We eat peaches and sliced bread for dinner. From the porch, we can see the faraway hint of firelight deep into the trees. We landed against the shore of this place when we needed it most, as if the sea knew we werenear death. It thrust us into the arms of this island that was once part of a much larger continent.
Anchored against a shoreline, time slows, as if it’s settled back into place.
The hours pass easily.
Days like air, sifting through an open window.
We are cautious at first—wary of these people who have managed to survive in a world that has been shredded and torn apart. There are seventy-three members of their community, living simple lives on an abandoned golf course—the greens now wild and overgrown. But they are welcoming, generous and curious, asking questions about our life at sea. Their speech is strange, slightly blunt. As if their language has been worn down by necessity.
“Tide pull you wrong?” one man asked when we first met the community, eyes scanning our threadbare clothes, our thin frames, all the hardship evident in our faces. “Rain find you last eve?” a woman wanted to know, edging closer to us—which I took to mean she wanted to know if it rained the night before we arrived. And from an older man whose face was like cracked bark: “You find folk out there? Or just ghosts floatin’ by?”
They speak like people who’ve shed the luxury of small talk. Every word must earn its place.
But they are not castaways scraping out a living from what’s left behind. They have no longing for a time before, no sense of what might be missing. They do not measure their lives against what was. They are a gathering of people whose ancestors surely came from the farthest seas. Their clothing hand-stitched from wool, flax, or sun-bleached cotton. Hues of sand and stone. Palettes from the land itself. Skin in every shade—warm amber, deep earth, soft brown, golden tan. Hair twisted or sheared or left to tumble in the wind. A people bound not by origin or nation, but—as Clay would say—by the quiet kinship of resilience.
We trade what we can: two coffee cups, a wooden chair we took from the catamaran, a handful of books. It’s the books that excite themthe most. One woman clutches a copy ofThe Secret Gardenby Frances Hodgson Burnett, a classic children’s novel that I discovered we had two copies of. Later, I overhear her referring to it asThe Book of Green.
At night, we return to the island, lying in bed, facing each other, our bellies full, a safety in our chests we haven’t known in a long time. “I know what yer thinking,” he says, his eyes lidded and watery in the moonlight through the window.
“What’s that?”
“I know my wife wants to make this place her home.”
I coil my toes around his. I drape my leg over his calf, I slide myself closer. Flesh to flesh. He smells like the sea, always. I remember a time when I craved him, but I never thought I’d feel his hands on me like they are right now. I feel desperate for him most days, desperate to pull him inside me and lay kisses along his collarbone, desperate to defy time. To hold this life in the palm of my hand so I can make each minute last.
“Maybe we should stop drifting,” I say.
He runs his thumb across my eyebrow, down to the tip of my nose, then pauses, staring at me. Like he can see the words inside me, see the secret I’m keeping.
“Ye never were any good at lying to me.” His voice is calm, waxen and unhurried. “There’s something ye aren’t saying.”
I let my lips edge into a smile—he can always see the truth in my eyes, in the way I breathe, every exhale giving me away.
I find his hand, bringing it to my stomach, pressing his palm flat. “I don’t know for sure, not yet, but I think so.”
His eyes fall to my abdomen, light flickering behind them, before they go dark.
“If I am, it won’t be like before,” I assure him. “What happened to Alice won’t happen to me.”
He swallows, shakes his head. “I canna lose ye.”
“You won’t.”
His hand lifts to my face, and I kiss his palm.
I had been so careful for so long, counting my cycle, noting the days so life wouldn’t form inside me. But after the Arctic, I lost track of time. It was about survival. I didn’t think it was possible, didn’t think my body was strong enough for cells to divide. For life to begin.
But I was wrong. And it found a way.
“There are women here who’ve delivered babies before, and they will make sure I’m safe.”
He folds his fingers around my waist, pulling me flush against him, so every part of me touches every part of him. So he can ease inside me.
“Maybe it’s time we… stay,” I say.
He lays his mouth against my lips. “I’d give ye anything ye asked for.”
In the morning, he begins hauling rocks up from the beach, laying them out across the inlet. He works through the day, sweating in the afternoon heat, the sun against his back. I walk up to the community, working with the women as they grind oats into flour under the shade of oak trees, then harvest honey from the cluster of hives up in the east meadow. They tell stories about the old world, when I ask—a time of towers and metal birds, lights that burned untended through the night. But mostly, they talk about the shifting seasons, of an early frost that took last spring’s cherries, of the thick-bodied fish that return each year with the warmer tides, and of the boy who lost his first tooth and the girl who won’t stop asking about the patterns of the stars. They tell me about mending nets and foraging for mushrooms after it rains. About salting cod to last the winter, and about an ache in the bones that tells them when the weather is about to turn. Their lives are stitched together by the earth and the sea, by hunger and abundance. I can see the resilience in them. A kind of unshakable hope that Clay and I have known all too well.
