Chapter Thirteen #2
He won’t allow me to go alone. If the island drifts away we’ll both be stuck on land, and our home will be gone, but without another word, he lifts the oar and begins paddling us across the tossing sea, toward shore.
He promised to take care of me, until the end. He’s keeping that promise.
Cold seawater rushes over the sides of the raft, swelling up through the slats between the bamboo. When paddling to the white-sand beach, the water was calm, warm. Nothing like this.
Halfway to shore, I look back, doubt skittering like a beetle across my thoughts. If the raft doesn’t hold, we’ll sink. And with water this cold, we won’t have long before we turn hypothermic. Or we drown. The memory of swimming across the North Atlantic from the Faroes stabs in my mind.
I pull my knees to my chest, shivering, and focus on only one thing: the luminous white orbs from Nana’s porch, just beyond the tall seagrass. Please be real, I think. Please let Nana be inside, cooking dinner, sipping cocoa with a pour of brandy. Please let me see her face again.
Finally, the raft scrapes up over the rocks, bottoming out against the gray sand.
But I stay seated, the chill inside me so deep that my legs refuse to move. The air smells of fish and wet sand, the faint hint of a BBQ somewhere up the beach, and also a sweetness I can’t pinpoint. Saltwater taffy, sweet tea—not a scent that hangs in the air, but conjured up from memory.
“Ellie?” Clay asks. He drops the oar then crouches beside me. “What is it?”
“What if she’s not there?” I tap my teeth together.
“Or what if she is, and she’s different.
Or she doesn’t remember me… what if her mind is not what it used to be?
” I remember one of my neighbors back in Seattle, Dr. Dalmire, who suffered from Alzheimer’s.
He’d walk down his short driveway, looking for the newspaper at all hours of the night, then mumble to himself about the neighbor kids who surely stole it while he slept.
Finally, one bright autumn morning, not a hint of rain in our usually overcast skies, his adult children came and loaded him into their shiny white SUV and moved him into a care facility.
Now, I try to imagine Nana this way, wandering the shoals and tidepools, looking for things that aren’t there. Looking for me.
Maybe it’s better if I remember her how she used to be.
“We dinnae have long,” Clay says, touching my shoulder. “If ye want, we can go back?”
“No.” The word is blunt and immediate. “I need to go see.”
Clay helps me stand up, and although my feet are soaked, my skin chilled, there is a sudden urgency to reach her house.
I push my way up the beach while Clay stays behind. He senses that I need to do this alone.
Several yards from her house, my legs feel weighted again. The curtains are pulled tight against the windows—something she never did. “Let in the moonlight,” she would say. “Otherwise it might forget us.”
I can hear the sound of a TV from inside, but I can’t clearly make it out. On the front porch sit two flowerpots, but no blooms. The whole place feels colder than I remember, sterile—it doesn’t feel like her.
Not her home anymore.
I swallow, certain she’s not inside. Certain some stranger lives here now.
But my eyes find something familiar: a small ceramic plaque mounted on the wall beside the front door.
It depicts a painted lighthouse, a beam of yellow light shining out over a calm sea.
At the bottom it reads: SANDY FEET WELCOME.
She bought the plaque at a local Saturday market the first summer I lived with her.
She thought it was unnecessary, but I loved it, insisted we get it, and she relented.
Even agreed to mount it beside the front door.
I think I just liked the idea of tracking sand into the house—messy and carefree. Without repercussions.
Seeing it now feels like a tide swelling in my chest.
If she had moved away, she would have taken it with her. And if she had passed, certainly a new owner would have taken it down.
I hurry up to the front porch, rapping my knuckles against the door quickly. I wait. The sound of the TV vanishes—put on mute. And then footsteps cross the old wood floor, slowly, unhurried.
I hold in my breath.
I try to slow my heart rate.
The door swings open, and my eyes widen. I nearly drop to my knees.
It’s not Nana. It’s a man. A stranger—someone I don’t recognize. Bald head, graying scruff of a beard, and he holds the door with one hand, towering over me.
“I—” I stammer, taking a step back. “So sorry. I was looking for someone else. I must have—I wasn’t…
” I glance over my shoulder, where I can see Clay down at the shore, waiting.
I swallow, swinging my eyes back to the man.
“My nana used to live here. A long time ago—” I wonder how long it’s actually been, how many years have passed?
“Her name was June, maybe you knew her?”
