Saundra Mitchell - Mistwalker

“Willa,” the lawyer said. He turned to whisper behind my ear. “The judge asked if you’re entering a plea. Now you say, ‘Yes, your honor.’ Then she’ll ask what you plead.”

I stepped off a ledge. “Guilty,” I said.

It was hard to tell if the judge cared that I went out of order. Flipping papers, she barely looked up at me. “Am I to take it to mean that you would like to admit liability?”

Voices exploded behind me. I recognized my father’s baritone in them, and turned. His face was red, and he whispered furiously to my mother. A few people around them murmured. I saw their lips moving, but couldn’t make out a word.

The judge didn’t shush them. She talked over them. “Mr. Farnham, Miss Dixon?”

Rattled, my lawyer looked back to my parents before addressing the judge again. “Yes, ma’am, that is, we are . . .”

“You understand that by admitting liability, you’ll forfeit your right to an appeal. That your fishing license will be suspended for three years. That you will be responsible for all fines levied against you.”

Daddy dropped an F-bomb, standing up and raising his voice. I don’t know what he was going to say. The judge cut him off, regal and unruffled. “You can wait outside, sir.”

“Your honor,” Daddy said between gritted teeth.

“Escort yourself or be escorted,” the judge replied.

My mother stood with him and put a hand on his elbow. It shocked me when he wrenched away from her touch. They’d raised their voices over the years. One memorable Thanksgiving, Daddy even threw his baseball hat. But I’d never seen him pull away from her, not once. Stalking outside, Daddy threw a last, ugly look back. I didn’t know who it was for exactly.

All I knew was that it wasn’t for me.

What’s most curious is that I have no idea where to start. The room she left behind should be full of clues.

I sit on the foot of the bed and ponder it like a puzzle. The family pictures are a lie. The brother is dead, one silver light in a jar that counts toward my tally. The boat is her father’s. The oars belong to no vessel; the witch balls are empty magic.

Willa doesn’t believe in magic. She accepts that I exist and disdains it at the same time. Now she disdains me; in this very room she believed the worst of me. I want her to take my place; my hands tremble to cover hers, and I want to breathe this curse into her mouth, feel my life come back on the warmth of her lips.

But willingly! Knowingly! I’m a creature, but not a beast. She doesn’t know the difference. I admit, I’m wounded, the smallest part. I put a ripple in her still pond. She put a pea beneath my mattress.

Slipping back on my elbows, I melt into her bed. It smells of her, but only faintly. Not enough to start that pang in my chest again. I stare into the net of her canopy. Bleached shells and sand dollars dot the lines, oceanic constellations to replace the stars. Everything is the sea: her photos, her memories—but I don’t think it signifies the same things to us.

My father’s boat was a hateful thing to me. Cutting ice is nearly as exciting as eating oatmeal. Our path varied only by the season—to Maine in the winter, to Nova Scotia in the summer. The cold and the slick pervaded the ship. I was never warm or dry, except in my thoughts.

Boats took me nowhere, again and again. The water was lonely. Blank and bare. No better than sitting in an empty room, without even a book for company.

Throwing my arm over my eyes, I hold my breath. My sea is not Willa’s sea. When I open my eyes, I intend to see it her way. I’ll let myself burn and feel a taste of desperation. She did last night; she coughed and struggled, even in her senselessness.

Now, it’s true I can’t die. My body’s not a real thing, but it plays the part beautifully. My imaginary whiskers grow. My wisplike hair falls in my eyes. An empty expanse imitates hunger. This insubstantial brain roils and sometimes has nightmares. The heart beats. It’s disconnected to me, but I think I feel it all the same.

So I sit up and try to see Willa’s room anew. She’s here, in the whites and blues and greens. The water, the photos. But I come back to the witch balls. They quiver in the window, put in motion by an ever-shifting earth. The vibrations break the light that shines through the glass. Rays flicker along the walls, dazzling and dancing. When sunlight plays the waves, it looks much the same.

That’s the answer, I decide. It’s not that she bears some secret well of magic. I remain her irritating exception.

Satisfied I’ve unlocked her, I slide to my feet. No, there’s no secret magic in her at all. It’s only another taste of the ocean for her. She loves it so much, she brings it inside. She longs to live on it.

Perhaps that’s the whole of Willa. It could be that she’s not so complicated after all.

But as I descend to my kitchen and my newest music box, I’m bothered. It feels like someone is pressing a finger behind my ear. It doesn’t hurt. It just lingers, coming from nothing, going nowhere. It makes me uneasy.

The brass bones of my oldest music box gleam in the light. I wished for a song to make sense of her, and this is what came with my breakfast. A clockwork I built a century ago, my very first. The parts hum when I touch them. Somehow, despite the hundreds I have, no matter the tedious hours I’ve spent building them, this one excites me.

Carefully, I pick up the movement and turn its key. The tinny pluck of each spike sounds on my skin. My body sings along; it mourns with the ballad. The lyrics are ghosts on a thin sheet of paper. They can float away; I already know this one. It’s the song my father’s piper played. An old tune; ancient even when I was alive.

My love said to me, “My mother won’t mind

And my father won’t slight you for your lack of kine.”

Then she stepped away from me, and this she did say,

“It will not be long, love, till our wedding day.”

The finger presses a little harder behind my ear. It means something. I’ll learn something. Sinking to my seat, I twist the key and play the movement again.

A car was a lousy place to have an argument. Well, maybe it was a good place for my parents. It sucked for me. The minute the driver’s-side door closed, Daddy started. “What was that, Willa?”

“Leave her alone.” Mom snapped her seat belt and pointed at the road. Just go, that gesture said. Drive this car before I drive it for you.

Dad stomped on the brake and threw it into gear. Then he backed out slow as molasses, because that’s the way he always drove in town. Squealing tires and burned rubber would have been more dramatic. But you couldn’t find somebody less dramatic than Daddy, really.

As he crept onto the highway, he looked at me in the rearview mirror. As if Mom hadn’t just warned him off, he raised his brows expectantly. “Well?”

“You weren’t there when the prosecutor came,” I said.

My mother whipped her head around. “You did what you were told, so don’t you worry about it.”

I would have replied, but Daddy said, “What?”

“This isn’t the only trial we’ve got to worry about.” Ice slipped into my mother’s voice. Not the polished, cutting kind. It was immovable frost instead. An iceberg. “She’ll get her license back in a couple of years.”

“Three,” he said.

“Some things are more important than fishing.”

Dad waited until he got up to speed before he exploded. “And what are we supposed to do for three years? I need Willa working the rail!”