My old bedroom is still painted a soft canary yellow, the paper stars—now curled at their tips from decades of moisture—still hang from strings above the bed. I drop my suitcase beside the closet, then, by habit, Nana and I pull on our raincoats and leave the house, walking down the sandy steps and out onto the beach. We do it as if no time has passed, no years spent apart. Except now, she folds her hand around my elbow. Maybe it’s to keep her balance—her bones not as steady as they once were—or maybe she’s worried I might slip away, be carried out with the sea, only to return with mysteries tangled in my damp hair.
“How is work?” she asks, tilting her chin up at me, smiling. Her eyes have lost some of their blue color—they’re paler, fishy-white—and her wrinkles have set in like hard clay on a summer day.
I let my eyes fall to the sand. The tide is out, and the rocks have exposed themselves closer to the waterline. “I have a few clients who are struggling, one boy who lost his mom barely talks. But it just takes time.”
“It’s good what you’re doing, this kind of work.” She pats my arm. “It’s good for you too, I think.”
I spent so many years in therapy as a kid, after what happened, that to grow up and become a therapist myself felt only logical. I had no idea what else I would do with my life. And I think Nana sees it as if I never truly left therapy. Just changed seats. Pivoted slightly. She thinks I’m working through their memories as much as my own. But what she doesn’t know is that I try not to think about what happened here when I was twelve years old. I tell myself I’ve moved past it, I’ve concluded it was all in my head, and there’s nothing more to be said about it.
But when that woman called yesterday, it tore open the flesh I thought was long ago scabbed and healed, and now I’m standing on the same beach where it all happened.
“I saw the photos, from the ship,” she says now, driving straight into the heart of it. She’s never been one to tiptoe around something. To live out here on the brutal edge of the Atlantic, to survive as she’s done, means walking straight toward what scares you the most and sorting it out quickly, because there’s no time to fuss and pick at it. There is harder work to be done. Storms blowing in. The tide rising. Living in a place like this makes hard shells of people.
“A lot of people saw it at the same time,” I say, because this is the part I’m struggling with the most. The number of witnesses, the evidence—the images and videos of an island drifting not far from the bow of a ship. A thing that looks strikingly like my memory: the pointed eaves of a structure near the center; the cliff face on one side of the islandlined with pale, windswept birch trees; the soft, sandy shoulder on the other. It causes my mind to spiral down into the forgotten corners of my past, searching for details, other clues to prove myself wrong. I need my memories to be a trick of the cold sea, of hypothermia. I need it to be all in my head, otherwise I won’t be able to let it go. It’s the only way I’ve moved on: convincing myself it was a lie, dreamed up in my fickle twelve-year-old mind.
“What does James say?”
I shake my head, eyeing the wet footprints Nana and I make up the beach, the sand quickly filling them in. “I haven’t told him yet.”
James knows about my past, about the night I disappeared and saw something I can’t explain. The memory that wakes me from sleep some nights—sweating and gasping for air like I’m choking on seawater. He knows about the place I’ve worked so hard to forget.
But he’s the only one. No one else in my life knows the full story, not friends, not my patients’ parents. If they did any digging into my name, they might find an article or two. But the story is old, not something that pops up easily. It’s also why I moved to the other end of the continent, to lower the odds that anyone would have heard of me or read my story.
Nana blinks, a look of silent reproach. “Does he know you’re here?”
“He asked me to marry him,” I answer bluntly, turning toward the sea, my thumb instinctively going to my ring finger. But the engagement band isn’t there. I put it in a small cotton pouch, then stuffed it into my suitcase before I left. “He loves me,” I tell her. “He would love me forever, and I know he’d never hurt me.”
She exhales through her nostrils. “That’s not really what matters though, is it? It’s not his heart I’m worried about.”
I nod.
