It’s still here. Nana never discovered it, or if she did, she left it. None of her business, I imagine her thinking.
I pry free the tape and hold the locket up in the dim moonlight. It’s heavier than I remember, time has added weight to it. An unsteady spasm pushes against my eardrums, a tectonic feeling, like the ground is jolting beneath me, vibrations rising from my toes up into the hollows behind my eyes. This locket is proof. It’s the thing I can’t wish away, the hard evidence that I went somewhere that night.
I left it behind all those years ago, when I moved out of Nana’s house to attend four slow years of college at WSU in eastern Washington. I left it, hoping I might forget its existence—the one thing that made it hard to convince myself that whatever happened that night wasn’t real.
I never told the police or Nana or any of my therapists about the locket. At first it felt like a secret, a little fib, a little theft, and the guilt of taking it, stealing it, made me hide it away and keep my mouth shut. But later, it felt dangerous. It blurred the lines between what had really happened and what was all in my head. I wanted to forget. When the kids at school called me Tall Tale Ellie, when my teachers stared at me like I might vanish again if given the chance, I wanted the island to be only a dream. I wanted it all to go away.
I was wrong when I thought I’d be braver after that night. Because I’ve been afraid ever since, afraid of my own mind, afraid that the thing that haunted the rest of my life—no matter how far away from it I got—was only ever a delusion.
I turn the locket over and read the inscription:For AL, until the seas take us away.I think about the newspaper article from 1952—the one I read at the local library after that night. They described a man named Clay Lockhart and his wife, Alice, who died in childbirth, whose twins died with her. Neighbors swore they heard the land break in two that stormy winter night, and they were convinced that the Lockharts’ white farmhouse severed free from the mainland, drifting out into the Atlantic atop a lonely island. But sightings of the island had been scarce in the decades before I saw it. The legend of Saltwell Island reduced to myth.
In the days after I returned, I would walk down to the docks and ask the local fishermen what they knew of strange things out at sea. Most ignored me, but a few bent low, their breath thick with ale and cigarettes as they spoke. It was the stuff of old folktales, passed down by men who chugged their boats too far out into the Atlantic—those who stayed out for weeks, sometimes months. And when they returned, they whispered of the impossible things they saw: tentacled creatures rising from the deep, women with long seaweed hair who sang to lure men from their cabins into the sea, where they drowned trying to find the source of those sweet, terrifying songs. But others spoke of an island that broke free from the rough shores of Scotland, and a man—brokenhearted,sea-mad—who sailed the Atlantic tormented by grief, using the patterns of stars to navigate, and sometimes running aground during relentless winter storms. There were other stories too about the man: how he never aged, how he could drink straight from the briny sea because the ocean was the same taste as the tears he shed the night his family died, and how he would strike down any who dared step foot on his island.
It wasn’t long before one of my teachers called Nana, told her I’d been skipping school to spend my days down on the wharf, watching the Atlantic. I was waiting, certain the island would return. They insisted I see a therapist, and Nana eventually agreed. She knew there was a torment inside me that she didn’t know how to fix.
After a few appointments with a short, brown-haired woman whose office was above Lola’s Saltwater Taffy Shop—and always smelled of spun sugar—I began to question if what I remembered was even true.
If I had been telling tall tales, like the kids at school said.
I touch the locket now, sliding my nail between the two halves and carefully pulling it open like parted wings. There are no photos inside, there never were—even that night when I found it and cracked it apart while I was still seated in the fishing boat, the tide pushing me back to shore.
Later, once I learned about Alice Lockhart, I wondered if the locket was meant to hold photographs of her two infant children once they were born. Was it a gift from her husband? Had I stolen the one reminder of his deceased wife and perished twins? The guilt of it held me tight for many years. It still does. If I could go back to the island that night, back in time, I would leave the locket where I found it. I would never slide it into my pocket. But I was young, impulsive, and I didn’t know what I had done. Or how important it might have been to that man.
I place the locket in my sweatshirt pocket and walk to the little desk beside the window, opening my laptop. The too-bright glow makes me wince. I type in:Saltwell Island. The first few image results are from thecruise ship, and a handful of video interviews with several passengers. But I don’t click on them—I don’t want to hear their stories, for fear they will sound like my own, feel too familiar in that raw, naked way. But below the images, where I expect to find more articles about the cruise ship sighting that happened two days ago, I find something else.
