JOHNNY SINCLAIR X READER
WORD COUNT:5601
REQUEST: OPEN
The island rises from the water like it’s been holding its breath all year, waiting for you. The ferry engine shudders, gulls wheel, and your suitcase bumps your shin as you watch Beechwood come into focus: the weathered dock, the shingled roofs crouched against the wind, the pines leaning as if eavesdropping. You count the scrape-scrape of the ferry on the pilings because counting is how you don’t think. One-two-three. You have counted every year. You tell yourself it is habit. You tell yourself it is respect.
Carrie is on the dock in her navy sweater, arms folded. She has new silver at her temples and an old smile.
“You came,” she calls, and her voice carries over the water. “Of course you did.”
“I always do,” you say, stepping onto the planks, feeling them move under you like a heartbeat.
She hugs you too tight. “You smell like city,” she says into your hair. Then, softer, “You smell like summer.”
“Don’t get formal with me, sweetheart. You know you’re mine.” She pulls back, studies your face the way people study paintings for meanings they brought with them. “You’re thinner.”
“Liar,” she says, pleased. “Come on. The golf cart’s dying, like always. We’ll see if it remembers you.”
It does. The cart complains up the sandy track, the island flickering by in slices: the blackberry bramble Johnny once swore was full of snakes, the broken-backed deck chair, the rope swing you both outgrew and then didn’t. The wind has that clean salt smell that grabs you under the ribs. You swallow hard. You do not cry on the ride in. You never cry until later, after the rituals,hello to the boathouse, hello to the shallow, dangerous stairs, hello to the place where the main house used to be.
“Stop,” you say when the clearing opens like a wound.
Carrie stops. She doesn’t look at you. “Every year I think: plant something. A tree. A bush. A sign: don’t look. And then I do nothing.” She smiles without humor. “Our family has always been better at doing nothing than doing the right thing.”
You get out. The foundation is still there, concrete rectangles like a child’s idea of a maze. There are rusted nails in the dirt, melted glass pebbles, a metal hinge fused into a shape like an apology. The sea talks to itself along the rocks. You put your fingertips on the concrete and feel heat that isn’t there. You say, quietly, “Hi.”
Carrie’s hand finds your shoulder. “You’ll stay at Red Gate,” she says. “Like always. Sheets are clean. I had the quilts aired out.”
“You hungry? I made soup. It’s nothing. But you have to eat.”
You look at the ruins again. “I will later.”
“I’ll bring it by,” she says, which means she will, and it will be too salty, and she will stand in your doorway and pretend she’s not checking whether your eyes are red. “You know…” She trails off, bites her lip. “He loved that you always came back.”
She shakes her head, brisk again. “I’m just saying what I always say. It makes me feel,” She stops. “Never mind. You know where I am.”
You do. You know where everything is. That’s the problem.
Red Gate waits at the end of the sandy path, the little gate flaking its bright paint, the shingles faded to driftwood, the porch steps worn by a thousand summers. The gate creaks when you push it with your hip. It sounds like a house remembering your name.
Red Gate smells like lemon oil and old paperbacks. The blue quilt is on the bed in the guest room, the one with the frayed edge where Johnny used to hook his fingers while you talked about nothing. You stand in the doorway and the room stands there too, innocent. Your suitcase sits obediently on the floor. Your breath is the only noise.
“Okay,” you tell the house. “Be kind.”
You unpack slowly. Swimsuit, sweater, the photo of you and Carrie at some long-ago Labor Day, both of you laughing at something not in frame. The ring Johnny gave you that last summer,garnet, oval, caught in a silver setting like a drop of blood in a web. You wear it on a chain now. You touch it and the chain goes cold.
“Don’t,” you tell yourself out loud, which is ridiculous, but better than saying his name. Saying his name opens doors.
At dusk you take the path down through the red-painted gate to the little beach. The tide is halfway in, making sounds like someone whispering in the next room. The water is darker than you remember, or else your memory has bleached everything but him.
You step in up to your ankles. You say, “Johnny.”
The wind picks up. That could be coincidence. It often is.
“Johnny,” you say again, and you feel foolish, a woman talking to air, a woman who returns every year like a migrating bird with a broken compass. “I’m here.”
A gull screams. A wave breaks. The far buoy nods like a person. Then nothing else happens, except your heart doing its terrible work.
The first night, you dream of him. That is normal. It’s almost a relief.
He stands in the Red Gate kitchen, barefoot, hair damp, knotting a dish towel like a little-boy sailor. He grins when he sees you. “You took forever,” he says.
