I lift a shoulder. “Hard to say.”
“Did it sound like your island?”
Air gusts from my nostrils. My island. “How do you know I was telling the truth?” I ask in return. “I was only a kid when I saw it, maybe I was only dreaming, like you said.”
“Were you?”
I look away from her. I wish it was a dream.
“I don’t think you’d come all the way here,” Helen says, “if you didn’t think what you saw was real. You wouldn’t have come hoping to find it again.”
“But there’s nothing to find,” I counter, glancing at her. “Only rumors and near misses. I should have gone home today.”
We stay that way for a while, watching the light change and the clouds slide in from the east. A soft rain begins to fall, and Helen jogs back to her rented car to toss her recording gear into the back seat. I follow, but more slowly, letting the rain dampen my hair and stream down my raincoat. Inside the car, Helen already has the engine running and heat blowing through the vents. We don’t speak as she turns the car around and starts back up the single-lane road. The barren grassland and sloping hills remind me of sleeping woodland animals. We pass farmhouses with damp, mossy foundations, fenced pastures, and sheds with the eyes of cattle or sheep peering out. The sky becomes pale and flinty, a storm sinking over the Faroes. But my heart feels dried out, exhausted. I’ve chased this memory too far. Wasted too many days, ignored the real world, my real life, long enough.
It’s time to go home.
I tilt my head back against the seat, watching the last of the daylight flatten against the sea to the west, the sky shedding all its color. Soft and matte. As if this place were saying its goodbyes, its good riddance to me.
Through the passenger window, I notice a soft glint of light. Like sunlight refracting off glass. Only a handful of yards from the coastline.
I sit up, leaning toward the window. The thing is moving slowly, a fishing boat, most likely. But I can’t make it out clearly through the rain.
“Stop the car.”
“What?” Helen asks over the thumping of the windshield wipers.
“Stop!” I press a hand to the window, starting to open my door before she’s even slammed on the brakes, the car swerving onto the shoulder of the road.
“What’s wrong?” she asks, but I step out onto the gravel shoulder, leaving the door open behind me, and hurry to the embankment. My heart hammers in my ears.
“Holy shit!” Helen gasps. I hear her open the back door, probably grabbing her recording gear so she can narrate what we’re seeing, what’s happening.
But I don’t wait for her.
With the sound of the car engine still running behind me, windshield wipers thudding back and forth, I scramble down the slick, grassy embankment to the pebbled shore below. I need to see. I need to be closer. I need to be certain. Waves roll and heave up onto the empty beach, and from here, the island doesn’t seem too far off. Only a few yards, a good swim at best. I glance back and I can see Helen at the top of the slope, clenching her microphone, speaking into it, describing what she’s seeing, but I can’t hear: Her voice is lost to the wind.
We’re on a remote sketch of road. No cars or nearby homes. No one to verify what we’re seeing.
My body vibrates as the rain streams over me. Adrenaline pumping wildly through every cell, every nerve, every memory I’ve tried to push away.
I swing my eyes back to the sea, a crush of thoughts piling up in my mind as I try to remember: In all the years I spent imagining this moment—what it might feel like to see it again—I can’t recall what I’m supposed to do now. Do I watch it drift by, content to simply see it? Do I trust my eyes, trust the sea air? Do I trust my own mind?
There’s been something unfinished inside me since the night I first witnessed the island. A loose thread that was never stitched back into place. A story without an end.
I tried to ignore it. I tried to pretend.
But it was always there… the part of me that still believed. That needed to know for sure. That’s been screaming silently to me since I was twelve years old. The part of me that’s still out on that island.
I need to finish the story.
I yank off my rain boots, my coat, and my jeans, and leave them in a pile on the rocks. Up the embankment, Helen is still speaking into her microphone, her free hand fidgeting at her side, eyes trained on the impossible island floating just offshore. She’s not even looking at me.
I hesitate. Even if I yelled up to her—told her what I’m about to do—she wouldn’t hear me over the wind.
So I turn, in only a T-shirt and underwear—like some reckless teenager who drank too much strawberry wine after prom—and I pick my way over the smooth, pebbled stones, and out into the Atlantic. It’s cold, jarringly cold, splinters-across-flesh cold. But the adrenaline is still thumping through my veins, and I wade in deeper, up to my chest.
I can feel the ground dropping away beneath me, the dark gray of the ocean, the deep. And I pause, suddenly doubting this stupid thing I’m about to do. But there is something else inside me, something louder: that grinding, impetuous need to know once and for all. To know the truth. And it propels me forward.
