“But you’re here, aren’t you?” she asks, turning on the stool to face me. “You came all this way because you’re still looking for it, because you were hoping it’s still out there.”
I want to tell her that she’s wrong, that I’m here for another reason, but there is no lie I could tell that would make sense. So I head for the doorway, when she calls after me. “The island has been spotted again.”
I stop mid-stride, but don’t turn around.
“I spoke to a woman on the northern isles this morning. She saw it just offshore last night. Your island. It’s still in the area.” I turn around. She stares back at me. “I have a rental car. You can ride with me if you want to come.”
The lump in my throat is making my head throb, my fingers twitching like a tiny electric shock pulsing through me.
“You don’t have to give a statement; I won’t even use you in the podcast if you don’t want. But I’m going up there tomorrow, and I’m guessing you’ll want to see for yourself if there’s anything there.” She dips her chin, green eyes leveled on me. “This is your chance.”
I meet Helen in the lobby just after eight a.m. and we climb into her small Ford Fiesta rental car. The drive to Viðareiði, a small farming community on one of the northernmost islands, will take almost two hours.
“Good day for a drive,” she comments as we set off, smiling as if she’s trying to bend back the barrier I’ve set between us. Start small, then maybe I’ll crack wide and tell her everything.
Out the window, the damp sky melts in with the dark Atlantic, and I watch a plane circle upward from the distant airport before it vanishes into the gloom, and I wonder if this was a mistake. If I should have taken the first flight out of here, instead of allowing this woman to take me farther north in hopes there might still be something out on that open ocean. Or maybe I’m hoping we’ll find nothing: just deep blue sea and a clot of floating debris that someone mistook for an island.
We pass a cluster of houses, a fishing boat sits on a rusted trailer, a young girl with long red hair and green tights pumps her legs higher on a metal swing set in a front yard. She frowns at us, then waves. A change of heart. I wave back. I can picture her sitting on the couch in my office, knees pulled to chest, explaining how she dreams of leaving this small community and going somewhere big and bright and noisy. I’d give her platitudes: Dreams become reality when you work for them. Finish school, apply to universities, get a job, save money. Sometimes I think I’m a shit counselor. Because when life hands you a pile of crap that’s impossible to dig out from under, my words won’t change anything.
“I know you don’t want to talk about what happened to you,” Helen says, accelerating up a rise in the road. “And this is off the record, but I’ve always been curious about one thing from your story.”
My story.
It was so long ago when I told the details of what happened that night to police, when my statement was leaked to the local newspaper. Mystory, as if it were a tale loosely spun together and could easily be pulled apart. “I was just a kid,” I say. “I can’t be sure if any of it was even true.”
Helen’s eyes flash to me, dubious, like she can see I’m only trying to shrug off what I don’t want to remember. “But the man you saw—” she continues. “Your report, and others over the years, say that he was in his mid-thirties.” She looks at me for verification, but I give her none. “When you met him, he was the same age as when his wife died, when he vanished along with the house.”
I look back at her, unsure what she’s asking.
“Are you sure he wasn’t older? In his eighties?”
I shake my head and turn toward the window. I hadn’t planned on giving her anything, but I say this small thing. “I’m certain. He was in his thirties, late thirties at most.”
I know what it means: The man hasn’t aged.
Her breathing changes, and she shakes her head. “I interviewed a physics professor last year. He wrote a book about time, examining our linear perceptions of how time is experienced and understood. It was fucking crazy stuff, hard to follow, honestly, but it made me wonder if time isn’t actually a straight road with guardrails, but maybe there are exits and off-ramps and roundabouts.” She gestures toward the black stretch of road ahead of us, her analogy made clear by the intersecting roads on either side. “And sometimes we stumble off one of these exits, deviating from the original timeline, and find ourselves in some other… I don’t know, different variation of it. All bent and contorted.”
I look at her, but her face is stoic, no hint that she’s making a joke, or trying to bait me into giving some comment about time that will make me sound unhinged later.
I know what happened to me that night was impossible. I was gone for only a couple hours, yet I returned a week later. I’m not delusional about the improbability of it. But I also can’t explain it. I don’t know why time moved slower for me on the island. I don’t know why the manI met was in his thirties, when he should have been a man with thinning gray hair and bent shoulders.
“Maybe the man I met was not Clay Lockhart,” I suggest.
She cuts her eyes over to me. “Then who was he?”
“An imposter.” I shrug. “Only pretending.”
Helen slows the car as we pass a row of houses where a herd of sheep grazes passively beyond a wood fence. “A man impersonating Clay Lockhart to keep the legend alive?” she surmises. “But how the hell did he get himself a floating island?”
“Maybe it was only a ship, a fishing vessel, but my twelve-year-old mind thought it was an island.” I find myself participating in this conversation, theorizing with a woman who could easily go back on her word and reveal everything I’ve said to her.
“Okay,” Helen says, nodding. “So a man, some local fisherman perhaps, out of work, unstable, wanting to make the old stories true, builds himself an island-shaped ship, then sails around the Atlantic claiming to be Clay Lockhart.” She pushes out her lips, letting the words settle in her mind. “I can go along with that, believe it even, but why only come ashore once in a decade or two? Why not make landfall every few months, let himself be seen, make his lie more believable, more eyewitnesses? Use it to his benefit, profit off it even?” She taps her fingers against the steering wheel and exhales. I can tell she loves this—this is her sweet spot—speculating, looking for the cracks in a mystery, finding new threads to tug apart, questions to ask. If we were recording her podcast right now, I could imagine the momentum building, the story spreading itself out like unrolling a dusty old quilt. My eyes flash to the back seat, wondering if she is in fact recording us secretly, but the black bag on the seat—which I assume contains microphones and equipment—is zipped closed. If it is recording, it’ll be muffled, hard to make out.
Still, I lower my voice. “People do strange things,” I say. “Maybe he was drunk, ran his ship aground the night I encountered it. And afterthat, he decided it was a bad idea. Went home, tore the ship apart, and never sailed it again.”
“Until now,” Helen points out, glancing at me with pale green eyes.
She’s right. Would he suddenly set out again, cross the Atlantic to the Faroes, and begin his hoax all over again? Maybe. But he would have aged as well; he’d be too old by now. Maybe he has a son who’s taken over the family hoax?
