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AFTER AN UNEASY NIGHT, Phil went to retrieve the body with a tarp, because a blanket would need washing afterwards, and a garbage bag seemed too cruel as well as too thin. She picked her way down the path, slick from the night’s rain, and stooped next to the small corpse: a little girl in an unseasonal floral dress that barely covered her knees, one shoe missing, her dark hair sticking to the black stones like torn bladderwrack. An honour guard of rock crabs had formed around the poor thing, but had not yet begun to cut into her half-frozen flesh. Phil shooed them gently away before they could.
As Phil stooped to roll the body onto the tarp, she felt something rumble under her gloved palm—had some scavenger gotten in after all? Worked their way into the chest cavity? She jerked back, then leapt forward again just in time to catch the child as she began to cough, spitting into her cupped, bluish hand. Before she pitched the contents into the sea, Phil caught a glimpse of sparkling fishbones and the dark claws of hermit crabs.
Back inside the lighthouse annex, the child listlessly accepted a mug of tea while Phil wavered in the kitchen with the landline phone in one hand and her cell phone in the other. Outside, the sea was flat and cerulean for the first time in months, as if it had expelled something which had disagreed with it. She put the phones down and went to the fireplace, where the child was sipping her tea and swinging her legs in the tall armchair.
“I’m Philomena Winslow,” she said, reaching for the girl’s free hand. “I go by Phil. What’s your name?”
“Devon,” she croaked, coughing again. This time nothing came up, but tea was spilling on the blankets; Phil took the mug away.
The kid’s hand was as cold as when she’d been removed from the rocks, and had not lost its blue colour. Dark veins twined under the thin, pale skin like tattoos. Phil looked up into Devon’s face, where the knowledge was written like the branching veins, and said, as kindly as she could, “Are you dead?”
“Yes. I’m sorry.” Tears welled, wobbled into the blanket’s folds. Phil handed her back the tea, in case it might help.
The story, such as it was, emerged over the next few hours—no, she couldn’t remember her parents’ names, but she remembered what they looked like; perhaps she could draw a picture so the police could find them? No, she couldn’t remember how she’d come to the beach, but she remembered their house—white, with brown beams on the front, and red and pink flowers—and their dog, whose name she also couldn’t remember. Her skin refused to warm, the black veins refused to recede; the darkness beneath her eyes resembled paint.
“Well, what’re we gonna do with you,” Phil murmured when the child fell asleep in the chair.
Jim Gregory, the island’s de facto sheriff, had no good answers. “Well, I dunno that a kid that young is gonna be able to draw us an Identikit of her parents, you know?” he said; in the background, Phil could hear the TV playing at the station, galloping hooves and staccato blanks. “I’ll make some calls, see if there’s any runaways, kidnappings reported with that name. Can you keep her a couple days?”
“Guess so,” Phil said, since there didn’t seem to be a polite way to refuse. She was on the far side of forty—not by much, as she’d tartly remind her mother whenever the old bat called—and had never wanted a man, children, anything like that. It had become enough of an inside joke in the town that when the opportunity came to staff the old Von Waren lighthouse, and no couples stepped up, Phil drew two dots on her hand and brought her ‘husband’ in to the interview. And now this, a dead seven year-old asleep in front of the dying fire.
Phil sighed hugely, gave her another blanket, then headed for the stairs to do the day’s readings and polish the lens.
At sunset, she turned on the light and came back downstairs, yawning from her afternoon nap, to find Devon sprawled on the floor, arm moving frantically, surrounded by completed drawings—mostly on crumpled newspaper retrieved from the recycle bin. In the long orange light, the black ink of the drawings seemed to have height and depth and width, almost able to stand up on its own. Phil stooped and picked one at random—a picture-perfect rendition of a dog, so clear that she could tell which breeds composed its bright, eager face. “Is this your dog?”
“Yeah, but I still can’t remember her name,” Devon said softly. Her voice seemed to have recovered, out of the seawater; she had an accent, Phil realized with a start, but nothing local.
