Boats took me nowhere, again and again. The water was lonely. Blank and bare. No better than sitting in an empty room, without even a book for company.
Throwing my arm over my eyes, I hold my breath. My sea is not Willa’s sea. When I open my eyes, I intend to see it her way. I’ll let myself burn and feel a taste of desperation. She did last night; she coughed and struggled, even in her senselessness.
Now, it’s true I can’t die. My body’s not a real thing, but it plays the part beautifully. My imaginary whiskers grow. My wisplike hair falls in my eyes. An empty expanse imitates hunger. This insubstantial brain roils and sometimes has nightmares. The heart beats. It’s disconnected to me, but I think I feel it all the same.
So I sit up and try to see Willa’s room anew. She’s here, in the whites and blues and greens. The water, the photos. But I come back to the witch balls. They quiver in the window, put in motion by an ever-shifting earth. The vibrations break the light that shines through the glass. Rays flicker along the walls, dazzling and dancing. When sunlight plays the waves, it looks much the same.
That’s the answer, I decide. It’s not that she bears some secret well of magic. I remain her irritating exception.
Satisfied I’ve unlocked her, I slide to my feet. No, there’s no secret magic in her at all. It’s only another taste of the ocean for her. She loves it so much, she brings it inside. She longs to live on it.
Perhaps that’s the whole of Willa. It could be that she’s not so complicated after all.
But as I descend to my kitchen and my newest music box, I’m bothered. It feels like someone is pressing a finger behind my ear. It doesn’t hurt. It just lingers, coming from nothing, going nowhere. It makes me uneasy.
The brass bones of my oldest music box gleam in the light. I wished for a song to make sense of her, and this is what came with my breakfast. A clockwork I built a century ago, my very first. The parts hum when I touch them. Somehow, despite the hundreds I have, no matter the tedious hours I’ve spent building them, this one excites me.
Carefully, I pick up the movement and turn its key. The tinny pluck of each spike sounds on my skin. My body sings along; it mourns with the ballad. The lyrics are ghosts on a thin sheet of paper. They can float away; I already know this one. It’s the song my father’s piper played. An old tune; ancient even when I was alive.
My love said to me, “My mother won’t mind
And my father won’t slight you for your lack of kine.”
Then she stepped away from me, and this she did say,
“It will not be long, love, till our wedding day.”
The finger presses a little harder behind my ear. It means something. I’ll learn something. Sinking to my seat, I twist the key and play the movement again.
SEVENTEEN
Willa
A car was a lousy place to have an argument. Well, maybe it was a good place for my parents. It sucked for me. The minute the driver’s-side door closed, Daddy started. “What was that, Willa?”
“Leave her alone.” Mom snapped her seat belt and pointed at the road. Just go, that gesture said. Drive this car before I drive it for you.
Dad stomped on the brake and threw it into gear. Then he backed out slow as molasses, because that’s the way he always drove in town. Squealing tires and burned rubber would have been more dramatic. But you couldn’t find somebody less dramatic than Daddy, really.
As he crept onto the highway, he looked at me in the rearview mirror. As if Mom hadn’t just warned him off, he raised his brows expectantly. “Well?”
“You weren’t there when the prosecutor came,” I said.
My mother whipped her head around. “You did what you were told, so don’t you worry about it.”
I would have replied, but Daddy said, “What?”
“This isn’t the only trial we’ve got to worry about.” Ice slipped into my mother’s voice. Not the polished, cutting kind. It was immovable frost instead. An iceberg. “She’ll get her license back in a couple of years.”
“Three,” he said.
“Some things are more important than fishing.”
Dad waited until he got up to speed before he exploded. “And what are we supposed to do for three years? I need Willa working the rail!”
A weight fell on me, but not on my shoulders. My sternum. It felt like my breastbone cracked, split like a Sunday chicken. He said that, and he meant it. It wasn’t idle or angry. It was desperate. I didn’t understand how this could be the same man who’d ordered me off the Jenn-a-Lo. And not just once.
Grabbing the back of my father’s seat, I leaned forward to say something. To explain. But Mom put her hand up. It wasn’t much of a screen, but it was enough to cut me off.
“We’ll find the money somewhere. It’s three years, not the end of the world.”
“Like we found it this summer?”
Voice breaking, Mom strained against her seat belt. “We’re still here, aren’t we?”
“No thanks to you or me!”
Trapped in the back seat, listening to them get hoarse and ugly—I wanted to drip through the floorboards. The wheels wouldn’t even thump over me if I was oil that melted into the asphalt.
Everything had changed and nothing had. I still wasn’t the next in an unbroken line of Dixons fishing this shore. I still couldn’t go out on the water. I was still the reason Levi was dead, only now I had a stupid, useless hope that I could pay penance for that.
“Will you just shut up and listen?” my mother yelled. Again. “Look at the bigger picture!”
“Here’s a bigger picture! We’re losing the boat. We’re losing the business! Good thing the truck’s paid off. We can back it into the kitchen and cook on the engine block when they cut off the power!”
Dad was used to keeping his hands on the wheel and his eyes in front of us, no matter what storm came. So he could scream at my mother and burn down Route 1 at eighty without blinking.
I pressed myself against the door. Through the window, the world flashed. Autumn leaves blurred in long red-gold streaks, broken up by green, intruding pines. The flicker back and forth made my stomach turn. My fingers on the handle threatened to tighten.
It had been news to Dad that I was pleading guilty. It was news to me that he expected me back on the stern. And suddenly I was angry. There they were, yelling about me like I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t remember the last time any of us had talked. About anything.
Not that I could imagine sitting down and having a chat with my dad. He wasn’t that man. And to be fair, I wasn’t that girl. We liked silent agreement. And if we couldn’t manage to agree, just plain silence was good too. Mom and Levi had talked. They had the same eyes and the same temperament.
It worked, we all worked, and now we didn’t. None of the pieces fit, none of the edges matched up. Mom and Dad fought away in the front seat. I pressed myself harder into the glass.
When we rolled into Broken Tooth, I saw Seth’s truck at the bait shop. Since he wasn’t at the shore, maybe the Archambaults had gotten lucky and their boat had been spared too. Seth’s dad sometimes ran overnight charters—to Boston, occasionally up to Halifax.
“Stop,” I said. “I want to talk to Seth. I can walk home.”
Mom frowned. “I don’t think you . . .”
“Let me out!” I didn’t mean to scream, but I did. It was a raw, ugly sound. I thought my throat might bleed, but I couldn’t stop myself. “I’m done listening to this! I’m just done. Let me out!”