As the last of the daylight vanishes below the sea, lights string up along the shore. Homes dotting the coastline.
“Ellie?” Clay’s voice finds me.
I sense him moving up behind me, stopping on the rocks.
“Where are we?” I ask.
He is quiet, but there is a knowing in the silence. Something he doesn’t want to say.
The lights of the shore get brighter, closer, and my eyes trace the jetty, the shape of it, the soft slope of the shoreline like a bow, arching back on itself.
Just like…
An old place I remember. A life, long ago.
My eyes flick to him. “Are we back?”
“Aye.”
He touches me, but I don’t react. I’m staring at the shoreline, counting off the row of homes, until I find the one.
“Nana.”
Before we’ve even run aground, before the island reaches the jetty like it did all those years ago when I was just a kid, I’m pushing our little bamboo raft down into the water.
“Ye cannae go alone,” Clay is saying, but I’m already scrambling onto the raft, reaching for the oar. “Ellie,” he says, louder this time. “The island hasn’t stopped moving, it might get tugged back out to sea.”
“I know.” My eyes meet his, panic rising in my chest. “But I have to see if she’s there. I have to try.”
Clay’s face tenses in the dark, then he nods as he steps aboard the raft.
“Clay—” I start to say.
“I’m coming with ye.”
He won’t allow me to go alone. If the island drifts away we’ll both be stuck on land, and our home will be gone, but without another word, he lifts the oar and begins paddling us across the tossing sea, toward shore.
He promised to take care of me, until the end. He’s keeping that promise.
Cold seawater rushes over the sides of the raft, swelling up through the slats between the bamboo. When paddling to the white-sand beach, the water was calm, warm. Nothing like this.
Halfway to shore, I look back, doubt skittering like a beetle across my thoughts. If the raft doesn’t hold, we’ll sink. And with water this cold, we won’t have long before we turn hypothermic. Or we drown. The memory of swimming across the North Atlantic from the Faroes stabs in my mind.
I pull my knees to my chest, shivering, and focus on only one thing: the luminous white orbs from Nana’s porch, just beyond the tall seagrass.Please be real, I think.Please let Nana be inside, cooking dinner, sipping cocoa with a pour of brandy. Please let me see her face again.
Finally, the raft scrapes up over the rocks, bottoming out against the gray sand.
But I stay seated, the chill inside me so deep that my legs refuse to move. The air smells of fish and wet sand, the faint hint of a BBQ somewhere up the beach, and also a sweetness I can’t pinpoint. Saltwater taffy, sweet tea—not a scent that hangs in the air, but conjured up from memory.
“Ellie?” Clay asks. He drops the oar then crouches beside me. “What is it?”
“What if she’s not there?” I tap my teeth together. “Or what if she is, and she’s different. Or she doesn’t remember me… what if her mind is not what it used to be?” I remember one of my neighbors back in Seattle, Dr. Dalmire, who suffered from Alzheimer’s. He’d walk down his short driveway, looking for the newspaper at all hours of the night, then mumble to himself about the neighbor kids who surely stole it whilehe slept. Finally, one bright autumn morning, not a hint of rain in our usually overcast skies, his adult children came and loaded him into their shiny white SUV and moved him into a care facility.
Now, I try to imagine Nana this way, wandering the shoals and tidepools, looking for things that aren’t there. Looking for me.
Maybe it’s better if I remember her how she used to be.
“We dinnae have long,” Clay says, touching my shoulder. “If ye want, we can go back?”
