There’s an opportunity to tell him about the rot. How it’s getting worse. But as the wine settles in my stomach, so too does a swirling shame. This is my problem, not ours.
“I would’ve guessed the opposite,” I say, keeping my tone light.
He smiles and sits back as I take my first sip of the soup. Thin, but I prefer it that way. Without the richness of a cream base, it’ll take longer for my decay to overtake the flavor.
“I have a sweet tooth,” he confesses. “My mother made maple taffy when I was young. I’d look forward to early spring every year when tapping season began.”
“Around here?” I hang on every new fact. A year ago, when we were either brooding or screaming at each other, would I have believed we’d speak over dinner of bygone maple taffy?
He shakes his head, looking down at his bowl. “Near Montreal. She helped with a sugar shack there for some of the year.”
“Why did you come here?”
He’s somewhere else now. Years ago, miles away. “The ocean is the only thing that doesn’t remind me of her. She hated the idea of any water deeper than her waist. It helped the grieving, in a way.”
I dip a slice of bread into the soup. There’s so much I don’t know about this man.
“We have red maples on the island, don’t we?” I ask, sitting taller as a smile spreads across my face. “Could we tap them? We could have maple syrup of our own.”
“Perhaps,” he agrees, running his fingers over the crust of the top piece of bread. “It requires a lot of sap to create a small amount of syrup. We used to need buckets and piping between the trees. Likely not noticeable by boats, but a risk.”
Right. Because in the real world, not my fantasy of making a ghost enjoy my company, there’s no room for tapping trees. Survival can’t become a second priority.
Douglas continues talk of pleasant things. The constant rain and the book he’s been rereading. I finish my soup, slurping unprettily. I usually wouldn’t notice. But I feel his eyes on me as I tip the dregs into my mouth.
“I have an odd request, Elle.”
“And that would be?” My mind flashes full of potential threats.
“Could you fill a spoon with soup for me? I don’t have muchstrength today in the physical realm. I would like to”—he looks away, boyish—“pretend.”
Pretend. It’s easy to forget even a small thing, grasping a spoon, can be beyond his reach. All he wants is a slice of humanity. He’s come to the wrong person, yet I must try.
I lean over the small table and take the spoon in hand, dip it carefully into the full bowl. My arm shakes slightly as I lift it to his face. His chin is within an inch of my knuckles. He breathes in slowly through his nose, taking in the smell.
I stay still and so close. He’s become so many different things to me. My sin, my guilt, the last shreds of my conscience. He closes his eyes and presses his lips to the edge of the spoon.
How could I have thought him old? Should my plans succeed, I’ll become older than him. A peculiar thought.
“Thank you,” he says, quiet as the dawn’s first light over the horizon, and raises his head. “There’s kindness in you. More than you know.”
I take his spoon back and tip it into my mouth. No use wasting it. His chest hitches up, but not back down. I’ve made a ghost hold his breath.
I clean up our plates and store the rest of the bread and soup for Liney. Then I down the last of my wine, its sweetness filtering out the rot.
That’s what Douglas does. He strains the darkness from me. What’s left is raw and small, achingly vulnerable, but it’s me. Every soft glance from him makes me think that perhaps that could be enough.
I could fall into foolishness. Liney has, given her giggles and blushing around Bridget. Perhaps it’s my turn. Douglas knows we’ve got no prospects together. Our beings aren’t of the same realm, and our moral compasses point at polar opposites. We’re a churning tide of my betrayal and his disappointment.
Yet in this lighthouse, in the setting sun’s orange light, we are James Douglas, young man, and Elle Forsyth, young woman.
“There’s a small music box tucked in a loose floorboard beneath theleft side of the bed,” Douglas says when I’m finished cleaning up. “I don’t believe you’ve discovered it yet.”
The music box is a delicate thing. It fits into my palms when I pluck it from under the floor. Wooden, square, with lacquered sides engraved with delicate flowers.
“A memento. My mother told me it was a gift from my great-grandfather to his wife. Passed down ever since. The key should be inside.”
I open the box with the delicacy of a surgeon. Inside are the brass mechanisms, the roll of tiny bumps to create the melody, and a small key on a dainty gold string. I pluck the key out and hold it up to him.