Newer articles. About a sighting that occurred just this morning.
While I was on a plane, several tourists standing on the northern coast of the Faroe Islands, watching for humpback whales with a tour guide, saw something: a small spit of land that shouldn’t be there, that wasn’t part of the chain of Faroes. But instead, this island seemed to be moving with the tide, adrift. And as it bobbed slowly past, they snapped photos, took shaky video that tilted toward the twilight sky, then down to the sea again. And in those photos, striding along the shore of the tiny island, is what appears to be a man.
CHAPTER FOUR
I book a flight for first thing the following morning. Then send out a dozen emails to clients, letting them know I would need to cancel my appointments for the following week. Family emergency, I lie. I’ve never lied to my clients, never bailed on my appointments. But it feels easier than trying to explain my past, or that I’m not entirely sure why, but I need to go see for myself. I need to know… once and for all.
“I don’t know if this is a good idea,” Nana says in the doorway as I stuff my things back into my suitcase.
“I know,” I agree, zipping closed my suitcase and hefting it from the bed onto the floor. “It just feels like something I need to do. Maybe this is my chance to finally deal with it, put it to rest.”
“And if you do find something out there, will it make you feel better or worse?”
Nana never said if she believed in the island or not, never told me I was wrong or right in what I claimed to have seen that night. She is a woman of these rough waters, spent her life in symphony with the tides, and there is a salty, mercurial nature about her—the part of her that believes in all sea-mad tales, the legends that are carried in on thestormy evening wind.You see things out here, she once told me.The ocean makes you believe in the impossible and unlikely.
But she also remembers the years of counseling, the months when I didn’t want to leave my bedroom, when I refused to go back to school because of the hateful way the other kids watched me, prodded at me at lunchtime—I was instantly made an outcast, a liar, the girl who vanished for a week and went god-knows-where. Nana remembers when I hardly ate or slept and instead spent my nights peering out my window with a pair of binoculars she’d bought me two years earlier, watching for any sign of the island returning. Now, she’s worried I’ll slip back into that place that turned me into a shell of a girl.
“I’ll call you when I land,” I promise, smiling and pulling her thin, aging frame into a hug. I don’t admit that if I do find something, if I do see that island, I’m just as worried as she is that it’ll break me open again in a way that I know I’m not ready for.
She places a sandwich and two raspberry scones wrapped in foil into my hands. “Go find your island,” she whispers, a sudden, unexpected glimmer in her eyes, like a daydream reflected back, a hint of the woman I remember when I was young: fearless and strong-boned, watery eyes that blinked out at the sea like she could see across to other lands, and dreamed of someday touching those shores. “Be a little reckless for once in your life.” Her thin lips curve into a knowing grin. “You just might find exactly what you’re looking for out on that ocean.”
I turn the car around in the driveway, glimpsing her in the rearview mirror—standing in the doorway of her blue-shingled house, the ocean visible behind her, dark and flat, and a thought rises up inside me, unbidden:Will I see her again?
I put the car in drive, shaking the notion away, but in some basement part of my gut—there is a nagging prick, something telling me not to go.
Warning me that this might be the last memory I have of her.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Faroes are a remote cluster of islands set deep in the Atlantic, solitary and strange in their placement—about as far from anything as a person can get. For several hours, it feels as if the plane is heading straight out into the abyss, with nothing but heaving, black sea below us. Not even a single ship appears through my tiny oval window.
But at last, with a final jostle and moan from the plane, we land just after sunset. I step out into a crisp, blustery landscape. At the little rental car kiosk, I’m told by the freckled girl behind the counter that all the cars have been rented, and that I should have booked one ahead. I’m surprised—in a remote place like this—that they would be out of cars, but I don’t press it and take a taxi instead. In the back seat, I check my missed calls. Five. Two are from the same reporter, Helen Ashcroft—she’s aware of the newest sighting of Saltwell Island, and she wants to know if I’ve heard, if I’d be willing to talk finally. The rest of the messages are from clients letting me know they got my email and would like to reschedule. When I get to the hotel, which I did book ahead of time, I’ll pull up my work calendar and call them back.
