Chapter Six #3
I reach out my hands toward the warmth, listening as he opens cupboards behind me, then cranks a lever at the kitchen sink—the sound of water rising up from a deep well underground—and the feeling of déjà vu is like a shiver behind my eyes. I’ve sat in this very spot, faced this same stove.
“Drink,” he instructs, pushing a mug into my hands, steam rising from the surface. The flavor is mild, earthy, like garden roots with a hint of lemon or mint, I can’t quite tell. My tastebuds feel numbed.
“That night,” I whisper, lowering the mug to my lap.
“When I got back to shore, everyone thought I made it up. That I lied.” My vision sways, like my thumping head is trying to pull me back into the past. “I’ve spent my life trying to convince myself that it wasn’t real, that this place, and you, weren’t real. ”
He looks back at me, creases pulled stiff along his forehead. “Aye, and yet here ye are.”
He’s exactly how I remember. But also not. He is changed somehow, in ways I can’t quite untangle.
“How is any of this possible?” I need to make sense of it, need some part of this—sitting here, back on the island—to remedy every moment I was mocked as a kid, all the hurt and therapy and nights when I couldn’t sleep because I was replaying what happened to me.
I need him to tell me I’m not insane. I need him to give me some proof that this is all real.
But he is steely, quiet, eyes flashing past me to the shelf beside the woodstove, where the locket I stole is now hung back on the same hook.
I took something from him that night. I hurt him deeper than I probably understand, and he doesn’t owe me a thing.
“I’ll get ye some clean clothes,” he says at last.
I glance down, my bare legs like two ghostly-pale tree limbs.
I had been so intent on reaching the front door, I failed to realize that I’m still wearing the T-shirt and underwear I wore when I swam out to sea.
And nothing else. “Thank you,” I say. My eyes click back to him—his skin darker than I remember, tinted by the sun—and I watch as he strides back into the living room.
I hear his boots on the stairs, a soft wisp of dust trailing down from the ceiling as he walks across the second floor.
When he returns, he hands me a heap of fabric: a pair of pants made of linen, the color of dry grass, and worn slightly at the hem. A folded button-up shirt—darker, navy blue like the sea.
He leaves the kitchen again without a word.
These clothes belonged to his wife.
The storm eases against the house as the sun curves along the edge of the ocean, slanting through the windows, afternoon turning to evening. Clay walks out onto the front porch, a mug of tea in his left hand.
Desperation scratches at me as I follow him out, squinting into the disappearing gloom where the clouds are rising up into the atmosphere, turning to nothing, calmed now that the weight of rain has left them. The sea is visible, whitecaps settling along the belly of the Atlantic.
“Where is it?” I ask, scanning the horizon. “Where’s the mainland?”
His eyes scrape over me. “Gone.”
I’ve changed out of my old clothes into the ones he gave me—the pants buttoning high at my waist, the shirt a little fuller at the bust, but the shoulders squared almost perfectly against my collarbones.
After I tucked the shirt in at the front, observing myself in the graying bathroom mirror, I marveled at how well the clothes fit.
Now, with his eyes on me, I feel uneasy standing before him like this, and I wonder what he’s thinking, if it unsettles him to see another woman in his dead wife’s clothes.
Or just to see another woman at all, after all this time.
“How long?” I ask, wiping the damp sea air from my forehead.
His eyebrows cut down.
“Until we see land again?”
His right hand slides into his pocket, chest rising with each breath. He is different, I think again. In the years since I last saw him, he’s been shaped by the sea, the tide, a life on this island I can’t begin to imagine. “Could be days, or longer.”
“How much longer?”
He starts down the porch steps, boots heavy against each wooden board.
“How long since you last saw land?” I press.
He looks back. “I saw it two days ago, when you swam from the shore.”
“No.” I shake my head, unsure why he’s messing with me. “Before that. When did you see land before the Faroes?”
He pulls the wet air into his lungs, takes a drink of his evening tea. “Five months and twenty-one days.”
A stone drops into my gut.
He strides away without looking back, shoulders wide and strong, hair lightened in places like streaks of sunlight. I watch him make his way down the dirt path, heading toward the barn at the end of a stone fence, where six sheep have gathered at the gate, waiting for him.
Five months and twenty-one days. A lifetime.
I watch him until he disappears into the dark interior of the barn, and my eyes sway out to the sea, the last of the sun sparking off the surface.
I feel dizzy, the pain in my skull returning.
Because if time moves slower on the island, then it’ll be years before we see the mainland again. Years before I get off this island.