Saundra Mitchell: Mistwalker

For an entire summer, again and again, I returned to her rock, to her pale and spectral kisses—until I swore I would do anything for her. I would die for her.

And then I did.

I was an idiot, and a fool, and I have had a century now to shame myself for mistaking lust for love. Every time I look in the mirror and see my dime-silver hair and my eyes dark as molasses—every time I look across the water to Broken Tooth, hoping that the girl thinking of me will soon come to my shore—I’m reminded of my stupidity.

And I hate myself only a little for hoping she’s just as unwise.

I wasn’t that late, but when I came in the back door, I was caked in mud and smelled like low tide.

Not a thing changed on Ms. Park’s face when she saw me. With one of our chipped coffee cups in her hands, she looked over her case folders and said, “I’m glad you could make it.”

She wasn’t even sarcastic about it, but my mom raised an eyebrow anyway.

“Sorry. I was working.”

“Bailey was here,” Mom said.

Guilty, I dumped my gear on the porch and went straight for the sink. I needed a shower, but it could wait. I turned the water on hot and then flipped the switch for the garbage disposal. “I’ll see her tomorrow.”

Gargling furiously, the disposal swallowed sand and silt as I pretended not to notice the prosecutor. Only, I knew the longer I looked away, the longer she’d be there. Waiting. Head down, I asked, maybe not even loud enough to be heard, “What do you want, anyway?”

Ms. Park cleared her throat, then twisted her chair around. Its wooden legs screeled against the linoleum, and I felt her move closer. “We need to go over your grand jury testimony.”

Digging mud from beneath my blunt nails, I said, “Don’t you have what I told the police?”

“Of course I do,” she replied. She sounded smooth, creamy even. The chair squeaked again, and then I could see her from the corner of my eye. “But I can’t have any surprises when you’re on the stand. You’re the only eyewitness we have, Willa.”

My tongue felt like liver, thick and heavy and useless. Everything I knew about courts and stuff came off TV, and it so happens that none of those shows get it right.

It’s not neat and clean, talking to the detectives, then going to trial, the end. No, I talked to the Coast Guard and Marine Patrol and then the police the night Levi died. And the next day, a detective totted up in a suit came and took notes.

When they arrested Terry Coyne, I talked to the detective again. My dad stood at my shoulder during the lineup. Even that wasn’t the same as TV.

They gave me a book of mug shots, rows and rows filled up with forty-year-old men with the same beaky nose and chickeny chin. It was scary, how much those pictures looked alike. I didn’t know until way after that I picked the right guy.

Now it was going to a grand jury. They had to decide whether there was enough evidence to indict him—whether there was even gonna be a trial. All the police had were two bullet casings that matched a box they found in Coyne’s trunk, and me. My eyes. What I saw. It was down to two bullets and my memory whether he’d ever stand trial for murdering my brother. If that wasn’t enough, he’d go free.

Cold, hard knots formed in my chest. “All right, what should I say?”

Ms. Park brushed her smooth black hair behind one ear and insisted, “I’m not here to put words in your mouth.”

“Then what do you want? I already told the police everything.”

“Everything?” Ms. Park let that question hang a minute. Then she went on. “Because I’m going to ask you about the gear war. It’s the only way this murder makes sense. And if you say nothing . . .”

“There wasn’t a gear war,” I said flatly.

“We know Mr. Coyne put his traps too close to yours. We know your father complained to the council about it.”

I shrugged. This, this part was Broken Tooth business. Ms. Park could ask all around town. Nobody would say gear war, because there wasn’t one. It was one lobsterman, me, taking care of business. Our waters were ours, our rules our own. Levi wouldn’t have told. He wouldn’t want me to either.

All we did was cut and dump. We went easy on Coyne. Last year, in Friendship, somebody sank Lobstah Taxi and Fantaseas in the middle of the night. Couple years before that, it was a scuttling in Owls Head and a shooting in Matinicus. You got up on a fisherman’s waters and he had to retaliate.

One fisherman against another, that was personal. When a whole town did it, orchestrated and arranged— that was a gear war. So I said nothing, and cast my gaze past Ms. Park.

She went on, barely ruffled. Working the sarcasm, she said, “Then, coincidentally, Mr. Coyne just happens to find you and your brother minding your own business on the wharf at two in the morning. Right after he discovered somebody cut all his trap lines, there you are. But it’s not related. ”

“It wasn’t a gear war,” Mom snapped.

“Then what was it?” Ms. Park snapped back.

My mother thrust herself between us, reaching for the potato scrubber. She took it to my fingertips, rasping them mercilessly. She hadn’t done that since I was little; I could clean up after fishing and worming just fine on my own.

Still, she soaped and scoured, her thin fingers pressing hard into my palm. “Where’re you from, Ms. Park? Concord?”

Unamused, Ms. Park said, “Boston.”

Mom scrubbed a little harder, hiding the ugly sound she made. The one that called the prosecutor a Masshole, after Mom had tried to give her an out by asking if she was from New Hampshire.

Back stiff and voice steely, Mom pulled my hands under the tap and said, “A gear war’s something we’d vote on, in the village. It’d be all of us doing it, not just one kid, one night.”

“Ma!”

Snapping her head up, she looked at both of us hard. “I’m not gonna let that bastard get off scot-free because she doesn’t understand how things work here.” Turning her attention to Ms. Park, she went on. “If you say ‘gear war,’ nobody on that jury’s gonna listen to you.”

“Then somebody needs to tell me what actually happened.”

My head felt full; my ears ached, like I’d slipped too far under water. It wasn’t a crime anymore to cut off somebody’s gear, but I could lose my license for it. Three years before I could get it back. Three years when Daddy would have to pay a sternman to work the deck; all that time with money running out instead of flowing in.

I could fight it. Claim I didn’t know anything about the cut gear. I could ask for a civil jury to decide it. If they found me liable, I’d have nothing. My family would have nothing.

Though I could keep worm digging, it wouldn’t be enough. And the thought of watching the rest of the fleet sail without me, the prospect of standing on land instead of waves—that felt like dying.

But all that was if they found me liable. They probably wouldn’t. Juries were our people. They understood you had to protect your waters. Turning their eyes the other way, they’d shake their heads. Shrug. They’d probably let me off. Probably, probably.

Could they, if I got in front of the grand jury and admitted it? I didn’t know. Would Coyne get indicted if I didn’t? I didn’t know that either. My chest got tighter as I tried to balance the right thing with the way things were supposed to be.

Expectant, Ms. Park said, “Well?”

When I looked past her, I saw Dad sitting in his truck on the street. Orange light suddenly illuminated him. He was smoking again. Drawing on the cigarette, he sat back in the glow of the embers. He’d quit for Levi. That he was back on them, guess he thought we were already lost. Nothing was balanced, and I broke.