“Traffic,” you say. You don’t look at the windows, because windows sometimes show fires.
“Hold still.” He leans in, brushes a speck of sugar from your cheek with his thumb. He tastes it, like he always did, theatrical, delighted with very small things. “Powdered donut,” he decides. “High cuisine.”
“Always,” he says cheerfully, like he’s rehearsed it, like he will always be fine. His eyes are ridiculous, bright as if the ocean climbed into them and stayed. “Swim?”
“Now now,” he says. “Before you remember something and ruin it.”
That line is pure Johnny, and it hurts like good music. You go with him down the back steps, into the night still slick with heat. The beach is the beach you remember, not the beach that exists. The moon is indecently full. He runs into the surf and you follow, both of you yelping when the cold bites you under the ribs. He ducks under, comes up combing his hair back, face turned toward you like you are the thing people write poems about.
“Hi,” he says, like he didn’t say hi already. It feels new anyway.
“Hi,” you say back, laughing.
“They told me no,” he says, a little breathless. “Mirren and Gat, you know how they are, with their rules. They said it would be cruel for me to,”
“Don’t say it,” you say quickly. “Don’t say anything you can’t unsay.”
He tilts his head, and his mouth makes the shape of your name. He moves closer. The water makes your skin hypersensitive, like the world is too much. He touches your wrist. You feel his pulse like a bird, frantic. He slides his hand into yours under the water and it is so stupidly ordinary, so human, that a calm comes over you like warmth.
“You always come back,” he murmurs.
He looks at you like you’ve told a joke and he’s the only one who gets it. “You always did that.”
You wake up with your cheek pillowed on your forearm and a mark on your wrist where his thumb might have been. You tell yourself dreams can leave marks if you sleep wrong.
Carrie appears at noon with a pot of chowder and a tin of biscuits she calls scones. She stands in your doorway with her sunglasses on her head like a crown. “Eat,” she orders.
“My queen,” you say, faintly, because it’s the joke and you both know the script.
She smiles. “Only if you eat.”
You do. When you finish, she sits at the foot of your bed like a teenager. “Do you want to walk later?” she asks. “Or,no. I’m not going to pretend I don’t know why you like the little beach better. I can keep to the front, if that’s easier. I can… exist somewhere else.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
She shrugs and looks around the room and the past. “First summer without him,” she says, and her voice goes husky. “You remember? You wouldn’t come out of here for hours. I would stand in the kitchen and imagine… I would imagine you and he were planning your getaway. He always wanted to ‘steal you,’ he said. Like a pirate. God, he was ridiculous.”
“Yes,” you say, because your throat is full.
“He loved you,” Carrie says, and that is not new information, it is the sun and the tide and the foolish gulls and the reason you’re not decent with anyone else. She says it like she says it every year. But then she adds, voice smaller, “I used to think,Don’t be angry with me for saying this,I used to think you’d be my daughter-in-law. That there would be a day with flowers that smelled too sweet, and everyone would pretend the family wasn’t awful for just one afternoon, and you and I would stand and fix his tie while he made faces in the mirror,” She stops, waves a hand at her face like she can erase what it just did. “Well. Then I thought it was cruel to wish that out loud. But I suppose I still do. Wish.”
“I know.” You put your hand over hers. It’s the closest description of the hole you carry around: not just a missing boyfriend but the missing of everything after. “You raised him good,” you say uselessly.
“That’s debatable.” She studies your fingers. “You’ve never brought anyone here. Not once.”
“I know.” You keep your voice steady. “Johnny hated sharing the island.”
“Mm.” She looks at you for a long time, like she’s trying to make a decision. “Sweetheart,” she says softly. “Do you,when you’re here,do you… talk to him?”
You consider lying, because it would be merciful. But Carrie Sinclair has learned truths the ugly way, and you don’t know how to give her pretty ones. You nod, barely.
Her eyes shine and then don’t. “Good,” she says, surprising you. “If anyone could find a way to visit, he would. He would talk his way past God and the coast guard both.” She puts her knuckles against her mouth for a second. “Tell him I said… Tell him I still yell at him in the car sometimes, when the radio plays those stupid songs he loved.”
“And if he says anything back, don’t tell me,” she adds quickly. “Not yet. I’m not brave enough.” She pats your knee and gets up, businesslike because that’s how she survives. “Leftovers in the icebox. Come up for dinner. I’ll make fish. Or ruin it. You can laugh at me.”