The other drawings were equally accomplished—the mock-Tudor house with its dark beams, smiling faces, a hundred types of fish, children her age—perhaps friends?—a man and a woman. Phil took photos of those for Jim. Maybe in these days of “social media” a sympathetic tourist would share the posters in the police station and they would “go viral,” and there could be a reunion. Might be good for business on the island.
With the last rays of the sun diminishing, Phil made up the nightly offering—two sardines from a fresh tin (sundried tomato and basil flavour), and some evaporated milk in the base of the saucer. As she put it on the front step of the annex, she heard Devon come up behind her.
“Is that for kitties?”
“Nope,” Phil said, locking the door. “Just paying respects. Don’t they do that where you’re from?”
“I don’t remember,” she whispered.
“All right,” Phil said. “It’s all right. Hey, don’t cry.”
“I’m nobody,” Devon said, wiping her face with one ink-stained blue hand. “And I don’t know anything.”
Phil squatted, her knees cracking, and took the child’s freezing shoulders, holding down a helpless shudder of distaste. “Listen, kid, grown-ups think that too.”
“No they don’t.”
“Sure we do. All the time. And we get by.” She hiked a thumb back at the door. “That’s to our little local gods, you know? Everyone puts out something. Doesn’t matter what, so long as you make an effort. In the morning we bring in the clean dish. Those of the salt and the silver watch over us here. Don’t you have them back home?” she said again.
Devon shook her head, curiosity overtaking her tears. “Maybe we do, and I just forgot,” she said. “Maybe they watched over me, and sent me here.”
Well, they didn’t save you from the sea, Phil almost said, then stopped herself. “Come on. There’s a lot of sardines left, and there’s fresh bread. Let’s have sandwiches for dinner.”
Devon’s astonishing sketches of sea life, now in India ink on good paper donated from Sal’s Arts in town, sold for first two, then five, then fifty dollars in the gift shop by the beach. Phil scrupulously set aside her share of the profits, planning to start a college fund or something, but found herself becalmed after a few weeks, staring at the envelope full of cheques and cash: She’d never be older than she was now; how could you send a dead girl to college?
Phil wept that night, confused at her own grief, turning her head away so that the salt wouldn’t spoil her special cleaning solution for the lens. Outside, on the dark water, the small gods of the island chirped and trilled to each other, just audible over the splash of their limbs and the clink of stones. Subsonics vibrated her feet and the bucket of solution, sent stray pens dancing off the desk. Help me, Phil thought, stifling sobs. Help me. Help her. Please. I know that’s not how you work. But if you can. Please.
Dangerous things to think at night; if you could help it, you simply put your offerings out, kept your head down, and tried not to attract attention. But surely the gods also knew that you couldn’t help what you thought.
When she was done, she dried her face thoroughly and walked back down to check on Devon—startlingly twisted in her blanket nest, dangling off the couch. Phil pulled the child back up and recoiled as the cold hands reached for her face. Her shoes squelched suddenly in wet fabric—a smell of iodine, salt, grey breezes. Gallons of saltwater and sealife had been coughed up on the floor, far more than her little body could have contained. Phil held her while she writhed, half-awake.
Finally the dark eyes flew open, glazed like a broken piece of shell on the beach. “I saw—I remembered—I saw...”
As she spoke Phil numbly watched a hermit crab stagger along the top of the couch, its claws getting stuck in the damp wool, as if it were trying to stitch a message there. The Westburn, a tourist boat out of Halifax. Sunk in a storm so terrible it seemed the waves had become monsters and grown limbs and eyes. Parents and brother killed; slung into a lifeboat with a handful of others soon washed overboard, till it was only the child and the storm, the storm and the child. Drifting for days, out of water and food, waiting for land, hearing things cry back and forth over her head, not knowing the sounds of bird or god. And no ships, not one. An endless procession of dark nights, white days, fog, fear.
“Devon,” Phil whispered. “Do you remember... how you died?”
