Fog on the Ferry

The fog comes for the ferry twenty minutes out of Rockland, and it comes like it has a grudge.

One minute you can see the whole bay, blue and glittering, islands scattered across it like somebody dropped a handful of green buttons. The next, the world is a gray wall six feet past the railing, and the Penobscot Dawn slows to a crawl, and somewhere ahead a horn lets out a long, low note that you feel in your back teeth.

You're the only passenger on the upper deck. Of course you are. Everyone else had the sense to go inside.

Your phone buzzes against your palm.

"Tell me you're not on a boat," Rania says.

"I'm on a boat."

"Ava." Your boss says your name the way other people say bless your heart. "You have six weeks of leave. HR made me promise not to call. I'm calling because I care about you."

"You're calling because the Sorvik account renewed and they asked for me."

A pause. "That too." You can hear her heels crossing the polished floor of the twenty-ninth floor, the city humming behind her glass. "VP of Brand, Ava. It's yours when you come back. If you come back ready. Not frozen in front of a client with your mouth open like a fish."

You close your eyes. You can still feel it, six weeks later: the conference room, the slides, your own voice going on without you, then stopping. The terrible silence. Your heart slamming like it wanted out of your body. Eleven people watching.

"I'll be ready," you say. "I'm selling the cottage. Three weeks, tops."

"Good girl. Sell it, cry about your aunt, come home."

She hangs up. The horn sounds again. You put your phone in your coat pocket and your fingers bump the stiff edge of a business card.

Shepard Ellingwood. Vice President, Acquisitions. Caswell Coastal Partners.

He'd found you on the Rockland dock an hour ago, which still doesn't make sense. Tall, tan in late September, a navy quarter-zip, a smile like a magazine ad for teeth. "Ms. Callister? So sorry for your loss. I knew your aunt a little. Wonderful woman. Stubborn." He'd handed you the card and a folded letter. "When you're ready to talk, we're ready to make it easy."

You'd read the letter in the ferry line. You'd read the number three times.

One point four million dollars. For a gray cottage in a hollow on an island with a hundred and forty people and one café.

You don't know what the Kettle is worth. You know it's worth less than that.

"Gull Rock," says a voice behind you. "Don't fall off before we get there. Paperwork's terrible."

The captain is a bearded man in a wool cap, holding two paper cups. He hands you one without asking. Coffee, black, scalding.

"Galen Nickerson," he says. "You're Hep's niece."

"How did you know?"

"You've got her chin. And you're standing in the rain on purpose." He nods at the fog. "She did that."

"Is it always like this?"

"No." He sips. "Sometimes it's worse."

He goes back to the wheelhouse. You stand at the rail with the coffee warming your hands and watch the gray, and slowly, the way a photograph develops, the island comes out of it: black rocks, dark spruce, a scatter of houses climbing a hill, lobster boats nodding at their moorings. A dock. A sign, hand-painted: GULL ROCK HARBOR. WELCOME. SLOW DOWN.

And far off to the north, on a dark point of land, a white tower.

You haven't seen it in twelve years. You didn't expect it to hit you in the chest like this.

When you were ten you stood at the top of that tower with Aunt Hep's hand on your shoulder and decided you'd live here forever. When you were eighteen you left for college and told her next summer. Then your parents' divorce turned every holiday into a battlefield, and your first job ate your weekends, and the next job ate your nights, and Hep's Christmas cards kept coming, every year, in her looping handwriting, the garden misses you, and you kept meaning to.

She died in August. The lawyer's letter found you in a meeting.

There's no taxi on Gull Rock. There's no anything. The ferry crowd scatters into pickups and onto bicycles, and you stand on the dock with your rolling suitcase and your city boots while the fog swallows everyone.

You know the way. You'd forgotten you knew it, but your feet remember. Up past the Mug-Up café, its windows steamed and golden. Left at the church. Then the dirt road north, a mile of it, spruce on one side and the sea breathing somewhere on the other.

Your suitcase wheels give up after a hundred yards. You carry it.

It's dusk by the time you reach the hollow, and you stop at the gate because you can't help it.

You expected ruin. A dead garden. Weeds to your waist.

Instead the Kettle sits in a riot of color. Dahlias as big as dinner plates, crimson and peach and a purple so dark it's almost black. Beach roses tumbling over the fence. Neat rows of kale. The crooked arbor Hep built the summer you were nine, heavy with late clematis. Someone has deadheaded every flower. Someone has raked the path.

And someone is sitting on the porch steps with a lantern.

She stands when you come through the gate. She's tall, taller than you, in a yellow rain slicker over a cream fisherman's sweater, and she lifts the lantern a little so the light finds your face before it finds hers.

"You're later than the ferry," she says.

Then the fog shifts and you see her properly, and you forget, briefly, how words go.

A dark auburn braid over one shoulder, damp at the ends. Freckles. A face so lovely it's almost rude, all clean lines and a wide, serious mouth, and eyes the gray-green of the water under the dock. She looks at you like weather she's already forecast.

"I walked," you manage.

"Hep always walked too." She holds out a ring of keys strung on a loop of blue and green sea glass. Your aunt's keys. "Marin Seaborne. I keep the light." She tilts her head north, toward the point. "Only neighbor for a mile, so if you need anything, I'm what you've got. Lois sent chowder. It's on the stove. The pilot light's fussy; you have to talk to it."

"You've been doing the garden," you say.

"Somebody had to." A small shrug. "She asked me to. Before."

There's something in the way she says before that makes your throat tight. You take the keys. They're warm from her hand.

"Thank you. Really. I'm Ava."

"I know." The corner of her mouth moves, not quite a smile. "She talked about you."

You don't know what to do with that, so you do what you always do. You get practical. You get polished. You give her the smile that closes deals.

"I won't be in your way long," you say. "I'm only here to sell. Three weeks, maybe less, and you'll have a new neighbor. Somebody who'll actually keep up the garden."

She goes very still.

Not dramatic. Just still, the way the water goes still right before the wind changes. Her eyes drop to your coat, to the pocket where the business card is sticking out, white against the dark wool, the blue Caswell logo plain as a flag.

The light on the point blinks. Once. Twice.

"He found you before the ferry did," Marin says quietly.