After she leaves you stand in the kitchen and listen to the wood creak. “She misses you,” you say to the empty house, or to the not-empty house, or to yourself. “We both do.” You open the back door. The wind comes in like a person. “If you’re here,” you say, “you’re late.”
“I was sulking,” says a voice behind you.
You don’t jump. You should. You turn slowly. He’s leaning against the doorframe like he owns time. He’s older than in the photos, but only because you’ve grown older and are projecting it onto him. He’s wet-haired again, like he’s always just come from the ocean. He’s wearing the T-shirt he liked with the dumb lobster on it. Your breath becomes a million pieces.
“You’re sulking?” you say, eyebrows up, heart in your throat. “Over what?”
“That you said my mother ‘raised me good.’ Grammar, darling.” He pushes off the doorframe, grinning. “Besides the grammar, it’s true, obviously.”
“Obviously.” You can’t help it; you close the distance and reach for him. Your hand stops an inch from his chest because you remember not remembering and you need to be sure. “Can I,?”
“Yes,” he says, no teasing. His face changes when he says it, grows gentler around the mouth. “Please.”
Your palm meets warmth. Not ice, not nothing: warmth. The very human rise of breath under skin. You skitter to his shoulder, trace the notch of bone you used to put your mouth on. You let out a sound that isn’t pretty.
“Proof,” he says quietly, closing his eyes.
“Proof,” you say, and then you don’t think. You curl your fingers in his shirt and kiss him, and he kisses you back like he learned there isn’t a lot of time. The kiss is too much and exactly enough and full of all the things you didn’t say on a night he did not live to hear them. When you pull back, his pupils are blown and he’s laughing breathlessly into your mouth.
“Hi,” he says, like a fool.
“Hi.” Your hands are shaking. “You can’t just,You can’t show up like a,like weather.”
“That’s literally what I am,” he says. “Weather. Tide. Bad habit.”
“I hate you,” you say, because it’s what you always said when you meant the opposite.
“Liar,” he says, stupidly fond.
You lean your forehead against his chest. “Where do you go when you go?”
“A question for philosophers.”
He swallows. You hear it, strange detail, the human sound of it. “When I go,” he says, “I’m still here, but ajar. Like a door. Like you could push and it would swing, but you don’t. You stand there and decide if it’s rude to enter. That’s where I am. In the deciding.”
“It is.” He lifts your chin with a finger. “But it’s true.”
You study him. His eyelashes clump in the damp. His mouth is the mouth that told you jokes you tried not to laugh at. “Are you,” You can’t say the word.
“Dead?” he says, not flinching. “I was. I am. I’m also here. The island is a terrible boundary; it can’t decide either.”
“So you haunt me because of geography.”
“I haunt you because I’m in love with you,” he says simply. “And because you keep your promises and come back.”
You sit, hard, on the kitchen bench. “You sound like me.”
“I always did.” He drops onto the floor with his back against your knees. “Tell me a thing.”
“Anything from the year. A small thing. Your favorite coffee shop closed? Your neighbor got a weird cat? Your hair did that thing where it won’t lie flat on Tuesdays?”
“You don’t know about my hair,” you say, faint, half-laughing.
“I know everything.” He turns his head and rests his cheek against your thigh like he used to when he wanted you to forgive him quickly. “Tell me.”
So you do. You talk about nothing for a long time. The pie you ruined at Thanksgiving. The time you accidentally wore two different shoes to work and pretended it was a trend. How you stood at a bus stop and watched a little girl give a pigeon a French fry and felt this sudden, ridiculous swell of joy so big you had to sit down. He listens like this is news bulletins from a country he longs for. He laughs in the right places. He makes you tell the French fry story twice.
Then he speaks, soft. “Tell me the hard things.”
You stare at the wall. “I don’t date,” you say, and it surprises you to say it like a confession. “Sometimes I try. I go to dinner. I laugh. And then I come home and think, I forgot to tell Johnny about the man who slurped his soup like a cartoon. And I realize I didn’t forget. I saved it for you.”
He is very quiet. Then: “That’s not a hard thing,” he says gently. “That’s an ordinary thing with a bruise on it.”
“Fine. The hard thing is that I don’t want to stop coming here. People think that means I don’t want to heal. But what if this is healing? What if you are the bandage and not the wound?”
“I’m agreeing with you.” He twists to look up at you. “I want you to come. I want to see you. And I… am not supposed to ask you to stay.”
“The committee,” he deadpans.
