Mistwalker

TWO Grey

Sailors used to mark the edges of their maps Here There Be Monsters.

They weren’t entirely wrong. Monsters don’t have claws, they have eyes dark as molasses and hair white as a new dime. They have soft petal lips that whisper the sweetest promises.

I can say with absolute authority that one doesn’t notice a cloak of fog if one is too entirely entranced with the creature wearing it.

It’s the thing beneath, the thing you cannot imagine, that captures you.

Susannah had delicate fingers; she liked to pull them through my hair. I would close my eyes and exist under her hand. My heart beat for her touch. My blood ran for a single flash of her lashes. Not once did I question the mist at her feet. It seemed ethereal at the time.

My father’s boat was fast; he had a talent for cutting ice. We sailed up the shore from Boston thrice weekly, buying lobster today to sell tomorrow while the beasts still waved their claws and curled their tails.

It was an idiotic profession. One he intended to press on me when I was of age to captain my own ship. He assumed I wanted it. That I would be no happier than at the moment I reflected him completely. But I stood on the deck of his ship and loathed him.

The man was gentle enough—many found him convivial company indeed. But I detested the cream he rubbed into his hands. As if any tincture might soften them and let him pretend to be a gentleman. I’d always wondered if he realized he stank of lobster. Even after a boiling bath with flowers and fresh soap: then he smelled of lavender and lobsters. It was no improvement.

I had bigger plans for myself. A life of adventure, one lived on rails and on horseback. Through cities and deserts. Oh, especially deserts—I fantasized about them. To bask in the heat all day long, to warm my feet in the sand. To spend not a single moment soaked with salt water. Whatever the hook that bound my father with the sea, I didn’t possess it. And I had my plans to abandon it eternally.

Working the lobster line with my father offered me little entertainment, so I had to make me own. The island in the Broken Tooth harbor, that fascinated me. The villagers said it was abandoned, dangerous, haunted.

When my father and I sailed in, I studied its forbidding shape, wondered about its secrets. On our departure, I did the same, gazing and gazing at Jackson’s Rock.

And it was in such contemplation that I saw Susannah for the first time. She stood on the island cliff in the bay, her hair unfurled, long locks tossed by the wind. With a pale cloak and gown, she seemed made of the mist.

Leaning over the side, I stared at her—I wondered earnestly if this was a siren. If she would open her mouth and sing. If she would draw our ship into the rocks beneath her feet.

Instead, she waved.

Her fingers bloomed like a peony bud, and there was a weight to her smile that I longed to lighten. She shrank as we slipped away on good winds. Soon she was nothing but a star on the horizon, and then nothing at all but a memory.

My thoughts troubled me: Was she the lighthouse keeper’s daughter? Was she there alone? It was the shape of her smile that drew me back. In my ship’s bunk, and in my bed at home, I invented in that expression a damsel that only I could rescue.

Certainly, her father had locked her away from the mainland; undoubtedly, her stepmother had made her a servant. She was a nymph or a princess, Snow White or Cinderella. She was Rapunzel, and in my fever, I felt certain that if I only asked, she would let down her platinum hair.

She did.

While my father attended to business in the village, I rowed to the rock. My shoulders burned, and the sun—so mild to just stand in it—spilled fire all across me. In dreams, I was dashing in my rescue, crisp in linens. In truth, I landed on the shore with my shirt soaked through and damp hair clinging to my face. The ocean. Always the godforsaken ocean.

“You shouldn’t be here.” Susannah stepped from the trees, a pale apparition.

Already lovesick from memory, the fresh sight of her only stoked the fever. Leaping ashore, I approached, hands out as if she might startle like a doe. I told her, “I came for you.”

“Why?”

With every bit of foolish sincerity I had in me, I replied, “Because I love you.”

In retrospect, I should have been surprised that she let me kiss her. That she threaded her fingers in my hair and whispered exactly the right words in my ear to entice me back. Our stolen moments were painted in romantic shades, in the bronze twilight beneath towering pines.

For an entire summer, again and again, I returned to her rock, to her pale and spectral kisses—until I swore I would do anything for her. I would die for her.

And then I did.

I was an idiot, and a fool, and I have had a century now to shame myself for mistaking lust for love. Every time I look in the mirror and see my dime-silver hair and my eyes dark as molasses—every time I look across the water to Broken Tooth, hoping that the girl thinking of me will soon come to my shore—I’m reminded of my stupidity.

And I hate myself only a little for hoping she’s just as unwise.