Chapter 31
Chapter 31
A week passed at Freetown. Then two. For Miriam, Ruth, and Sadie, the clock had ticked through nineteen days. The team and I had nothing. No hint. Ashley’s girls had disappeared literally without a trace. I had seldom felt so helpless. Eddie, Jess, BP, and Camp, with input from Ariel’s team, had scoured the data vault and come up empty-handed. Zilch. We were no closer. We didn’t disagree with Ariel’s theory, but the data he suggested we’d find was not in Frank’s servers. If his theory was true, the data existed someplace else, and it began to look like Eddie might be right. If the data existed, Frank hid it in plain sight somewhere in one of ten trillion possible addresses on the internet.
In the meantime, Ashley moved a piece across the board and began living the drama. His public appearances were uncharacteristically not good. People in his own party began to not so subtly suggest he rescind the nomination. Step aside. Some even suggested he step down. During this time, who was his sole ally? Who stood by his side, making the prime-time rounds, arguing with the talking heads and prognosticators? Who was the singular voice speaking contrary to the critics? To the party?
Maynard was a rock.
The waiting was always the hardest part. It could be excruciating. I tried not to listen to the whispers of what could be happening to the girls in that very moment, because there was nothing I could do about it. I tried to remind myself that if there was, I’d be doing it, but that was little consolation. Without more to go on, finding Miriam, Ruth, and Sadie was like finding a needle in the Milky Way. We were in a holding pattern until something happened. And we were useless until that something happened. Well, maybe that wasn’t entirely true. Eddie, Jess, BP, and Camp were scouring the black web. Combing the internet. Burning the candle, looking for anything. I, on the other hand, because I did not possess their tech-savvy computer skills, was the one who was currently useless. I could have stood around in command central, but I’d only be in the way.
With more going on in my head than I knew how to process, I had to give my hands something to do. Busy hands freed up a tangled mind. So when Ellie pushed open the door at 5:00 a.m., she found me cleaning guns in the basement. They weren’t dirty, but that wasn’t the point. Bed head, pajamas, blanket in tow, slits for eyes, she sat next to me and dug her shoulder beneath mine without saying anything. Evidently her mind needed unwinding too.
Ellie had taken to life in Freetown with all she had. She was all in. She worked with Summer in the dance academy during the day, had been learning photography from Bones in the evenings, and tended the ice cream parlor on weekends. She was always busy. Always cheering somebody up. But every once in a while over the last few months, she’d ask me a question about Marie. “Dad, tell me about Mom.” At first, she wouldn’t ask me in front of Summer. Felt it was some sort of betrayal of Summer. Felt like she had to sneak around and find me alone. Then Summer overheard her one day, walked in, sat behind her, and began brushing her hair while I told her stories about her mom. When I finished, Ellie was leaning against Summer’s chest, and Summer had both arms wrapped around Ellie’s waist. That was the end of the shame.
Despite my best attempts, I felt like no matter how hard I tried or what I told her, I always left her wanting more. Answering nothing. Or very little. I tried to give her something to hold on to, but it was difficult to touch a memory. But oddly, when she walked in the basement, I heard myself ask myself, “Or is it?”
She leaned against me, just content to be in my presence. Finally, she wrapped an arm around me and said, “Tell me about Mom?”
That was when it hit me. Maybe it wasn’t impossible to touch a memory. I nodded. “Yes. But not here. Get dressed first. We’re going on a trip.”
Thirty minutes later, as the first rays of sunlight were cracking the skyline, we were buckled into our seats and climbing to our cruising altitude of forty thousand feet. Three hours later, we touched down at Craig Field in Jacksonville. We taxied to my hangar, and the pilots shut her down just a few feet from the door. I brushed the cobwebs off the keypad and pulled back on the doors, shedding light on one of several gear rooms I had stashed around the country. Ellie loved going with me into my gear rooms. Said she always learned something new about me. I handed her a helmet, pulled on my own, cranked the BMW GS1200, and she climbed on the back. I pulled out of Craig, turned west on Monument, and headed north on I-295, exiting at Heckscher Drive. She loved riding a bike with me but not as much as I loved riding one with her. She’d wrap her arms around me and cling tighter every time I accelerated. So I accelerated a lot.
We wound north up Heckscher Drive and finally turned left onto a dirt road that led onto my island.
The coastal islands of North Florida are not Hawaii or the Bahamas. And they’re not something you’d see on Gilligan’s Island or read about in Robinson Crusoe —which, by the way, is possibly my all-time favorite book. The coastal islands along Northeast Florida and Southeast Georgia sat within eyesight of the mainland, separated by patches of marsh, tidal creeks, or the Intracoastal Waterway. The ICW. Some were connected by short bridges, and we called them islands because “marshy extensions” didn’t sound as romantic and didn’t help sell. Most all of them were inhabited by Native Americans at some point due to an ample food source such as fish or oysters, and at the turn of the twentieth century, many of them were turned into wealthy country clubs for the uber elite such as the Morgans and Rockefellers—Sea Island and Jekyll were two notable examples. My island was a small pitch of land just across the creek from Fort George Island. It was there, during one idyllic summer of my childhood, that I’d met Marie and shown her my secret world beneath these majestic oaks.