“They have a quorum. They bring snacks. They say things like, ‘This is unhealthy, Johnny.’ And I say, ‘Obviously.’ And then I break the rules anyway because I’m a Sinclair and that’s our family sport.”
You laugh wetly and wipe your face with the heel of your hand. “Your mother says to stop haunting the radio.”
“I’ll try,” he says, guiltily delighted. “But if Hozier comes on and I don’t sing, am I even a specter?”
“Don’t make me tell Carrie you said ‘specter.’”
“She’ll be proud I read something. Also: Tell her I miss her cooking and that she should never attempt risotto again.”
“I’m not getting between you and your mother’s risotto,” you say. “That’s a death wish.”
“Little late for that,” he murmurs, which is awful and he knows it, and he squeezes your hand when you flinch. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be,” you say. “We always made terrible jokes.”
“True.” He looks at the window where the afternoon has arranged itself into something luminous. “Walk with me?”
You blink. “We can do that?”
“Apparently,” he says. “There are loopholes. Come on. Before Mirren sends a thunderclap as a warning.”
You go. On the path, the light makes everything tender. He opens the red-painted gate for you with a mock bow. He points out turtles like he invented them. You argue about whether the clouds look like a dinosaur or a teapot. You sound like yourselves and also like actors who studied you for weeks and got the rhythm right.
At the clearing he stops. The ruins sit square and stubborn in the grass. The place where the kitchen was is a rectangle of weeds. He doesn’t step closer. He tucks his hands in his pockets like a boy called into the principal’s office.
“I keep thinking if I stand there,” he says conversationally, “it will reverse. That the concrete will unpour. That the nail heads will pull themselves out of the floor like teeth unbiting. That we will be idiots in the hall with wet towels and silly grins, planning a future like we owned the calendar.”
He sighs. “I know. That’s not how anything works.”
You go to him, take his face between your hands. “Let’s not be here,” you say. “Let’s be every other place. The porch steps. The boathouse. The stupid swing. Red Gate.”
He kisses your palms like he agrees. “Deal.”
That night Carrie makes fish that is, in fact, ruined, and you and she eat it anyway and lie to each other about it. After dishes she pours you tea and sits across from you at the Red Gate table like a treaty negotiation is about to occur.
“Are you sleeping?” she asks.
“Like a log,” you lie, because your dreams are raucous, like beach parties.
“Good,” she says, and looks relieved in a way that hurts. “Staying how long this year?”
“Two weeks,” you say, and she nods like it’s a business matter and not your heart opening at the hinges.
“Stay three,” she says impulsively. “Stay all of August. Let the city forget you exist.”
“You can,” she says, then catches herself. “I mean, of course you have a job and a life and,and I’m meddling.”
“Sorry.” She smiles a little. “You know, I still keep his room the same.” She says it like a confession, like she expects you to scold her. “I know. It’s foolish.”
“Sometimes I talk in there,” she admits. “I read out loud. I tell him about plastic in the ocean and the price of milk and how the dog across the street barks at snow. I tell him you’re coming. I tell him you did your hair different. I tell him he would have hated it.” She laughs, then presses her fingers to her eyes. “He would have loved it. He would have loved everything.”
“He did,” you say, and your voice breaks on the did like a wave. “He really did.”
She reaches across the table and grabs your hand with both of hers so hard it almost hurts. “If you see him,” she says, fierce with borrowed courage, “tell him I forgive him for everything that isn’t his fault.”
You nod. You cannot promise anything else.
On the fifth day the wind is mean, and the sky lowers itself to the roof like it wants to listen. You and Johnny play gin rummy on the floor like you’re sixteen, and he is so bad at it that you suspect cheating in reverse.
“You’re throwing the game,” you accuse.
“I would never,” he says, haloed by late afternoon.
“I would,” he admits. “I like the way you look when you win. It’s very… sharp.”
“Triumphant. Like you climbed a mast and planted a flag.”
You roll your eyes and arrange your cards. “We should fight,” you say impulsively. “We never do.”
He snorts. “We fought all the time.”
“We bickered.” You meet his gaze. “We never fought about this.”
“This,” he repeats. The cards go still in his hands. “About me being a dead boy?”
“About you asking me to let you go,” you say, because the words have sat in your mouth all week, unspooled and hot. “About me refusing.”
He looks at you like you just opened the right door. “Oh,” he says softly. “That.”
