I start to move the phone away from my ear, to hang up, but her voice says quickly. “You haven’t heard, have you?”
“What?”
“About the recent sighting? Off the coast of Maine.”
I shake my head but don’t reply.
“It was a cruise ship, at least two hundred people saw the island. Most claimed they saw a white-shuttered house at the center, a smaller glass structure, maybe a greenhouse, on the lower rocks, and a man standing at the shore, looking back at them.” She exhales, as if waiting to see if I’ll speak, or if I’m even still on the line. “It’s the largest number of people who’ve ever reported seeing Saltwell Island at once. A few even got video of it. They’re saying it can’t be disputed now, that the island is real, and your story of what happened—” She pauses, like she’s searching for the right words. “They’ll believe you now… everyone will believe you.” I can hear her breathing into the phone, waiting for me to respond.
Believe you now. The words are like a key sliding into a buried vault of memories, and the past breaks open inside me, a lifetime of pain and therapy and doubt resurfacing.
“We’d love for you to tell your story… now, as an adult. And with your career as a therapist, it will hold more weight. No one will deny it. It will change everything.”
My hand trembles against the phone. “They won’t,” I answer. “People only believe what they see with their own eyes.”
She starts to reply, to plead with me to reconsider, but I lower thephone and end the call. My legs buckle beneath me, and I sink to the floor. I breathe, an old ember glowing hot inside my chest—a feeling I had nearly forgotten. Tamped down enough that it didn’t have oxygen to breathe, but a single phone call has stirred it up, given it life.
With my head against the wall, I lift my phone again and do a search for Saltwell Island. The first news article that appears includes a photo taken from the deck of a massive cruise ship—I can see the edge of a pool and a corkscrew-shaped water slide in the foreground—but there is something in the distance, out on the water. It’s slightly out of focus, far away, and it’s hard to tell what it is exactly. I open the link and it takes me to a Brunswick, Maine, article titledSALTWELL ISLAND SEEN BY HUNDREDS.
I skim the article, quickly reading interviews from passengers recounting what they saw in the early evening hours two days ago.
“A ghost ship rising up from the sea.”
“My kids thought it was a whale or something, but when we got closer, we could see the waves against the rocks.”
“I wish I could say I didn’t see it, but shit, there was a house and a man. I swear he was looking right at us, he might have even waved. Weirdest damn thing I’ve ever seen.”
“It was there for several minutes, we were getting closer to it, but a storm blew in, and it was no longer visible. We never saw it again.”
I close the article and dial a number I know by heart.
She answers on the second ring. “Hello?” Nana sounds groggy, like she was asleep and I’ve just woken her.
“The island’s been spotted again.” My voice is thick, choking on the sea air from that night, like it’s been lying in wait, gathered in my lungs after all these years.
She is quiet, but I can hear the springs from her mattress as she sits upright.
“I’m coming for a visit,” I tell her quickly, my fingers finding the tiny scallop shell hanging from a gold chain around my neck. Nanagave me the necklace the day I left for college. A reminder of the sea, she told me.
“When?”
“I can probably still get a red-eye tonight. I’ll call you when I land.”
I will cancel Monday’s appointments from the airport, tell them I’m taking a long weekend. I’ll text James, explain that I have to go to Nova Scotia, back to the place where it happened. Where it all started.
I’m going home.
CHAPTER THREE
The flight is plagued by turbulence. I hardly sleep, landing just after eight a.m. at the airport outside Dartmouth. Craving a stiff drink, head pounding, I rent a car and drive the two and a half hours to Maylarch, right at the southern cusp of the peninsula.
After the flight, I had seven missed calls, mostly from patients, but three from Helen Ashcroft—apologizing for her unexpected call the evening before and begging me to reconsider an interview. I imagined calling her back and politely telling her to fuck off—that it’s taken nineteen years and a mountain of therapy for me to get over what happened, to convince myself that it wasn’t real. And each time a new sighting occurs, it’s like a fault line reopening beneath everything I’ve worked so hard to repair. It’s taken years to convince myself that there was no island, no man who found me drenched and standing outside his door, who brought me into his house, who sat me at his kitchen table, then handed me hot tea and asked me how I got there.
The sky is insipid, gray and uninteresting as I drive, drops of rain smearing the windshield. And when I finally arrive in Maylarch, turning down the long, rutted driveway, I feel both relief and a nagging ache at the back of my teeth. This place is knotted with memories: eveningstrolls along the pebbled shore looking for clams, Nana’s peanut-butter-and-apple-jam sandwiches that we’d eat from a basket she carried out to the farthest rocks, where we’d watch storms roll across the Atlantic. But there are also memories of later, after I returned from the island that night. At first it was local folks who turned up, asking questions, then it was newspapers and photographers wanting to know where I’d been for a week—missing and then reappeared, with a story that some believed, but others wrote off as childish fiction. They said I likely ran away from home, slept in one of the old, abandoned boat houses along the shore until I was finally cold and hungry enough to wander back home up the beach.
They didn’t want to believe that I’d only been gone a single night. That something else might have happened.
I park the car and step out, staring up at the wind-battered house: gray siding peeling away in places; dark, persistent moss growing up from the foundation; and the sea crashing against the outer rocks beyond. My heart pounds, while a stack of sharp-cornered memories thrashes inside me. I’m tempted to turn away, climb into the rental and drive back north to the airport. But the front door of the house creaks open and Nana steps out.
