ONE LAST TIME, I am on Rosita’s balcony. I gaze across the frozen lake at the point where it meets the surprisingly bright blue sky. Just beyond the horizon is the first stop of the journey I’ve planned, the shore of Ohio.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve attached the sail to the iceboat, and tested the vessel on the frozen lake.
Now I see the iceboat by the dock, awaiting me and Largo. The wind is right. All I need to do is collect Largo, who is in her cage, covered over with Maxine’s Underground Railroad quilt, and go down to the dock. Get in the boat.
I have loaded it with food, my suitcase, my lockbox, my bird book. I have burned the rest of my clothes and any evidence I have ever been here. I’ve left the mess of the others’ possessions in the library. Let anyone who comes here in the spring come up with their own stories, their own explanations. Let everyone think as Eddie wanted them to think—that Rosita and I are gone, lost to the lake.
But we will not be lost to the lake, Largo and I. And I sense that Rosita is not. I can only hope we will not cross paths again.
Once I’m in Ohio, I will sell all I can, take the money from that and from what I collected from the rooms for a train ticket—or if I get enough, for an automobile—and Largo and I will go to Key Largo. I will work, perhaps in a bar or restaurant. I will save. Eventually, I will have my own place. An inn with a restaurant.
Largo will have a place of honor. She might not be able to fly free with her clipped wings, but at least she’ll be in a climate that suits her.
I will need another name. I would like to go by Maxine, but no. I will not have the name of anyone I knew before. I will come up with something altogether new.
I will start a new bird-watching notebook, but for birds on the furthest tip of Florida.
One night, at the fire circle outside behind my inn, where people gather for an evening to tell stories of their fishing exploits, I will not tamp out the fire. I will let it rise again.
In it, I will at last put my father’s cigar box. And my bird book with the story of all that’s happened on Trouble Island.
A funeral pyre for the past.
Now, I wonder, once Largo and I are out on the ice, the wind pushing us away from the island and toward our new life, will I look back? Take one last glimpse of Rosita’s mansion on Trouble Island?
I will be tempted.
But I will not look back.
Instead, I will feel the mansion receding behind me, and I will think of how eventually the mansion will crumble into the earth, leaving only remnants for future people to wonder about. Because eventually, nature overtakes everything man-made.
The wind will push us on, and I will stare straight ahead across the frozen gray-and-white ice of Lake Erie.
Perhaps a goshawk will soar above us, gazing down, noting us as a peculiar dot sliding across the frozen lake, on and on, pushed by the wind, finally loosed from Trouble Island.