“Don’t ask,” you say. “Don’t be noble. I don’t want noble. I want selfish. I want you to haunt me at the grocery store and in the dentist chair and when I’m choosing laundry detergent. I want you to be the voice when I can’t decide between two terrible dresses. I want you in my head like a glorious, infuriating chorus.”
He laughs, a startled sound, and then sobers. “I want that too,” he says. “You know I do.”
“Then why do I hear you pulling back?”
“Because…” He puts his cards facedown. “Because sometimes I see you look at the door when a phone pings. Because sometimes you tell a story and switch out ‘we’ for ‘I,’ and that’s wrong. Because sometimes in the morning you rub your wrist like it aches. Because I don’t want to be the reason you never,” He cuts himself off. “I’m so tired of being the reason.”
"The fire..." you started to say.
“I know. I also know I was there.” He leans forward, elbows on knees, eyes very blue and very sad. “I want every life you could possibly have, and I only get this one with you on the island. It feels greedy to keep it. And yet,” He looks at your mouth as if it’s his favorite view. “And yet.”
“Johnny,” you say, and then you can’t speak because crying has shut your throat with glue. You sit there like a fool with water on your face. He moves to you, ridiculous, tender, pressing his forehead to yours.
“Hey,” he whispers. “We were always going to have a stupid fight about nothing.”
“I know.” He closes his eyes. “Okay. Compromise.”
“What kind of compromise exists between leaving and staying?”
“A messy one,” he says. “Promise me that when you’re in the city, you’ll try. You’ll let someone make you coffee. You’ll kiss somebody terrible and laugh about it later. You’ll wear a dress you don’t buy for a wedding you’re not invited to. You’ll do a thing that feels like a betrayal and then tell me about it in too much detail so I can be jealous.”
You let out an incredulous sound. “That’s your compromise?”
“And in exchange,” he says, “I won’t stop coming. Not this year. Not while you ask. Not while you stand at the water and say my name like a blessing and a curse.” He swallows. “I’ll be selfish with you just a little longer.”
You cover your face with your hands. “This is a stupid deal,” you say, voice wrecked.
“The best kind,” he says, pulling your hands down and kissing the tips of your fingers like you’re made of something worth worshiping.
On the tenth night the rain stops after midnight, and everything drips like applause. You and Johnny walk to the boathouse because the boathouse is a church and you are devout. You sit on the steps and watch clouds move.
“Remember when we thought we’d live in a tiny apartment with a window onto an alley and pretend the alley was the ocean?” he says.
“We were poor at fantasies.”
“We were rich in other ways,” he says. “I learned to fix a sink on YouTube for you. That’s love.”
“You clogged the sink with kale.”
“Health is dangerous,” he says solemnly. Then, quieter, “What will you do tomorrow?”
“Swim. Eat something green so you don’t haunt me about kale. Try not to think about leaving.”
“Don’t,” he says immediately. “Don’t think about leaving until the boat comes. Pretend the island is the only map.”
“And tell my mother,” he adds, “that I hear her. That I know she reads to me. That she should read something trashy. That I forgive her for the things she thinks need forgiving.”
“I’ll tell her,” you say. You don’t say: She will believe me or she will not, but she will like that I said it.
He leans his shoulder against yours. “Tell me another ordinary thing from the city.”
You look out at the black water. “I bought an ugly lamp from a yard sale,” you say. “It makes the whole room softer, like evening has a personality.”
“You always were good at choosing light,” he says.
“And I planted basil. It died.”
“You murdered an herb in cold blood,” he says gravely. “I am scandalized.”
“My landlady says I am a serial killer. Of plants.”
He laughs, warm. “I am glad you have a landlady who says things like that.”
“I’m glad you’re here to hear it,” you say, even though glad feels like an indecently small word.
He hums and then is quiet for a long time. The quiet feels heavy, like a coat you could wear.
“What,” you say finally, nudging him.
He breathes out. “Sometimes I think I’m selfish for wanting you to come,” he says. “Sometimes I think I’m selfish for asking you to try to have that other life. I am selfish in both directions. That is very me.”
“You’re human,” you say. “Which is funny.”
“Isn’t it?” He laughs, then shivers, and you realize the night has turned cold. You tuck your sweater around his shoulders like that could do anything. He makes a face. “That’s very cinematic,” he says. “The girl gives the boy her sweater. The boy is a ghost. The sweater is a metaphor.”
“Marry me,” he says, without thinking, the way you say pass the salt. And then he slaps a hand over his mouth, eyes huge. “I didn’t,”
You stare at him. Rain ticks from the eaves like a clock.
