“That life we had together, back home, that’s how I try to remember her. The only thing I’d trade it for is to spare her what she went through.”
For a few minutes, we both watched the water slip down the glass, the soft way of the dark trees outside.
“Would you move back to Newfoundland?” I asked. “If Adam was gone?”
“No.” She answered without hesitation. “My life is here now. This town and the people in it—they’re my family now. But a visit. God, b’y what I wouldn’t do for a visit. To feel the sand in my toes and smell the ocean. To hear people who talk like me. To sing a sea shanty in one of those corny bars in St. John’s.”
She laughed. She looked so beautiful, my heart hurt.
Then Winona smiled, but it wasn’t steady.
I pulled her against me, my chest pounding; a tumult ofeverything. Fury at men who took what they wanted and bullied and beat anyone in their way. Pain, that she’d crossed paths with one of the worst. Honor, that she’d confided in me.
Later, as we lay in bed, the first rays of the sunrise spilling onto the floor of my space upstairs in the pool house, sleep making us drowsy and heavy-limbed, Winona whispered, “Tell me something about you, Mitchell. Something real. Something you’ve never told anyone else.”
I considered. I could tell her any number of things. I could tell her some surface fact that didn’t matter; something about the research LoupTeq was doing we hadn’t released yet. I could tell her all the places I’d been and people I’d met.
But none of that was right. Not with her. She’d opened up her soul to me.
I didn’t want to give her more pain.
I thought about the spaces in my childhood that were good; the places where I loved life. Where I had fun and played games, and acted ridiculous because it felt good. Before my father snuffed it out of me.
“We had a cabin,” I said. “I guess we still do. On an island in the San Juans.”The water there is as deep and bottomless blue as your eyes.
I held back on the bad poetry.
“It’s an unserviced island, so there are no ferries, and no power. We had to take this little dinghy with an outboard motor over there, and pack all our food with us. There were only a handful of other cabins there, so it always felt like we had the whole island to ourselves. It was the only place I remember my dad being only marginally relaxed. The only place he didn’t constantly criticize what me and my brothers were doing. It was like he could let go of that persona, just for a little bit. It wasn’t like he played with us or anything, but he just… let us be.”
I lay back against the pillow, Winona tucked into my arm.It felt like the most natural place to be in the world. She’d be leaving. She had to. But for now, I took her with me, back to Giller’s Island, with its sound and scent of the ocean and the little cabin where I shared a room half the size of my closet with my two older brothers. I told her how we only slept in that room half the time when we were there because we liked to set a tent out in the grass outside. We’d stay up late by the fire pit telling ghost stories, and when we went to bed, we’d keep the fly off and just stare at the stars, the sounds of the surf a constant backdrop.
“There were so many stars there. Billions, and whenever I look up at the night sky today, no matter where I am, I still hear the soft sound of the ocean crashing way down on the rocks the way it did back then.”
She sighed, closing her eyes. “The stars over the sea are unparalleled.”
I squeezed her shoulder, kissing the top of her head.
“My father, he didn’t have an ounce of humor in him,” I said. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forgive him for how he kept us down, and how he treated our mother, but I know he didn’t speak to his own family. Mom said he never thought he’d have a family of his own, and never had anyone tell him the right way to bring up kids. But the best thing he ever did was leave us alone at that cabin.”
“What’s your favorite memory from there? Out of all of them?”
I took in a breath. A clear image popped into my head, right away. I didn’t want that to be the memory, not when I had so many that seemed better.But it shone as if desperate for Winona to see it.
“Once, when I was maybe eight or nine, I made my brothers put on a play with me. A full on sword-fighting, dragon-slaying thing. We waited until nighttime to perform it, because we needed the fire in the fire pit out back. For effect.”
She laughed softly.
“We’d learned early on never to ask Dad to join us for anything like that. For anything at all. He’d never come, and if he ever did, he’d tell us it was nonsense and that we needed to get our damned heads out of the clouds. So we only invited Mom.”
I shifted so I could stroke Winona’s hair as I felt myself back in that cool evening, with the scent of the ocean mingling with the woodsmoke of the fire, my chest giddy with excitement at my brothers playing along to my script.
“It was Mom who always believed in me.”
Mom, who’d tried to fish the smoldering ruins of my notebooks out of the fire after she’d seen me yelling, trying to get them out myself.
“Mom cheered along at all the right parts. Conrad made sound effects. And when I killed the monstrous dragon—Blake, wearing garbage bags—I remember looking up, and there he was.”
“Your dad?”
