What the Waves Know (23 page)

Grandma Jo never answered my question directly, though I had tossed and turned with her answer in my head well past midnight.

“You were the light of his life.”

The statement shouldn't have vexed me beyond all reason, but it did, and all the tossing just jumbled it up more. My father had spent his entire life chasing after the light, and it never brought him home to me. It had never been enough, no matter how hard I tried to make it shine. I could not blot out the stars that led him away, could not compete with the pull of the moon.

I can't say exactly when I finally dozed off, but I was jolted to, still sleepy, by the bleeping of my alarm clock at seven.

I waited outside Herman's for Remy for a full half hour, holding a tube of glazing in my hand for the window with not one idea what to do with it. Just after ten, the Purple
Monster pulled up to the curb at breakneck speed and skidded to a stop. Riley got out of the driver's seat, shut the door with a thud, and sauntered over.

“Remy's tied up at the pier.” He took the tube from my hand. “I've got to get back on down there to help out, but I'll get you started.”

Pulling a penknife from his back pocket, he slit the tip from the tube and wriggled it into a metal contraption with a long trigger, giving it three solid pulls until a clear gluey strand eased out the tip.

“Here, hold the gun like this.” He propped it in my hands and turned me toward the glass. The scent of sweet smoke and cloves filled my nose. I figured he'd probably been cleaning either the boat or the taxi stand with Mr. O'Malley, but it reminded me of what I had thought about Remy's cottage the first time I'd seen it—sugar cookies and warmth.

Placing both arms around me and guiding my hands, he squeezed the trigger slowly. “Now just pipe it out all the way around the edges.”

I turned my head to brush a curl out of my face with my shoulder, glancing at him, then hurried to turn away when he glanced back. He was still talking, but I was busy picturing him racing down Remy's back hill on a toboggan and letting out a laugh. I had never seen him laugh.

“Once you're done, take this cloth and run it over the line to push it between the glass and wood. Got it?”

My heart was thrumming at the speed of light. I nodded, but the truth is I barely heard a word he said. I wanted to hate him; at least I had thought I wanted to. He had made it clear that he didn't like me. But every time he came close, my hands started to sweat and shake. I'd been carrying around the memory of his face in the picture from the library since I first saw it and, even though it didn't make sense, I felt connected to him in a way I couldn't shake. There was that. And there was this, too: he had the greenest eyes I had ever seen. They reminded me of stars in a pitch-black sky and there was a depth that said they understood the ways of the moon.

“Good. Remy says she'll pick you up at three o'clock to help set up the square.”

As he climbed back into the driver's seat and spun off, I considered it a good thing that I didn't speak because whenever Riley was around my words jumbled up in my brain anyway.

“Don't forget the inside, too.” I'd been working on glazing the window for forty-five minutes when Mr. Herman appeared at the bottom of my ladder carrying another cold soda. After handing it up to me, he pulled his spectacles from the breast pocket of his grocer's smock and hooked them over his ears, following the line of glaze from start to finish.

I sat on top of the ladder watching him until he'd checked every inch.

“I guess it'll do.” Pulling the wire-rimmed glasses back
off, he hobbled inside, leaving me sitting on my perch, wondering. It was the kindest thing Mr. Herman had ever said to me and I was willing to bet it was the nicest thing he said to anybody that day.

Main Street was already brimming with tourists smushing their noses against windowpanes and wandering around with paper cups of frozen lemonade. A young girl skipped down the street past the White Whale with an ice cream cone in one hand and carrying a stuffed doll of Yemaya under her other arm. Finishing my soda, I picked up the glazing gun and went inside.

“Cedric,” Mr. Herman said, wagging a finger at the boy bagging groceries. “Go get the ladder for her. It's heavy.”

The boy stuck chips into the bag and disappeared, coming back with the ladder dragging behind him.

“Pick it up! You're going to scratch the floors,” Mr. Herman snapped and sent the boy reeling under the weight of the unruly ladder, trying to accommodate his boss.

After another hour, Mr. Herman gave his final stamp of approval and I walked out of the market, giving the window one last glance before heading home.