“Okay,” you say, and he looks stricken and luminous and ridiculous all at once. You add, because you need to cut the wire before it explodes, “Okay as in I hear you. Not okay as in,You know.”
He lets his hand drop. “I know.” His smile is devastated and then repaired. “I just,I had to say it once, out loud. To know what it sounded like.” He looks out at the water. “It sounds like a bell.”
“It does,” you say, and you sit there with him and listen to the bell until it’s only the sea again.
On your last morning, the island is in a mood. The wind knocks at the windows like a friend who doesn’t know how to be polite. You stand on the sand with your toes gripping the cold, like you could anchor yourself. Johnny stands inches away, his hands in his pockets the way he does when he thinks he’ll be brave if his fingers can’t fidget.
“I hate this part,” he says.
“I hate that it feels like a trick every time we get away with this. Like we’re going to be caught and given detention by God.”
“Maybe God likes lovers,” you say.
“Maybe God is Carrie with better lighting,” he says, and you snort damply and elbow him in the ribs.
“Your mother will make me pack you a sandwich,” you say. “If I tell her.”
“Tell her I want roast beef,” he says, automatic, then winces. “That was… unkind.”
“It was human,” you say again, and he nods, grateful for the excuse.
The ferry moves like a beetle on the horizon. Your body recognizes the shape of it and begins to shake, as if it knows what your brain is hiding.
“Okay,” he says. He turns to you, and there it is, the way he looks at you like traffic lights turn green out of respect. “Okay. The deal. You’ll try.”
“I’ll try,” you say, and the promise tastes like salt.
“And you’ll come back,” he says softly.
He nods, once. He steps in, and you do too, and he kisses you with his eyes open, like he doesn’t want to miss a frame. He tastes like rain and something you will never be able to name. When he pulls back he rests his forehead against yours a second that lasts all morning.
“Johnny,” you say, and the wind takes it. “Johnny. Johnny.”
“Good.” He smiles, lopsided, boyish. “I like the way my name sounds in your mouth.”
“Ego,” you say, wiping your face with your sleeve.
“Sinclair,” he says back, which is the joke and the truth.
You walk up to the house together, back through the red-painted gate. Carrie stands on the porch with a mug that says WORLD’S OKAYEST CHEF. Her mouth trembles when she sees you. She hands you a paper bag that is too heavy to be just snacks.
“I put the scones in there,” she says. “And also the good jam. And also the terrible risotto I tried to make into rice balls. Don’t laugh.”
“I would never,” you say.
“Liar,” she says, loving you.
You hesitate. “Carrie,” you say, and you are shaking again, but not from cold. “He hears you. When you read. He wants you to read trash next time.”
She closes her eyes, then opens them, fierce and wet. “I can do that.” She frames your face in her hands. “You are my girl,” she says, as she has said every year, which means you are not hers and you are and both are true. “Be safe out there.”
She studies you, then looks past your shoulder at nothing. “And you,” she says, to the air in a voice that belongs in a church. “Come to me in a dream when you can. I’ll make us tea.”
The wind goes gentle, just for a second. You don’t look back, because you are afraid of what you’ll see, or not see.
When you reach the dock, you stand very still. The ferry is at the pier. The rope groans. The island is patient.
“Okay,” you say under your breath. “Okay.”
And then, because you are a woman who keeps her promises, you go to the edge of the dock and look at the place where the water changes color and say, very softly, “I’ll try, but I’ll be back.” The buoy nods. The gulls wheel. The sea says something in its quiet language.
On the crossing you hold the paper bag and breathe the smell of jam and lemons and steam and time. You watch the island shrink without actually shrinking. In the glass behind your reflection there is a boy leaning against the railing as if he has never been afraid of falling.
He doesn’t speak. You don’t either. You lift your hand. He lifts his. Your palms meet on the ghost of a window.
You say nothing. You understand everything.
When the city rises like a new problem at the horizon, you take out your phone and type a text into a note you keep just for him.
“Ordinary thing: a woman on the ferry has a hat shaped like a strawberry. She looks like she could juggle summers. I think you’d like her courage.”
You save it. You tuck the phone away. You touch the ring at your throat. You stand in the wind and let it take your hair in its hands. You think of Carrie at Red Gate reading trashy novels out loud to air that is not empty. You think of risotto that is rice balls that is love, and the red gate that swings when someone you love comes home.
You think of a committee of ghosts arguing over rules and you grin, mean and alive.
“See you,” you whisper toward the line where water meets sky. “Soon.”