I parked the bike, Ellie slipped her hand inside mine, and we walked through the shade and back into my memories. I had not rebuilt since Frank blew up my boat and set my entire world on fire, so I pointed as we walked through the charred remains. “That’s the old slave chapel.” The two-foot-thick tabby walls were impervious to fire, meaning what was left of the roof just leaned against it.
“Does it make you sad?” Ellie asked.
I nodded. It did. We walked the exterior of the chapel. “This is where I first met Angel.” She liked the thought of that. Her eyes lit. “Really?”
So I told her the story.
“So this is where she first started calling you Padre?”
I laughed. “Yep. Right here.”
I pushed away some burnt timbers and we walked inside where the pews used to line the floor in front of the altar. I showed her the wall. This intrigued her. She pointed. “What’s that?”
“This chapel was once part of the Underground Railroad. It was more of a destination than a stop on the way. Once here, they were free. So they carved their names along with the date as best they knew it. It’s a record of who they are. And that they matter. It’s as if they stood here and said to the world, ‘God made me. I matter. What you see when you see me started in the mind of God. He actually took the time to think me up.’”
Ellie traced her fingers through the grooves. “Is that what led to the tattoos on your back?”
“I think so.”
I watched her run her fingers through each of the letters. “Your mother used to do that very thing.”
“Really?” She smiled.
“She’d trace every one. Tell them they weren’t forgotten.” I studied the fallen world around me. “This island was a declaration. A stake driven into the surface of the earth. Both an ending and a beginning.” Above the names, someone had carved, “Even the Rocks Cry Out.” Ellie traced this too.
“What does this mean?”
“I think it means that no matter how dark the darkness, light pierces it. That no darkness can keep out the light. Darkness is powerless against light.”
“Did Bones teach you that?”
I nodded. “Yes.” A smile. “He did.” Another pause. “And your mom did too.”
We walked down what was once a well-worn trail now overgrown and green. I pointed to the mounds we’d made as kids. “We’d dig here. Hours at a time. All the way to China. That hole used to be above my head.”
She giggled, knelt, and ran her fingers through the dirt.
“Found several megalodon sharks’ teeth in here.” I circled one of the mounds. “Your mom and I planted those citrus trees.”
She reached up, pulled a green lemon from a tree, and smelled it, saying nothing.
“One afternoon, I uncovered this grave of what I had to assume was a Native American. Slowly, we removed the dirt, trying not to disturb anything. We couldn’t tell how he died. All his bones were intact and he’d been buried wearing something on his head, a fishhook in one hand, a small knife in the other, and a rather primitive bow and arrows lying across his chest.”
She sat on the mound and pulled her knees to her chest.
“The bow was worn, maybe three feet long, and the string must have been something like catgut. The arrows were surprisingly straight and flint-tipped. Sharp enough to penetrate hide. The feather fletching was long since gone. Your mom was amazed at him. Just lying there. We must have sat right about where you’re sitting and stared at him for hours. Wondering what his life was like. Making up stories about him and that bow.” I sat next to her. Shoulder to shoulder. “I don’t know if I’ve ever made this connection, but it was probably right here that your mom taught me to daydream. To wonder. To tell a story.”
Ellie stared up at me. “Mom taught you that?”
“Yeah. I think so. I remember the feeling of standing in that hole, staring at those bones lying beneath these trees, and just letting my imagination run free. Your mom used to love to listen to me spin a story about ‘the old man,’ as I called him.”
She giggled again.
“I know, not very original, but it’s all I could think of at the time.” I pressed into the memory. “During that summer, your mom would sit and listen to me for hours as one story led to another. About the pirates who stored gold beneath the old man’s bones. About the girl who escaped the ship and swam ashore here.” I shook my head in wonder. “I guess if I had to say, this is where it happened. This is where I learned to make story.”
She was shaking her head and smiling. “Mom did that?”
“She was the catalyst.”
“What’d she do?”
“She gave me the freedom to think outside the box—to dream and then put words to the dream without worry of criticism. Without causing a knee-jerk in me that it might not be good enough. That it might be stupid.” A longer pause. “Your mom was never a critic. I never knew that from her. So, much later in life, when I found myself in a rough spot, tending bar in Key West, I found an outlet for my pain. My pen.”
“So all these books that you’ve written, they all started here?”
“The process did.” I stared at the mound. “As the sun was setting, we knew we needed to return him to the ground, so we slowly and quietly covered him back up. Returning the stones as best we knew how. Then, to make sure the dirt held in place and wouldn’t erode too quickly, we transplanted several ferns and two lemon and two lime trees to mark the four corners.” I pointed. “And from the looks of things, they did just that.”
I lifted her by the hand and we continued walking the path. “This is also where I learned to hunt. Killed my first pig over there. It was trying to dig up the old man.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Oooh.”
