Chapter Three #4
I never told the police or Nana or any of my therapists about the locket.
At first it felt like a secret, a little fib, a little theft, and the guilt of taking it, stealing it, made me hide it away and keep my mouth shut.
But later, it felt dangerous. It blurred the lines between what had really happened and what was all in my head.
I wanted to forget. When the kids at school called me Tall Tale Ellie, when my teachers stared at me like I might vanish again if given the chance, I wanted the island to be only a dream. I wanted it all to go away.
I was wrong when I thought I’d be braver after that night. Because I’ve been afraid ever since, afraid of my own mind, afraid that the thing that haunted the rest of my life—no matter how far away from it I got—was only ever a delusion.
I turn the locket over and read the inscription: For AL, until the seas take us away.
I think about the newspaper article from 1952—the one I read at the local library after that night.
They described a man named Clay Lockhart and his wife, Alice, who died in childbirth, whose twins died with her.
Neighbors swore they heard the land break in two that stormy winter night, and they were convinced that the Lockharts’ white farmhouse severed free from the mainland, drifting out into the Atlantic atop a lonely island.
But sightings of the island had been scarce in the decades before I saw it.
The legend of Saltwell Island reduced to myth.
In the days after I returned, I would walk down to the docks and ask the local fishermen what they knew of strange things out at sea.
Most ignored me, but a few bent low, their breath thick with ale and cigarettes as they spoke.
It was the stuff of old folktales, passed down by men who chugged their boats too far out into the Atlantic—those who stayed out for weeks, sometimes months.
And when they returned, they whispered of the impossible things they saw: tentacled creatures rising from the deep, women with long seaweed hair who sang to lure men from their cabins into the sea, where they drowned trying to find the source of those sweet, terrifying songs.
But others spoke of an island that broke free from the rough shores of Scotland, and a man—brokenhearted, sea-mad—who sailed the Atlantic tormented by grief, using the patterns of stars to navigate, and sometimes running aground during relentless winter storms. There were other stories too about the man: how he never aged, how he could drink straight from the briny sea because the ocean was the same taste as the tears he shed the night his family died, and how he would strike down any who dared step foot on his island.
It wasn’t long before one of my teachers called Nana, told her I’d been skipping school to spend my days down on the wharf, watching the Atlantic.
I was waiting, certain the island would return.
They insisted I see a therapist, and Nana eventually agreed.
She knew there was a torment inside me that she didn’t know how to fix.
After a few appointments with a short, brown-haired woman whose office was above Lola’s Saltwater Taffy Shop—and always smelled of spun sugar—I began to question if what I remembered was even true.
If I had been telling tall tales, like the kids at school said.
I touch the locket now, sliding my nail between the two halves and carefully pulling it open like parted wings. There are no photos inside, there never were—even that night when I found it and cracked it apart while I was still seated in the fishing boat, the tide pushing me back to shore.
Later, once I learned about Alice Lockhart, I wondered if the locket was meant to hold photographs of her two infant children once they were born.
Was it a gift from her husband? Had I stolen the one reminder of his deceased wife and perished twins?
The guilt of it held me tight for many years.
It still does. If I could go back to the island that night, back in time, I would leave the locket where I found it.
I would never slide it into my pocket. But I was young, impulsive, and I didn’t know what I had done.
Or how important it might have been to that man.
I place the locket in my sweatshirt pocket and walk to the little desk beside the window, opening my laptop.
The too-bright glow makes me wince. I type in: Saltwell Island.
The first few image results are from the cruise ship, and a handful of video interviews with several passengers.
But I don’t click on them—I don’t want to hear their stories, for fear they will sound like my own, feel too familiar in that raw, naked way.
But below the images, where I expect to find more articles about the cruise ship sighting that happened two days ago, I find something else.
Newer articles. About a sighting that occurred just this morning.
While I was on a plane, several tourists standing on the northern coast of the Faroe Islands, watching for humpback whales with a tour guide, saw something: a small spit of land that shouldn’t be there, that wasn’t part of the chain of Faroes.
But instead, this island seemed to be moving with the tide, adrift.
And as it bobbed slowly past, they snapped photos, took shaky video that tilted toward the twilight sky, then down to the sea again.
And in those photos, striding along the shore of the tiny island, is what appears to be a man.