Page 26 of Bonetide

“He’s not⁠—”

“He is. He is offering something, and whatever it is, your body, your hormones, are reading it as being wanted. And your body is going to put you on its side every time. So I am asking you to let me be on the other side for a minute. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Okay. Good.”

A pause.

“I miss you,” she says, quieter now. “I know I shouldn’t be, but I’m worried for you all alone out there. I know your brother is too. And I’m going to let you go to bed, because you sound like you’re either about to fall asleep or about to do something stupid, and I’m going to choose to believe the first one.”

“Don’t worry, I’m going to bed, and I’m not doing anything stupid. I promise.”

She sighs. “Alright. Well, lock those doors again and text me when you wake up, even if I’m asleep. Okay?”

“Goodnight, Maddie.”

I sit in the chair for a long time after she hangs up. The salt at the window is the color of bone in the dim light.

Maddie is correct about one thing.

I am going to open the door.

Not tonight. Not tomorrow.

But eventually, I will. I have made stupid decisions before and this will be no different.

And it will be my downfall.

I sleep like shit, quelle surprise! But at least the tossing and turning lets me sleep in a little longer than normal, my jet lag having finally succumbed to this time zone.

I drink my coffee on the back step in Effie’s old wax jacket and watch birds flitter atop the bay, identifying the unfamiliar calls with my Merlin Bird ID app. The castle across the water sits where it sat yesterday, broken and silent against the slope. No light in any window. No man on any rock. Just red sandstone, and gull-cry, and the long, slow shush of the water.

I have made myself a list of productive things in the notebook by the kettle, because productive things are what I do when I am trying not to think about something specific: Sort out the trunk and learn more about Effie. Press the foxgloves before they get any sadder. Beware the thistle (it’s out to get you).

The foxgloves get pressed. The thistle gets tossed. The trunk takes me two hours because I keep being distracted by Effie’s old field sketches—there’s a single page of seaweed studies that is so good that I swear my allegiance to the sea if I can, one day, draw like that—and by mid-afternoon, I have unearthed three notebooks I have not yet opened, a tin of pen nibs from the 1970s, a pretty packet of pressed violets between waxed paper, and, at the very bottom, a heavy thing wrapped in oilcloth that turns out to be a pair of—huzzah!—binoculars.

They are the kind of binoculars a serious person owns. Brass and leather, worn to the same warm honey as the kitchen cabinets, the leather strap salt-stiff but not cracked. The rubber eyecups have the faint paler indentations of someone’s regular use. Two patches where Effie held them to her, decade after decade.

I set them on the kitchen table and look at them, wondering about what she would be watching from the windows.

Or who she would be watching.

I decide not to answer that, pick the binoculars up, and take them outside.

I awkwardly bring them to my eyes and the world telescopes. The lenses are good enough that I can see a single curlew picking its way along the far shore as cleanly as if it were on my step. I track along the shoreline, taking in the seaweed on the red-and-brown rocks, then the lichen above that, and the heather above that.

And then I am looking at the castle.

The first glimpses of the curtain wall, the dusky rust color of the rock beneath it. A slit window in the stone, dark. Another window, narrow and tall, also dark. A higher opening with no glass in it at all, framing only sky. Just how crumbling is this castle? If he lives there, there must be parts of it that have been refurbished.

I sweep the parapet. The arched doorway with no door in it. The grass coming through where flagstones used to be.

I don’t see a soul, except a few wood pigeons taking flight.

Should I feel a little guilty about spying on my neighbor? Yeah. Maybe. But hell, it’s not like he hasn’t been doing something similar to me.

I lower the binoculars and get on with my afternoon. I do my laundry in the cramped closet where the washing machine shares space with a coatrack. I make a terribly dry tuna sandwich along with half a can of tomato soup, jotting down more things to get from the store that are ADHD zero-executive function friendly, even if unhealthy—kids’ cereal, minute rice, biscuits? Suddenly I can’t recall what food is.