Saundra Mitchell: Mistwalker

It wasn’t until Ms. Park left that Dad finally came in. While I boiled mud and memories from my skin in the upstairs shower, I listened to him talk to my mother in the kitchen.

Not his words—I couldn’t really pick them out. Just his voice, rising and falling. Slipping beneath my mother’s voice, strange and dark. Maybe it was about me. I didn’t know; I couldn’t tell. But it felt like an accusation.

It was always obvious to my parents what happened that night. Pretty much the whole village knew and understood. Our waters were our waters. If Coyne hadn’t dropped gear on top of ours, he’d have been dropping it on someone else’s.

Broken Tooth didn’t have much. We were all starving a little bit, shrinking every year. Bailey wouldn’t come back. A degree in political science wouldn’t do her any good around here. The bright ones like her, they went off to the world. To New York Cities and LAs and Londons. None of the Baileys came back.

Instead, tourists moved in, all romantic about living Down East. Untouched wilderness, rustic everything. Then they paved it and blocked off our beaches. They pitched a fit about how much noise we made in the harbor when we went out to fish. They held condo meetings about the stink of salted herring that lingered when we sailed out.

But our harbor was what we had. Our families and our town. The burying ground was full of slate gravestones, our names all the way back to the 1600s. Washburns, Dyers, Dixons. Archambaults and Ouelettes, on and on, over and over.

What I did, my neighbors woulda done too. The Coynes and the out-of-towners carried poison with them. No one in Broken Tooth would have blamed me.

Ducking my head under the water, I let heat flow through my hair and run the trail of my lips. Fresh water always smelled like blood, especially when it was turned up hot. The steam robbed me of deep breaths. I stared as sand collected in the bottom of the tub, slinking toward the drain.

Downstairs, Dad raised his voice, then the back door slammed. I didn’t hear it so much as feel it, an unexpected slap. Twisting the tap off, I listened to the silence that followed, then the low hum of his truck driving away.

They’d always known what I did, but tonight they had to admit it. The space gouged out of this house, this family, it was—

I was never afraid I’d get in trouble for cutting off Coyne’s gear. It was the telling that scared me. The confessing. Having to look at my mother and my father afterward. Having to look at myself. Having to say it out loud:

It was my fault Levi was dead.

Not in some roundabout, butterflies-in-Africa-starting-hurricanes-in-Maine kind of way. My little brother would have been a Bailey. He had a soft smile, and notebooks full of art. Full of good song lyrics that Nick and Seth put to bad music. He made stop- motion movies, and flipbooks, and plans to give up the sea entirely.

He could’ve; he would have.

Except I leaned in his doorway that night. I waited for him to pull out his ear buds and ask me, “What up, Willard?”

And instead of saying “Let’s go find the Grey Man” or “Nothing, I just wanted you to know I ate the last of your Trix on purpose,” I tossed him the keys to the Jenn-a-Lo.

He caught them on the first throw.

There she is again, thinking about me.

I transfer my calipers to my left hand and peer at the music box on my desk. The coils are tightened, the clockworks pinned. Nothing rattles when I lift it to my face.

Turning the copper key, I hold it—master of time, the god of the figures trembling on top of the box. If they dance, it’s because I wish it. If they hang forever in anticipation, that, too, is within my grasp.

But I let the key go, and it slowly unwinds. The “Maple Leaf Rag” is more a waltz at this pace. The figures circle each other, their copper skin glinting with each mechanical turn. Placing it in the window, I watch them sway against the line of the horizon. Tonight’s sunset is red and bright—sailor’s delight.

And mine, too, for she’s thinking of me. She must be realizing, as I once did, that something lives on this rock. Tomorrow I shall stand on the cliff and wait. I will be the pale star that blinks on the horizon. I will be ethereal and tempting.

If there is any balance in the world, any justice between the heavens and the earth, she’ll see me. Is that not the true nature of this curse? I’ve no chance of collecting a thousand souls. Nor did Susannah, nor any other Grey to stand on this island. The only escape is through another. A willful, if stupid, choice—she must say yes. She must choose this mantle.

I do believe she’ll come. I could wish for it, for her to appear at my breakfast table the same way my books and toys and oddments do. But the bindings of the curse are clear: anything that I want will be mine.

Only by happenstance and the slightest shift of fog can I get what I need.

Tomorrow I’ll hold back the mist, arrange myself handsomely. The wind will finger through my hair while I stand and wait. If there’s any justice at all, I’ll meet her eyes across the water and become her fascination.

Already she’s thinking of me.

Now I just need her to come.

“I could take Latin next year,” Bailey said, “but I’d have to drop welding so I can drive all the way up to Herrington.”

My head hurt. And much as I loved Bailey, I didn’t know if I could go another two hours dissecting her senior year schedule. Since I wasn’t going to college, I planned to take the five classes I needed to graduate. That would let me get out at one, so I could go pull traps with my dad. Well, that’s what it used to be. I figured I’d be getting out at one to go pull bloodworms now.

That’s what I was doing—sorting them at the cellar, anyway. The room was too cold and stank of fish and mud. The professional worm diggers, the ones who made their whole living year round on it, had already gone. They counted faster than we did. And maybe they didn’t want to hear about dead languages versus vocational arts either.

Bailey was overachieving like usual. She already had three years of Spanish. She didn’t need Latin. Not like she needed welding, because her truck was about to fall apart. It was probably two sticks of gum and some duct tape away from collapsing into parts.

One more language on her transcript would look good. And she was gonna twist her schedule until she got it. I already knew the ending, so it was hard to get excited about the journey.

After a while, she noticed I was only offering her uh huh s and yep s. Her plastic sorting tray thumped against mine. My pile of worms was smaller than hers. Probably because I’d been counting instead of talking.

“Are you listening?”

I had to shake my head. “Not really. Sorry.”

Shifting her tray again, she started pulling the shorties to one side. We got paid less for those. She made a leap I hadn’t. “I know you hate letting Seth go out with Dad. Somebody has to, though.”

“I’m well aware.”

“Quit being so damned old,” she said.

“I’m not,” I sniped back. “I’ve got a lot on my mind. I can’t imagine why. ”

This time, Bailey cracked her tray against mine on purpose. “You’re allowed to be depressed. You’re not allowed to feel sorry for yourself.”

“And why not?”

Bailey had a fire going inside. Probably tindered when she was on time to talk to Ms. Park and I wasn’t. She’d had a couple of days to feed it. While she was good enough not to play silent-treatment games on me, I sometimes wondered if I wouldn’t have liked that better.