She met James two summers ago. I was feeling homesick in a nostalgic, unsteady sort of way. I hadn’t been back to Maylarch since before college. I still talked to Nana almost every day, and I made promises tocome visit—much like my mom did when I was young—but I wasn’t sure I was ready to return to the place where it had all happened. James, in his attentive, caring way, recognized the swollen pain growing in my chest, and he booked two flights for us, said it would be good for me to go back, face what I’d been running from. And clearly I missed Nana. I agreed. I even believed him that it might be just what I needed. And when we first arrived, it felt good. The three of us drank coffee together on the back porch, we stayed up late over bottles of wine, even went into town and ate at Libonelli’s—stuffing ourselves with garlic bread and clam-herbed linguine.
But soon, the hours felt strained against my flesh, the air too salty in my lungs. Maybe it was because James was here—my two lives bleeding into each other. The one I wanted to forget, and the new one I was building with James.
He’s always been the thing that steadies me. Early on, we were merely friends, and I’d walk to the café for dinner a couple nights a week. But soon he started offering to cook for me at my place. We watched movies and he made me laugh and I felt comfortable with him. It was easy—from the start. It was also easy to kiss him that first time, to let him sleep over. He sewed himself into my life so effortlessly I hardly noticed. Until he was down on one knee in my kitchen, a ring in his hand.
Some part of me knows he’s too good, too perfect for me—and it makes me wary. Suspicious. Not of him, but of life. Like I’ve always known I don’t deserve him. And that right there is self-sabotage at its finest. I’m the kind of person I’d have to resist rolling my eyes at if they walked into my office. Self-sabotage, bleh, so predictable. So painfully cliché. I couldn’t come up with something more clinical, more nuanced for my psychosis? Nope. I’m just as straightforward as most people.
We flew back to Seattle, and I remember promising myself that I’d finally forget the past. I’d quit doubting every good thing in my life—like I was waiting for the sea to prove me wrong, to take everything away. I’d let myself love James and never look back.
But two nights ago, staring at him in the candlelight, the taste of red wine on my lips—his eyes overflowing with hope—it felt like a switch flipped inside me. A strange, unnamable fear, as if life was pushing me toward something I wasn’t prepared for. Somewhere, maybe, I didn’t want to go.
“People will forget about the island with time,” Nana assures now, the wind sliding through the gray waves of her hair. “They always do.”
But it feels different this time. Too many people spotted the island—or they think they did. The photos will get international attention, they’ll be circulated through the media, dredging up the long-rumored history of Saltwell Island, and perhaps more reporters will seek me out. The thought of facing it all again, answering questions, makes me cringe—a sharp blade driving up the center of my spine, separating the scaffolding of my bones. I’ve spent my whole life trying to bury the past, but somehow it still finds its way back to me, unearthed, time and time again.
I slow my pace, looking at Nana. “What do you think happened to me that night?”
Her mouth flattens, the sea skids up across the beach, nearly reaching our feet before falling back into the swell. “You were lost for a little while…” she muses gently, “but you came back.”
“I was lost for a week.” I squeeze her hand, needing her for balance now. “But it only felt like a single night to me. It really did.”
She nods and pats her hand against my arm, as if it were a detail so tiny it hardly warrants mentioning. But I remember the look on her face as dawn broke over the sea and I motored the little fishing boat up to the beach. She was out on the shore, fully dressed, the gray house lit up behind her, every lamp and overhead light switched on, which was strange in that early dawn hour, and she wasn’t alone. Strangers—who I would later learn were detectives and neighbors—were gathered on the back porch and inside the house, hands worrying over maps spread out across the dining room table, trying to track the route I might havetaken if I had run away. Or the route someone else might have taken if they’d snatched me from my room.
The little boat slid up onto the sand, and Nana ran to me, pulling me out and up into her arms. She was crying, deep and gasping, her tears staining my hair. I didn’t understand why she was so upset, why there were police and searchers combing the beach for any sign of me. I had only been gone a few hours. I was surprised she even knew I wasn’t in my bed. “Where have you been?” she kept asking as her hands shook with relief.
“There was an island,” I told her. “It ran aground on the cape.” But when I turned and pointed out to sea, to the rocky headland where the storm was clearing away, there was no island. It was long gone. Just like the man had said it would be.
