Grey
I’m ready. Everything is ready. I climb to the lantern gallery just as the beacon switches on for the night. The gears grind, the light hums. It charges the air, not quite like lightning, but full of portent all the same.
The tune from the music box keeps winding in my head. It seems a sign. I’m ready for Willa; she’s ready for me. I’m certain, because she’s thinking of me again. Though I look to the glow of souls all along the shore, all of them out of my reach, there’s only one that looks back.
My anger is shed. My frustration. I’m not Susannah and Willa is not me. I have nothing to tempt her, nothing to recommend myself. But I master the sea. I stand above it, timeless, immortal. I never leave it, and it never leaves me.
This curse will not be a curse for her. It’s her dream. She won’t suffer the solitude of the waves. She’ll embrace it. I have all of this for her. The ocean, eternal. It will always be hers; she’s longed for this magic. Today and a thousand days from today, she will be the Grey Lady, and she will savor it.
There’s no one to hear me, so I laugh. I lean into the wind and let the ribbon slip from my hair. My heart opens and beats; I’m exposed to moonlight and the rush of surf all around me. Soon I’ll walk on that side of the water again. I’ll see faces, hear voices, cut myself shaving. I haven’t bled for a hundred years, and I never would have imagined this: I’m looking forward to it.
I am.
To pain and pleasure, to soup sometimes too hot. To nights sometimes too cold. To breathing. To a body that’s fully real, subject to time and injury and whim. This strange almost-life that I have doesn’t suit me at all. But Willa’s made for it. She’ll flourish in it. Just her and the water and all the time in the world.
That’s all she wants. It’s evident now. Her room is untouched, just as she left it. Nets for a canopy, boats for decoration. Shutters thrown open to the sea, and the slightest bit of magic hanging in the window, incongruous with the rest. There she is, solved and neat. Her destiny in a little turret chamber, her truest heart revealed.
“Come, Willa,” I say.
The sound is lost in the cry of sea birds and the twist of the wind. I have no faith that she hears me, but I believe, truly believe, she feels that call. She’ll come back to this island, and back to me—not with starry eyes but with purpose. I have everything she wants, and I’ll give it to her. She need only ask.
EIGHTEEN
Willa
That weekend, Daddy took Mr. Eldrich out to check their pots. Because ropes get cut and accidents happen, every lobster pot has an escape hatch. Can’t let ghost traps destroy the future of fishing. But that meant going out even when the fleet was turned upside down. Lobsters left in a trap too long figured out how to leave.
It also meant Mr. Eldrich and Daddy had to tell each other where they laid their trawls. It was a big thing to give up the secret, best waters they had. That’s all they really had in the world. But they didn’t have a choice.
Me, I stayed onshore with Bailey, untangling the traps thrown free during the storm. It was like the bottom drawer of a giant jewelry box. Ropes and loops and wire knotted together, all different colors, belonging to different boats.
“It’s supposed to get cold this week,” Bailey said.
She hefted a pink-painted trap over her head. Those belonged to Lane Wallace; he said it kept people from stealing them. He was wrong, though. He lost one or two to the summer jerks every year because they thought a pink lobster trap was funny.
Tugging the wrist of my glove tighter with my teeth, I plunged my hand into a nest of rope. “Maybe we should have a bonfire.”
Bailey leaned her head back, letting the wind push her hair from her face. “Yeah, we could. I’m going to Milbridge later. I’ll say something to Cait.”
“Things better?”
“Kind of the same.” Bailey stacked the pink trap with its brothers, then came back to the pile. She had swift fingers, good for working tricky wire free. She should have taken Mrs. Baxter’s class. “We’re going to visit her uncle Dalton later.”
“The rum-smelling guy? Why?”
Rolling her eyes, Bailey shrugged. “She likes him. I don’t know.”
“Why are you go—” I cut myself off. Straightening in the tangle of rope, I tugged at my collar to let some air in. “Never mind. Stupid question.”
Though I’d answered it myself, Bailey threw up her hands. “It’s like we’re in a play now. We both know how it ends, but we’re saying all the lines and doing all the scenes anyway.”
I couldn’t make it better. I just knew exactly what she meant. Softly, I said, “Everything ends, Bay. Life ends. You still keep living it.”
Bailey made a face. She probably would have flipped me off if her hands had been free. “Hypocrite advice, fifty cents?”
“Experience advice,” I countered.
“Whatever.” Bailey pushed on, lifting another trap from the mess and balancing it against her hip. “I’m driving. You should come with.”
“Tonight?”
“Yeah, why not? Uncle Dalton’s kinda woo-woo, but he’s all right. Since you’re all on a kick, maybe you can ask him about the Grey Lady.”
“I’m not on a kick,” I said. Then I added sullenly, “It’s a Grey Man now.”
“Not the way he tells it.” Bailey added another trap to the stack, then turned to lean against it. “Just come and run interference, all right? You don’t have anything better to do.”
Rasping my leather glove against my brow, I marveled at her. “Seriously?”
“It’s my job to call you on your shit,” Bailey replied. Then she smiled, putting her head down as she reached into the pile again.
It had been hypocrite advice. Because as I watched my best friend work another trap free, all I could see was the space she’d leave behind. College was coming; her life far from here was already starting. In a hard way, giving up her high school sweetheart.
And me. She had to. She’d come back for Christmas and summers, we’d e-mail and call. But it wouldn’t be the same. There would be somebody else to hear her everyday problems. Another place that she called home.
Screw it, I thought. Forcing my fingers into a knot, I kicked a loose shrimp tray in Bailey’s direction. “So what do I wear to a hot date with Uncle Dalton?”
I wore blue jeans and a white T-shirt. And my best fake smile, because things were worse between Cait and Bailey than maybe they even knew. They really were just going through the lines. They laughed in the right places; they held hands automatically. But the softness was gone, the dew eyes and the long looks.
So I made conversation in the truck. I talked about a bonfire we hadn’t planned yet. The formal, even though I wasn’t going. They had dresses already, so that was a good half hour right there. When that started to die, I told them about Seth taking his cousin. That was worth another twenty minutes, and finally, we were there.
The sign said lockwood village, but it was just one building. A little lawn in the front, and I hoped more in the back. It smelled like baked cod and menthol in the front lobby.
Somebody played a piano, and a lot of people were scattered through the rooms. Some played cards; two watery old women faced off over a chessboard. From the looks of them, I wasn’t sure they wouldn’t shed blood over a checkmate.
“Hi, Uncle Dalton,” Cait said. She led us to a window seat by the fireplace. It wasn’t burning. I longed to get down in there and get some embers going. I sat instead, because I was running interference.