The crane’s mechanism was perched on top of a nearby hill. Someone was inside, but from this distance I could not make out any distinguishing features. All I could see was a human silhouette. The winch rotated, the cable unspooling. The Billy Pugh dropped out of sight. I watched a seabird pass. I inhaled the odor of mildew and guano. The islands were pungent enough to singe my lungs.
My luggage followed me on the same perilous trip. By the time I got to my feet, the Billy Pugh was sitting beside me again, stacked with my suitcases. The ferry was already leaving. The prow was pointed to California, the wake a churn of gray sludge. I could not see Captain Joe. He had descended into the deckhouse without so much as a goodbye tip of the hat. It did not do to linger in these waters.
I looked around for my unknown assistant. But the silhouette in the crane’s window was gone too. Whoever had been there, operating the machine, had not seen fit to introduce himself, to help me with my bags, to welcome me to the islands. There was a lump in my throat. For now, I was on my own.
It took me a while to make my way to the cabin. Dragging my suitcases. Panting and sweating. It was early afternoon, cold and clear. A seabird winged by in the distance, braying its harsh cry. The ocean boomed. White spray rose above the cliffs. The lighthouse stood sentinel against a hazy sky.
On the porch, I felt like the victim of a shipwreck. The cabin appeared abandoned. There were cracks in the windowpanes. The boards sagged beneath my weight. There was no doorbell. I was still winded from the labor of my walk. My luggage was strewn around my feet. I remember steeling myself to knock. I remember arranging my face into a pleasant, oh-how-nice-to-meet-you expression.
But before I could move — before I could blink — the door was yanked open from within. I stepped back, startled. Two men lunged into the doorway.
One was old, the other young. Perhaps it was the influence of my sea-addled gut, but they both struck me, in that moment, as otherworldly. The elderly one could have been cast in a movie as Poseidon — a thatch of silver hair, a weather-beaten face, an air of gravitas. The younger man was as slim as a sapling. He had calloused, muscular hands. A minor deity, perhaps. A sprite with limited but surprising powers.
Now, of course, I know their names: Galen (old) and Forest (young). At the time, however, I had no idea. I took a deep breath and grinned.
“Hello,” I said.
“Get your tail in gear, or we’re going to miss the whole show,” Forest said. It took me a moment to realize that, although he was facing in my direction, he was addressing the man behind him. I just happened to be in between his interested gaze and the sea.
“Fine, fine,” Galen grumbled, cramming a hat over his white bangs.
“Hi,” I said, louder. “I got off the ferry a few minutes ago. I’m—”
Forest pivoted, smiting himself on the brow. “I forgot the damn camera. Can you believe it? I forgot the damn—”
“Too late,” Galen said. “We’ll have to make do without it.”
They barged onto the porch, and if I had not moved aside, Forest would have collided with me. He was zipping up his coat. Galen scanned the shoreline with a pair of binoculars. I opened my mouth and closed it again. My nerve failed me. I could not attempt to announce my presence to them a third time. I watched mutely as they stepped over my suitcases and darted down the stairs.
For a moment, I actually wondered if I might be dreaming. It did seem a bit like an anxiety nightmare: the dreadful boat ride, the massive waves, a horrible mesh cage, a soupy ocean, distant dorsal fins, mysterious figures on the landscape, no greeting, no assistance with my suitcases, no surety, no safety.
Both men trotted off down the path. I watched their figures receding. They had almost reached the crest of the hill when Forest finally turned.
“Oh, of course. You must be Melissa,” he yelled. “Welcome! We’d stay and chat, but—”
Galen took over the sentence, finishing the other man’s thought.
“—there’s a feeding frenzy in the West End Cove,” he shouted. “Get into the house. Don’t go outside. This place is tricky.”
I could not bring myself to bellow back that they had my name wrong. They were already out of sight, dashing away like kids after the ice cream truck.
2
THIS LETTER, LIKE all the others, will never be mailed. In the past, I have found all kinds of creative solutions for the letters I write to you. I’ve burned them. I have buried them in the ground. I have shredded them into confetti. While hiking in the mountains, I have folded my messages into origami flowers, hanging them in the trees. When I took a rafting trip down the Mississippi during a long summer, I would fashion the pages into boats, which I set on the current, watching them drift like water lilies, darkening slowly, sinking when my back was turned.
I have been writing to you for almost twenty years. But none of these missives have ever reached you. None of them have ever been read. After all, I wrote my first letter to you the week you died.
THIS IS WHAT I remember:
Your exit from the world was sudden. You kissed Dad on the cheek, went to work, never came home. I was at school when the accident happened. I heard the sirens. An ambulance went haring past the windows of my eighth-grade history class, drowning out a lecture on trade routes in Europe. A little while later, the intercom buzzed into life, a crackling hiss that filled every classroom in the building with the aural equivalent of sand. There were a few thumps as the principal grappled with the microphone. I remember the look of annoyance on my teacher’s face. Then my name was spoken. My name was spoken again. I got to my feet, feeling all eyes on me, and began shoving books into my bag. I was not apprehensive. At the time, I did not connect those two things — the ambulance and my name.
It turned out that your car had stalled. The morning was cold, as only D.C. winters can be cold, the air so damp and heavy that it lay over the world like cheesecloth. You had no knowledge of mechanics — that was my father’s job — but you went through the motions anyway: cursing, opening the hood, staring in bafflement at the labyrinth of cogs. Finally you abandoned the vehicle where it was, at the corner of 13th and G, and strode up the hill toward the nearest garage. The sidewalks were wet and slick. Handfuls of blue salt, strewn over the pavement by landlords and store owners, coped imperfectly with the pockets of ice. I imagine you, a slim figure in brown, your face muffled up to the eyes by one of your own hand-knitted scarves. You paused at a crosswalk. You waited for the green. In the middle of the street, you observed too late that a dump truck had begun to skid on a patch of black ice.
The police would later refer to this as a No Fault Accident. You were correct to be in the crosswalk just then. The driver had seen the light changing and attempted to stop, but the slippery pavement, combined with the inertia of his cargo — thirteen tons of gravel — had prevented him. Everybody had followed the law. Somehow this bothered me. I would have preferred an accident in which somebody was at fault. It was difficult to grasp that there was no one to blame for the loss of my mother — not even you yourself.
What I recall most clearly about that day is sitting outside the principal’s office kicking my feet on the carpet and wondering whether I’d brushed my teeth earlier. The only reason I could come up with for having been dragged out of class was that you, in your well-intentioned but over-scheduled way, had once again forgotten to pick me up for a dentist appointment. You were notorious among the staff at Dr. Greenberg’s. I imagined that someone had called with a friendly reminder, and you had gone flying out of work, coffee on your sleeve, your purse dispensing bits of Kleenex down the road from an unzipped pocket. That was the drill. Any minute now, I was sure that you would appear in the hallway, breathless and bewildered.