I pointed at the recent signs. “Feral hogs have been here since the Spanish landed on that beach over there. They’d brought them with them in the hull of the ships as a food source. Once here, they domesticated them, but some got loose. They populate fast, so it didn’t take long for them to take over. They can pretty well annihilate a patch of ground rooting for worms and grubs.”
A pause. “In the summer of my junior year, we had our own archaeological dig in here, and it was your mom who discovered a large collection of shells. Kind of a three-hundred-year-old trash heap. We spent the summer digging right there. This mound became the mother lode of pottery shards, arrowheads, shark’s teeth. Even glass beads.”
She looked up at me. A sly smile. “You kiss Mom here?”
I laughed and shook my head. “No. Too afraid. I wanted to, but we were just two kids, nothing but sweat, dreams, and innocence. Plus, I didn’t know anything about how to kiss a girl. The thought of that scared me half to death. I was much more comfortable with a fishing pole or a cast net.”
This time Ellie laughed out loud. “I see little has changed.”
I studied her. The image of her mother. I could even hear it in her tone of voice. Looking at her was like looking into the eyes of Marie. “When did you ever get so grown up?”
“Dad.” She put one hand on her hip to emphasize her point. “I’m not a little girl anymore.”
“Yeah, I’m seeing that.” And she wasn’t. Ellie was becoming a woman.
We spent the afternoon beneath the shade on the beach. I fished or threw the cast net while Gunner terrorized the mullet. Ellie lay in the sun, her face hidden beneath a straw hat and sunglasses, and held a paperback in her hands. Her voice brought me out of my memories. “What’re you looking at?”
“Huh?”
“You’ve been sitting there staring at me for five minutes. What’re you looking at?”
“Sorry.” I shook my head. “If I squint my eyes, I see your mom.”
She liked the thought of that. “You think Summer is jealous of Mom? Of the memory of her?”
“No.” Another shake. “Summer knows who she is. She walks in no woman’s shadow. She also knows that love is not something you have to cut in half when you meet another. Love is not like a bucket and that’s all you got. Use sparingly. It’s more like a well. Or a river. The more you draw from it, the more water it pours out. Love doesn’t halve—it doubles. Triples. It’s an exponential thing.”
I didn’t know the full effect of my words on Ellie. If I’m honest, while one half of me was here on the island with her, the other half of my mind was worrying about Ruth, Miriam, and Sadie. Would they ever get to walk in the woods again with their dad? To just spend a lazy day in each other’s presence? I did my best to hide that from Ellie, to be present here with her in this moment, because the longer we stayed on my island, the more her demeanor changed. She was “becoming” before my very eyes. Becoming what, I wasn’t sure. But her posture was changing. I was watching a shift in the tectonic plates that made up her soul. As if her shoulders were rolling back and this connection to Marie, to her beginnings, was birthing something in her that I could only relate to something Bones once told me: “Identity precedes purpose. You can’t know who you are until you know whose you are. Belongingness matters.”
Here, for some reason, Ellie was learning whose she was. Who she belonged to. Here beneath these trees, her heart was learning that she was ours. Mine and Marie’s. Together. Standing on this island, she had placed her finger on that pulse and knew that the beautiful thing that had happened between Marie and me, the love we shared, had grown and become her. That love made her. And I think the impact of that was more than I had anticipated. As the sun set and the shadows stretched across the beach, I found myself stalling. I knew we needed to get back, but I was waiting. Waiting for one thing. One sound.
Then, as if on cue, it cracked through the stratosphere. There it was. I might have left. Traveled the globe. But it never had. It had remained. If heaven has a frequency, it must be this one. It is both a lonely echo and a magnificent cry. Made by a singular creature. While I don’t pretend to understand sound waves, this one travels. I don’t mean it’s loud. It’s not. It’s actually quite quiet. More like a whisper. Something you have to train your ear to hear, and if you’re not careful, you’ll miss it. It’s the song of the mourning dove. One dove calling to its mate. Cooing. For me it has long been the cry of heaven, and I’ve wondered, more than once, if it’s the sound of angels. The truest cry of the human heart. One lover calling to another. I waited and there it was again.
This time she heard it. She pointed. “Is that...?” She fell silent and there it was again. Off to our left, a second dove answered. I nodded and said nothing.
We sat there as the two lovers called back and forth. She whispered, “They really do call to each other.”
“They really do.”
Moments passed. “I think that may be one of my favorite sounds. Ever.”
There it was again. “Me too.”
“Dad?”
We returned up the trail, her hand in mine. I looked at her but said nothing.
“Thanks for bringing me. I know it’s been difficult.”
“Being with you is never difficult. It’s one of my favorite things.”
“I mean, being here while Ruth, Miriam, and Sadie are out there and you can’t help them.”
I had kept the wave of urgency at bay, away from my mind and heart. But when she said that, I could hold it back no longer. It came crashing down with a vengeance. “That’s the other thing your mom gave me.”
She waited.
I pointed out across the water that led into the Atlantic. Then I pointed at the single ring she wore that had belonged to her mom.