“Come with me,” he said. He held out a hand. It was pale, and in the moonlight, it looked skeletal. Suddenly, he was a long, gangling thing. Bones and angles, and it made my skin crawl. But I followed him, because I had to know. Because he had something inside his head, and it had to do with me, and Levi, and I had to know.
It wasn’t the music-box room when we went through the door of the lighthouse this time. Not the kitchen, either, or any of the rooms I’d seen. It looked like a pantry, sort of. Wood doors lined the walls. A bitter smell wafted on the air, like old paper, or an unused closet. Grey opened one of the doors.
Row after row of glass bottles lined the inside. Each hung in its own nook. Corked, they were empty. And they didn’t make sense. The jars weren’t much bigger than my thumb. They didn’t look like test tubes or like they were for spices. Light reflected on their rounded bottoms. I tightened my arms around myself because a chill came on.
“I could have collected you the night of the storm,” Grey said. “I risked myself. I tore myself to shreds to get to you, to save you! I am not a monster.”
The jars tinked, shaking in their neat slots. It was like they were alive. Or something bigger than all of us was subtly shaking the lighthouse. My heart decided to quiver too. I felt sick and uneasy, but all I could do was ask questions.
“How’s that, Grey? It doesn’t even make sense.”
Closing one door, Grey opened another. Tilting his head to the side, like he was admiring art, he considered the three uppermost jars. They glowed, like each one had a firefly caught inside. When I stepped closer, Grey pressed himself between me and his precious jars.
“There are two ways off this island. The first? Collect a thousand souls. Anyone who dies on the water, beneath my light . . . a tally in my book. This is a century’s worth.”
All my blood drained away. I felt raw and cored, and I wanted to fall to my knees. If this was the truth, if any of it was real . . . My head split; it felt like Grey had dropped an axe instead of some words. Too many questions. Too many possibilities.
My hand shaking, I pointed. “What is that?”
“All that remains.”
I lunged past him, trying to grab the bottle. It was like hitting a wall. Icy, immovable. When I lunged again, the pantry shifted. It was there, then I took a breath, and it was gone. All that was left was music boxes. All of them, keys ticking. Notes playing. Each one played a different song, none of them in tune. In time.
Throwing myself at Grey, I grabbed his shirt. I shook him. “You let my brother die!”
“No, Willa,” he said, newly, coldly calm. “You killed your brother. I only kept what was mine.”
I tasted bile, but I wasn’t gonna turn myself inside out for Grey. For that thing. For all I knew, it was a hallucination. Another lie. There was nothing left of Levi. He was dead and gone. Gone.
Shells and stones ground beneath my feet, because I walked away. I ran. Putting my back to him, to that lighthouse, I dared him to do something about it. I wasn’t gonna be a part of this. Everything on the Rock would become myth again for me, I hoped forever.
“I promised to be honest with you, Willa! You can’t hold the truth against me. Your brother was one more toward a thousand, it’s true! But he was a happy accident. One I tried to prevent, one you engineered!”
Biting my own lips, I held in a reply. I held in everything: my gaze, my voice, my churning belly. If I could have made it a mile in icy water, I would have swum home instead of getting into that cursed boat.
Instead, I sat at the bow, staring into the sea. Staring at the shore. Looking everywhere but behind me.
I was never going back to Jackson’s Rock, not even with my eyes.
NINETEEN
Grey
When the Big Dipper is upside down, it will rain for three days.
My father believed that—he, long dead now. My mother didn’t; she, too, molders in the earth. Every home I ever knew is ashes. Every street I ever walked, paved over. No one I knew by name, who could greet me with mine, remains aboveground.
The stars are all turned, and it hasn’t stopped raining since Willa left. Cold, ice rain that makes me glad I only imagine my body. I think I save myself from the worst of mundane realities. I feel cold, but I don’t go numb with it. I feel heat, but I never sweat.
Because I’m dead. A remnant. A revenant.
She’s not thinking of me.
I’ll never be free.
TWENTY
Willa
Every time I started to look toward the Rock, I distracted myself. It was hard, because the weather went crazy. Well, not the weather so much. The fog.
It rolled in and out, wildly random. The horn blared constantly, sometimes for ten minutes, sometimes for four hours. It was like a strobe light in slow motion. White, then clear. Clear, then white.
But distraction didn’t come too hard. The way my parents saw it, I’d disappeared for three days after court. Long enough that they reported me missing. Long enough that a patrol car came to our house when I turned up.
I sat in the living room. Head hanging, I suffered through the lecture Scott Washburn gave me. He talked like I was supposed to forget he was my lazy-eyed cousin just because he was wearing a badge.
“That kind of irresponsible behavior, you set people to worrying,” Scott said. “There’s been enough trouble in Broken Tooth this year, don’t you think?”
Stepping on my own toes, I didn’t even lift my head. “I know. I said I was sorry.”
With a suddenly sympathetic face, Scott stared at me real hard. “Where have you been? You in some kind of trouble?”
“I’ve been around.”
Dad made a disgusted sound. My mother echoed him with irritated precision. “Around.”
“I haven’t been fishing, if that’s what you want to know.”
“You’re just making this hard on yourself,” Scott said.
“I hear that a lot,” I snapped. Cutting a look at my parents, I spread my hands. “I hid out in Uncle Toby’s cabin, all right? It was quiet. I wanted some time to think.”
They all relaxed. That’s why it was a perfect lie. Uncle Toby’s cabin was an old hunting lodge up in the woods. Surrounded by blueberry barrens, hidden in the trees—it had been abandoned in the fifties. We all sort of owned it, and most everybody in Broken Tooth had spent a night or two there. It was full of graffiti and other people’s first times.
“That place is dangerous.” Scott had to say it; nobody believed it.
I apologized, and they didn’t have to know I wasn’t sorry. I hadn’t meant to disappear like that. Time on the Rock was different. Somehow I forgot that at the worst possible moment. I wondered if I was three days older. If my molecules had kept the time, or if I was just stopped when I was there.
A real important question Grey needed to answer, since he wanted off that rock so bad. He might be happy to stay there if he knew he’d crumble to a hundred and seventeen years’ worth of dust if he left.
“Am I dismissed?” I asked, because I wasn’t thinking about Grey. I wanted to get out of the house.
Scott shrugged at my parents. Mom stepped right in; at least she was a warden I was used to. “You’re leaving this house to go to school and back, period. I’ll walk you if I have to. This nonsense stops today.”
I shrugged. “Okay.”
Since they didn’t know what to do with compliance, Mom and Dad fell quiet. Since Scott was her side of the family, Mom followed him to his car and saw him off. Daddy pushed the curtains back. He watched her stop on the walk to talk with Scott, then finally turned to me.