Saundra Mitchell: Mistwalker

I couldn’t do rings or necklaces or anything that dangled—too easy to rip off when I was working the boat. But what I could wear, I liked. I just wasn’t artistic when it came to making it.

And it’s not like I didn’t know that. I was supposed to have Forensics during third period. The school was so small, we had only two electives a semester. Solving fake crimes with the double-duty science teacher sounded like more fun to me than beading necklaces.

I don’t know who changed my schedule. Could have been the principal (also, the dean and guidance counselor). Or my parents. I guess they decided that after Levi died, the last thing I needed was twelve weeks of dead bodies and the torment people put them through.

They were protecting me. And maybe they were right. At least Mrs. Baxter didn’t expect me to be good at beading. I had a solid C for turning everything in on time, and she never asked me to explain my vision on critique days.

The class turned out to be soothing, in a way. We were allowed to talk, but we didn’t much. It was all soft patter, pass me that knotter, and could I have that clamp? It sounded like distant rain, so many beads being poured from tray to tray, slipping easily on wires. They whispered, and so did we.

When Bailey opened the door, it disturbed the rain. We all looked up at the same time.

“From the office,” Bailey said, and crept to my table. She touched the coiled mess of my project and said “pretty” before getting to the point. Smoothing a note onto the table, she told me what it said. “Your mom tried to text you, but you didn’t answer.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked. I took a quick look at my phone, but it was blank. No big surprise. There was only one cell tower and nothing but rock and cliff for miles. We were lucky when we got a signal at all.

Bailey fished through the beads, pulling out a red and purple one to roll between her fingers. It would disappear into her pocket any time now; those were Cait’s favorite colors. “You have to go home straight after. The lawyer’s coming.”

Not my lawyer, the prosecutor. I didn’t bother to correct her. Instead, I brushed her hand away so I could pretend to work on my bracelet. Staring down at the silver loops, I said, “All right.”

“Do you want me to come?” she asked.

Did I? Not really. “You can.”

Rubbing her shoulder against mine, Bailey reached for another bead. “I’ll do community service with you.”

“Good,” I said, frowning when my sight wavered, hot with tears. “’Cause I’ll probably need a ride.”

“I’m not getting my brakes fixed for you, princess. Just so you know.”

“Who asked you to?”

She flipped me off behind Mrs. Baxter’s back, and left. I was glad she hadn’t looked too close. If I could get a couple breaths in, I could seal myself up. I wouldn’t break down in the middle of class. They already knew I was guilty and nobody blamed me, anyway.

So what was there to cry about?

Sailors used to mark the edges of their mapsHere There Be Monsters.

They weren’t entirely wrong. Monsters don’t have claws, they have eyes dark as molasses and hair white as a new dime. They have soft petal lips that whisper the sweetest promises.

I can say with absolute authority that one doesn’t notice a cloak of fog if one is too entirely entranced with the creature wearing it.

It’s the thing beneath, the thing you cannot imagine, that captures you.

Susannah had delicate fingers; she liked to pull them through my hair. I would close my eyes and exist under her hand. My heart beat for her touch. My blood ran for a single flash of her lashes. Not once did I question the mist at her feet. It seemed ethereal at the time.

My father’s boat was fast; he had a talent for cutting ice. We sailed up the shore from Boston thrice weekly, buying lobster today to sell tomorrow while the beasts still waved their claws and curled their tails.

It was an idiotic profession. One he intended to press on me when I was of age to captain my own ship. He assumed I wanted it. That I would be no happier than at the moment I reflected him completely. But I stood on the deck of his ship and loathed him.

The man was gentle enough—many found him convivial company indeed. But I detested the cream he rubbed into his hands. As if any tincture might soften them and let him pretend to be a gentleman. I’d always wondered if he realized he stank of lobster. Even after a boiling bath with flowers and fresh soap: then he smelled of lavender and lobsters. It was no improvement.

I had bigger plans for myself. A life of adventure, one lived on rails and on horseback. Through cities and deserts. Oh, especially deserts—I fantasized about them. To bask in the heat all day long, to warm my feet in the sand. To spend not a single moment soaked with salt water. Whatever the hook that bound my father with the sea, I didn’t possess it. And I had my plans to abandon it eternally.

Working the lobster line with my father offered me little entertainment, so I had to make me own. The island in the Broken Tooth harbor, that fascinated me. The villagers said it was abandoned, dangerous, haunted.

When my father and I sailed in, I studied its forbidding shape, wondered about its secrets. On our departure, I did the same, gazing and gazing at Jackson’s Rock.

And it was in such contemplation that I saw Susannah for the first time. She stood on the island cliff in the bay, her hair unfurled, long locks tossed by the wind. With a pale cloak and gown, she seemed made of the mist.

Leaning over the side, I stared at her—I wondered earnestly if this was a siren. If she would open her mouth and sing. If she would draw our ship into the rocks beneath her feet.

Instead, she waved.

Her fingers bloomed like a peony bud, and there was a weight to her smile that I longed to lighten. She shrank as we slipped away on good winds. Soon she was nothing but a star on the horizon, and then nothing at all but a memory.

My thoughts troubled me: Was she the lighthouse keeper’s daughter? Was she there alone? It was the shape of her smile that drew me back. In my ship’s bunk, and in my bed at home, I invented in that expression a damsel that only I could rescue.

Certainly, her father had locked her away from the mainland; undoubtedly, her stepmother had made her a servant. She was a nymph or a princess, Snow White or Cinderella. She was Rapunzel, and in my fever, I felt certain that if I only asked, she would let down her platinum hair.

She did.

While my father attended to business in the village, I rowed to the rock. My shoulders burned, and the sun—so mild to just stand in it—spilled fire all across me. In dreams, I was dashing in my rescue, crisp in linens. In truth, I landed on the shore with my shirt soaked through and damp hair clinging to my face. The ocean. Always the godforsaken ocean.

“You shouldn’t be here.” Susannah stepped from the trees, a pale apparition.

Already lovesick from memory, the fresh sight of her only stoked the fever. Leaping ashore, I approached, hands out as if she might startle like a doe. I told her, “I came for you.”

“Why?”

With every bit of foolish sincerity I had in me, I replied, “Because I love you.”

In retrospect, I should have been surprised that she let me kiss her. That she threaded her fingers in my hair and whispered exactly the right words in my ear to entice me back. Our stolen moments were painted in romantic shades, in the bronze twilight beneath towering pines.