I barely remember crossing the kitchen, but I do recall the heat from the fire once I was seated in the chair.
I watched him at the sink, filling a kettle with water.
His hands were rough and workworn—he had been at sea a long time.
“Your house is a ship?” I asked. When I think of it now, I realize how innocent I had been.
How easily I accepted the oddness of the whole encounter: speaking to a man on an island that shouldn’t exist. I asked him questions as if I were on a school tour, and I’d be writing an essay about it on Monday morning.
He blinked back at me, his jaw chewing over the words he wouldn’t speak, like he was trying to sort out what kind of creature I was.
I pressed him with another question. “How do you steer, where are your sails?”
The kettle began to hiss, and he removed it from the woodstove, pouring water into a mug, then handing it to me. It smelled of sweet mint and oat.
He went back to the sink, his features cold, unwelcoming, and he looked to the window where the wind was gaining strength, thrashing against the walls. But I sensed the house had seen far worse gales than this. “I don’t have sails,” he answered stiffly.
“Then how do you know where you’re going?”
“I don’t. The seas take me where they wish.”
I swiveled in the chair, really looking at him. He had an accent, a lowness to his words, his r’s enunciating themselves strangely. “Where are you from?”
He straightened up and walked to the door, surveying the storm, calculating something. But he also looked briefly wistful, as if he was recalling some faraway place that he ached for deep in his bones. “Called Saltwell. Long way from here.”
He kept his eyes on the storm while mine circled around the kitchen, gathering more details: herbs drying over the woodstove, glass jars filled with sliced apples and pears, radishes, cucumbers, yellow squash.
There was even a jar that held what looked like chunks of pineapple.
Golden and syrupy. Where did he get pineapple?
And in a crate beside the woodstove, I even thought I saw a cracked-open coconut husk.
But then something else caught my attention, something silver resting on the shelf beside the stove.
With his focus out the window, I stood and reached for the small piece of glistening metal. It was flat and round, like a coin, but weightier. A locket. And there were words inscribed on the back: For AL, until the seas take us away.
I didn’t have time to open the locket before the wind slammed a door shut somewhere in the house, and a great screeching sound rose up from outside. It was the same sound I’d first heard echoing across the water that woke me from sleep and tugged me from bed.
The man snapped his eyes back to me. “Ye need to go.”
Without thinking, without understanding what I was doing, I slid the locket into the pocket of my raincoat.
I didn’t mean to steal it. It was a reflex, a flash of panic and sudden fear, a mindless act that held no purpose or intention.
But the moment its weight settled in my pocket, it felt rooted there, like I couldn’t pull it back out.
The deed was done. And I couldn’t stomach retrieving it, couldn’t risk the man seeing what I’d taken, for fear a different fate might have befallen me.
“What’s happening?” I asked, darting my eyes to his—hoping he didn’t see the guilt on my face.
“Storm is pushing the island back out to sea. Ye have to leave now.”
The island moaned and released a terrible howling sound, rocks grinding over one another, fighting to be set free.
The man yanked open the door, the lashing wind slamming into the kitchen, but I followed him out into the storm.
The rain screamed against my face. I could hardly see beyond the edge of the island.
But I heard the change in the air, the gnashing of rocks falling silent, and felt the ground beneath me begin to sway.
The island had broken free of the cape, and we were set adrift. Floating on the Atlantic.
I think I heard the man curse under his breath.
We hurried down the rocky slope, past the greenhouse, back to the shore. But I couldn’t see Nana’s fishing boat. It was gone, carried out with the storm. The man and I stood, squinting through the sideways rain, and then he pointed.
“There!”
The boat had come untethered from the rocks, but it only drifted a short way down the shoreline.
We scrambled over the slick boulders to the water’s edge, where the man waded in up to his knees. The sea thrashed around him, and when he reached the boat, he hauled it back to the shore, the sky gray and angry around us.
“Hurry,” he shouted over the wind. “There’s no time.” I heard the urgency in his words, saw it in his face. He wanted me off the island before it was carried farther out to sea. We’d already traveled a good distance from the mainland.
I inched out onto the rocks, closer to him and the boat.
But the island heaved, rocked a bit to one side.
I nearly slipped into the cold sea, but the man grabbed my forearm, hauling me down into the little fishing boat.
Once I was seated, he gave the boat a shove, pushing me out into the open sea, toward the harbor.
But I felt a strange twisting in my stomach—I knew I would never see the island again—and I sensed what had just happened was something I would later doubt.
I had touched the edge of the known world, tiptoed along the shore of a fable, the boundary between myth and the waking world, and it was something that no one would believe.
“What’s your name?” I called out to him as the island drifted away.
He looked like he had been carved from stone, more like a memory than a real man, and I was sure he wouldn’t reply, but as the rain beat against his face, arms braced at his sides, the house rising up against the gloom behind him, he answered into the wind, “Clay Lockhart.”
I swallowed the name, held it in my chest so I wouldn’t forget.
Even after I grew up and fled this forgotten, gray town, started a life somewhere else, I wanted the name to remain engraved in my mind.
Proof that I had witnessed something genuine—that rare kind of magic.
And maybe I would be changed because of it, turned into someone bold, heroic, someone who saw the shimmering light between cracks that others simply ignored.
I wanted what I saw that night to be true.
I glanced back at the shore, at the distance I needed to cover in the storm, but when I turned to look up at the man and the island one last time—they were already gone.
Only the rain and the churning, violent sea remained.
Rain weeps down my bedroom window.
The remembering is painful, like digging up a hole in my mind that I’d filled with mud and tar long ago, never planning to unearth what was buried there.
I rest a shoulder against the window frame, feeling restless—like the itch of insects beneath my skin—and my eyes sway to the old dresser set against the wall.
Above it hangs a painting of three white seagulls in a summer-blue sky.
I leave the cool draft of the window and pull open the top dresser drawer.
Inside I find neatly folded sweaters and a stack of clean linens. Nana uses it for storage now.
But I slide my hand past these things, finding what I’m looking for.
There, fastened with Scotch tape against the inside of the drawer, is the locket.
It’s still here. Nana never discovered it, or if she did, she left it. None of her business, I imagine her thinking.
I pry free the tape and hold the locket up in the dim moonlight.
It’s heavier than I remember, time has added weight to it.
An unsteady spasm pushes against my eardrums, a tectonic feeling, like the ground is jolting beneath me, vibrations rising from my toes up into the hollows behind my eyes.
This locket is proof. It’s the thing I can’t wish away, the hard evidence that I went somewhere that night.
I left it behind all those years ago, when I moved out of Nana’s house to attend four slow years of college at WSU in eastern Washington. I left it, hoping I might forget its existence—the one thing that made it hard to convince myself that whatever happened that night wasn’t real.