“I died in the lifeboat,” Devon said, wringing her hands together. “It was... dark, I thought it was the end. I was so happy. But something hit the boat, and I fell out and sank, and kept sinking... I saw everything, the whales, the fish, the lights...”
“The lights?”
“The lights at the bottom. And then I was trying to swim, but I couldn’t. And then I fell asleep again and I woke up and I was with you, and everything hurt. Phil, what are we going to do?”
“Oh, honey.” Phil cradled the icy body to hers, feeling it steal the heat from her chest. Devon’s damp hair smelled of blood and tidepools. The Westburn, my God, that went down... six, eight months ago? Last June, it must have been. No wonder no one had reported her missing; she would have just gone down on a list of ‘Unrecovered,’ and nothing else.
Phil got Devon into a dry t-shirt and tried to get her settled again, with some difficulty—they could both hear the squeaks as the gods crowded the annex outside, their translucent bodies transforming the moonlight into stained glass. The walls creaked under weight both insubstantial and massive. Finally Phil took Devon upstairs and tucked her into the cot next to the desk, where the lighthouse keeper traditionally spent the night. She pulled the shutters to keep out prying eyes, knowing it was too late.
“What now, smart guy?” she muttered to herself as the child slept, painstakingly texting Jim with the phone’s screen turned down to a few percent brightness. Never wanted kids; didn’t, technically, want this one. Knew it was temporary. Did they still have orphanages, or was that a Dickensian thing? Group homes or something, surely. Best case a foster family. And yet: Who would take in a dead girl? Even here? Jim’s brother Dennis had said as much the last time he’d come to the lighthouse. A horrible thing to think or say, but Dennis had always been like that, blunt to the point of crass—even when he had proposed to Phil all those years ago. Happy enough now, with his three kids.
Just see if she’s got other family, she wrote.
I’ll call you in the morning, Jim wrote back.
It can’t be a life here, she had wanted to say. Jim, listen. It’s not that I want to get rid of her, God knows she’s got nowhere else to go, but if you do find somewhere else for her to go, she... she could...
But where else could she go?
Devon was visibly worse the next morning, unsmiling and grey instead of the pale blue they’d gotten used to. She ate a few bites of her eggs and toast, and retreated to draw. Unsellable stuff, Phil saw right away; just her parents, her brother, the beloved mutt, the long-lost house. Nothing from the sea.
Phil left her drawing while she headed to town for supplies and advice. Heads turned as she drove her battered truck down unusually busy streets. Strange for February, but then the dead girl’s sketches had gained some notoriety, and they were getting some weird tourists even by island standards. People who angled at the window to watch her draw, who braved the night gods to vandalize the annex—she’d been able to pressure-wash off most of the paint, but grease sticks had left ugly traces. A window had been broken, and they’d put weather film up and locked the shutters. Boats had been attacked by unseen forces within shouting distance of the lighthouse. It had become a dim and gloomy life. And now this, the locals turning to watch Phil go by, as if she had not been born and raised here, one of their own. It had become a feeling in the gut, Phil knew; she felt it too. Something was out of balance.
Lacy Colton, widely but not publicly acknowledged to be the local witch, was waiting on her front porch, exhaling plumes of frozen breath and something more questionable from a long-stemmed pipe. “Well, well, Miz Winslow,” she said flatly, not evincing pleasure or surprise or even disdain, as Phil had expected.
“Miz Colton,” Phil said, holding out the bag she’d bought in town—a better class of offering had to be made to an intermediary, if that’s what Lacy was. No chipped saucer of dinner scraps, but frozen trays from Dewey’s Grocery, good mainland stuff, lasagne and cottage pie and chicken alfredo. Lacy accepted the bag with a grunt of assent, and led her inside.
“The gods ain’t happy, Phil,” she said before they even sat down. The words hung in the air like the bluish plume of smoke that had trailed after her. Phil’s stomach sank. It was one thing to know it and think it and even say it to herself; it was quite another to hear it from Lacy. But there was nothing for it but to go on.