“You want to
ride along, Josephine?” Remy stood in the doorway waiting for me to pull on my shoes. The Purple Monster was parked out front, pulling a trailer chock-full of collapsible tables and chairs.

“I could use a little break,” Grandma Jo said, walking straight out and climbing into the Purple Monster without bothering with shoes.

“Me, too,” my mother said, setting a file down on the dining room table. She plucked a pear from the fruit bowl, tossing it to Remy as she passed.

Remy looked at her as though she'd sprouted green hair. “Really? You don't have to work? Are you feeling okay?”

“Just fine,” my mother lobbed back sarcastically, following Grandma Jo out to the taxi. Remy bit the pear and watched her get in.

There was already
a gaggle of people in the town square by the time Remy came to a stop, and I unfolded myself from the car. White tents lay on the grass waiting to be propped into the day.

“Okay, unload the tables first! It comes together like a jigsaw puzzle. Here's the diagram of what goes where. Once the tables are laid right, we'll stack the chairs beside them and throw a tarp over the whole shebang,” Remy barked. “Izabella, grab the tablecloths.”

Two dozen people hustled back and forth moving furniture, planters, and tents around the square. Grandma Jo and Mr. O'Malley busied themselves setting the poles for the tents while my mother handed chairs off the trailer two at a time. I don't know if it was the fact that she was relaxing or Grandma Jo's cooking, but the bones along
her shoulders had softened and I had caught her smiling several times over the last day or two.

“Get outta the way or get smushed!” Remy called. “They're bringing in the statue. Dillon, Jim! Help unload it.”

I stepped behind the sheriff to clear a path for the men to carry the statue of Yemaya into the center of the square.

“You hear the way she speaks to the law, Jim?” Officer Dillon lifted a brow at Remy, shaking his head woefully.

“She
is
the law. It's best just to accept the fact and move on.” The sheriff landed a soft cuff on his deputy's arm.

“That means you can't give her a court order or something to make her go out with me?”

“Sorry, kid. You're on your own.” The sheriff laughed.

“That's all right. I've dealt with hardened criminals. I'm not scared of her.”

“Hardened criminals,” Remy scoffed, putting her hand on her hip and crinkling up the diagram as she did so. “What hardened criminal have you dealt with, Dillon Baxter? You have lived on Tillings your whole blessed life, and there is not one hardened criminal on this island. Ha! Hardened criminals.” She shook her head. “And let me tell you what: even if you had dealt with hardened criminals, they've got not one damn thing on me!”

“Told you,” the sheriff whispered before heading for the center of the square, where Telly was coming in with the church's statue of Yemaya loaded on the front of the forklift. He drove to the center and climbed down to loosen the straps as five men scurried up to help.

“Riley, grab that table!” Remy hollered. “This one needs to go in front of the church. Izabella, get the other end. Then you two can set those stones into a ring for the fire dance right over there.”

“Great,” sputtered Riley, who had arrived with Telly. “Now Dillion's got my aunt all fired up and the rest of us are gonna pay for it.” Riley followed me over to the table, lifting his end with ease. “Maybe you could teach him to shut up.” He smirked and began moving the table, stringing me along on the other end.

From across the lawn, I saw Lindsey walking toward Remy with a large sandy-haired man. She looked at me, said something to the man, and started to turn the other way. The man grabbed her by the wrist, giving her a shake. His face was red, and for a minute, I thought he might slap her before he let her go with a shove and she slipped through a row of hedges on the opposite side of the square.

“Motherfucker.”

I looked at Riley, who was watching the scene unfold, too, taken aback at the anger in his tone.

“Riley,” Remy called. “This table needs to come off the one over there in an L shape.” She pointed at another table.

“Come on,” he grumbled.

By late evening
the square was starting to take shape and Remy finally dropped my mother, Grandma Jo, and me back at the Booth House, smelly, tired, and hungry.

“I call the first shower.” My mother tossed a green beach towel over her shoulder, leaving her sweater behind on the armchair, and climbed the back stairs.

Grandma Jo flopped down on the couch, kneading her bare feet, which had become blackened with mud. She patted the spot beside her with a smile.