If I’m lucky, maybe this man is local, has lived here his whole life, and he knows where she is, how I can find her.
But the stranger just blinks at me, like I’ve lost my mind. Like I’m some wandering madwoman. I have no idea what I must look like, how wild and rough—skin a deep copper, hair turned light from the sun. A year spent at sea will change a person.
Make them feral and uncivilized and free.
“I grew up in this house,” I add, hoping to validate myself. Hoping he’ll see I’m not trying to talk my way into his house to steal something. “But it’s been a while since… since I was last here.”
Still, the man doesn’t speak. His eyes only narrow on me, and now I’m worried he’s going to slam the door in my face and call the police.
“Sorry,” I add, realizing that this stranger won’t be any help, realizing how unstable I sound, and I backstep down the stairs. “Sorry to bother you so late. I—uh—hope you have a nice night.”
I reach the sand, blink up at him—at the plaque still mounted on the wall—then turn and start down the beach.
Don’t look back, I tell myself. You’ll only make it worse.
Keep moving, get to the raft, get back to the island.
But I only make it a few paces when I hear the man’s footsteps on the porch.
Shit, he’s coming after me. I think of yelling to Clay, shouting for him to get the raft in the water.
But the man speaks from behind me. “Ellie?”
My legs seize beneath me.
“Ellie… Mills?”
The air stiffens in my lungs, and I consider darting into a run. But I let my body turn. I’m afraid to speak, to admit who I am. “Do I know you?” I ask.
He descends the porch steps, moves toward me, and I flinch. He sees the motion, and he stops short before getting any closer.
“I don’t understand…” he says now, swallowing. “How are you here?”
Did he used to be a neighbor, someone I should know? A friend of Nana’s?
“Ellie,” he says again, eyes reddening at the corners.
“I don’t know who you are,” I admit.
He touches a hand to his chest, and I can see his legs actually wobble, like his knees are going to give out. “James,” he says. “It’s James.”
“No,” I hear myself say. I frown at him, taking another step back. This man looks nothing like James. His hair is gone, his beard full and riddled with gray—a beard that James never would have grown. And he’s old, much older than James was when I last saw him.
“I didn’t think…” The man smiles, lets out a rounded laugh.
“I didn’t think I’d ever see you again. I, uh—” He starts to cry, wiping at the tears.
“You look… the same. You look—” He frowns, like his mind is bending in on itself, trying to make sense of it.
“Everyone thought you were dead, drowned,” he says now, like too many memories, too many thoughts, are rushing through him.
“But your grandma, she always believed you were still alive, said she could hear your voice in the sea air.” He smiles again, and this time…
I hear something in his voice, the tenor, the short swing of his vowels, the clipped way he ends a sentence.
“James?”
He smiles even brighter, takes another step closer. This time I don’t back away. But my mind is pinwheeling forward and back, trying to calculate the time. “How long…” I ask. “How long ago did I disappear?”
“Twenty-two years, and a few months.”
My legs teeter beneath me like I’m back on the island. “Twenty-two?”
He nods, the smile fading. “But you haven’t changed at all.”
I blink, trying to anchor myself.
It’s been far longer than I thought. Too long.
Twenty-two years feels like an anvil against my chest, fracturing any hope I had that my old life may still be just as I’d left it.
Fuck. James is in his fifties now. But he looks even older.
Time has worn him down, taken things from him.
My disappearance may be partly to blame.
“We got your letter,” he says now.
“Letter?”
“The note you left, in that hotel on St. Andre Island.”
Now I’m the one to smile. “You found it?”
“A pair of fishermen found it while exploring the island. Total luck, they just happened to see it. It had been there a while, a few years, but they recognized the name. Your name.”
I shake my head, feeling like I might cry.
“It was a big deal when you vanished… for the second time. People still talk about it. The legend of Saltwell Island and the woman who found it twice. Especially among sailors, there’ve been countless reports over the years of people seeing the island.
We always hoped you’d come back someday, and when we got your note, we knew you were still out there, alive.
Police thought it was a hoax, that the fishermen had written the note…
because of the last name. But we knew your handwriting. We knew it was you.”
“The last name?” I ask.
“Wells-Lockhart. It’s the same surname as the man from the old stories, about the island. Clay Lockhart, I think his name was. It was odd, the only thing that didn’t make sense about your note.”
He exhales, searching my face for answers. But then his gaze drops—to my hand.
To the ring.