When they crest the last slope of the footpath, my son waves.
Robbie has her arm around Reed’s waist, and he has his arm about her shoulders. They wave back with their free hands and start the steep walk to the highest point on this part of Vyggia, where their house sits overlooking the ocean. It was a house Reed paid my husband’s father to watch and tend to for many winters. My husband took on some of the tasks as a boy, and when the one-eyed man returned to our island, he told me he was excited to meet the owner of the house. It’s a house no different from any other islander’s home, from any house where other salt folk live, but its owners and its position are unusual, so it is a bit of a famous home here.
It is a day of rest. My children are done with their chores and begging to walk down the footpath to swim. Neither my husband nor I feel like watching them. We tell them no. They are fractious and bored, and I am about to threaten them with a chore when we hear wagon wheels. They run to the door and one of my girls cries out, “There is a woman covered in tattoos just like Robbie!”
I step to the door and peer outside. I recognize the wagon. It’s owned by a man down at the docks who sells the use of it and his horses to merchants who bring trade there. He has delivered two women who look at least ten winters or more older than I am. One of them is covered in tattoos like Robbie’s. She is smaller, fine boned with dark hair. The other woman is taller and carries more weight on her bones. Something about the angle of her head, the way she holds it, reminds me of Robbie.
“That’s right,” my husband says. “Her niece and her daughter arevisiting. All the way from Eccleston. Must have taken them two whole moons.”
Robbie must have told me this and I forgot. “She has a daughter? I did not know she had children. Do you mean the woman called Fox?”
My husband shrugs. “Reed just said she is ‘like a daughter’ and the other is her niece by blood.”
“Let’s go and meet them!” one of my girls squeals.
“I want to see the tattoos up close,” shrieks the other.
My son begins to babble along in his half speech, trying to keep up with his sisters. All three of them begin to make as if to leave the house when I call for them to stay.
“If we are invited over, we will go. But Robbie hasn’t seen her family in some time. We will let them reunite.”
There is a collective disappointment that I ignore, but I smile.
On the second day, we are invited to their house. We meet Adelaide, Robbie’s niece, a smiling, shiny-eyed woman. We meet Fox, the tattooed woman who is like a daughter to Robbie, who does not speak. She signs something, and Adelaide tells us what she means. Then Adelaide shows my children some gestures with her hands so that they can speak to Fox.
They are delighted by this and by her tattoo of a fox on her forearm. The way it is positioned, it looks as if it is at play in a field of daisies.
Robbie is incandescent. She sits and stares at the two visiting women and watches them converse with us. I can tell she is trying not to cry.
After the meal, Reed and my husband walk down to the beach with the children who, though mystified by Fox’s tattoos and charmed by Adelaide’s friendly manner, have lost interest in the conversation of adults.
We sit outside, four chairs from the house brought out so we can look out at the ocean. We shell peas from Robbie’s garden. Fox smiles at me and hands me a bowl from a stack she has carried with her.Robbie pours a heap of the peas into each of our laps from a bucket, and then we sit. I listen as Adelaide and Robbie ask and answer a thousand questions. Sometimes there is silence when Fox adds something, and then there is a repeating of it to me as I do not understand the elegant flow of her fingers. And though I do not know the people or places they reference, I do not feel left out.
And then they reference something I am too young to know about, the great war between Perpatane and Tintar, something that broke out when I was too young to know the terror of war. It did not reach the islands of Vyggia.
Then Fox begins to weep softly and spills her peas when she pulls her apron out from under them to dry her eyes. And Robbie begins to cry too. Adelaide turns to me and says, “We’re here to give the ashes of two women to the sea. My stepmother, Tessa, and our dear friend, Ilsit.”
“I would give anything to see my Jade again,” Robbie says, and she spills her peas too to use her apron on her own wet eyes.
None of them seem concerned about the vegetables.
Adelaide seems to enjoy her role as interpreter and says to me, “My aunt Jade is in good health, as is her husband, Reed’s brother, but a physician suggested that at their age they shouldn’t make such a journey. And Keir would have made it, but once Jade was told she shouldn’t—Well, he won’t let her carry anything heavier than a tin cup. And it has nothing to do with her age. He’s always been that way. And then Dermid wanted to come, but Jade got after him about his own age and it was a whole to do. All three of them talking at once. It is a very, very arduous journey from Eccleston to here. And when Ilsit passed, Fox and I figured we had better do it as we are both already near fifty. My father is too old as well, but he funded our journey here. Said we should lay our dear ones to rest somewhere beautiful.”
I nod along even though I do not understand. I just understand that all these people, both the dead and the living, had and have love for each other.
“Will you come to the shore with us?” Adelaide asks me. “We’re going to give their ashes to the sea in the morning. I’d like it if you could come.”
“But why me?” I ask. I am not uncomfortable by this devotion they have for these women, this Tessa and Ilsit, but I did not know them.
Fox looks at me with her reddened eyes and signs something.
“She says to bear witness,” explains Adelaide. “To be one more soul to pay them honor. To bear witness to the earthly ends of two who loved us and taught us how to better love. To love others and ourselves.”
And suddenly I am crying too, and I do not know why.
We give up on the peas.
In the morning, I explain to my husband that he will have to arrive a little late to the salt shallows, that I need an hour on the beach, that he must look after our children. He is confused, frightened even by the tears already spilling down my cheeks, but he agrees.