“Tell me.”

I looked at her with a degree of confusion.

“Who is he?” She handed me one of my mother's empty files and a pencil.

Who?

“The boy you were staring at all day. The one you were working with.”

Riley? He's just Remy's nephew.

“Handsome nephew,” she added, intrigued.

He hates me.

“I have seen a lot of hate in my day,” Grandma Jo teased. “Trust me when I tell you it doesn't look anything like that. Tell me something else. How long ago did you start speaking again?” Her eyes were chicken soup warm, but the underbelly of her words said she really wanted to know. She could do that in a way my mother had never figured out, with a steely seriousness that had been drained clean of judgment.

I didn't answer her, not because I didn't want to, but because words falling out here and there isn't really speaking in the proper sense of things.

“I see.” She laid a hand over my shoulder, leaning back
into the couch cushions. “You know, eventually you're going to tell your mother. And, eventually, she's going to understand. That's the nature of things between daughters and mothers.”

I tried to count how many times those words had come out of my grandmother's mouth in my lifetime as I climbed to my Pepto-Bismol-pink bedroom. I still felt the room whispering to me as surely as it had the first day I'd stepped foot inside it, but I wasn't any closer to finding out what it was saying. The message was all jumbled around in my head, flashes of things from the past that didn't connect to anything else. One thing was always the same, though: every time I walked into the room, I felt I needed to hurry somewhere. The sensation was so potent I had to fight not to go running out again, since I did not have a single clue where I was supposed to hurry to.

I grabbed my journal and flopped down on the bed. The Yemaya Festival was only one day away and I played with the idea of writing a poem to go along with my sketch. After half an hour, the page was still blank. I set the journal aside, yanked my sneakers free, and switched the light off. Lifting Luke onto the bed, I began rubbing his bandage. His leg was still sore, but even my mother had to admit Grandma Jo's oregano leaves were working wonders. With a contented sigh, he tucked his nose in my armpit.

I was almost asleep when I heard Grandma Jo's voice flitting up the stairs.

“Zorrie, can I get you a cup of tea?” Everything about her was canary-like, especially her voice. If mine ever fully came back—and it did not sound like my father's—I hoped it would sound like hers.

“Hmm?” I heard my mom murmur, followed by, “Good God, Mother! Would you
please
put some clothes on?”

Chuckling, I pulled the covers to my chin and closed my eyes

“Why? What's wrong with my body? Freshen up, put clothes on . . . It's enough to make one self-conscious beyond repair.”

“It's fifty degrees outside.”

“I'm not outside.”

“Mother!”

“Zorrrrieeeeeee . . .”

Grandma Jo pattered back down the hall. When she was gone, I heard my mother laugh right out loud.

Far off in the distance, the Moorhead lighthouse flickered like one of those summer fireflies, on . . . off . . .

I cannot say
when the faces started to organize themselves into a dream, but this is the dream they made up. . . .

I was walking down Knockberry Lane to Remy's cottage in the middle of the afternoon. It was sitting ahead of me, but instead of moving toward it, I turned down Mr. O'Malley's drive toward Witch's Peak. A white thread was pacing back and forth on the ridge. I knew it was Riley,
and for some reason I was happy about it. But the closer I got, the more I could make out that it wasn't Riley at all standing on the ledge with waves lapping hungrily below. The face belonged to my father and he was wearing the purple striped Father's Day sweater. He turned as though he were going to disappear over the ledge as Riley had done.

“Come on, Be,” he urged, flashing his dimples. “Come dance with the moon. Come fly with me.”

Run. Hurry
.

I started to run to him, but Mr. O'Malley's salt licks kept tripping me up. When I finally made it to Witch's Peak, my father was gone and a woman with dark hair pulled back by cowry shells was staring at me with stormy gray eyes. She held out her hand without saying a word. She did not have to; I knew what she was waiting for. My hand moved on its own, digging until it found the stone, and handed it over to her. As she lifted it into the sky, I was being pulled back, back, back, even though my feet were not moving. The cliffs were shrinking until there was nothing but the stone flinging through the air, disappearing with the secret of my sixth birthday inside into the waves below.