“I know,” Phil said. “What can we do? She ain’t happy either, and them of the salt...”
“Watchin’ you,” the old woman said sharply. “Us too. Because the little one died on the water, didn’t she? But didn’t stay there.”
“That’s right,” Phil said. “How did—“
Lacy waved her off. “She’s passed into the wrong hands now. Them of the stones and the trees, they don’t want her; and the little gods of the sea can’t take her back. You’ll have to do a ceremony. A petition. If you want to give her up.”
“I...” Phil swallowed, hard. The tea Lacy had poured her had, impossibly, gotten stuck in her throat—some kind of lump there, as big as a plum. “Supposing I did.”
“Supposing.”
Jim Gregory was waiting in front of the annex when Phil returned, staying warm in the jury-rigged cruiser, technically just a couple of emergency lights duct-taped to the roof of his Camry. They shook hands when he got out, not feeling it through their gloves. “Talk a minute?” he said, gesturing at her neat, red-painted door; Phil glanced over, saw Devon braced on the window, watching them. Her skin was splotched darkly all over now, not just under her eyes, and the casual watcher might not parse it as a face. Jim probably hadn’t. But this wasn’t a conversation to have in front of her anyway, whatever it was.
“Out here,” she said.
He shrugged. “Your funeral,” he said. “Listen, two things. She’s got an aunt and uncle back in Canada, haven’t been able to get ahold of them. Dunno if it’ll be a matter of claiming a body or doing a guardianship form or what. But she’s got people.”
“What’s the second thing?”
“Big storm coming in tonight. You’ll have to come back to town and—“
“Nope,” Phil said firmly. “I saw the radar before I left—the receiver that grad student left here, remember, last summer? That’s better than anything you’ve got in town, or radioed down from Ruth.”
“Look again. Big, all right? And when I say big—look, can you set aside the attitude for a minute and just do like you’re told?”
“Bye, Jim.”
He followed her to the door, but was slightly too far away to grab it before she slammed and locked it, and put on the chain in case he tried something Hollywood. Devon stared out the window as Jim shouted soundlessly at them for a while, then gave up and left.
“Come on, bud,” Phil said, and they walked up the white stone stairs to the lighthouse room, where the radar setup was showing all sorts of colours it hadn’t been just a few hours ago. Those colours could certainly damage the old lighthouse, and the annex would be battered to a pulp; sea levels were higher than they used to be. But the water stretched smoothly across the horizon now, glassy and innocent under the noonday haze.
“What did the police want?” Devon said.
And it had to be laid out then, since they were so nearly out of time: the aunt and uncle in Halifax, did she remember them? Did she want to go with them? Because the alternative...
“Would it work?” Devon said uncertainly, looking down at the heaving water, barely lapping the slate-grey stones; the rim of tidefoam looked thinner than her outstretched hand, like a silk thread. “And we’d have to do it before the storm?”
“Yes. We might not be able to do it after. I know, I’m sorry,” Phil blurted, “it’s a lot, it’s a lot to take in, it’s a lot to ask. But I’m not gonna make you do it. I’m asking.”
“Will I get to be back with Mom and Dad and Brent?”
“I don’t know. I’m sorry about that too.”
Devon chewed on her lip, resulting in a slow drool of seawater where her teeth parted the thin flesh. Phil dabbed at it absently with her sweater sleeve.
“I can’t make you say yes,” Phil said. “I can’t make you stay. I can’t make you go.”
“But...you won’t have the drawings any more, the money—“
“Forget the money!” Phil said, shocked. “Don’t stay for that, if you’re staying. Don’t even think it.”
“But you’re poor here, and...”
“Even if I was, it doesn’t matter. And I’m not, anyway,” she lied. Devon gave her a look—she may have been young, Phil thought with pride, but she had been lied to by enough adults to practice that look. Good. Good. Maybe wherever she was going, she’d be able to use it. Wherever that was.
“I don’t want to leave you,” Devon said softly.
“Then don’t. Is that what you’re picking?”
“No. I just... wanted to say it.”
