Chapter Three
The flight is plagued by turbulence. I hardly sleep, landing just after eight a.m. at the airport outside Dartmouth. Craving a stiff drink, head pounding, I rent a car and drive the two and a half hours to Maylarch, right at the southern cusp of the peninsula.
After the flight, I had seven missed calls, mostly from patients, but three from Helen Ashcroft—apologizing for her unexpected call the evening before and begging me to reconsider an interview.
I imagined calling her back and politely telling her to fuck off—that it’s taken nineteen years and a mountain of therapy for me to get over what happened, to convince myself that it wasn’t real.
And each time a new sighting occurs, it’s like a fault line reopening beneath everything I’ve worked so hard to repair.
It’s taken years to convince myself that there was no island, no man who found me drenched and standing outside his door, who brought me into his house, who sat me at his kitchen table, then handed me hot tea and asked me how I got there.
The sky is insipid, gray and uninteresting as I drive, drops of rain smearing the windshield.
And when I finally arrive in Maylarch, turning down the long, rutted driveway, I feel both relief and a nagging ache at the back of my teeth.
This place is knotted with memories: evening strolls along the pebbled shore looking for clams, Nana’s peanut-butter-and-apple-jam sandwiches that we’d eat from a basket she carried out to the farthest rocks, where we’d watch storms roll across the Atlantic.
But there are also memories of later, after I returned from the island that night.
At first it was local folks who turned up, asking questions, then it was newspapers and photographers wanting to know where I’d been for a week—missing and then reappeared, with a story that some believed, but others wrote off as childish fiction.
They said I likely ran away from home, slept in one of the old, abandoned boat houses along the shore until I was finally cold and hungry enough to wander back home up the beach.
They didn’t want to believe that I’d only been gone a single night. That something else might have happened.
I park the car and step out, staring up at the wind-battered house: gray siding peeling away in places; dark, persistent moss growing up from the foundation; and the sea crashing against the outer rocks beyond.
My heart pounds, while a stack of sharp-cornered memories thrashes inside me.
I’m tempted to turn away, climb into the rental and drive back north to the airport.
But the front door of the house creaks open and Nana steps out.
My old bedroom is still painted a soft canary yellow, the paper stars—now curled at their tips from decades of moisture—still hang from strings above the bed.
I drop my suitcase beside the closet, then, by habit, Nana and I pull on our raincoats and leave the house, walking down the sandy steps and out onto the beach.
We do it as if no time has passed, no years spent apart.
Except now, she folds her hand around my elbow.
Maybe it’s to keep her balance—her bones not as steady as they once were—or maybe she’s worried I might slip away, be carried out with the sea, only to return with mysteries tangled in my damp hair.
“How is work?” she asks, tilting her chin up at me, smiling. Her eyes have lost some of their blue color—they’re paler, fishy-white—and her wrinkles have set in like hard clay on a summer day.
I let my eyes fall to the sand. The tide is out, and the rocks have exposed themselves closer to the waterline. “I have a few clients who are struggling, one boy who lost his mom barely talks. But it just takes time.”
“It’s good what you’re doing, this kind of work.” She pats my arm. “It’s good for you too, I think.”
I spent so many years in therapy as a kid, after what happened, that to grow up and become a therapist myself felt only logical.
I had no idea what else I would do with my life.
And I think Nana sees it as if I never truly left therapy.
Just changed seats. Pivoted slightly. She thinks I’m working through their memories as much as my own.
But what she doesn’t know is that I try not to think about what happened here when I was twelve years old.
I tell myself I’ve moved past it, I’ve concluded it was all in my head, and there’s nothing more to be said about it.
But when that woman called yesterday, it tore open the flesh I thought was long ago scabbed and healed, and now I’m standing on the same beach where it all happened.
“I saw the photos, from the ship,” she says now, driving straight into the heart of it.
She’s never been one to tiptoe around something.
To live out here on the brutal edge of the Atlantic, to survive as she’s done, means walking straight toward what scares you the most and sorting it out quickly, because there’s no time to fuss and pick at it.
