Let’s just not get caught.
NO OVERNIGHT DOCKING: Sign posted on dock at northern end of Rapture Island, several miles south of Beauty. There are more than thirty islands in Narragansett Bay, and Rapture, though uninhabited, is one of the largest.(Personal photo/Josephine Saint-Martin)
Chapter 18
Lucky was right: Rapture Island is small. Very small.
It’s a little rocky on both ends, with trees in the middle. Among those trees, I can make out a few old buildings—or what remains of them. Just stones, really. And at one end of the island, near a weathered pier, a white-and-red lighthouse beckons like a finger into the water.
Not a single human being in sight.
Just the two of us.
Our own private getaway.
Lucky pilots us to the pier by the lighthouse, shutting off the motor to startling silence. And as he moors the boat, I exit it and tread onto old, gray boards stippled with white bird droppings. The boards bounce like rubber with each step.
It smells good out here, like saltwater and cedar, and as I approach a boxy, gray clapboard dock house on the sandy land at the end of the pier, the sweet scent of shrubby beach roses drifts from beneath its dusty windows.
A painted sign stands between the empty dock house and a footpath that splits between the lighthouse and farther into the island. It reads:
RAPTURE ISLAND
FIRST SETTLED BY THE NARRAGANSETT TRIBES.
SOLD TO EARLY AMERICAN PATRIOT, ROBERT HART.
HAS BEEN: TRADING POST, PIG FARM, RELIGIOUS COLONY.
RAIDED BY THE BRITISH IN 1776.
DESTROYED BY THREE HURRICANES.
SETTLED BY FORK-TAIL ROCK SWALLOWS IN 1969.
MINDFUL HUMANS MAY VISIT THE RAPTURE BIRD SANCTUARY FROM APRIL THROUGH OCTOBER. PLEASE PAY FEE TO TOUR THE ISLAND INDEPENDENTLY TO THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER.
NO OVERNIGHT STAYS. NO FIRES. PICK UP YOUR TRASH. DON’T PICK ANY VEGETATION OR FEED ANIMALS. STAY ON THE DESIGNATED TRAILS.
PEACE BE WITH YOU.
“Oh my God,” I whisper as Lucky trudges up behind me. “How did I not know this was out here? This should be a huge tourist attraction for Beauty. This is … amazing.”
“Yeah?” he says, hefting the strap of the cooler across his chest.
“Yes.” I swing around, trying to take it all in. “Look at all this. Everything.”
“Everything?”
“Like, okay, first of all—I love beach roses. They’re better than garden roses, because they’re the outcasts of the rose kingdom,and wherever we’ve lived up and down New England, there they are, like a good luck sign that smells amazing,” I say, smiling.
“Never thought about them that way. My mom calls them trash roses.”
“My mom says they’re magnets for bugs. See? Outcasts of the rose kingdom.”
He nods. “I can get behind an outcast.”
“And second, the website for the island isn’t half as weird as this sign, so now I’m totally intrigued about what’s here. But, oh my God.This sign!Wow!”
