Chapter Four
I book a flight for first thing the following morning.
Then send out a dozen emails to clients, letting them know I would need to cancel my appointments for the following week.
Family emergency, I lie. I’ve never lied to my clients, never bailed on my appointments.
But it feels easier than trying to explain my past, or that I’m not entirely sure why, but I need to go see for myself. I need to know… once and for all.
“I don’t know if this is a good idea,” Nana says in the doorway as I stuff my things back into my suitcase.
“I know,” I agree, zipping closed my suitcase and hefting it from the bed onto the floor. “It just feels like something I need to do. Maybe this is my chance to finally deal with it, put it to rest.”
“And if you do find something out there, will it make you feel better or worse?”
Nana never said if she believed in the island or not, never told me I was wrong or right in what I claimed to have seen that night.
She is a woman of these rough waters, spent her life in symphony with the tides, and there is a salty, mercurial nature about her—the part of her that believes in all sea-mad tales, the legends that are carried in on the stormy evening wind.
You see things out here, she once told me.
The ocean makes you believe in the impossible and unlikely.
But she also remembers the years of counseling, the months when I didn’t want to leave my bedroom, when I refused to go back to school because of the hateful way the other kids watched me, prodded at me at lunchtime—I was instantly made an outcast, a liar, the girl who vanished for a week and went god-knows-where.
Nana remembers when I hardly ate or slept and instead spent my nights peering out my window with a pair of binoculars she’d bought me two years earlier, watching for any sign of the island returning.
Now, she’s worried I’ll slip back into that place that turned me into a shell of a girl.
“I’ll call you when I land,” I promise, smiling and pulling her thin, aging frame into a hug. I don’t admit that if I do find something, if I do see that island, I’m just as worried as she is that it’ll break me open again in a way that I know I’m not ready for.
She places a sandwich and two raspberry scones wrapped in foil into my hands.
“Go find your island,” she whispers, a sudden, unexpected glimmer in her eyes, like a daydream reflected back, a hint of the woman I remember when I was young: fearless and strong-boned, watery eyes that blinked out at the sea like she could see across to other lands, and dreamed of someday touching those shores.
“Be a little reckless for once in your life.” Her thin lips curve into a knowing grin.
“You just might find exactly what you’re looking for out on that ocean. ”
I turn the car around in the driveway, glimpsing her in the rearview mirror—standing in the doorway of her blue-shingled house, the ocean visible behind her, dark and flat, and a thought rises up inside me, unbidden: Will I see her again?
I put the car in drive, shaking the notion away, but in some basement part of my gut—there is a nagging prick, something telling me not to go.
Warning me that this might be the last memory I have of her.