There is harder work to be done. Storms blowing in.
The tide rising. Living in a place like this makes hard shells of people.
“A lot of people saw it at the same time,” I say, because this is the part I’m struggling with the most. The number of witnesses, the evidence—the images and videos of an island drifting not far from the bow of a ship.
A thing that looks strikingly like my memory: the pointed eaves of a structure near the center; the cliff face on one side of the island lined with pale, windswept birch trees; the soft, sandy shoulder on the other.
It causes my mind to spiral down into the forgotten corners of my past, searching for details, other clues to prove myself wrong.
I need my memories to be a trick of the cold sea, of hypothermia.
I need it to be all in my head, otherwise I won’t be able to let it go.
It’s the only way I’ve moved on: convincing myself it was a lie, dreamed up in my fickle twelve-year-old mind.
“What does James say?”
I shake my head, eyeing the wet footprints Nana and I make up the beach, the sand quickly filling them in. “I haven’t told him yet.”
James knows about my past, about the night I disappeared and saw something I can’t explain. The memory that wakes me from sleep some nights—sweating and gasping for air like I’m choking on seawater. He knows about the place I’ve worked so hard to forget.
But he’s the only one. No one else in my life knows the full story, not friends, not my patients’ parents.
If they did any digging into my name, they might find an article or two.
But the story is old, not something that pops up easily.
It’s also why I moved to the other end of the continent, to lower the odds that anyone would have heard of me or read my story.
Nana blinks, a look of silent reproach. “Does he know you’re here?”
“He asked me to marry him,” I answer bluntly, turning toward the sea, my thumb instinctively going to my ring finger.
But the engagement band isn’t there. I put it in a small cotton pouch, then stuffed it into my suitcase before I left.
“He loves me,” I tell her. “He would love me forever, and I know he’d never hurt me. ”
She exhales through her nostrils. “That’s not really what matters though, is it? It’s not his heart I’m worried about.”
I nod.
She met James two summers ago. I was feeling homesick in a nostalgic, unsteady sort of way.
I hadn’t been back to Maylarch since before college.
I still talked to Nana almost every day, and I made promises to come visit—much like my mom did when I was young—but I wasn’t sure I was ready to return to the place where it had all happened.
James, in his attentive, caring way, recognized the swollen pain growing in my chest, and he booked two flights for us, said it would be good for me to go back, face what I’d been running from.
And clearly I missed Nana. I agreed. I even believed him that it might be just what I needed.
And when we first arrived, it felt good.
The three of us drank coffee together on the back porch, we stayed up late over bottles of wine, even went into town and ate at Libonelli’s—stuffing ourselves with garlic bread and clam-herbed linguine.
But soon, the hours felt strained against my flesh, the air too salty in my lungs. Maybe it was because James was here—my two lives bleeding into each other. The one I wanted to forget, and the new one I was building with James.
He’s always been the thing that steadies me.
Early on, we were merely friends, and I’d walk to the café for dinner a couple nights a week.
But soon he started offering to cook for me at my place.
We watched movies and he made me laugh and I felt comfortable with him.
It was easy—from the start. It was also easy to kiss him that first time, to let him sleep over.
He sewed himself into my life so effortlessly I hardly noticed.
Until he was down on one knee in my kitchen, a ring in his hand.
Some part of me knows he’s too good, too perfect for me—and it makes me wary.
Suspicious. Not of him, but of life. Like I’ve always known I don’t deserve him.
And that right there is self-sabotage at its finest. I’m the kind of person I’d have to resist rolling my eyes at if they walked into my office.
Self-sabotage, bleh, so predictable. So painfully cliché.
I couldn’t come up with something more clinical, more nuanced for my psychosis?
Nope. I’m just as straightforward as most people.
We flew back to Seattle, and I remember promising myself that I’d finally forget the past. I’d quit doubting every good thing in my life—like I was waiting for the sea to prove me wrong, to take everything away. I’d let myself love James and never look back.